POSTMODERN CULTURE

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  • The First Amendment in an Age of Electronic Reproduction

    Daniel Barbiero

    barbiero@enigma.com

     

    Ronald K.L. Collins and David Skover. The Death of Discourse.Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995.

     

    What, in an age of electronic mass communication, is the status of the First Amendment? Specifically, what is or should be the scope of First Amendment protection, given the seeming ubiquity electronic dissemination has afforded commercial speech and entertainment? Ronald Collins and David Skover raise and explore just such questions in their book, which examines the contemporary culture of free expression in the overlapping contexts of popular culture and commercial discourses.

     

    (In the interests of full disclosure, I should mention here that I know Collins and Skover and have discussed some of these issues with them in connection with the articles — subsequently and substantially rewritten — on which this book is based. I am acknowledged in the book for my part in these informal dialogues.)

     

    I

     

    Collins and Skover contend that there are operating at present two cultures of expression. The first, roughly corresponding to the political and intellectual elites, is that of discourse, while the second, roughly corresponding to mass cultures, is t hat of “the new free speech.” By their definition, “discourse” is speech resounding “with reason, with method, with purpose” (ii), while the new free speech consists in the “vernacular of the popular culture . . . in the service of self-gratification” (i i). Although the deliberative discourse of the elites has traditionally been afforded full First Amendment protection, this same protection has been increasingly granted to other forms of expression, thus creating a “wide gulf” separating the kind of (ve rnacular) expression now meriting protection from the deliberative speech the First Amendment was designed to protect (iii). Given this situation, the authors ask, “can the high values of free expression be squared with the dominant character of mass com munication in our popular culture?” (vi).

     

    Collins and Skover’s answer to this question is set out over the course of the book’s three main sections. In the first, they describe what they take to be the general problem created by contemporary First Amendment interpretation, while in the other two they look at the specific issues involved in determining the constitutional status of commercial speech and pornography.

     

    In the first section, the authors describe the defining problem of First Amendment interpretation as a “paratrooper’s paradox.” The image of the paratrooper is meant to convey the notion of one parachuting “into a territory hostile to old notions of free speech” (2). And the “paratrooper’s paradox” consists in the difficulty of reconciling a provision created to protect discursive speech from government tyranny with a culture accustomed to invoking that protection for even the most trivial forms of expression.

     

    The second section is devoted to an examination of the constitutional status of commercial speech. The argument is that modern, image-based advertisers demand constitutional protection by claiming association with the information-based advertising ch aracteristic of a previous era (84). And yet, the authors hold, it is just such image-based advertising that, far from furthering the original goals of the First Amendment, is threatening to turn “America’s marketplace of ideas . . . [into] a junkyard of commodity ideology” (64).

     

    In the third section, the authors examine the debate over whether or not full constitutional protections should apply to expression with an exclusively, or almost exclusively, sexual content. Collins and Skover choose pornography not only as a First Amendment test case, but also as the symbolic epitome of a debased culture of expression. To this end, they construct a fantasy anti-utopia they call “Pornutopia,” which is presented as the logical culmination of the intersection of commercialism, the el ectronic mass media, and indiscriminate First Amendment protection. Although the authors point out that such a state “is not quite America as we now know it” (117, emphasis in the original), they wish to offer a hypothetical object lesson i n what happens when expressive freedoms create an atmosphere in which discourse is degraded, electronic technologies are put at the service of profit and pleasure (130), and “private passion overrides public reason as the key rationale for constitu tional protection of expression” (127, emphasis in the original).

     

    What the authors wish to establish overall is that in a mass culture saturated with television and advertising, the effective exercise of First Amendment rights is threatened more by what they call the “Huxleyan” scenario than by an “Orwellian” scenar io. While the Orwellian scenario is the familiar one of State suppression of speech,the Huxleyan scenario involves the relatively novel danger of the trivialization of (serious) speech through a “tyranny of pleasure” (5). Though not discounting the pote ntial danger to free expression posed by State intervention, the authors assert that within the context of contemporary First Amendment culture, “the Orwellian evil is not likely to pose a clear and present danger to traditional First Amendment values” (2 1).

     

    For Collins and Skover, the Orwellian-Huxleyan dichotomy is the key to understanding the current debate over First Amendment protections (29), and, they note, this dichotomy does not admit neat solutions along traditional ideological lines (22). In o rder to show this, the authors outline three potential scenarios in which the First Amendment and contemporary reality might be made to square (22-28). These are the Classical, the Modern, and the Reformist. In the Classical scenario, various forms of e xpression may be regulated in the interests of protecting deliberative discourse. In the Modernist scenario, fears of State repression of expression — the Orwellian problem — lead to a laissez-faire approach in which all forms of expression are protect ed. The Reformist scenario is a sort of compromise attempt to provide the greatest latitude for expression while still promoting deliberative values. Which do they prefer?

     

    Given the logic of their argument, and their evident distaste for consumer culture and commercial speech, one would expect them to declare that discursive expression alone is deserving of protection, and that either the Classical or Reformist position would set things right. But they do not. Instead, they assert that if we wish to preserve a culture of expression in which Orwellian dangers are minimized, then neither of these two positions will work. Attempting to put either into force would result in a situation they describe as destroying the First Amendment in order to save it (168) — that is, imposing potentially tyrannical restrictions on expression in order to promote only the “high-value” deliberative discourse appropriate to the serious di scussion of weighty issues. At the same time, though, they appear ambivalent toward the Modern position which, while significantly expanding the scope of First Amendment protection, has brought about the “death of discourse.”

     

    Rather than choosing from among these three alternatives, Collins and Skover call for a “bottom-up,” “cultural approach” (iv) that would recognize that First Amendment principles are as much a function of what people actually do with expression as the y are a function of what elites say those principles should be (177). Adopting the cultural approach means rejecting what they call the “deliberate lie”: that protecting trivial expression will foster deliberation and rational discourse (169). They conc lude that “once we confront the reality of First Amendment hypocrisy, we will no longer wish to perpetuate it” (177).

     

    II

     

    Although Collins and Skover call for a bottom-up analysis that would by necessity be rooted in the actual expressive habits and inclinations of mass culture, they clearly display a distrust of certain aspects of that culture. In this respect their bo ok continues a well-established tradition, as an overview of postwar critiques of mass culture readily reveals (e.g. Bulik; Jay, chapter 6). In their alarm over mass culture’s threat to critical thinking one hears echoes of Fromm (Fromm 277); in their ac cusation that advertising debases language and stunts thought, one hears echoes of Marcuse (Marcuse 95). And like that of some of these earlier critics of mass culture, Collins and Skover’s perspective is informed, though by no means wholly determined, b y a mandarin outlook. Such an outlook is made explicit when they state that “if the Philistines have invaded America’s culture, it is not because television forced open the gates of the popular mind. Rather . . . it has everything to do with the nature of popular democracy” (18).

     

    But although they take the mandarin position in regard to the content of contemporary media culture, their cultural approach allows them to take a more sympathetic position on the forms associated with that culture, some of which they wish to incorpor ate into their work. In an attempt to recreate in a print medium some of the features of a computer environment, the authors punctuate their text with icons, table windows, and dialogue boxes; citations are to popular songs as well as to the more traditi onal books and articles. In an afterword about the book, the authors even claim that the book is “interactive and multi-media” — but by interactive they simply mean that they intend the reader to attempt to develop his or her own answers to the problems they pose. (It would not be too far off the mark, in fact, to see the entire book as a full-length exercise in devil’s advocacy.) The multi-media aspect is a bit more complicated. Though it mostly consists in the citations to non-print sources, it inc ludes the construction of “virtual dialogues” at the end of each of the book’s three sections. What the authors have done is to quote letters they solicited from or conference discussions they held with their colleagues, and assemble them to appear as if they have been transcribed from a real-time discussion involving all the participants. The effect is reminiscent of the digitally manipulated images one frequently runs across in cyberspace — convincing records of events that never actually took place.

     

    The authors’ borrowings from the culture(s) at large are not limited to these cyber-conventions, however. For they adopt something of the hyperbolic tone of commercial culture as well. In fact it is in this atmosphere of hyperbole that the book’s ma in weakness lies. Partly this is the result of the authors’ predeliction for sweeping generalizations, which frequently are asserted rather than argued. In other instances, available evidence bearing on a claim may be treated selectively. In making cla ims for the cognitive and behavioral effects of television, for example, the authors admit that studies attempting to establish just such effects are “indeterminate” (19); their response is to dismiss these studies and appeal instead to a series of hypoth etical assertions that they claim are supported by “ample experiential evidence” (19), none of which is given.

     

    In fact, the book’s hyperbole threatens to cross over into jeremiad. For although Collins and Skover explicitly disavow adherence to a “hell-in-a-handbasket” viewpoint, their rhetoric frequently creates the opposite impression. During a virtual dial ogue in which they deny precisely this charge, they remind their critic that “the commercial culture appears low only from the lofty place of traditional First Amendment values. In one important sense, low or lofty is of no moment to us” (106). Perhaps not, but they spend much of the book describing a crisis in which the low threatens to overwhelm the lofty. They speak of an “electronic commonwealth [that] belittles the American mind by degrading discourse” (15); they entitle one section of their analy sis “The Decline of Citizen Democracy and the Rise of Consumer Democracy” (77); they predict that, should entertainment culture continue in its current course, “deliberative discourse dies and is reincarnated as image-driven onanism” (117); and they warn of the “high ideals of Madisonian discourse” being “invoked to protect the low practices of mass communication” (176-7). The authors’ rhetoric of decline recalls the kind of critique Nicholas Zurbrugg has characterized as consisting in a reductive, “apoc alyptic fallacy” (Zurbrugg 5). Drawing on the work of John Cage, Zurbrugg shows that the postmodern situation need not be interpreted apocalyptically, that one can find in postmodern technologies of communication and reproduction the potential for new an d fruitful modes of representation and conceptualization (8-9). Though Zurbrugg perhaps carries his optimism too far, he is surely right to reject the posture of apocalyptic hand-wringing. And indeed, when pressed, Collins and Skover admit the justice o f such a critique (e.g., 19). The trouble is that, having made this concession, they immediately return to their rhetoric of catastrophic decline.

     

    Indeed, the author’s reliance on the rhetoric of decline threatens to undermine their conclusion. For in the end it is difficult to reconcile their denunciation of contemporary culture as a “debauched dystopia” (177) with their hope that a cultural a pproach to First Amendment rights will have a salutary effect on the exercise of those rights. Confronting and refuting expressive hypocrisy calls for a particularly active intellectual engagement; but it is exactly this, they have been arguing, that has been all but washed away in flood of entertainment-induced passivity. Thus it would seem we can either accept at face value their description of the utter degradation of contemporary expression, or we can accept the prescriptive program of unmasking imp licit in their cultural approach — but not both, since the former would seem to preclude the latter.

     

    III

     

    It may be best to see this book as an elaborate thought experiment designed to illuminate a real problem but worked out through various hypothetical conditions and extreme or hyperbolic gambits (the first of which is the “paratrooper’s paradox” itself ).1 Even if we reject the terms of Collins and Skover’s analysis, we may agree that they have identified a problem of real moment in American culture — the problem of effectively maintaining a First Amendment whose interpretation has long been intractably bifurcated.

     

    The bifurcation in First Amendment interpretation consists in the distinction between high-value speech, which is deemed worthy of full protection, and low-value speech, which is not. Speech with political intent or content is uncontroversially consi dered high-value speech, even if the attribution of political intent and content may in particular cases be controversial. Other types of speech — commercial speech, for example — are considered low-value, and historically have not been accorded full F irst Amendment protections. This bifurcation of expression on the basis of political intent and content is a function of Madisonian standards. What happens, though, when Madisonian standards are superseded in a broadened interpretation of First Amendmen t protection?

     

    The question is not idle, since it might be argued that the Madisonian standard has largely been replaced in actual practice by the standard of self-realization. The principle of self-realization, which holds that individuals should be allowed to cul tivate themselves in order to attain a state of total personhood (however defined), would expand First Amendment protections on the assumption that allowing the broadest possible scope of expression will promote the democratic goal of allowing the greates t number of people to realize themselves. And in fact this principle can be seen to be at least implicit in First Amendment interpretation since the 1950’s, particularly as embodied in the opinions of Supreme Court Justices William O. Douglas and Hugo Bl ack. As Cass Sunstein shows, Douglas and Black did much to push First Amendment intepretation toward an “absolutist” position (Sunstein 4-7) compatible with distributing protection on the grounds of self-realization.

     

    But such grounds are not always self-evident. Collins and Skover illustrate this in a virtual dialogue on the problem of determining the status of sexually-explicit expression (154-9). Determining high-value expression (in this case, art) from low-v alue expression (in this case, obscenity) is in and of itself difficult — internal or content-based standards, for instance, have a tendency to be murky and often seemingly arbitrary. But as the authors and their virtual debate partners show, it is also true that the application of the self-realization standard — i.e., that a given work is not obscene (that it is art and therefore has redeeming value) because it contributes to self-realization and thus furthers democratic principles — is itself highly elastic and perhaps ultimately no less arbitrary than the evaluation of the work’s internal features.

     

    What strikes the authors as noteworthy is that, even when the self-realization standard is used, there may still be a discrepancy between the ideals invoked by defenders of freer free expression, and the value of the expression thus protected. The au thors explain this discrepancy by maintaining that despite the explicit invocation of the self-realization principle (when in fact it is explicitly invoked), the de facto principle behind much current extension of First Amendment protection is that of sel f-gratification. They conclude that defenders of the modern First Amendment have found themselves having to “cloak the self-gratification principle in the garb of something more ennobling” (43).

     

    It is this that is behind the authors’ prescription that we become more honest in acknowledging the true motivations behind the current distribution of First Amendment protection. Such honesty would, presumably, go far toward ending what the authors see as the hypocrisy of those invoking the principle of self-realization in order to justify expression that is in fact geared toward self-gratification.

     

    Truly taking the “cultural approach” seriously, it seems to me, would entail going further and recognizing that the distinction between self-realization and self-gratification is itself an unsteady one. Much like the distinction between “true” needs and those that are, to paraphrase Fred Dretske’s expression, cognitively derived desires (Dretske 128-9), the distinction between self-realization and self-gratification may simply be the distinction between two points at different locations on a spectrum .2 If this is so, then it may be that the most honest approach would be to acknowledge that self-gratification may indeed be a contributing factor toward self-realization. Would this bring on the apocalypse? Some no doubt will think so. But it very well may be that encouraging the greatest range of deliberation means tolerating a corresponding diversity in the relative values of expression produced.

    Notes

     

    1. Two assumptions seem to be required to accept the “paratrooper’s paradox.” One must first assume an absolutist interpretation of the First Amendment in which “mass advertising’s pap . . . [is elevated] to the level of fundamental discourse” (113), and then assume that any situation in which this is not the case represents intolerably tyrannical regulation. The first assumption does not describe an actual situation — as evidenced by, e.g., the prohibition of televisio n advertising for hard liquor and cigarettes — and the second does not seem inevitable.

     

    2. It is worth recalling the rationale behind the 1952 Supreme Court decision extending full protections to motion pictures. As Justice Tom Clark wrote, “The line between . . . informing and entertaining is . . . elusive ” (De Grazia 619).

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Bulik, LouAnne. Mass Culture Criticism and Dissent. Bern: Peter Lang, 1993.
    • De Grazia, Edward. Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius. New York: Random House, 1992.
    • Dretske, Fred. Explaining Behavior: Reasons in a World of Causes. Cambridge: MIT, 1988.
    • Fromm, Erich. Escape from Freedom. New York: Avon, 1969.
    • Jay, Martin. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950. Boston: Little Brown, 1973.
    • Marcuse, Herbert. One Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon, 1964.
    • Sunstein, Cass. Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech. New York: The Free Press, 1995.
    • Zurbrugg, Nicholas. The Parameters of Postmodernism. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993.

     

  • Theorizing Public/Pedagogic Space: Richard Serra’s Critique of Private Property

    Minette Estevez

    Hofstra University
    engmam@hofstra.edu

     

     

    Richard Serra. Writings/Interviews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

     

    If artifacts do not accord with the consumerist ideology, if they do not submit to exploitation and marketing strategies, they are threatened or committed to oblivion.

     

    — Richard Serra

     

    Writings/Interviews, a collection which spans the 60’s through the early 90’s, makes clear the depth of Richard Serra’s commitment to art as a critical intervention, as an inquiry into the social contradictions that unfold in the dominant discourse. Though his politics are most concretely visible in those essays and interviews detailing the battle over Tilted Arc, this volume demonstrates that Serra’s grasp of the repressive nature of bourgeois aesthetics has always been a major component of his work. While his earlier minimalist and process art practices were specifically directed toward the commodification of art and “creativity,” his recent encounters with the legalities of intellectual property rights has succinctly focused his work on the politics of public space. This places Serra’s work within some of the most contested of discursive spaces. Given the current world-wide efforts at the reprivatization, the concept of “public” itself has become one of the most densely layered sites upon which the superstructure of a new world order is being erected.

     

    The continuing controversy surrounding the U.S. government’s destruction of Serra’s sculpture Tilted Arc has made it one of the most publicly visible of contemporary battles over intellectual property law. Though Serra’s contract, like most contracts for public art work, sought to guarantee the sculpture’s maintenance in the site it was commissioned for, the government was able to break the contract, moving, and subsequently destroying, the work. Serra argued that the government’s actions were a violation of “free artistic expression, but the final court ruling held that any rights of artistic “free speech” were not violated since as owner, the government also owned the “speech” of the art work. Property rights take precedence. As Serra learned, “the right to property supersedes all other rights: the right to freedom of speech, the right to freedom of expression, the right to protection of one’s creative work.”(215)

     

    What lends the work of artists like Serra their particular political resonance, a resonance that goes beyond the mere affirmation of “free expression,” is that they do not abandon the institutional spaces of artistic practice — the conceptual apparatus of “high art” as well as its museums and galleries — for a supposedly unmediated contact with their audience. Thus, such work begins from an implicitly materialist assumption about the institutional structuring of experience. In this way it makes possible the important argument that institutional spaces cannot simply be abandoned but must be worked with and transformed. These concerns are spelled out in Serra’s earlier writing and interviews, such as the 1980 interview with Douglas Crimp in which Serra highlights the importance of context in thinking through the potential of any public sculpture. “There is no neutral site,” he remarks. “Every context has its frame and its ideological overtones” (127). For Serra, then, one of the functions of any public art should be to make those “ideological overtones” visible and accessible to an audience. Public space thus becomes a pedagogical space where citizens can become students of, in the words of Serra’s contemporary Robert Smithson, “cultural confinement.”

     

    Serra rightly links the attack on Tilted Arc to a larger conservative agenda. In his essay “Art and Censorship,” he details the effort of politicians like Pat Buchanan and Jesse Helms to conduct a “cultural war.” It is important to recognize the extraordinary ideological mileage conservatives have gotten out of recent “arts” crises. The battles over the NEA are only one of the domestic sites touched by multinational capitalism’s reprivatization efforts. But the NEA struggle is functioning as an exemplary test-site for the dismantling of public institutions and the ideological remaking of notions of “the public” generally necessary for the creation of a post-Cold War ideology. With the collapse of communism, the evil threat from “outside,” new enemies must be manufactured to legitimate a “new” political agenda. Reprivatization is being sold as a “moral” or “democratic” attack on stifling and oppressive bureaucracy, with the “beneficiaries” of bureaucracy pictured as the “real” oppressors of society: welfare queens, incompetent blacks, arrogant elitist artists, and other perverts who undemocratically demand “special treatment.” Through the creation of this cast of “outsiders from within,” defending the public becomes the pretext for an all-out evacuation of the public sphere.

     

    Serra also examines how this agenda is underwritten in the work of art critic Hilton Kramer. Kramer justifies highly-stratified hierarchical social relations through a defense of “the aesthetic”: those epistemological categories which have historically provided one of the most powerful guarantees of bourgeois property relations. In his attacks on Serra, Kramer is not defending the universal rights of individuals, but is instead defending the rights of bourgeois governments and institutions to suspend individual rights at whim, and the legitimation of such suspension of rights through appeals to the “public” and the “common man.” The struggle over Tilted Arc was not the struggle of “the little people” against an “authoritarian” artist, as it has been represented by Hilton Kramer, Donald Kuspit, and then District Attorney Rudolf Giuliani. It was in fact a struggle over the responsibility of powerful institutions, like the United States government, to live up to their contractual obligations, and the rights of “little people” to dispute and redress ontractual violations. It was also a struggle over public space: a struggle over what interests are represented by the uses these spaces are put to, in fact, a struggle over what “public” means, who the “public” is.

     

    That Hilton Kramer should seem to be a defender of “the average joe” is more than a little bizarre since in all his work he assiduously strives to stave off the barbarian hordes from the sacred portals of High Art. However, Kramer’s faux populism in the case of Titled Arc is not so strange considering the kind of adversary Serra is for Kramer. The reason Serra’s work is so threatening to the position represented by Kramer, is that it contests the notion of a “pure” aesthetics, one where art has no necessary connection to anything else in the world except self-reflexive aesthetic categories: form, space, weight, etc. From this vantage Minimalist sculpture would seem to embody the essence of “art” itself. But “Minimalism” is not the idealized category that bourgeois criticism would wish; in fact, in order to represent Minimalism in this fashion the history of its development must be suppressed. And no figure more aggressively gives the lie to a “pure” minimalism than that most political of Minimalists, Richard Serra. In fact no other contemporary American sculptor has so consistently and relentlessly challenged not only traditional notions of pure art, but also traditional notions of political art — that politics amount to a “content” held in an aesthetic container.

     

    The theoretical category of the aesthetic defended by bourgeois critics emerged with the historical transition to a capitalist mode of production. It is a by-product of the processes by which cultural production becomes “autonomous” — severed from earlier social functions. As autonomous artifacts, art objects can be incorporated into the marketplace as commodities. This idealization of the autonomous or “self-reflexive” art object suppresses an understanding of its materiality, its production through historically specific labor relations, and instead glorifies it as an individuated, self-contained “thing.” Art derives its value then from its status as a commodity: a singular and precious item that can be sold, bought and owned. The notion of “autonomy” this brand of aesthetics protects is necessary to the rationalization of bourgeois property relations as it regards the idealization of the commodity as a natural, ontological condition of existence. From this perspective, ideas and objects naturally belong to the separate and discrete cultural domains they have been historically “found” in. Thus a critic like Kramer can insist on the absolute restriction of things and ideas to their proper realm — art can be divided from politics, morals from business, and so forth.

     

    Serra’s art practices have always resisted the epistemological and political divisions that lie behind these aesthetic categories. His early process art pieces, such as splashed lead sculptures, challenged the collectibility of the art object and the market and patronage system which demands art’s availability as private property. His site-specific sculpture also resist the notion of art as exchangeable objects; they are designed to exist as art objects only in one place, incorporating as artistic elements all aspects of the site of their installation, from the formal to the social, historical, and political. The interdependence of work and site in site-specific work forces connections between the formal and the political to the surface and makes difficult the re-separation of these categories attempted by art critics such as Hilton Kramer and Rudolf Giuliani. In capitalist society what makes art “art” is its status as private property, its capacity to be owned. So it comes as no surprise that in bourgeois law, property rights, defined as the rights of owners, are more important than the rights of producers. And the copyright laws derived from this understanding of “property” don’t just limit the circulation of ideas, they place the ownership and control of ideas in particular hands, they render intellectual property the private property of certain classes, and so are inimical to the free access of all individuals.

     

    The current ideological reworking of “private” and “public” achieved through the alignment of conceptuality with authoritarian domination, while representing itself as a progressive “protection” of “individuals” and “individuality,” in fact, quite neatly corresponds to the global restructuring of public institutions under the pressures of privatization necessitated by the late capitalist crisis in productivity. Far from offering some space beyond and therefore resistant to the encroachment of power, such constructions of the “inviolability” of the self and the “interiority” of public space are in fact necessary to their inscription within a transnational political economy which requires not the abolition of existing transpersonal boundaries but rather their reworking — the category of the autonomous subject and its position within a single world order is rendered more flexible, but still intact. What is being defended is bourgeois privacy, a space beyond the limits of the public inquiry and contestation. This makes a political rereading of the controversy surrounding Tilted Arc all the more urgent since it has become a standard touchstone in debates over “the public.” For example, Tilted Arc is the central art work discussed in Critical Inquiry‘s special issue on public art. Virtually all the articles accept the “official” version of the controversy, that is, the version of conservative officials. By unquestioningly accepting those terms of the discussion, the participants leave unchallenged the theoretical concepts which structure conservative discourse on art, most importantly the concept of “the public.” Thus, in his essay, W.J.T. Mitchell, who would undoubtedly not represent himself as a conservative of any sort, ends up pretty much subscribing to the same understanding of reality as Jesse Helms. Mitchell can make such statements as the public is “fed up” with “tolerating symbolic violence against religious and sexual taboos,” and talk about “the public, in so far as it is embodied by state power and public opinion,” without asking how the public may be considered embodied by such things or without considering other publics — the public of intellectuals, artists, blacks, gays who are “fed up” with tolerating the real violence of exploitation and oppression.

     

    In a similar vein, John Hallmark Neff uses Tilted Arc as evidence that public art has “failed” because of the absence of shared beliefs and common interests between artists and the public. In his essay art is imagined as little more than the icing on the cake of consensus, and unsurprisingly, “difficult” or “avant garde” art is dismissed as elitist. That difficulty and rigor are not essentially elitist is beyond Neff, who never bothers to ask whether it might not be more elitist to contend that the “common man” cannot handle rigor and difficulty than to give him the opportunity to do so. And in Michael North’s essay the work of Vito Acconci is smeared as authoritarian. In Acconci’s work Fan City, viewers participate by unfolding banners printed with slogans, “so the viewer is made to wave the flag of a faith he or she may not share . . . the viewer is in fact entirely helpless in the hands of the sculptor.” Setting aside his conflation of sculpture and sculptor, North seems to believe that the temporarily uncomfortable awareness of oppressive structures of power which works like Fan City and Tilted Arc encourage is somehow commensurable with the relentless economic and political helplessness many Americans are subjected to constantly. Mitchell and North, and possibly Neff, would all see themselves as opposite numbers to Hilton Kramer, yet it is striking that “aesthetics” allows them a ground on which to agree: democracy is a formal assemblage of free individuals and their “feelings,” rather than the particular organization of institutions which limit or allow public access to the resources which create and satisfy those feelings and desires.

     

    The discrediting of artistic practices like Serra’s is ultimately not just an issue for the art world. The prohibition of avant-garde practice found in traditional arguments as well as in postmodern ones is connected to a dismantling of systemic critique and revolutionary opposition currently sought by both conventional conservative forces and by postmodern neo-liberalism. What is specifically under attack here is the notion of “public” as a pedagogic space. The “difficulty” of work like Serra’s comes from its challenging of “simple” and common sense modes of understanding “art” and its relation to anything else — in other words from the work’s ability to transform subjectivity, to serve a criti(que)al pedagogic unction. A criti(que)al pedagogy requires a self-distancing from its object, from the common sense, from “the common man,” and all other conventional understandings of a common public, precisely in order to interrogate and transform those conceptual series. In this regard criti(que)al pedagogy contests liberal humanist notions of the public as simply an extension of private individuals — a space where people get together to take care of interests they have in common, a space to mediate conflict and make sure that nobody transgresses the private boundaries of anyone else. Criti(que)al pedagogy argues instead for a notion of public space which doesn’t rest content with a basis in the private individual. It wants instead to transform private subjectivity in order to produce a public individual — one who is interested in enabling the transformation of the global distribution of resources and capable of setting into motion collective modes of institutional organization.

     

    An unexamined humanism explains the hostility to avant-gardism, or indeed to any art which is not immediately accessible to everyone at the same time and in the same way. Such a standpoint assumes that art works and other texts have direct and immediately appreciable politics “in” them as opposed to producing their meaning in their various uses within concrete contexts. Theories of the empirical immanence of meaning correspond to and reinforce the “interiority” of the liberal public space and the homogeneity of the private individuals who constitute it. In both cases criti(que)al pedagogy appears to come from “outside,” and seems apocalyptically threatening. And in a sense it is, since criti(que)al pedagogy is an attempt to exacerbate the very contradictions which the “inside” attempts to suppress. The political effect of this suppression, however, is to exorcise from the community any rigorous consideration of its social content, of the purposes or uses that it does or might serve. Given this set of circumstances, a criti(que)al pedagogic practice, in “art” or any other social space, must place a critique of institutionality at the center of its practices; a critique which does not imagine that one can abolish public/collective institutional effects and “free” the private and individual.

     

    In other words, far from being an alien intrusion from “outside,” as radical strategies are commonly understood (i.e., Serra is “forcing” a restrictive art work on the “free” movement of the public), the resources for revolutionary opposition are also produced by those institutional contradictions, between forces of production and social relations which in Marx’s words comprise “two different sides of the development of the social individual. [They] appear to capital as mere means . . . for it to produce on its limited foundation. In fact, however, they are the material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high.” The interiority of the individual subject, then, is no more than the position of this subject within the interior of capital. A criti(que)al pedagogy brings the cultural “outside” (in all its vanguard and avant-garde forms) to bear on the “inside” in order to disrupt the formation of subjects as interior forces of production and force the possibilities for collective transformation. In this sense it is truly a practice of public pedagogy. Throughout this volume, and of course in all his work, Serra argues for an understanding of the artist as cultural critic, a stance which may seem “old-fashioned,” but still flies in the face of business as usual in a time when, as Serra puts it, “criticism in the United States has become for the most part a promotional exercise, a pseudoadvertisement to enhance sales” (226).

     

  • Biding Spectacular Time

    A.H.S. Boy

    spud@nothingness.org

     

    “Guy Debord.” The Society of the Spectacle.trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994.

     

    Numbers between brackets refer to numbered theses in the book.

     
    For decades, Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle was only available in English in a so-called “pirate” edition published by Black & Red, and its informative — perhaps essential — critique of modern society languished in the sort of obscurity familiar to political radicals and the avant-garde. Originally published in France in 1967, it rarely receives more than passing mention in some of the fields most heavily influenced by its ideas — media studies, social theory, economics, and political science. A new translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith issued by Zone Books last year, however, may finally bring about some well-deserved recognition to the recently-deceased Debord. Society of the Spectacle has been called “the Capital of the new generation,” and the comparison bears investigation. Debord’s intention was to provide a comprehensive critique of the social and political manifestations of modern forms of production, and the analysis he offered in 1967 is as authoritative now as it was then.

     

    Comprised of nine chapters broken into a total of 221 theses, Society of the Spectacle tends toward the succinct in its proclamations, favoring polemically poetic ambiguities over the vacuous detail of purely analytical discourse. There is, however, no shortage of justification for its radical claims. Hegel finds his place, Marx finds acclaim and criticism, Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg add their contributions, and Debord’s own insights are convincingly argued. It becomes evident quite quickly that Debord has done his homework — Society of the Spectacle is no art manifesto in need of historical or theoretical basis. Debord’s provocations are supported where others would have failed. The first chapter, “Separation Perfected,” contains the fundamental assertions on which much of Debord’s influence rests, and the very first thesis, that

     

    the whole of life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.

     

    establishes Debord’s judgment; the rest attempt to explain it, and to elaborate on the need for a practical and revolutionary resistance.

     

    By far Debord’s most famous work, Society of the Spectacle lies somewhere between a provocative manifesto and a scholarly analysis of modern politics. It remains among those books which fall under the rubric of “oft quoted, rarely read” — except that few can even quote from it. A few of the general concepts to be found in Society of the Spectacle, however, have filtered down into near-popular usage. For example, analyses of the Gulf War as “a spectacle” — with the attendant visual implications of representation and the politics of diversion — were commonplace during the conflict. The distorted duplication of reality found in theme parks is typically discussed with reference to its “spectacular nature,” and we are now beginning to see attempts to explain how “cyberspace” fits into the framework of the situationist critique. (Cf. Span magazine, no. 2, published at the University of Toronto.) But this casual bandying about of vaguely situationist notions by journalists and coffee-house radicals masks the real profundity of Debord’s historical analysis. Much more than a condemnation of the increasingly passive reception of political experiences and the role of television in contemporary ideological pursuits, Society of the Spectacle traces the development of the spectacle in all its contradictory glory, demonstrates its need for a sort of parasitic self-replication, and offers a glimpse of what may be the only hope of resistance to the spectacle’s all-consuming power.

     

    Fully appreciating Society of the Spectacle requires a familiarity with the context of Debord’s work. He was a founding member of the Situationist International, a group of social theorists, avant-garde artists and Left Bank intellectuals that arose from the remains of various European art movements. The Situationists and their predecessors built upon the project begun by Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism in the sense that they sought to blur the distinction between art and life, and called for a constant transformation of lived experience. The cohesion and persuasive political analysis brought forth by Debord, however, sets the Situationist International apart from the collective obscurity (if not irrelevance) of previous art movements. Society of the Spectacle represents that aspect of situationist theory that describes precisely how the social order imposed by the contemporary global economy maintains, perpetuates, and expands its influence through the manipulation of representations. No longer relying on force or scientific economics, the status quo of social relations is “mediated by images” [4]. The spectacle is both cause and result of these distinctively modern forms of social organization; it is “a Weltanschauung that has been actualized” [5].

     

    In the same manner that Marx wrote Capital to detail the complex and subtle economic machinations of capitalism, Debord set out to describe the intricacies of its modern incarnation, and the means by which it exerts its totalizing control over lived reality. The spectacle, he argues, is that phase of capitalism which “proclaims the predominance of appearances and asserts that all human life . . . is mere appearance” but which remains, essentially, “a negation of life that has invented a visual form for itself” [10]. In both subject and references, we see Debord tracing a path similar to Marcuse in Counter-Revolution and Revolt, in which Marcuse describes the motives and methods behind capitalism’s “repressive tolerance” and its ability to subsume resistance, maintain power, and give the appearance of improving the quality of everyday living conditions. Debord’s global cultural critique later finds an echo in the work of scholars like Johan Galtung, the Norwegian peace research theorist who established a similarly pervasive analysis of cultural imperialism. It is the situationist focus on the role of appearances and representation, however, that makes its contributions to political understanding both unique and perpetually relevant.

     

    The spectacle is the constantly changing, self-organizing and self-sustaining expression of the modern form of production, the “chief product of present-day society” [15]. An outgrowth of the alienating separation inherent in a capitalist social economy, the spectacle is a massive and complex apparatus which serves both the perpetuation of that separation and the false consciousness necessary to make it palatable — even desirable — to the general population. The bourgeois revolution which brought about the modern state is credited with founding “the sociopolitical basis of the modern spectacle” [87]. The longest chapter of the book, “The Proletariat as Subject and Representation,” follows the development of the modern state in both its free-market and state capitalist forms, and attempts to describe how this development increasingly led to the supersession of real social relations by representations of social relations. Later chapters cover the dissemination of spectacular representations of history, time, environment, and culture. The scope of Debord’s critique is sufficient to demonstrate that the spectacle is more than the brain-numbing flicker of images on the television set. The spectacle is something greater than the electronic devices to which we play the role of passive receptors; it is the totality of manipulations made upon history, time, class — in short, all of reality — that serve to preserve the influence of the spectacle itself. Much like Foucault’s discipline, the spectacle is an autonomous entity, no longer (if ever) serving a master, but an entity which selectively chooses its apparent beneficiaries, for its own ends, and for only as long as it needs them. Consequently, resistance is difficult and the struggle is demanding.

     

    On the one hand, Debord faults Marxists for their rigid ideologizing, their absorption in an archaic understanding of use value, and their faith in the establishment of a socialist state to represent the proletariat. On the other hand, he criticizes the anarchists for their utopian immediatism and their ignorance of the need for a historically grounded transformational stage. Debord’s own offerings in Society of the Spectacle are generally vague, beginning with claims like

     

    Consciousness of desire and the desire for consciousness together and indissolubly constitute that project which in its negative form has as its goal the abolition of classes and the direct possession by the workers of every aspect of their activity. [53]

     

    In the chapter on “Negation and Consumption,” Debord outlines the theoretical approach of the situationists, distinct from that of contemporary sociology, which he claims is “unable to grasp the true nature of its chosen object, because it cannot recognize the critique immanent to that object.” The situationist, according to Debord, understands that critical theory is dialectical, a “style of negation” [204] — and here we find the description of what has become perhaps the most well-known tactic of the situationists, détournement. This strategy, at a theoretical level, is a manifestation of the reversal of established logic, the logic of the spectacle and the relationships it creates. At a practical level, détournement has found its expression in comic strips, whose speech bubbles are replaced by revolutionary slogans; utopian and apparently nonsensical graffiti; and the alteration of billboards. This latter tactic, first introduced in Methods of Détournement (1956), involves the radical subversion of the language — both textual and graphic — of the modern spectacle. In its most common form, it involved taking comic strip speech bubbles or advertising copy and replacing them with revolutionary slogans or poetic witticisms. The point, according to Debord, is “to take effective possession of the community of dialogue, and the playful relationship to time, which the works of the poets and artists have heretofore merely represented” [187]. This “unified theoretical critique,” however, can do nothing without joining forces with “a unified social practice,” and this is where Debord’s scholarship fails him despite its veracity. The situationists were, after all, a group of intellectuals, and not factory workers — a fact which Debord himself did not hesitate to acknowledge. He firmly believed, however, that “that class which is able to effect the dissolution of all classes” was the only hope for a return to real life.

     

    Despite their predominantly intellectual status, however, the Situationist International has had its share of practical influence. One of their members is credited with writing the bulk of On the Poverty of Student Life, the tract published by the students of Strasbourg in 1966 and often cited as a catalyst for the events of May ’68. The Situationists played a role in those events as well, seeing in them the first real possibility of a general strike — a modern Commune — in their time. But it may be Greil Marcus, in his book Lipstick Traces, who has done the most in recent times to promote the visibility of the Situationists. Lipstick Traces follows the history of punk rock back to the tradition of Dada and situationist theory. Both Jamie Reid (creator of much of the graphic “look” of punk) and Malcolm McClaren (self-styled “creator” of the Sex Pistols) acknowledge the influence of the SI on their own work, and the legacy of punk rock may well be the last great youth movement which involved not only a musical revolution, but total social critique (with a soundtrack).

     

    Plagued by constant internal battles (in which Debord, in his best André Breton manner, irrevocably excluded virtually every member over the course of 15 years, in a hail of harsh criticism each time), and so determinedly revolutionary that it alienated most of its potential sympathizers, the SI finally disbanded in 1972. It’s a bit ironic, in this light, that the latest translation of Society of the Spectacle is brought to us by Nicholson-Smith, who was himself excluded from the SI in 1967 along with his colleague Christopher Gray. Together, their translation efforts account for a large part of the major SI texts available in English — an admirable testament to their belief in the significance of situationist theory. This new translation addresses a number of awkward points in earlier translations, but is not without its own inconvenient or clumsy prose. Debord writes in a difficult manner; style is not his strongest point. But Nicholson-Smith sometimes forsakes fidelity in favor of his own sense of consistency and clarity, even when these things were lacking in the original. The result is a bit less awkward, but also a bit less Debord.

     

    When Debord released his Comments on Society of the Spectacle nearly 20 years after the original publication, he had several comments to make on the importance of recent events, but virtually no revisions to his original theses. His reflective judgment was not in error. The concise Society of the Spectacle remains an accurate depiction of modern conditions. Debord’s only addition to his original critique was, however, cynical and foreboding. Whereas the spectacle in 1967 took on two basic forms — concentrated and diffuse, corresponding to the Eastern Block and American social structures, respectively — we have now reached the era of the integrated spectacle, which shows less hope and exercises greater control than ever before. The spectacle now pervades all of reality, making every relationship manipulated and every critique spectacular. In this age of Disney, Baudrillard, the total recuperation of radical chic, and the dawn of virtual worlds, we need to familiarize ourselves with the situationist critique. The recent hype surrounding the Internet and the regulation of digital affairs — not to mention the very structure of virtual relationships we are beginning to feel comfortable with — are perfect candidates for evaluation. The speed of life, the pace of the spectacle, is proportional to the speed of computers and communication. True criticism is plodding, historically situated, and unwilling to accept the immediate fix of reformism. The challenge today is to recover the situationist critique from the abyss of the spectacle itself. Debord concluded Society of the Spectacle by stating that “a critique capable of surpassing the spectacle must know how to bide its time” [220]. Not by waiting, but through the unification of theoretical critique and practical struggle of which “the desire for consciousness” is only one element.

     

    NOTE: The Situationist International published their works with an explicit anti-copyright notice which states that the writings may be “freely reproduced, translated, or adapted, without even indicating their origin.” With this in mind, the Situationist International archives were established at http://www.nothingness.org/SI. The reader will find there a number of Debord’s works translated in their entirety, as well as texts in the original French, Situationist graphics, and links to other Situationist-related sites.

     

  • Lacan Looks at Hill and Hears His Name Spoken: An Interpretive Review of Gary Hill through Lacan’s “I’s” and Gazes

    S. Brent Plate

    Institute of the Liberal Arts
    Emory University
    splate@emory.edu

     

     

    Gary Hill. Exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum SoHo. May 11 – August 20. Organized by Chris Bruce, Senior Curator, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle.

     

    [D]esire, alienated, is perpetually reintegrated anew, reprojecting the Idealich outside. It is in this way that desire is verbalised. Here there is a game of see-saw between two inverted relations. The specular relation of the ego, which the subject assumes and realizes, and projection, which is always ready to be renewed, in the Idealich.

     

    -Jacques Lacan1

     

    Gary Hill’s video and installation art challenges a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) view of perception by showing the mediated nature of the viewing subject’s interaction with the artwork. Hill investigates the relationships between bodies, words, images, and technology. While much of Hill’s work in the past has focused on single-channel videotapes, his recent exhibition at the Guggenheim SoHo (11 May – 20 August) is a display of 13 room-sized installations, artworks within which the viewer’s body must move. Furthermore, by incorporating philosophical and literary texts (e.g., writings of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Blanchot) into his videos and images, Hill manages to confront the incessant relationship of words and images in a striking ly original way in artistic practice.

     

    Hill’s exhibition spaces are spaces of and about media (sing. medium) in two senses of the word. As the American Heritage Dictionary defines it, a “medium” is, “1. Something . . . that occupies a position or represents a condition midway between extremes. 2. An intervening substance through which something else is transmitted or carried on.” This dual definition makes it possible to consider the term ‘medium’ in aesthetic categories of form and content. Medium as content is “something between.” Medium as form is a “substance through which something else is transmitted.” Hill’s art investigates each sense of the term, and both of them together.

     

    Though essays about Hill are pocked with poststructural references, Hill makes no explicit mention of Lacan in his installations or video works. Yet, Hill and Lacan seem to share affinities for what Lacan calls the “function of seeingness.”2 That is, they each explore the space of mediation between the viewer and the object viewed. This relation is a see-saw game of desire and projection, and is, finally, constitutive of subjectivity.

     

    In the following i take Lacan’s theory of subjectivity and the interrelated notion of “the eye and the gaze” as an orienting point. From there i create a “conversational re-view” of Hill’s recent exhibition. As this exhibition included thirteen installations — each abundantly rich enough in content to summon its own essay — i will concentrate on only three particular installations.

     

    The dense opening quote of Lacan serves as a preface to the following reading of Hill’s installations. Within the quoted passage resides the catalyst that is desire, the notion of projection, and a relation between the registers of the imaginary and the symbolic. In further comparing Hill and Lacan, i suggest that through the registers of the imaginary and the symbolic one of Lacan’s underlying motifs is to reconceive the relation of the word and the image within the realm of subjectivity. While it is clear that Lacan privileges the symbolic over the imaginary (and hence also, the word over the image), they each remain vital in the construction of the subject.

     

    Turning to Lacan’s mediated view of “the function of seeingness,” there is found a distinction between the eye and the gaze. To clarify this distinction, Lacan provides what are perhaps the simplest of his diagrams (91):

     

    (IMAGE)

     

    The first diagram portrays the geometral perspective set up in Renaissance schema (notably that of Alberti) of a singular point-of-view taking in the whole of the other (object) through the eye. As the agent of vision, the subject is the “Cartesian subject, which is itself a sort of geometral point, a point of perspective” (86). As the still point of singular perspective, the subject is affirmed in her or his position. Lacan’s conception is duplicitous in its combining of the simple, now common-sensical notion of perspective with the modern view of the singular and unitary subject.

     

    Entering Hill’s exhibition space, the viewer comes upon a room containing the installation Learning Curve (1993). Here the viewer/subject finds a seat, and the eye is given “something to feed on” (101). Sitting in a chair at a schooldesk, the viewer faces forward (the only way possible) and finds the lines of the edge of her or his desk fanning out a long way away from the chair toward a screen at the far end of the schooldesk. (The desk is approximately 8′ long.) The viewer sits at the “point” of the triangular schooldesk which, due to its size, shifts from being a mere desk to a spatial plane — separating, but also connecting — the seated viewer to the image on the screen. Projected on to the screen from a video projector above the head of the seated viewer is the moving image of a seemingly endless breaking wave. Metaphors of drowning hardly need be mentioned as one quickly becomes captivated by the image of a perfect wave, curling right into infinity.

     

    Learning Curve, 1993

     

    (IMAGE)

     

    Without mention of Lacan, commentator Robert Mittenthal states that, “To sit in Learning Curve is to become part of the piece; one is physically supported by the same object that focuses one’s attention on the pure visual space of the projected wave. The chair forces the viewer into a single-point perspective.”3 The single point of the eye in this installation is matched by the “projection” of the wave. The light is projected from a singular point (the video projector above the head of the seated viewer) and spreads out to the site where the screen is filled by the projected image. Projected lines of light exactly match the lines of the desk, thereby conflating the viewer’s position of seeing with the projector, and with the projected image.

     

    Lacan’s comments on the imaginary realm of projection are fitting here: “Each time the subject apprehends himself as form and as ego, each time that he constitutes himself in his status, in his stature, in his static, his desire is projected outside.”4 In Learning Curve, the subject constitutes her or his self in the static schooldesk, and desire is projected to the screen in front. Desire is desire of a wave, the Idealich, the fluid motion, the amniotic fluids. To be identified with a wave . . . To be there . . . To Be, there. . . .

     

    While the single-point perspective of Learning Curve and of Lacan’s Renaissance diagram entails a position of mastery — where everything flows from the eye/I — slippage is already occurring. The sight of the other (the perfect wave, the imago) enthralls, captivates, and causes the viewing subject to begin to dissolve because the other is finally only the image of the subject her or him self projected onto the other. For a final entry into subjectivity, the other must become more than a screen for a projected image of the subject. The subject must enter a field of visual relations (the symbolic) where she or he is the one seen as well as the one seeing.

     

    Lacan’s theories of subjectivity confound the subject of visual mastery. The single-point perspective corresponds to a singular subject position, and Lacan is out to foil and complicate this notion associated with “modern science.” In so doing, Lacan inverts the first diagram, and the subject is now seen in relation to the gaze (see diagram 2, above). The gaze is a web of which the subject is but one (but not One) piece: “We are beings who are looked at, in the spectacle of the world. . . . [The] gaze circumscribes us” (75). Further inverting the first diagram’s effects, the gaze “is that which turns me into a picture” (105), with light moving in the opposite direction. The point of light is projected from the site of the other (the gaze) on to the subject through a “screen.” The subject is constituted by this pre-existing screen, a pre-existing set of symbols which creates a grid for the other(s) to perceive the subject.

     

    Hill, in a separate but related installation, Learning Curve (Still Point) (1993), likewise inverts the triangle of vision. Now, rather than a large screen opposite the viewer with lines extended out, the viewer sits at the “base” of the triangular desk. The edges of the desk converge at a video monitor at the end of the long desk. The schooldesk and the seat are similar in each installation, only now the image of the wave is displayed in the small form of a 5″ video monitor, making it difficult for the viewer to identify with and be captivated by the image. Furthermore, the light is also reversed. With the first installation (as with Lacan’s first diagram), light is projected from the point of perspective, the “geometral point.” Now the light originates from the far end, from the “point of light” (due to the fact that a video monitor has replaced a video projector). Here the light is projected onto the viewer from the place of the other. The subject/viewer becomes, in essence, “the screen.”

     

    Learning Curve (Still Point), 1993

     

    (IMAGE)

     

    Further comparing Learning Curve (Still Point) to the gaze, Mittenthal, again without reference to Lacan, suggests of Hill’s installation that “one imagines a California schoolboy daydreaming of surfing, suddenly called upon to answer one of his teacher’s queries.”5 The schooldesk becomes the site of “the subject sustaining himself in a function of desire” (85), the desire to be surfing, that is, to be elsewhere. Coextensive with this desire is the element of surprise, and one must wonder why Mittenthal, who neither quotes Lacan nor surfs, brings in the element of surprise in the viewing of these waves rather than the others. Perhaps his imagined response to sitting in this position is tinged with the voyeuristic shame of peering through a keyhole: “the gaze that surprises me and reduces me to shame” (84). This shame brings the viewer out of her or his self (out of the surfing daydream) into the realm of others, and therefore also becomes a realization by the subject of her or his role within the larger symbolic order.

     

    Lacan further complicates the relation of the eye and the gaze by overlapping the first two diagrams, creating a more comprehensive “field of vision.” The eye and the gaze are brought together in a third diagram (106) and placed on opposing sides.

     

    (IMAGE)

     

    Here the viewing subject is not simply either the master of perception (as in the Renaissance schema), or objectified within the gaze. Rather,

     

    Only the subject — the human subject, the subject of the desire that is the essence of man — is not, unlike the animal, entirely caught up in this imaginary capture. He maps himself in it. How? In so far as he isolates the function of the screen and plays with it. Man, in effect, knows how to play with the mask as that beyond which there is the gaze. The screen is here the locus of mediation. (107; emphasis mine)

     

    It is, finally, at the site of the screen — at the point of the medium — that the subject’s identity is negotiated.

     

    In Lacan’s third diagram we are brought back to the relation of the imaginary and the symbolic: “The moment of seeing can intervene here only as a suture, a conjunction of the imaginary and the symbolic” (118). In the register of the imaginary, the subject/viewer projects her or his own imago onto the screen. There the projected imago comes into contact with the other side of the screen, on which is portrayed the image through which the subject is seen by others in the symbolic realm. While the gaze circumscribes the subject, the site of the screen becomes the site where the eye and the gaze meet. Out of this sutured relation, this discourse in the field of the other, this sight in the field of vision, identity springs.

     

    At this point Lacan shifts his oft-quoted “man’s desire is the desire of the Other,” to say “that it is a question of a sort of desire on the part of the Other, at the end of which is the showing (le donner-à-voir)” (115). Lacan makes his final turn against the realm of vision and states that this showing is connected with the desire to see, and that desire is fascination (Latin: “the evil eye”). Too much fascination turns to envy (invidia): “the envy that makes the subject pale before the image of a completeness closed upon itself, before the idea that the petit a, the separated a from which he is hanging, may be for another the possession that gives satisfaction” (116). Here it is the symbolic (and language) which will rescue the subject from the power of annihilating envy. And “where can we better picture this power than in invidia?” (115). And perhaps, where can we better picture Lacan’s notions than in video?

     

    One would have to imagine a continually spinning swivel chair at a schooldesk intersecting Hill’s two installations to relate the overlapping third diagram. But this wouldn’t quite get us to the point (however still). Fortunately, if we move into the next room, we come upon an installation which provides a clearer manifestation of the subject’s relation to vision. The installation places the subject/viewer in the overlapping third diagram of Lacan, but in an even more fluid way than Lacan imagined (or, was able to chart).

     

    This next room is the site of the installation Beacon (Two Versions of the Imaginary) (1990). Beacon is a simple design with complex content. The “beacon” (“a signalling or guiding device; a source of guidance or inspiration”)6 is a piece of aluminum pipe, 6″ in diameter and 54″ in length. The pipe is suspended from the ceiling and comes to rest about 78″ from the floor, just high enough for most people to walk under, yet just low enough to cause many to feel they have to duck to pass under it. Powered by a motor, the beacon spins slowly in a darkened room (approximately 20’x40′) providing all the light for the room. The light which is here provided is given by two 4″ video monitors placed in each end of the pipe. The video image is then projected out by projection lenses which cap the ends of the pipe. (Note that in this set-up the image can be seen two ways, by looking into the pipe — though no one would actually do this – – and by looking at the projected image on the wall.) The beacon spins in a circular motion, and since it is placed off-center in a rectangular room, the projected images vary in size, sometimes filling a good part of a wall, sometimes a small square. Finally, four speakers are placed in the corners of the room, with the sound sometimes “following” the moving images, sometimes not.

     

    The fact that i have used the word “sometimes” four times in the last two sentences suggests that Beacon (Two Versions of the Imaginary) gives a sense of chance. Many of Hill’s works provide for chance, yet this chance springs out of a polished and precise technological medium (even the appearance of the polished aluminum pipe itself gives a “smooth” feel). In Beacon there is a motor, a system, and an array of electronics controlling the piece. Hill arranges the installation to allow the blips in the circuitry (the slips, the elisions) to show through. Even so, it sometimes seems the blips may be intentional, wired into the circuitry, and that may be, but Hill allows an even greater interruption (a much greater inbreaking of the Real in Lacanian terms): the presence of the viewer in the space of the installation. The viewer is not a detached viewer here. The viewer is part of the room, part of the installation, and this interaction creates chance elements beyond the technical apparatus of the piece. Similarly, there is no position from which to take in the entirety of the piece, no place for a singular point-of-view. As the beacon spins, projecting its light onto the walls, viewers are caught in the searching path of light, their silhouettes outlined against the wall for others to see. Hill asks in a short writing on Beacon, “What will you do when you are in the light?”7

     

    And i, as an observer and participant, watched what others did in the light, realizing that i, at the same time, was being watched. When i viewed the installation, there were on average five to ten others in the room at once — so there was a necessary negotiation taking place between bodies and between bodies and the revolving light. Most often people would move aside, attempting to get out of the light for fear of disrupting someone else’s view. The problem was that there were two sides to the beacon and to move out of the light meant an almost continual movement. One could stand directly under the beacon and always remain out of the light (standing at the geometral point, even if it is spinning), but due to the height mentioned above one kept feeling as if the pipe would hit one’s head, which would create an even more intense feeling of being a spectacle. Hence, there were few people who ever did stand close to the pipe. The perpetual escape from the light mixed with the revolving images and the viewer’s desire to see the images meant quite simply that the viewing involved a lot of bodily movement within the space of the installation.

     

    There were others who — either due to an exhibitionist streak, or to a resignation that there was no escaping from the panoptic light — merely remained in their positions and allowed the light to cast their shadows on the wall. But of course, from this bold position there was still no way to see the entirety of the installation; one had to choose which image to look at. And then there were the younger ones who would jump up into the space of the light just to be seen, or would create fun shadows of dogs or butterflies with their hands, wanting to show a part of their selves and have an other take notice.

     

    But let me leave aside the formal nature of the piece and address the content. What sounds are emanating from the speakers? And what exactly are the images being projected onto the walls? A text is being read. Various voices in somber tones recite a text of Maurice Blanchot. Ironically, the “Imaginary” in the title does not refer to Lacan, but to Blanchot’s short essay “Two Versions of the Imaginary.” Likewise, the images often correspond to this text. Sometimes there is an image of the printed essay itself, with the camera (like an eye) following along the pages and lines being spoken. Sometimes there is an image of a person reading the text. Other times there is a still shot of a person as the spoken text continues, leaving the simple view of a face moving across the walls.

     

    Blanchot’s essay is complex and obscure, and i will only point out a few of the more important elements as it relates back to Hill’s video work. “Two Versions of the Imaginary” chiefly concerns the role of the image within language. The image brings forward places and times which are “absent” in the current perception to remake them as somehow present. In other words, linguistic images are a representation. But it is the relation between presence and absence in the image which for Blanchot provides the possibilities of power and fascination.

     

    The essay begins with this enigmatic paragraph (and the quotes i give here are also quotes heard spoken within Hill’s installation):

     

    But what is the image? When there is nothing, that is where the image finds its condition, but disappears into it. The image requires the neutrality and the effacement of the world, it wants everything to return to the indifferent depth where nothing is affirmed, it inclines towards the intimacy of what still continues to exist in the void; its truth lies there. But this truth exceeds it; what makes it possible is the limit where it ceases. Hence its dramatic aspect, the ambiguity it evinces, and the brilliant lie with which it is reproached.8

     

    The image is a two-sided coin (perhaps even an effaced one), or a two-sided screen: showing limits as well as giving the experience of limitlessness. This, i would suggest, is Blanchot’s version of the suture between the Lacanian imaginary and symbolic.

     

    In the subject’s perception, according to Blanchot, to see an event as an image is not to be infinitely removed from the originary thing itself. Rather, “to experience an event as image is not to free oneself of that event . . . it is to let oneself be taken by it . . . to that other region where distance holds us, this distance which is now unliving, unavailable depth, an inappreciable remoteness become in some sense the sovereign and last power of things” (87). Just as a cadaver is typically thought to come “after” the being itself, the image, if all it did were to imitate a “real” thing, would be subordinated as a secondary event. But for Blanchot, contrarily, the image is “not the same thing distanced, but that thing as distancing” (80-81). The perception of the image exists in an in-between place, a mediated site.

     

    Blanchot’s two versions of the imaginary are intertwined and stitched together. One version brings us to Lacan’s imaginary, the site of “universal unity.” The other version, through its emphasis on limits, recalls Lacan’s symbolic: “what makes [the image] possible is the limit where it ceases.” Subjectivity is created through splits and gaps enlisting desire and the need of mediation, a mediation working internally and externally.

     

    Concluding my own stitched together review, i return to the site of Hill’s installation Beacon. The installation is an experience, a passing through (ex-peri: “pass through”), both in the sense that one must cross the room to continue the rest of the exhibition, and in the sense that one passes through a series of mediations while in the room. Among these mediations there is, of course, the need for negotiating space with other bodies in a darkened room. Then there is the negotiation with the revolving light; inevitably, the image is projected onto the viewer’s body for all others to see, the subject is caught in the gaze. Correlatively, the interception of light by the body leaves a dark spot (scotoma; blind spot) on the wall in the midst of the image, leaving others with a fractured, incomplete view. There is also the space of the viewer existing between the two images on opposing walls. While the images originate at the same point (the pipe) they are cast to opposit e ends of the room. From there the two images develop a relationship with each other — there are times when the book is shown on one wall while the person reading is imaged on the other wall — and, as Hill states, “perhaps one forms the Other’s projection across time.”9 Across time and space, the viewer occupies the space between.

     

    Clearly, in Hill’s art, what you see is not what you get; there is a space opened up for mediation and negotiation. That space is a space the subject/viewer enters. In the midst of these interventions the subject’s body takes on the place of mediation. In Lacanian terms, the body becomes the site of identity, the image and the screen, a site projected on to, and a site projecting itself. It is a space between text and image (between spoken words and projected images) and between the symbolic and the imaginary (between others in a room and one’s own bodily negotiation to remain out of the light).

     

    Notes

     

    1. Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Trans. Alan Sheridan. (New York: Norton, 1978) 174.

     

    2. Four Fundamental Concepts 82. All further quotes given in text.

     

    3. “Standing Still on the Lip of Being: Gary Hill’s Learning Curve,” Gary Hill, Exhibition Catalog, Essays by Chris Bruce, et al. (Seattle: Henry Art Gallery/University of Washington, 1994) 92. < p> 4. “The see-saw of desire,” In The Seminar of Jacques Lacan; Book 1: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953-1954, trans. John Forrester (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988) [Fr. 1975] 171.

     

    5. “Standing Still on the Lip of Being” 93.

     

    6. American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd ed, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992).

     

    7. “Beacon (Two Versions of the Imaginary),” Gary Hill 25.

     

    8. “Two Versions of the Imaginary,” The Gaze of Orpheus: and Other Literary Essays, trans. Lydia Davis, (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1981) 79. Further quotes from this essay are given in text.

     

    9. “Beacon (Two Versions of the Imaginary)” 25.

     

     

  • Radio Lessons for the Internet

    Martin Spinelli

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

     

    For the first time in history, the media are making possible mass participation in a social and socialized productive process, the practical means of which are in the hands of the masses themselves. Such a use of them would bring the communications media, which up to now have not deserved the name, into their own. In its present form, equipment like television or film does not serve communication but prevents it. It allows no reciprocal action between transmitter and receiver; technically speaking it reduces feedback to the lowest point compatible with the system.1

     

    These words were not written in celebration of the Internet, as one might expect, but were were written about radio decades ago by German broadcaster and poet, Hans Magnus Enzensberger.2 Enzensberger critiques mono-directional media and argues for a democratizing and empowering media rife with promise for the masses in a language that has recently found new currency with the net’s rise in popularity.

     

    The ease with which Enzensberger’s radio essay could be mistaken for a contemporary tract about the Internet attests to the similarities between the utopian rhetoric once used to promote radio and the rhetoric now being used to promote the Internet. This essay is a study of the promises made for two emergent media: radio and the Internet. Three common aspects arise in a close examination of the independent popularization of radio and the Internet: (1) the emergent medium is instilled with hopes of initiating utopian democracy, providing for universal and equal education, and bringing a sense of belonging to a community; (2) cultural investment in these hopes is encouraged by people in power and exploited for commercial gain; and (3) the rhetoric of these promises obfuscates any real understanding of the material place of the emergent medium in society (such as who has knowledge of its use, how is it used, how is it produced, how is it consumed, how it addresses both basic and inessential needs) and ultimately defuses any potential for social change the emergent medium might have had. After an analysis of the emergent media of radio and the Internet, and their utopian rhetoric, I want to suggest a less naive, more responsible rendition of the net and a way of describing the net that conceives of citizens as genuine producers, not consumers.

     

    That it operate in the “public interest, convenience or necessity” was the mandate handed down to radio in the Communications Act of 1934. But from its infancy as a laboratory experiment, through its advent on the market, radio was conceived by its creators not as a public service but as a consumer product. David Sarnoff, the future president of National Broadcasting Company, is often given credit for being the visionary employee of the Marconi Company who first imagined popular radio. In 1916, in a letter to the company’s general manager, he described the “Radio Music Box” which would “make radio a ‘household utility’ in the same sense as the piano or phonograph.”3 This letter, notably empty of ideas of public service, concludes with a generally overlooked table of projected radio sales which figures that $75 million can be made selling radio sets in the first three years they are put on the market.4 This document of the seminal moment in American radio shows only a profit motive driving the production of radio.

     

    Originally the companies that manufactured radio sets were the same companies that produced broadcast programs. As the federal government fumbled to insure standards and regulate the industry, programming was used to motivate people to consume radio sets.5 By the end of the 1920s, with network broadcasts beginning to cover the most populated areas of the U.S., radio began to enter the minds of social thinkers. Writers, politicians and educators began to characterize radio as the fertile ground where the seeds of a better life would take root and mature.

     

    “[A]nything man can imagine,”6 was how Martin Codel, a newspaper editor and later a radio theorist, described the promise of radio in 1930, nearly a decade after the first radio ad quoted Nathaniel Hawthorne to sell suburban homes to Manhattanites.7 Codel exemplifies the utopian strain in writing about radio, rhetoric that would be detached from any political agenda and unconscious of profit motive. Radio was nothing short of magical.

     

    [T]hat anything man can imagine he can do in the ethereal realm of radio will probably be an actual accomplishment some day. Perhaps radio, or something akin to radio, will one day give us mortals telepathic or occult senses!8

     

    Codel finds in the emergent medium a most interesting space: reality and fantastic projection overlap and become indistinguishable. This overlap, happening in the virtual space of radio, shifts the consideration of life possibilities from an everyday physical space to an ethereal, magical one. For Codel, before radio life possibilities were confined to what could be done in the material world; after radio there are no limits. The possibilities of the emergent radio are but virtual possibilities; they take place not in a material space, not in the space of a physical being in the physical world, but in the virtual and surrogate world provided by the emergent medium. Radio has created a new space that has not been fully understood. Its conditions and limits are as yet so vague that radio can give rise to any utopian plan or individual desire. The shift in focus onto the surrogate space of the emergent media, the place where real desires seem to find virtual or “occult” answers, will ultimately allow virtual or simulated equality to stand in for actual equality while the switch goes unnoticed.

     

    The feeling of fulfillment offered in the surrogate space of radio was a key element in the rhetoric of democracy and equality which evolved around the promotion of the emergent medium. The Codel-style euphoria that characterized earlier thinking on radio began to crystalize and soon led to the suggestion that buying a radio was like buying a seat in political chambers in that it promised a greater feeling of participation in a national democracy as well as a sense of access to that democracy not dependent on class status. Rudolf Arnheim, a German psychologist of media and communications effects, wrote in 1936 that the democratizing power of radio was so complete that it made class distinctions irrelevant, and the very concept of class an anachronism:

     

    Wireless eliminates not only the boundaries between countries but also between provinces and classes of society. It insists on the unity of national culture and makes for centralization, collectivism and standardization. Naturally its influence can only be extended to those who have a set, but from the very first there has nowhere been any attempt to reserve wireless reception as a privilege of certain classes, as it might have happened had the invention been at the disposal of feudal states.9

     

    While egalitarian and inclusive in proclamation, Arnheim’s conception of a public does not include all the people in a society. As Arnheim describes radio as a requirement for contemporary civilized life, membership in his public begins to be defined in terms of consumption:

     

    Rather it is the case that wireless, like every other necessity of life from butter to a car and a country house, is accessible to anyone who can pay for it, and since the price of a wireless set and a license can be kept low, wireless, like the newspaper and the film, has immediately become the possession of everyone.10

     

    The class limitations of his “everyone” are obvious; “everyone” means car owners and those that own a second (country) home, not urban laborers or people who walk or use public transportation. (But even if we accept Arnheim’s premise that everyone may claim a radio as a birthright, the previous element of his argument is similarly untenable: that equality of access to the emergent medium makes for social equality. In saying all people are now a priori equal by virtue of access, Arnheim renders inappropriate any attempt to describe the economic realities that separate different classes. Here the rhetoric of the emergent medium covers up class distinctions while not erasing them.) For Arnheim, the “universal commodity”11of radio confers citizenship; it is a “necessity” for citizens in a national culture. In order to be counted, one must tune in. This will soon evolve into: in order to participate in democracy, one must be a consumer.

     

    In returning to David Sarnoff we again find an elaboration of this ethic of consumption. In testimony before the Federal Communications Commission, Sarnoff describes consumption not only as a sign of membership in a national culture, but as a quasi-patriotic act that feeds other American (free market) ideals. Before the FCC, as president of the largest producer of receiving sets in the world (RCA),12 and chairman of the board for the first and largest radio network (NBC),13 Sarnoff skirts implications of monopoly while defending competition as an abstract principle.14 Sarnoff cloaked himself in the rhetoric of the social benefits of listenership in order to defend against federal anti-trust action. Because the emergent medium of radio could be conceived as a great leveler, it had a social value beyond price:

     

    [T]he importance of broadcasting cannot be measured in dollars and cents. It must be appraised by the effect it has upon the daily lives of the people of America — not only the masses who constitute a listening audience numbered in the tens of millions, but the sick, the isolated, and the under-privileged, to whom radio is a boon beyond price. The richest man cannot buy for himself what the poorest man gets free by radio.15

     

    The maintenance of the quality of radio as a social tool was more important than trust-busting. And because it is a tool that legitimates capitalist competition while feeding American myths of equality and equal opportunity in spite of class, Sarnoff could be given free reign to develop it in its current form. The emergent medium is described as existing beyond pecuniary value because it benefits all sectors of society; therefore it should transcend any critique of monopoly capitalism.

     

    What belies the true nature of this proclaimed public space is that its ownership and management were to remain decidedly in private hands. Apparently unaware of the implicit contradiction, a 1939 NBC informational pamphlet exclaims: “Fortunately for the United States, the democratic answer to the programming problem was found in private enterprise.”16 As is to be expected, neither Sarnoff nor NBC nor RCA articulates the limits of a democracy based on the idea of citizen-as-consumer fostered by private enterprise capitalism.17 How could they when their fortunes depend on nurturing a nation of consistent consumers?

     

    The rhetoric of radio’s power to democratize brought with it a renewed interest in the idea of community. Arnheim found in radio a sense of community defined in terms of use and interest, rather than proximity or economic relation. He explains how a national unity and identity are produced out of a collapse of geographic space:

     

    Wireless without prejudice serves everything that implies dissemination and community of feeling and works against separateness and isolation.18

     

    This replaces an old social order in which

     

    [t]he relation of man to man, of the individual to the community, of communities to one another was originally strictly determined by the diffusion of human beings on the surface of the earth. Spatial propinquity of people — so we used to think — makes for a close bond between them, facilitates common experience, exchange of thought and mutual help. Distance on the other hand makes for isolation and quiet, independence of thought and action . . . individuality and the possibility of sinking into one’s own ego. . . .19

     

    What would come about with the end of “distance” might today might be described as the totalitarian effects of a medium or its potential for control.20Radio can collapse a regional sensibility, displace independence and individuality, unify the national community, and make possible a general standardization. The emergent medium of radio, he says, both homogenizes and colonizes:

     

    Just as it incessantly hammers the sound of “educated speech” into the dialect-speaking mountain-dweller of its own land, it also carries language over the frontier.21

     

    Radio, for Arnheim at least, is a collector of individuals into some unified conception of a society, not a purveyor of choice.

     

    The utopian rhetoric of early radio often described this colonization as “education.” Collected in a celebratory volume on the first decade of radio published in 1930, Joy Elmer Morgan, then the editor of The Journal of the National Education Association, sees the emergent medium of radio as an educational tool ripe with potential. Earnestly, he declares radio a revolutionary tool on par with the invention of moveable type. As with moveable type, radio’s revolutionary nature lies in its ability to generate a unified cultural identity. For Morgan, education comes to mean a complete integration into this cultural identity:

     

    It will give to all that common background of information, ideals, and attitudes which binds us together into a vast community of thinking people. It is giving the school a new tool to use in its daily work. No one can estimate the stimulus which will come into unfolding life as radio brings it into instant contact with the great thoughts and deeds of our time.22

     

    Morgan also finds in radio a useful kind of isolation or bracketing off individual experience which insures a fidelity to the common cultural identity. In removing the unpredictable variable of interactivity found in the public school classroom, radio codifies experiences and allows for controlled learning in isolation. Radio makes possible distance-learning from home by turning the home into a sacrosanct schoolroom:

     

    [Radio] has helped to keep people in their homes and in that way to preserve the integrity of home life. No other agency can take the place of the home as a force for excellence and happiness. In it are the issues of life. In a very real sense it is the soil into which the roots of human life reach for spiritual nourishment and security. Whatever radio can do to strengthen the family circle is clear gain; whatever it can do through widespread instruction, looking toward better home practices in such matters as housing, nutrition, family finance, home relationships, home avocations, contributes to a better life.23

     

    Radio is the proposed antidote for the very social fragmentation it encourages. It is a provider of stability that works toward an America of happy homes while it limits broader human interaction. Socializing or organizing outside of the highly structured and morally regulated familial unit (communication that might lead to uncontrollable political union for example) is thus prevented. As Morgan continues, radio becomes more than just a force that keeps a family together. It provides a virtual example of an appropriate life: “Increasing numbers of people will catch a vision of what intelligent living really means.” The emergent medium civilizes and humanizes as it educates:

     

    Through experience, through study, through habits of industry and reflection, and through long years of right thinking and right doing, there comes into individual life a unity and a quiet sense of power and happiness which are the highest of human achievements. We believe radio has a contribution to make here both in the school and in the home. It widens the family circle and the school circle to include the ablest teachers, the most earnest preachers, and the noblest statesman.24

     

    Here consumption rhetorically becomes a productive act. Because it is tied to values of self-discipline and industry, radio has the power to turn buying and passive listening into things more than refining and educational. Consumption itself imparts “habits of industry” and provides a feeling of diligence.

     

    A survey of today’s radio landscape fails to reveal the flowering of what was then seen as nascent democracy, community, and educational potential. For a case study I look to Buffalo, New York, where (with the exception of three small independent holdouts) all commercial radio stations are now owned by four large media companies. The result is a dominance of talk radio and classic hits programming as these same companies fight over the same “average consumer.”25

     

    The recent decades of FCC deregulation allowed for format changes by freeing stations from having to employ news personnel and reducing or eliminating community service broadcasting requirements. But, because regulations preventing large-scale corporate ownership remained intact, the real homogenization of radio content did not occur until 1992 when FCC deregulation made it possible for a single company to own up to 49 percent of some radio markets.26 Consolidated ownership, when coupled with the programming deregulations of past years, has lead to a massive increase in the broadcast of canned programming (pre-recorded programs produced outside of the local region and distributed via satellite or postal carrier) in Buffalo.

     

    Hearing the listening choices diminish, and noticing in particular the lack of local bands now receiving air time, the Buffalo Common Council launched an investigation of local broadcasting in 1994. Their public study describes “a virtual blackout of local music”27: only one song in roughly 900 played on commercial radio came from a local band without a national record contract. The Council invited the management of local stations to a public forum to address concerns about the lack of local context and content in broadcasts and the reduced variety in program offerings. Instead of appearing at the forum, the management of WKSE-FM (consistently one of the top rated music stations in Buffalo) sent a letter to the Council stating that they had “no legal or moral obligation to play music by local musicians” and that there were no FCC guidelines indicating that they should even consider the issues raised by the Council:

     

    We retain the services of the country’s best broadcast consultants, research companies, and in-house employees to make decisions on our playlist. I can assure you that at no time has any data or direct input from our listeners ever given us reason to believe that a true demand exists for more music by local artists. It is our opinion that our ratings would be damaged and our profitability impaired if we were to increase our commitment to local musicians. . . . Meanwhile, we would encourage the local musicians coalition to strive to continually improve the quality of their work. Only then can they hope to gain a contract with a recording company who can promote them into a position to be played on our airwaves.28

     

    This letter emphasizes clearly and repeatedly that the profit motive exclusively, not any conception of community, is guiding the development of this radio station. The capitalism of deregulated commercial broadcasting does not even have room for the ideas “local” or “community.” In order for a band to be described as a local success it must have a national contract. Regional interest is simply not a category. It should further be noted that stations’ playlists do not even represent a kind of populist democracy in terms of most simple popular opinion determining what gets played. Marketing analysts are employed not to determine general popularity but only to define what is the most sellable or what will be the most appealing to an audience of consumers.29Here again membership in a public would be defined as an ability to purchase. The management of WKSE-FM has even failed to understand how, by only making available limited musical choices calculated to appeal to a targeted audience, they might help determine the musical taste and interest of local consumers. The station plays what is popular to increase listenership and advertizing revenue, but they have not recognized that what they play influences what gets bought and what is popular. Simply put: people will not buy music they have never heard before.

     

    Local music is not the only avenue presented for the expression of community. Talk radio has received much popular press for facilitating democracy. But this democracy is wholly inflected by a profit motive as well. Arbitron ratings for the Buffalo market (Autumn, 1995) show that a single and delineable demographic constitutes the audience for all the top talk shows. The fight to attract this demographic between every daytime talk show has eliminated content difference and reduced what might have been an exchange of ideas to a repetition of the single ideology of the target demographic. In Buffalo the hosts of all the daytime shows on all the top rated talk stations are exclusively right of center, libertarian, and populists (Rush Limbaugh, G. Gordon Liddy, or locally-based equivalents). For an active demonstration of the counter-democratic operation of these programs we need only examine the way the callers are handled: All calls are carefully screened to prevent airing anything that might shock listeners into turning off their radios. Guests and callers with views opposed to those of the host/audience are invited to speak only in so far as the host may confirm carefully predicted listener fears about an issue or to provide an opportunity for the host to engage in ad hominem or to assert his verbal prowess. Should a caller slip past the screener and seriously threaten the host/audience he or she is quickly and easily disconnected and the host is given ample time to recontextualize the caller in an unthreatening manner or to dismiss the caller as simply abhorrent. Talk radio “Democracy,” like “The Latest News,” or “The Greatest Hits of the ’70s,” is simply a programming format aimed at a specific demographic to insure faithful listening and (indirectly) steady consumption by the target audience. As with the radio of the 1930s, today’s talk radio offers only a promise of democracy.

     

    The utopian rhetoric that surrounded the emergent medium of radio functioned largely to obscure a profit motive; and, in a celebration of consumption-as-citizenship, the needs for real democracy, fulfilling community, and equality in education were not realized even in a virtual sense in the surrogate space of radio. The same hopes have become staples of Internet theory. As with radio, the utopian promotion of the net under the rubrics of democracy, community, and educational opportunity, will serve only to obscure economic and representational disparity and thwart any democratizing potential the net might have.

     

    In a recent Forbes magazine column, House Speaker of the 104th Congress, Newt Gingrich, gushes with praise for the democratizing, liberating potential he sees in the Internet:

     

    The information age means . . . more market orientation, more freedom for individuals, more opportunity for choice. Government must deal with it.30

     

    He seeks both to highlight the virtual potential of the information age, and to characterize government in its familiar role as antagonistic regulator of liberating emergent media.

     

    As it is typically characterized by Internet promoters, access to the net is another great social leveler which does away with government and gives equal weight to everyone’s voice. When Gingrich asserts, “Everybody’s an insider as long as you’re willing to access [the information on the net],”31 “access” becomes not simply a supplement to democracy, but the only way democracy can now work. In strikingly similar terms to the discussion of early radio, the emergent medium of the Internet can end the oligarchy and provide us with genuine democracy. For Gingrich, the Internet is not just a corrective to democracy, it is democracy.

     

    In January 1995, Gingrich testified in front of the House Ways and Means Committee about the democratic imperative of access to information through the Internet. He said:

     

    If we’re moving into the information age, don’t we have to figure out how to carry the poor with us? Don’t they have every right to have as much access as anybody else? . . . [M]aybe we need a tax credit for the poorest Americans to buy a laptop.32

     

    Gingrich neglects to acknowledge a basic economic reality in his assertion that a tax-credit-for-access would equal opportunity: He does not mention or is not aware that the vast majority of poor people would not save enough through an annual tax credit to buy even the most basic software package.

     

    The scope of net promotion is not confined to guaranteeing democracy. An evangelical zeal has evolved within Internet rhetoric. Being online offers a kind of salvation which must be heralded to everyone. In this way Gingrich’s Internet functions as Morgan’s radio did:

     

    Maybe private companies ought to do it. But somehow there has to be a missionary spirit in America that says to the poorest child in America, “Internet’s for you. The information age is for you.” There’s an alternative to prostitution, drug abuse and death, and we are committed to reaching every child in this country. And not in two generations or three generations; we’re committed this year, we’re committed now.33

     

    The recourse again to private ownership/management is more than a rehash of the now standard “smaller government” rhetoric. Its implications are capitalist colonization and perpetuation of a market. If private companies supply people with simply another way to consume wrapped in the promise of equal opportunity, money would soon find its way back to those owners in the form of training classes, always “affordable” user fees, and the sale of ancillary computer products and services each with additional attendant promises. Money that could be returned or given to the disenfranchised to improve their real lives (to buy clothes or food, to build new schools, or to rent busses to transport angry voters to Washington to lobby Congress or protest) is channeled back into the accounts of private companies. The virtual possibilities of “anything man can imagine” cover up real, material disparities with the promise of the benefits of access.

     

    The official vision for the Internet from the White House, The National Information Infrastructure: Agenda For Action, is also utopian. On the first page we encounter language that could have been lifted directly from Morgan’s tract on radio and education: “The best schools, teachers and courses would be available to all students, without regard to geography, distance, resources, or disability. . . .”34 This education is still based in some school somewhere, and maintains the rather traditional concept of education with students, teachers, and courses. Described in this way its disruptive force is not revealed. What this description lacks however is an acknowledgement of the real economic and political problems that can come with this idea of collapsed geography and local context. Carried to fruition, a centralized model of distance learning would electronically shift larger and larger blocks of the student population to what are currently considered the “best” schools. Increasing virtual enrollment at these (almost exclusively suburban) schools would cause a shift in public educational dollars from poorer schools less prepared to deal with the “information age” to schools already in possession of liberal technology budgets. Even better programs would then be created at the these large affluent schools. As poorer urban schools have funding decreased and are forced to close due to declining enrollment, poorer students who are currently excluded from the information age by the economic realities of their own lives and educational facilities would then be even further removed from the physical sites of education and would ultimately have less access to educational materials. These students will be left behind in the race to virtualize education.

     

    The Agenda continues, “vast resources of art, literature, and science are now available everywhere.”35 Beyond the overstatement (fewer than four hundred books are currently available online for the cost of access alone), this assertion reveals the Agenda‘s monolithic spirit. What the Agenda does not observe is that a fixation on a global community of art and literature will cause the destitution of locally relevant art and literature in the same manner that radio has meant the destitution of local music in our Buffalo example. While it is true that the net could be used as an archival site for regionally specific culture, this seems outside its purview. Couched in the Agenda‘s language of “best” and “greatest” is the belief that “art” means images from the Louvre, not ballads from Appalachia. In addition to the problems of what is and will be available in the globalized community of the Agenda, there is the more interesting notion of what the Agenda calls “universal access.” Following a vow to promote private-sector ownership of the net, the Agenda articulates its second objective which reads:

     

    Extend the ‘universal service’ concept to ensure that information resources are available to all at affordable prices. Because information means empowerment — and employment — the government has a duty to ensure that all Americans have access to the resources and job creation potential of the Information Age.36

     

    It continues:

     

    As a matter of fundamental fairness, this nation cannot accept a division of our people among telecommunications or information “haves” and “have-nots.” The Administration is committed to developing a broad, modern concept of Universal Service — one that would emphasize giving all Americans who desire it, easy, affordable access to advanced communications and information services, regardless of income, disability, or location.37

     

    As with Gingrich, “affordable access” to the emergent medium is made available to all. But what these official promoters have failed to recognize is that access by itself is meaningless and unimportant.

     

    There are, however, political gains of all sorts in the promotion of access to information as a social curative. Political thinking about the net is most often condensable to this: “If we give welfare mothers laptops they can get their benefits and do their shopping online and we can end the wasteful bureaucracies of Food Stamps and WIC; after access they shouldn’t be found asking for better schools because the best courses and teachers are already online; and they won’t need better ways of holding their elected officials accountable — protests and boycotts now being irrelevant — because dissent can now be sent neatly to Congress electronically.” In this system a mere feeling of representation in a community must replace actual representation.

     

    As with radio’s early promoters, the Agenda promises classlessness in an information age: “It can ameliorate the constraints of geography and economic status, and give all Americans a fair opportunity to go as far as their talents and ambitions will take them.”38 “Ameliorating constraints” is code for effacing real class difference.

     

    “Democracy” in the Agenda, as in Arnheim’s radio, means the act of consuming. Vice President Al Gore, in his contribution to the Agenda, goes so far as to say, “We can design a customer-driven electronic government.”39 Those without the technology, or without the opportunity to learn how to use this very class-bound technology, are left without representation in his electronic government. This conflation of the consumer with the voter can do nothing to realize any genuine democratic potential of the net. Again, the implication is that one must be buying the emergent medium to have representation.

     

    A similar kind of virtual/consumptive inclusion is evident in the assertion of community on the net. Howard Rheingold’s The Virtual Community (1994) offers an excellent reference for this new community spirit as embodied in the WELL of San Francisco (a typical fee-based computer network). The need for a fulfilling sense of community was so strong among the WELL’s creators that its 1985 design goals included the credo: “[The WELL] would be a community.”40 The conception of the electronic space as community existed before the space did. Even the name “WELL,” is a forced acronym designed to evoke an image of a traditional village resource. It stands for “Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link.”

     

    Included in those goals was the belief that the WELL should be profit making. In trying to realize this goal the virtual value of electronic community becomes apparent; in telling the history of the WELL Rheingold invokes one of the WELL’s architects, Matthew McClure, whose vision was to “facilitate communications among interesting people” at “a revolutionary low price”:

     

    To reach a critical mass, [the architects] knew they would need to start with interesting people having conversations at a somewhat more elevated level than the usual BBS stuff. In Matthew’s words, “We needed a collection of shills who could draw the suckers into the tents.” So we invited a lot of interesting people, gave them free accounts, called them “hosts,” and encouraged them to re-create the atmosphere of a Paris salon — a bunch of salons.41

     

    The virtual community of the net is artificial even on its own terms: the communal feeling did not grow out of shared interests, but was formed by bribes, discount prices, and contrived social interaction. Its “community” was a commodity the WELL’s creators could then market like any other.

     

    But in spite of the celebration of the WELL as the new informal meeting place, a space that has replaced the pub, the cafe, and the park, Rheingold somehow manages to claim that the highest achievement for his electronic community is its ability to transport the user to yet another community. He describes the WELL as “a small town” with “a doorway that opens onto the blooming, buzzing confusion of the Net.”42 Movement, not destination is the real goal. This reveals that the net has clearly not replaced the corner coffee shop in that its greatest achievement is always transporting the user out of a community, leaving whenever a community promises to become recognizable or delineable. No real community, in the sense of actual interaction or exchange of something (ideas, goods, etc.) is ever sufficient. Clearly the promise of connection is more important than what is being connected to, this is the impulse that led to the virtualization of the idea of community in the first place. The eagerness to abandon and move on, rather than to work in and develop a community, mirrors the promise of that first radio ad: the better world is always just through the next gateway, ready-made and without those noisy neighbors. It also reveals that a buffet of choices is more important than developing the potential of the options or spaces already available. This is the same thinking that promises 500-channel television.43

     

    Despite utopian rhetoric’s complicity with monopoly capitalism and its actual denial of real democracy, community, and educational opportunity in promising their virtual equivalents, there may yet be value in the utopian expression of the emergent media. The value certainly does not exist in the “electronic commons” promised by the Agenda,44 any more than it existed in the almost identical “America’s Town Meeting of the Air” of the RCA of the 1930’s.45 In light of past failures, I would like to argue for a smarter, more aware, set of ideas to guide our thinking, a set of ideas conscious of the material realities of the “information age” and the Internet that does not pretend “affordable access” is social penicillin.

     

    To do this I would like to return to Enzensberger whose theory of the media may yet unlock any real potential for social change that might exist in the net. Enzensberger would not have us see in emergent media a panacea or a pacifier for the disenfranchised, but the power to “mobilize.” This mobilization is not the virtual movement of telnetting from San Francisco to Milan, nor is it access to the Library of Congress at affordable prices. It is the mobilization of production — that is, a public identified as producers, not consumers. Any democratic potential in an emergent medium must lie in its ability to facilitate the organization of non-virtual politics, not in vacuuming political action into itself.

     

    On only a few occasions have I experienced a glimmer of this kind of mobilization: the February 1995 “Freely Espousing” multi-city demonstration against cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Protests and marches were planned and the net was used to help organize them and arrange their simultaneous occurrence. Distribution lists such as POETICS were used to provide information used for speeches and posters, and texts of angry letters were posted to be downloaded and mailed to politicians. It must be emphasized however that this example does not address “access” as an issue of class and shows the net being used for mobilization by people on the cultural margins but not the economically disenfranchised.

     

    Other, primarily aesthetic, versions of this mobilization exist within the net. Mobilization on the net happens around textual poaching,46 the reinflection of texts already generated by the medium in order to elaborate new meanings or uses to discrete users. The Anti-hegemony Project47 poached texts and formats from news oriented usergroups to illustrate the vacuity of traditional news coverage and to poke fun at the group of writers spontaneously involved in producing the Project. Also, the currently difficult to regulate transfers of information (if not ownership and access) of the net facilitate valuable copyright violations which occasionally make available everything from philosophical texts to pornography otherwise locked up by publishing company capitalism and intellectual property law. But as the technology of information control and intellectual property law evolve to service the needs of private enterprise these useful moments will doubtlessly become more scarce.

     

    But in spite of these moments of genuine productive potential and sparks of mobilization, the current system of ownership and management of access generally renders the productive activity on the net framed by consumption on all sides. In order to produce anything, whether news story or parody, we must not only buy a modem but access time for every minute of our productive activity. The argument can be made that there are costs of consumption involved in every productive activity. But the one-time purchase of a computer or typewriter, and the continuous cost of paper to print on, are minimal (and get less and less significant over time) when compared to the 3 dollar an hour (plus extras) charge of most access providers. And interestingly, the vast majority of information produced on the net (the writing of user groups and chat rooms) already seems to revolve almost exclusively around other consumptive activities: the consumption of goods or of other media products. And further, it must be restated that the cultural community or democracy of the net, in so far as it consists of a collection of producing subjects, is still extremely class bound. Observing that a kind of creative enfranchisement exists for those with the money and the education to use the net does not minimize the efficacy of our critique of the Gingrichian classless democracy proclaimed by Internet promoters.

     

    Corporate ownership of the media, says Enzensberger, is simply antithetical to a conception of citizen-as-producer and only affords the most co-opted and simulated form of production:

     

    To this end, the men who own the media have developed special programmes which are usually called “Democratic Forum” or something of the kind. There, tucked away in the corner, the reader(listener/viewer) has his say, which can naturally be cut short at any time. As is the case of public opinion polling, he is only asked questions so that he may have a chance to confirm his own dependence. It is a control circuit where what is fed in has already made complete allowance for the feedback.48

     

    The responsible role then for those in possession of the technology of use is to insure not a universal access to what has already been produced, but to insure a universal knowledge of media production which grows out of, and contributes to, an understanding of material social relations. This means more than simply making the economic and class realities of human relations more central to the subjects of the media; it means actually using the media to enact a change in material circumstances. Revolutionaries of all stripes learned this decades ago, hence broadcasting centers are always the first things seized in a political overthrow.

     

    Neither the Internet, nor radio, is some kind of deus ex machina of democracy, community, or education. The net is only an emergent medium, existing in a specific context with a real set of material confines, and possibly with a real potential. But it is a potential that will remain unrealized if we allow the drive to virtualize to obscure its material base and the economic realities of our culture.

     

    Notes

     

    1. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Constituents of a Theory of the Media,” New Left Review 64 (1970) 15.

     

    2. Enzensberger’s career as a writer, broadcaster and critic spans various genres and addresses various audiences. After having attended several German Universities as well as the Sorbonne, Enzensberger could have easily entered academe, but he chose initially to engage with the world on a more populist level. He joined Radio Stuttgart and began producing radio essays. During years of radio work, journalism, writing poetry and criticism, and guest lecturing in the 1950’s and 1960’s, Enzensberger evolved as a protegee of the Frankfurt School. In 1964, on the event of his first public address as the poet-in-residence at Frankfurt University, he was introduced by Theodor Adorno. His works of criticism, poetry, novels and plays interrogate a broad range of topics (Spanish anarchism, cultural progress and barbarism, documentary fieldwork, communication technology, etc.) and have always been informed by political analysis. In 1968 he gave up a fellowship at Wesleyan University and left the United States in protest of the Vietnam War. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Critical Essays, ed. R. Grimm and B. Armstrong with a forward by J. Simmon (New York: Continuum, 1982) xi-xv. “Constituents of a Theory of the Media” serves as both a series of observations about the genuine potential of emergent media and as a site of utopian hyperbole about emergent media, it therefore makes an excellent point of departure for our discussion.

     

    3. Radio Corporation of America, Principles and Practices of Network Radio Broadcasting — Testimony of David Sarnoff Before the Federal Communications Commission November 14, 1938 and May 17, 1939 (New York: RCA Institute Technical Press, 1939) 102.

     

    4. RCA 104.

     

    5. Robert Hilliard and Michael Keith, The Broadcasting Century (Boston: Focal Press, 1992) 28-29.

     

    6. Martin Codel, “Introduction,” Radio and Its Future, ed. Martin Codel (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1930. New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1972) xi.

     

    7. Hilliard 30.

     

    8. Codel xi.

     

    9. Rudolf Arnheim, Radio, trans. Margaret Ludwig and Herbert Read (London: Faber & Faber, 1936; New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1971) 238-39.

     

    10. Arnheim 239.

     

    11. Arnheim 239.

     

    12. RCA 10.

     

    13. Hilliard 48.

     

    14. Sarnoff says, “Our policies are based on the belief that the public interest . . . will best be served by a strong, prosperous, and growing radio industry, and by vigorous competition which results in better service to the public and greater stimulus to the industry.” (RCA 7)

     

    15. RCA 12.

     

    16. National Broadcasting Company, Inc., Broadcasting in the Public Interest ([New York]: National Broadcasting Company, 1939) 10.

     

    17. The emphasis on “private enterprise” in the American discourse of radio owes much to the extensive use of radio by fascist European governments at this time. It only took a few casual references to Nazi Germany to create a popular fear of the idea public ownership (government management) of radio in America. This fear of fascism was used by Sarnoff and others to stall the regulatory efforts of the FCC. For an example of this fear of government managed media see Thomas Grandin’s The Political Use of the Radio (Geneva: Geneva Research Institute, 1939).

     

    18. Arnheim 232-233.

     

    19. Arnheim 227.

     

    20. These totalitarian aspects, viewed as favorable by Arnheim in the emergent medium of radio, are almost always absent from discussions of the emergent medium of the Internet. But if this totalitarian potential is found to be essential in one emergent medium it probably also exists in another. Obviously today an Internet promoter would not laud this potential but conceal it.

     

    21. Arnheim 223.

     

    22. Morgan 68.

     

    23. Morgan 71.

     

    24. Morgan 74.

     

    25. Anthony Violanti, “Uneasy Listening,” The Buffalo News 22 April 1994, “Gusto” section: 20. One local politician describes the state of the city’s radio as “below banality.” See also Violanti’s “Morning Madness,” The Buffalo News 10 March 1995, “Gusto” section: 18.

     

    26. David Franczyk, The State of Buffalo Radio (Buffalo: The Buffalo Common Council, 1994) Appendix E.

     

    27. Franczyk 11.

     

    28. Franczyk, Appendix D.

     

    29. “The myth is, of course, that the American public gets the programming it wants (and can thus blame no one but itself for the banality of mass culture); the reality is that the American public gets programming calculated to attract the “commodity audience” with limited concern for what most [people] actually desire.” (Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers [New York: Routledge, 1992] 30)

     

    30. Newt Gingrich, “Newt’s Brave New World,” Forbes 27 February 1995, “ASAP” section: 93.

     

    31. Gingrich 93.

     

    32. “Gingrich Pushes Computers for Poor,” The Los Angeles Times 6 January 1995: A18.

     

    33. Gingrich 93.

     

    34. The White House, The National Information Infrastructure: Agenda for Action (Washington, D.C.: The White House, 1993) 3.

     

    35. The White House 5.

     

    36. The White House 5.

     

    37. The White House 8.

     

    38. The White House 12.

     

    39. The White House 17.

     

    40. Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community (New York: HarperPerennial, 1994) 43.

     

    41. Rheingold 42.

     

    42. Rheingold 10.

     

    43. For a discussion of the social ramifications of this virtual movement, and an understanding of the virtual ideology that it facilitates, see Arthur Kroker and Michael A. Weinstein, Data Trash: the Theory of the Virtual Class (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994).

     

    44. The White House 15.

     

    45. RCA 12.

     

    46. Henry Jenkins, in his Textual Poachers, provides a useful model and vocabulary in his discussion of TV series fans as producers of a kind of cultural community. Fans of Star Trek pirate stories and characters from the series to produce new stories in fanzines, songs and videos. Armed with copyright attorneys the owners of the series object to this appropriation. Fanzines draw attacks from Hollywood because they short-circuit the desired distribution and consumption of a product: new products with roots in an old series are distributed without any involvement of, or profit to, network TV or Hollywood. But because the commodity of the net is different from that of Hollywood or network TV — it is access or means of consumption/distribution not an image or story — the poaching metaphor must be deployed differently to describe would-be alternative culture on the net. Since the “text” in the case of the net is access, “poaching” would resemble something like stealing blocks of AOL time for non-profit or anarchist purposes.

     

    47. Archived at the Electronic Poetry Center. http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/

     

    48. Enzensberger 22.

     

  • “Early Spring” and “Equinox”

    Cory Brown

    Ithaca College
    cbrown@ithaca.edu

     

    Early Spring

     

    It is early evening of a spring late,
    very late in coming–so late, in mid-April
    the deep crescents and parabolas of snow
    in the yard, resisting even an imperceptible
    slide down the subtle slopes on a chilly
    gray evening, seem something new grass
    may simply latch onto to grow on
    and carpet right over. And the child’s
    swing in the yard, and the clothesline too,
    are moving back and forth in a way which,
    to me, represents a motion seemingly knowing.
    Like someone slowly rocking–toes, heels,
    toes, heels–someone who’s been standing
    a long while, say, in a cold snow waiting
    for a bus, foothills of the Ozarks or Rockies
    in the distance, implacable and unforgiving
    as they block the early evening sun–
    and the grayness begins to bear down
    as she ponders the disease which has taken
    a mind she thought was well secured
    and robbed it of its house, its room of memory,
    his own street’s name, his spouse’s name–
    her name!–their children’s faces,
    indiscriminately the minutest details
    that surfaced their lives then slowly sank
    to what she thought was an inviolable core.

     

    Equinox

     

    It is dark outside, sixteenth of April
    and the stars are turning and turning,
    but the equinox is weeks to come it seems.
    Dolls around the house, mice and bears,
    a cow and little doll boys and girls,
    are seemingly mesmerized by the sound
    the dryer makes late at night,
    when animation’s at a standstill and cars
    and trucks on the nearby highway are hushed.
    Hush my sweets, your bangs are growing
    sweetly into your eyes, but we will
    trim them back. And your ankles
    sometimes ache in your growing pains,
    like my knees do when the world
    suggests that you will suffer one day
    before you die. And the word “die”
    sends the ache up my thighs and into
    my chest. There are small baskets
    of varying sizes around the house;
    one from Easter a few days ago casts
    its handle’s arched shadow onto the yellow
    wall. And the globe atop another table
    goes untouched, Australia catching day
    after day of sunshine and dust. It is
    too much, at times, to synthesize
    the desires, to subliminate the question,
    to wonder how long the child’s marble
    will remain misplaced beneath the wicker
    chair before a chance encounter
    brings to light its green translucence.

     

  • Hyper in 20th Century Culture: The Dialectics of Transition From Modernism to Postmodernism*

    Michael Epstein

    January 1994, Atlanta
    Emory University
    russmne@emoryu1.cc.emory.edu

     

    1. The Modernist Premises of Postmodernism

     

    The first half of the 20th century evolved under the banner of numerous revolutions, such as the “social,” “cultural” and “sexual,” and revolutionary changes in physics, psychology, biology, philosophy, literature and the arts. In Russia, momentous changes took place in spheres which were not the same as those in the West. But both worlds were united through a common revolutionary model. This fact explains the typological similarities, which have emerged in the second half of the 20th century, between Western postmodernism and contemporary Russian culture, which is evolving, like its Western counterpart, under the sign of “post”: as post-communist or post-utopian culture.

     

    Our analysis will deal with the laws of cultural development of the 20th century which are shared by the Western world and Russian society, nothwithstanding the fact that this was Russia’s epoch of tragic isolation from and aggressive opposition to the West. It was Russia’s revolutionary project which distinguished her from the West, but it was precisely through this “revolutionariness” that Russia inscribed herself into the cultural paradigm of the 20th century.

     

    Revolutions are certainly a part of the Modernist project. In the widest meaning of the term “modern,” this project is a quest for and reconstruction of an authentic, higher, essential reality, to be found beyond the conventional, arbitrary sign systems of culture. The founding father of Modernism was in this respect Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with his critique of contemporary civilization and discovery of a primal, “unspoilt” existence of man in nature. The thought of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, which exposed the illusion of an ideological self-consciousness, discovered an “essential” reality in the self-propagation of matter and material production, in the life instinct, in the will to power, in the sexual drive and in the power of the unconscious. These discoveries were all creations of Modernism.

     

    In this same sense, James Joyce, with his discovery of the “stream of consciousness” and the “mythological prototypes” underlying the conventional forms of the “contemporary individual,” was a Modernist. The same can be said of Kazimir Malevich, who erased the multiplicity of colors of the visible world in order to uncover its geometric foundation, the “black square.” Velimir Khlebnikov, who insisted on the essential reality of the “self-valuable,” “trans-sense” word, affirmed the shamanistic incantation of the type “bobeobi peli guby” in place of the conventional language of symbols. Although antagonistic to artistic Modernism, the communist revolution was a manifestation of political Modernism. It strove to bring to power the “true creators of reality,” who “generated material well-being” — namely the working masses. These masses would bring down the “parasitic” classes, who distort and alienate reality, appropriating for themselves the fruits of the labour of others by means of all manner of ideological illusions and the bureaucratic apparatus.

     

    On the whole, Modernism can be defined as a revolution which strove to abolish the arbitrary character of culture and the relativity of signs in order to affirm the hidden absoluteness of being, regardless of how one defined this essential, authentic being: whether as “matter” and “economics” in Marxism, “life” in Nietzsche, “libido” and “the unconscious” in Freud, “creative elan” in Bergson, “stream of consciousness” in William James and James Joyce, “being” in Heidegger, the “self-valuable word” in Futurism or “the power of workers and peasants” in Bolshevism. The list could go on.

     

    Postmodernism, as is known, directs its sharpest criticism at Modernism for the latter’s adherence to the illusion of an “ultimate truth,” an “absolute language,” a “new style,” all of which were supposed to lead to the “essential reality.” The name itself points to the fact that Postmodernism constituted itself as a new cultural paradigm in the very process of differentiating itself from Modernism, as an experiment in the self-enclosure of sign systems, of language folding in upon itself. The very notion of a reality beyond that of signs is criticised by Postmodernism as the “last” in a series of illusions, as a survival of the old “metaphysics of presence.” The world of secondariness, that is, of conventional and contingent presentations, proves to be more authentic and primary than the so-called “true reality,” in fact, “transcendental” world. This critique of “realistic fallacy” nurtures diverse postmodern movements. One of these, Russian Conceptualism, for instance, exposes the nature of Soviet reality as an ideological mirage and as a system of “supersignificant” signs projected by the ruling mind onto the empty place of the imaginary “signified.”

     

    Our task is to explore the intricate relationship of Modernism and Postmodernism as the two complementary aspects of one cultural paradigm which can be designated by the notion “hyper” and which in the subsequent analysis will fall into the two connected categories, those of “super” and “pseudo.” If Russian and Western Postmodernism have their common roots in their respective Modernist past and the revolutionary obsession with the “super,” so also the current parallels between Western Postmodernism and its Russian counterpart, their common engagement with the “pseudo,” allow us to glimpse the phenomenon of Postmodernism in general in a new dimension. This new depth, which it acquires through the comparison, is projected as the path leading out of a common revolutionary past, whose heritage both postmodern paradigms — the Russian and the Western one — are striving to overcome.

     

    Paradoxically, it was the revolution as a quest and an affirmation of a “supersignified,” a “pure” or “essential” reality, which has led to the formation of the pseudo-realities, constituted by hollow, non-referential signs of reality, with which postmodern culture plays in both Russia and the West.

     

    What follows is an attempt to analyze “the modernist premises of postmodernism in the light of postmodern perspectives of modernism,” or, simply speaking, the interdependence of the two historical phenomena. My argument will focus on the variety of modernist approaches, in physics (quantum mechanics), in literary theory (new criticism), in philosophy (existentialism), in psychoanalytic theories and practices (sexual revolution), in Soviet social and intellectual trends, such as “collectivism” and “materialism” — which expose the phenomenon of “hyper” in its first stage, as a revolutionary overturn of the “classic” paradigm and an assertion of a “true, essential reality,” or “super-reality.” In the second stage, the same phenomena are realized and exposed as “pseudo-realities,” thus marking the transformation of “hyper” itself, its inevitable transition from modernist to postmodernist stage, from “super” to “pseudo.” What I want to argue is the necessary connection between these two stages, “super” and “pseudo,” in the development of 20th century cultural paradigm. The concept of “hyper” highlights not only the lines of continuity between modernism and postmodernism, but also the parallel developments in Russian and Western postmodernisms as reactions to and revisions of common “revolutionary” legacy.

     

    2. “Hyper” in Science and Culture

     

    A series of diverse manifestations in the arts, sciences, philosophy and politics of the 20th century can be united under the category “hyper.” This prefix literally means “heightened” or “excessive”; its popularity in contemporary cultural theory reflects the fact that many tendencies of 20th century life have been brought to a limit of development, so that they have come to reveal their own antitheses.

     

    The concept of “hyperreality” in the above sense of the prefix “hyper” has been advanced by the Italian cultural semiotician Umberto Eco and the French sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard, both of whom relate it to the disappearance of reality in the face of the dominance of the mass media. On the face of it, mass communication technology appears to capture reality in all its minutest details. But on that advanced level of penetration into the facts, the technical and visual means themselves construct a reality of another order, which has been called “hyperreality.” This “hyperreality” is a phantasmic creation of the means of mass communication, but as such it emerges as a more authentic, exact, “real” reality than the one we perceive in the life around us.

     

    An illustrative example is the influential movement in the art of the 1970’s and early 1980’s, called Hyper-Realism. Works produced by this movement included giant color photographs, framed and functioning as pictures. Details, such as the skin on a man’s face, appeared in such blow-ups that it was possible to see every pore, every roughness of surface, and every protuberance not normally visible with the naked eye. This is the “hyper”-effect, which allows reality to acquire an “excessively real” dimension due entirely to the means of its technical reproduction.

     

    According to Baudrillard, reality which is firmly entwined in a net of mass communication has disappeared completely from the contemporary Western world, ceding its place to hyperreality which is produced by artificial means:

     

    Reality itself founders in hyperrealism, the meticulous reduplication of the real, preferrably through another, reproductive medium, such as photography. From medium to medium, the real is volatilized, becoming an allegory of death. But it is also, in a sense, reinforced through its own destruction. It becomes reality for its own sake, the fetishism of the lost object . . . the hyperreal.1

     

    This paradox was discovered by quantum physics long before the advent of the theoreticians of postmodernism. It was the scientists who first discovered that the elementary particles, that is, the objects of observation, were largely determined by the measuring instruments. The reality which was revealed to the physicists from the late 1920’s onwards came to be increasingly recognised as a “hyperreality,” since it was constituted by the parameters of the measuring equipment and the mathematical calculations. In the words of the American physicists Heinz Pagels, “it is meaningless to talk about the physical properties of quantum objects without precisely specifying the experimental arrangement by which you intend to measure them. Quantum reality is in part an observer-created reality. . . . [W]ith the quantum theory, human intention influences the structure of the physical world.”2

     

    The most challenging methodological question in present-day physics, engaged in the modelling of such speculative entities as “quarks” and “strings,” is the question of what is in fact being investigated? What is the status of the so-called physical objects and in what sense can they be called “physical” and “objects,” if they are called into existence by a series of mathematical operations?”

     

    Quantum mechanics became the first discipline to admit to its hyper-scientific character or, more precisely, the hyper-physical nature of its objects. In getting ever closer to the elementary foundations of matter, science is discovering the imaginary and purely rational character of that physical reality, which it allegedly describes but which in fact it invents. In the past, discoveries and inventions could be clearly distinguished: the former revealed something that really existed in nature, the latter created something that was possible and useful in technology. In the present, there are no such strictly delimited categories of discoveries and inventions, since all discoveries tend to become inventions. The difference between discovery and invention has become blurred, at least as far as the deepest, originary layers of reality are concerned. The more one penetrates into these layers, the more one finds oneself in the depths of one’s own consciousness.

     

    In the same way, the more perfect instruments for the observation of physical reality are used, the less can it be detected as reality in a proper sense, as something different from the very conditions of its observation. This is precisely the creation of “an observer-created reality” which makes the case for Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality. The notion of “hyperreality,” in relation to cultural objects, was introduced by Baudrillard in his book Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), half a century later than Niels Bohr laid foundation for the new understanding of physical objects as “influenced” by human intention (1927). It is the improvement of instruments for the observation and reproduction of physical and cultural reality that dimmed out reality as such and made it interchangeable with its own representations. In his statement “From medium to medium, the real is volatilized . . .” Baudrillard refers to the most authentic and sensitive means for the reproduction of reality, such as photography, cinema, and television. Paradoxically, the more truthful are the methods of representation, the more dubious the category of truth becomes. An object presented with the maximum authenticity does not differ any more from its own copy. Hyperreality supplants reality as truthfulness makes truth unattainable.

     

    Alongside the hyperphysical objects, there are several other parallel processes generating the “hyper,” emerging particularly in the timespan of 1920’s to the 1930’s. These spheres of “hyperization” are so diverse and at such distance from one another that it is impossible to speak about a direct influence between these processes. Rather, they describe a new limit of being and perception, at which Russia and the West had simultaneously arrived.

     

    3. Hyper-Textuality3

     

    In the human sciences the same thing takes place as in the natural sciences. Along with hyperphysical objects emerges what could be called hypertextuality. The relationship between criticism and literature undergoes a change. The Modernist criticism of the 1920’s and 1930’s, as represented by the most influential schools, such as Russian Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism, and later Structuralism, attempts to free itself from all historical, social, biographical and psychological moments, integrated into literature, in order to separate the phenomenon of pure literariness. This literariness of literature is analogous to the “elementary particles” of the texture of literature, its ultimate and irreducible essence.

     

    Criticism is engaged in purifying the stuff of literature by separating from it all those additional layers, with which it was encumbered by schools of criticism of earlier times: the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Realism, the biographical, psychological and historical criticism, the criticism of Naturalism and Symbolism, and all other critical fashions of the 19th and early 20th century. That is, criticism now wanted to free literature from an imposed content in order to turn literature into pure form, to reduce it to the “device as such,” to the text in itself. Everything which was valued in literature — the reflection of historical reality, the author’s world view, the influence of the intellectual trends of the times, the inferred higher reality of symbolic meanings — all of this now seemed naive and old-fashioned and extraneous to literature.

     

    But as the process of purification of literature from all non-literary elements continued to reduce literature to the text itself, so the process of appropriation of that text by criticism developed alongside it, until the text was transformed into a thing wholly dependent on and even engendered by criticism. The literary work thus becomes a textual product, created in the modernist critical laboratory by means of the splitting of literatures into “particles” or structural elements and by virtue of the separation of literature from the admixtures of “historicity,” “biographicality,” “culturalness,” “emotionalism,” “philosophicalness,” considered alien and detrimental to the text.

     

    In the same manner as textual criticism, quantum mechanics splits the physical object — the atom — into so many minimal component parts whose objective existence fades into ideal projections of the methods of observation and the properties of the physical measuring appartus. Pure textual signs, excised from literature in the manner of the smallest irreducible particles or quants, are equivalent to ideal projections of the critical methodology. Since these signs are purified of all meanings, supposedly imposed by the author’s subjectivity and extraneous historical circumstances, the critic is the only one empowered to read them as signs carrying meanings or signs with potential meanings. It is the critic who determines the meanings of those signs, intially purified of all meanings.

     

    The paradoxical result of such a purification of literature has been its increasing reliance on criticism and on the method of interpretation. Both Formalism and Anglo-American ‘new criticism’ make literature accessible to the reader through the intermediary action of criticism itself. Literature thus becomes a system of pure devices or signs, filled with meanings by a criticism according to one or another method of interpretation. In other words, criticism bans literature from its own territory and substitutes the power which the writer used to exercise over the mind of the reader by the power of the critic.

     

    In the mid-60’s, the result of this modernist overturn was reflected in the words of the English critic George Steiner who complains about this new status of a critic as the Master of a hyper-textuality: “The true critic is servant to the poet; today he is acting as master, or being taken as such.”4 Similarly, Umberto Eco remarks that “at present, poetics are coming more and more to get the upper hand of the work of art. . . .”5 And according to the writer Saul Bellow, “criticism tries to control the approaches to literature. It confronts the reader with its barriers of interpretation. A docile public consents to this monopoly of the specialists — those ‘without whom literature cannot be understood.’ Critics, speaking for writers, succeeded eventually in replacing them.”6

     

    Certainly, all these negative responses to the modernist revolution in criticism belong themselves to anti-, rather than postmodernist consciousness; more precisely, they designate the very limits of modernism. Postmodernism emerged no sooner than the reality of text itself was understood as an illusionary projection of a critic’s semiotic power or, more pluralistically, any reader’s interpretative power (“dissemination of meanings”). The critical revolution which began with Russian formalism in the 1920’s and continued with structuralism in the 1950’s-1960’s ended with a brief reaction in the 1960’s when lamentations about “the critical situation” and the domination of critic over creator became popular. With the advent of postmodernism, both modernist enthusiasm for the “pure” reality of text and antimodernist nostalgia for the “lost” reality of literature became things of the past.

     

    4. Hyper-Existentiality

     

    Hypertextuality as a phenomenon of literary criticism parallels the phenomenon of the hyper-object created by physical science. Another form of “hyper” can be found in one of the leading Western philosophical trends between the 1920’s to the 1950’s. European Existentialism turned to the authentic reality of individual existence, to “being as such,” which precedes any categorization, every rational generalization. With this, Existentialism seemed to subject the “abstract,” “rationalistic” consciousness of idealistic systems from Plato to Descartes and Hegel to crushing criticism.

     

    Yet it is the case that as early as Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, Russian literature pointed to the process of the production of being or of “pure existence” from a[n] [abstract] consciousness which dissolved all concreteness and formalness of being. This “pure being” was constituted by the temporal duration of a permanence. Existence thus became a pure abstraction of being, produced by consciousness and deprived of all characteristics which might impart concreteness to it. In his concreteness, a man is either one or another entity, he is either lazy or diligent, a clerk or a peasant and so on. Dostoevsky’s underground man, one of the first Existentialist (anti)heroes in world literature, is not even capable of rising to the definition of a good-for-nothing, or an insect. His consciousness is infinite and even “sick” in its “excessiveness”; it destroys the definitiveness which enslaves the “dull,” “limited” people of action, pushing towards that ultimate limit of existence at which a human being is nothing concrete but only is, simply exists.

     

    Not only couldn’t I make myself malevolent, I couldn’t make myself anything: neither good nor bad, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. . . . [A] wise man can’t seriously make himself anything. . . . After all, the direct, immediate, legitimate fruit of heightened consciousness is inertia. . . . I practise thinking, and consequently each of my primary causes pulls along another, even more primary, in its wake, and so on ad infinitum. That is really the essence of all thinking and self-awareness. . . . And finally, “Soon we shall invent a method of being born from an idea.7

     

    Thus existentialist critique of routine forms of existence (“neither a hero nor an insect”), paradoxically, brings forth even more abstract kind of existence, “a method of being born from an idea.” The quest for such absolute being, which precedes all rational definitions and general classifications — such as psychological traits or the attributes of belonging to a profession — is not less abstract and rational than such classifications. It is even more abstract. It is the limit of the abstraction of being, which is also an abstraction of singularity, resulting in a kind of “hypersingularity,” which is only itself and which is alien to all forms of typicality. Such is the result of the existential quest. This “hypersingularity,” based on the “in-and-for-itself” (to borrow a Hegelian term), is the highest possible abstraction, which clings to the “tip” of the self-conscious consciousness, dissolving all qualitative determinateness. This it does in the same way as quantum physics dissolves the determinateness of matter to obtain elementary particles as projections of mathematical description. Precisely because of its “elementariness,” existence thus becomes the metaphysical “quant,” the ultimate, indivisible particle of “matter” or existence-as-such — a derivation of the most speculative type of consciousness, which objectifies itself in the form of “being as such.” The existentialist self-definition “I am” is much more abstract than “essentialist” definitions like “I am a reasonable being” or “I am a lazy man.”

     

    In Hegel, the Absolute Idea develops through its embodiment in increasingly concrete forms of being, according to the principle formulated as “the progression from the abstract to the concrete.” Starting with Kierkegaard, being itself becomes a form of abstraction. This is the abstraction of “the particular,” the unique “this one here,” which applies equally to any concrete form of existence, from insects to human beings, from the peasant to the artist, who are completely dissociated from any typical features of the genus, which Hegel still endows with the concreteness of the manifest idea. Contrary to a conventional opinion, Kierkegaard is a much more abstract thinker than Hegel. Hegel’s thought proceeds from the abstract idea to its specific manifestations, whereas Kierkegaard’s thought proceeds from concrete idea to abstract singularity. Hegel’s Idea goes through the process of concretization through being; the Existentialists’ being itself goes through a process of abstraction through the ultimate generalization of the idea of “being.” Thus being becomes “pure being” or an almost empty abstraction, a “hyperbeing,” the form of Heidegger’s and Sartre’s “nothing.”

     

    Sartre’s La Nausee demonstrates how the “unhappy” consciousness of Roquentin, not bound by anything and raised to the highest degree of abstractness, suddenly encounters — but in reality engenders — the abstract texture of being, of the roots and of the earth, stubborn in its absurdity and inducing nausea. This absurdity, which the Existentialist consciousness discovers everywhere as the revelation of a “true” reality, which has not been distorted or generalised, and which is given anterior to any act of rationalization, is in fact “hyperreality.” It is the product of a rational generalisation, which singles out in the world such an all-embracing trait as the “irrational.”

     

    Existentialism is not a negation of rationalism but rather its ultimate expansion, a method of rationalistic construction of the universal principle of irrationality, designated as “will” by Schopenhauer, as “life” by Nietzsche, as “existence” and “the individual” by Kierkegaard. This irrationality is much more cerebral and abstract than all the forms of rationality which divide being into concrete types, into essences, into laws and into concepts. Rationality always contains at least a certain dose of concreteness because it is always in a determinate relation with “some thing,” it is “the sense of a concrete thing,” the rationality of something which needs to be defined or specified from a rational point of view. “Irrationality” does not demand such concretisation, it is “irrationality as such,” “the absurdity of everything,” it represents “an all-embracing absurdity.” It betrays its ultimate generality precisely through its totally and nausiatingly indiscriminate relationship to the concrete things. The irrational world, which ostensibly eschews rational definition, is a product of the most schematizing rationality, which negates all concrete definitions of things and which finds its ultimate expression in abstractions such as “existence as such,” “the particular as such.”

     

    At this ultimate level of abstraction, being is only the opposite of non-being. As Sartre asserts in Being and Nothingness, consciousness, or being-for-itself, in its freedom from all ontological determinations, is pure nothingness emerging from itself and nullifying, or, to use a Sartrean term, “nihilating” the substantial definitions of the exterior world.

     

    The type of existence of the For-itself is a pure internal negation. . . . Thus determination is a nothing which does not belong as an internal structure either to the thing or to consciousness, but its being is to-be-summoned by the For-itself across a system of internal negations in which the in-itself [the world of objects] is revealed in its indifference to all that is not itself.8

     

    As Hazel E. Barnes comments, in Sartre “consciousness exists as consciousness by making a nothingness arise between it and the object of which it is consciousness. Thus nihilation is that by which consciousness exists.”9Therefore, the phenomenon of existence is determined by the series of “internal negations,” proceeding from the consciousness as pure nothingness. In this case, the absurdity of being, as it appears to the nullifying consciousness, can be understood as the derivative of this nothingness, of this abstraction that strips concrete things of their meaning. One would imagine that there is nothing more abstract than “nothing,” since it is draws itself away from all peculiarities and specificities of being; but being, as it is posited in Existential philosophy, is even more abstract than non-being, since it emerges as the second order projection of this nothingness. This is no longer that nothingness which has a reality in-and-for-itself, like the self-effacing nothingness of self-consciousness. This is a nothingness which has lost that intimate relationship to its for-itself and which is turned towards the absurd Being which surrounds it, which is pure abstraction, deprived of even the concreteness of self-consciousness and of self-negation. This Being is simple nonentity — a being-for-no-one.

     

    Behind the apparently authentic and self-evident “existence as such” postulated by Existentialism, one can detect the hyper-reality of a reason abstracted from itself in the emptied form of ultimate irrationality. It is a conceptual abstraction to such a degree that it abstracts itself from its own rational foundation in order to affirm itself as its own opposite — as Being as such, ungraspable by reason, unconcretizable and untypifiable. There are two degrees of abstraction: a moderate abstraction, which is confined to the sphere of reason, and an extreme abstraction, which goes beyond the limits of reason. When rational abstraction goes as far as to abstract from rationality itself, it converts into the concept of universal irrationality. This form of abstracting reason from reason is the one which gives rise to the notion of the non-sense of pure Being.

     

    5. Hyper-Sexuality

     

    In the 20th century, the “hyper” phenomenon is also in evidence in the sphere of intimate personal relationships, in which experimentations with sex come to the fore. War is declared on the Puritanism of the 19th century and the entire Christian ethics of “asceticism.” The sexual instinct is set up as the primordial reality, underlying thought and culture. The Nietzschean celebration of the life of the body prepared European society, which had experienced the trauma of the First World War and the explosion of aggressive emotions, for the acceptance of psychoanalysis, which becomes the dominant intellectual trend of the 1920’s. The scientific work of Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich and their pupils, the artistic discoveries of surrealists, Joyce, Thomas Mann, D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller and others, the new freedom of sexual mores characteristic of the culture of jazz and cabaret — all of these things placed the 1920’s under the banner of the so-called “sexual revolution.” The “basic instinct” is sought in theory and art, and extracted in pure form as the “libido.”

     

    But, as already noted by many critics, in this pure form, the “basic instinct,” abstracted from all other human capabilities and driving forces, is nothing but an abstract scheme, the fruit of the analytic activity of reason. In the words of the English novelist and religious writer, C.S. Lewis, “Lust is more abstract than logic; it seeks (hope triumphing over experience) for some purely sexual, hence purely imaginary conjunction of an impossible maleness with an impossible femaleness.”10 Moreover, the notion of an “abstract lust” emanates from a bookish, post-logical conception of desire, generated by the theorizing of the sexual revolution. The passionate dionysiac ecstasy of the “flesh as such” thus becomes like the burning fantasy of the onanist, who through pure mental effort separates this flesh from the great diversity of the individual spiritual and physical qualities of the desired “object.” On an individual level, such exaggerated fantasies may lead to the exhaustion of physiological potency. On the scale of Western civilization, it was a construction of still another level of hyper-reality: the artificial reproduction of bodily images, more bright, tangible, concentrated, hypnotically effective than the physical reality of the body, and therefore evoking mental ecstacy while eroding the properly physical component of attraction. Thomas Eliot noticed about Lawrence’s novels: “His struggle against over-intellectualized life is the history of his own over-intellectualized nature.”11 As is the case with existentialism, the struggle against rationalism is an expression of over-rational approach, an abstraction of “existence of such” or “flesh as such.”

     

    Critics often point to this internal contradiction of Lawrence’s creativity: “[H]is world of love [is] more strangely and purely abstract than that of any other great author. The more intense and urgent it is the more it is a world inside the head. . . . [T]he ‘phallic consciousness’ seems a hyper-intellectual, hyper-aesthetic affair, making Lady Chatterly one of the most inflexibly highbrow novels ever written.”12 It is interesting that Bayley still uses the prefix “hyper” to characterize the intellectual component of Lawrence’s erotic images, while today we would rather identify them as “hypersexual.” In the first case, hyper means “super,” while in the second case “pseudo” or “quasi”: the critic’s implication is that Lawrence’s images are super-intellectual, but pseudo-sexual. This evolution of hyper‘s predominant meaning from super to pseudo constitutes the very core of hyper‘s dialectics, as will be discussed in the last section of this chapter.

     

    Hypersexuality, as one might call this “rationally” abstracted and hyperbolised sexuality, emerges in the theories of Freud and in the novels of D.H. Lawrence, as well as, on a more basic level, in the upsurge in the circulation of pornographic writing. Pornography is the very bastion of hypersexuality which presents the condensed simulacra of sexuality: glossy photographs and screen images of unthinkable sex, of unimaginably large breasts, powerful thighs and violent orgasms.

     

    Even the theory of psychoanalysis, for all its scientific caution and sophistication, reveals this hyper-sexual, and more broadly hyper-real, tendency. The world of the unconscious, proclaimed by Freud to be the primal human reality, was discovered or invented by consciousness, as its internal, in-depth “self-projection.” This invention assumed the proportions of another reality, preceding and exceeding the reality of consciousness itself. True to its ultimate destiny in the 20th century, consciousness thus creates something other than itself out of itself in order to surrender to this other as something primal and incontestably powerful. A more likely explanation of this phenomenon is that it is not at all a primary or “pre-existing” reality, opposed to consciousness from within, but that the unconscious is constructed by consciousness itself as a form of self-alienation of consciousness, which then sets itself up as a “super-real” entity dominating the latter. Hyperreality is a mode of self-alienation of consciousness. The Freudian unconscious thus becomes one of the most pronounced and hypnotically convincing projections of consciousness “outside itself.” As Derrida remarked, “the ‘unconscious’ is no more a ‘thing’ than it is a virtual or masked consciousness,” the continuously delayed consciousness which can never come to terms with itself.13

     

    Even Freud admitted that the discovery of the unconscious as a force dominating consciousness must serve the overall increase in the power of consciousness itself. Psychoanalysis is a process of decoding and illuminating the unconscious, which would allow consciousness to regain control over this “boiling cauldron of desires.” In other words, consciousness discovers the unconscious in its ‘underground’ in order to resume dominance over it. Thus psychoanalysis is the method of penetrating into those spheres of consciousness which consciousness itself had declared to be beyond its penetration; through the symbols of the unconscious, consciouness plays hide-and-seek with itself.

     

    As distinct from quantum mechanics, which recognizes its physical object to be prestructured by consciousness a priori, psychoanalysis sets up the conscious structuring of its psychical object as its final goal. But in both cases the physical and psychic realities prove to be at least partially projections or functions of the intellect, which observes and analyzes them. Perhaps psychoanalysis would benefit methodologically if it followed the example of quantum mechanics and recognized that the observed attributes of the unconscious were primarily determined by or even derived from the very conditions of its observation and description.

     

    The significance of the sexual revolution, theoretically dominated by psychoanalysis, did not consist of the fact that organic life and instinctual life changed the modes of their existence from one being dominated by consciousness to one of dominance. That was only the ideological intention, the “wishful thinking” of the revolution. Where instinct dominated — in the intimate sphere, in real-life sexual relations — there it had always been dominant. The sexual revolution was in fact a revolution of consciousness, which had learned to produce life-like simulations of a “pure” sexuality, which were all the more “ecstatic” the more abstract and rational they became. The result of the sexual revolution was not so much a triumph of “natural” sex as a triumph of the mental over the sexual. Sex thus became a spectacle, a psychological commodity, reproduced in infinite phantasies of seduction, of hypersexual power, of a hyper-masculinity and a hyper-femininity. This “hyper,” which renders sexual images into mass products of popular culture, is a quality missing from nature. It is a quality introduced by a consciousness with infinite powers for abstraction and generalization.14

     

    6. Hyper-Sociality

     

    The four processes indicated so far, which led to the creation of hyperobjects — namely: the hyperparticles of quantum mechanics, the hypersigns of literary criticism, the hyperbeing of Existentialism and the hyperinstincts of psychoanalysis and the sexual revolution — were processes taking place in the advanced Western societies of the 20th century. Within the communist world, however, similar processes of “hyperization” were taking place at the same time, during the 1920’s and 1930’s, and these extended over the whole social sphere. Even communism itself, its theory and practice, could be viewed as the typically Eastern counterpart of the “hyper”-phenomenon.

     

    Soviet society was obsessed with the idea of communality, of the communalization of life. Individualism was castigated as the gravest sin and a “cursed remnant of the bourgeois past.” Collectivism was proclaimed the highest moral principle. The economy was built on the communalization of private property, which came under the jurisdiction of the entire people. The communal was placed infinitely higher than the individual. Communal existence was considered to be prior and determinative in relation to individual consciousness, in full accordance with Karl Marx’s formula: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”15 In factories, in kolkhozes, in party meetings, in penal colonies, and in urban communal apartments, a new man “of communist future” was produced — a conscientious and effective cog in the gigantic wheel of the collectivist machine.

     

    But this new type of sociality, infinitely tighter and denser in its imperatives compared to the earlier (pre-revolutionary) one, was nothing but another instance of hypersociality and a simulacrum of communality. In fact, the social bonds which unite people were rapidly being destroyed. Towards the middle of the 1930’s, even people in familial relationships, like husbands and wives, parents and children, could no longer trust one another in all respects; their Party loyalty and social obligations forced them to denounce and betray even their closest friends. The civil war and the process of collectivization destroyed the natural ties among members of the same nationalities and professional communities. “The most tightly-knit society in the world” (a cliché of Soviet propaganda) was an aggregate of frightened, alienated individuals and tiny, weak social units of families and friends, each of which was trying on his or her own to survive and to withstand state pressure.

     

    Even the base of the entire state pyramid rested on the will of a single individual, who regulated according to his own needs or judgement the work of the whole gigantic social mechanism. And it is curious that it is precisely communism, with its will to communality, which always and everywhere gave rise to the personality cult: in Russia, in China, in North Korea, Roumania, Albania and Cuba. This is not accidental but is the expression of the hypersocial nature of the new society. Communism is not a natural, primary sociality, arising on the basis of biological and economic connections and needs, which unite people. It is a sociality constructed consciously, according to a plan, emanating from the individual mind of the “founder,” and enacted by the individual will of “the leader.”

     

    The “pure” sociality of the communist type is similar to all those modernist models of “hypers” described above: the “pure” sexuality of psychoanalysis, the textuality of new criticism, and the elementariness of quantum mechanics. Communism thus represents some sort of hypnotic quintessence of the social body, which excludes and destroys everything individual and concrete by virtue of its exclusive abstractness — and for this very reason reveals, in the final analysis, its purely individualistic and speculative origin. If we conventionally qualify the pre-modernist state of civilization as “traditional,” then traditional sociality made provisions for the whole gammut of individual diversity and for private forms of property, just as traditional sexuality included the physical, emotional, social, and spiritual intimacy of two people, and just as the traditional work of art gave expression to the views of the author and the spirit of the age. But the “hyper,” by virtue of its artifically constructed character, is the “extract,” the “quintessence” as it were, of one particular property or sign to the exclusion of all others. Hypertextuality excludes all illusions of a separable, distinct content (opposed to form), hypersexuality excludes the notion of a “spiritual intimacy,” or “sexual relation.”16 In similar fashion, hypersociality excludes the “illusion of independence and personal freedom.” “Hyperization,” the process enacted by modernism and realized by postmodernism, achieves this exclusion precisely because it represents the hypertrophy of an abstract property, its heightening to an absolute, “super” degree.

     

    7. Hyper-Materiality

     

    The same applies to the basis of the basis of the Soviet Weltanschauung — “scientific materialism.” From its point of view, physical matter comes first, is primary while consciousness and spirit are secondary. Reality is through and through material and even thought represents only one form of the “movement of matter,” along with physical, chemical, and biological forms of the same movement. Such is the postulate of this philosophy, aspiring towards a completely sober, scientific approach to reality, verified by experience. “The world is moving matter, and nothing exists which would not be a specific form of matter, its property or a form of its movement. This principle took shape on the basis of the achievements of scientific cognition and Man’s practical mastery of Nature.”17

     

    But as is well-known, in practice Soviet materialism never tried to conform to the laws of material reality but strove instead to refashion this reality. The material of nature was subjected to merciless exploitation, pollution and destruction, the material life of the people was brought into decline, the economy was subordinated not to the material laws of production but to entirely idealistic five-year plans and ideological edicts of the successive party congresses. As Andrei Bely remarked at the beginning of the 1930’s, the dominance of materialism in the USSR brought about the voiding of matter itself. Materialism was, in essence, a purely ideological construct, which raised the primacy of material into a theoretical absolute. In practice, materialism annihilated the material. “Matter,” which is thus aggrandized and separated from the principles of spirituality, consciousness and aim-orientedness, becomes a simulacrum of matter, destructive of matter as such. Just as hypersociality served the cult of the singular personality, so hypermateriality became a means of legitimating abstract ideas in their scholastically enclosed finality. The materiality of this materialism was thus the same “hyper” phenomenen as “collectivism,” “the libido,” “the elementary particle” and “the pure text.”

     

    It is significant that out of the six spheres of “hyperization,” three are traditionally subsumed under the term “revolution”: the social, sexual and scientific. But three other “hypers” — hyperexistentialism, hypermaterialism and hypertextuality — can equally well be qualified by the term “revolution,” since they, too, developed in a movement of complete reevaluation of values: from essentialism to existentialism (the revolution in Western philosophy); from idealism to materialism (the revolution in Soviet philosophy); from “idea” and “content” to form and device and text (the revolution in criticism). To this we can add the revolution in the means of communication — the mass media revolution — which led to the birth of TV, video and computer technologies, producing a reality on the screen, perceived as more real than the world beyond the screen.

     

    8. From Super to Pseudo

     

    The very nature of the revolution appears in a new light — as the means or force productive of hyperphenomena. In its straightforward aims, the revolution is a coup — it sets up one antithesis in the place of another: matter in the place of thought, the collective in the place of the individual, the text in place of its content, the instinct in the place of the intellect. . . . But paradoxically it is revolution itself which demonstrates the impossibilty of reversal and expands, rather than eliminates, the power of the “suppressed.” That which is victorious in a revolution, gradually turns out to subordinate itself more and more to the very thing which it was supposed to have vanquished. Materialism has thus turned out to be much more detrimental to the notion of matter and much more scholastic and abstract than any idealistic philosophy anterior to it. Communism has turned out to be more favorable for the abolute affirmation of a singular, almighty individuality than any kind of individualism which preceded it. Literature reduced to a text and to a system of pure signs turns out to be much more dependent on the will of the critic than “traditional” literature, filled with historical, biographical and ideological contents. Matter, reduced to elementary particles, turns out to be a much more ideal entity, mathematically construed, than matter in the traditional sense of the term, having a certain inertia mass. Sexuality reduced to pure drive turns out to be much more cerebral and phantasmagorical than the ordinary sexual urge, which results in a total state of enamouredness in the physical, emotional and spiritual sense. It is the “purity,” the “quintessentiality” as the goal of all the above-named revolutions — pure sociality, pure materiality, pure sexuality and so on — which transforms them into pure antithesis and negations of themselves. That is why pure reality is ultimately a simulation — a simulacrum — of the property of “being real.”

     

    Let us return to the initial meaning of the prefix “hyper.” Unlike the prefixes “over-” and “su[pe]r-,” it designates not simply a heightened degree of the property it qualifies, but a superlative degree which exceeds a certain limit. (The same meaning is found in words like “hypertonia,” “hypertrophy,” “hyperinflation,” “hyperbole” . . .) This excess is such an abundant surplus of the quality in question that in crossing the limit it turns into its own antithesis reveals its own illusionary nature. The meaning of “hyper,” therefore, is a combination of two meanings: “super” and “pseudo.” “Hyper” is such a “super” that through excess and transgression undermines its own reality and reveals itself as “pseudo.” By negation of a thesis, the revolutionary antithesis grows into “super” but finally exposes its own derivative and simulative character.

     

    Certainly, it is neither the classic Hegelian dialectics of thesis and antithesis with subsequent reconciliation in synthesis, nor the modernist model of negative dialectics elaborated in the Frankfurt school (Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse), with an irreducible opposition of a revolutionary antithesis to a conservative thesis. Postmodernist dialectics (if it is still possible to combine such heterogeneous terms) implies neither reconciliation nor revolution but the internal tension of irony. Antithesis, pushed to an extreme, finds thesis inside itself, moreover, exposes itself as an extension and intensification of this very thesis. Revolutionary negation proves to be an aggrandizement, a hyperbole of what is negated. Antithesis circles back on thesis, as its disguised and exaggeratated projection.

     

    In this way, materialism proves to be not a negation of idealism, but its most radical and militant form, ruthlessly destructive in regard to materiality. Communism proves to be not a negation of individualism, but its most voluntarist form ruthlessly destructive in regard to communality. The “hyper” is the “other” of the initial quality (“thesis”), its “second order” reality, its virtual intensity. The excess of quality turns into the illusion of this quality whereas its opposite which was intently negated actually becomes heightened.

     

    Thus hypersociality heightens the power of an individual over society. It is a sociality raised to a political and moral imperative, to an absolute degree of “oughtness” or “duty,” which is no longer connected to any particular being, like mother, father, child, one’s neighbour and so on, but which, instead, destroys all such particulars in order to absolutize an ultimate individuality or particularity in the “personality cult.” The meaning of “hyper” in this instance subdivides further into the following: “super” and “pseudo.” Hypersociality is thus simultaneously a supersociality and a pseudosociality. That is, the social factor is subject to such a degree of intensification that it exceeds and negates all the particularities which initially made up the social. Thus the social becomes the virtual “other” of the social, which through its phantasmic growth fills a space which does not belong to it — the space of the particulars and, therefore, of the social itself, which it stifles.

     

    Historically, intensity and illusion, “super” and the “pseudo” evolve in the development of “hyper” only gradually, as two successive stages. Its first “revolutionary” phase is represented by the “super.” This is the phase of the enthusiastic discovery or construction of new realities: of the socialist “supersociety,” of the emancipated “supersexuality,” of the elementary “superparticle,” of the self-referential “supertext,” of the self-propelled “supermatter.” The first half of the 20th century was mainly preoccupied with the revolutionary advancement of all these “super” phenomena. They germinated in the 1900’s to 1910’s in the theoretical soil of Marxism, Freudianism and Nietzscheanism; in the 1920’s and 1930’s, these “super” theories take on practical form — as the social, sexual, scientific, philosophical and critical revolutions.

     

    This is followed in the second half of the 20th century by a gradual realization of the virtuality of all these ubiquitous superlatives. “Hyper” flips to its other side and second stage — “pseudo.” The transition from the “super” to the “pseudo,” from the ecstatic illusions of pure reality to the ironic realization of this reality as a pure illusion, accounts for the historical transformation of European and Russian culture in the 20th century which can also be described as the movement from modernism to postmodernism.

     

    From this standpoint, Gorbachev’s perestroika (meaning literally, “reconstruction”) and Derrida’s deconstruction can be seen as isomorphic stages in the development of Soviet hyper-sociality and Western hyper-textuality.18 Both exemplify a transition from the “super” stage, manifested in the rise of communism and formalism (“new criticism”) in 1920’s-30’s, to the “pseudo” stage of 1970’s-1980’s. Both demonstrate that “structuredness” (in the form of ideally structured society or structuralist conception of textuality), which was the goal proclaimed by communist and formalist-structuralist movements, manifests only the illusion of social integrity or logical coherence. In the same way that Gorbachev revealed the illusory character of socialism, which proved to be a utopian communality of alienated individuals, Derrida exposed the illusory character of structuralism, of the very notion of “structure” which proved to be a utopian communality of actually decentered, dispersed, disseminated signs.

     

    The “pseudo” phase is the common denominator for all the crises taking place at the end of the 20th century in place of the constructs of the early 20th century: social, scientific, philosophical and other revolutions. Under the sign of the “pseudo,” all of the following phenomena undergo a crisis: the crisis of structuralism in the human sciences, the crisis of the concept of elementariness in physics, the crisis of Leftist projects and Freudian Marxism in political ideology, the crisis of materialism, existentialism and positivism in philosopy, the demise of Soviet ideocratic system and communist society — such are the consequences of world-wide metamorphosis of “hyper” from “super” to “pseudo.” It is a crisis of the utopian consciousness as such, followed by the construction of parodic “pseudo”-utopian discourses.

     

    In its historical evolution from the “super” to the “pseudo,” the “hyper” only now becomes revealed in its full significance, as the necessary connection and succession of its two phases, modernism and postmodernism. Modernism viewed its revolutionary accomplishments as a breakthrough into metaphysically “pure” reality of the super: supersexuality, supermateriality, supersociality — whereas postmodernism reveals the full range of the hyper’s dialectics, as an inevitable conversion of “super” to “pseudo.” From a postmodernist perspective, socialist revolution, sexual revolution, existentialism, materialism are far from being those liberational insights into the highest and “truest” reality they claimed to be. Rather they are intellectual machines designed for the production of pseudomateriality, pseudosexuality, pseudosociality, etc. Thus postmodernism finds in modernism not only the target of criticism, but also the ground for its own play with hyperphenomena. These hyperphenomena would be impossible if not for those revolutionary obsessions with the “super” that gave rise to the tangible “voids” and flamboyant simulacra of contemporary civilization, including non-sensical, empty forms of totalitarian ideologies which gave rise to Russian postmodernism.

     

    In the final analysis, every “super” phenomenon sooner or later reveals its own reverse side, its “pseudo.” Such is the peculiarly postmodernist dialectics of “hyper,” distinct from both Hegelian dialectics of comprehensive synthesis and Leftist dialectics of pure negation. It is the ironic dialectics of intensification-simulation, of “super” turned into “pseudo.”

     

    Every revolution of the first half of the 20th century is doubled and cancelled out with its own “post” of the century’s end. These “posts” are sprouting in all cultural spaces where the most radical changes and dramatic reversals occurred in the modernist era. Contemporary society is postmodern, postcommunist, post-utopian, post-industrial, post-materialist, post-existential, and post-sexual. At this point, the dialectics of “hyper,” which shaped the ironic wholeness of 20th century culture, comes to its complete self-realization.

    Notes

     

    *This essay is an excerpt from the forthcoming book, Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Late Soviet and Post-Soviet Literature, written by Mikhail Epstein, Alexander Genis, and Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, and published by Berghahn Books (Providence, Rhode Island and Oxford). Publication is scheduled for Spring, 1997. The ISBNs are as follows: 1-57181-028-5 (cloth) and 1-57181-098-6 (paper). Thanks to Dr. Vladiv-Glover, who translated and edited the original Russian language version of this essay. It was then revised and extended by the author.

     

    1. Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988) 144-145.

     

    2. Heinz R. Pagels, “Uncertainty and Complementarity,” The World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy, and Mathematics, ed. Timothy Ferris (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1991) 106.

     

    3. As a reader will see, the concept of “hyper-textuality” in the context of this article has nothing to do with the “hyper-text” in commonly-understood, “electronic” sense of the word. “Hyper” is used here in the sense “super” and “pseudo” which relates it to the concepts of “hyper-sexuality,” “hyper-sociality,” etc.

     

    4. George Steiner, Human Literacy, in The Critical Moment. Essays on the Nature of Literature (London, 1964) 22.

     

    5. Umberto Eco, “The Analysis of Structure,” ibid. 138.

     

    6. Saul Bellow, “Scepticism and the Depth of Life,” The Arts and the Public, ed. James E. Miller Jr. and Paul D. Herring (Chicago-London: U of Chicago P, 1967) 23.

     

    7. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground/The Double, Trans. Jessie Coulson (London: Penguin Books, 1972) 16, 26, 27.

     

    8. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Books, 1966) 256, 257.

     

    9. Sartre 804.

     

    10. C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (New York: Oxford UP, 1958) 196.

     

    11. Cited in D.H. Lawrence: A Critical Anthology, ed. H. Coombes (Harmondsworth: Penguin Education, 1973) 244.

     

    12. John Bayley, The Characters of Love (New York: Basic Books, 1960) 24, 25.

     

    13. Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” A Derrida Reader. Between the Blinds, (New York: Columbia UP, 1991) 73.

     

    14. In more detail the phenomena of hyper-textuality and hyper-sexuality, though in different terms, are considered in my articles “Kritika v konflikte s tvorchestvom” (“Criticism in Conflict with Creativity”), Voprosy literatury (Moscow, 1975) 2: 131-168; and “V poiskakh estestvennogo cheloveka” (“In Search of a Natural Human Being”), Voprosy literatury, (1976), 8: 111-145. Both articles are included in my book Paradoksy novizny. O literaturnom razvitii XIX-XX vekov (“The Paradoxes of Innovation. On the Development of Literature in the l9th and 20th Centuries”) (Moscow: Sovetskii Pisatel’, l988). The affinity between these two modes of hyper (hyper-textuality and hyper-sexuality) is formulated in the following way: “What is the general meaning of the paradoxes examined in the articles about ‘critical situation’ and ‘sexual revolution?’ In one case criticism attempts to extract from its object, literature, the most ‘literary’ essence and to isolate it from non-literature; as a result, it takes up the priority that was designed for the text purified from all ‘metaphysical’ contaminations. In another case, literature (and art in general) attempts to extract from its object, a human being, the most ‘natural’ essence, to purify it from all ‘intellectual’ contaminations; the result is the devastation of nature itself and the triumph of pure rationality” (Paradoksy novizny 249).

     

    15. K. Marx. “Marx, Engels, Lenin: On Dialectical Materialism,” Preface, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977) 43.

     

    16. Compare Lacan’s “There is no sexual relation.” “A Love Letter (Une Lettre D’Amour),” Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, ed J. Mitchell and J. Rose, trans. J. Rose (London: Macmillan, 1983) 149-161.

     

    17. A Dictionary for Believers and Nonbelievers, trans. Catherine Judelson (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1989) 336. The same formulation can be found in all Soviet textbooks of dialectical materialism.

     

    18. Derrida’s own comments on the relationship between the concepts of “perestroika” and “deconstruction” can be found in his small book on his trip to Moscow in 1990. Zhak Derrida v Moskve: dekonstruktsiia puteshestviia (“Jacques Derrida in Moscow: a deconstruction of the journey”) (Moscow: RIK “Kul’tura,” 1993) 53.

     

  • Deleuze, Sense and the Event of AIDS

    C. Colwell

    Villanova University
    ccolwell@ucis.vill.edu

     

    . . . and the moral of that is — “Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves.”

     

    –the Duchess.1

     

    AIDS, like cancer, syphilis, cholera, leprosy and bubonic plague before it, has woven the threads of our biological, social and moral existence together into a complex disease entity that is much more than the physical interaction between its cause(s) and the human organism. It presents those already marginalized individuals and communities most affected by it (so far) with personal and political challenges that threaten their social and their physical existence. And it presents the scientific and medical community with a challenge and puzzle that equals, if not surpasses, those that have preceded it. But it is a mistake to separate these two arenas (social/political and scientific) as they inscribe on one another their codes of sense and meaning in a hyper-dialectic of transcription and reverse transcription. It is, as such, a mistake to take the biological objects offered to us by science (specifically the HIV virus) as referents free from infection by meanings ideally supposed to be excluded from its domain. What I will attempt in the following is to mobilize Gilles Deleuze’s notion of sense, as he presents it in The Logic of Sense,2 as a strategy for understanding the direction that the meaning of AIDS has taken and as a means of multiplying other directions that it might take.

     

    As a preliminary sketch of the strategy that I will draw out of Deleuze I want to distinguish between three levels, strata or series that his discussion of sense will deal with: thoughts, things, and sense/events. Thoughts, insofar as they have meaning (are meaningful, make sense), are a function of language, i.e., the form and matter of their expression is that of language. But meaning is about or of things.3 As Michel Foucault notes in The Birth of the Clinic, the problem lies in the relation between words and things.4The Logic of Sense is directed at that gap between words and things in an attempt to understand what it is that bridges the gap, what inhabits the interval. Briefly, Deleuze uses the term “states of affairs” to refer to things and begins his analysis of words with propositions. Between the two he locates a realm of “sense” and “event” (which he equates as two sides of a plane without thickness). It seems to me that it is to the sense/event that we must direct our attention if we are to address the multi-faceted (social, political, economic and scientific) phenomenon of AIDS.

     

    The first section of this essay is an explication of Deleuze’s notions of sense and event as a propadeutic to addressing the specific sense/event of AIDS. Deleuze’s approach is particularly useful here as it provides a conceptual strategy that accounts for the complex interactions between those arenas of meaning that are traditionally (and mistakenly) held separate while avoiding the mirror image errors of positivism and linguistic idealism to which much of post-Kantian philosophy of language is prone. In the second section I turn to the sense/event of AIDS, addressing in particular the social, political, economic and scientific dominance of the HIV model. I conclude by suggesting the ways in which this strategy allows us to pervert and transform the current hegemonic model of AIDS in all its facets. Let me stress at this point that I am using Deleuze’s work as a strategy here instead of as a conceptual model. As will become clear towards the end of this essay I am less concerned with developing a “better” conceptual model of AIDS than I am with perverting the dominant model(s).

     

    I. Sense/Event

     

    Although, as Jean-Jacques Lecercle notes,5 Deleuze largely bypasses those thinkers who have treated the question of sense in the last century, it is worth briefly addressing Gottlob Frege’s analysis of sense. In his seminal paper “On Sense and Reference (Meaning)”6 Frege distinguishes between the “mode of presentation” of a sign (sense) and that which the sign designates (reference). His purpose here is to give an adequate account of the functioning of propositions that contain signs that either have no referent (e.g., propositions in which “Odysseus” is the subject) or cases in which propositions containing different signs have the same referent (“morning star,” “evening star,” and Venus). While Frege rehearses a form of neo-positivism and privileges reference (due to its truth value function) to the detriment of sense there is one point worth noting here. Frege asserts that sense has a certain objectivity, that it is not subjective since it can be, and is, the property of more than one thinker. As such, Frege equates sense with thought (here thought is not the result of a thinker’s mental activity but that which a thinker “grasps”) and positions it between the subjective ideas of thinkers and the objects to which thought refers.

     

    The striking thing is that Frege moves the consideration of sense out of the realm of both subjects and objects. That is, a philosophy of sense is neither a philosophy of the subject (phenomenology/existentialism) nor a philosophy of the object (positivism), although in the end it is on the side of the object, the referent, that Frege positions himself.7 This notion of sense as residing in the “in-between” is one of the two notions I want to retain from Frege. As to the second, Deleuze plays on the multiple meanings of the French word sens, “meaning,” “direction” or sense as a faculty of perception. While I will mobilize all of these meanings I also want to retain Frege’s use of the term as a “mode of presentation.”

     

    Deleuze arrives at the realm of sense from two directions, one beginning with words or propositions, the other beginning with things or states of affairs. From the standpoint of words, he begins with three relations within the proposition: denotation, (which links the proposition to particular things); manifestation (which links the proposition to the beliefs, intentions, etc., of a speaker); and signification (which links the proposition to general or universal concepts) (LS 12-14).8 The problem arises when we seek to understand which of these relations is the primary one, i.e., which functions as the ground of the other two. Depending on one’s standpoint, each of the three relations offers itself as primary. In speech (parole), manifestation is primary since it is the “I” which begins (to speak). This is, of course, Descartes’ position in which the cogito functions as the ground of all propositions; it is the I which, e.g., denotes this piece of wax (LS 14). In language (langue) however, it is signification which is primary. In language, propositions appear “only as premise[s] or conclusion[s]” (LS 15); here “this is a piece of wax” is a conclusion that subsumes its object under a universal category. (Deleuze does not offer the standpoint from which denotation would appear as primary but it is obvious enough: the “this-now-here” of sense certainty.)9 Deleuze argues that when we seek the primary relationship we find ourselves in a circle, “the circle of the proposition” (LS 17). None of these relations will function as the principle of the proposition, as the condition of the possibility of the proposition, as the link or relation between the proposition and what is external to the proposition.10

     

    That relation is the fourth dimension of the proposition, sense. It is “the expressed of the proposition . . . an incorporeal, complex, and irreducible entity, at the surface of things, a pure event which inheres or subsists in the proposition” (LS 19). Note that Deleuze reprises Frege’s notion that sense lies in between, though now it lies in between propositions and states of affairs instead of in between ideas and objects. Sense functions as the condition of the possibility of denotation, manifestation and signification (and thus of truth value — but also of paradox), as the linkage between propositions and events and, as such, between ideas and objects. Sense is the “coexistence of two sides without thickness . . . the expressed of the proposition and the attribute of the state of affairs” (LS 22). That is to say that sense is a characteristic of both words and things. It lies in between but is also at the surface of both and identified with neither (it is identified with the event to which I shall return to below).

     

    To a certain extent Deleuze leaves sense undefined and this necessarily so, since the sense of a proposition can never be an object of denotation or signification of the same proposition, as it is always presupposed in denotation and signification (LS 29-30).11 That is, when one makes the sense of a proposition (P1) explicit in another proposition (P2) the second (P2) always has another sense which is itself presupposed and so on in an infinite regress. As such, any proposition that attempts to offer a definition of sense will itself require another sense.12 Moreover, sense is a property of expressions that have no denotation, manifestation, signification or expressions in which these functions miscarry, i.e., absurd and nonsensical statements. We get a clearer idea of sense by seeing how Deleuze distinguishes it from good sense and from common sense and how he links it with nonsense. Good sense is the sense of signification (LS 76). It is the sense that is ordered in one direction only, the sense of linear thinking.13 It is the sense, as Deleuze says, that “foresees” (LS 75), that is able to extrapolate from the present and the past in order to predict the becoming of the future based on past and current models. It is “good” sense precisely because it identifies the past, present and future as the Same, as a repetition of the Same in the face of the Other (a repetition that denies the possibility of the repetition of difference). Common sense is the sense that governs denotation (particularly the application of signification in denotation: this is a piece of wax) and manifestation (LS 77-8). It “identifies and recognizes” (LS 77). It identifies and recognizes both the self, the “I” that manifests, and the things which the self experiences. The two function complementarily as the identity of common sense provides a beginning and end (and thus a direction) for the movement of good sense and the action of good sense in bringing the manifold of experience under the categories of general signification provides the matter without which identity would remain empty (LS 78). Sense, itself, underlies both good and common sense in that it allows for multiple directions other than the one that any particular manifestation of good sense adopts, and, as the virtual ground of all actual identities, it potentially fragments any particular identity formed by common sense.

     

    Nonsense, absurdity, expressions which violate the rules of good and common sense, have sense too, i.e., are sensical and sensible. “A round square” and “I am every name in history” respectively denote an impossible object, equate two inconsistent categories and fragment the identity of the one who speaks. Yet they nonetheless make sense and function expressively. The best example of this is Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky:

     

    Twas brillig and the slithey toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe14

     

    Even prior to Humpty Dumpty’s definition of these terms this poem functions, it expresses . . . something. The notion of sense that Deleuze elaborates is one that grounds the functioning of language in its widest range, that includes nonsense and the absurd rather than excluding such expressions to fit a theory. Nonsense is not the absence of sense; it is sense that fails to result in denotation or signification or manifestation. The import here is that (non)sense15 grounds the possibility of meanings, directions of thought, of research, and modes of presentation that are cut off by the illusory clarity of good and common sense.16

     

    Moreover, because the Jabberwocky makes sense it functions to transport us into the event of the slaying of the Jabberwock. And it is through the event that the second avenue to the realm of sense lies. Before examining Deleuze’s theory of the event it is worth pausing a moment to look at what counts as events. Michel de Certeau says that “the event is first and foremost an accident, a misfortune, a crisis.”17 Writing on Deleuze, Foucault speaks of the event as “a wound, a victory-defeat, death,” the last being the “best example,”18 while in the context of Nietzsche he says it is a “reversal of a relationship of forces” in response to “haphazard conflicts.”19 Deleuze takes a similar position on the event, considering it primarily as some sort of calamity. My point in raising this issue is to note the emphasis in Deleuze’s work since in what follows I will adopt a wider view of what counts as an event. It seems to me that the synchronic state of a science functions as a state of affairs as it is the set of static relations between bodies (theories, methodologies, experimental technologies, laboratory practices, objects of knowledge, etc.) in an immediate present. As such, it will give rise to its own sense/event.

     

    Events are the effects of the interactions of bodies but are not themselves bodily, corporeal (LS 4). Deleuze distinguishes events from states of affairs, which are the static set of relations that bodies, things, are found in at a particular point in time. When bodies interact they produce effects, events, which are not coextensive with themselves, insofar as they are states of affairs, and which do not inhere in the same time. The time of states of affairs is rectilinear time, a time of “interlocking presents,” that flows in a single direction, from past to future but in which, strictly speaking, past and future do not exist except as boundaries of the present (LS 4, 61-2). The time of the event, however, is a time without a present, a time of an unlimited past and an unlimited future, a time that is expressed in the infinitive form of verbs (LS 5, 61-2). To a great extent, the distinction is between the brute existence of physical things (both in themselves and in their static relations to one another) and the subsistence of an incorporeal entity that floats on the surface of things and constitutes the movement and duration of their becoming and of their sense.

     

    Take disease. As a state of affairs we have a relation between two bodies, two organisms, an infectious organism and a human body. At any particular moment in the course of this disease there will be various states of affairs, an infection, the reproduction and multiplication of the microbe, a fever, an immunological response, a recovery, an exacerbation, etc. But the disease as an event does not inhere in the present. What is in the present is, on the one hand, biological interactions between infectious and infected organisms and, on the other hand, malaise, pain, suffering, etc. The disease, however, is always just past, and yet to come, more appropriately, it is always becoming, always expressed in the infinitive of the verb. As Lecercle notes, the actors in the midst of the event do not experience it as the event, as a single identity, even though the event inheres in all of their actions.20 Insofar as we perceive the person with a disease, insofar as we sense her as having this disease, insofar as we treat and investigate her disease our attention is directed to something more than the body before our eyes, our treatment protocols, our instruments and our diagnostic devices, more than the series of bodies that present themselves to the medical gaze. Our technologically extended and enhanced senses are directed to the event of the disease, an event that is manifested in the body in front of us but which is never immediately present to us either temporally or spatially.

     

    This second path to the realm of sense leads through the event because Deleuze equates sense and the event, indeed, sense is a “pure event” (LS 19, cf. 22). Sense and the event both lie in the “in-between” of words and things. They are the same “thing” from different aspects, two sides of a plane without thickness. Each aspect adheres to its respective dimension, sense to words, events to things, and to each other, sense/event. The in-between realm of sense/events is the place, or, rather, “non-place,” in which words and things mingle, rub up against each other, consorting with one another to produce effects. The issue of causality is important here since there are, at least, three series of cause-effect relations. The first series operates at the level of things, bodies producing effects on other bodies, changes in the states of affairs of those bodies (the scalpel that cuts, the organism that infects). The second series is that in which the interaction of bodies produces events (being cut, being sick). These events are ideational or incorporeal entities that have “logical or dialectical attributes” (LS 5), i.e., entities that have sense and which can generate meaning.

     

    The third series is that of the interaction of events themselves, in which events produce effects on each other. The causal relation here is a weak one, Deleuze calls it a “quasi-cause” (LS 6), partly because there is no necessary relation between cause and effect among events, partly because of the difficulty of distinguishing whether the causes that produce the effects in events are those that arise from things or from other events. Insofar as Deleuze depicts events as hovering over things we may describe two horizontal series of causal relations (among things and among events) and one vertical series that flows from things to events.

     

    Following this it seems to me that we can describe two other series of causal relations. The first (or fourth) is the horizontal relation between propositional structures. As Georges Canguilhem says, “theories never proceed from facts . . . [t]heories arise only out of earlier theories . . . facts are merely the path — and it is rarely a straight path — by which one theory leads to another.”21 Lastly, there is a transverse relation that moves from propositional structures to the level of the sense/event in which our ability to make explicit the sense of events can produce effects on meaning (with the proviso that we always presuppose another sense in doing so). It is by this avenue that we may produce transformations in the event itself. However, we must describe these relations as “quasi-causal” in nature because there is no strict necessity in operation that links these causes and effects. That is, good sense is not able to predict the effects of making the sense of an event explicit and common sense is not able to govern the denotation or manifestation of identities that arise as the effects of doing so.

     

    In order to bring this conceptual strategy to bear on the event of AIDS I need to turn to one last notion in Deleuze, that of “actualization.” In a discussion of Henri Bergson’s theory of evolution22 Deleuze opposes the virtual-actual distinction to the possible-real distinction in order to show that actualization is the “mechanism of creation” (B 98). Here, the relation between the possible and the real is attributed to a “theological model of creation” in which the real is simply one of the many possibles, all of which resemble the real, that has been brought into existence.23 Actualization, on the other hand, is the process in which the virtual differentiates itself in the active creation of something new, an actual which does not resemble the virtual from which it arose (B 97). The best example here is the relation between an organism and the genetic code of its DNA. It is through a process of actualization that the virtual structure of a strand of DNA generates an organism, the organism (phenotype) bearing no resemblance to its genotype.

     

    We are now in a position to state the relation between sense/events and the meaning of propositions (denotation, manifestation, and signification as well as what Frege would term reference). Sense is the ground or condition of meaning, and thus of truth, but it is not a ground in the sense that it simply covers a wider range of possibilities, i.e., it does not stand in relation to reference as the possible to the real.24 Instead, it has the relation of virtual to actual, meanings are generated by actualizing lines of difference from sense/events. This opens up a second possibility for transformation, this time the transformation of the propositional meaning of the event. Precisely because meaning does not stand in a relation of resemblance to sense, or to the event, the sense/event grounds multiple possible meanings.

     

    We should note at this point that Deleuze’s notion of the sense/event does not function as either an epistemology or a metaphysics. That is, it does not function as a method for distinguishing between the truth and falsity of a particular proposition or set of propositions. And it does not provide us with a foundation for distinguishing between reality and appearance. Instead, the argument is that for any event, multiple meanings are possible, that the event can be actualized in multiple ways. And this allows for the possibility that the event of AIDS can be actualized in another way than it has been so far. Again, this is why I take Deleuze’s work to be strategic rather than conceptual model building. Rather than offering us a new way to construct the event it shows us the possibility of re-eventualizing the event, of setting it in motion again, of producing a thaw in the frozen river of “knowledge” that has fixed the event along a particular line of actualization.

     

    II. The Sense/Event of AIDS

     

    With the general outlines of this conceptual strategy in place I will now turn to the event of AIDS. What I will show is that the relations of (quasi)causality and lines of actualization of AIDS run through the in-between of sense/events in an extremely complex manner. The essential point here is that AIDS is not a single phenomenon, a repetition of the same, but a multiplicity whose identity is, at best, illusory. Following that I will argue that we must turn our attention to the senses of these events in order to adequately confront them.

     

    My concern here is with the scientific, economic, political and social hegemony of the HIV model of AIDS and the correlative emphasis on the search for a cure/vaccine to the detriment of social measures designed to control the spread of the disease. Since 1984 it has been taken as a fact that HIV is the necessary and sufficient cause of AIDS.25 I say “taken as a fact” not because there are no qualified dissenters from this view but because HIV has become the dominant model in the four registers listed at the beginning of this paragraph to the exclusion of all other possibilities. HIV may well be the sole cause of AIDS (and if we are lucky we will eventually find out whether or not this is the case) but the troubling aspect is that other avenues of research and treatment (not to mention prevention) have been effectively marginalized. Given the stakes, to say “troubling” is to say the least.

     

    The dominance of this model is due to a number of reasons both within and outside the domain of what we nominally call science. “Science” is taken to be that language which accurately represents the world in a universalized system of signification in which signs refer to independent objects and the system of their relations to one another. It appears as an empirical endeavor in which the facts of the matter provide their own conceptual structure by means of revelation to sufficiently rigorous and insightful researchers. While this image has been criticized by a number of authors (e.g., Paul Feyerabend, Foucault, Thomas Kuhn) it remains the dominant model socially, politically, economically and scientifically (by this last I mean that scientists themselves largely retain this image of their work). With regard to AIDS the point is that scientific propositions that identify HIV as the cause of AIDS appear to establish a universal and uncontestable reference free of significant effects of the sense of those propositions, the mode of presentation of those propositions and the mode of presentation of the theories and observations which generate those propositions.

     

    But if Deleuze is right, the always unexpressed sense of these propositions, theories, observations and the multiplicity of correlative and contiguous propositions, what Foucault calls a discursive formation, functions as their ground, as the virtuality from which they are actualized. Let me now turn to what I take that sense or senses, at least in part, to be.

     

    As Donna Haraway has shown, immune system discourse, and correlatively, disease discourse, are structured around the concept of identity and individuality where the primary task of the immune system is the differential identification of Self and Non-self and the defense of the (self-same) individual against foreign intruders.26 Political/military metaphors are not misplaced here as they permeate immune system discourse as they have done the discourse of both disease and the body for at least the last two centuries. On the one hand, epidemics such the one of cholera in Paris in the 1830’s were perceived as foreign invasions (and continue to be: syphilis sent back in the blood of soldiers returning from foreign wars, AIDS is the invasion of the heterosexual community by the gay or drug abusing communities).27 On the other hand, the body’s cells were described as closed, individual organisms with their own borders and identity at both the advent of cellular theory and well into this century.28 The sense of both immune system and disease discourse adheres to the surface of the propositions that deploy the terms Self, Non-self, individual, identity, border, attack, defense.

     

    Moreover, the shift from vitalism/mechanism models of life to the information system model of DNA has not produced any fundamental change in the political/military sense of medicine and biology. All that has changed is the conception of the attack/defense structures. With the development of genetic models of heredity and the advent of DNA, the body (and all other forms of life) becomes the phenotypical expression of a genotype, a code, carried in the recesses of the cells that constitute it. Disease becomes a battle between information systems, those of the body and of the disease organism with a third system, that of medicine, intervening on the side of the body. This sense of disease becomes particularly apparent in both AIDS and auto-immune diseases (e.g., multiple sclerosis, lupus erythematosus). Part of the genetic code is the program for the development of defense mechanisms, the immune system, but precisely because it is a program it carries the possibility of errors occurring both within the code itself and in its translation. Auto-immune diseases (which can be either congenital defects in the code or defects produced by infectious agents or a combination of the two in which a pathogen activates a dormant gene) are caused by “errors” in the code that turn the body against itself in a physiological death drive. In this context HIV appears as an alien infiltrator that invades the body’s most fundamental structure and perverts the code that produces and maintains its identity. If auto-immune diseases are evidence of traitors within the body then HIV appears as a subversive foreign agent that recruits and produces traitors. And it appears as such precisely because of the way the sense/event of medicine and disease has been actualized.

     

    Modern medicine is constituted largely as a discipline of intervention that confronts disease as an entity to be combatted and defeated. For the most part even preventative measures are simply efforts to identify disease at an early stage in order to initiate a counter-attack before a beachhead is secured. This is due both to the dominance of the germ model of disease, disease as an invader, and to the institutional reorganization of medicine that Foucault has dubbed the “birth of the clinic.” The clinic or hospital is where the body is placed in a position of hyper-individuation as it is removed from its socio-environmental context in favor of a controlled, universally reproducible setting in which the environment has no effect on the disease process other than those intentionally produced by medical intervention (in the ideal scenario29) in order to isolate the disease process from all the other processes in which the body is enmeshed. The clinic enjoys a privileged position in the medical community; it is the site of teaching, the site of research, the site with the highest concentration of technology and new treatment modalities, the site where those on the cutting edge of the profession want to be. As such, it becomes the standard, the norm, for the practice of medicine, the treatment of disease.

     

    The production of the ideal, neutral setting in which to isolate and treat diseases and the diseased has as its correlate the construction of the ideal, neutral social environment. The structure of medicine as interventional and the correlative invention of the neutral site for the study and treatment of disease constitutes the body’s environment, insofar as it is of medical interest, as either neutral or threatening. Either the environment acts as a factor or co-factor in the production of disease or it remains neutral. That is to say that social environments only appear as potentially invasive, as alien, to the body insofar as they appear at all as a factor in the generation or transmission of disease. In the social, political and economic structures of the western world the neutral environment (outside the clinic) is the white, bourgeois, suburban and rural domain of monogamous heterosexuals.

     

    Lastly, we may note the long genealogy that has linked sex and sexuality to pathology. As Foucault has ably shown, sex and sexuality have been constituted as harboring within them an always present pathological element that can manifest itself along moral, psychological, and physiological lines in the individual generating a danger to both the individual and the species.30 Sex is an autochthonous danger to the defense of the Self precisely because it is a drive within oneself (one’s Self) that violates the defensive borders of the Self by exposing the body to an Other, to a Non-self that harbors a potential invader. Sexuality is always, at least potentially, a double agent opening the back door of the citadel and admitting foreign insurgents.

     

    These are some of the senses into which the disease we now call AIDS irrupted. The sense/event of AIDS mingles and interacts with the sense/events of medicine, biology, the immune system, sexuality and the environment in the in-between. It is here that it becomes, as Avital Ronnell has said, an historical event rather than a natural calamity.31 As an historical event it is caught up in the genealogy of these other sense/events that allows its propositional determination not only as a viral infection that disrupts the functioning of the immune system but also as an alien invader (whether it be from the “dark continent” or from the [gay and/or promiscuous] “aliens” among us), as moral retribution for abominations of nature, as divine retribution for the same, as “nature’s way of cleaning house,” etc.32 The construction of AIDS as an essentially gay disease (and hence one that affects those undeserving of “our” full social, political, economic and scientific intervention in the cause of eliminating “their” suffering) is not simply the result of imaginations fueled by ressentiment (although this element cannot and must not be ignored). It is a complex of propositions whose ground lies in the realm of sense/events. That is, all of the actualizations of all of the sense/events, all of the propositional meanings that arise from the sense/events, outlined above enter in to the constitution of AIDS as a “gay” disease. Moreover, the search for a singular and self-same cause of the disease elicits the construction of a singular and self-same “alien” presence that imports the disease into “our” midst — despite however illusory both of those identities are.

     

    But this ground in sense/events does not have the relation of resemblance to its current manifestation as the possible does to the real. It is a virtuality, or series of virtuals, from which one line of actualization has been realized. The sense/event(s), along with the mixture of sense/events in which it is immersed, is not determinative of any particular line of actualization in the strong sense. Sense/event as ground of both sense and nonsense, truth functional statements and the absurd, is the ground of multiple avenues of meaning; it does not fix meaning, it enables it (that is, it enables both its fixation and the perversion of that fixation).

     

    At this point, let me return to the question of the dominance of the HIV model of AIDS. Despite the fact that prominent researchers, Robert Root-Bernstein and Peter Duesberg among others, have provided significant evidence and coherent arguments that HIV is not a sufficient, and may not be a necessary, cause of AIDS there has been little research done along the lines that they suggest.33 Indeed, those who have dared to publicly argue along these lines have had their research funds cut off. The reasons for this are multifold. Economically, the HIV model has generated enormous income for the manufacturers of HIV tests and antiviral drugs. Politically, it has allowed governments to claim that they are acting responsibly and to assure a frightened populace that the cause has been found with the concomitant implication that the risk has been decreased, that the scientific will to knowledge continues to have the power to protect them. Socially, it has strengthened the identification of the threat with body fluids of those already marginalized and feared and furthered their exclusion in the interests of the safety of the “general population.” Its hegemony lies in its positing of a singular and identifiable Non-self that functions as an invader and internal insurgent as opposed to multiple-antigen models that propose complex interactions in which no single, and thus identifiable, enemy is present.

     

    To be sure, AIDS research is not entirely monolithic — if it were, neither Roots-Bernstein’s nor Duesberg’s work would be known or published. Nonetheless, such research is marginalized to the extent that the social-political-economic actualization of AIDS has effectively fixed HIV as the necessary and efficient cause. And this actualization functions in a spiral manner insofar as our social, political and economic capital is invested in scientific research on HIV which then provides support for the continuing reinvestment of capital.

     

    Moreover, the hegemony of the HIV model focuses the direction of research toward the discovery of a magic bullet, a cure or vaccine that will overthrow the disease and render it harmless. Because the social environment is presented as either neutral or hostile it appears as something to be defeated instead of a milieu that can be transformed. And as the environment of AIDS has been actualized as sexual in nature, sex becomes an enemy to be defeated either through abstinence or its imprisonment within the legitimized perimeter of monogamous heterosexuality. This mode of presentation has functioned to the detriment of social measures designed to control the spread of the disease by lowering a cone of silence over the discourse of safer sex and IV drug use.

     

    That is to say that the fixation of one line of actualization, the one that runs through HIV, has established this retrovirus as a functional referent for both the popular imagination and the economically and politically legitimized scientific/medical community. It establishes a single meaning of the disease, single direction for research, a single perception of the infected and diseased. And it does so because it is both good sense and common sense, a means of foreseeing the future (hopefully) and a means of identifying the threat. It stabilizes and freezes the event, shifting us from the uncertainty of becoming of the event to the safety of the being of the referent.

     

    Following this it seems to me that there are two ways of thinking about how we can respond to the sense/event. On the one hand, we have the project of counter-actualization.34 By making the sense of the event explicit we return to the virtuality of the sense/event, to the series of virtual singularities that make up the sense/event, in an attempt to allow the formation of new lines of actualization, the formation of new structures of propositional meaning, new designations, manifestations, significations and referents. The sense/event is repeated but as a repetition of difference in place of the repetition of the same. On the other hand, the mobilization of virtual singularities holds open the possibility of transformations at the level of the sense/event itself, at the level of the interactions of the various sense/events that underlie, overlap, and interconnect with the sense/event of AIDS. These two operations are not fundamentally distinct in any manner. Instead, they are two ways of thinking about the mining of sense and the effects it might produce.

     

    To return to the sense/event of AIDS, to the realm of the in-between, is to re-eventualize sense and the event, to set them moving again, to find in its becoming the multiplicity of other possibilities, of other lines of actualization, to other lines of research, to the possibility that AIDS is not the unitary and univocal disease that it is presently constructed as. The means to do so is by taking care of the sense, by mining the realm of sense/events in order to make its sense explicit, by remaining suspicious of the senses we presuppose in making sense of that sense. To do so is to produce, hopefully, shifts in the sense of AIDS, shifts in the mode of presentation of AIDS, shifts in the direction of AIDS and shifts in the meaning of AIDS.

     

    Our project, then, is one of counter-actualization, undoing the lines of actualization in order to re-eventualize the virtual elements of the sense/events. The problem that appears to arise at this point is that of how we are to prevent other noxious lines of actualization, new lines that continue to increase suffering rather than decrease it. But this is a false problem or, more accurately, a bad formulation of the problem that supposes that we have control over the lines of actualization or over sense/events, that our causal interactions are more than quasi-causes whose effects we have the good sense to predict and the common sense to identify and control. But it is precisely the case, as Foucault has shown us so well, that this is the sort of control, the sort of power/knowledge, that we do not have. The best we can do is to pervert the actualizations that we find and wait to see what is actualized in the wake. The tactics and strategies of counter-actualization, of the mining of sense, are those of the nomad, the guerilla fighter, the terrorist. Counter-actualization is a street fight that attacks sedentary blockages and obstacles in order to set things moving again and then waits (im)patiently for new sedimentations, new blockages, new obstacles, new struggles.35

     

    We cannot simply take care of the sense and allow the words to take care of themselves. The Duchess is wrong there. Indeed, taking care of the words is a part of taking care of the sense. And if we do not take care of the sense, the words will surely take care of us.

     

    Notes

     

    I wish to extend my thanks to Constantin V. Boundas for his comments on an earlier version of this paper. My thanks also to Lisa Brawley of Postmodern Culture and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments.

     

    1. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass (New York: Bantam Books, 1981) 68.

     

    2. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester, (New York: Columbia UP, 1990). Hereafter cited in the text as LS.

     

    3. This is, of course, too simplistic. But I leave aside here the reflexive issues of meanings that are about thought, language, meaning itself, etc.

     

    4. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, trans. A.M. Sheridan-Smith (New York: Vintage Books, 1975) xi. See also The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon, 1970): the original title of this work is Les mots et les choses.

     

    5. Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Philosophy Through the Looking Glass (La Salle: Open Court, 1985) 92.

     

    6. Gottlob Frege, “On Sense and Meaning,” trans. Max Black, Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, ed. Peter Geach and Max Black (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982) 56-78, hereafter cited in the text as SR. There is some debate over whether to translate the term “Bedeutung” (as Frege uses it) as “meaning” or “reference.” Following J.N. Mohanty’s practice I shall use “reference” at those places where I do not use both terms. See Husserl and Frege (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982) 43-4.

     

    7. Michel Foucault, introduction, The Normal and the Pathological, by Georges Canguilhem, trans. Carolyn Fawcett, (New York: Zone Books, 1989) 8; cf. Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum,” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977) 175-6. Nor is the philosophy of sense a philosophy of the concept for Deleuze, but of the conditions in which concepts appear.

     

    8. We may note here that, on Frege’s terms, denotation and signification fall under the heading of reference while manifestation is a form of sense.

     

    9. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, (New York: Oxford UP, 1977) 58-66. The relation in which the denotation of a pure this breaks down nearly immediately into an dialectic between the I and the this-now-here. See Michael Hardt, Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993) for reasons why Deleuze would ignore Hegel at this point.

     

    10. Philip Goodchild offers a lucid description of this problem in “Speech and Silence in the Mumonkan: An Examination of the Use of Language in the Light of the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze,” Philosophy East and West 43.1 (1993): 1-18.

     

    11. Lecercle argues that the positive definition of sense is that of a paradoxical element that links the series of signifiers and the series of signifieds, always in excess in the first and lacking in the second. See Lecercle, 101-2, cf. LS 48-51. AIDS is always excessive in the series of signifiers that are deployed around it (see note to Paula Treichler below) and remains lacking in a number of ways as a signified.

     

    12. This creates what in Platonic scholarship is known as the third man problem. One might argue that despite this sense could still be defined. However, I take Deleuze to argue that sense is an aleatory function that cannot be captured in any proposition precisely because it cannot be contained within language.

     

    13. See Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method, in particular Part 3 in Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Donald Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1980), 12-7.

     

    14. Carroll, Looking Glass 117.

     

    15. Cf. Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia UP, 1994) 64, on non-being. Nonsense, on this view, is not the negation or absence of sense but sense as a problematic.

     

    16. One might well wonder at this point what nonsense has to do with the event of AIDS, particularly with the scientific and medical aspects of the disease. What the history of science shows us is that propositions that had denotations or significations (or referents) in the past (under previous paradigms or in previous discursive formations) no longer have those referents. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, propositions that currently have referents did not have them in the past. Foucault points out that Gregor Mendel’s statements regarding hereditary traits were not truth-functional in 19th century biology (“Discourse on Language,” The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan-Smith [New York: Pantheon Books, 1972] 224). They were taken to be absurd or nonsense and in the context of the dominant scientific theories of the day they were just that, even though they are presently not only truth functional but, to a certain extent, true. My point is that sense and nonsense function at a level prior to what Foucault would describe as the underlying order that structures an episteme. This is why I have not referred to Foucault’s discussion of the in-between in The Order of Things, xx-xxi.

     

    17. Michel de Certeau, “History: Science and Fiction,” Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986) 205.

     

    18. Foucault 173-4.

     

    19. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 154.

     

    20. Lecercle 98.

     

    21. Georges Canguilhem, A Vital Rationalist, ed. Francois Delaporte, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Zone Books, 1994) 164. Italics in the original.

     

    22. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1988). Hereafter cited in the text as B.

     

    23. John Rajchman, Philosophical Events (New York: Columbia UP, 1991) 160.

     

    24. Cf. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 153.

     

    25. Mirko Grmek, History of AIDS, trans. Russell Maulitz and Jacalyn Duffin (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990) 68.

     

    26. Donna Haraway, “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of the Self in Immune System Discourse,” Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991) 203-30.

     

    27. See Francois Delaporte, Disease and Civilization, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986); and Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors (New York: Anchor Books, 1990).

     

    28. Canguilhem 168.

     

    29. This is of course an ideal as there are always nosocomial infections, to name but one unintended effect.

     

    30. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, (New York: Vintage Books, 1980).

     

    31. Avital Ronnell, “A Note on the Future of Man’s Custodianship (AIDS Update),” Public8 (Toronto: Public Access, 1993) 56.

     

    32. See Paula Treichler, “AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification,” AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Criticism(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989) 31-70, for a discussion of the multiplicity of meanings that have been generated around AIDS.

     

    33. See Robert Root Bernstein, Rethinking AIDS: The Tragic Cost of Premature Consensus (New York: The Free Press, 1993). Let me note here that there are serious problems with the sense of Root-Bernstein’s own argument which tends to portray certain sexual activities as inherently dangerous. Nevertheless, the multiple-antigen-mediated-autoimmunity (MAMA) model answers a number of questions that HIV model does not, in particular why some individuals have been infected with HIV for over ten years without developing AIDS or any symptoms thereof.

     

    34. I take this term from Constantin Boundas.

     

    35. One of the most remarkable examples of this sort of activity is the activity of ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). See Douglas Crimp and Adam Rolston, AIDS DemoGraphics (Seattle: Bay Press, 1990).

     

  • “God has No Allergies”: Immanent Ethics and the Simulacra of the Immune System

    Adrian Mackenzie

    Sydney University
    adrian.mackenzie@philosophy.su.edu.au

     

    “[T]he science of life always accommodates

    a philosophy of life.”1

     

    Conventional approaches to bioethics long for a purified set of principles in order to guide the application of scientific knowledges of the body — the life sciences — to individual “cases.” In the realm of bioethics, the possibility that these knowledges might themselves constitute entities such as the individual, or the possibility that the individual body might itself be something other than the more or less governable a-historical object of technoscientific action, awakens a kind of horror autotoxicus. Nor do the prevalent modes of ethical discourse react kindly to the possibility that the “living” body of an individual is also a self, an actor within a complicated set of narratives, codes and apparatuses whose various registers — medical, economic, racial, sexual, religious, and so on — intersect. In short, conventional bioethical discourses refuse to acknowledge that, as Emmanual Levinas has written, “the body is a permanent contestation of the prerogative attributed to consciousness of `giving meaning’ to each thing; it lives as this contestation.”2

     

    Traditional bioethics disappoints us insofar as it overlooks the ways the body contests the prerogatives of consciousness, contests reason and self-identity. Instead of opening onto the possibility of divergent ethea, bioethics’ universalizing adjudicative principles legitimate the biomedical normalization of differences by trying to deal only with the moral rights of the rational self and by leaving the differing character of embodiment — a most profound aspect of the ethical habitat — aside. In its separation of scientific theory and “ethical” practice, and in its unwillingness to transit any borders into the epistemological territory of science, conventional bioethics misapprehends the active and ambivalent role of technoscientific intervention, an intervention which both produces these crucial differences in embodiment and participates in their effacement. Traditional bioethics allergically responds to the ethical issue — the maintenance of ethos, of embodied differences, of the character and habits of individual bodies.

     

    Bios: nomó

     

    "Now it is over life, throughout its
unfolding,
that power establishes its dominion."3

     

    Foucault’s well-known description of a shift during the last two centuries from sovereign to disciplinary power or “bio-power” implies a displacement in the substance of ethics.4 In diverse discourses and domains, it becomes increasingly obvious that the presumed exclusion of ethics from the theoretical-pragmatic complex of science itself, from the very concrete operations and forces of technoscientific discourses engaging living bodies, significantly limits the relevance and effectiveness of the traditional notion of ethics.5

     

    As Donna Haraway describes it, “the power of biomedical language . . . for shaping the unequal experience of sickness and death for millions is a social fact deriving from on-going heterogeneous social processes.” 6 The morality-displacing power of biomedical discourse and practice does not confine itself to sickness and death, but branches out into the normalization of whole populations. At many different scales and under different aspects — birth, death, sexual relations, work, fitness, stress, leisure, and so on — life is targeted by the vectors of biomedical intervention.

     

    Again, Foucault makes this point succinctly when he writes of the emergence of bio-power: “For the first time in history, no doubt, biological existence was reflected in political existence; the fact of living was no longer an inaccessible substrate that only emerged from time to time; amid the randomness of death and its fatality; part of it passed into knowledge’s field of control and power’s sphere of intervention.”7 The propagation of bio-power — designating “what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculation and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life”8 — powerfully challenges any responsive ethics to address the realm of physiology and to reframe the ethical substance to include the embodiment of biomedical materiality. In other words, so-called “physiological” or “biological” questions increasingly raise ethical issues in ways that cannot be disentangled from the historical conditions of life as a locus of power relations or, conversely, solved through an a-historical ethico-moral calculus. Under the auspices of bio-power, biological knowledge increasingly presents itself as the ground of self-realization and governance in relation to life in general. It is difficult to suggest a more obvious example of the explicitly biomedical complications of ethics than the response to HIV/AIDS over the last decade: the rhetorics of defence and exclusion comprehensively blur the borders between scientific representations of disease and the institutional and “ethical” responses.

     

    In the course of this translation, which constitutes biology as an object of power, a concomitant conceptual and representational shift has occurred in biological understandings of the body. “The body,” as the object of biomedical discourse, no longer displays the hierarchical unity of organs and structures which projected it as subject to the rational self, master of its own self-reflexive truth, the presupposed self of traditional ethical codes. In a shift that correlates with the shift from sovereign power centered on the speaking, judicative subject to the statistical, dispersed technological networks of disciplinary power, the living body can no longer be thought of as the “unambiguous locus of identity, agency, labour,” as Haraway stresses in her reading of the immune system as “icon.” Rather, the living body is symbolized and operated on as “a coded text, organized as an engineered communications system.”9 From the standpoint of bio-power, it is difficult to decide where, if not everywhere in the corpus of life, difference and identity reside. Certainly it no longer gravitates towards the constellation of reason as consciousness of self.

     

    Hence two inter-related problems are at hand: (i) the need to dislocate the locus of ethical concern so that it is not simply excluded from the discourses of science, or confined to the instrumental regulation of their application; (ii) the issue of how to formulate such a relocated ethics when the new locus of embodiment turns out to lack stability because it “emerges as a highly mobile field of strategic differences.”10 Together they suggest that an ethics of embodiment must concern itself with the attempts of biomedical discourses exhaustively to code differences. Such an ethics calls for an account of the irreducibility of individual differences that goes outside the traditional assumption of independent selves standing in the solitary light of reason, illuminated by transcendent interior values. At the same time, if we seek differences conducive to heterogenous ethea in the face of ever-extending processes of bio-political normalization, we cannot rule out the possibility that strategic zones of difference reside within science itself.

     

    Immunity and alterity

     

    In the context of immunology the major stake is indeed the irreducible difference and self-identity of individuals. A contemporary textbook of immunology asseverates:

     

    The central question in immunology has always been, How can the immune system discriminate between “foreign” and “self.”11

     

    Immunology proffers itself as the science of bodily self and non-self recognition. Varela and Anspach write: “[W]hat is the nature of the body identity when a syndrome such as AIDS can cause its breakdown? This leads us directly to the key phenomenon of body identity: the immune system.”12 Haraway also cites a number of reasons why the study of the immune system stands out as an exemplary and strategic site in the biomedical coding of differences. First, immunological discourse increasingly tries to determine who or what counts as the “general population.”13 The diagnosis of HIV-AIDS has, for instance, created a new population group with different legal, insurance and employment status to the general population. In a more direct negotiation of differences, immunology now supplies anthropological field study with the means to conclusively determine ethnic groupings.14 As an already fertile field of biotechnological activity, the practical importance of immunology continually grows as the technology of monoclonal antibodies infiltrates diverse industrial, diagnostic and agricultural practices.

     

    Secondly, Haraway proposes that the immune system be viewed as representative of the denaturing processes mentioned above which have translated the body into an explicitly decentered and dynamically structured object. She writes: “My thesis is that the immune system is an elaborate icon for the principal systems of symbolic and material `difference’ in late capitalism.”15 The use of the word “system” is not incidental in this context because one of Haraway’s main concerns is to show how biomedical representations of bodies now resort to the conceptualities of signal and logic derived from communication “systems.”16 Immunology, according to Haraway, is one of the principal actors in the re-staging of the body as a biotechnological communications system.

     

    The corporeal negotiations of material differences carried by the immune system intimately determine what is properly one’s own body; they regulate a body open to and capable of responding to an indefinite variety of “others” — living, non-living, or on the borderline between the living and the dead (e.g. viruses). Thus we can identify a particularly apt biomedical figuration of “ethical” interest in the immunological figuration of the self, where “practically all molecules in the universe are antigens,” 17 that is to say, where almost any kind of matter potentially elicits an immune system response, and where there is no simple borderline between what is foreign and what is recognized as belonging, no simple dividing line between between drug and toxin, nourishment and parasite.

     

    The triumph of an icon of the self: the self as icon

     

    How can the promise of an ethics which does not place itself beyond the material effects of a biomedical discourse such as immunology be fulfilled? In what mode would ethics permeate the supposedly value-resistant fabric of the science of immunology? By dwelling less obsessively on values and orienting itself more towards an ethics understood as “a typology of immanent modes of existence.”18 The natural properties of bodies are steadily being diversified and complicated by immunologically sophisticated organ transplants, prosthetics, pharmaceuticals, by practices of corporeal grafting and by all the inflorescences of matter to which the flesh is currently heir. If it wishes to account for the specificities of ethea — the dwelling places of living things — for the character, habits and habitat of localized bodies, ethics must begin to register the contours of difficult terrains such as the immune system on a map of embodied difference.

     

    In part, as I have said, ethics must show how biomedical discourses such as immunology actively produce rather than merely describe differences. Can the biomedical sciences be shown always to be doing more than describing the origin of bodily differences? Can they also be seen as actively elaborating differences? If they can, we may assume that immunology not only describes how the immune system differentiates and secures self from other, but that immunology, in constituting a self immunized against others, also performs an ethically charged immunizing operation. (Certainly an obsession with severing obligation or connection to others runs strongly through the isolating treatment accorded to people infected with HIV-AIDS.) Counter to Haraway’s thesis that the immune system is an icon of symbolic and material differences, immunology could be read as a discourse of immunity which attempts, as the Latin root immunis suggests, to free or exempt the self from obligation to others.

     

    Immunology, like nearly every science, does indeed present itself as “merely representing” rather than actively producing differences between self and non-self within the contemporary social field. In this sense it remains, along with most other sciences, Platonist. But unlike many other sciences, immunology explicitly allies itself with Platonism — the Western tradition’s most persistent and wide-ranging discourse on representation and the judgment of representation — in its foundational paradigm, the Principle of Clonal Selection. Because this foundation is no longer even questioned by immunology it is not, as Golub’s textbook points out, referred to as clonal selection theory but merely as Clonal Selection.19 Experiments do not test this foundation; they only test hypotheses consistent with it. Clonal Selection purports to explain how the body’s immune system is able to discriminate and respond to “foreign” material (antigen):

     

    Antigen does not instruct the immune system in what specificity to generate; rather, it selects those cells displaying a receptor of the appropriate specificity and induces them to proliferate and differentiate, resulting in expansion of specific clones of reactive cells.20

     

    The “founding father” of this theory, Niels Jerne, conveyed Clonal Selection in the following terms:

     

    Can the truth (the capacity to synthesise antibody) be learned? If so, it must be assumed not to pre-exist; to be learned it must be acquired. We are thus confronted with the difficulty to which Socrates calls attention in Meno (Socrates, 375 B.C.), namely that it makes as little sense to search for what one does not know as to search for what one knows; what one knows one cannot search for, since one knows it already, and what one does not know one cannot search for since one does not even know what to search for. Socrates resolves this difficulty by postulating that learning is nothing but recollection. The truth (the capability to synthesise an antibody) cannot be brought in, but was already inherent.21

     

    Can this overlapping of the Clonal Selection theory and the Platonic theory of knowledge as a recollection which needs nothing from the outside and which is exempt (immune) from obligation to the unknown be regarded as anything more than a fascinating but purely rhetorical invocation of a philosophical text as metaphor? Yes, if it can be shown that the Platonic investment descends beyond the play of `mere rhetoric’ into the deep structure of immunological theory, or, more significantly, that the rhetoricity of this Platonic explanation of the possibility of an immunological self could not be completely expelled from the body of immunological theory.

     

    A logic of decontamination

     

    In “Plato and the Simulacrum,” Gilles Deleuze claims that the founding motive of Platonism has always been the effort to secure the domain of representation on a model of Sameness. The dialectic and myths of Plato’s texts are read by Deleuze as providing a founding model for distinguishing and selecting proper claimants from false claimants. Proper claimants are copies which have some claim to truth, knowledge and the Good because of their internal resemblance to the Idea on which they are modelled; false claimants constitute the simulacra whose apparent resemblance to truth and the Good conceals an “interiorized dissimilarity.”22 This founding model is thus designated as the model of Sameness. Only representations or copies that have an internal relation to the essential Idea of the Good, beauty, or virtue possess the authentic resemblance or Likeness which delineates the domain of philosophical representation. I will return to the issue of the simulacra and the false claimants to be excluded because of the absence of any proper relation to the Same. But first, I would roughly contextualize Jerne’s fortuitous encapsulation of the foundation of immunology in Platonic terms within the broader framework of Platonism.

     

    Varela and Anspach are explicit: “Formulated another way, the organism learns to distinguish between self and nonself during ontogeny”.23 The idea of knowledge as recollection of the differences inscribed earlier (during embryogenesis) is understood as the immunological parallel to the immortality of the soul which Plato consistently introduces into his texts under the guise of a myth. These myths claim that only because the soul (and by analogy, the immune system), prior to its current embodiment (that is, during embryogenesis), has contemplated the eternal Forms or Ideas beyond the mundane world, can knowledge approximate in recollection the Truth which the soul has seen (that is, one’s body can recognise what belongs to it and what is other). While the myths of the Phaedrus, Symposium, Republic, Statesman and Meno which present the eternal life of the soul might all be regarded as interruptions or digressions in the course of the dialectic, Deleuze argues that the ironic play at evasion (the myths are always explicitly advertized as heuristic fictions by Socrates) only conceals the deeper motive of methodically dividing the faithful claimant from the false claimant in order to protect a line of succession from Same to Like. “The myth, with its constantly circular structure, [i.e. souls circulating between mundane and extra-mundane life, contemplating the Forms in eternity] is really the narrative of foundation.” 24 It permits the claims of representations to be founded by determining which claimants may share in that which the unsharable, imitated Idea possesses firsthand: eternal, unchanging Being. Without that share, claimants are nothing but those impostors known as simulacra.

     

    The philosophical schema and principle of selection of Platonism — and hence of any knowledge system such as immunology which purports simply to describe or represent differences — can thus be formulated as “only that which is alike differs.” The Same always returns, insofar as it generates good copies, faithful imitations, paternally authorized by the logos of reason. It instates a hierarchy descending from the Same to Like, from being towards becoming. (Hence the hierarchy of copies of the bed — idea, artifact, painting — to be found in Book X of The Republic, 596b-602b.) The method of recognition and selection by division constitutes “an exact definition of the world as icon.” 25 This world-schema, within whose parameters science at least sometimes moves, does more than represent what is known. It actually selects or excludes various copies and representations on the grounds of their affiliation or non-affiliation to Sameness. The mundane world, a body, or an immune self is thereby selected and affirmed as an icon or good representation of that which it copies: the Same.

     

    In this respect, Haraway’s ascription of iconic status to the “material-semiotic actor” of the immune system shares in the Platonism of the determinations of self she so cogently reads in the text of immunology. If the immune system is read as an icon of difference, it pictorially represents more or less truthfully an imitated referent which exists elsewhere. Read as icon, the immune system is condemned to remain within the hierarchical lineage of good or truthful claimants in the domain of mimetic representation.26 In its allegiances to Platonism, this is also the operation of the immune system as constituted by immunology in its fundamental problematic of self and non-self. The immune system, insofar as it is governed by Clonal Selection (and insofar as it can be represented in the very ideal of a system), is said to function in order to exclude anything whose claim cannot be traced through a lineage of recognizable likeness founded in the complex genetic locus known as the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC).27 The immunizing operation of immunology transpires through a theory that faithfully copies the Platonic operation of selecting among claimants, of bringing differences within a hierarchy of models and copies dominated by the model of the Same.

     

    This way of looking at the immune system (and the world) has always cost dearly: it tends to preclude any relation with the outside other than the allergic. Indeed Derrida has argued that for Platonism in general, the

     

    immortality and perfection of a living being would consist in its having no relation at all with any outside. That is the case with God (cf. Republic II, 381b-c). God has no allergies. Health and virtue . . . , which are often associated in speaking of the body, and analogously, of the soul (cf. Gorgias, 479b), always proceed from within.28

     

    In conformity with Clonal Selection, immunological research privileges processes of selection that expel internal differences. Through an innumerable series of mouse-obliterating grafts, transplants, exchanges, extractions, and the patient isolation and exclusion of immunological diversity through selective breeding (for instance, the “nude mice,” lacking a thymus, often used in immunological work), immunologists have begun to map the complex molecular interactions of the immune system in terms of “marks” or coded traces. The guiding assumption: all the principal immune system cells involved in the immune response can recognize molecular markers on other cells, and these markers — MHC antigens — are elaborated by or refer back to genes in a certain region of the individual’s MHC gene complex. No proper immune response against antigens is to be expected unless all the participating cells display appropriate markers of self derived from the same genetic source. Indeed this attribute is now accepted as the operational basis of self in the immune system, although as Golub admits, “we do not now how non-reactivity to self is maintained.” 29 MHC restriction entails the Platonic provision that the immune system can only react to “foreign” by recollecting an older, interior “self,” ultimately sourced in genetic coding. Unless “foreign bodies” are accompanied by the markings of “self,” they will pass unnoticed. The immune system’s reaction to antigens is therefore not an absolute barrier against all comers, but a selective response: only those outsiders who can be marked as “foreign” by self-identical MHC markers will elicit a response. Like the soul who has gazed on the truth prior to the earthly phase of its cycle, immunology has argued that the system’s marking begins prior to the body’s nativity (during embryogenesis MHC markers are already starting to mark every cell in the body as self 30) and gradually accretes a memory of alterity through exposure to the infinite variety of antigens.

     

    Difference within?

     

    In the Platonic world, the domain of faithful representation is demarcated and defended by the methods of selection and exclusion which determine the legitimacy of the copy or the representation by either establishing its hierarchical position in relation to the model of the Same or excluding it from knowledge and reality altogether. Similarly the general orientation of immunology has been towards understanding the immune system as maintaining a defended bodily self, brought about through processes which recognized antigens related to the same MHC and dealt with foreign (allogenic) bodies marked as without an internal resemblance to the same by reacting defensively against them. This approach, carried out by the Platonic method of division and selection, is reproduced both in the inscriptive practices of immunology — the carefully controlled breeding of immunology’s laboratory mice essentially ensures that all offspring-copies are purged of hidden genetic differences — and in the theoretical formulation of the hierarchical mechanisms of cellular interaction in the immune system: the mnemic self of Clonal Selection. Clonal Selection in conjunction with MHC restriction distinguishes those claimants with proper internal resemblances from the diseased, pathogenic and purely factitious resemblances presented by antigens. A false claimant — a simulacrum — within the field of recognition of the immune system initiates the proliferation of good copies (antibodies in particular) which will expunge interiorized dissimilitude.

     

    This Platonist commitment of immunology, although it permeates contemporary immunology and therefore needs to be taken into account, does not fully saturate it. Another dynamic is operative there, and it threatens the overthrow of Platonism. Deleuze expresses it directly as “only differences are alike.”31 Another possible reading of the immunological potentialities of the body can be linked to this other-than-Platonic rendering of the world. Jerne, who formulated the strongly Platonic motif of Clonal Selection which we have been following, also proposed a reading of the immune system that threatens the unity and telos of the system and the model of the Same it is employed to support. The network theory describes a regulation of immune response in which Clonal Selection would be undercut by the incessant reverberations of internal differences.

     

    The theory specifies that all possible antigens of the outside world are able to be recognized by the immune system because they reverberate with interactions between elements internal to the immune system. Because every antibody within the system can interact with every other in a straightforward antigen-antibody reaction, i.e., every antibody can potentially mimic an antigen for some other antibody, the immune system will function through an unceasing cascade of internal responses. Of the roughly ten million or so different antibodies of the body (each antibody responds to a single specific type of antigen), “a vast number of responses are going on all the time, even in the absence of foreign antigen.”32 The equilibrium state of the immune system is a highly dynamic balance generated in a continual flux of differential relations. Antigens, ostensibly pathogenically entering the body from the outside world, are internally imaged by antibodies acting as defacto antigens. The immune system is capable of responding to the immense diversity of natural antigens because the part of the antigen (the epitope or antigenic determinant) internally imaged by an antibody acting as antigen (in this role, it becomes an idiotope) is shared by a relatively large number of epitopes. The confrontation with a foreign body takes place not in the mode of a defensive mobilization but in terms of a reverberation or resonance with some element of the system already sounding its own glissando of response. Varela and Anspach write:

     

    [T]he immune system fundamentally does not (cannot) discriminate between self and nonself. The normal function of the network can only be perturbed or modulated by incoming antigens, responding only to what is similar to what is already present.33

     

    An epitope would normally attract the response of a number of antibodies (an antibody acting as antibody in the network is called a paratope) because only part of it is imaged by a particular idiotope, and conversely, a specific paratope would most likely not be the only possible response to the epitope. A proliferating number of never fully equivalent paratopes respond to any particular epitope.34

     

    In consequence, the humoral “self” maintained by the immune system in responding to foreign bodies would not be a matter of selection and exclusion according to criteria of internal relation to identity. Rather the identity of immune “self” would be produced as the effect of internal reverberations of disparate elements. The introduction of differences from the outside would thus effect nothing more than an amplification of certain reverberations already in play. As Haraway puts it:

     

    In a sense, there could be no exterior antigen structure, no “invader” that the immune system had not already “seen” and mirrored internally.35

     

    The difference in response between “foreign” and “self” would be measured by the degrees of this quantitative amplification. The network theory implies that the immune system includes within itself the angle or point of view from which differences and distinctions between self and others are made, rather than having division imposed from above by a principle of selection based on resemblance to a foundational identity. Thus, the immune response (insofar as it concerns the generation of antibodies) takes on that very same simulacral aspect which Platonism has always, according to Deleuze (and Derrida), sought to exclude:

     

    In short, folded within the simulacrum there is the process of going mad, a process of limitlessness . . . a constant development, a gradual process of subversion of the depths, an adept avoidance of the equivalent, the limit, the Same, or the Like: always simultaneously more and less, but never equal.36

     

    Interpreted as a simulacral entity, the immune system functions on the basis of internal disparities rather than on the basis of an internal likeness derived from a mnemic-genetic self. What immunology in its most explicitly Platonist inspiration regards as the recognition of external differences, can be understood as a sign that “flashes between two bordering levels, between two communicating series,”37 a prolongation of the on-going interaction that is the functioning of the network. Immunology’s admission that “it is possible for an individual to make a productive antibody response against its own idiotypic [i.e. uniquely marking the individual] determinants” 38 shows that (lymphocytically expressed) self-identity cannot be the ultimate foundation of the immune response against which all claimants, foreign or otherwise, are to be measured. Rather, the work of the simulacrum is a production of resemblances — between inside and outside, idiotopes and epitopes — through the resonance of divergent series. The effect of resemblance arises because the simulacrum (the sign generated between communicating series) “includes within itself the differential point of view.”39 These resemblances can no longer be selected on the basis of their hierarchical position in relation to the Same, because the system operates so as to render the notion of hierarchy between Same and Likeness infinitely reversible. There can be no order of model and successively degraded copies because everything — the resemblances, the relation between elements — begins in differences, in mobility, not in the sharing of an unsharable Same.

     

    Exclusion and selection of difference

     

    We ourselves wish to be our experiments and
guinea pigs.40

     

    How, in the pursuit of “resemblances” between Platonism and the dominant immunizing strain of immunology, between the overthrow of Platonism and a largely latent simulacral immunology, can biomedical ethics begin to assert the primacy of an ethical concern affirmed as embodiment or ethos?

     

    The locus of ethical concern is ineluctably drawn into considering embodiment by virtue of the increasingly refined and comprehensive investments staged by bio-power around the management of living bodies. Immunology is likewise confronted by a disintegration of the underpinnings of its disciplinary object — the immune system considered as a mode of self-identity. In the case of immunology, any bioethics that recognized the constitutive effects of biomedical discourses and practices in producing the self would have to accommodate an equivocal production: the simultaneous naturalizing of bodies as a self modelled on interior Sameness and the denaturing of bodies across a mobile and contingent field of communicating but divergent series of differences. On the one hand, through the “myth” of a remembered exposure to identity (Clonal Selection) maintained by exclusion and division, immunology affirms Platonism and lays down the laws of an immune system belonging to a world bound by the hierarchy of Same and Like, defended against representations without the proper internal resemblance. On the other hand, the problem of the regulation of the immune system’s response produces an inversion of the principle of hierarchy, a mirroring confusion of borderlines between inside and outside and a corresponding complication of the lines between self and nonself. While the Platonic motif suggests an attempt to maintain a bodily order and integrity in the face of the chaos threatening from the outside, against the foreigners that might insinuate themselves, the anti-Platonic motif — read sympathetically — suggests the possibility of subverting the drive to master chaos by allowing resemblance and recognition only through internal dissimilitude, through the constantly decentered responses of divergent series.41

     

    Aligning immunology to “whatever, in scientific practice, has always already begun to exceed the logocentric closure,”42 entails two principal but uncertain outcomes. First, the simulacral impulse in immunology uproots any single identifiable locus in which, finally and with certainty, the immune self could be located. In addition, the ethical substance of the immune self would, in the interplay of divergent series of mirrorings and reverberations between disparate elements placed in contact, appear as in experimental relation to alterity rather than as a conclusive ordering of likeness and divergence.

     

    The primary characteristic of such an experimental orientation would be to augment the legions of nude mice and hybridomas currently employed by immunological laboratories with a version of the self able to affirm the complication within itself of heterogeneous series through real experience, whether this be of infection, disease, auto-immune reactions, allergies, grafts, transplants and so on. It is precisely the internal reverberation of divergent series that characterizes the simulacrum, and, I would argue, the simulacral processes of the network theory of immunity. In constantly generating a plethora of paratopes in response to the endless variety of idiotopes, the cascading activity of the immune system unravels any putative identity or unity of the embodied self. Reframing the deracinated bodies of contemporary biomedical discourse within an ethical anti-Platonism enables an immunological ethics that neither severs obligations to others (since its regulation would take the form of a “resonance” between differences that cannot be definitively divided according to interior Self and exterior Other) nor defends an immured self through a self-assertion that always regards differences as allergic.

     

    The ethos of a self inhabited by interior differences would be more like the “window of vulnerability” that Haraway speaks of: a mode of dwelling in which boundaries between individuals are hard to fix (this is not to say there are no boundaries, only that they are complicated), in which inside and outside are traversed by a non-identical self generated in the scintillations and reverberations of divergent series. Immunology thus suggests that ethics need not begin and end in the privilege of an immune self.

     

    Moreover, if this self inhabited by differences is to assert itself over the iconic self, it cannot maintain the immune system (contrary to Haraway’s reading) or any other systematization of living bodies as an icon of symbolic or material differences. Read as icon, any system, no matter how de-naturalized or differential in its operations, stands ready for re-incorporation in the world of representation, along with all the distinctions (model/copy, essence/appearance) and exclusions mobilized there. It is precisely this world, the world of representation, that the simulacrum calls into question by showing that the resemblance and identity which purportedly legitimize the icon are the outward effects of perhaps small internal differences. Not selection, but the simulation of resemblance and identity; not hierarchy, but the “condensation of coexistences.”43 Under these conditions, the ethos appropriate to the biopolitically-sensitive immune self would not seize on postmodern icons but would evaluate sameness as the always contingent resonances and harmonics of divergent series.

     

    Notes

     

    1. Jacuqes Derrida, “Autobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name,” The Ear of the Other, trans. C. McDonald, ed. P. Kamuf (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1988) 6.

     

    2. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality & Infinity, trans. A. Lingis, (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969) 129.

     

    3. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. R. Hurley, (Hammondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981) 138.

     

    4. Foucault 139-140.

     

    5. Two papers about bioethics strongly influence this discussion: Rosalyn Diprose, “A `Genethics’ that makes sense?” in R. Diprose & R. Ferrell, eds Cartographies: Poststructuralism and the Mapping of Bodies and Spaces, (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991); and Donna Haraway, “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Determinations of Self in Immune System Discourse,” Differences, 1.1 (Winter, 1989).

     

    6. Haraway 1.

     

    7. Foucault 142.

     

    8. Foucault 143.

     

    9. Haraway 14.

     

    10. Haraway 15.

     

    11. Golub, Edward S., Immunology : A Synthesis (Sinauer Associates, 1987) 416.

     

    12. Varela, Francisco and Mark Anspach “The Body Thinks: The Immune System in the Process of Somatic Individuation” in Materialities of Communication, trans. W. Whobrey, eds. H.U. Gumbrecht and K.L. Pfeiffer (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994) 273.

     

    13. Haraway 37.

     

    14. Golub 67.

     

    15. Haraway 2.

     

    16. Haraway 14-16.

     

    17. Golub 380.

     

    18. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. R. Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988) 23.

     

    19. Golub 1.

     

    20. Golub 1.

     

    21. Golub 9.

     

    22. Gilles Deleuze, “Plato and the Simulacrum,” October Winter 1983: 49.

     

    23. Varela 278.

     

    24. Deleuze 46.

     

    25. Deleuze 52.

     

    26. See Deleuze, 47-48.

     

    27. “Each person has a group of genes, the major histocompatability complex or MHC, which codes for self-antigens.” See L. Sherwood, Human Physiology: From Cells to Systems (St Paul: West Publishing Company, 1989) 391. Self-antigens mark each one of a person’s cells, thereby allowing the recognition of cells as proper to the individual. A more technical explanation states: “MAJOR HISTOCOMPATIBILITY COMPLEX (MHC). Mammalian gene complex of several highly polymorphic linked loci encoding glycoproteins involved in many aspects of immunological recognition, both between lymphoid cells and between lymphocytes and antigen-presenting cells.” See The New Penguin Dictionary of Biology, 8th ed. (Hammondsworth: Penguin Books, 1990) 340. Also see, for an even more disconcertingly technical explanation: Golub chap. 17.

     

    28. Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Dissemination, trans. B. Johnson, (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981) 101-102.

     

    29. Golub 481. For that matter, non-reactivity to self isn’t always maintained, as the multifarious auto-immune reactions show.

     

    30. Golub 222, 421.

     

    31. Deleuze 52.

     

    32. Niels Jerne, quoted by Golub 384. Haraway 22-23 provides a clear explanation of the network theory.

     

    33. Varela 283.

     

    34. This diversity of possible responses to a given epitope is accentuated by the fact that “antibodies seem to recognize the three-dimensional configuration and charge distribution of an antigen rather than its chemical make-up as such.” The New Penguin Dictionary of Biology 33.

     

    35. Haraway 23.

     

    36. Deleuze 49.

     

    37. Deleuze 52.

     

    38. Golub 386.

     

    39. Deleuze 49.

     

    40. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974) S319.

     

    41. On these different relations to chaos, and the connection they have with two different types of Eternal Return, the Platonic and Nietzschean, see Deleuze, “Plato and the Simulacrum” 54-55.

     

    42. Jacues Derrida, Positions, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981) 36.

     

    43. Deleuze 53.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Deleuze, Gilles. “Plato and the Simulacrum.” October (Winter 1983): 43.
    • —. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. trans. R. Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988.
    • Derrida, Jacques. “Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name,” The Ear of the Other. trans. P. Kamuf, ed. C. McDonald. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1988.
    • —. “Plato’s Pharmacy.” Dissemination. Trans. B. Johnson. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.
    • —. Positions. Trans. A. Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.
    • Diprose, Rosalyn. “A ‘Genethics’ that makes sense?” Cartographies: Poststructuralism and the Mapping of Bodies and Spaces. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991.
    • Golub, Edward S. Immunology: A Synthesis. Sinauer Associates, 1987.
    • Haraway, Donna. “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Determinations of Self in Immune System Discourse.” Differences 1.1 (1989).
    • Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Trans. W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1968.
    • —. The Gay Science. Trans. W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974.
    • Scott, Charles E. The Question of Ethics. Indiana UP, 1990.
    • Sherwood, L. Human Physiology: From Cells to Systems. St Paul: West Publishing Company, 1989.
    • Varela, F. and M. Anspach. “The Body Thinks: The Immune System in the Process of Somatic Individuation.” Materialities of Communication. Trans. W. Whobrey. Eds. H. U. Gumbrecht and K. L. Pfeiffer. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994.

     

  • Women Writers and the Restive Text: Feminism, Experimental Writing and Hypertext

    Barbara Page

    Vassar College
    page@vassar.edu

     

    It was while reading my way into a number of recent fictions composed in hypertext that I began to think back on a tendency of women’s writing which aims not only at changing the themes of fiction but at altering the formal structure of the text itsel f. In a useful collection of essays about twentieth-century women writers, called Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction, Ellen Friedman and Miriam Fuchs trace a line of authors who subvert what they see as patriarchal assumptio ns governing traditional modes of narrative, beginning with Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Richardson, and Virginia Woolf, and leading to such contemporaries as Christine Brooke-Rose, Eva Figes, and Kathy Acker. They write:

     

    Although the woman in the text may be the particular woman writer, in the case of twentieth-century women experimental writers, the woman in the text is also an effect of the textual practice of breaking patriarchal fictional forms; the radical forms — nonlinear, nonhierarchical, and decentering — are, in themselves, a way of writing the feminine. (3-4)

     

    Among contemporary writers, women are by no means alone in pursuing nonlinear, antihierarchical and decentered writing, but many women who affiliate themselves with this tendency write against norms of “realist” narrative from a consciousness stirred by f eminist discourses of resistance, especially those informed by poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theory. The claim of Friedman and Fuchs cited above is itself radical, namely that such women writers can produce themselves — as new beings or as ones p reviously unspoken — through self-conscious acts of writing against received tradition. A number of the contemporary writers I discuss in this essay make a direct address within the fictive text to feminist theory, rather more as a flag flown than as a definitive discursive marker, in recognition of themselves as engaged with other women in the discursive branch of women’s struggle against oppression.1For some writers of this tendency, hypertext would see m to provide a means by which to explore new possibilities for writing, notwithstanding an aversion among many women to computer technologies and programs thought to be products of masculinist habits of mind. My argument is not that the print authors I d iscuss here would be better served by the hypertext medium, but that their writing is in many respects hypertextual in principle and bears relation to discourses of many women writers now working in hypertext.

     

    These women writers, as a rule, take for granted that language itself and much of canonical literature encode hierarchies of value that denigrate and subordinate women, and therefore they incorporate into their work a strategically critical or opposit ional posture, as well as a search for alternative forms of composition. They do not accept the notion, however, that language is hopelessly inimical or alien to their interests, and so move beyond the call for some future reform of language to an interv ention — exuberant or wary — in present discourses. I focus in particular on writers whose rethinking of gender construction enters into both the themes and the gestural repertoire of their compositions, and who undertake to redesign the very topograp hy of prose. At the most literal level of the text — that of words as graphic objects — all of these writers are leery of the smooth, spooling lines of type that define the fictive space of conventional print texts and delimit the path of the reader. Like other postmodernist writers, they move on from modernist methods of collage to constructions articulating alternatives to linear prose. The notion, for example, of textuality as weaving (a restoration of the root meaning of “text”) and of the constr uction of knowledge as a web that has figured prominently in the development of hypertext has also been important in feminist theory, though for rather different purposes.2 Like other postmodernist writers, also, many of these women experimentalists are strikingly self-reflexive, and write about their texts in the text. One important difference, though, concerns the self-conscious will among these writers not simply to reimagine writing as wea ving but rather to take apart the fabric of inherited textual forms and to reweave it into new designs. For all of these authors, restiveness with the fixity of print signifies something more than a struggle going on under a blanket of established formal meaning. Their aim is to rend the surface of language and to reshape it into forms more hospitable to the historical lives of women and to an esthetic of the will and desire of a self-apprehended female body that is an end unto itself and not simply ins trumental. One frequent mark of this new writing is the introduction of silence, partly as a memorial to the historical silencing of women’s voices, but also as a means of establishing a textual space for the entrance of those “others” chronically exclud ed from the closed texts of dogmatists and power interests.

     

    As my point of departure, I want briefly to describe Carole Maso’s 1993 novel, AVA, her fourth book in order of composition, though published third. This text unfolds in the mind of a thirty-nine-year old professor of comparative literat ure named Ava Klein, who is dying of a rare blood disease, a form of cancer. The book, divided into Morning, Afternoon and Night, takes place on the last day of Ava’s life, the same day in which President George Bush draws his line in the sand of the Per sian Gulf states, inaugurating a war. Against this act and all the forces of division and destruction it symbolizes, against the malignancy of cancer and of militarism, Maso poses the unbounded mind of Ava, whose powers of memory and desire abide in the emblematic figure of a girl, recurring throughout the text, who draws an A and spells her own name. Ava’s narrative is in fragments that in the act of being read acquire fuller meaning, through repetition, through their discrete placement on the passing pages, through variation, and also through the generous space between utterances that gives a place to silence and itself comes to represent a certain freedom — of movement, of new linkage, of as-yet-unuttered possibilities. Here is how the book begins:

     

                        MORNING

Each holiday celebrated with real extravagance.  Birthdays. In-
dependence days.  Saints' days.  Even when we were poor.  With
verve.

Come sit in the morning garden for awhile.

Olives hang like earrings in late August.

A perpetual pageant.

A throbbing.

Come quickly.

The light in your eyes

Precious.  Unexpected things.

Mardi Gras: a farewell to the flesh.

You spoke of Trieste.  Of Constantinople.  You pushed the curls
from your face.  We drank Five-Star Metaxa on the island of Crete
and aspired to the state of music.

Olives hang like earrings.

A throbbing.  A certain pulsing.

The villagers grew violets.

We ran through genêt and wild sage.

Labyrinth of Crete, mystery of water,
home.

     

    In a polemical preface to AVA, Maso argues that much of current commercial fiction, in attempting to ward off the chaos and “mess” of death with organized, rational narratives, ultimately becomes “death with its complacent, unequivocal tr uths, its reductive assignment of meaning, its manipulations, its predictability and stasis.” In this preface, Maso traces her resistance to traditional narratives back to feelings of dissatisfaction with the “silly plots” of stories her mother read alou d to her as a child. In order to stop “the incessant march of the plot forward to the inevitable climax,” she would, she recalls, wander away, out of earshot, taking a sentence or a scene to dream over. Often she would detach the meanings from the words her mother read, turning the words into a kind of music, “a song my mother was singing in a secret language just to me.” Bypassing the logos of stories, then, she walked into a freer space where she was able to invent, or rediscover, another tempo and o rdering of language felt as a sensuous transmission from the mother’s body to hers. “This is what literature became for me: music, love, and the body.” (From AVA 175-76)

     

    This is the beginning, but not the end or sum of Maso’s fiction. Rather like Adrienne Rich’s “new poet” in her “Transcendental Etude,” she walks away from the old arguments into a space of new composition, where she takes up fragments of the already spoken with a notable lack of anxiety about influence. In the stream of her narrative one hears formal and informal voices of precursors and contemporaries, male and female, along with patches of fact, history, even critical discourse that figure as feat ures of the rhythmic text, the writing of a richly nourished adult mind — Ava Klein never more alive than on the day of her dying:

     

    García Lorca, learning to spell, and not a day too soon.

Ava Klein in a beautiful black wig.  Piled up high.

And I am waiting at what is suddenly this late hour, for my ship to
come in --

Even if it is a papier-mâché ship on a plastic sea,
after all.

We wanted to live.

How that night you rubbed "olio santo" all over  me.  One liter oil,
chili peppers, bay leaves, rosemary.

And it's spaghetti I want at 11:00 A.M.

Maybe these cravings are a sign of pregnancy.  Some late last-minute
miracle.  The trick of living past this life.

To devour all that is the world.

Because more than anything, we wanted to live.

Dear Bunny,
       If it is quite convenient we shall come with our butterfly
       nets this
Friday.

You will have literary texts that tolerate all kinds of freedom --
unlike the more classical texts -- which are not texts that delimit
themselves, are not texts of territory with neat borders, with
chapters, with beginnings, endings, etc., and which will be a little
disquieting because you do not feel the

Border.

The edge.

How are you?  I've been rereading Kleist with great enthusiasm and I
wish you were around to talk to and I realize suddenly,

I miss you. (113)

     

    For Ava, thinking and feeling go together, and reading is sensuous, rendering literal the definition of influence, so that whole passages of her text — still unmistakably her own — are washed in the colors of an admired author: Woolf, García Lorca, Beckett, and others. Ava’s reading is finally a species of her promiscuous engorgement with life, and of a mind that declines to wall off speaking from writing or to isolate recollection, narration and description from meditation and analysis. In the passage above, for example, a snatch of a letter to Edmund Wilson (“Bunny”) from the lapidary lepidoperist Nabokov stands next to a bit from Hélène Cixous that graphically tails off into broken borders which in turn begin to enact an ex pansion of the text of the sort that Cixous calls for. The book, curiously, achieves unity in the act of reading, as the rhythmic succession of passages induces a condition approaching trance. The effect is both aural and visual: when spoken, real time must pass between utterances; when read, real space must be traversed by the eye between islands of text.

     

    In an essay that itself intermingles argument and reflection with quotation from her own novels and from precursor writers and theorists, Maso points to images that both ground her ambition and suggest alternatives to linear prose: “AVA c ould not have been written as it was, I am quite sure, if I had not been next to the water day after day. Incorporating the waves.” And, “The design of the stars then in the sky. I followed their dreamy instructions. Composed in clusters. Wrote const ellations of associations.” Attributing independent will to genres, she describes the “desire” of the novel to be a poem, of the poem to be an essay, of the essay to reach toward fiction, and “the obvious erotics of this.” (Notes 26) The desiring text r ebels against the virtual conspiracy between “commodity novelists” and publishers to lock a contrived sense of reality, shorn of its remoteness and mystery, into “the line, the paragraph, the chapter, the story, the storyteller, character.” As a lyric ar tist in large prose forms, Maso explains that

     

    Writing AVA I felt at times . . . like a choreographer working with language in physical space. Language, of course, being gesture and also occupying space. Creating relations which exist in their integrity for one fleeting moment and then are gone, remaining in the trace of memory. Shapes that then regather and re-form making for their instant, new relations, new longings, new recollections, inspired by those fleeting states of being. (Notes 27)

     

    She names as precursors Virginia Woolf of the Waves and Gertrude Stein, in Stein’s remark, “I have destroyed sentences and rhythms and literary overtones and all the rest of that nonsense. . . .” (28, 27) In place of plot she aims to “imagin e story as a blooming flower, or a series of blossomings,” for example, and makes space in the text for “the random, the accidental, the overheard, the incidental. Precious, disappearing things.” (27) And here the italicized words, from the secon d section of AVA, both incrementally repeat a line from the opening of the book — “Precious. Unexpected things” — and underscore the ethical, as well as esthetic impulse in Maso’s fiction. (AVA186)

     

    For Maso, the attraction of the novel is its unruly, expansive refusal of perfection. She argues that, because we no longer believe that the traditional stories are true, we can no longer write tidy, beginning-middle-end fiction, even if this means t hat we must “write notebooks rather than masterpieces,” as Woolf once suggested. (Notes 29) The gain will be “room and time for everything. This will include missteps, mistakes, speaking out of turn. Amendments, erasures, illusions.” Instead of the “r eal” story, we shall have: “The ability to embrace oppositional stances at the same time. Contradictory impulses, ideas, motions. To assimilate as part of the form, incongruity, ambivalence.” (Notes 30) And for Maso, who has the confidence to found ima gination on her own experience, this form of fiction, that does not tyrannize and that allows “a place for the reader to live, to dream,” leads not to the “real” story but to “what the story was for me”: “A feminine shape — after all this time.” (Notes 3 0, 28)

     

    In an essay that is something of a tour-de-force, entitled “:RE:THINKING:LITERARY:FEMINISM: (three essays onto shaky grounds),” poet and theorist Joan Retallack, like Maso, addresses what is — or can be — of particular import for women in the refiguration of writing toward non- or multi-linear, de- or re-centered prose, by means of a revaluation of the terms traditionally affixed to the subordinated figure of the feminine:

     

    An interesting coincidence, yes/no? that what Western culture has tended to label feminine (forms characterized by silence, empty and full; multiple, associative, nonhierarchical logics; open and materially contingent processes, etc.) may well be more relevant to the complex reality we are coming to see as our world than the narrowly hierarchical logics that produced the rationalist dreamwork of civilization and its misogynist discontents. (347)

     

    In thinking about why for her the writing of women today seems particularly vibrant with potential, Retallack underscores the worth both of productive silence, that gives place to the construction of new images and meanings, and of collaboration, that emp owers writer and reader to “conspire (to breathe together) . . . in the construction of a living aesthetic event.” (356) While denying a turn toward essentialism, she argues that the historical situation of women now provides a particularly fertile “cons truction site” for new writing, one important feature of which is its invitation to the active participation of others in an ongoing textual process:

     

    I’d like to suggest that it is a woman’s feminine text (denying any redundancy), which implicitly acknowledges and creates the possibility of other/additional/simultaneous texts. This is a model significantly different from Bloom’s competitve anxiety of influence. It opens up a distinction between the need to imprint/impress one’s mark (image) on the other, and an invitation to the other’s discourse . . . (358. My italics)

     

    Against those feminists who despair of entering a language over-coded with misogyny, Retallack argues that “Language has always overflowed the structures/strictures of its own grammars,” and that “The so-called feminine is in language from the start.” (37 2) In this regard, Retallack supplies a validation of Maso’s ready, unanxious introduction of quotation from male authors in what she calls her feminine text.

     

    That prose writers like Maso and poet/theorists like Retallack do not stand alone is indicated, for example, by the 1992 anthology entitled Resurgent: New Writing by Women which has been co-edited by Lou Robinson and Camille Norton . It brings together a generous selection of writers who mix genres of verse and prose freely and embed manifesto or critique both in the narrative and the topography of the writing. Resurgent is divided into two, or perhaps four, pa rts — “Transmission/Translation” and “Collaboration/Spectacle” — as it moves from single-author texts to collaborative and to performative texts. Lou Robinson writes in the introduction:

     

    Everywhere in these prose pieces I find that unpredictable element in the language which forces consciousness to leap a gap where other writing would make a bridge of shared meaning . . . , a sense of something so urgent in its desire to be expressed that it comes before the words to say it, in the interstices, in the rhythm: Marina Tsvetaeva’s “song in the head without noise.” . . . This is writing that swings out over a chasm, that spits. (1)

     

    Among the most interesting pieces in Resurgent are the collaborations, including one by Daphne Marlatt and Betsy Warland, entitled “Reading and Writing Between the Lines,” that undertakes a punning reclamation of the term “collabor ation” itself. Their endeavor resembles that of Retallack, when she reclaims the word “conspire” by reminding readers of its root meaning as “to breathe together” and applies it to the notion of opening the authorial text to the discourse of others. In their piece, Marlatt and Warland, “running on together,” write their way through the self-betrayal of collaboration in its political sense to a celebration of co-labial play, in the lips of speech and of women’s sex:

     

    'let me slip into something more comfortable'
					she glides across the
room
labi, to glide, to slip

(labile;  labilis:
labia;	labialis)
				la la la
'my labyl mynde...'
labilis,  labour,  belabour,  collaborate,  elaborate

. . . . .

slip of the tongue

				'the lability of innocence'

. . . . .

				 labia majora (the 'greater lips')
				 la la la
							and
						labia minora
				      (the 'lesser lips')
not two mouths but three!
slipping one over on polarity

						slippage in the text
you & me collabi, (to slip together)
labialization!)
slip(ping)  page(es)
like notes in class

o labilism o letter of the lips
o grafting  of our slips
labile lovers
'prone to undergo displacement in position or change in nature,
form, chemical composition;  unstable'

     

    This word play owes most, perhaps, to Irigaray’s feminist displacement of the phallus as the central signifier in the sexual imaginary, particularly as articulated in Lacan. In “This Sex Which Is Not One,” she writes: “Woman ‘touches herself’ all the time, and moreover no one can forbid her to do so, for her genitals are formed of two lips in continuous contact. Thus, within herself, she is already two — but not divisible into one(s) — that caress each other.” (24) Although Irigaray’s language is open to the criticism that it may lead to biological essentialism, we should bear in mind that all language is shot through with metaphors, many derived from the body, and that some of the boldest interventions by innovative women writers have been throu gh an insistence on speaking the body in new terms as a way of breaking the hold of traditional discourses that denigrate and demonize the female body. This is a move against a crippling inheritance of ideology, as Nicole Ward Jouve points out: “The whol e idea of sex talking is itself symbolic, is itself discourse; the phrase is a turning around and reclaiming of ‘male’ discourse.” (32) It is also a move, as we have seen in Maso, toward the discovery, in material forms commonly associated with th e feminine, of structures capable of inspiring new forms of writing. For collaborative writers Marlatt and Warland, the co-labial slippage between two and one opens the text to a commingling of voices about the unsanctioned commingling of women’s bodies, thus enacting a double subversion of the Lacanian Law. The effect is not that of reductive essentialism but rather of the frank erotics Maso refers to, an imaginative discursive enactment of the “desire” of one text for another.

     

    At some points in Marlatt and Warland’s text two voices march down separate columns of type in a way reminiscent of Kristeva’s antiphonal essay-invocations,3 but at others, they merge into pronominal ha rmony and a playful syntactic break-up, reminiscent of Stein, that shakes loose the overdetermined subject:

     

    to keep (y)our word.  eroticizing collaboration we've moved from treason
into trust.  a difficult season, my co-labial writer writing me in we
while we
are three and you is reading away with us --

who?

you and you (not we) in me and	      are you trying to avoid the auto-
all of us reading, which is what      biographical? what is 'self' writ-
we do when left holding the	      ing here? when you leave space
floor, watching you soar with	      for your readers who may not
the words' turning and turning	      read you in the same way the
their sense and sensing their	      autobiographical becomes com-
turns i'm dancing with you in	      munal even communographic in
the dark learning to trust that       its contextual and narrative
sense of direction learning to	      (Carol Gilligan) women's way of
read you in to where i want to go     thinking -- and collaborating.
although the commotion in
words the connotations you
bring are different we share the
floor the ground floor meaning
dances on . . .

     

    The verbal strategies here are familiar enough to contemporary readers: the deconstructive questioning (whose is (y)our word?) that exposes the instability of subject and object; the reclaiming of terms and unmaking of conventional syntax; the diologism o f the blocked texts. The antiphonal effect of the double columns in fact puts eye-reading into crisis, just as, conversely, the broken, parenthesized, multiplication of signifiers baffles a single voice reading aloud in sequence. Unlike many collaborati ve writers, Marlatt and Warland refuse to distinguish between their two voices by use of a different type face or placement on the page. In Maso’s AVA, influences naturalize and borders among texts break; in Marlatt and Warland, collaboration undermines the notion of writing as intellectual property: we cannot tell where one leaves off and the other begins. It is no coincidence, I think, that prose of this kind floats in generous, unconventional volumes of space, seeking escape, it would seem , from the rigid lineation and lineage of the print text.

     

    Just as the potential for self-circling narcissism in Maso’s text is overcome by an ethics of regard for the external world, so similarly in many of the texts in Resurgent is celebratory subjectivity matched by an engaged politics, even — in Charles Bernstein’s words — by the “need to reground polis,” through “an act of human reconstruction and reimagining.” (200) Some, like co-authors Sally Silver and Abigail Child, directly link self-renovation with revolutionary politics, as when they urge women to “defeat coherent subjectivity on which capitalism, idealism is based.” (167) For others, though, political positioning has been made difficult by the very fragmentation of the culturally constructed self, owing to a painful severa nce from a home base. In Resurgent, the editors’ decision to select “Melpomene Tragedy” from Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee highlights this phase of alienation and the yearning it engenders. In this chapter of her book, Cha writes from exile in America to her mother in South Korea and from a cultural dislocation caused by war that is felt as the separation of the self from a machine-produced screen image. In half-broken syntax, she makes a fervent and bitterly ironic ap peal to the traditional female personification of tragedy to intervene against the war machine that invented and shattered her:

     

    Arrest the machine that purports to employ democracy but
rather causes the successive refraction of her none other than
her own.  Suffice Melpomene, to exorcize from this mouth the
name the words the memory of severance through this act by
this very act to utter one, Her once, Her to utter at once.
She without the separate act of
uttering.

     

    In Cha’s Dictee, each chapter enunciates through formal and visual means a distinctive matter, often contrapuntal or even contradictory to that in other sections of the book. Its method of including writing in several languages and visua l artifacts from East and West, and its experimental form in fact led scholars of the 1980’s who were gathering the heritage of Asian American writing to shun Dictee for a time, as lacking ethnic integrity. The composition escapes the bounda ries of a single cultural identity, just as its form steadily resists confinement within the print book. As scholar Shelley Sunn Wong explains, Dictee “instantiates a writing practice that stumbles over rather than smoothes out the uneven te xtures of raced and gendered memory.” (45) At the very front of the book, for example, before the title page, appears a photograph of Korean graffiti etched in stone on the wall of a Japanese coal mine, by one of many workers forced into exile and labor. The words read in translation:

     

    Mother
I miss you
I am hungry
I want to go home.

     

    Wong regards Cha’s placement of this text — the only words in Dicteein the Korean language — that reads vertically from right to left, ending at the extreme lefthand margin, as a provocative move against conventional writings and readings that encode and enforce oppressive hierarchies: “Instead of leading the reader into the work, the directional movement of the frontispiece begins to usher the reader back out of the text. Within the context of narrative development, the frontispiece thus functions not to forward the narrative but, rather, to forestall it.” (46)

     

    The tendencies of the kind of writing I have been describing receive fresh realization in the medium of hypertext. One of these, a collaborative fiction called Izme Pass, by Carolyn Guyer and Martha Petry, seems particularly congruent wi th those in Resurgent, both in its politics and in its formal concerns. Izme Pass came about as the result of an experiment in writing proposed for the journal Writing on the Edge. The editors first asked hy pertext novelist Michael Joyce, best known for his hyperfiction Afternoon, to compose a story. Then they invited other authors to revise or augment his text into a collaboration. Carolyn Guyer and Martha Petry, each of whom had been at work on a hyperfiction of her own, took up the challenge but refused to accept Joyce’s fiction, called WOE, or a memory of what will be, as a prior or instigating text. Recognizing a patriarchal precept in the positing of a master text, they set about to create an independent construction that would also transgressively subvert and appropriate WOE. (79) In an on-screen map they placed a writing space, containing fragments of Joyce’s text, into a triad with spaces containing parts o f their own works-in-progress, then added a fourth, new work, called “Pass,” woven of connections they created among the other three texts to produce an intertextual polylogue:

     

    (Image)

     

    As Guyer and Petry explain: “Almost immediately we began to see how this process of tinkering with existing texts by intentionally sculpting their inchoate connections had the ironic effect of making everything more fluid. Izme Pass bega n to affect Rosary [Petry’s work] which poured its new character back into Quibbling [Guyer’s work] which flowed over into WOE and back through Izme.” (82) At the level of textual organization and of st ructural metaphor, Izme Pass mocks WOE, which graphically emanates from a “Mandala,” an Asiatic diagram for meditation supposed to lead to mystical insight:

     

    (Image)

     

    Instead, they designed a diamond- or o- or almond-shaped map headed by a “Mandorla,” the Asiatic signifier of the yoni, the divine female genital:

     

    (Image)

     

    Appropriations and revaluations of the sort illustrated here constitute critique as an internal dynamic of this hypertext. Because it is written in the Storyspace program, however, Izme Pass takes the further step of opening itself to in terventions by readers turned writers, who can if they choose add to, subtract from, or rearrange the text. In this respect, the politics of hypertext allows for one realization of the feminist aim articulated by Retallack: it provides “an invitation to the other’s discourse.” It pushes further those disruptions of the “real” story Maso calls for, allowing for effects of the sort she lists, including “missteps, mistakes, speaking out of turn. Amendments, erasures, illusions.” Like all hypertexts, Izme Pass prohibits definitive reading; the reader chooses the path of the narrative. The graphical device of notating linked words, moreover, sometimes introduces further narrative possibilities. Opening Izme Pass through its title , the reading begins with this figure of a female storyteller:

     

    When a woman tells a story she is remembering what
will be.  What symmetry, or assymetry, the story
passes through the orifice directly beneath
the wide-spread antlers, curved horns of ritual at her head,
just as it passes through the orifice between her open
legs.  Labrys.	How could she not know?

When a woman tells a story it is to save.  To husband
the world, you might say.  Thinking first to save
her mother, her daughter, her sisters, Scheherazade
tells, her voice enchanting, saving him in the bargain.

When a woman tells, oh veiled voice, a
story.

     

    In Izme Pass, words linked to other texts can also signify in the passage on-screen. Here, for example, the linked words a story; passes through; passes through; mother; daughter; her sisters; saving him in the bargainyield a narrativ e surplus, becoming syntactic in themselves and creating resonant juxtapositions. In this case, the linked words sketch an incipient story having many “passes,” constellated around a family of women, that predicates the saving of a man.

     

    Proceeding into the text through the word “story” itself, on a first pass one arrives at a text space under the title “stones,” that gives a definition of “cairns” and suggests one metaphor — or several — for communal story-writing:

     

    Cairns: the cumulative construction of heaps of stones by
passers-by at the site of accidents, disgraces, deaths,
violence, or as remembrances (records) of journeys.

It is as if the stones in their configuration, in the years of
their leaning against one another, learn to talk with one
another, and are married.

     

    Nested in the “stones” box at the map level is an assemblage of writing spaces that themselves graphically depict a sort of cairn and produce a textual neighborhood, so to speak, of thematic materials associatively linked to the notion of stones:

     

    (Image)

     

    Such a rich site as this offers a host of possibilities to the reader. I might for example linger at the level of this screen to examine the variety of materials gathered into the cairn. Or I might choose a text and follow the default path where it leads , out of this screen to other locations in Izme Pass. If I choose to click on “Stonestory 1,” at the center of the cairn, I am transported abruptly to a narrative line: “She said, When I was little I held stones up to my crotch to feel the coldness.’” Following the default path from this space, I navigate next to a space titled “a wedding,” containing this text:

     

    Beside her groom, the cool stone closed tightly in her palm.
Just before the ceremony he had given her a small jade
butterfly, signal of his intent.  He wanted to learn her, and
one of the first things he knew was that jade was her
stone.

Piedras de ijada, stones of the
loin.

     

    And then after that to a space titled “delight”:

     

    His.  Delight.	Is what she seeks.  In this shade which
she herself creates, his mind turned inward, she might
hold him in her palm so, brief reprieve.

Another, he says.  Again.

     

    Another click on the default path returns me to “Stonestory 1,” establishing a tight narrative circle that I realize has moved me swiftly through ritual passages of a female eroticism that has been symbolically associated with and mediated by stones. Deciding at this point to investigate the adjacent “Stonetory 2,” I navigate into the prophetic speech of a woman, here again unnamed: “She said, In order to move mountains you’ve got to know what stones are about.’” The default path in this case issues outward into a journal entry about a sort of female Demosthenes, with the words “She gathered a pearl in her mouth, an O within an O . . . ,” and then on to a screen entitled “Scheherazade,” one of Izme‘s key figures, I realize, recalling th e “stories” text with which my reading began. Backtracking to the journal entry about “an O within an O,” I take note of the growing significance of circles in Izme, and decide to revisit a screen I had previously encountered in my survey o f the cairn, entitled “salt,” and I read:

     

    The alchemical symbol was the same for water as for
salt (representing the horizon, separation and/or
joining of earth and sky)

symbol of purification and rebirth

tastes like blood and seawater, both fluids identified
with the womb

     

    Within this configuration of Izme‘s texts, circles have produced associations among: the form of a woman’s body, rituals of sexual passage, prophetic speaking, female storytelling and, here, a mystical perception of cosmic order. Becau se I am exploring Izme as an open text, that is, one that allows, even encourages, the reader to intervene as a writer,4 I now decide — unthinkable in one too well-schooled in reading closed pr int texts — to make a link and add a new text, by joining the O motif to the passage I quoted above in this essay, from Irigaray’s “This Sex Which Is Not One.” But where to place it? In order to answer this question, I find myself attending more closel y than I might otherwise do to how the structure of Izme and its thematic nodes interact. Finally, I decide simply to nest my new text within the salt, so to speak, by dragging a writing space I create into the interior of the “salt” space, linking it to the Irigaray passage from the alchemical symbol on a path that I name “like lips”:

     

    In all of the texts under discussion here, there is a dynamic relation between feminist thematics and textuality, a relationship that intensifies in a hypertext such as Izme Pass, with its complex interweaving of disparate writings and it s invitation to the reader to move freely both among texts and between texts and syntactic maps. Not all hypertexts by women are as unconstrained or open as those, like Izme Pass, although many nevertheless contain aspects of what one might call hypertextual feminism. Judy Malloy’s lyrical fiction its name was Penelope, for example, presents only a handful of choices at any given moment of reading, through labels that may be clicked on to carry the reader into sections titled ” Dawn,” “Sea” (subdivided into four sections: “a gathering of shades,” “that far-off island,” “fine work and wide across,” “rock and a hard place”) and “Song.” Because the text screens of the “Dawn” and “Sea” sections have been programmed by the computer to produce a sort of random rearrangement with each successive reading, the contexts and nuances of any given passage change with different readings, even though one’s movement through a sequence is relatively linear. Though restrictive by comparison wit h Izme Pass, the structure Malloy adopts strengthens the analogy she intends between the text screens we read and the photographic images her artist-protagonist, Ann Mitchell, is trying to work into assemblages.

     

    The “it” named Penelope in Malloy’s fiction is a toy sailboat, the inciting image of her strategic reconsideration of the Odyssey. In her story, Anne Mitchell, though a weaver of images like her wifely forebear, does not stay put but rather wends her way through relationships and sexual liaisons, evading “That Far-Off Island,” Malloy’s version of Calypso, on which, Malloy remarks in her introductory Notes, “[i]n these days, some married women artists feel trapped.” (11) Penelope’s compounded, disjun ctive structure corresponds with and seems to arise from the narrator’s restless splitting off of attention, under the opposed attractions of sexual and esthetic desire:

     

    That Far-Off Island
    On the telephone he told me a story
    about working in an ice cream store
    when he was 14 years old.
    I looked through the box of photos that I keep by my bed
    while I listened.

     

    Repeatedly in the narrative, the pursuit of art draws Anne away from a lover and the “island” of monogamous, domesticated sex:

     

    That Far-Off Island
    We were looking at contact sheets in his kitchen.
    My coffee sat untouched in the center of the table.
    Where his shirt was unbuttoned,
    dark hairs curled on his chest.
    I got up and began to put the contact sheets
    back into the manilla folder.
    “I have to go,” I said.

     

    Unlike its classical antecedent, Malloy’s Penelope is spare rather than expansive, made of vignettes rather than continuously developed action or panoramic description. Malloy, however, argues that Penelope, a narrabase, as she calls it, is not stream of consciousness, like parts of Joyce’s Ulysses, though it does bear a resemblance, she believes, to Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, “that strove to be the writing equivalent of impressionist painting ,” just as Penelope “strives to be the writing equivalent of the captured photographic moment. . . .” (Notes 13) The analogy between the on-screen texts of Penelope and sequences of photographs prompts the reader’s reflection up on the nature of each medium. A photograph can be read as a composed image of visual objects removed from time and stilled into permanence, or as a momentary arrest of motion in time, pointing back toward a just-gone past and forward to a promised future . Similarly, though the lines of any on-screen writing are set (at least in a read-only text), and may seem as isolated as a single photograph found on the street, in the varied sequences one reads, the words of a text screen float on a motile surface, p oised for instantaneous change into another, not fully predictable writing.

     

    In light of this interrelation of theme and structure in Penelope, Malloy’s decision to set the texts in “Song” — which tells a partial tale of a love affair — into a fixed sequence nudges the reader to consider how this differently des igned episode relates to the rest of the fiction. “Song” offers something of a romantic idyl, and something of a threat to Malloy’s edgy contemporary woman artist, fearful that sexual desire may lead her to yield to a man who would fill all of her space and time with his demand for her attention and care. And so the set sequence of “Song,” threaded through with images of a recording tape that is ravelled and rewound, comes to an end that allows either for a replay of its looping revery, in accordance wi th the textual program, or instead to a new departure, either through the active agency of the narrator within the fiction, who takes up the instrument of her work, or of the reader, who reaches out for a selection other than [Next]:

     

    Song
    Across the brook,
    three teenage boys sat on a rock,
    drinking beer.
    I took out my camera.

    END OF SONG — if you press <Next>,
    the chorus will begin again.
    Next Sea Song

     

    Thus, in Malloy’s Penelope, the interplay of hypertextual freedom and sequential constraint — an artifact of the electronic medium itself — surprisingly produces a variant enactment of the dilemmas and decisions her woman artist struggles w ith inside the fiction.

     

    In all of the works I have been discussing, the conscious feminism of the writer animates her determination not simply to write but to intervene in the structure of discourse, to interrupt reiterations of what has been written, to redirect the streams of narrative and to clear space for the construction of new textual forms more congenial to women’s subjectivity. And all of these writers have understood that their project entails both the articulation of formerly repressed or dismissed stories and th e rearticulation of textual forms and codes. It is for this reason, perhaps, that feminist theory and textual practice can be of particular pertinence to theorists of hypertext who recognize a radical politics in the rhetoric and poetics of hypertextual writing. And this is why, I believe, hypertext should prove to be a fruitful site for innovative writing by women, despite a deep-dyed skepticism and resistance toward its claims and demands.

     

    In her hypertext novel Quibbling, excerpts of which provided material for Izme Pass, Carolyn Guyer embeds passages from a diary that reflect her sense of writing at a critical moment of change in relations between women and m en. Importantly, she conceives that where they are placed textually will affect how they can develop and how they will encounter one another. Here, for example, is one such passage; its title is, significantly, “topographic”:

     

    8 Sept 90
I wonder what would happen to the story if I changed how
I have it organized right now.	I've been keeping all the
various elements of it gathered separately in his/her own
boxes and areas just so I could move around in it and work
more easily.  But it strikes me that each of the men is
developing as himself and in relation to his lover, while
the women are developing as themselves but also kind of like
sisters.  Each man has his box as a major element, or cove,
but each woman has her own box within the nun area.
Like a dormitory, gymnæceum, or a convent.

I've thought a number of times lately to bring each woman
into her lover's box and make each cove then a marriage box,
but have not done it.  The topography of the story speaks as
it forms, as well as when the reader encounters it.  I believe
what I was (am) doing is helping the women stay independent.
Also, giving them access, through proximity, to each
other.

     

    In many ways, topography is the story of this writing, and it is remarkable that women, so long objectified and imprisoned in male fantasies of the feminine as territory, earth, terra incognita, should incorporate into the struggle to achieve self-articulation the remaking of both the material and figurative space in which they live, or will live after the earthquake that shakes down the myriad symbols and structures that have constricted them. Even in the handful of hypertextual fict ions that have been written thus far, the potential for projects of radical change in representational art is evident. Especially for women writers who self-reflexively incorporate thinking about texts into fiction and for women who wish to seize rather than shy from the technological means of production, hypertext — which peculiarly welcomes and makes space for refraction and oppositional discourses — can be inviting, even though it rightly arouses a suspicion that its assimilative vastness may swallo w up subversion.

     

    This suspicion is confirmed provocatively by Stuart Moulthrop and Nancy Kaplan in a discussion of what they regard as the “futility of resistance” in electronic writing: “Where a resistant reading of print literature always produces another definitive discourse, the equivalent procedure in hypertext does just the opposite, generating not objective closure but a further range of openings that extend the discursive possibilities of the text for ‘constructive’ transaction.” (235) The very openness of hy pertext, initially appealing to writers of resistance discourses, carries the risk that their voices may simply be absorbed into the medium, precisely because, as Moulthrop and Kaplan explain, “it offers no resistance to the intrusion.” (235) The subversions and contestations in Izme Pass, however, suggest that resistance is possible at least at the level of syntax or structure. Similarly, as her diary in Quibbling indicates, Guyer wishes to structure gender-specific bo undaries and communities into her text, in an effort to preserve her fictive women’s independence from men while giving them proximity to other women. While the principle of linking perhaps does open a text to limitless discursive possibility, as Moulthr op and Kaplan argue, when a graphic mapping is used, as in Storyspace documents, new possibilities for demarcation and affiliation appear. This protocol, however, carries its own hazard; although any writing in an open electronic text is both provisional and discursively extendable, graphic maps or syntactic displays can reinscribe enclosure and hierarchy.

     

    In differently structuring the text spaces of men and women in Quibbling, Guyer moves toward the encoding of difference at the level of structure, but then, through the reflexive interpolation of the diary, she shifts the signification of those spaces into history, by analogy to women’s communities in the dormitory, convent or gymnæceum. Historians of women have viewed such places variously, either as sites of confinement or as sites where women have achieved both supportive commun ity and freedom from servitude. While giving scope to the independence of women, in Quibbling (and in the collaborative Izme Pass) Guyer places emphasis on the importance of women’s communities through both structure and story. In Penelope, Malloy lays emphasis on the development of women’s subjectivity: like the individualistic Woolf with her room of one’s own, Anne Mitchell seeks a place where she can concentrate her attention and do her work, like Maso wh o wants to write, not the “real” story, but what “the story was for me.” (my italics) There is ample room in feminism for both tendencies; one can easily imagine an Ava or an Anne Mitchell at work within the fictive space of Quibbling. The direction hypertext and its fictions will take in this volatile moment for textuality and for gender relations is not altogether clear, but if hypertext is to realize its potential as a medium for inclusive and democratic writing, it is profoundly important that women’s desire and creative will should contribute to its future shapings. As Guyer writes, “the topography of the story speaks as it forms,” and a more hospitable topography will speak a fuller, richer story, one that can, as Retallack a rgues, invite those former Others into an ongoing shared discourse.

     

    Notes

     

    1. On the matter of “writing the feminine,” two questions are likely to be raised right away: (1) does the very term impose an invidious construction of the dyad masculine/feminine, such that the “feminine” locks writers into otherness, lack, and erasure; (2) does “writing the feminine” limit or liberate the writer, or perhaps achieve some other unanticipated result? I intend to take up these questions less in reference to theory than to the practice and professions of women writers wh o regard themselves as feminist or who regard their texts as examples of writing the feminine.

     

    2. See for example Nancy K. Miller, “Arachnologies: The Woman, The Text, and the Critic.”

     

    3. Kristeva’s “Stabat Mater,” for example.

     

    4. In her essay, “Fretwork: ReForming Me,” Carolyn Guyer describes her dismay on finding that someone had taken up her invitation to add writing to a work of hers, because she first judged that it was not good and then felt guilty becau se she “was imposing cultural values as if they were universal, absolute standards.” In this essay she searches for theoretical and figurative means by which to incorporate and embody “the challenges of multicultural communities,” uncovering along the wa y the trap of perfectionism (as Maso has also done in her argument for the messiness of the novel) and, by contrast, the privilege, as she defines it, “in sharing rather than in the owning of knowledge.” This leads her to argue for the value of opening a rt to differences that alter contexts and restore the vitality of dynamic process rather than the stillness of mastery. Guyer’s argument calls to mind John Cage’s advocacy of aleatory composition.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Bernstein, Charles. A Poetics. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP, 1992.
    • Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. Dictee. 1982, Berkeley: Third Woman P, 1995.
    • Friedman, Ellen G., and Miriam Fuchs, eds. Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989.
    • Guyer, Carolyn. “Fretwork: ReForming Me.” Unpublished.
    • —. Quibbling. Eastgate Systems. Software, 1991. Macintosh and Windows.
    • Guyer, Carolyn and Martha Petry. Izme Pass. Writing on the Edge 2.2 (Spring 1991). Eastgate Systems, 1991. Software. Macintosh.
    • —. “Notes for Izme Pass Expose.” Writing on the Edge 2.2 (Spring 1991): 82-89.
    • Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985.
    • Joyce, Michael. Afternoon. Eastgate Systems, 1987. Software. Macintosh.
    • —. WOE. Writing on the Edge 2.2 (Spring 1991). Eastgate, 1991. Software. Macintosh.
    • Jouve, Nicole Ward, with Sue Roe and Susan Sellers. “Where Now, Where Next?” The Semi-Transparent Envelope: Women Writing — Feminism and Fiction. Eds. Roe, Sellers, Jouve, with Michèle Roberts. London and NY: Marion Boyers, 1994.
    • Kristeva, Julia. “Stabat Mater.” The Kristeva Reader. Ed. Toril Moi. NY: Columbia UP, 1986.
    • Malloy, Judy. its name was Penelope. Eastgate Systems, 1993. Software. Macintosh and Windows.
    • Maso, Carole. AVA. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive P, 1993.
    • —. “OnAVA.” Conjunctions 20 (May 1993): 172-76.
    • —. “Notes of a Lyric Artist Working in Prose: A Lifelong Conversation with Myself, Entered Midway.” American Poetry Review 24.2 (March/April 1995): 26-31.
    • Miller, Nancy K. “Arachnologies: The Woman, The Text, and the Critic.” The Poetics of Gender. Ed. Nancy K. Miller. NY: Columbia UP, 1986. 270-95.
    • Moulthrop, Stuart and Nancy Kaplan. “They Became What They Beheld: The Futility of Resistance in the Space of Electronic Writing.” Literacy and Computers: The Complications of Teaching and Learning with Technology. Eds. Cynthia L. Selfe and Susan Hilligoss. NY: Modern Language Association of America, 1994. 220-37.
    • Retallack, Joan. “:RE:THINKING:LITERARY:FEMINISM: (three essays onto shaky grounds).” Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory. Eds. Lynn Keller and Christanne Miller. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994. 344-77.
    • Rich, Adrienne. The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977. New York: Norton, 1978.
    • Robinson, Lou, and Camille Norton, eds. Resurgent: New Writing by Women. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois Press, 1992.
    • Wong, Shelley Sunn. “Unnaming the Same: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s DICTEE.” Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory. Eds. Lynn Keller and Christanne Miller. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994. 43-68.

     

    Some Other Hypertext Works by Women

     

    • Arnold, Mary-Kim. Lust. Eastgate Quarterly, 1:2 (1993).
    • Cramer, Kathryn. In Small & Large Pieces. Eastgate Quarterly, 1:3 (1994).
    • Douglas, Jane Yellowlees. I Have Said Nothing. Eastgate Quarterly, 1:2 (1993).
    • Jackson, Shelley. Patchwork Girl, by Mary Shelley and Herself. Eastgate Systems, 1995.
    • Larsen, Deena. Marble Springs. Eastgate Systems, 1993.
    • Mac, Kathy. Unnatural Habitats. Eastgate Quarterly, 1:3 (1994).
    • Moran, Monica. Ambulance: An Electronic Novel. Electronic Hollywood, 1993.
    • Smith, Sarah. King of Space. Eastgate Systems, 1990.

     

  • “The Nine Grounds of Intellectual Warfare”

    Paul Mann

    Department of English
    Pomona College
    pmann@pomona.claremont.edu

     

    Prediction (1994):

     

    We are about to witness a rise of “war studies” in the humanities. On your next plane trip the person beside you dozing over a copy of Sun Tzu’s Art of War might not be a corporate CEO but a professor of philosophy. There will soon be whole conferences on warfare; more courses in liberal arts curricula on the theory and literature of warfare; special issues of journals on war studies published not by historians or social scientists but by literary critics; new studies of the culture of the Kriegsspiel; new readings of Homer, Kleist, Crane. Books of gender criticism on the subject of war are already appearing, and essays on Clausewitz are now liable to turn up in literary journals and books of critical theory.1 And we will hear more and more of the sort of moral outrage critics exercised during the Gulf War over the way the video-game imagery of computer simulations displaced grievous bodily harm.

     

    Perhaps this imminent frenzy of production will open another front in the current campaign against the aesthetics of ideology. To the extent that modern warfare depends on the eclipse of the real by images, cultural critics would seem especially qualified to analyze it. Elaine Scarry: “it is when a country has become to its citizens a fiction that wars begin.”2 If this is the case, if war arises from an investment in certain fictions, then critics of fiction ought to be able to teach us to read war critically — and, along the way, to establish the moral and political gravity of their own work. What is at issue here, however, are not only analyses of war but also analogies of it. We will burrow into the archives of warfare because we will see, or at least want to see, criticism itself as a form of warfare. We will project an image of ourselves onto a field of study and recognize our reflection in it. Gender critics already study war discourse in order both to attack its violent phallicism and to conceive gender struggle itself along strategic lines. We have theory wars, PC wars, linguistics wars, Gerald Graff’s culture wars, Avital Ronell appropriating the war on drugs for a theory of reading.3 Vast energies will be expended not only on the archives and rhetoric of warfare but on the warcraft of rhetoric and critical inquiry, on the “violence” of the question, on the “mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms” that, for Nietzsche, make up what is called truth.4

     

    We will pursue the subject of warfare because we will increasingly see a relationship between our own activity and warfare. Let me articulate the law that governs this movement: Critical discourse always tends toward the eventual phenomenalization, as objects of study, of the devices that structure it. War becomes a field of critical study when critics come to believe, however obliquely, that criticism has always been a field of warfare. And warfare not only in the narrow terms of intellectual difference, but in the most material terms as well. If, for Clausewitz, war is an extension of policy, for Paul Virilio the reverse is true: politics and culture are, from the outset, extensions of warfare, of a logistical economy that encompasses and ultimately exhausts all of society. Standard critiques of the coordination of scientific research with the “military-industrial complex” are already being extended to include the ideological state apparatus; for Virilio, technology as such is a logistical invention and in one way or another always answers logistical demands, and the same point will be made about technologies of representation.5 The humanities are in a mood to see the complicity of what Enzensberger called the “consciousness industry” in the military-industrial-knowledge complex, to see themselves at one and the same time as ideological agents of the state’s “war machine” and as warriors against the state.6 I will have more to say about this contradiction.

     

    To repeat: The object of criticism is always a symptom, if you will, of the structure of critical discourse itself, always a phenomenalization of the device. But this device tends to appear in a surrogate form, still dissimulated and displaced; it appears and does not appear, makes itself known in ways that further conceal its stakes. And it always appears too late, at the very moment it ceases to function: a kind of theory-death, a death that is not a termination but a particular sort of elaboration. Now, everywhere we look, critics will be casting off their clerical mantles and rhetorical labcoats for suits of discursive armor; the slightest critical aggression or ressentiment will be inflated with theoretical war-machines and territorial metaphorics.7 At the same time, the very rise of war discourse among us will signal the end of intellectual warfare for us, its general recuperation by the economics of intellectual production and exchange. It might therefore be delusional — even, as some would argue, obscene, given the horrible damage of real war — to think of this academic bickering as warfare, and yet it remains a trace of war, and perhaps the sign of a potential combat some critical force could still fight.

     

    It would be a mistake to assume that this metamorphosis of discourse as war into discourse on war has occurred because criticism has become more political. On the contrary, criticism has never been more than a political effect — “policy” carried out, and in our case dissipated, by other means. The long process of seizing politics as the proper object of criticism is one more tardy phenomenalization of the device. What we witness — and what difference would it make even if I were right? — is not proof of the politicization of criticism but an after-image of its quite peripheral integration with forms of geopolitical conflict that are, in fact, already being dismantled and remodeled in war rooms, defense institutes, and multinational corporate headquarters. War talk, like politics talk, like ethics talk, like all critical talk, is nostalgic from the start. While we babble about territories and borders, really still caught up in nothing more than a habitual attachment to disciplinary “space” and anxious dreams of “agency,” the technocrats of warfare are developing strategies that no longer depend on any such topography, strategies far more sophisticated than anything we have imagined. And we congratulate ourselves for condemning them, and for our facile analogies between video games and smart bombs.

     

    I would propose two distinct diagnoses of the rise of war talk. On one hand, war talk is merely another exercise in rhetorical inflation, intended to shore up the fading value of a dubious product, another symptom of the imaginary politics one witnesses everywhere in critical discourse, another appearance of a structural device at the very moment it ceases to operate. On the other hand, war talk might still indicate the possibility of actually becoming a war machine, of pursuing a military equivalent of thought beyond all these petty contentions, of realizing the truth of discourse as warfare and finally beginning to fight. It will be crucial here not to choose between these diagnoses. In the domain of criticism they function simultaneously, in a perpetual mutual interference; there is no hope of extricating one from the other, no hope of either becoming critical warriors or being relieved of the demand that we do so.

     

    The real task of this prediction is thus not to make any claim on the future, but rather to pursue a sort of genealogy, in Nietzsche’s or Foucault’s sense, in reverse: a projective genealogy, so to speak: an account not so much of the future as of the present, of the order of knowledge at this very moment. War here is a way to theorize discourse as collective behavior, to reconceive shifting positions, alliances, defenses, attacks, casualties and losses, logistical strengths and weaknesses, the friction and fog of discursive conflict. I will sketch out nine grounds of intellectual warfare: Logistics, Logomachia, Fortification, the Desert, the Screen, Number, High Ground, Chaos, and the Cemetery.8 These grounds are not exhaustive and do not constitute a singular field; they are not arranged in a logical sequence and do not amount to a single argument moving toward a single conclusion. War looks different from the vantage of each ground. During a given campaign an army or a writing might find itself, at different times, in different tactical situations and encounters, occupying several or all of these grounds, and deploying its forces in different arrangements. In this essay, the nine grounds do not amount to any telos, any whole, nor even an intellectual position, but in my movement among them I hope to indicate, in the most preliminary and doubtless futile manner, strategies for a critical writing that might actually learn from the war machines it studies.

     

    I. Logistics:

     

    It is commonplace to reduce intellectual production to economic terms. There is a vast, indeed a surplus critique of the commodification of thought, but critics are only just beginning to believe, as perhaps our travelling CEO has long believed, that there is some advantage in seeing their own business as warfare, and that it is possible to do so because culture, business, and defense are always to some degree integrated.9 Any executive who entertains the notion that he or she is a corporate warrior is no doubt engaged in a fantasy, but one should not be too quick to dismiss the utility of such fantasies, their ability to inspire performance. And perhaps we too should make a more rigorous accounting of our own investments in various critical ideologies, which so often presume to combat the institution while sustaining its discursive economy by the very means of our attacks. Everyone is aware that thought has been reified and transformed into a commodity, but that awareness has never inhibited production. The critique of the commodity produces perfectly marketable commodities. The half-conscious fantasies of the truth-warrior energize the intellectual economy quite as much as the samurai fantasies of the corporate factotum fuel the marketplace.

     

     

    Virilio would argue that they are not fantasies at all; stripped of narcissistic ornament, we would still have to see ourselves as soldiers. Writing in the high years of the Cold War, Virilio developed a theory of “pure war,” global war so efficient it never needs to be fought, rather like William Burroughs’s notion that a functioning police state needs no police. What is most crucial for Virilio’s conception of the warfare state is his extreme emphasis on logistics. “Logistics is the beginning of the economy of war, which will become simple economy, to the point of replacing political economy” (PW 4). The invention of the city as such lies in logistical preparation for war. War is not an aberration, the negation of the truth of civilization, so much as its origin; or rather, civilization depends on an origin and order that forever threaten its destruction. And in a sense we have returned to this logistical origin:

     

    If we can say that war was entirely strategic in past societies, we can now say that strategy is no more than logistics. In turn, logistics has become the whole of war; because in an age of deterrence, the production of arms is already war. . . . Deterrence is the development of an arms capacity that assures total peace. The fact of having increasingly sophisticated weaponry deters the enemy more and more. At that point, war is no longer in its execution, but in its preparation. The perpetuation of war is what I call Pure War, war which is acted out . . . in infinite preparation. [However,] this infinite preparation, the advent of logistics, also entails the non-development of society . . . , peace as war, as infinite preparation which exhausts and will eventually eliminate societies. The Total Peace of Deterrence is Total War pursued by other means. (PW 91-93, 139, 25)

     

    One could argue that the stakes have changed: the Cold War is over and smaller wars are heating up; one could also argue that this is merely another case of total deterrence, and not yet achieved. In any event, to whatever degree a discrete militarization of the peacetime economy has occurred, in Virilio’s model this logistical “endocolonization” depends on the production of technical knowledge. Indeed technology has its very origin in logistical demands: technology arises from the need for weaponry, “from the arsenal and war economy” (24). But it is not a matter of armaments alone: “the war-machine is not only explosives, it’s also communications, vectorization. It’s essentially the speed of delivery. . . . It’s war operating in the sciences. It’s everything that is already perverting the field of knowledge from one end to the other; everything that is aligning the different branches of knowledge in a perspective of the end” (20). There is, here, no viable distinction between defense research and peacetime applications of science. Technology as such is a function of total logistics. Every form of knowledge supports the warfare state. Analogous if less exaggerated claims have been made by Alvin and Heidi Toffler in War and Anti-War, a lay account of the reliance of post-Cold War strategy on increasingly sophisticated weapons systems. It would seem that the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Virilio’s global deterrence, which has resulted in drastic cutbacks in defense budgets and damage to the American economy as a whole, only exacerbates the logistical demand. Weapons now have to be smarter because we cannot afford so many of them; fighting forces now have to be more skilled, more mobile, and more cybernetically coordinated to deal with the realities of post-Cold War conflict. Tactical advantages are measured in technological terms rather than by sheer force of troop numbers. War, the Tofflers argue, is now about technical knowledge, increasingly fought by means of knowledge, and perhaps, in the future, over knowledge, over technological capabilities. “Cyberwar” is no longer science fiction: the acquisition, systematization, and deployment of technical knowledge have become the ground and stakes of bloody wars.10

     

    As the economy in general and technological development in particular come to be seen in logistical terms, so the critical industry too will be taken as a logistical system, and war discourse as pure war carried out by other means. But it is all too easy to conflate military, technological, and intellectual production. It might be that the forces of deterrence or nuclear war really do extend into criticism, into the study of texts, into the colloquium and critical journal, but even if there is some economic coordination between them, it would be a mistake to elide their differences. There is no question that military success is increasingly determined by access to technical knowledge and that logistical development is a laboratory for new technologies, but to recognize this is not to prove that all fields of knowledge are connected to military research in the same ways. Such claims will certainly be made, with fantastic effects, just as the critical truisms that fictions are informed by political realities and that politics is dependent upon fictive forms are turned around, without careful examination of the reversability of these propositions, into the quite dubious but productive thesis that therefore criticism of these fictions constitutes political action. What pure war indicates, however, is that intellectual warfare is not oppositional: it is a form of systems-maintenance, and a feature of the status quo of capital.

     

    Hence war discourse will cast intellectuals as agents of a general logistical economy and at the same time offer them an array of quite useful and quite delusional critical fantasies about their combat for and against the warfare state. But let me suggest another economics here, another fantasy, one not restricted to the familiar terms of use- and exchange-value for the military-industrial-knowledge complex, but based as it were on waste-value: a general economy, in Bataille’s sense: an economy like that of the sun, which gives life but is utterly indifferent to it, burns itself out as fast as it can, expends most of its energy into the void. Bataille’s image of war-economics is the ritual practice of the potlatch, a form of symbolic combat most likely associated with funerary observances, but which he sees as a solar means of purging the superabundance of natural and cultural energy. The purpose of art and thought is the purest expenditure, waste, dépense.11 Intellectual warfare can be seen in this light, as ritualized combat whose value is that it has no value: a means of squandering useless wealth. Intellectual production is the production of superfluities tricked out with beautiful illusory truths, and we meet to exchange ideas only in order to destroy thought itself with these ludicrous gifts.

     

    II. Logomachia:

     

    The quasi-conflictual structure of the colloquium; the nationalization of intellectual outlooks (e.g., French vs. Anglo-American feminism, English studies vs. German philology in the wake of the First World War); the “diversification” of disciplines carried out as the conquest and colonization of discrete areas of academic territory, and all the ensuing turf wars between departments, methodologies, etc.; rising concern about the invasive, “violent” force of interrogation and argument in even so innocuous an act as literary interpretation; all the petty jockeying for personal advantage that will pass for intellectual combat: these are horizonal phenomena, indications of more prevalent and insistent orders of conflict that structure intellectual work and, perhaps, work in general.

     

    Beyond these familiar instances, imagine for a moment (it is a fable, not philosophy) that Hegel, or at least Kojève’s Hegel, was right: consciousness, history, civilization begin with combat: “man, to be really, truly ‘man,’ and to know that he is such, must . . . impose the idea he has of himself on beings other than himself,” in a fight to the death in which no one dies, and in which the stakes are only recognition, the establishment of a certain narcissistic regime, the invention of nothing more than the subject.12

     

    Perhaps then the first violence is the formal and ideal reduction of the complexity of conflict to a dialectical system.

     

    Let me modulate the fable a bit further:

     

    When imposition is collective, the fight becomes battle.

     

    When it is strategically directed, it becomes warfare.

     

    When we fight to impose not our own idea but an idea that has been imposed upon us, and with which we identify so intensely it is as if the idea were our own, we become soldiers.

     

    The soldier is essential to the dialectic: neither master nor quite simply slave but the device that mediates between them. The soldier is slave as hero, risking death in order to impose the master’s will on another slave. Perhaps intellectual soldiers too are not slaves who can comprehend their slavery and still revolt but hoplite phalanxes marshalled in order for the day of intellectual battle; Plato’s guardians in the chariot of reason, and a chariot is, after all, a military transport.

     

    It is not even precisely that some specific other has imposed his idea on us: the master is always in part a figure out of our own imagination, out of our desire and fear, a stand-in for a “true” master we can never quite locate and who need not even really exist, and we confront “death” in his name, in various surrogate forms, so that we will never have to confront our death. Any veteran of combat could testify to the folly of this project, even though the veteran might only have shifted his or her own allegiance to another ideal.

     

    The slave’s fear of death is thus overcome as a warrior fantasy, itself in the service of a master the slave has to some degree invented. For the intellectual warrior as well, fear of death — of not being recognized, and thus of not being — is not overcome but displaced, sublimated, pursued through a vast array of surrogates, including the sublime study of death. Intellectual warfare is not a culmination of the master-slave dialectic but its proxy, its aesthetic. The sentimental violence of dialectics.

     

    Today almost everyone seems to believe that, at the end of this struggle, what we confront is not the triumph of absolute reason but the collapse of the entire project, the idea, the hope and dream of the absolute. I would argue that this theoretical collapse is the event-horizon, the phenomenal threshold, of intellectual warfare. The theoretical abandonment of the absolute is rarely accompanied by its disappearance: the absolute returns in a ghostly form, haunting precisely those discourses that claim to have left it behind, and that continue to orient themselves around its evacuation. Nevertheless, this half-waking from the half-dream of absolute reason returns us to a primal dialectical scene, to a war for recognition now without stakes. In the farcical relativism that results, dominance is ever more explicitly a matter not of truth but of force. And if we discover that we have never gone further, that force is all that ever mattered, can we say that the dialectic ever occurred at all?

     

    This self-consuming conflict is visible from another perspective. If war, as an extension of logistical, tactical, and strategic knowledge, is an extension of thought, it also ruins thought. It exceeds every effort of dialectical containment. The same forces that drive military conflicts past the limits of rational control, in Clausewitz’s view, drive the idea of war past the limits of conception. As Daniel Pick observes,

     

    For Clausewitz, war is always to be understood as subordinate to political will. That is an iron law. But it also slips out of control, threatening to become jubilantly and anarchically autonomous. It is willed, but all too prone to chance and accident. . . . The practice of war, Clausewitz contends, can be shown to undermine the consistency of thought and theory upon war. . . . [War is] an idea, an abstraction, a supposed structural necessity; but also . . . an impossible subject, the subversive force in the account that seeks to master it.13

     

    The “friction” of war can never be reduced to a system. That is why Clausewitz distrusts theory, even as he engages in what would seem to be a theoretical exercise. According to Garry Wills, that is also why Clausewitz insists on the distinction between theory and Kritik, the broadest empirical assessment possible in any strategic or tactical situation, without reference to absolute laws of warfare that the realities of battle may well disprove, with disastrous results for those who adhere to them. It is not that Clausewitz refuses any generality — his dictum about war as politics is certainly theoretical, and rules of warfare are proposed everywhere in his text — rather that tactical and strategic considerations should never be determined by rules alone; rules need to be tested, and what is most important is close critical observation of the field of battle from the highest empirical ground available. But if Wills believes that the distinction between theory and Kritik resolves the problem of analyzing the friction of war, Pick is just as adamant that theory and Kritik themselves are at war in Clausewitz’s own analysis, in any consideration of warfare, and the notorious inconsistencies of On War reflect the truth of this conflict. Kritik is compromised by its own forms of friction. As Peter Paret observes, in published studies of war even the most factual descriptions of battle ought to be printed in a different colored ink to indicate the discrepancy between a battle and every account of it.14War is absolute force pushed past the limit of dialectical recuperation; it involves the theoretical experience of the destruction of theory, which cannot be alleviated by any resort to empiricism.

     

    Jacqueline Rose makes a similar point in respect to Freud. As a fundamental instance of human aggression, war could be said to constitute a proper field for psychoanalytic investigation, an object of scientific knowledge. The problem is that

     

    [if] Freud offers . . . an explanation of war, he does so by means of the death drive. But the death drive, and hence the truth of war, operates, it has so often been pointed out, as the speculative vanishing point of psychoanalytic theory, and even more boldly, of the whole of scientific thought.15

     

    Hence war is not only an object of knowledge but its “crisis,” its proper logomachia, “the instability, the necessary failure, of knowledge as resolution that [Freud] places at the foundation, or limit, of all scientific thought.”16

     

    War . . . operates in Freud’s discourse, and not only in that of Freud, as a limit to the possibility of absolute or total knowledge, at the same time as such absolute or total knowledge seems over and again to be offered as one cause — if not the cause — of war. . . . The end of war [is] the end of knowledge. (16-17)

     

    What is most challenging about this formulation is that the destruction of knowledge, its vanishing point, is both its foundation and its limit, the condition of its existence even as it destroys it. The impossibility of knowledge becomes the very order of knowledge. This device too must eventually rise into discourse and manifest itself as a proxy object of inquiry.

     

    III. Fortification:

     

    Nothing is more important to the intellectual than a position. Even the fabled collapse of foundations has done little to change this: economically, discursively, this collapse turns out to be yet another position, something to believe in and hold true, the consolidation of “flows,” “drift,” etc., into the most familiar academic architecture. You must have a position, and if you do not, one will be assigned to you, or you will simply not exist. The homology of position as standpoint and position as job, budget line, FTE, is a matter of a great deal more than analogy or vulgar marxism. With a position, everything is possible. You are supported by a truth, a discipline, a methodology, a rhetorical style, a discursive form, a mode of production and exchange. You know where you stand, you recognize yourself by your position; you see yourself there because you see yourself seen there. Your position is your identity and value; it authorizes your work, circulates it, constitutes it as property, lends you the security of ownership. But at the same time nothing is possible with a position. To hold a position is to be held by it, to be caught up in its inertial and economic determinations, to be captured by an identity that you might not, finally, believe to be quite your own. Nothing could be more difficult than really, substantively, radically to change one’s mind, change the forms in which one works, risk everything by leaving behind a position on which, it seems, everything has come to rely.

     

    The position is a fundamental form of civilization. Recall Virilio’s remark that the city itself originates in a position, a garrison, a defensive posture, a logistical form.17 To adopt the terminology of A Thousand Plateaus, the position is a “sedentary fortification” of “state armies”; it is entirely contained by the state apparatus.18 In academic criticism, the symbolic place of the state is occupied and held by the text or oeuvre, around which the defending force of commentaries is deployed; in a field such as English or Comparative Literature, the state or national form of the text is clearly and hence problematically manifested. The critic defends the text by the elaborate construction of interpretations around it; at the same time, in a kind of fractal homomorphism, the critic’s own position is defined and defended by the construction of the paper circle of his or her own works. The more forces occupy a position, the stronger it will be. The barrage of words projected from the most heavily fortified strongholds (currently: New Historicism, postcolonial criticism, certain orders of gender and race theory) can repel critiques by sheer force of numbers. Indeed, conflict between positions is itself one of the chief means by which they are defined. As Rose points out, for Freud war “not only threaten[s] civilization, it can also advance it. By tending towards the conglomeration of nations, it operates [not only] like death [but also] like the eros which strives to unify” (16). In intellectual warfare, the strategic form of this erotic unification is the discipline, in every sense of the word.19 Mechanisms of regimental identification are crucial here. It would be impossible to overestimate the importance of esprit de corps to garrisoned forces. Healthy competition keeps troops battle-sharp and singles out the most effective officers, but such conflict must be contained and focused toward strategic goals.

     

    If, on one hand, it is a mistake to refer to intellectual movements, since their force is always institutional, static, on the other hand it is the fixity of the intellectual position that proves to be illusory. A position must not only be held, but advanced. The surrounding territory must come under its influence and control. Furthermore, as Clausewitz indicates, defenses tend to become offensive. It is not simply that the best defense is a good offense; defenses, like attacks, exceed the limits of strategic reason. The escalating, offensive character of nuclear deterrence has long been noted. So also for the provocative force of the most striking cultural formations: defensive postures escalate beyond the power of whatever threat they face. More importantly, the position is never more than a temporary establishment: once consolidated, its termination is assured; the more force it generates, the more certain that its walls will be breached. That is Virilio’s brief against deterrence: it exhausts its own resources, it destroys the societies it defends. There is no indefensible position, and no position that can be defended for very long. At the moment a position is founded, its destruction has begun. Defections to other positions, other cities of words, are doubtless already under way.

     

    The intellectual position is therefore not simply a ground, let alone a foundation, however attached to or identified with it its garrison becomes, even in the act of arguing that there is no foundation. On the contrary, the position turns out to be a point along a vector, a line of advance or retreat, a temporary encampment, a bivouac, of strategic or tactical importance alone, and supportable only by means of its relation to other positions, other forces, counterforces, and logistical agencies all along the line. There is no question that the strength of the sited force’s investment in its ground, however temporary, is crucial. But in the end every position will turn out to have been a relay-point or intersection, the temporary location of an intellectual army whose grounding is not to be measured by its “rightness” — the archaic notion of truth proven by combat may be said to survive only in the academy — but by its force and resistance in relation to other quantities of force, velocity, intensity, logistical power, tactical skill, etc., all of which will not only support but eventually help to detach that army from its ground. In psychoanalytic terms, it would be necessary to see the texts that a writer deploys around his or her position as defense mechanisms of another order, that is to say, as symptoms, but not only of an individual pathology: rather as encysted trouble-spots on the intersecting curves of discursive forces about which the intellectual is often barely, if at all, aware, and which no one — no chaos theorist of discursive physics — will ever be able to map.

     

    The position is surrounded by a “border,” a “margin.” This circular, flat-earth topography mirrors larger discursive models, which still map everything in terms of centers, lines of defense, and antagonistic margins. It is little wonder that questions of colonialism have become so pressing: here too we encounter a phenomenalization of the discursive device. Modern critical production consistently sees itself as a matter of hegemonic centers (e.g., defenses of tradition) and marginal oppositions. But insofar as one wishes to retain this topography of margins and centers — and in the end there might not be much to recommend it — it might be better to see the marginal force as a function and effect of the center, the very means by which it establishes its line of defense. Military commanders might be unlikely to deploy their most troublesome troops along their perimeter, but in intellectual warfare the perimeter is marked out and held primarily by troops who imagine themselves in revolt against headquarters. This is the historical paradox of the avant-gardes: they believe they are attacking the army for which they are in fact the advance guard. The contradiction does not dissolve their importance, it marks their precise task: the dialectical defense and advance of discursive boundaries. It might therefore indicate the fundamental instability of cultural positions, but it does nothing to support the strictly oppositional claims of marginal forces. That is why postcolonial criticism remains a colonial outpost of an older critical form.

     

    Without exception, all positions are oriented toward the institutional apparatus. Marginality here is only relative and temporary: the moment black studies or women’s studies or queer theory conceives of itself as a discipline, its primary orientation is toward the institution. The fact that the institution might treat it badly hardly constitutes an ethical privilege. Any intellectual who holds a position is a function of this apparatus; his or her marginality is, for the most part, only an operational device. It is a critical commonplace that the state is not a monolithic hegemony but rather a constellation of disorganized and fragmentary agencies of production. This is often taken as a validation for the political potential of marginal critical movements: inside-outside relations can be facilely deconstructed and critics can still congratulate themselves on their “resistance.” But the contrary is clearly the case. The most profitable intellectual production does not take place at the center (e.g., Romance Philology), where mostly obsolete weapons are produced; the real growth industries are located precisely on the self-proclaimed margins. It will be argued that resistance is still possible; nothing I propose here argues against such a possibility. I wish only to insist that effective resistance will never be located in the position, however oppositional it imagines itself to be. Resistance is first of all a function of the apparatus itself. What would seem to be the transgressive potential of such institutional agencies as certain orders of gender criticism might demonstrate the entropy of the institution, but it does nothing to prove the counterpolitical claims of the position. Fantasies of resistance often serve as alibis for collusion. Any position is a state agency, and its relative marginality is a mode of orientation, not an exception. Effective resistance must be located in other tactical forms.

     

    IV. Desert:

     

    The standpoint, identification with and defense of one’s own thought, the demand that one be on one’s own side, that one stand by one’s word, is so standard a feature of intellectual ethics and politics that it has been taken completely for granted. But the entrenched position is a vestige of archaic forms of warfare. The Tofflers argue that the Gulf War demonstrated the failure of entrenchment — Iraq’s older, industrial, sedentary strategy — against advanced military technologies of speed, stealth, and coordinated intelligence. “[T]he allied force was not a [conventional military] machine, but a system with far greater internal feedback, communication, and self-regulatory adjustment capability. It was . . . a ‘thinking system’” (80). For Napoleon as well, Virilio notes, “the capacity for war [was] the capacity for movement” (WC 10). In the same manner, those bound to intellectual positions remain blind to the tactical advantages of mobility and secrecy, and the new war studies will be used to suggest strategic figures outside the position’s fortified walls.

     

    I will return to the precisely oxymoronic, self-canceling figure of secrecy in a later section. Here, I will proceed by suggesting that the new war studies should come to quite rigorous and unromantic terms with the nomadology of Deleuze and Guattari.20 In their work, the war machine is essentially exterior to the state, even if the state appropriates it. The problem is, therefore, how to pursue exteriority in disciplinary and epistemological structures that are themselves entirely defined by their institutional interiority. It will certainly not be through any of the current specular and spectacular modes of narcissistic identification with the “other.” One should treat every text that peddles its vicarious nomadism while elaborating the most conventional analyses with the greatest suspicion, and at the same time with some confidence, perhaps quite groundless, that an intellectual nomadology might still be carried out elsewhere.21 It is necessary to comprehend the force of extremely difficult ideas: the nomadic war-machine’s exteriority to the state and its precise relation to battle; the nomads’ territorial engagement with smooth space, without “striation,” interiority, or chrono-historical organization; their indifference to semiological systems and their particular epistemological orientations (ornament instead of sign, ballistics and metallurgical science, numbering, speed, etc.); the strange relation of A Thousand Plateaus to texts that would seem to treat the same matters in a more disciplinary way — its relation, for instance, to psychoanalysis and philosophy (and what is the strategic connection between this book and Deleuze’s extraordinary and in many ways quite scholarly treatments of the history of philosophy?); indeed, the very ontology of the nomadic idea itself: all of these must be explored in considerable detail, without ever descending to any merely exegetical commentary, and without reducing what is at stake in this book to an intellectual position. Deleuze and Guattari challenge us to rethink our whole relation to books and to writing, to the very order of our thought — a task in which they themselves often fail. One must begin by reading them at a loss, but a loss that is not only the result of their work’s difficulty, which careful analysis would eventually overcome; rather, a loss that reaches down into our deepest epistemological attachments. It will be necessary, for instance, to reconceive the very notion of intellectual rigor (the order of argument, demonstration, proof) and communicative clarity: not to abandon them for the sake of some impressionistic indulgence, but to relocate them outside the striated space of the state apparatus that has always provided their structure. One might find oneself, for instance, no longer putting forth positions, outlining, defending, and identifying oneself with them: one might find oneself engaged in an even more severe, more rigorous discipline of affirming ideas without attaching oneself to them, making them appear (as Baudrillard suggested in another context) only so as to make them disappear.22 One might find oneself developing a logic that is no longer striated and arborescent (a trunk and its branches) but smooth, rhizomatic, turbulent, fractal, self-interfering, labyrinthine, subterranean. I am fully aware of how treacherous, how complex and self-contradictory a gesture it is even to refer to these ideas in such a form and such a forum as this one, how properly absurd it would be to pursue writing, to pursue knowledge itself, in the following manner:

     

    The hydraulic model of nomad science and the war machine . . . consists in being distributed by turbulence across a smooth space, in producing a movement that holds space and simultaneously affects all of its points, instead of being held by space in a local movement from one specified point to another. . . . The nomadic trajectory . . . distributes people (or animals) in an open space, one that is indefinite and noncommunicating. . . . [S]edentary space is striated, by walls, enclosures, and roads between enclosures, while nomad space is smooth, marked only by “traits” that are effaced and displaced with the trajectory. Even the lamellae of the desert slide over each other, producing an inimitable sound. The nomad distributes himself in a smooth space; he occupies, inhabits, holds that space; that is his territorial principle. It is therefore false to define the nomad by movement. . . . [T]he nomad is on the contrary he who does not move. Whereas the migrant leaves behind a milieu that has become amorphous or hostile, the nomad is one who does not depart, does not want to depart, who clings to the smooth space left by the receding forest, where the steppe or the desert advance, and who invents nomadism as a response to this challenge. (TP 363, 380-81)

     

    How shall we read this passage, which so clearly bears on the organization of thought itself, even in respect to the question of the historical, empirical factuality of its account? How shall we read work that conceives nomadism in a way that has nothing to do with the standard distinction between stasis and movement, that never defines nomadism simply as movement opposed to sedentary positions? Can we ourselves move and distribute our thought across a deterritorialized discursive field, now conceived as smooth space, living off it without attachment to or support of any state form? And how can one write nomadically, since Deleuze and Guattari consign writing to the state apparatus?23What then is writing to them? One’s very attempt to appropriate nomadology in a critical essay serves as another instance of the state’s never quite successful appropriation of the war machine, and of the never fully addressed logistical-economic order of one’s own thought.

     

    Let me advance here — as a preliminary gesture toward work being carried out elsewhere and precisely in other forms, and perhaps only in order to help put an end to the delusional use of such terms as nomadology, deterritorialization, and the rhizome in almost every academic forum that tries to employ them — a tactical figure that has nothing to do with sedentary and fortified positions: the assemblage. I am concerned here with the “numerical” organization of intellectual work.24 Such work is of course highly institutional, hierarchical, regimental: intellectuals labor as individuals but their individualism is for the most part the atomic form of social and discursive systems entirely reliant on this atomization. The assemblage represents a mode of intellectual organization quite distinct from the pyramid scheme of individual in the service of discipline (whatever its ideological orientation) in the service of institution, etc., under which the professional intellectual currently labors. The notion of the assemblage can be traced, along one of its lines, to the nomad on horseback. The constellation “man-horse-stirrup” is a primary instance of an assemblage: a technological extension that transforms the subject it would seem to have served, installing the subject in another sort of instrumental relation and, in effect, in another ontology. “[T]here are no more subjects but dynamic individuations without subjects, which constitute collective assemblages.”25 Even so subjectivist a notion as desire is transformed here: assemblages are “passional, they are compositions of desire,” but desire “has nothing to do with a natural or spontaneous determination; there is no desire but assembling, assembled, engineered desire” (TP 398). What is at issue is the projective movement of desire, its ballistic force out of anything like a subject-position into something more like a “relay” on an extensive line of flight across smooth, nomadic space. “The problem of the war machine is that of relaying, even with modest means, not that of the architectonic model of the monument. An ambulent people of relayers, rather than a model society” (377). We are confronted with a different order of logistics itself: in a sense, the importance of lines of communication overtakes the importance of the strategic positions they were once thought only to support. There is clearly room here for a certain kind of analysis of cybernetic developments in critical exchange, although here too one must avoid indulging in any romance of technological transformation. If the assemblage of writer-software-network offers nomadic possibilities, no one would deny that the state has already recuperated this technology (the Internet is the home shopping network of the knowledge industries). That is why it is crucial to focus not only on the technological assemblage, but on its mode of circulation: the network’s accessibility for packs and bands that in their assembling do not serve institutional interests, whatever their day-jobs and unavoidable investments. Clearly the role of the hacker is suggestive here, not because of the quite trivial outlaw romance of hacking, nor because of any particular damage hackers might manage to inflict on this or that data base, but because of the form and force of the relay itself. Imagine banding together with others in temporary, mission-oriented, extra-institutional units, with specific, limited, tactical and strategic goals. Not the death or transcendence of the subject (not any metaphysics at all); not a post-bourgeois utopia of drifts; surely not the establishment of any new isms; rather the transitory platooning of specific on-line skills and thought-weapons in mobile strike forces in the net. Perhaps the resurgent interest in the Situationist International will be less valuable for its polemics against the “spectacle,” which only serve an already over-represented critique of representation, than for the organizational models offered by its particular forms of intellectual labor: the Situationist council as a nomadic war machine. The practice of such organization would affect the forms of thought itself. Assemblages will serve as the auto-erosive becoming-machine of what was never exactly the intellectual “subject.” The transformation might already be occurring, on-line, even as the network surrenders to the apparatus of the newly transformed state.

     

    The task is to develop a war machine “that does not have war as its object.” It is a persistent theme for Deleuze and Guattari: the war machine only takes military conflict as its primary object when it is appropriated by the state; nomadology indicates other directions and ends. Reducing the war machine to warfare: in the realm of intellectual warfare, that would involve reducing it to conflicting binaries, to dialectics. If warfare as such indicates the most reduced dialectical forms of positionality and negation (no use imagining oneself “beyond dialectics,” since the beyond still drags the dialectic along with it), even the state army’s distribution of its forces might already suggest a more nomadic form of organization: deployed like a herd across a whole field, communicating rhizomatically, etc.26 Witness then this strange twist on Clausewitz:

     

    the distinction between absolute war as Idea and real wars seems of great importance. . . . The pure Idea is not that of the abstract elimination of the adversary, but that of a war machine which does not have war as its object, and which only entertains a potential or supplementary relation with war. Thus the nomad war machine does not appear to us to be one case of real war among others, as in Clausewitz, but on the contrary the content adequate to the Idea, the invention of the Idea, with its own objects, space, and composition of the nomos. . . . The other pole seem[s] to be the essence; it is when the war machine, with infinitely lower “quantities,” has as its object not war, but the tracing of a creative line of flight, the composition of a smooth space and of the movement of people in that space. At this other pole, the machine does indeed encounter war, but as its supplementary or synthetic object, now directed against the State and against the worldwide axiomatic expressed by States. (420, 422)

     

    It is crucial to note that Deleuze and Guattari are not critics, of Clausewitz or anything else. For all its talk of “against the state,” very little about their work has to do with critical dialectics. They are committed rather to a certain affirmation, generated perhaps most of all out of their nomadic encounters with Nietzsche’s thought. In that sense, a proper approach to their work will never take the form of elaborating critical objections to it, even when they would seem to be warranted. Nonetheless, I would argue that the greatest obstacle to deploying nomadology in a smooth space outside the state lies in the fact that nomadology, or something like it, might also represent the current form of the state’s own development. Sedentary armies are being defeated and replaced by nomadic strategies still directed toward warfare, in the service of deterritorializing states.27If the end of global deterrence has hardly resulted in anything resembling a more pacific internationalism, but rather in a more ferocious and, it is often claimed, atavistic nationalism — represented in western eyes, as usual, by Africa (e.g., Rwanda) and the Balkans — at the same time we are also witnessing a reorganization of the state apparatus through the movement of multinational capital, information technologies, and high-tech international military interventions, as in Somalia and the Gulf. It is tempting, for some, to see these changes as signs of a shift from an old world order to a newer, braver one, but one ought to see them instead as the most complex of knots. The Bosnian conflict represents at one and the same time an especially vicious nationalism and the resurgence of nomadic war machines; the allied forces of the Gulf War represent interests at one and the same time external to the state and entirely in its employ; multinational capital represents at one and the same time a nomadic form of deterritorialization and the state’s attempt to survive what it believes to be its imminent demise. In the light of these events intellectual warfare confronts the complexities of its own appropriations and lines of flight. It also confronts massive proof of its utter triviality.

     

    V. Screen:

     

    Much of what we will be given to read in the new war studies will be rehearsals of older critiques of representation, heated by a certain love-hate toward cyber-technology; critiques of aestheticized violence as violence against real suffering, with the critic posing heroically beside the figure of the real. This moral reconnaissance of video games and smart bombs will be accompanied by historicist accounts of the spectacular aspects of warfare, perhaps along the lines of Virilio’s War and Cinema, in which, it is argued, “war is cinema and cinema is war,” a “deadly harmony . . . always establishes itself between the functions of eye and weapon” (26, 69). This facile but suggestive conflation of military and cinematic epistemologies into a single logistical project will also lend itself to the familiar critique of the phallic violence of the cinematic “gaze.” The limit of these reflections is liable to be the logic of the “simulacrum,” greatly reduced from its development in either Baudrillard or Deleuze. Let me suggest that the problem before us is not, however, only the spectacularly telegenic appearance of the Gulf War but the fact that these critical reflections on spectacular screens are produced on the spectacular screens of critics’ computers. It will be necessary to investigate the cybernetic and epistemological apparatus of critical debates in the light of developments in military technology and the conduct of actual warfare, but it will be some time before the extraordinarily complex ways in which their integration occurs can be adequately described, and one should avoid collapsing differences between these networks. They are not to be mapped onto each other in any sort of simple homology; the means by which intellectual “cyberwar” serves the state remain, to some degree, obscure. I would hope that enough thinkers soon become sufficiently bored with the standard critical tropes about military simulation to move on to a more incisive critique of the connections between our software and the military’s.

     

    For the moment, this one observation: simulation means that intellectual warfare is always fought on other grounds. It is precisely the sort of virtual war it condemns. It is not a pure extension of politics but a form of ritual warfare, a phenomenon of the ritual dimension of politics and of the political deployment of ritual. War games of every kind present us with modes of simulation, of surrogation, that should not be addressed solely by reference to some terrible, displaced reality that criticism can or cannot locate behind the veil of the video image.28 What we witness is rather the oblique necessity of virtual violence itself, of surrogate conflicts even in the very critique of surrogacy: the necessary satisfaction of a demand for warfare that war alone cannot fully satisfy.

     

    So perhaps we still face nothing more than a Mirror: All discursive warfare is autoaggressive. We sacrifice ourselves in the name of an ego-ideal and become the enemy that we behold.

     

    VI. Number:

     

    If discursive combat is decided by might more than by right, we should allow for the remote possibility that intellectual warfare can be quantified, measured, calculated, perhaps with the sorts of empirical tools that have been developed in recent years by such social scientists as J. David Singer, K.N. Waltz, and Magnus Midlarsky, in their studies of international conflict.29 Given the friction and fog of war and the difficulties it poses for any sort of analysis, however, it might also be advisable to entertain the folly of empirical, systems-oriented research in this area. The contradiction is vital: intellectual warfare is just as quantifiable as any form of military engagement, which is to say, absolutely and hardly at all.

     

    In the critical discourse of war, number operates exactly as Kant predicted in the analytic of the sublime. The determination of quantity is overwhelmed by a Clausewitzian escalation of force past its measurable limit, which is then taken as its true destination. The mathematical sublime is the suppressed dream of every empirical study of warfare.

     

    Hence the intellectual war machine will pursue the potential of number in Deleuze’s sense as well, no longer a quantity in the striated space of the state, the university, the discipline, but a determining movement or speed through smooth, nomadic space (TP 381); a mode of transit rather than a measured sum. Deleuze’s “numbering number” could be said to begin at the point where the mathematical sublime leaves number behind for x, for the infinite; number then rediscovers itself outside striated space, no longer the perpetual trace of the imminent loss of numerical representation, but a singular space in which one actually moves — a space still entirely outside the current occasion.

     

    VII. High Ground:

     

    Is this what Pierre Bezukov hoped to observe when he climbed a fortified hill to gaze down on the Battle of Borodino? Kant: “War itself, provided it is conducted with order and a sacred respect for the rights of civilians, has something sublime about it, and gives nations that carry it on in such a measure a stamp of mind only the more sublime the more numerous the dangers to which they are exposed, and which they are able to meet with fortitude.”30 Perhaps that is what Tolstoy would have us believe Pierre did see: all the sublimely ennobling horrors of war. But let us imagine that he also witnessed the sublime from another perspective, that he saw the flatness of the abyss, a flat figure of lofty visions of bottomless depths.

     

    In Daniel Pick’s account of the war machine, two contending forces are in play: the increasing technical efficiency and rationalization of warfare, and an insistent figuration of war as a destructive energy that surpasses every effort of rational control. Warfare “assumes a momentum of its own which is difficult, even impossible to stop. . . . Battle is now nothing more than the autonomy . . . of the war machine,” the “unstoppable engine of war” (11). It is as if this machine obeyed the familiar logic of the Frankenstein mythos, in which the most rationalized human technology must eventually reveal its madness and destroy everything, including its creator. War too is reason’s war against itself: “nothing less than a catastrophic eclipse of sense, a bestial and mechanical descent into anarchy” (20). No Kritik can ever master it; one can never rise to the exact height above battle, high enough to see but not so high that one loses its detail, because the exact height doesn’t exist; it is an ideal standpoint. In respect to war, thought always shoots past its mark. That is why there is a war in On War. “Questions of friction, illness, madness, morals, fear and anarchy continuously need to be mastered by [Clausewitz], converted back into manageable currency which enables decision-making. He presides over and marshalls his thoughts, like a general seeking to retain control over potentially wayward troops” (40); and, as every reader of Clausewitz, including Clausewitz himself, knows full well, the war in On War gets out of hand. That is part of the attraction of the new war studies: even as warfare becomes a function of knowledge production it reveals itself as the transgressed limit of knowledge, as the very agent of its destruction. The thought of war is the sublimely desirable experience of thought’s abyss.

     

    War is sublime.31 The theory-war in Clausewitz’s text, the war between knowledge and everything proper to it that surpasses and destroys it, signals the way war takes its place beside tragedy as a sublime for philosophy, theory, and critical studies. The sublime of war study is one of theory’s recuperated figures of its own imaginary abyss, an abyss in which it seeks its deepest reflection. Whatever the truth of war, what we witness here first of all is thought’s fascination with an imaginary and quite compelling depth projected out of an obscure “drive” for its own “death.” If the self-destruction of the family in classical tragedy is an interior form of this paper abyss, the contemplation of warfare serves as one of its public forms, as the sublime for a political criticism, already scaled down from the recent, imaginary apocalypses of nuclear criticism.32 “The issue,” Rose writes,

     

    seems to be not so much what might be the truth of war, but the relationship of war to the category of truth. . . . Friction, dissolution, fluidity . . . surface in defiance of a resistant totalization. . . . In Clausewitz’s text, war seems to figure as the violent repressed of its own rationalization. It becomes, so to speak, the unconscious of itself . . . an intruder or foreign body that fastens and destroys. It is the perfect image of the alien-ness that Freud places at the heart of human subjectivity, the alien-ness whose denial or projection leads us into war. In Clausewitz’s text, the theorization of war seems finally to be taken over by its object. The attempt to theorize or master war, to subordinate it to absolute knowledge, becomes a way of perpetuating or repeating war itself. (23-24)

     

    Under the aegis of a critique of war technology, critical discourse becomes a machine that both rationalizes the contests of thought and surpasses rational control. The end of this conflict, of intellectual warfare as such, is a terminal image of reason’s self-destruction, of the Endlightenment, an ideal we will fight to the deathto fall short of. Hard critical knowledge will no more lead us past this end than knowledge of war leads humanity past armed conflict.

     

    VIII. Chaos:

     

    Consider what Clausewitz calls the fog of war — its untheorizable turmoil, error, accidents, chance, the sheer disorientation of combat terror. The fog of war is quite literally noise, war’s resistance to language, to objectification, to the code: both its problematic and its seductiveness, the limit of its intelligibility and the depth of its sublimity.

     

    There are two approaches to this fog. One can try to burn it off with the bright intensity of analysis, as if it were only a surface effect, even though everything would lead one to believe that fog is an irreducible element of war, something that must be taken into account, that cannot simply be withdrawn. Then perhaps one ought instead to attempt to map this fog, not in order to eliminate it but to put it to use. The fog of war might be more than an enemy of reason: it might be a tactical advantage.

     

    But how to map the fog of war? I anticipate an increase in references to chaos theory, discourse analyses deploying language like the following:

     

    military interest in turbulent phenomena revolves around the question of its negative effects in the performance of weapons systems or the effects of air drag on projectiles or water drag on submarines. But for our purposes, we want an image not of the external effects of turbulent flows, but of their internal structure. We are not concerned here with the destructive effects that a hurricane, for instance, may produce, but with the intricate patterns of eddies and vortices that define its inner structure. . . . In order to better understand turbulence, we must first rid ourselves of the idea that turbulent behavior represents a form of chaos.

     

    For a long time turbulence was identified with disorder or noise. Today we know that this is not the case. Indeed, while turbulent motion appears as irregular or chaotic on the macroscopic scale, it is, on the contrary, highly organized on the microscopic scale. The multiple space and time scales involved in turbulence correspond to the coherent behavior of millions and millions of molecules. Viewed in this way, the transition from laminar flow to turbulence is a process of self-organization.33

     

    It remains to be seen whether and to what extent the turbulence of intellectual warfare obeys the theoretical laws of chaos. Perhaps it will become possible to map the way epistemic breakthroughs stabilize themselves as singularities and fractal “eddies within eddies” (De Landa), increasingly dense, detailed, and localized skirmishes in entropic disciplinary subfields. I imagine that the effect would be at one and the same time to deepen the breakthrough, by intensifying subconflictual areas within the field, and to dissipate it. Again: resistance, subversion, opposition, etc., stabilize quite as much as they destabilize. The deepening specificity of gender criticism, for instance, might represent the regulation of gender conflict as much as its disruptive potential: its increasing density becomes the paradoxical mark of its dissipating force. It is just as likely, however, that attempts to apply chaos physics within analyses of discursive warfare will constitute nothing more than another set of tropes, another pipe dream of a scientific humanities, another mathematical sublime: the same contradictory desire for the rational conquest of phenomena that seem to escape reason and the autodestruction of reason in the process that one finds in Clausewitz.

     

    Even if fog cannot be reduced to a science without being caught up in the mechanics of critical sublimity, one might still pursue its tactical uses. There is no question that the military is committed to deploying the fog of war. The importance of disinformation, propaganda, jamming, covert operations, “PsyOps,” and so on increases as warfare becomes more dependent on technical and tactical knowledge. As the power of reconnaissance and surveillance grows, so does the tactical importance of stealth technology. Virilio remarks that, in the hunt, the speed of perception annuls the distance between the hunter and the quarry. Survival depends on distance: “once you can see the target, you can destroy it” (WC 19, 4). Thus, from now on, “power is in disappearance: under the sea with nuclear submarines, in the air with U2s, spyplanes, or still higher with satellites and the space shuttle” (PW 146). “If what is perceived is already lost, it becomes necessary to invest in concealment what used to be invested in simple exploitation of one’s available forces — hence the spontaneous generation of new Stealth weapons. . . . The inversion of the deterrence principle is quite clear: unlike weapons which have to be publicized if they are to have a real deterrence effect, Stealth equipment can only function if its existence is clouded with uncertainty” (WC 4). For Virilio, stealth is not a matter of radar-immune bombers alone: it involves a vast “aesthetics of disappearance” that reaches an order of perfection in state terrorism:

     

    Until the Second World War — until the concentration camps — societies were societies of incarceration, of imprisonment in the Foucauldian sense. The great transparency of the world, whether through satellites or simply tourists, brought about an overexposure of these places to observation, to the press and public opinion which now ban concentration camps. You can’t isolate anything in this world of ubiquity and instantaneousness. Even if some camps still exist, this overexposure of the world led to the need to surpass enclosure and imprisonment. This required another kind of repression, which is disappearance. . . . Bodies must disappear. People don’t exist. There is a big fortune in this technology because it’s so similar to what happened in the history of war. In war, we’ve seen how important disappearance, camouflage, dissimulation are — every war is a war of cunning.34

     

    The methods of strategic disappearance developed by terrorist states are the most insidious form of secrecy. That is why Virilio, the anti-technologist, believes that the technology of secrecy must be exposed. Every order of stealth weaponry is purely and simply a threat. The aesthetics of disappearance must be reappeared. For Virilio, as well as for the reconnaissance cameras whose history he records, success depends on the logistics of perception, on closing the distance between the critic and his quarry. But what if critics are not only hunters; what if they are the quarry as well?

     

    Michel de Certeau points out that, for Clausewitz, the distinction between strategy and tactics is determined not only by scales of conflict (war vs. battle) but by relative magnitudes of power. Strategy is for the strong, and it is deployed in known, visible, mapped spaces; tactics is “an art of the weak,” of those who must operate inside territory controlled by a greater power; it takes place on the ground of the “other,” inside alien space.35 It must therefore deploy deception in the face of a power “bound by its very visibility.” De Certeau suggests that even in cases where the weak force has already been sighted, it might use deception to great advantage. This is another lesson from Clausewitz: “trickery is possible for the weak, and often it is his only possibility, as a ‘last resort’: The weaker the forces at the disposition of the strategist, the more the strategist will be able to use deception.” In the “practice of daily life,” in spaces of signification, in the contests of critical argument, such a tactics of the weak would also apply:

     

    Lacking its own place, lacking a view of the whole, limited by the blindness (which may lead to perspicacity) resulting from combat at close quarters, limited by the possibilities of the moment, a tactic is determined by the absence of power just as a strategy is organized by the postulation of power. From this point of view, the dialectic of a tactic may be illuminated by the ancient art of sophistic. As the author of a great “strategic” system, Aristotle was also very interested in the procedures of this enemy which perverted, as he saw it, the order of truth. He quotes a formula of this protean, quick, and surprising adversary that, by making explicit the basis of sophistic, can also serve finally to define a tactic as I understand it here: it is a matter, Corax said, of “making the worse argument seem the better.” In its paradoxical concision, this formula delineates the relationship of forces that is the starting point for an intellectual creativity that is subtle, tireless, ready for every opportunity, scattered over the terrain of the dominant order and foreign to the rules laid down and imposed by a rationality founded on established rights and property. (38)

     

    And yet it is rare that any of this ever occurs to critics, who seem to believe that “subversion” consists of vicarious identification with subversives, and of telling everything one knows to one’s enemies.

     

    It is nonetheless already the case that, in critical discourse, behind all the humanistic myths of communication, understanding, and interpretive fidelity, one finds the tactical value of misinterpretations. In an argument it is often crucial for combatants not to know their enemy, to project instead a paper figure, a distortion, against which they can conceive and reinforce their own positions. Intelligence, here, is not only knowledge of one’s enemies but the tactical lies one tells about them, even to oneself. This is so regular a phenomenon of discursive conflict that it cannot be dismissed as an aberration that might be remedied through better communication, better listening skills, more disinterested criticism. One identifies one’s own signal in part by jamming everyone else’s, setting it off from the noise one generates around it. There is, in other words, already plenty of fog in discursive warfare, and yet we tend to remain passive in the face of it, and for the most part completely and uncritically committed to exposing ourselves to attack. Imagine what might be possible for a writing that is not insistently positional, not devoted to shoring itself up, to fixing itself in place, to laying out all its plans under the eyes of its opponents. Nothing, after all, has been more fatal for the avant-gardes than the form of the manifesto. If only surrealism had been more willing to lie, to dissimulate, to abandon the petty narcissism of the position and the desire to explain itself to anyone who would listen, and instead explored the potential offered it by the model of the secret society it also hoped to be. Intellectual warfare must therefore investigate the tactical advantages of deception and clandestinity over the habitual, quasi-ethical demands of clarity and forthrightness, let alone the narcissistic demands of self-promotion and mental exhibitionism, from however fortified a position. If to be seen by the enemy is to be destroyed, then intellectual warfare must pursue its own stealth technology. Self-styled intellectual warriors will explore computer networks not only as more rapid means of communication and publishing but as means for circumventing publication, as semi-clandestine lines of circulation, encoded correspondence, and semiotic speed. There will be no entirely secure secrecy, just as there are no impregnable positions — that too is Virilio’s argument — but a shrouded nomadism is already spreading in and around major discursive conflicts. There are many more than nine grounds, but the rest are secret.

     

    IX. Cemetery:

     

    When the notion that knowledge is not only power but a mode of warfare has gained sufficient currency, criticism will take it upon itself to develop the strategic implications of thought, and to combat the coordination of the “knowledge industries” with the military-industrial complex. Here, however, on this final ground, already razed by the self-consuming turbulence of battle, the project of war study is neither to serve the state nor to oppose it, but rather to trivialize the very idea of war, as we trivialize everything we take up as sublime.

     

    Even as it imposes itself with unprecedented force, intellectual warfare is already dead. It is death carried out by other means. Do not mistake this claim. It has nothing to do with saying that war talk will stop; on the contrary, we will be subjected to it as never before precisely because it is dead. Let me repeat this essay’s fundamental law: The object of criticism is always a phenomenalization of some systemic device of discourse, and it always appears in a surrogate form at the very moment it is no longer functional. The task in respect to the knowledge and critique of war is thus not developmental but simulacral, a term whose own recent fate attests to its truth. Everything that Baudrillard’s theory of simulation was about happened to the theory itself: the sublime disappearance of its own referent through its obscene overexposure, its precipitous reduction to a mere bit of intellectual currency that quickly expended all its value and force. But what if that is the task of intellectual warfare as well: not to advance and defend the new truths of war but to ruin them in the very act of construing them, to level whatever criticism has assigned to itself of war’s sublimity, to recast it in the proxy forms of mental war toys and pitch them about in mock combats, in ritual battles for possession of the dead, waged in the name of the dead and on dead ground, and most of all to cast their shades across the future.

     

    We — and who really is speaking here? is it the dead themselves? — we come to fight discourse’s war against itself. We are soldiers of an intellectual “suicide state” that practices the politics of its own disappearance (PW 90). War for us is no longer an idea, a historical object, or even a sublime image: all these are only symptoms of an autoaggressive drive, a rage for self-destruction, a turbulent movement that distributes and evacuates every image and idea. We are like Kleist’s Kolhaas or Penthesilea, in a question posed by Deleuze and Guattari: “Is it the destiny of the war machine, when the State triumphs, to be caught in this alternative: either to be nothing more than the disciplined, military organ of the State apparatus, or to turn against itself, to become a double suicide machine?”36 It is certainly one task of A Thousand Plateaus to avoid reducing its field to such alternatives, such ethico-political choices — to project and affirm different possibilities. But here, at this moment and on this ground, imagine Kolhaas on the scaffold, reading the future of the state in a text that he always carried close to his heart but never before considered, and swallowing it without uttering its truth at the very instant he expires.

     

    Notes

     

    1. See, for instance, Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War (New York: Doubleday, 1992); Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott, eds., Gendering Wartalk (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993); Cynthia Enloe, The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War (Berkeley: U of California P, 1993); Garry Wills, “Critical Inquiry in Clausewitz,” in W.J.T. Mitchell, ed., The Politics of Interpretation, special issue of Critical Inquiry (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982, 1983) 159-80; Mette Hjort, The Strategy of Letters (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993).

     

    2. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford UP, 1985); cited in John Muse, “War on War,” War After War, ed. Nancy J. Peters (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1992) 55.

     

    3. Randy Allen Harris, The Linguistics Wars (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993); Gerald Graff, Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (New York: Norton, 1992); Avital Ronell, Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1992).

     

    4. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter S. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1954) 46. See also Avital Ronell, “Support Our Tropes,” in War After War 47-51. On war as a metaphor for argument, see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: U of Chicago P,1980).

     

    5. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1976); Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext(e), 1986); Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer, Pure War, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983); Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1989).

     

    6. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, The Consciousness Industry: On Literature, Politics and the Media, ed. Michael Roloff (New York: Seabury Press, 1974).

     

    7. One example of ressentiment calling itself war: Sande Cohen, Academia and the Luster of Capital (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993).

     

    8. The figure of the nine grounds is taken from Sun Tzu, The Art of War, trans. Thomas Cleary (Boston: Shambhala, 1991) 88-105. This is not a scholarly edition, but precisely the sort of volume one might pick up in an airport, one of a series of “spiritual” handbooks including Buddhist and Taoist texts and works by Thomas Merton, Marcus Aurelius, and Rilke. Sun Tzu’s own grounds are, of course, quite different; it would be interesting to develop the grounds he stipulates as grounds for intellectual war as well.

     

    9. The question of degree is crucial. If certain orders of humanistic discourse tend to suppress the strategic aspects of cultural exchange, the new war discourse will exaggerate them.

     

    10. Alvin and Heidi Toffler, War and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century (Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1993). On the figure of “cyberwar,” see James Der Derian, Antidiplomacy: Spies, Terror, Speed, and War (Cambridge, MA.: Blackwell, 1992).

     

    11. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy: Vol. I (Consumption); Vols. II (The History of Eroticism) and III (Sovereignty), trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1988, 1991); “The Notion of Expenditure,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Stoekl et al. (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985) 116-29.

     

    12. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1969) 11.

     

    13. Daniel Pick, The War Machine: The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale UP, 1993) 7-8.

     

    14. Peter Paret, Understanding War: Essays on Clausewitz and the History of Military Power (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992) 85.

     

    15. Jacqueline Rose, Why War? — Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Return to Melanie Klein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993) 18. Rose’s chief text from Freud is “Why War?” (1932) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psycholgical Works, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1955) 22: 195-215.

     

    16. In Zizek’s vigorous defense, Hegel has already accounted for this crisis, and attempts to reduce the dialectic merely to its most formal and totalizing elements misconceive, among other things, the perpetual surplus of negation. See Slavoj Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York: Routledge, 1992); For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment As a Political Factor (London: Verso, 1991); and Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology Durham: Duke UP, 1993).

     

    17. See also John Keegan’s account of fortification in The History of Warfare (New York: Knopf, 1993) 139-52.

     

    18. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Volume II, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987), 389-90.

     

    19. One must, of course, refer here to Foucault’s vast elaboration of this term in The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper and Row, 1976); Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977); Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977); Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980); and other works.

     

    20. See A Thousand Plateaus, especially Plateau 12: “1227: Treatise on Nomadology — The War Machine,” 351-423. For Deleuze’s most relevant preliminary explorations of nomad thought, see Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia UP, 1983), and The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia UP, 1990).

     

    21. There are several instance of the former in a recent issue of Yale French Studies; nomadology there is rarely more than an interpretive prosthesis for sedentary academics. See Françoise Lionnet and Ronnie Scharfman, eds., Post/Colonial Conditions: Exiles, Migrations, and Nomadisms, spec. issue of Yale French Studies 82:1 (1993).

     

    22. Jean Baudrillard and Sylve`re Lotringer, Forget Foucault, trans. Philip Beitchman, Lee Hildreth, and Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext(e), 1987) 127-28.

     

    23. I have already suggested that the very procedures of this essay constitute, at least for me, an exploration, quite preliminary and by no means successful, of the mode of nomadic thought itself. A ground is not a sort of geo-narcissistic foundation, a stand that is more plausible the more solid and immovable one can make it, but a strategic field across whose surface one moves and deploys one’s forces for the duration of a particular tactical encounter, in a manner that uses and may even defend the ground but does not finally attach itself to it. At all points, one must take into account the multiplicity of grounds and the fact that the field or ground itself changes given the forces in conflict upon it. This would seem to resemble Wills’s version of Clausewitzian Kritik, put into motion; insofar as that is the case, one cannot be too attached to the idea of nomadism either: as I argue at various points (grounds 2 and 7), the chaos of conflict itself militates against the full clarification of any tactic, and one must avoid the facile opposition of theory and Kritik (i.e., practice). And one must also avoid becoming too attached to Deleuze and Guattari, or to “Nomadology,” or to any body of thought, lest one turn one’s own work into sedentary commentary on a position.

     

    24. For the Deleuze-Guattari treatment of nomadic numbering, see A Thousand Plateaus 387-94.

     

    25. Deleuze, with Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia UP, 1987) 93.

     

    26. On the figure of the rhizome, see the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus 3-25.

     

    27. Manuel De Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (New York: Zone Books, 1991) 11 ff.

     

    28. It is by no means in order to defend Baudrillard’s position that one notes how, in this context, critics who dismiss the notion of simulation in the name of some political or historical reality are themselves caught up in the very same “precession of simulacra.” Baudrillard: “the successive phases of the image: it is the reflection of a basic reality; it masks and perverts a basic reality; it marks the absence of a basic reality; it bears no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.” Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983) 11. For Baudrillard’s notion of strategy, see Fatal Strategies, ed. Jim Fleming, trans. Philip Beitchman and W.D.J. Niesluchowski (New York: Semiotext(e), 1990).

     

    29. See, for instance, Magnus I. Midlarsky, ed., Handbook of War Studies (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1989).

     

    30. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986) 112-13.

     

    31. We might also call war the sublime of the state. As Pick remarks, in Clausewitz, “friction occurs within war, rather than in the nature of the relation of war to politics,” but “a more radical interrogation of war is also implied; we glimpse a war machine which threatens the political state with something madder, more disabling and disruptive than the dominant formulation of On War suggests” (32-33). War is the state’s own limit text, its proper transgression of itself, its essential and constitutive surplus, its seductive symptom of the death drive.

     

    32. See Klein, Richard, ed., Nuclear Criticism, spec. issue of Diacritics 14.2 (Summer 1984).

     

    33. The first passage is from De Landa, 14-15; the second is cited by De Landa (15) and is taken from Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos (New York: Bantam Books, 1984) 141. See also James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Penguin Books, 1987).

     

    34. Pure War 88-89. See also Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, trans. Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991).

     

    35. Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) 37.

     

    36. A Thousand Plateaus 356. Heinrich von Kleist, The Marquise of O– and Other Stories, trans. David Luke and Nigel Reeves (London: Penguin Books, 1978).

     

  • Selected Letters from Readers

     
     
     

    PMC Reader’s Report on PMC 6.2

     
    Like every other issue.
    People act before they think.
    the history of acrylic can be told in terms other than analysis:
    polymerization of substance is not a fictive lacquer but an immanent
    rechaining of actual potential.
    see the movie stalingrad.
    war
    indeed.
     
    These comments are from: Paul Freedman
    The email address for Paul Freedman is: pfreedma@osf1.gmu.edu
     
    First of five letters on this topic.

     

     

    PMC Reader’s Report on Nice Job

    This page has been VERY helpful in my 11th grade English research paper, and i just wanted to thank the builder of this site. It’s is hard to find text referances these days. You did a great job and i probably used this source more than any of my others…
     
    These comments are from: Jon Trejo
    The email address for Jon Trejo is: nebula@prairienet.org
     
    Second of five letters on this topic

     

     

    PMC Reader’s Report on critique

     
    Perhaps this imminent frenzy of critical post-production will calm the peripheral aesthetics, where subject remains pure. To the extent that modern creation depends on the eclipse of the real by images, cultural critics would seem especially qualified to analyze it. Elaine Scarry: “it is when art has become to its makers a fiction that critique begins.” If this is the case, if self-esteem arises from an investment in certain fictions, then critics of fiction ought to be able to rule over each of our bodies — and establish the moral and political gravity of their own. What is at issue here are analyses of self and analogies of it. We will burrow into the histories of critique because we will see, or at least want to see, criticism itself as a form of creation. We will project an image of ourselves onto a field of study and recognize our reflection in it. Critics of creation already manipulate the Self of their discourse in order both to attack their violent egoism and to conceive the struggle itself along imaginary lines. Vast energies will be expended not only on the histories and rhetoric of the creation of the Self, but on the mechanism of rhetoric and critical inquiry, on the “violence” of the intellect, on the “mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms” that, for Nietzsche, make up what is called truth.
     
    These comments are from: Scott Morris
    The email address for Scott Morris is: sm92+@andrew.cmu.edu
     
    Third of five letters on this topic.

     

     

    PMC Reader’s Report on Postmodern Culture

     
    Dear Mr. Unsworth:
     
    Just cruising this morning in my favorite area of interest which could be broadly defined as cultural/critical theory and came upon your paper about your efforts at PMC. What I would like to tell you is that although I am a long time home pc dabbler your journal was the primary reason I finally gained access to the internet. I came across some files from it that had been uploaded to a bulletin board (Temple of the Screaming Electron) in california. They fell like manna into a relatively parched, but beautiful, rural environment in which I live. When I finally realized that your magnificent journal was only accessible online I signed up with my local service provider.
     
    I’m a union teamster living in rural Vermont so I don’t have a lot of access to the sort of stuff you have in your journal and you provide access to from your website. Our local library is swell, computerized too, but a computer search under postmodernism or poststructuralism or Derrida or Baudrillard or Jameson produces zero hits.
     
    Thank you.
    Finley
     
    Fourth of five letters on this topic.

     

     

    PMC Reader’s Report on Just trying to create communication:

     
    I just wanted you to know that I really appreciate what you are doing.
     
    It would an honor if you keep in touch, or send your messages, and what’s new.
     
    By the way, this is my first time on the Net, so do you know how postmodern issues are touching Music? I mean, for me, I am trying to apply my ways and senses over the music that I am composing, and I have to say, the results are fascinating, even to me.
     
    These comments are from: Issa Boulos
    The email address for Issa Boulos is: imad-ibrahim-boulos@worldnet.att.net
     
    Fifth of five letters on this topic.

     

     

    PMC Reader’s Report on Schwartz’s Review of Sex Revolts, PMC 6.2:

     
    In PMC 6.2, Jeff Schwartz raises a particular problematic that is continually grappled with at conferences on popular music and in examining books featuring popular music studies — the serious examination of the music itself. Schwartz’s concerns about mu sicology being “hostile” (with the exception of “radical” musicologists Brett, McClary, and Walser) and cultural studies being “incapable of rigorous engagement,” completely overlooks the role that ethnomusicology may play in the explication of not only t he social/cultural context of popular music, but also the “formal, technical, or semiotic analysis of the medium and texts in question” (Schwartz). I think young ethnomusicologists (like myself) and musicologists are bringing the study of popular music i nto the academy without fear of invalidation. I know it will be necessary to teach music-lovers how to articulate “real” musical information in more musicological and ethnomusicological ways then that currently practiced in general. The American public is being musically educated almost entirely by music critics (i.e., VH1’s Four on the Floor).
     
    My own research in ethnomusicology specializes in popular/vernacular music and gender. I examine issues of gender and popular music from the standp oint of music-making experiences practiced in the everyday and in institutional contexts (i.e., handclapping games, double-Dutch, and the music-making process involved with sampling). Musical analysis or semiotic analysis of music need not be represented as conventional music notation, but there are quite a few advantages to being able to enlighten the “resistant” musicologists by showing them the legitimate structural features of, for example, the musical grooves of Public Enemy through conventional not ation. Or to highlight the complex musical forms located within various genres of popular music, everyday music-making, and to attempt to represent the subjective listening experience so highly prized among popular music affecionados. Schwartz ultimatel y raises a critical issue, which musicology, ethnomusicology, culture studies, and sociology need to seriously engage through actual musical and semiotic analysis of the codes that shape musical sound, the meanings that inflect musical appreciation and di scourse, and the elements of sound the function both within and without modern conventions of music theory and aural cognition of popular music. Popular music studies must move past the constant re-interpretation of fan-dom and star-dom with its stereoty pical gender codes. It’s time to struggle with how pitch, timbre, tone, rhythm, dance, and the more significant compositional process of live and recorded music-making shape and problematize social codes and individual expression of gender, race, ethnici ty, class, kinaesthetics, sexuality, and sexual preference (to name only a few of the dimensions that represent identity in popular music). For example, the music and the roles that women artists play in the creative process as musicians, producers, perf ormers, etc., such as Me-shell Ndege Ocello (bi-sexual neo-funk composer and bass player), Alanis Morisette (eclectic vocalist and composer), Tori Amos (classical pianist and alternative rock composer exploring sexuality and religion), K.D. Lang (lesbian “performance artist” of song), BOSS (gangster rap duo), or the incredible rap finale by Ursula Rucker on The Roots debut CD (1994) are telling us a great deal about problematizing conventions of musical sound, grain of voice, and style that extends beyond popular music and engages the sounds of classical and “world” musics. Ultimately, it’s the music that is turning us on. Making us think about other music and style. Changing our ways of seeing, hearing, and talking about the world, its subcultures, and its people through music. Continuing to privilege the social context of popular music can only serve to perpetuate the hegemonic and dialectical appreciation of Western “high” art music as an autonomous musical phenomenon. I appreciate Schwartz’s review of Sex Revoltsfor publicly acknowledging this critical need in the study of popular music.
     
    These comments are from: Kyra D. Gaunt
    The email address for Kyra D. Gaunt is: kgaunt@umich.edu
     
    First of three letters on this topic.

     

     

    PMC Reader’s Report on “The Sex Revolts” review

     
    Bravo! Excellent critique not only of this work but of the genre of “pseudo-musicological” journalistic views of popular music. As a composer and writer on all kinds of music (like Riot Grrrl, etc.), I know well that the writing in this area has been la rgely compiled by journalists, music critics, etc. Even the musicologists you name, however (Brett, McClary and Walser), tend to rely less on their critical faculties when approaching this music (see esp. the use of metaphor in, say, McClary’s “Feminine Endings”). If I may request a response, I’d like to know what you thought of Queer Noises, the new British book on pop music’s undercurrent of homosociality. I, personally, found it less than successful (I don’t even remember the author’s n ame, at this point! Oh, wait, I think it’s John Gill.) Anyway, just curious. Thanks again for the interesting review.
     
    These comments are from: Renee Coulombe
    The email address for Renee Coulombe is: rcoulomb@ucsd.edu
     
    Second of three letters on this topic.

     

     

    PMC Reader’s Report on Schwartz: Review of Press/Reynolds’ Sex Revolts

     
    While I’d concur with most of Schwartz’s assessments ofSex Revolts, I wish he’d been able to spend more time on the problems of analyzing specifically musical aspects of pop. While musicological analysis, if wielded carefully, can yield imp ortant insights into the musical workings of pop, its applicability is limited by the terms of its own historical development, as McClary, Walser,et al, point out (even if sometimes they ignore their own advice). The basic problem is that most po st-war popular music, certainly in America and in England, and to varying degrees elsewhere, valorizes texture and rhythm far more than melodic or harmonic information. No big revelation this — but since those last qualities are the qualities around whi ch Western musicological analysis has grown, that analysis is relatively ill-equipped to address what makes pop work: the complex affective semiotics of its rhythmic and textural spatiality, the way the sound hits you.
     

    To resort to impressionistic, vague language here often seems the only alternative to the failure of more rigid, analytical language to come even close to conveying the impact and effects of the music under analysis: it’s like nailing the wind to the wate r. (I succumb to my own diagnosis, it seems . . .)

     

    Sound often begins to seem irreducible, non-repeatable, impossible to reproduce. Rap producers, for instance, often justify sampling as the only way to capture a complete sonic precis of particular old records: only those instruments, those musicians, in that room with those mics, recorded on that board by a particular recording team — and only on that take — bear exactly the sonic signature desired.

     

    If even sound seems incapable of speaking itself, what chance has language — except in its attempt to fray, fuzz, distort its own bounds, in imitation of music itself? Which makes me wonder: why does Schwartz think a more rigorous and scholarly engageme nt with cultural studies thinkers would lead to a less impressionistic account of the workings of the music itself — as his last criticism strongly implies, following immediately upon his critique of Reynolds and Press’s musicological shortcomings? The writers he mentions resort to rather imagistic language in their work on music — while conventional musicology fails notoriously to describe the musicality (as its performers must engage it) even of its native, proper music, the Western art music traditi on.

     

    These comments are from: Jeffrey Norman
    The email address for Jeffrey Norman is: jenor@csd.uwm.edu

     

    Third of three letters on this topic.

     

     

    PMC Reader’s Report on [Spinelli’s “Radio Lessons for the Internet,” PMC 6.2]:

    I just finished reading the very interesting article comparing the Internet to the early days of radio. I would have to agree with you that the Internet is currently over-utopianized. However, I do believe that the capability of people to become produce rs rather than consumers is very strong on the Internet. For example, imagine if musicians and underground film makers could put their work onto the Internet! I think it would be extremely cool if people could broadcast their work through the Internet, cheaply and with high-quality. However, this might not happen if the protocols of the Internet increasingly become owned by corporations. For example, the premier streaming audio standard on the net is currently RealAudio; do you realize how expensive i t is to buy a RealAudio server? To service only one-hundred people costs something like five or ten thousand dollars; it’s crazy.

     

    But you did raise a very interesting point. Why is the Internet so much more interested in the “process” than the “destination”? And why are most of the discussion groups on the Internet oriented around consumption? Those are two very interesting point s “you” (if I am talking to the writer of this article) brought up.

     

    The thing that always bothers me is: if I could completely recreate society, how would I do so? What am I asking society to do anyway? What is the “good life”?

     

    Is it to make sure no one ever goes hungry? Is it to attempt to achieve the ideal of justice? Personal freedoms?

     

    Is it to better enjoy the material comforts of life, or is it to reach for something higher?

     

    A lot more questions than answers!

     

    Anyway, good article. Hope you have some interesting responses to what I have sent you.

     

    These comments are from: Brad pmc Neuberg
    The email address for Brad pmc Neuberg is: bkn3@columbia.edu

     

     

    First of two letters on this topic.

     

     

    PMC Reader’s Report on “Radio Lessons for the Internet”

     

    The rhetorical tone of early radio and early Internet definitely have striking similarities. However, I would suggest to Mr. Spinelli to also look into the developments in Internet technology to see that the Internet may be headed in the direction of rad io and television.

     

    Without the specific newspaper article next to me, I have read that many cable television providers and even satellite television providers are looking into ways of creating a “cable modem”, a one-way modem that acts as a high speed receiver. While advoc ates of the cable modem point to its significantly higher speed than a traditional phone modem, they also assume that users will spend more time “downloading content” than uploading. As the cable modem provides inexpensive access to most homes (many woul d use an “internet terminal” to browse web sites and launch remote applications), the individual’s ability to transmit information will be just as limited (possibly by only having a phone line out) or eliminated altogther.

     

    Also, the economic limitations of broadcast on the internet are as real as those in radio: an inexpensive FM transmitter and antennae might cost in the $15,000 to $20,000 range for a used transmitter with a 1500 watt capacity. A web server with a fast en ought connection to the internet to allow large numbers of users is similarly priced. However, as an internet user, I can at least transmit responses to other individuals broadcasts and even make information accessible to lay people.

     

    These comments are from: Jack McHale
    The email address for Jack McHale is: jmchale4@ix.netcom.com

     

    Second of two letters on this topic.

     

     

    PMC Reader’s Report on [Barker’s “Nietzsche/Derrida, Blanchot/Beckett: Fragmentary Progressions of the Unnamable,” PMC 6.1]

     

    Although perhaps your various digressions on the theme of fragments might at some time and at some place disclose an aperture onto the very view which every fragment, by force or by cunning, forces onto the reader, at least in Nietzsche, it remains an ope n question as to the difference between a fragment and an aphorism. Think, for example, of Novalis, from whom Nietzsche undoubtably received the art of anti-hegelian writing you are so fond of . . . Now, the serious question only begins after you have s aid what you desired to say, namely, can we articulate the difference, and hence the movement, from the fragment to the aphorism. My claim is simple: until you acheive the style of thinking — or writing — where the aphorism sheers away from the mere fr agment, you invariably miss the point of what Blanchot will name the writing of the disaster and Derrida will urge us to call the margin.

     

    These comments are from: Chad Finsterwald
    The email address for Chad Finsterwald is: pfinster@acs.bu.edu

     

     

    PMC Reader’s Report on Paul Mann’s “The Nine Grounds of Intellectual Warfare“

     

    Clausewitz took the extremely difficult subject of warfare and explained it in simple, understandable terms. You have taken a relatively simple concept (“I critique, therefore I’m not!”) and spun so much hyperbole into it that it requires a dictionary an d a case of beer to get through it. I found many pearls of wisdom, but the oyster shells are up around my waist. I wonder if you didn’t fall into the pit you dug for others.

     

    These comments are from: Mike Johnson
    The email address for Mike Johnson is: b205s1.ssc.af.mil

     

     

    PMC Reader’s Report on Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland

     

    When I stumbled on a remaindered hardbound of Vineland (while working in my local Barnes & Noble non-superstore, since closed) I was amazed that anyone could capture the stresses of trying to keep the experiences of living in the ’60s (in my case, in Central Square, Cambridge MA) as a New Left activist both alive and moving through what has been made of them by their direst opponents (The New Right whose NeoAscendancy now controls Congress). Surely nobody who lived those years and is still l iving them as a forwardable experience has any illusion as to what actually happened, least of all Pynchon. Laborious academicization of the book is a form of engagement, but dissipates its gravity, by breaking it down into a series of discretionary note s. For a non-academic poet & journalist, this acts as an unnecessarily self-checking reduction of what a survivor like myself uses as an encoded, portable experience. I’m not disabled by the ’60s: I’m infuriated by the inability of non-participants to appreciate its continuing effects on the survivors as beneficial. This is no illustrated cartoon history we lived. I might also mention that Vineland is (as was not even noted) in California. We who lived the ’60s in Cambridge, MA had a dr amatically different experience only some of which has been preserved as fiction (by Marge Piercy in Dance the Eagle to Sleep) since we did not intend it to be fictionable while we lived it. Finally, when I sent one of my copies of Vin eland to John Brennan, a Boston College (Class of ’63) classmate who later got his PhD at U.C.-Davis, I inscribed it: “An American Mahabharata.” I suggest you see it as that: a minatory epic of reversals as terrifyingly instructive to warring impe rial clans who knew they were — the 60s was the Civil War of my generation. That the New Right appears to have won is evident; that they will control its history is not, citing this essay as an attempt to refute it. Thanks for the intent. I’m sure Pyn chon appreciates it. I do. Now write it again as a popular article that the general public can digest. The ideological action continues in the Public World, not the rarified section of the illustrated/annotated edition. Pynchon didn’t write Alic e in Wonderland, he wrote Vineland (CA).

     

    These comments are from: Bill Costley
    The email address for Bill Costley is: sunset@gis.net
     

  • Schama and the New Histories of Landscape

    Mark Shadle

    Eastern Oregon State College
    mshadle@eosc.osshe.edu

     

     

    Simon Schama. Landscape and Memory. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1995.

     

    Mythology is the ghost of concrete meaning.

     

    — Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction

     

    Lithuanian Bison protected so they could be annihilated for “sport” by Goring as an incarnation of Tacitus’s transformed “wild man” of Germania, royalist Robin Hoods masquerading as mythological Green Men, the maniacal, neo-Roman hydraulics of Renaissance fountain builders, and whole drawing-rooms of mad Englishmen climbing Mt. Blanc with a pack train of gourmet food — these are just a few of the fascinating eccentricities of Simon Schama’s latest book, Landscape and Memory. But beyond its appetizing details, this book is an intriguing example of the increasingly problematic process of writing history in postmodern times.

     

    Schama’s project is a controversial one. Besides examining the complex interpenetrations of nature and culture, he considers the difficulty of placing an environmental ethic within a postmodern “autobiography of history.” He also considers the tension between the individual and the communal, and between myth and history in light of “New Historicist” perspectives. Schama begins by following his lodestone of Henry Thoreau’s notion (and Magritte’s before him) that both “the wild man” and “wilderness” are more a matter of what we carry “inside” us than an exterior reality. He argues that the cultural appropriation of landscape may not be an entirely bad thing. In fact, he argues that this should be “a cause not for guilt and sorrow but celebration” (9). After praising their ability to make “inanimate topography into historical agents,” and “restoring to the land and climate the kind of creative unpredictability conventionally reserved for human actors” (13), Schama dismisses environmental historians like Stephen Pyne, William Cronon, and Donald Worster for their similarly “dismal tale: of land taken, exploited, exhausted; of traditional cultures said to have lived in a relation of sacred reverence with the soil displaced by the reckless individualist, the capitalist aggressor” (13). Schama also steers clear of environmental critics like Max Oelschlaeger, whose call for new myths Schama paraphrases as the need to “repair the damage done by our recklessly mechanical abuse of nature and to restore the balance between man and the rest of the organisms with which he shares the planet” (13). Instead, Schama describes his own book as: “a way of looking; of rediscovering what we already have, but which somehow eludes our recognition and our appreciation” (14).

     

    This new book will be accompanied by five filmed BBC television programs that will air in America. Unlike Professor Schama’s previous works — including Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands 1780-1813, Two Rothschilds and the Land of Israel, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, and Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations)— this one seeks an audience beyond historians. Ironically, though, it is this book for non-specialists which calls the nature of history most radically into question.

     

    Instead of being yet another explanation of what has been lost, Schama wants his book to be an exploration of “what we may yet find” (14). Certainly he is right that old myths — and the behaviors they generate and are generated by — are still with us. But while Schama’s “range” (historically and geographically) is vast, his internal summaries and conclusions about what we “may yet find” are curiously slight and vague. Notice, for example, his way of letting Krhushchev’s response to his uneasy inheritance of the European forest drift into mystery when he says: “But although for a century or more, the rulers of Russian empires, from Tsar Nicholas I to General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, liked to show off their royal hunt, there was, at the same time, something about the heart of the forest that remained irreducibly alien; impenetrable, resistant” (53). Khrushchev, here, is a stand-in for all the heads of state who regularly exploit a “mythological bath” in nature on their way to becoming “super-natural.”

     

    Schama makes it clear that this paradoxical relationship between nature and culture is a venerable one when he describes “Rome’s mixed feelings about the forest” (83). He explains it this way: “On the one hand, it [the forest] was a place which, by definition, was ‘outside’ (foris) the writ of their law and the governance of their state. On the other hand, their own founding myths were sylvan” (83). Even though the world since John Locke has extended Divine Law into a natural law that extends culture into nature, it should no longer be ironic that a “macho” politician like Khrushchev, who liked to indulge his “feral nature” in the forest, would try to subdue it with his “Virgin Lands” Project. Similarly, Donna Haraway has shown how the gun-totin’ Teddy Roosevelt both fed upon and horribly distorted nature with chauvinism and racism through the gorillas exhibited in the Natural History Museum in New York City.”1

     

    Schama’s book presents us time and again with this basic problematic, reminding us that landscape myths and memories have both “surprising endurance” and a “power to shape institutions that we still live with” (15), and that landscapes themselves “are culture before they are nature; constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock” (61). Far from hoping to unravel actual nature from its mythological or ideological representations, Schama aims to show just how mutually entangled these categories really are. It should be acknowldeged, he says, “that once a certain idea of landscape, a myth, a vision, establishes itself in an actual place, it has a peculiar way of muddling categories, of making metaphors more real than their referents; of becoming, in fact, part of the scenery” (61).

     

    Schama does not seem fully to appreciate the tragedy of this “muddling,” now being learned everywhere, which is that playing out our own mortality against the immortal “image” of the forest can quickly kill nature while some subconscious human feeling of immortality for our species goes on. A redwood is not merely the hot air of metaphor, but the slow growth of actual wood and a giant ecosystem through the cool air of several millennia. No nursery of metaphor can regrow it without the soothing coastal fog of time. While Schama does not “deny the seriousness of our ecological predicament, nor . . . dismiss the urgency with which it needs repair and redress” (14), he never cites the best accounts of how nature was wrestled into submission in America (e.g. Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America, or Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence), nor does he discuss the most thoughtful and esoteric attempts to recycle and transform old histories and myths in order to find again or anew what Charles Olson calls, in Poetry and Truth, an “actual world of value.”2 This destination/process is the central work of Olson’s three-volume set of poems to reclaim Gloucester, Massachusetts, The Maximus Poems.3

     

    Schama could appreciate Olson’s careful approach to myth and history as it came out of his readings in pre-Socratic Greek culture. In The Special View of History, Olson follows out and shapes Heraclitus’s notions that “man is estranged from that which is most familiar” and that “what does not change is the will to change” (Olson). This is brilliantly elaborated by Sherman Paul:

     

    One lesson [of Olson’s wanderings in Mexico] was that there were people who were not estranged from the familiar, who lived in the physical world and knew how to attend it closely, to make it a “human universe.” Another was the realization that since time does not alter the fact that they were like us, there is no “history.” In the enthusiasm of his discovery of the Mayan world, the only “history” Olson acknowledged was the “second time . . .” This does not mean that he transcends history. Instead it tells us what his preparatory poem declares: that civilizations decline when there is no will to change.4

     

    While postmodern writers like Olson would agree with Schama that “place is a made thing,” and that language is slippery, they have worked hard to imagine an intertwined world of creatures and language “placed” not in the noun of history but in the histori/city of the only absolute we can still believe in: “Man is, He acts.”5 While the entanglements of myth and history can contribute stability to society, they can also close it off to certain individuals, groups , cultures.

     

    To clarify this, we need to consider the recent history of history. “Postmodern history” (as opposed to histories of the contemporary or postmodern period) has inherited the tension between incremental, authorial scholarship (“our civilization”) on the one hand, and autobiography (at once “my-story/stery” and the “his/her-story” implicit in Charles Olson’s translation of Herodotus’ “istorin’” as “to find out for yourself”) on the other. The New Historicism is the most prominent example of the kind of fractured historical practice this tension has produced. In the course of displacing both traditional historiography and the intellectual history of ideas, the New Historicism has opened the practice of history to the institutional and discursive violence inherent within the discipline itself, to the ways in which historical interpretation has functioned to shut out certain stories, to shut down possibilities of negotiation and exchange. While Stanley Fish has seen the value and efficacy of New Historicists’ work as essentially limited to the classroom (where, for example, it has helped to produce a new, multicultural canon),6 Hayden White locates in their practice a more thoroughgoing (pronounce it Thoreau-going) and Olsonian transformation of the subjects and objects of historical knowledge:

     

    What they [the New Historicists] have discovered . . . is that there is no such thing as a specifically historical approach to the study of history, but a variety of such approaches, at least as many as there are positions on the current ideological spectrum; that . . . to embrace a historical approach to the study of anything entails or implies a distinctive philosophy of history; and that . . . finally one’s philosophy of history is a function as much of the way one construes one’s own special object of scholarly interest as it is of one’s knowledge of “history” itself.7

     

    While Schama remains in many ways a traditional historian, this book takes on something of a New Historicist cast. In the “Introduction,” he gives his account a post-structuralist frame and a feel for the kind of situational and environmental ethics that have characterized much New Historical work when he says: “My own view is necessarily . . . historical, and by that token much less confidently universal. Not all cultures embrace nature and landscape myths with equal ardor, and those that do, go through periods of greater or lesser enthusiasm” (15). Using the work of Mary Lefkowitz and Norman Manea, Schama castigates both Mircea Eliade in Europe and Joseph Campbell in America as structuralist myth-lovers and ultimately as hero worshipers impatient with democracy (133).

     

    Yet there is the residue of the structuralist-idealist in Schama when he confesses that “it is clear that inherited landscape myths and memories share two common characteristics: their surprising endurance through the centuries and their power to shape institutions that we still live with. National identity, to take just the most obvious example, would lose much of its ferocious enchantment without the mystique of a particular landscape tradition: its topography mapped, elaborated, and enriched as a homeland” (15). Despite his clear recognition that this “national identity” has been the engine of such political catastrophes as Nazism, Schama seems to place himself at least partly under its peculiar spell.

     

    Schama apparently wants to have it both ways. The tension between his philosophy of history and his practice of history escalates in his accounts of visiting the sites of his Jewish heritage in Poland, or his American in-laws in the redwoods of the American West. In these places Schama “re-places” himself as historian to re-incscribe landscape. Working more in the sub-tradition of American literary history epitomized by Fred Turner in The Spirit of Place, where Turner revisits the sites and communities of some famous American writers, Schama tries here to feel the effects of history.8Having absorbed both the need for “objectivity” from the sciences and the value of situated subjectivity from the humanities, Schama, more than many historians, finds that the garden of personal narrative presents him with a tangle of difficult choices.

     

    Historians can no longer easily decide which rhetorical and stylistic devices to use. Ironically, this is because we have set our “his/her-stories” aside, as something for the province of “expert” historians writing for incredibly diverse audiences, rather than as the responsibility of the more local “tribe.” What Schama’s alternately scholarly and autobiographical approach reminds us of is the call to “compose” the rough draft of any history as something personal. Out of several observations of revisited sites and serendipitously created intersections of texts, the “my-story/stery” becomes the “his/her-story,” inclining not toward the complete abstraction of some “universal” audience, but toward the scattered members of what composition scholars Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford call a new or “invoked” audience who have lived in the places/events (however metaphorically idealized or mythologized) under question.9Out of the seed of personal observation stem a description and analysis that will, in their greatest and final abstractions, paradoxically challenge the limits of an individualistic perspective.

     

    Barry Lopez explains this process in what might have been a perfect epigraph for Schama’s book:

     

    It is through the power of observation, the gifts of the eye and ear, of tongue and nose and finger, that a place first rises up in our mind; afterward, it is memory that carries the place, that allows it to grow in depth and complexity. For as long as our records go back, we have held these two things dear, landscape and memory. . . . Each infuses us with a different kind of life. The one feeds us, figuratively and literally. The other protects us from lies and tyranny. To keep landscapes intact and the memory of them, our history in them, alive, seems as imperative a task in modern time as finding the extent to which individual expression can be accommodated before it threatens to destroy the fabric of society.10

     

    Yet the beauty of this process is accompanied by a danger which Lopez also describes:

     

    The intense pressure of imagery in America, and the manipulation of images necessary to a society with specific goals, means the land will inevitably be treated like a commodity; and voices that tend to contradict the proffered image will, one way or another, be silenced or discredited by those in power.11

     

    The increasing resistance to this “pressure of imagery” has led in American Studies to a critical engagement with myth-symbol, as for example in Frederick Turner’s Beyond Geography, where Turner argues that we Americans have substituted mythology for history.12 Such an argument relies on the notion of a history distinct from mythology. Schama’s rather different engagement with myth-symbol, with its emphasis on the complex interweaving of myth and history in European experience, can assist Americans in better understanding their own situation. In this respect his book can be seen as extending a project that links together such diverse work as Raymond Williams’s study of the politics of ideas in The Long Revolution and Evan Connell’s tracking of a wanderlust of business in A Long Desire.13

     

    Schama’s book demonstrates the need in America to dive back into a European past of “mythological history” and “historicized mythology,” but it also implies a need to study what we have lost of other venerable histories and mythologies around the world. Lopez, continuing his discussion of the danger of image and mythology, helps us appreciate this postmodern urge to “get behind the Greek” when he says:

     

    All local geographies, as they were defined by hundreds of separate, independent native traditions, were denied in the beginning in favor of an imported and unifying vision of America’s natural history. The country, the landscape itself, was eventually defined according to dictates of Progress like Manifest Destiny, and laws like the Homestead Act which reflected a poor understanding of the physical lay of the land.14

     

    Lopez’s concerns are being acted upon in America by a host of reflective, often multicultural, writers — writers who are in many cases important postmodernist historians in their own right, drawing on “folk” cultures that comprised “postmodern” knowledges and strategies long before the Modern Language Association staked out that term and territory. This work, by writers like Ishmael Reed, Gerald Vizenor or Leslie Silko, Schama does not examine in any direct way. But there are many points of potentially fruitful contact between such work and his, since both are centrally concerned with the ways “landscape” is produced and consumed by those who would claim merely to be observing or exploring or preserving it: writers, artists, tourists, museums, governments, corporations, and of course historians.

     

    Ultimately, the great value of Schama’s book would seem to lie in the urgency of the questions it raises rather than the clarity or completeness of the answers it can provide. In his admirably idiosyncratic way, Schama is wrestling with the central problem at the intersection of history and nature, the problem of how to put memory and interpretation positively to work in the natural world. Once we have deconstructed the mythological, morally-informed landscapes of the past, where are we to locate what Olson calls the “actual world of value”?

     

    Notes

     

    1. Donna Haraway, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City 1908-1936,” Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, ed. Nicholas Dirks, Geoff Eley and Sherry Ortner (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994).

     

    2. Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977). Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1800 (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan UP, 1971).

     

    3. Charles Olson, The Maximus Poems (Berkeley: U of California P, 1983).

     

    4. Sherman Paul, Olson’s Push: Origin, Black Mountain and Recent American Poetry (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1978) 29.

     

    5. Charles Olson, The Special View of History (Berkeley: Oyez, 1970) 34.

     

    6. Stanley Fish, “Commentary: The Young and the Restless,” The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Weeser (New York: Routledge, 1989)315.

     

    7. Hayden White, “New Historicism: A Comment,” in Weeser, 302.

     

    8. Fred Turner, The Spirit of Place: The Making of an American Literary Landscape (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1989).

     

    9. Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford, “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy,” College Composition and Communication 35.2 (May, 1984)155-171.

     

    10. Barry Lopez, “Losing Our Sense of Place,” Teacher Magazine (Feb., 1990) 188.

     

    11. Lopez, 42.

     

    12. Frederick Turner III., Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness (New York: Viking Press, 1980).

     

    13. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (New York: Columbia UP, 1961). Evan Connell, A Long Desire (New York: Columbia UP, 1961).

     

    14. Lopez.

     

  • Bisexuals, Cyborgs, and Chaos

    Kelly Cresap

    University of Virginia
    kmc2f@virginia.edu

     

     

    Marjorie Garber. Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.

     

    Is it possible to conceive of bisexuality without resorting to binary logic? The very nomenclature of bisexual seems to declare faith in a certain form of dualism. Where, after all, might one locate bisexuality except between heterosexuality and homosexuality, as a predilection involving both sexes? Harvard literary scholar Marjorie Garber goes to considerable lengths in her new book to reveal the fallacies of such ways of thinking. She ushers bisexuality into a postmodern realm where it may be seen in fruitful interaction with anti-dualistic discourses and practices such as those of cyborg culture and chaos theory.

     

    Garber strategically avoids providing a clear-cut, delimited view of her central topic in Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life. A reader’s search for hard definitions is contraindicated by the book’s sheer proliferation of material, which includes excursions into cultural and literary history, scientific and pseudoscientific inquiry, mythology, etymology, fact, fiction, and anecdote. Through the course of 584 pages, bisexuality amasses a bewildering diversity of connotations.

     

    Indeed, without Garber’s sustaining critical presence, the views of bisexuality registered in the book would threaten to devolve into a kind of pluralistic rampage. We ascertain from “common wisdom” that “everyone is bisexual” and that “there is no such thing as bisexuality” (16). Bisexuality is either the most “natural” or the most “perverse,” “the most conservative or the most radical of ideas about human sexuality” (250). Conceivable in terms of experience, essence, or desire (176), it presents a Janus-faced (365) or Sphinx-like (178-80) emblem of enigma. It is alternately chic and “creepy” (146), ubiquitous and invisible (267); a “whole, fluid identity” (56) and a “phantom proposition” (481); a practice predating antiquity (252) and a contemporary fad (219). Bisexual tendencies can be expressed concurrently or sequentially (30) as well as defensively, ritually, situationally, experimentally, and “technically” (30); they may also involve triangulated desire (423-35) or erotic substitution (435-42). Persons who behave bisexually do not necessarily identify as such, and (appropriately enough) vice versa. We learn from journalistic and cinematic accounts that bisexuals are creatures of “uncontrollable impulses” (93), the “ultimate pariahs of the AIDS crisis” (Newsweek, 1987); that the bisexual male is “the bogeyman of the later 1980s” (New York Times, 1987); and that the bisexual female’s known proclivities include vampirism (The Hunger) and serial murder (Basic Instinct). Such accounts mingle with discussion of long-standing stereotypes which cast bisexuals as fence-sitters (21), double agents (94), and swingers (20); as people who are habitually flighty, promiscuous (28), confused, irresponsible (56), opportunist (351), indecisive (360), going through a phase (345), devoted to group sex (476), attracted to anything that moves (55), guilty of wanting heterosexual privilege (20), and incapable of making commitments (56). Further, the situation of bisexuality is “either allegorically universal or untenably conflicted” (473); and coming out as bi would be easy for a dozen reasons, hard for a dozen reasons (67-8).

     

    Garber intervenes in this topical maelstrom to assert that bisexuality acts as one of the great destabilizing forces of postmodern culture: “Bisexuality means that your sexual identity may not be fixed in the womb, or at age two, or five” (86); it “unsettles ideas about priority, singularity, truthfulness, and identity” (90). “Bisexuality marks the spot where all our questions about eroticism, repression, and social arrangements come to crisis” (368); it presents “the radically discontinuous possibility of a sexual ‘identity’ that confounds the very category of identity” (513).

     

    However, rather than simply declare bisexuality a dissolver of categories and proclaim herself a sexual agnostic, Garber devotes the bulk of Vice Versa to documenting the concrete cultural and social histories that inform contemporary notions of bisexuality. She chronicles varieties of Western bisexual experience in a great many guises and milieux: in bohemian circles from Bloomsbury to the Harlem Renaissance to Georgia O’Keefe’s New Mexico; in the confined space of barracks, prisons, and boarding schools; in the U.S. Congress, the Mormon Church, Hollywood, the world of early psychoanalysis; in the irreducibly plural affections of dozens of historical figures, from Plato and Shakespeare to Bessie Smith and Sandra Bernhard.1 With what the Boston Globe has called “a doctoral candidate’s rigor and a channel-surfer’s restlessness,”2 Garber assesses the multifold bisexualities emerging from a range of cultural artifacts, including memoirs, novels, plays, movies, nonfiction, newspapers, letters, academic journals, talk shows, advice columns, fanzines, “slash” lit, and song lyrics.

     

    This material, taken together, clearly militates against the notion that any individual can claim a “sexual identity” that is either unwavering or fully comprehendible. Readers of all sexual orientations will find that the engaging wit and eloquence of Vice Versa belie its disconcertingly open-ended questions about the stubborn liminalities of human behavior and desire. Casting about for a way of conceptualizing bisexual politics, Garber enlists the metaphorical use of miscegenation and hybridity made (respectively) by Donna Haraway and Homi K. Bhabha (88-9). Concluding her chapter on bisexuality and celebrity, Garber writes, “the cognate relationship between postmodernism and bisexuality merely underscores the fact that all lives are discontinuous” (150).

     

    What are the consequences of such destabilization and discontinuity? What cultural fallout attends Garber’s assessment of bisexuality as a resolutely non-homogeneous, category-unsettling phenomenon?

     

    Her book, like the topic it addresses, arouses intensely ambivalent response.3 Even while gay author and activist Edmund White charges Garber with neglecting the more unnerving implications of her research, he confesses that her book left him profoundly unnerved. In White’s view, Garber focuses on the playfully “transgressive” side of her topic “at the expense of a deeper discussion of the threat that bisexuality poses to the orderly separation of gender roles, and of the corresponding rage that bisexual behavior can provoke.”4 Yet Vice Versa clearly prompts White to carry on such a deeper discussion himself, at least as regards his own past. The conclusion of his review finds him looking askance at his post-Stonewall “conversion” to a “full” gay identity, and at the way this conversion made him invalidate his previous sexual experience with women:

     

    I must confess that Garber's very multiplication of examples browbeat me into wondering whether I myself might not have been bisexual had I lived in another era. . . . Following a tendency that Garber rightly criticizes, I denied the authenticity of my earlier heterosexual feelings in the light of my later homosexual identity. After reading "Vice Versa," I find myself willing to reinterpret the narrative of my own personal history.5

     

    Certainly one of the virtues of Garber’s book is its ability to elicit this kind of self-reinterpretation. It’s not just that people will need to revise their position on the Kinsey scale (either retroactively or otherwise), but that they will be newly aware of how inadequate this and other scales are at accounting for the fluctuations and undercurrents of a sexual life. Vice Versa will also serve to help countermand the tendency in gay and lesbian circles to “reclaim” as homosexual any and all historical personages who displayed same-sex desire at any point in their lives. However, such factors only begin the task of reckoning with the Pandora’s-box contents of the book.

     

    Without wanting to impose an artificial consensus on Garber’s scholarship, nor to downplay the specific and urgent rights-based agendas of the contemporary bisexual movement (of which both Garber and myself are members),6 I find it useful to describe Vice Versa in intellectual terms as a species of chaos theory, and to hazard Garber’s bisexual as a counterpart to the cyborg in Donna Haraway’s writings. (I use the word “hazard” here advisedly.)

     

    In Chaos Bound, N. Katherine Hayles defines cultural postmodernism as “the realization that what has always been thought of as the essential, unvarying components of human experience are not natural facts of life but social constructions. We can think of this as a denaturing process.”7 Hayles speaks of interrelated waves in postmodern culture that have acted to denature language, context, and time. The next wave, she writes, “is the denaturing of the human. While this fourth wave has yet to crest, it is undeniably building in force and scope” (266).

     

    Hayles’s account of this fourth-wave project focuses on Donna Haraway’s ironic political myth, “A Cyborg Manifesto.” Hayles finds the denaturing of the human sphere exemplified in how Haraway’s cyborg works to “undo” three distinct sets of opposites: human/animal, human/machine, and physical/nonphysical (284).8 The purported effectiveness of such “undoing” of opposites needs a caveat, which I will provide later in this review. At present I wish to explore the implications of this logic for Garber’s text.

     

    Key passages in Haraway’s essay might lead us to assume a close likeness between her cyborg and Garber’s bisexual:

     

    The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation (150). The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence (151). My cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work (154). Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia (181).

     

    While sensing a potential affinity between Haraway’s cyborg and Garber’s bisexual, I am nonetheless aware of the risk involved in announcing a family resemblance. Haraway specifically states:

     

    the cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity (150).

     

    Re-reading this passage in the context of Vice Versa, I was immediately struck with two questions: Why does Haraway assume that bisexuality necessarily constitutes a “seduction to organic wholeness”? Why does Haraway’s notion of bisexuality seem to have nothing to do with Garber’s?

     

    The species of bisexuality Haraway refers to here is in fact one from which both she and Garber take pains to distance themselves. Garber singles out for ridicule the “holistic” notion of bisexuality popularized in this century by followers of Carl Jung. In her chapter “Androgyny and Its Discontents,” Garber lambastes Jung for his static universalist notions of masculinity and femininity, showing how the intrapsychic union of “anima” and “animus” espoused by Jung constitutes an etherealized form of the practice of compulsory heterosexuality. Vice Versa mercilessly exposes a host of skeletons in the closet of Jungian psychology: essentialism, egocentrism, romanticism, puritanism, sexism, heterosexism, and ethnocentrism (208-19). Garber shows how traces of such elements persist in a host of Jung-influenced practices: in the writings of Joseph Campbell (215-6), Mircea Eliade (218), June Singer (214 ff.), and Camille Paglia (221- 2); as well as in the men’s movement (224-5) and in certain cross-dressing and transgendered circles (225-9). Garber instances radical-feminist theologian Mary Daly as one of androgyny’s outspoken malcontents. (Although elsewhere in the book Garber criticizes the idea of Pauline conversions, she presents this one approvingly.) Daly initially favored the idea of “psychic wholeness, or androgyny,” then “recanted” from the position, finding the word androgyny “confusing,” “a semantic abomination,” and describing the androgynous ideal as the equivalent of “John Travolta and Farrah Fawcett-Majors Scotch-taped together” (216).

     

    In Garber’s reconstructed sense of the term, as distinguished from Jung’s and Haraway’s usage, the bisexual may be said to collaborate in Hayles’s project of denaturing the human sphere. Like Haraway’s cyborg, Garber’s bisexual works to “undo” certain prevailing oppositions — though the principal oppositions involved in this case are not human/animal, human/machine, and physical/nonphysical, but rather 1) homosexual/heterosexual, 2) masculine/feminine, and 3)sexual/platonic.9

     

    Garber problematizes the first of these three fundamental dyads in a number of ways: a) by looking at “borderline” cases which raise general doubts about the viability of a linear gay/straight continuum;10 b) by revealing the specific shortcomings of quantified indexes such as the 7-point Kinsey scale and the Klein Sexual Orientation Grid (28-30); and c) by citing Judith Butler and Gayle Rubin, whose scholarship has shown how normative claims are culturally produced within what Butler has called “a heterosexual matrix for desire” (161). Within this matrix, Butler argues, bisexuality is “redescribed as impossible” by the patriarchal law that “produces both sanctioned heterosexuality and transgressive homosexuality” (183-4). In a similar vein, Garber quotes feminist Mariana Valverde: “Although bisexuality, like homosexuality, is just another deviant identity, it also functions as a rejection of the norm/deviance model” (250).

     

    In connection with the second dyad, Garber extends the discussion of her previous book Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. Her chapter on androgyny deconstructs not only Jungian psychology but related concepts such as hermaphroditism and the myth of unisexuality.11

     

    With respect to the third dyad, Garber argues that there is an unavoidably erotic component in amorous childhood and adolescent friendships (ch. 13), as well as in the teacher/student relationship (ch. 14). The realm of pedagogy is institutionally bisexual, Garber asserts, noting that classroom transferences occur regardless of the sexual predilections students and teachers display outside the class setting.

     

    As this list suggests, few social or psychological institutions remain uninterrogated in the pages of Vice Versa. In addition to those already mentioned, marriage (chs. 16, 17), monogamy (chs. 18-21), “normalcy” (297-303), the “conversion” narrative (ch. 15), and even theories of ambidexterity (ch. 12) all come up for revisionist scrutiny.

     

    I see Garber’s bisexual as a potential complement or corrective to Haraway’s cyborg. Haraway and Garber both create a “powerful infidel heteroglossia” which charts paths away from a unitary sense of self; but the paths they select diverge in important ways. Despite the masculine/feminine dyad discussed above, Garber’s bisexual would hardly be overjoyed at the prospect of living in Haraway’s “world without gender.”12 Even if such a world were imaginable, would it be advisable? providential? fun? In Haraway’s talk of “ideologies of sexual reproduction” and the “informatics of domination,” one is left to wonder what place, if any, remains for Garber’s “eroticism of everyday life.” The very style of Garber’s book — its affable wordplay, countless anecdotes, vigorous readability — stands as an implicit rebuke to Haraway’s manifesto, with its ascetic ironies and pinched, semi-automaton syntax.

     

    At the same time, a greater appreciation for what Haraway means by situated knowledges might have helped Garber to curb her occasional tendency toward grandiosity. Garber’s chapter on Freud ends with this pronouncement: “Bisexuality is that upon the repression of which society depends for its laws, codes, boundaries, social organization — everything that defines ‘civilization’ as we know it” (206). Despite the element of irony in the final words, Garber leaves open the possibility here, as elsewhere, that bisexuality carries the potential for shaking Western civilization to its very foundations. Such a cataclysm would be a tall order indeed for a movement which is bedeviled with problems of visibility and representation, and which is unlikely to yield a politically empowering event equivalent to the Stonewall Riots.

     

    This matter of “pull-apart” opposites, and of cultural theory encroaching on realpolitik, calls for a caveat. John Guillory, rearticulating a concern that has become almost ritualized in the field, recently criticized the cultural studies tendency toward fostering claims about the supposed across-the-boards subversiveness of certain marginalized practices.13 This tendency, he suggests, arises as a kind of fantasy wish-fulfillment in the midst of a widening credibility gap: in the absence of persuasive totalizing narratives about politics or economics, cultural studies brings ingratiating relief in the form of crypto-totalizing discourse about neglected minorities. Guillory specifically takes Judith Butler to task for intimating that historically entrenched binaries about gender can be fully “subverted” through the auspices of drag performance.14 A similar argument could be made about some of Garber’s claims for bisexuality — her occasional habit of resorting to breathless superlatives (does bisexuality really mark the spot where all of our questions about eroticism, repression, and social arrangements come to crisis [368]?), and of relying on a plethora of literary close readings where broader historical analysis is called for. In Vice Versa, bisexuality at times seems to be elevated to the status of a full-fledged sociopolitical paradigm shift by surmise and enthusiasm alone, by the sheer prettiness of thinking it so.

     

    Yet it must also be argued that bisexuality is an unusually volatile and productive site of present contestation, and it is not Garber’s duty to undersell the potential of a movement whose parameters are still manifestly in flux. What Eve Sedgwick asserted of her book Epistemology of the Closet may be said as well of Vice Versa:

     

    A point of the book is not to know how far its insights and projects are generalizable, not to be able to say in advance where the semantic specificity of these issues gives over to (or: itself structures?) the syntax of a 'broader' or more abstractable critical project.15

     

    Nor, pace Edmund White, should Garber be burdened with the task of enumerating every one of bisexuality’s discontents. The enormous misconceptions and prejudices that still saturate most discussions about bisexuality, even among the highly educated, form their own inverted justification for the kind of playfully affirmative treatment Garber provides. Many readers, faced with the carnivalesque inversions and crosscurrents found in Vice Versa, will feel a sense of vertigo akin to the kind Fredric Jameson has described about the encounter with postmodern architecture:

     

    We do not yet possess the perceptual equipment to match this new hyperspace . . . The newer architecture . . . stands as something like an imperative to grow new organs, to expand our sensorium and our body to some new, yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossible dimensions.16

     

    Notes

     

    1. A sampling of individuals from the present century: Mattachine Society founder Harry Hay, married to a woman and actively gay (73-4); Patricia Ireland, whose bisexuality came under political censure when she became the president of N.O.W. (72-3); writer John Cheever, described by his daughter as a man who loved men but disliked homosexuals (403); First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt (76-8); ex-congressman Robert Bauman, who pled “nolo contendre” to charges of homosexual solicitation, and whose marriage was subsequently annulled by the Catholic Church on grounds of “Mistake of person” (71); and painter Larry Rivers, for whom the term “trisexual” is coined (“He’d try anything”) (448).

     

    2. Joseph P. Kahn, “The new book on bisexuality,” Boston Globe, 6 Sept. 1995, 80.

     

    3. See also Rita Mae Brown, “Defining the New Sexuality,” Los Angeles Times Book Review, 30 July 1995, 2,9; and Frank Kermode, “Beyond Category,” New York Times Book Review, 9 July 1995, 6-7.

     

    4. Edmund White, “Gender Uncertainties,” The New Yorker, 17 July 1995, 81.

     

    5. Ibid.

     

    6. Garber traces the roots of nineties bisexual activism through the gay and lesbian movement to seventies feminism and the civil rights movement of the sixties (86-7). She acknowledges that the activist and theoretical sides of bisexuality are by no means interchangeable: “the two strands of bisexual thinking, the identity-politics, rights-based arguments for visibility on the one hand and the theoretical, deconstructive, category-questioning arguments for rethinking erotic boundaries on the other are not always easily combined” (87). For biographical material on Garber, see Kahn, 75, 80.

     

    7. N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990) 265.

     

    8. See Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991) 149-81. The material Hayles refers to is found in pp. 151-4.

     

    9. Garber writes, “If bisexuality is in fact, as I suspect it to be, not just another sexual orientation but rather a sexuality that undoes sexual orientation as a category, a sexuality that threatens and challenges the easy binarities of straight and gay, queer and ‘het,’ and even, through its biological and physiological meanings, the gender categories of male and female, then the search for the meaning of the word ‘bisexual’ offers a different kind of lesson . . . The erotic discovery of bisexuality is the fact that it reveals sexuality to be a process of growth, transformation, and surprise, not a stable and knowable state of being” (65- 6).

     

    10. See note 1.

     

    11. Regarding the potential for “destabilizing” the man/woman divide, Garber’s bisexual shows an affinity with the drag queen as figured in Judith Butler. See Butler’s “Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions,” Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990) 128-41, and note 14 below.

     

    12. Haraway, 181.

     

    13. John Guillory, “System Without Structure: Cultural Studies as ‘Low Theory,’” Keynote Presentation, GWU “Intersections” Conference, Washington, 30 March 1996. An earlier formulation of this oft-reiterated concern is found in Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986) 177-8.

     

    14. Guillory singles out Butler’s scholarship as an unusually intelligent and influential (rather than unusually vulnerable) example of this practice. Butler herself, of course, is not unaware of the problem. She spends a considerable portion of Gender Trouble making similar objections to this tendency in the writings of Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault, and Monique Wittig (79-128). Further, she has made a number of clarifications about her own claims for drag performativity in “Critically Queer,” GLQ 1:1 (1993): 21, 24, 26-7; see also Butler’s Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993). In Gender Trouble Butler writes, “Feminist critique ought to explore the totalizing claims of a masculinist signifying economy, but also remain self-critical with respect to the totalizing gestures of feminism” (13).

     

    15. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: U of California P, 1990) 12.

     

    16. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke UP, 1991) 38.

     

  • The Problem of Strategy: How to Read Race, Gender, and Class in the Colonial Context

    Anjali Arondekar

    Department of English
    University of Pennsylvania
    arondeka@dept.english.upenn.edu

     

    Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest.New York: Routledge, 1995.
     

    Strategy works through a persistent (de)constructive critique of the theoretical. “Strategy” is an embattled concept-metaphor and unlike “theory,” its antecedents are not disinterested and universal. “Usually, an artifice or trick designed to outwit or surprise the enemy” (Oxford English Dictionary)

     

    — Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine 

    One of the founding assumptions of this book is that no social category exists in privileged isolation; each comes into being in social relation to other categories, if in uneven and contradictory ways. But power is seldom adjudicated evenly — different social situations are overdetermined for race, for gender, for class, or for each in turn. I believe however that it can be safely said that no social category should remain invisible with respect to an analysis of empire.

     

    — Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather

     

    In a recent interview, ironically entitled “In a Word,” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak revisits the term “strategy,” and argues for the use of precise critical “strategies” in academic scholarship. As the quotation above indicates, her notion of “strategy” strives for a political accountability, for a situated reading that prioritizes a local context that by definition cannot function as a blanket “theory” that is then applied to all like-sounding cases. “A strategy suits a situation,” she reminds us, “a strategy is not theory.” While Spivak’s work on “strategic essentialisms” is well known, and often misunderstood as an excuse to proselytize on the virtue of academic “essentialisms,” her particular articulation of the critical necessity of the notion of “strategy” itself has often been overlooked.

     

    I begin my review of Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest with an invocation of Spivak’s notion of “strategic” readings to situate McClintock as one such admirably engaged and embattled “strategic” reader. McClintock’s collection of essays wrestles with situating and balancing the problematic variables of race, class, and gender in readings of the colonial context within a range of hermeneutical discourses. While it is critical commonplace in current academic parlance to speak of the imbricated discourses of race, class, and gender, McClintock calls for a critical reading of empire that demands a rigorous re-conceptualization and historicization of such utterances. Race, gender, and class, she argues, are to be called “articulated categories” that “are not distinct realms of experience, existing in splendid isolation from each other, nor can they simply be yoked together retrospectively. Rather they come into existence in and through relation to each other, if in contradictory and conflictual ways.” (5) These categories thus do not derive their signification from a fixed point of origin, but instead are “articulated,” unfolded from uneven and often opposing locations. Operating within such a methodological framework, McClintock’s book offers three related critiques of “the project of imperialism, the cult of domesticity and the invention of industrial progress”(4). Each critique points up the tendency in earlier critical work to overemphasize one term of the articulation at the expense of the others. For instance, McClintock demonstrates how the cult of domesticity in late nineteenth-century England has as much invested in hierarchies of race as it does in traditional taxonomies of gender. Or that imperialism has as much to do with gender asymmetries (both within and without the colonial context) as it does with the more pronounced impositions of class and race.

     

    McClintock’s heuristic gestures reflect the same kind of constant structural scrutiny that she brings to bear on the analytical categories of race, class, and gender. One of her preliminary moves is to locate herself firmly at the juncture of a range of traditionally separate theoretical schools:

     

    An abiding concern of the book is to refuse the clinical separation of psychoanalysis and history . . . and to rethink the circulation of notions that can be observed between the family, sexuality and fantasy (the traditional realm of psychoanalysis) and the categories of labor, market and money (the traditional realm of political and economic history) (8).

     

    McClintock similarly refuses to conceive of time and history as a binary of before and after, with the post-colonial condition comfortably cushioned from an oppressive colonial past; she points instead to the urgent continuity of historical patterns. The plotting of time and histories, she argues, is nothing more than “a geography of social power” (37).

     

    In this essay, I will pursue the limits of McClintock’s claim for such critical practices insofar as they can be traced in her book, and in turn pose a series of questions: First, given the scattered, albeit connected, chronologies of the book’s individual essays (which begin with Rider Haggard’s sketch map of the Route to King Solomon’s mines, and end with a more contemporary map of South African politics), does McClintock manage to achieve the kind of precise historical and theoretical intervention she herself calls for? Second, is the scale of McClintock’s project simply too ambitious, too wide-ranging, too methodologically fragmented to produce readings that are coherent and “strategic?” Imperial Leather‘s table of contents reads like a model for a cultural studies collection, with sections on a dizzying array of issues from an essay on race, cross-dressing, and the cult of domesticity, to another on commodity racism and imperial advertising. Does McClintock, in her effort not to privilege one category over another as an organizing trope for her analysis of different cultural pheonomena, end up with a more radical version of the “commonplace, liberal pluralism” that she so abhors (8)? Third, how does McClintock’s book add to the current scholarship on the structures of colonial discourse? The past few years have seen a prolific and rich widening of critiques in the area of colonial discourse analysis. Christopher Lane’s The Ruling Passion: British Colonial Allegory and the Paradox of Homosexual Desire, Ali Behdad’s Belated Travellers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution, Ann Stoler’s Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, and David Spurr’s Rhetoric of Empire are just some examples of the diverse cultural-studies based critiques of empire that have recently emerged. Does McClintock offer us something that we won’t already find elsewhere in this rapidly emergent field?

     

    The first, and most persuasive section of McClintock’s book is entitled “Empire of the Home.” This section attempts to situate genealogies of imperialism within the European domestic landscape, and specifically within the cult of domesticity. “Discoveries” of the colonies appear as belated gestures where the “inaugural scene is never in fact inaugural or originary: something has always gone before” (28). And that “something [that] has gone before,” McClintock argues, is something that is staged internally within the bedrooms and boardrooms of the European metropole. McClintock expands the notion of domesticity to include “both a space (a geographical and architectural alignment) and a social relation to power” (34). Using material examples of commodity racism such as a 1899 Pears Soap advertisement, she demonstrates how discourses of scientific racism and commodity fetishism conflate in scenes of marketable “imperial domesticity.” The Pears’ image “shows an admiral decked in pure imperial white, washing his hands in his cabin as his steamship crosses the threshold into the realm of empire” (32). Access to imperial spaces is arrived at through the cleansing powers of a domestic product that significantly promulgates a version of imperial domesticity that is without women. Colonialism may well be metaphorised as the benevolent expansion of the English family and its accompanying domestic habits, yet it is a family that is structurally inflexible and exclusively male.

     

    McClintock’s most successful location of the convergence of racist, classist, and sexist structures in the production of late nineteenth-century bourgeois English domesticity lies in her analysis of the infamous Arthur Munby/Hannah Cullwick affair. Arthur Munby, a well-known Victorian barrister (1829-1910), was discovered, posthumously, to have “loved Hannah Cullwick , “servant born at Shifnal,” for forty-six years, and for thirty-six of those years to have secretly harbored Cullwick as his “most dear and beloved wife and servant” (76). McClintock not only points to the myriad connections between work and sexuality that found this “particularly Victorian, and particularly neurotic” relationship (77), but further demonstrates how this dynamic is artfully managed through a Victorian order of things that relies on learned and interconnected discourses of race, class, and gender. Munby’s urban projects and elaborate typologies of working-class women collide, McClintock reminds us, with the distinctly “imperial genre” of travel ethnographies: “Like the colonial map, Munby’s notations [and photographs] offered a discourse of the surface and belonged — like the musuem and exhibition hall — to the industrial archive of the spectacle” (82). Working-class women, like the racialized ‘natives’ dotting the imperial landscape, become subject to, and object of a similar masculinist order of colonial logic. And the genre of Munby’s photograph, as Malek Alloula’s Colonial Harem has also stridently articulated in a related context, is the imperial site/sight of choice.

     

    Unlike earlier readings of the affair that cast Cullwick as the beleaguered lower-class victim of an oppressive master, McClintock however chooses to emphasize the couple’s shared investment in the maintenance of this S/M dynamic. Throughout the various roles Cullwick adopts for her master’s pleasure (from servant to mistress, from class to race transvestism), she stages, for McClintock, not merely her master’s fantasies, but also her own. The couple’s desires can converge because and not despite of their articulated class and gender positions. And the site at which they do indeed converge most markedly is in their mutual fetishization of race. Munby, in stride with the discourses of Victorian degeneration, imagines Cullwick, not just as transgressively “male” but also as “black.” At her most desirable (for Munby, that is), Cullwick is presented “in a grotesque caricature of the stigmata of racial degeneration: her forehead is flattened and foreshortened” (107). Cullwick, too, stages her most effective rebellion against Munby’s authority when she refuses to relinquish control of a “slave-band” that marks her as racialized, even as she is performing other roles. In a radical re-writing of Freud and theories of fetishism, McClintock grants Cullwick, the woman, the ability to fetishize. The filthy leather “slave-band” as fetish stands in not for the phallus, but for the concealed/missing component of Cullwick’s/womens’ labor.

     

    I find McClintock’s fusing of psychoanalytical categories of the fetish with categories of race and class persuasive but also problematic. While McClintock’s careful placement of Munby and Cullwick within a dense history of Freudian disavowal and displacement of early objects of desire (such as the elusive and yet everpresent maid-figure) is compelling, I am less struck by her reading of race in such an analysis. McClintock does not fully problematize Cullwick’s and her own conflation of slavery with gender and class oppression. Such conflations have been vehemently opposed by many African American feminist critics, such as Carla Peterson and Hortense Spillers, who argue that to make such analogies in experiences is to elide the very specificities and brutalities of the history of slavery. Herein lies the main challenge to McClintock’s heuristic battles: her continued appeal to the analogical as well as to the intensely different structures of analysis within the categories she is exploring. In other words, race is to class as class is to gender, and so on and so forth. Within such analogs, race can only approximate gender, never stand in or substitute for it. Yet, to argue, as she does, that race, class, and gender participate in mutually generative relationships is to erase the binary structures of the analogy, and to arrive at problematical dialectical moments such as the one cited between slavery and gender oppression. I am not suggesting that there is an easy way out of this quandary, but merely that McClintock appears to have overlooked such potential pitifalls in an otherwise dense argument.

     

    McClintock’s second large section, entitled “Double Crossings,” moves our gaze from the domestic body of Cullwick’s performances to the larger domestication of the market of empire. In this instance, the history of English soap production and advertisement functions as an allegory for the whitewashing of empire. Imperial advertisements for different brands of soap invoke images of the monkey (Monkey Brand Soap), or of an evolutionary racism, to sell not just commodities but a particular version of positivist history: “Civilization is born [such images imply] at the moment of first contact with the Western commodity” (223). Commodities in their crossings to the colonies suggest the possibility of a different brand of colonial mimcry. The native is not encouraged to aspire to the public status of an Englishman, but only to adopt his private habits and accoutrements; to buy, but never to participate in the trading of such commodities. The poetics of colonial cleanliness become “a poetics of social discipline” (226). But as McClintock’s prior section has already demonstrated, such boundaries and fantasies of colonial control are rarely maintained. Myths of native idleness, lassitude and filth are crucial to the reification of such commodity exchanges, myths that, McClintock points out, are easily dismantled through close historical readings of the particular colonial labor context. Fetishism appears disruptively here, too, as in the case of Hannah Cullwick, manifested in the uncanny quality of commodity exchange processes, especially as they involve indigenous practices and products. Colonial feminists, like Olive Schreiner, further interrupt the hegemony of Western commodity discourse through their focii on gendered and racialized forms of production.

     

    Again, as in my critique of the earlier section, I will argue that McClintock falters in her analysis of the category of race. Race, as is refracted through the multiple images of soap advertisements in this section, does not transcend its traditional binary of black and white. McClintock restricts her analysis to the African continent, ignoring the similarly powerful reverberations such racialized commodities had on other colonies, such as India. Extending her critique to India, or even gesturing toward its perverse racial position (India begins to be read in heavily racialized terms only after the rebellion of 1857) would permit McClintock to interrogate conflicting discourses of race in simultaneous moments of colonial history. Similarly, I would add that just as units of analysis like race and gender have their particularized locations in history, so also do discourses of critical inquiry. If we are urged to localize the fetish, we must concurrently localize the post-colonial theory that McClintock uses in its precise political and historical moment. While McClintock expends considerable effort in explicating and situating psychoanalyis and Freud within a distinct genealogy of theoretical negotiations, she is less prone to do so with regard to post-colonial theory and its practitioners such as Homi Bhabha.

     

    McClintock’s final section, “Dismantling the Master’s House,” provides a contemporary and powerful closure to her first two sections. Using the political struggles of men and women in South Africa, this section explores the crucial thread of historical continuity, exposing the disruptive kernel of colonial oppression that contaminates any neat division of the colonial past from the putatively post-colonial present. The theoretical purchase of terms such as hybridity takes on a markedly political valence in contexts such as South Africa, where narrative ambiguities perform tasks that few politicians can accomplish. McClintock uses the example of a collaborative literary text, Poppie Nongena, produced through the labor of a white and a black woman, as one site of hybrid resistance. Elsa Joubert, a white Afrikaans writer and mother, transcribes in this text the orally transmitted history of a black woman, “Poppie Nongena” recorded during the bloody Soweto uprising of 1967.

     

    I will end as I began with a reference to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. In an interview republished in The Post-Colonial Critic, Spivak compares the project of sustained critical inquiry to the daily cleaning or brushing of one’s teeth. Both, she argues, need to be undertaken in the spirit of daily maintenance, and unlike a surgical operation, should not be expected to bring about a drastic recovery or change. McClintock’s book asks for a similar critical vigilance in our analysis of the categories of race, class, and gender. Thus, even if at times McClintock’s text appears maddeningly repetitive and heavily over-burdened with disparate topics, it is her commitment to constant rereadings of empire that we most remember. The post-script to her book, “The Angel of Progress” sums up this gesture and warns us against the dangers of critical lethargy:

     

    Without a renewed will to intervene in the unacceptable, we face the prospect of being becalmed in a historically empty space in which our sole direction is found by gazing back spellbound at the epoch behind us, in a perpetual present marked only as “post.” (396)

     

  • Personal Effects, Public Effects, Special Effects: Institutionalizing American Poetry

    Joe Amato

    Lewis Department of Humanities
    Illinois Institute of Technology
    amato@charlie.cns.iit.edu

     

    Jed Rasula. The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects, 1940-1990.National Council of Teachers of English. 639 pp. ISBN 0-8141-0137-2. Hardcover $42.95.

     

    Judging by its sheer heft, its blurbs, and its bulk of carefully-detailed appendices, one might expect that The American Poetry Wax Museum represents a major intervention in the ongoing struggles over American poetry. The second title in NCTE’s Refiguring English Studies series, it bills itself as an “innovative and irreverent” book that “oscillat[es] between documentary and polemic.” The inside book-jacket bio of Rasula details a curious trajectory, involving a Ph.D. from the University of California at Santa Cruz’s History of Consciousness program, a “stint as researcher for the ABC television series Ripley’s Believe It Or Not,” and a relocation to Ontario, Canada, where the now expatriate author teaches at Queen’s University.

     

    Front matter includes a brief mission statement of this NCTE series, which aims to provide “a forum for scholarship on English studies as a discipline, a profession, and a vocation.” The Series Editor, Stephen M. North, is himself author of The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field (Boynton, 1987), the first truly comprehensive attempt to survey the field of composition studies. North’s emphasis on and validation of “practitioner lore” launched a provocative challenge to then-prevailing notions of researcher expertise, and substantially bolstered the status both of composition studies and of its practitioners.

     

    Rasula’s book thus emerges from a curiously recombinant domain of publishing practices within the English industry, a domain whose academic lineage is marked by the rocky ascent to legitimacy of composition studies, and with it the corollary effect that writing practices as such, including poetry, are a suitable subject for institutional interrogation. Which legitimation has in turn been reinforced by the present popularity of cultural studies — specifically, critical reception theory, an enterprise focused on unveiling the various social and cultural apparatuses of textual consumption. With North as custodian, then, and under the imprimatur of NCTE, we might expect from this unconventionally situated author a renegade challenge to prevailing orthodoxies.

     

    And to a considerable extent, the book delivers on its promise. I’ll begin at the beginning, synchronizing my commentary with the text rather closely through Chapter Two to give some idea of its conceptual progression. A Polemical Preface” provides Rasula’s motivated macro view of what he is up to: his is “a study of the canonizing assumptions (and compulsions) that have fabricated an image of American poetry since World War II,” a “field of productive tensions . . . which are foreclosed prematurely by denials that they exist.” Concurring with Don Byrd’s appraisal that “‘poetic’ self-expression” has proliferated to the point of being a “cradle to grave opportunit[y],” Rasula alleges that it has been “anthologists and commentators” who have legislated this state of denials, compiling and categorizing in the service of a graven-cum-waxen image, “the enshrinement of the self-expressive subject” (4).

     

    Chapter One: Though I found the opening salvo a bit mechanical and digressive in places, Rasula’s modus operandi is comprised of equal parts erudition and rhetorical aplomb, and a penchant for mordant observation: in accord with the NCTE series title, he refigures American poetry anthologies as museums of wax simulations whose “carceral” condition is such that each “talking head” is forced to “speak” courtesy of the wonders of voice-over technologies (yes, Baudrillard looms large in all of this, as do the lesser known Philip Fisher and Neil Harris). Poets along with their poetry are thus reduced to ventriloquial ploys employed by their curators both to pander to public taste and to promote various not-so-hidden, but often complex social-qua-literary agendas:

     

    My concern, in elaborating this thesis of a poetry wax
museum, is to suggest that the seemingly autonomous
"voices and visions" of poets themselves have been
underwritten by custodial sponsors who have
surreptitiously turned down the volume on certain
voices, and simulated a voice-over for certain others.
Nothing defines the situation more succinctly than the
police phrase protective custody.
(33)

     

    For Rasula, the “figure of the poet as cyborg” (another refiguring, incidentally, one owing to the work of UC Santa Cruz scholar Donna Haraway) signifies but one of many facets of a cultural imbrication best captured in buzzword. “For some time now,” he writes, “we have been citizens of a Cybernation,” the pun serving to connote an American collective consciousness construed as a “mental homeless shelter that harbors Dan Rather, Roseanne Barr, and Bullwinkle” (47). The Wax Museum is in fact itself transfigured, courtesy of further conceptual correspondence, into an orphanage “where mute icons of imaginative authority are sheltered along with the voices just out of their reach” (48). Chapter One concludes with a “coda” that transfigures again (or pe rhaps prefigures) the Wax Museum to evoke the greenhouse; in particular, Roethke’s invocation of same in “Child on Top of a Greenhouse.” “Greenhouses are controlled environments, sites of artificially induced vegetal animation” (53). Etc. Given its scholastic medium, the message of Chapter One is guaranteed both to illuminate and to exacerbate the public disputes that have lingered on among neoformalists, antiformalists, language poets, and others (where “formalist” is itself understood as a highly conflicted term). By the end of his first chapter, Rasula emerges as something of a latter day Pound, sans Pound’s annoying self-righteousness and unforgivable bigotry.

     

    Chapter Two, “The Age of ‘The Age of’”: Part One of this two-hundred-fifty page chapter constitutes the beef. Rasula begins with a summary overview of Louise Bogan’s correspondence, arguing that, because she was a “fastidious observer,” had “significant contact with many of the more famous personnel of the poetry world,” and “was generationally situated so as to have a dual perspective on both the modernist and subsequent generations,” Bogan’s letters help to provide an accurate “sense of poetry in America as lives lived” (58). Well, yes. Someplace along the way, though, Bogan’s intimate voice recedes rather quickly into the background (to resurface at irregular intervals) as Rasula gradually builds his case against, as one might have expected, the New Critics and their New Criticism — to simplify enormously, a southern agrarian, religious, somewhat autodidactic collective led by John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren. A quick paraphrase of Rasula’s argument might go something like this: Whereas many have illustrated how the New Criticism shaped the way English studies came to be practiced during the thirties, forties, and fifties, few have emphasized sufficiently the overarching, extratextual imperatives and consequences associated with this latter’s “public relations” role in servicing a constraining literary-academic enterprise, an establishment initially rooted in trade press publication and eventually forced underground — where, however, it has continued to shape academic practice.

     

    My professorial mortarboard began to tip to one side as it grew increasingly clear to me in reading through Rasula’s careful indictment that New Critical hegemonic effects are yet unconsciously with us (i.e., us academics), the source of numerous anxieties and tacit alliances. Here Rasula indicates incisively, and with unprecedented historical clarity, how New Critical textual practices reinforced and informed more organizational motivations. New Criticism is successful in the postwar world precisely because this baby-booming “age of sociology” — an age in which “introspective compulsion” grows increasingly susceptible to an external, “managerial temperament” — demands explanation (122, 126). “Poetry fared well in the age of sociology,” Rasula observes, “because New Critical pedagogy constituted a veritable explanation industry, reassuringly in the hands of ‘qualified experts’” (127). Ultimately it is the “romance of technical efficiency” that validates and is validated by New Critical close readings and the like, a damaging functionalism” that reduces and trivializes the “traumas of history.” Among the most significant of such “traumas” in coeval literary terms was the awarding of the Bollingen Prize to Ezra Pound in 1949, following as it did on the heels of treason charges against him (which were ultimately suspended on the grounds of insanity). Rasula’s analysis of “the Pound affair” manages to capture the contradictions manifested by the Fellows in American Letters (who presided ove r the award) without wishing away either the evils or the ambiguities of Pound’s actions, symbolic and otherwise.

     

    One might argue that Rasula’s elaboration of New Critical influence itself contributes to such influence, that he has “paid homage” to the New Critics by accusing them of such far-reaching and pernicious effects. To be sure, there are other histories to be written, histories that have more to do with writers and artists whose work has never been regarded as “central” to prevailing academic or cultural orthodoxies. Any critique of orthodoxy risks a certain sort of reification, a reification of the center. One antidote is to introduce, as Rasula has done, a presumably marginal figure such as Louise Bogan — though Bogan’s marginality as a poet per se belies her access to poetry power brokers. And as I have indicated, Bogan figures into Rasula’s argument only irregularly after her initial appearance. One would therefore expect some resistance to Rasula’s argument from those who have an interest in revising historical “realities” to reveal the imposition of a center as a fiat of historical method.

     

    Rasula’s evocation of the “age of sociology” includes a brief survey of those institutional consolidations (high-cultural, pop-cultural and geopolitical) that (re)constitute the American bandwidth. Part Two of Chapter One situates in the midst of this bandwidth those poetic imperatives that conspired throughout the fifties to promote the ascendancy of Robert Lowell as the “poet who personified the postwar American bard” (247). Auden’s arrival in New York and subsequent naturalization as a US citizen provides immediate sanction for the then current, now sometimes retrospective view that this marks the “Age of Auden” (and in subsequent mimicry, the “Age of Lowell”), an age initiated, in Rasula’s caustic formulation, by Auden’s “demonstrating to Americans how to import a poetry culture, much as horticulturalists imported French vine stock to get the California wine industry going” (148). Auden’s presence and influence worked to reinforce the “pedagogic and scholastic advocacy” of the New Critics, while the formation of a “centrist” position cleverly concealed its more avant-garde Modernist roots (145). To his credit, Rasula suggests a “nonaesthetic” reason for this development: race. If Lowell had been elected the prodigal son as if by default, it was certainly not without regard for the fact that he was a white Christian (male), whereas many of his contemporaries — Zukofsky, Reznikoff, Oppen — were Jewish. Anthology-wise, this was indeed the age of the WASP.

     

    Expertly weaving poetry and criticism from the fifties with critical studies of the period, Rasula chronicles the twists and turns of fifties establishment/ counter-establishment mores and poetic positionings, warts and all. The advent of the widely publicized and popular Beat movement, along with the controversies that ensued from its high profile, are viewed by Rasula as the historical springboard for the decade’s notorious, and defining, literary culmination: the “anthology war” inaugurated by the release in 1960 of Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry (revised and rereleased in the late seventies as The Postmoderns). The Beat and Black Mountain harshness that gives offense to the status quo of the academic elite is shrewdly and accurately cast as a function of these presumed upstarts’ collective tendency toward “theorizing a poetics” — and in this formulation Rasula offers us a convenient way of understanding the historical present of poetic practice. As for Lowell, he emerges under Rasula’s scrutiny both as id and superego of “Criticism, Inc.,” his life punctuated by genteel self-aggrandizement and manic outburst even as his poems themselves ultimately reveal the self-tortured persona grata and non grata congenial to conformist culture. In the terms he borrowed from Virginia Woolf in his acceptance of the National Book Award — terms which, as Rasula indicates, resonated well with establishment skepticism — Lowell may be seen with some sympathy neither as cooked nor as raw; he was simply overdone. In any case, I found Rasula’s contrasting of Lowell’s poetic self-construction with Charles Olson’s “Maximus” (to the latter’s advantage) instructive, if not altogether convincing; one is tempted simply to observe in this connection that boys will be boys.

     

    Chapter Two’s concluding section is entitled “Conformity Regained,” the ironic evocation of Milton signaling an establishment coup de grace in this veritable epic of American poetry’s various struggles and perturbations. The section begins with a cursory review of “previously formalist poets” whose work underwent “dramatic stylistic and procedural changes” (269) as a result of sixties instigations — Merwin, Wright, Kinnell, Wilbur (not much change here), Bly, Eshleman (publisher of Sulfur) and Baraka. With Baraka, Rasula’s historical overview becomes the occasion for a sustained meditation on multiculturalism. I must admit to having felt a bit uneasy at first, what with Rasula’s observation that, given “the present conundrum of a revised canon in which it is essential that minorities be included” even as “their minoritarian features must not be essentialized,” “we now see the shameless opportunism of a curriculum designed to reflect political correctness” (279). What initially troubled me here was less the insight itself than Rasula’s adoption of “political correctness” as an easy pejorative, which gesture mirrors precisely the current conservative jeremiad against “(il)liberal” education.

     

    But my discomfort was quickly dispelled as Rasula derived an alternative to such “tokenism” from a close reading both of Baraka’s process orientation and recent critical work by Nathaniel Mackey (another member of the UC Santa Cruz faculty). Rasula discusses in a footnote why Mackey’s concept of “creative kinship” has not caught on, suggesting that the influx of Continental theory, among other factors, has produced a “scholarly climate in which the admissible terms of affiliation are legislative, not creative” (282). In demonstrating the value of seeing the poet as subject of creative kinships, Rasula once again seizes on Olson as a powerful example, and throughout his discussion of ethno-aesthetic complexities he suggests that jazz and its history might serve usefully to reorient our thinking and our curricula. After some further exploration of the specifically WASPish ethnic character of the New Critical hegemony, Rasula concludes this chapter with a reference to Robert Duncan’s spirtual reading of poetic warfare, calling for poets and anthologizers not only to admit the “multiplicity of convictions at work in poetry,” but to “be at strife with [their] own conviction . . . in order to give [themselves] over to the art” (305).

     

    Chapters Three, Four and Five together comprise a progressive illumination of the present situation of poetic practice in general and poetry anthologies in particular. Rasula borrows Chapter Three’s title, “Consolations of the Novocain,” from Karl Shapiro to indicate that American poetry suffers from the application of critical anesthesia. After surveying the relative dearth of informed studies of postwar poetry, Rasula diligently dissects what he calls the “default mode” of literary criticism in this period, whereby “readings are so ‘close’ that the critic’s own claustrophobia permeates the text” (318). He explicates the textual reduction (and subsequent redaction) of poetic practice to luxuriating lyrical egos, a reduction which produces a fatal(istic) reading of poetry as a social art to the extent that “the lyrical ego condemns itself to a prison of its own making” (329).

     

    In Chapter Four, “Politics In, Politics Of,” Rasula mounts a complex overview and critique of poetry’s material basis vis-a-vis the ubiquitous and normative medium of television. Rasula’s argument throughout is predicated on his view that “poetry is not a linguistic oasis, and is not immune from the discursive norms of society at large” (366). Hence the question becomes one of how best to address such norms without ignoring materialist concerns. “Insofar as poetry has become synonymous with the free verse lyric,” he writes, “‘poetry’ is in dangerous competition with television,” for “the inscrutable rhetorical foundation of free verse abandons all the immunizing paraphernalia of prosody” (366). Poetry is apt to come up short if it aspires to the flashier projections of the tube. After a brief and enlightening foray into typography, Rasula turns his attention to the “mind-cure theology” of “industrial-communications society,” the exemplar of which becomes televangelism. “Watching television is keeping the faith,” he writes, and this leads to his most oracular, and enigmatic, assertion: “Poetry, unlike television, is not contingent on belief” (373). He is at some pains to show, largely through a 1942 essay by Welsh poet David Jones, that the art of poetry, unlike the art of war, is a “path of charities” (374). Building on the work of Manuel DeLanda and Paul Virilio to the effect that “we have inhabited an ‘eternity’ of war,” what Virilio calls “pure war” (374), Rasula offers a peculiarly sociobiological version of a crisis in the arts: “The lapse of poetry is more serious than any supposed competition with television suggests, for what is at stake is not simply cultural displacement but the erosion of a species’ [sic] trait” (377).

     

    This would seem to accord very nearly with the radically empirical view of language practice evident in the work of William Burroughs (and others), where language becomes a viral social machine of self-replication akin to our genetic substrate. Although Rasula is quick to distinguish between poetry “as public event, which is to say commodity” — the only “kind of event recognized as public in the U.S.” (379) — and the poetic concerns of Olson and Williams, he nevertheless seems to allow precious little non-poetic space for resistance against the encroachments of popular-cum-militarized culture (the more hopeful elements of Michel de Certeau’s work come to mind here). It would seem that Rasula wants to safeguard a kind of political efficacy for poetic practice which he will not grant more popular media, and this despite his stated disavowal of any special status for poetic agency. This represents a curious romantic deviation from what is for the most part a pessimistically Foucauldian reading of the postwar technological era, a reading in which, to take one example, the movement of the humanities online is seen in part as an extension of the “military communications network” (376).

     

    Rasula’s discussion of political poetry and language poetry warrants a few specific remarks. In a brief foray into the poetic thematic of war, Rasula invokes Duncan once again to the effect that his work exemplifies “the old and venerable journey” of “resolving public crisis in spiritual autobiography” (385); it is clear that Rasula feels a special affiliation with the Olson-Duncan lineage. He offers little here in the way of anatomizing specific examples of “topical” political poetry; as he puts it, the “risk run” by such poetry is that “it may prove to be expendable after its suit is resolved” (389). Yet the same may be said of more (and less) aesthetically-motivated work, finally, such as that of Lowell & Co., much of which clearly steered away from direct political confrontation with dominant fifties rhetoric (Rasula’s gist throughout much of Chapter Two). I would have preferred here more active consideration of war-oriented poetry, such as that of (Viet Nam War poet) W. D. Ehrhart (whose work, though hardly popular in demographic terms, is nonetheless predicated in large part on first-person experiential narrative); in fact, some discussion regarding the “literature of trauma” in general might have been to the point.

     

    With this question of political poetry as a prelude, Rasula intervenes in the past two decades of controversy over language poetry-writing (term used advisedly — it’s a “fuzzy” construct, as Rasula indicates). Situating language writing over and against “low mimetic realism” — this latter marked by “the unexamined urge to find the soft emotional center of its issues” (393) — he emphasizes the “community of readers” that constitutes perhaps the signal achievement of such work (397). Rasula summarizes several of the aesthetic liabilities foregrounded by (and often in) language writing: that it “risks reifying distraction in a new complacency” (398); that, “once the soft lyric voice has been deconstructed or deposed, the remaining linguistic material is susceptible of further unforeseen subordinations” (410). Although “it is apparent from the existing body of language writing that poetic praxis and theoretical examination have rarely been so intimately bound together in American poetry” (405), the customary “separation of theory and practice” evinced even in language writing anthologies has resulted in a certain measure of “isolation and apparent autonomy” (405). Hence such poets have thereby “courted the spectre of preciousness, art for art’s sake, and esotericism” despite their theoretical assertions to the contrary (405). I would argue, on the other hand, that language writing may well have blurred the theoretical initiative as such, despite actual distinctions evinced by its various practitioners and anthologists; time will tell. Citing Maria Damon’s and Michael Berube’s studies of marginality, Rasula concludes by aligning, in brief, excerpts from Charles Reznikoff, Bob Perelman, and David Antin (this latter’s “skypoem”) to suggest that documentary “witness,” deconstruction of “the rhetoric of expert testimony,” and “a refusal of monumentality,” respectively, comprise evidence as to how “the most vital American poetry has operated on those margins that it has conscientiously allied itself with, rather than haphazardly submitted itself to” (408-413).

     

    A critical establishment enamored of its capacity for celebrating the lyrical self provides the backdrop against which Rasula identifies and dismantles one of the real targets in his book, canonical method. Rasula’s frustration with scholastic inertia becomes the source of perhaps his most contentious remark, that “Poets may be justified in thinking of scholarly critics as educated halfwits” (317). He finally squares off against the orthodoxy by addressing what Ron Silliman has coined “canonic amnesia or Vendler’s Syndrome” (qtd. in Rasula; 333). Named after its chief purveyor, Helen Vendler of Harvard, Vendler’s Syndrome refers to the hegemony of “tastemakers” who authorize the who’s who of literary anthologies, and do so “imperiously presum[ing] unanimity (of taste) where none exists” (334). Rasula demonstrates how, in Vendler’s case, this assumption of edict coincides with a certain infantilization of students as well as those deemed unworthy of the editorial task (such as Jerome Rothenberg and George Quasha!). In truth, Rasula does have an axe to grind with the Vendler-Harvard University Press establishment, which he reserves for a footnote (334); his remarks on this score are candid and unflinching. “The cost of those left out of the game is hard to assess,” he writes, and what is refreshing here, in my view, is his resistance to any “polite” appraisal of the poetry power center(s), his willingness to see indoctrination and oppression for what they are. Rasula elucidates the editorial and critical myopia of Daniel Hoffman’s Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing, and continues his critique with a summary dismissal of Jay Parini’s Columbia History of American Poetry, which he calls “literary history as calculated (or — maybe worse — casual) obscurantism” (355). As he puts it, this kind of official literary history “inevitably reproduces private life as public event without accounting for its social (and sociable) dimension” (360). Because this fai lure is closely allied, in Cary Nelson’s words, with a “collapsing of modern poetry’s wild diversity” into a homogeneity that “mirrors the most simplistic of 1950’s North American political world views” (360), the only “solution” that presents itself to Rasula is to refrain from “thinking of solutions as happening only once” (361). Tactics of resistance, in this as in other areas, must be conceived as regular and ongoing practices.

     

    The critical denouement represented by Rasula’s decimation of Vendler et al. is followed later in the text by an examination of four recent anthologies: J. D. McClatchy’s Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry; Eliot Weinberger’s American Poetry Since 1950; Paul Hoover’s Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology; and Douglas Messerli’s From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry 1960-1990. Of the four, only McClatchy’s book fails (like the Vendler, Hoffman and Parini anthologies) “to be explicit about the strategies of consensus building” (464) — which is to say, only McClatchy’s relies on “awards and prizes” as the implicit measure of inclusion. But the crux of the matter here, for Rasula, is a “disabling nostalgia” that he finds “symptomatic of all four of these recent ambitious anthologies” (461). McClatchy’s nostalgia is simply a case of Vendler’s Syndrome — a yearning for the false consensus of the past. But for Weinberger, Hoover, and Messerli, the nostalgia is one which neutralizes the “practice of outside” by absorbing it into a “reverie of the outside, the experimental” (461). As Rasula asks, rhetorically, “what purpose is served by making an orthodoxy of the unorthodox?” (463).

     

    “It’s now possible,” Rasula writes, “. . . to summarize the genealogical contours of contemporary American poetry” (440). In five or so pages, he presents an historical precis — the climax of his documentary narrative — which serves to demarcate what he calls the “four zones” of the contemporary American “poetry world”: the Associated Writing Programs; the New Formalism; language poetry; and “various coalitions of interest-oriented or community-based poets” (440). Rasula is careful to note that these four zones are “utterly disproportionate” in resources and the like, and that the fourth zone is “more heterogeneous and fluid than the others” (440).

     

    As an alternative to current anthology practices, Rasula proposes, tentatively, a “certain cunning and guile” (464): to align more familiar, (let’s say) AWP writers with (let’s say) writers from the fourth zone. Crossing zones, that is, would seem to be the only provisional answer he can muster to this question of how best to generate a compilation, as opposed to a representative collection or display, and one that can challenge the authority of the AWP. Such an approach is undeniably viable, though it, too, is vulnerable to the more agonistic impulses of poetic discourse. Anthologists would invariably be open to the charge of “rigging” poetic “confrontations,” of “unfairly” deforming a given work’s contextual (not to say aesthetic) aims. Moreover, this charge would likely be leveled by all parties, not simply by those who enjoy privileged status (however this latter is defined), simply because there are no guarantees that more “experimental” work will fare well in readerly terms when compared and contrasted with more “accessible” samplings. One can already hear cries of “meet the new boss/ the same as the old boss.”

     

    Rasula’s final chapter, “The Empire’s New Clothes,” begins with an examination of how poetry has “successfully been quantified and integrated into the marketplace” through the “vast domain” of (M.F.A.) writing programs operating largely under the aegis of the Associated Writing Programs (AWP; 419). Though “the workshop demeanor can hardly be said to derive unmodified from earlier poetic models of selfhood” (421), it is nonetheless the American “self-help” tradition, as this latter “readily settles into cultism,” that provides the social glue for more obscurantist workshop posturing (421). Elaborating on the recent critique of creative writing programs one finds in the work of writing specialists such as Eve Shelnutt (but with no mention, curiously, of Wendy Bishop’s substantive criticism of workshop format), Rasula argues not surprisingly that “we need to rethink the social role of creative writing” (424). Yet instead of emphasizing a revision of writing practices per se, Rasula addresses himself to the broadly “discursive function distributed throughout this network [that] requires a steady focus on the purported ‘needs’ of selfhood” (425). Because “poets speak only for themselves” in the prevailing mediocrity, statistically averaged, of the workshop environs, critics can no longer resort to “nominat[ing] representative figures”; hence the proper “critical vocabulary” for the present state of affairs “necessitates a shift from the aesthetic to the sociological and political” — Rasula’s study itse lf obviously serving as an example of such a shift (426-427).

     

    Rasula turns his concluding gaze to “the case of Walt Whitman” as “curiously appropriate to the topic of anthologies” (472). Perhaps not so “curious,” for Whitman has in the past forty years been made to seem “appropriate” to just about everything peculiarly American. Whitman’s self-proclaimed “new Bible,” Leaves of Grass, is elucidated in the abstract as an anthology akin to the Bible itself, which latter text Rasula regards as “at once the most encompassing ontology in the West, and the definitive anthology” (473). Drawing on John Guillory’s work on canon formation and Alan Golding’s study of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anthologies, Rasula discusses the “nationalist rhetoric” underwriting anthology production, against which Whitman’s notion of “ensemble-Individuality” potentially augurs some relief. Because Whitman “secures the linguistic act” to “his sociopolitical prospect,” Leaves becomes a revisionary self-anthology which, unlike postwar American anthologies, constructively surfaces tensions owing to the “experimental” de- and self-regulation of its author-subject-citizen (474-5). Here I have but one reservation. Speaking as a poet myself, and to state the matter somewhat contortedly: however idiosyncratic or mediated (or appealing!) the gesture, recourse to a poetic past grounded in no less a figure than Whitman, coming as it does at the end of a sprawling historical study, sanctions a (conventional) historiographic first cause. We end where “we” — “we” poets, many of us — believe “we” each began; received poetic wisdom is reinstated, and in our end is our beginning. This kind of traditional reassurance seems to work against the critical thesis with which Rasula concludes his book, the thesis that “poetry can — and should — be our term for a language in crisis” (482).

     

    Whatever my reservations, this is an extraordinary work. There are few punches pulled here, and almost nothing of the sort of connoisseur-based preciosity (not to mention self-indulgent tastemaking) that typically mars such treatises. Indeed, one sometimes gets the feeling that Rasula’s intervention in the scene of American poetry is less a historical blow-by-blow than a contemporary coming-to-blows. Rasula evinces at times more than a touch of Noam Chomsky’s investigative resourcefulness, unraveling establishment machinations and covert disinformation practices with unrelenting rigor, and regardless of the culprit’s publicly-endowed prestige. In fact, one of the unintended side-effects of Rasula’s remarkable effort may be that his disputatious, lengthy history proves too daunting, that its sheer scope and depth discourage even specialist readers. Yet this book should be studied, and restudied. Its very existence bears witness to the stubbborn durability of the ancient alphabetic art. Just as a certain anarchic anxiety (or pretension to same) may explain poets’ vociferous resistance to viewing poetry as a symbolic technology, an allied impulse toward vatic self-authorization prevents many from confronting the institutional bases of their calling in concrete and critical terms. Rasula’s book provides an occasion for poets and critics alike to reexamine their contiguous, conterminous, and often conflicting word processes. Given its critical unmasking of the discourses and institutions of canonization, the book itself stands as counsel against the panegyric impulse to label it a masterpiece of historical research and analysis. Perhaps one might observe, though, that the book also stands as an exemplar of applying to scholarship what Rasula calls poetry’s “privilege” — its “insouciant disregard for the exemplary pose” (483).

     

     

  • A Millennial Poetics

    Kenneth Sherwood

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

                            -- Edmond
                            Jabés

     

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

    James Berger

    George Mason University
    jberger@gmu.edu

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

     Notes

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    Works Cited

     

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

     

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

    Andrew McMurry

    Indiana University, Bloomington
    jmcmurry@mach1.wlu.ca

     

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

     

    -- Al-Qur'än

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    Prophecies

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    Four Horsemen

     

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

     

    1

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    2

     

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

     

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

     

    3

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    4

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    Revelations 6:17

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

     

    Notes

     

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

     

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

     

    Works Cited

     

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

     

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

    Cory Brown

    Ithaca College
    cbrown@ithaca.edu

    My Name in Water

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

    Adumbration

     

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

    Offering

     

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

    Depth Perception

     

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

     

  • Youngest Brother of Brothers

    Chris Semansky

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

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

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

     

  • HYPERWEB

     

     

     

    This is an experimental hypertext site using HTML.

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    What happens…

     

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

     

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

     

    Making it work

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    FTP

     

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

     

    Technical specs

     

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

     

     

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

     

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

     

     

     

     

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

     

    Dear Dr. Shepherdson:

     

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

     

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

     

    Thank you very much for your attention

     

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

     

    Dear Mr. Shepherdson:

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    Yours,

     

    Marcus Lopes
    marclop@omega.lncc.br

     

     

    Charles Shepherdson

    Pembroke Center
    Brown University
    engcs@mizzou1.missouri.edu

     

    Dear Mr. Lopes:

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    1.1. Inside/outside

     

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

     

    1.2 Topology

     

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

     

    1.3 Being-toward-death

     

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

     

    1.4 The structure of the body

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    1.6 Demand and desire

     

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

     

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

     

    1.7 The “invention” of the body

     

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

     

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

     

    2.1 The limits of formalization

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    2.2 Cause and law

     

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

     

    2.3 The Other and the object

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    2.4 The Subject and the Real

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    2.6 A new division: free association and transference

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    2.7 Against hermeneutics

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    2.8 Identification with the object

     

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

     

    2.9 The “end” of analysis

     

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

     

    2.10 Aporetic sciences

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    2.11 Incest

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    2.12 The gold standard

     

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

     

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

     

    2.13 Supplementarity

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    2.14 The time of the object

     

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

     

    2.15 The phallus

     

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

     

    2.16 Material aporetics

     

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

     

    3.1 Two versions of the real

     

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

     

    3.2 A parenthesis on “being”

     

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

     

    3.3 “Reality” and “lack”

     

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

     

    3.4 The “pre-symbolic” real

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    3.5 The “return” of the real

     

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

     

    3.6 Beyond mimesis

     

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

     

    3.7 Reality and the real

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    3.8 “The innermost core of the imaginary”

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    3.9 The phobic object

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    3.10 Retroactive trauma

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    3.11 The “post-symbolic” real

     

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

     

    3.12 Butler and Zizek

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    3.13 Beyond “discursive” postmodernism

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    3.14 The anatomy of criticism

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    3.16 The incestuous object

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    Notes

     

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

     

    Abbreviations

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Attridge, Derek. “Language as History/History as Language: Saussure and the Romance of Etymology,” Post-Structuralism and the Question of History, ed. Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington, and Robert Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 183-211.
    • Boothby, Richard. Death and Desire: Psychoanalytic Theory in Lacan’s Return to Freud (New York: Routledge, 1991).
    • Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel. Lacan: The Absolute Master, trans. Douglas Brick (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).
    • Brousse, Marie-Hélène. “La formule du fantasme?” Lacan, ed. Gérard. Miller (Paris: Bordas, 1987).
    • Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993).
    • Dean, Tim. “Transsexual Identification, Gender Performance Theory, and the Politics of the Real,” literature and psychology, 39:4 (1993), pp. 1-27.
    • Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 278-93.
    • Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Science (New York: Vintage, 1970).
    • Granon-Lafont, Jeanne. La topologie ordinaire de Jacques Lacan (Paris: Point Hors Ligne, 1985).
    • Grigg, Russell. “Signifier, Object, and the Transference,” Lacan and the Subject of Language ed. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan and Mark Bracher (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 100-15.
    • Heidegger, Martin. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. with introduction and lexicon by Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982), 27-76.
    • —. “Kant’s Thesis About Being,” Thinking About Being: Aspects of Heidegger’s Thought, ed. Robert W. Shahan and J. N. Mohanty (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984), pp. 7-33.
    • —. “The Thing,” On the Way to Language, trans. P. Hertz and J. Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 165-86.
    • Irigaray, Luce. “Le Lieu, L’intervalle: Lecture d’Aristote, Physique IV, 2, 3, 4, 5,” Éthique de la différence sexuelle (Paris: Minuit, 1984), 41-59. “Place, Interval: A Reading of Aristotle, Physics IV,” An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1993), pp. 34-55.
    • Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: Macmillan, 1973).
    • Laplanche, Jean. Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1976).
    • Lee, Jonathan Scott. Jacques Lacan (New York: G. K. Hall, 1990).
    • Miller, Jacques-Alain. “Extimité,” Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure, and Society, ed. Mark Bracher, Marshall Alcorn, Jr., Ronald J. Cortell, and Franĉoise Massardier-Kenney (New York: New York UP, 1994), pp. 74-87.
    • Montrelay, Michèle. “The Story of Louise,” Returning to Freud: Clinical Psychoanalysis in the School of Lacan, ed. Stuart Schneiderman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980).
    • Nasio, Juan-David. Les Yeux de Laure (Paris: Aubier, 1987).
    • Piaget, Jean. Structuralism, ed. and trans. Chaninah Maschler (New York: Harper and Row, 1970).
    • Safouan, Moustafa. Pleasure and Being: Hedonism from a Psychoanalytic Point of View, trans. Martin Thom (New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1983).
    • Samuels, Robert. Between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis: Lacan’s Reconstruction of Freud (New York: Routledge, 1993).
    • Shepherdson, Charles. “Vital Signs: The Place of Memory in Psychoanalysis,” Research in Phenomenology [special issue, “Spaces of Memory”], vol. 23 (1993), 22-72.
    • —. “The Role of Gender and the Imperative of Sex,” Supposing the Subject, ed. Joan Copjec (London: Verso, 1994), 158-84.
    • —. “Adaequatio Sexualis: Is There a Measure of Sexual Difference?” From Phenomenology to Thought, Errancy, and Desire, ed. Babette Babich (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer, 1995), pp. 447-73.
    • —. “History and the Real: Foucault with Lacan,” Postmodern Culture, 5:2 (January, 1995).
    • —. “The Epoch of the Body: Need, Demand and the Drive in Kojève and Lacan,” Perspectives on Embodiment: Essays from the NEH Institute at Santa Cruz, ed. Honi Haber and Gail Weiss, (New York: Routledge, 1996).
    • Silverman, Kaja, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996).
    • Weber, Samuel. Return to Freud: Jacques Lacan’s Dislocation of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991).
    • Zizek, Slavoj. For They Know Not What They Do (New York: Verso, 1991).
    • —. Tarrying with the Negative (Durham: Duke UP, 1993).

     

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

    Wes Chapman

    Illinois Wesleyan University
    wchapman@titan.iwu.edu

     

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    Notes

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    Works Cited

     

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

     

  • Disney and the Imagineering of Histories

    Scott Schaffer

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    the Three Caballeros: The Monroe Doctrine’s Piñata

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    The Jungle Book: The Bare Necessities, Made in India

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    Aladdin: A Whole New (Old) World

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

    Notes

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    Works Cited

     

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

     

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

    Stephen A. Fredman

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

     

    I.

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    Then why did you bother in the first place?

     

    Don’t ask stupid questions.

     

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

     

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

     

    Needed me for what?

     

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

     

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

     

    II.

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    III.

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    IV.

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    V.

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    VI.

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    Notes

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    Works Cited

     

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

     

  • Selected Letters from Readers

     
     
     

    PMC Reader’s Report on Theoretical Obsolescence

     

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

     

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

     
     

    PMC Reader’s Report on Cyborgs

     

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

     

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

     

  • Resistance in Rhyme

    Brent Wood

    Trent University
    bwood@trentu.ca

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    Works Cited

     

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

     

  • Multiplicity: Una Vista de Nada

    Crystal Downing

    Messiah College
    cdowning@mcis.messiah.edu

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    Notes

     

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

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

    Theresa Smalec

    University of Western Ontario
    tsmalec@julian.uwo.ca

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    Works Cited

     

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

     

  • Music and Noise: Marketing Hypertexts

    Thomas Swiss

    Drake University
    ts9911r@acad.drake.edu

     

    Eastgate Systems, Inc.

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

     

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

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

     

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

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

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

     

    Cover of Eastgate catalog, Spring 1996

     

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

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

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

     

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

     

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

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


    Storyspace browser

    Netscape browser

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

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

     

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

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

    Notes

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    8. Joyce, Minds 57.

     

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

     

  • Whose Opera Is This, Anyway?

    Jon Ippolito

    Guggenheim Museum, Soho
    ji@guggenheim.org

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

    Samuel Collins

    American University
    SCOLLIN@american.edu

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    Works Cited

     

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

     

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

    Carina Yervasi

    University of Michigan
    cly@umich.edu

     

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

     

    “An Ironic Dream of a Common Address”

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    Confession

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    Works Cited

     

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

     

  • Trip

      
     

  • Hypercapital

    David Golumbia

    University of Pennsylvania
    dgolumbi@sas.upenn.edu

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    Hyperactivity

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    “As One Put Drunk…”

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    Fixity…or, Forget It

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    Medium/Message

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    Specters, Subjects

     

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

     

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

     

    In Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida writes that

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    Internationalists

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    Il n’y a pas de hors-tissu

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    Notes

     

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

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Arick, Martin R. The TCP/IP Companion: A Guide for the Common User. Boston, London and Toronto: QED Publishing Group, 1993.
    • Besser, Howard. “From Internet to Information Superhighway.” Brook and Boal, eds., 59-70.
    • Brook, James. “Reading and Riding with Borges.” Brook and Boal, eds., 263-274.
    • Brook, James, and Iain A. Boal, eds. Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1995.
    • Chomsky, Noam. The Chomsky Reader. Ed. James Peck. New York: Pantheon Books, 1987.
    • —. Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1989.
    • —. Deterring Democracy. London and New York: Verso, 1991.
    • —. “Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda.” Westfield, NJ: Open Magazine Pamphlet Series, Pamphlet #10, 1991.
    • —. Letters from Lexington: Reflections on Propaganda. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1993.
    • de Grazia, Margreta, and Peter Stallybrass. “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text.” Shakespeare Quarterly 44:3 (Fall 1993). 255-283.
    • Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. (1972). Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
    • —. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International., 1993. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York and London: Routledge, 1994.
    • Dretske, Fred. Knowledge and the Flow of Information. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press/Bradford Books.
    • Eisenstein, Elizabeth. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979.
    • Erickson, Lee. The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800-1850. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.
    • Ess, Charles. “The Political Computer: Hypertext, Democracy, and Habermas,” 1994. In Landow, ed., Hyper/Text/Theory, 225-267.
    • Golumbia, David. “Black and White World: Race, Ideology, and Utopia in Triton and Star Trek.” Cultural Critique 32 (Winter 1995-96): 75-96.
    • Hayes, R. Dennis. “Digital Palsey: RSI and Restructuring Capital.” Brook and Boal, eds., 173-180.
    • Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.
    • Kotz, David M. “Accumulation, Money, and Credit in the Circuit of Capital.” Rethinking MARXISM 4:2 (Summer 1991): 119-132.
    • Landow, George P. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992.
    • —, ed. Hyper/Text/Theory. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994.
    • Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), 1858. London and New York: Penguin Books/New Left Review, 1993.
    • —. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1., 1867. Trans. B. Fowkes. New York: Vintage Books, 1977.
    • —. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 2, 1865-70). Trans. David Fernbach. New York and London: Penguin Books/New Left Review, 1978.
    • McGann, Jerome J. The Textual Condition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991.
    • Moulthrop, Stuart. “You Say You Want a Revolution? Hypertext and the Laws of Media.” Postmodern Culture 1:3 (May 1991). 53 paragraphs. Available at http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/issue.591/moulthro.591.
    • —. “Reading from the Map: Metonymy and Metaphor in the Fiction of ‘Forking Paths.’” Hypermedia and Literary Studies. Ed. Paul Delany and George Landow. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991.
    • —. “Rhizome and Resistance: Hypertext and the Dreams of a New Culture.” (1994). In Landow, ed., Hyper/Text/Theory, 299-319.
    • Neill, Monty. “Computers, Thinking, and Schools in ‘the New World Economic Order.’” In Brook and Boal, eds., 181-194.
    • Poster, Mark. The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
    • Rosenberg, Martin. “Physics and Hypertext: Liberation and Complicity in Art and Pedagogy.” Landow, ed., Hyper/Text/Theory, 268-298.
    • Serexhe, Bernhard. “Towards Another ‘Brave New World’?” CTheory: Theory, Technology, and Culture 19:1-2. Global Algorithm 1.10, 7/3/96. Available at http://www.ctheory.com/ga1.10-deregulation.html.
    • Shell, Marc. Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophic Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era, 1982. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993 .
    • Spinelli, Martin. “Radio Lessons for the Internet.” Postmodern Culture 6:2 (January 1996). 35 paragraphs. Available at http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/issue.196/pop-cult.196.html.
    • Sterling, Bruce. “Unstable Networks.” CTheory: Theory, Technology, and Culture 19:1-2. Global Algorithm 1.9, 6/26/96. Available at http://www.ctheory.com/ga1.9-unstable_networks.html.
    • Sweezy, Paul M. The Theory of Capitalist Development, 1942. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1953.
    • —. Modern Capitalism and Other Essays. New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1972.
    • Wall, Wendy. The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1993.
    • Warner, Michael. The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990.

     

  • Poststructuralist Paraesthetics and the Phantasy of the Reversal of Generations

     
     

    Vadim Linetski

     
     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    IV. Aphanisis and telepathy

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    V. Paraesthetics and the infantile sexual theories

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    VI. Sublimation and its discontents–Sublimation primal and secondary

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    VII. The production of Oedipus

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

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

     

    IX. The guilt of gift, the gift of guilt

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

    X. The Law of (Oedipal) Return

     

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

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

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

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

     

    XI. Sublimation qua aphanisis of hermeneutic desire

     

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

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

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

     

    XII. The poststructuralist return to Jung

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

    XIII. The Ulysses complex and its Oedipal representation

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

    XIV. The debt of madness

     

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

     

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

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

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

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

     

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

     

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

     

    XVI. What James knew

     

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

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

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

     
    Paradoxically, by acquiescing to this option poststructuralism gains more than it loses, at least at first sight. Upon cursory reading, the novel seems to reenact the foundational fantasy of poststructuralism–the fantasy of the reversal of generations–and what is more to do this on both levels of discourse–of author and heroine alike, allowing us to conceive of tele-empathy as a genuinely discursive phenomenon.

     
    In effect, in the course of the narrative, which coincides with the process of growing up, Maisie’s status undergoes a characteristic reversal that it is not too far-fetched to be described as a generational one. The divorce of Maisie’s parents, with which the story starts, positions the child as an entity the parents desire “not for any good they could do her, but for the harm they could, with her unconscious aid, do each other” (1966: 13). Hence from the outset she functions as a means of mediation. However, the older she grows the more consciously she deploys this role “of bringing people together” (54-55, 66-67, 233) for which she developes a kind of talent if which she is quite proud (264-265). However, this reversal, far from being an instance of “art for art’s sake,” is fostered by Maisie’s need to feel secure in an unstable situation, which is governed by the instincts of self-preservation.81 Notably, this movement from activity to passivity is caused by the aphanisis of the parents’ desire to harm one another.

     
    The reversal which apparently structures the rècit is paralleled by the discursive reversal, by the interplay of the two tropes for which James has an obvious predilection. These tropes are the master tropes of poststructuralism. Hence, as is easily foreseen, the outcome of the interplay between oxymoron and pleonasm82 is the same interaction with which our analysis has sufficiently acquainted the reader. The impossibility of discursively revitalizing what vitally needs revitalization would be especially disastrous in James’s case, amounting to the author’s failure to attain the aim that he has posed himself, namely, to endow the heroine with the power to transform “appearances in themselves vulgar and empty enough” into “the stuff of poetry and tragedy and art” (7-8). The whole Jamesian project boils down to this particular aim. Put otherwise, it would not be enough for Maisie “simply to wonder…about them” (8), for within the (para)esthetic libidinal framework of aphanisis, especially when doubled, is at odds with this task. To worsen matters beyond any possibility of repair, discursive tele-empathy between author and hero, especially for novel that by its very title foregrounds the question of knowledge, would make the author an easy prey to logocentrism, positioning him either as the subject who knows, or, what amounts to the same, as a victim of repression. As the study of Przybylowicz amply proves, this is precisely how poststructuralism (mis)reads James. Fortunately, on an unbiased reading, James turns out to be not such an easy mark.

     
    Put paradoxically, for all their suspicion regarding the author’s overtly stated intentions, poststructuralist critics interpret James’s preface and not the text itself. If read alone, James’s preface allows us to speak about repression and thereby stage an interpretive act as an intertextual affair between the author (who in this perspective should have committed suicide in order to attain clairvoyance) and the reader.

     
    Such a view leads to a dialogically-conventional (mis)reading of Bakhtin, especially of his notion of emphatically grounded exotopy as a privilege of the author. The unnoticed irony is that on these terms it neither makes sense to speak of dialogism as a textual characteristic83 nor, and this is the point we are drawing, of the dialogicity of interpretive encounter with the text, of course, if we continue to use the term “dialogism” as a synonym for subversion.

     
    The result of the one-sided excess of vision is that the author-hero relation comes to be conceived in terms of amplification and supplementation of what the hero(ine) does not see/know. As Tony Tanner has put it, “In a sense the book hinges on what Maisie does not know” (1965: 288). However, it is precisely this “in a sense” that makes all the difference in the world.

     
    Although James is the first to foreground supplementarity of the auctorial discourse84, he is also the first to notice that this exotopy is at odds with his task, but which is more profound than the preface’s phrasing may suggest. James’s task is not the dialogical revitalization–technically impossible and morally deplorable85–but the de-victimization of his heroine, the transformation of her (and thereby his own) discourse into the discourse of innocence free of intertextual guilt/debt. The task is a Nietzschean one, for despite all the poststructuralist efforts to make of Nietzsche an avatar of primordial (intertextual) indebtedness, Nietzsche himself was quite unambiguous regarding the priorities among (re-evaluated) values: “In this way the gods served in those days to justify man…in those days they took upon themselves, not the punishment but, what is nobler, the guilt” (1989: 94). Since the justification/de-victimization of man/hero can be achieved only through the other, it follows that the model Nietzsche had in mind represents a ‘beyond’ of logocentric monologue/dialogue dyad which reinforces indebtedness. This means that Nietzschean views correspond neatly to the Bakhtinian model of aesthetic activity aimed at ensuring the discursive innocence.

     
    Characteristically, the very title of James’s novel undermines all attempts to situate Jamesian textuality within the dialogically-intertextual (para)esthetic framework. The rough fact is that within this framework the title makes no sense at all.

     
    The supplementary nature of the one-sided excess of vision indebts the author to the reader by in turn indebting the reader to the hero(ine). So long as Maisie is conceived as the subject supposed not to know, it follows that the author’s task is to provide the reader with the answer to the question posed by the title. Certainly, the author becomes a possessor of knowledge but, since he is indebted/obliged to pass it to the reader, his possession is only a provisional one and has nothing to do with Absolute Mastery.86 However, James is reluctant to acknowledge this debt.87

     
    Ironically, from the poststructuralist standpoint, the answer to the question of what Maisie knew is doomed to remain in abeyance, albeit without this answer no interpretation can be regarded as complete.88 Certainly, this incompleteness itself may be interpreted in favor of a poststructuralist stance as evidence that the central concern of James is to perpetuate the transmission of tradition. For, in effect, James is quite unambiguous about the communicative point, to wit, about how Maisie knew. That her knowledge is acquired by (para)esthetic means of empathy and telepathy, if not by hypnotic clairvoyance, lies at the surface.89 This should already suggest that matters may eventually be a bit more complex.90 And in effect, on second glance, we are bound to concede that the title of James’s novel relates to the text in a way which is apparently more “conventional” than the one envisaged by Derrida (1991: 123). Nevertheless, it is precisely this conventionality that proves to be an actual subversion of tradition promoted by Derrida’s communicative supplementarity of which the title is a privileged example.

     
    Appearances notwithstanding, the real question on which the narrative hinges is not the “how” but the “what” of Maisie’s knowledge. Not for nothing is the text punctuated by confirmations coming from the author as well as from the other personages that Maisie actually does know, albeit the content of her knowledge remains unrevealed. This means that James grants Maisie an excess of vision over himself equal to that which his status of the author provides him with. Put otherwise, if the “how” presupposes the (para)esthetic one-sided excess of authorial vision, the “what” grants the same excess to the hero(ine), thereby introducing the dimension of mutual discursive dependency between the author and the hero which effectively abolishes the intertextual indebtedness to the reader promoted by the one-sided exotopy. But to make our model of the aesthetic event fully coincide with Jamesian textuality and unfurl its subversive potential, a final step remains, which will reveal its implications for the construction of feminine sexuality closely tied with the process of sublimation.

     
    Our description of mutual dependency between the author and hero can still be reappropriated (para)esthetically so long as its temporal dimension remains unspecified. One may argue that mutual dependency boils down to a mutual act of tele-empathical time-giving as the precondition of interpretation as such. The result would be a communicative re-naming of James’s novel. In other words, we still have to prove that the title of the novel has much more to it than the postructuralist reader is willing to concede.

     
    Fortunately, this proof provides the notion of aphanisis that within the (para)esthetic setting can be experienced only negatively as an always already present danger of communicative exhaustion which can be warded off only by recourse to the device that brings it about. This vicious circle is effectively broken by Jamesian narrative.

     
    Witness the final scene of the novel, the scene of Maisie’s departure with Mrs. Wix. This departure, since it is a matter of free choice on Maisie’s part, is essential to the proper understanding of James’s relation to his heroine and the appreciation of the subversive force of his textuality. For, in choosing to depart, Maisie effectively disentangles herself from the network of indebting relationships which, paradoxically, she herself has helped to establish by means of her empathetical identifications. To depart means to renounce the (para)esthetic strategy and the knowledge accumulated by its means. This proves that there actually was something that Maisie knew. And this renouncement makes it impossible to define our novel as a Bildungsroman, that is, as a passage from innocent ignorance to knowledge–a structure underpinning logocentric discursivity as the mechanism of tradition transmission (rites de passage).91 For that we are left with is the return of innocence.92

     
    The return of innocence should not be confused with the return to the monistic myth of pure origins. Paradoxically, (para)esthetics promotes this myth by conceiving of the aesthetic event as a relation between text and reader which becomes motivated by primordial indebtedness. On the other hand, Bakhtin’s theory corroborated by Jamesian textuality makes the bond between author and hero a purely arbitrary one and thereby for the first time provides an opening for the deployment of Saussurean linguistics without betraying its essence. But by the same token, we have a chance to solve the psychoanalytic quandary about super-ego and sublimation.

     
    The trouble with the concept of the super-ego is derivative of the fundamental psychoanalytic trouble with temporality. The basic structure of temporality with which psychoanalysis operates is that of Nachträglichkeit, of belated understanding. It is precisely these hermeneutical concerns which hinder a genuine psychoanalytic narratology.

     
    Paradoxically, the same Nachträglichkeit grounds both views on the emergence of the super-ego. According to Kleinians, the super-ego is already present at the pre-genital stage, whereas in the more conventional perspective it is the heir of the Oedipus complex. Appearances notwithstanding, both views are complimentary, representing an instance of the patently Lacanian signifying see-saw between too early and too late. For both theories converge at one fundamental point, i.e., both view the emergence of the super-ego as the result of introjection, that is, of the transformational movement from arbitrariness into motivatedness, the latter the precondition of interpretation. This explains why the relation between ego and super-ego is unanimously considered to one of indebtedness, guilt and fear of aphanisis. Put otherwise, the excess of vision is one-sided.

     
    From the poststructuralist standpoint, the semiotic correlate of the super-ego is the reader and the ego correlates with the author and/or the text. The result is the perpetuation of tradition, the inability to disentangle logocentric strictures.

     
    However, Bakhtinian theory and Jamesian textuality suggest that it is far more adequate to conceive of the aesthetic event as structured by the mutual dependence between author and hero. Psychoanalytically, this means that super-ego is equally and to the same extent dependent on the ego as the latter is on the former which boils down to saying that the relation between the two agencies is that between loved and beloved (cf. Schafer 1960). Semiotically, the relationship thus conceived is purely gratuitous and arbitrary, for the super-ego is the ego’s product, the result of the renouncement of the claims of the instincts of self-preservation,93 of the actively performed aphanisis qua sublimation leading to the emergence of sexuality. It is this sublimating process which structures James’s novel, making it the very locus of the construction of feminine identity beyond patriarchal Oedipality.

     
    According to Freud, the weakness of the super-ego stemming from polymorphous identifications places women in a dependent position (1925: 29; 1933: 138). Therefore, we can conclude that the basic problem of feminism is the strengthening of the super-ego, which, as our exploration suggests, has by definition a feminine gender.

     
    Significantly, only on these premises can we hope to allot the notion of sublimation the place in psychoanalysis that it deserves, and thereby offer a theory of culture that escapes the notorious fancifulness of psychoanalytic accounts. The trouble with sublimation is that, so long as one conceives of it as a desexualization, it remains impossible to account for the existence of subversive art. In the conventional perspective sublimation is a synonym for conformism and compliance with received cultural norms. Sublimation becomes the very opposite of any genuine creativity, which is subversive by definition.94 However, certain psychoanalytic accounts of creativity suggest that it has nothing to do with repression of sexuality (cf. Lowenfeld 1941: 119-121) and that the self-preservative instincts, epistemophilia being the most prominent among them, interfere with creativity.95 Witness Freud’s study on Leonardo.96 In other words, if we are to continue to align sublimation with creativity, we must redefine the former as the process of sublimation of ego-instincts.97

     
    In its turn, this redefinition paves the way for a relationship between psychoanalysis and literature which will not lead to mutual reductivity. Textuality receives a firm psychoanalytic grounding in the ternary structure of psychic agencies. If the aesthetic event is an affair between author/super-ego and hero/ego, then its product–a text–is the Id itself.98 This explains why it can only be repressed, distorted, misread by the super-ego aligned by post-structuralism with the reader.

     
    Witness the poststructuralist repression of Jamesian textuality by an interpretive confinement within the framework of the ego’s fantasy of reversal of generations which James’s discourse on Maisie effectively subverts.

     

    Notes

     

    1. Put otherwise, it is not enough just to add the prefix “anti-.” Unfortunately, in the wake of Deleuze and Guattari theorists are quite content with this option.

     

    2. Cf. “…no absolute transcendence of the Oedipal is possible. It is no more possible to get rid of the omnipotent aspect of the Oedipal position than it is to get rid of the pre-Oedipal fantasy of omnipotence. (Or rather, it would only be possible in a world without loss, envy and difference–which would be a wholly omnipotent world.) Rather, the point is to subvert the concealed omnipotence by exposing it, as well as to recognize another realm of sexual freedom that reworks the Oedipal terms. To be sure, this realm depends upon the other face of omnipotence: the over-inclusive capacities to transcend reality by means of fantasy, which can be reintegrated in the sexual symbolic of the post-Oedipal phase” (Benjamin 1995: 119). It remains to be seen whether the equation of envy, loss and difference, on the one hand, and of fantasy, over-inclusiveness and sexuality, on the other, can be sustained. The testing of these equations is one of the aims of our present inquiry.

     

    3. I do not think that this is a simplification or a misreading. Speaking pre-Oedipally, there is only one combined parental figure (a notion which falls under the rubric of the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis). Hence an attack on Kristeva for reinscribing gender stereotypes within the pre-Oedipal phase (cf. Cornell 1991: 69-71) is rather puzzling from the psychoanalytic standpoint. However, since this attack focuses on Kristevan phrasing, it corroborates our assumption about the conventional rhetoricity of postsructuralist strategies.

     

    4. Cf. J. Hillis Miller 1984; A. Ronell 1984, 1989; N. Rand 1988, 1989; E. Rashkin 1988, 1990; M. Sprengnether 1995, among other examples.

     

    5. Both views converge in a most paradoxical way, representing two ways to the same notorious impasse of applied psychoanalysis which constantly misses its target (text) hitting either too low or too high. “A perfect psychoanalysis of literature” (the one performed in Derrida’s view by Lacan) reduces the text by treating it as a symptom which itself is a failure (too low). On the other hand, Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” undermines the very possibility of psychoanalytic explorations into the arts. Bloom deals only with “strong poets,” that is, with those who have successfully overcome the influence of predecessors. This obviously means that there are no traces (symptoms) of this influence in their texts (too high). It is precisely this paradox of Bloom’s intertextuality to which N. Abraham’s elaborations address themselves. Every text hides a “secret” (“truth”, “symptom”), but this secret cannot be located in any concrete text save that of the interpreter (a most lucid example of this strategy is Abraham’s “The Phantom of Hamlet or The Sixth Act,” 1988). The interpreter comes to occupy the middle position assigned by Derrida to “pharmakon.” This means it is impossible to maintain that logocentrism undermines itself prior to any deconstructive intervention. Further it means that an act of interpretation boils down to the production of the “aesthetic object,” the production that, as we have shown elsewhere (Linetski 1995), in Bakhtinian theory is an activity of the reader as a fictitious other.

     

    6. I refer the reader to Lacan’s Eleventh Seminar where he invokes “aphanisis” only to make fun of it as a phantastical notion (cf. 1977: 207).

     

    7. Cf. “It is always difficult to imagine that one might be able to think of something in separation, within one’s interior space, without being surprised by the other…This puerile belief of mine, in part mine, can only stem from a foundation–sure, let’s call it unconscious….” (Derrida 1983: 212). The last sentence exposes the link between the two excerpts from Jones’s paper and in doing so exposes Lacan as a mediator between Jones’s and Derrida’s views on the unconscious, for it was up to Lacan to define the unconscious as “the presence of the analyst” (1988: 159). That is why already at this point we can precipitatingly hint at two conclusions of our analysis. The telepathic unconscious propounded by Derrida is profoundly similar to the logocentric one of Lacan because both guarantee the possibility of understanding and make the presence of the analyst/interpreter indispensable (one cannot help but wonder what the unconscious telepathic discourse “repeated in large letters to avoid all misunderstanding” has to do with the basic assumption of deconstruction concerning the primordial impossibility to deliver any “truth” whatsoever at its hermeneutic destination). This makes the unconscious an “aesthetic object” that, according to Bakhtin, is a product of interpretative activity of the reader as a fictitious other. Whence the Jones-Bakhtin connection, for the former also defines the operator as a dispensable figure. And this prompts us to equate the unconscious conceived along the poststructuralist (telepathic) lines with fetish qua Freudian ” (para)esthetic object” par excellence–a theme to be pursued elsewhere.

     

    8. As we shall see, the reference to Russian Formalism is a far cry from being simply a figure of speech. Derridian narratology, primarily thanks to the concept of “supplement,” has incurred a debt to Formalist theory–a debt which, given Derrida’s view of structuralism and its Russian precursor as adhering to the logocentric paradigm, no one is willing to notice, let alone to requite.

     

    9. “One may lay down the dictum that if the patient is not treated by psycho-analysis he will treat himself by means of suggestion, or–put more fully–he will see to it that he will get treated by means of suggestion, whatever other views the physician may have on the subject” (291).

     

    10. Cf. “Perhaps, incidentally, this is the reason why it is so difficult for the hypnotist to give effective suggestions that obviously conflict with the father-ideal, such as criminal and immoral suggestions” (287).

     

    11. Cf. “A general philosophical category is imposed, leading to a curiously asexual (and affectless) psychoanalysis” (Macey 1995: 81). Although Macey is speaking about Lacan and his commitment to Hegelian categories, the formula also applies well to psychoanalysis in general. The only point where a correction seems to be necessary is the linking of asexual and affectless. As our investigation will prove, psychoanalysis comes to be threatened with ultimate and unambiguous desexualization precisely in the wake of the poststructuralist foregrounding of various models grounded in affectivity, the telepathic model being the most illuminating example.

     

    12. Paradoxically, psychoanalysis not only boils down to this problem but, in the last resort, stands or falls with it. In effect, the theories of neuroses and psychoses alike hinge on the notion of sexual traumatic experiences of childhood. But the assumption of the sexual nature of these traumas presupposes that there is such a thing as infantile sexuality, the main evidence here being precisely the infantile sexual quest.

     

    13. The point of view advocated here allows for the first time to really merge structure and history–a task which remains unaccomplished despite all efforts undertaken in this respect from Saussure to Derrida. And this is because sublimation is not an arbitrary moment (a dominant psychoanalytic view) but a necessary and unavoidable stage predating repression/Oedipality. The quandary regarding sublimation is precisely the inability to conceive of it temporally. This leads to the structural misconception of this notion.

     

    14. That psychoanalysts and poststructuralists alike prefer to turn their eyes away from this logic is quite understandable, for to expose it means to undermine the famous notion of the mirror stage as a first step in acquiring an identity by an attempt to unify anarchical sexuality through the reference to the other. Ironically, to relinquish this notion means not only to part with the Lacanian version of dialogism but also with the very point d’appui of a postsructuralist attack on patriarchy which, as Brennan has made sufficiently clear, has to postulate the existence of a self-contained ego (cf. Brennan 1993: 12-25).

     

    15. See “The Ego and the Id” (1923).

     

    16. It seems that this is the only indisputable point in the psychoanalytic theory of the super-ego.

     

    17. Cf. Quite a random example: “With every identification, Freud points out, there is a desexualization and at the same time an instinctual diffusion. The libidinal cathexis no longer binds the destructive tendencies which now find expression in the severity and punitiveness of the superego. This diffusion is particularly evident in melancholia” (Sandler 1960: 134; italics mine).

     

    18. Witness his attempt to provide an intertextual symbolic framework for the Rat Man’s fantasy or for Dora’s imagery–an attempt that received a full elaboration in Shengold (1980) and Kanzer (1980). But the most notorious example of psychoanalytic thematicism is certainly “Character and Anal Eroticism” (1908).

     

    19. It is not an accident that the obfuscation of infantile sexual theories is paralleled by the interest in primal fantasies, for the latter foreground the notion of repression problematized by the former.

     

    20. In point of fact, if the child’s concerns were defensive ones, he would have had all reasons to accept the explanation furnished by the parents, and this precisely because a stork or its substitute can be hindered (at least phantasmatically) from coming. The parents’ aim is not so much to deceive, but to console the child who–unexplainably–does not want to be consoled.

     

    21. “Perhaps we have not always noted sufficiently in our analyses that this is when children begin to divine that their father and mother can do something that they themselves cannot, namely, can produce children together” (Boehm 1931: 449). As we shall see, the apparent familiarity of this statement evaporates the moment we try to read it semiotically (i.e., to treat the parent’s “doing” as a performative). However, in our case the deployment of this patently poststructuralist mode of interpretation will immediately subvert the claims of its propagators.

     

    22. It is worthwhile to adumbrate one of the “remnants” of our analysis which proves its fruitfulness by highlighting the scope of reassessments to which it can give rise. From the point of view advocated here it is possible to resuscitate one of the most abused items from psychoanalytic archives, namely, Rank’s theory of the “trauma of birth” which turns out to be indispensable for tackling a number of contradictions that Freud’s rejection of Rank’s intuition has left us with. But, in order to make Rank’s notion an effective weapon, one has to view the traumatic birth as the birth of a sibling.

     

    23. Thus far only one author was candid enough to at least voice suspicions that perhaps dialogism may be a purely logocentric affair (cf. Calinescu 1991: 163). Needless to say, to pursue this train of thought requires more independence than the average theorist can muster.

     

    24. Obviously this begs the question of how we are to conceive the development of a child who is spared the society of siblings. The question is crucial since, on our own terms, the secondary sublimation is a necessary stage. Although an answer requires a large amount of original clinical work, we can assume that the situation in both cases is basically the same. A single child is prompted in his quest by comparison with his more (un)fortunate playmates. One can even go as far as to surmise that his quest will be all the more compelling since in addition he has to grapple with the puzzle why “there are too few…persons involved” (Fenichel 1931: 421).

     

    25. However idiosyncratic or paradoxical it may appear, this thesis is the only solution to the contradiction which haunts psychoanalytic theory in matters of infantile sexual curiosity. As we have already pointed out, the whole problem is central to Freud’s teaching. But the irony of the matter is precisely that within the Oedipal framework which is postulated as preexistent, the infantile sexual theories can be conceived of only as an arbitrary phenomena unable to influence child’s development in any significant way. In effect, if the incestuous wishes are primordial, if they preexist the traumatic situation we are investigating, it is impossible to understand what influence the arrival of sibling and the fantasies which it fosters can have upon them.

     

    26. In the wake of Foucault and Derrida, we happily take for granted that semiosis as such is grounded in repression. Against this background, the recent study by Kincaid (1992) is bound to appear more innovative than it actually is. Kincaid’s critique of Foucault and the questioning of the notion of repression deserves our full appreciation especially because it comes as an introduction to the study of the period (Victorian culture) which is conventionally regarded as a patent example of the workings of repression. Unfortunately, Kincaid’s introductory remarks lack consistency, being a far cry from a theory of writing without repression.

     

    27. This has corollaries, the notion of the primal scene being the most formidable among them. Paradoxically, within the libidinal framework we have to make an unpleasant choice between the notion of the primal scene–as a real event or as a fantasy, it matters little–and the concept of infantile sexual curiosity. According to Freud, the primal scene is already a result of sexual curiosity while at the same time it is said to awaken sexuality (Freud 1925: 24 et passim). On the other hand, sexual curiosity is an ultimate proof for the existence of infantile sexuality.

     

    28. Cf. Silverman (1988), Przybylowicz (1986), Rashkin (1990).

     

    29. As a reminder to the reader with an all too stark reality complex: the whole story is played on the fantasmatic/hallucinatory plane, the plane on which the (para)esthetic tele/emphatic discourse of poststructuralism deliberately operates.

     

    30. Especially if we grant pertinence to the poststructuralist assessment of logocentrism as a culture which places (absolute) knowledge above all other values.

     

    31. Thus far poststructuralism has not managed to get beyond these two–complementary–solutions in its attempt to account for the “ego’s era” in the history of human knowledge.

     

    32. Therefore Derrida’s critics, whose main target is the alleged a-historicity of deconstruction (cf. Lentricchia 1985: 105-106; Brennan 1993: 195) obviously miss the point. The paradox is that deconstruction’s inherent historicity is a purely self-deconstructive affair.

     

    33. Cf.: “In art, material must be alive and precious. And this is where there appeared the epithet, which does not introduce anything new into the word, but simply renews its dead figurativeness” (Shklovsky 1973, 43; italics added).

     

    34. The most lucid example is certainly Derrida’s La carte postale (1980). According to Derrida, the postcard depicting Plato behind Socrates corroborates his views on textuality/writing which by definition is incompatible with the notion of stable origins. Writing by virtue of the reversal it stages makes it impossible to grant hermeneutic supremacy to any particular structure: “…the oedipal trait is only a rection for the leading thread of the spool” (362), “only one figure among others” (Weber 1987: 106). This explains why the generational reversal has become a poststructuralist strategy par excellence: “Everything has to be read in reverse” (Derrida 1986: 74). Allegedly this is “a new attitude towards knowledge” directed “against the traditional model of research” and by the same token against the continuity of tradition grounded in the belief in “an irreversible heritage” (Ulmer 1985: 133, 136). However, an attempt to apply grammatology more or less coherently immediately exposes the real state of affairs. I refer to endeavours of Abraham, Torok and their imitators. The aim to be attained is the one mentioned above: to prove that the symptoms are more varied and complex, are not reducible to one common source (Oedipus/castration) but that they have multiple origins (cf. Rashkin 1988: 32-34). But the result is the substitution of one general structure for another: instead of Oedipus we have the genealogical reversal structure which comes to be regarded as an explanatory structure “par excellence” (Abraham/Torok 1978: 395). The irony is twofold. For one thing, the search for (textual) secrets which declares itself free from Oedipus/castration but nevertheless stresses its psychoanalytic character, by necessity boils down to equating psychoanalysis with the most general structure of scienticity which poststructuralism attempts to undermine by means akin to those of Abraham and Torok (this logic is especially lucid in Torok and Rand 1994). This means that precisely within the conventional psychoanalytic framework Oedipus/castration is only one figure among the others. However, this is not to say that we are dealing with another instance of the paradox of the Cretan liar sufficiently thematized by poststructuralism as the universal fate of discursivity. The gist of the matter is that the famous critique of Barbara Johnson (1977) is no critique at all, for Derrida is the first to admit that it is impossible to escape the Law(s) of the genre one sets out to deconstruct. But by the same token our analysis can lay claim to being the first sustained critique of the shortcomings of deconstruction, and this because only from our standpoint does it becom possible to show that deconstruction does not repeat the fallacies it has pointed out but tries to secure the mechanisms which tradition itself has failed to shield.

     

    35. “The ‘reversal’ fantasy then gratifies this by placing the child in the imagination in a position of power over the parent” (Jones 1950: 411). The same interpretation is reiterated by Brennan, who evokes the fantasy in her discussion of the “ego’s era” but significantly breaks off the discussion at the point where further investigation threatens to undermine the accepted views on patriarchal discourse (1993: 96-97).

    36. One goes even as far as to say that the notion of reversal is the Lacanian concept par excellence. It is the reversal which underpins the Imaginary as well as the Symbolic. Witness the famous scheme of the concave mirror (1977: 145; 1978: 132-134; 1988: 77-79) or the definition of transference illustrated by reference to “a famous song by Georgius Je suis fils-père (‘I am son-father‘)” (1977: 159), or, last but not least, the reversal underpinning the celebrated interpretation of the Freudian dictum “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden” (1988: 232).

     

    37. Although I see no point in multiplying evidence, it may be worthwhile to make an exception for a corroboration which comes from the Lacanian camp. Paradoxically, an attempt to develop Lacanian theory has led Laplanche to reformulate the problematic of castration in terms of a conflict between fathers and grandfathers (1980a: 226-227) which is precisely the conflict foregrounded by the reversal fantasy (to posit oneself as a father of one’s own father means to adopt the role of the grandfather).

     

    38. Hence Brennan’s account is in itself an example of discursive reversal: “In making the woman…the repository of his truth…the man is directing his urge to control and his belief in something beyond himself to the same object. He has no reference point for his ‘I’ that is distinct from his ego, in that he has no grounds for separating that to which he defers (the woman as truth) from that which he seeks to shape” (1993: 74). As we shall shortly see, some Bakhtinian intuitions applied to the textual reality offer an effective solution to this self-imposed poststructuralist quandary.

     

    39. Cf. “…the slower time becomes, the greater the ego’s need to speed things up, its anxiety, its splitting, its need for control, its ‘cutting-up’ in its urge to know…and its general aggression towards the other” (Brennan 1993: 181). According to Brennan, these are the consequences of the acting out of the foundational fantasy of patriarchy. As our analysis shows, the failure to identify the foundational fantasy leads not only to the misconception of patriarchy but to the theoretical acting out which reconfirms what it intends to subvert.

     

    40. Characteristically, Brennan speaks of the “energetic attention” as “the cornerstone of my theory of an intersubjective economy of energy” (110; italics added). However, this allegedly innovative theory is what patriarchal discursivity boils down to.

     

    41. Hence the controversy Derrida vs. Heidegger, deconstruction vs. hermeneutics which continues to trouble theorists (cf. Allison 1982; Hoy 1982; Behler 1991; Krell 1990) proves to be a tempest in a teapot.

     

    42. This is not to subscribe to the view expressed in an equally seminal paper by R. Gasché (1994) who thinks that Derrida and Derridians are simply and bluntly at odds. In my view, the appropriation of Derrida’s theory by literary critics is faithful enough. The real problem is not the one of misreading but of ignoring instances in Derrida’s work where the author is at odds with himself. These contradictions have nothing to do with de Manian dialectic of blindness and insight, being far closer to the Freudian conflict between conscious and unconscious strivings, save that in Derrida’s case the conflict seems to be a hysterical one, i.e., the conflict between two consiousnesses which, according to Freud, comes to the fore in hypnotic and similar paranormal states (cf. Freud 1885: 91). Needless to say, it is precisely these instances that can furnish the starting point of a real deconstruction.

     

    43. All the apparent “parergonal” confusion of tongues (polylogue) notwithstanding, Derridian polylogue cannot escape from this basic Bakhtinian rule: the speaking subjects remain distinct and do not merge (cf. 1987: 340-343, 358, 377).

     

    44. Witness Derrida’s style, his obsessive question “where?” followed by an immediate unequivocal reply: “there” (cf. among many examples 1987: 361, 366, 372). Which means that Derrida’s and Heidegger’s concerns are fundamentally the same. Cf.: “While the content of the call is seemingly indefinite, the direction it takes is a sure one” (Heidegger 1962: 318; his italics). Place and direction establish an elementary communicative network. In respect to the latter the content of the”call” (Heidegger)/”missive”, “letter” (Derrida) is secondary, but by the same token it is only seemingly indefinite. Notably, Abraham and Torok’s paraesthetic cryptonymie operates precisely within this Heideggerian setting: “It is understandable that, in contrast to other cases, this type of work requires a genuine partnership between patient and analyst: all the more so since the construction arrived at in this way bears no direct relation to the patient’s own topography but concerns someone else’s” (Abraham and Torok 1978: 290).

     

    45. It is towards this model that most advanced versions of poststructuralism are oriented: “The standpoints of Kristeva and Laplanche are flawed in respect of…the outside as constitutive of desire itself. By contrast, I suggest that we must develop a psychoanalytic account of subjectivity and intersubjectivity which breaks with this inside/outside boundary” (Elliott 1995: 45). Derridian “parergonal logic” is another unavoidable point of reference especially since its fullest elaboration is to be found in the study of visual representations (Derrida 1987: 18-121).

     

    46. Interestingly, our interpretation is corroborated by Lacan himself who cannot help but acknowledge that sexuality proper “shows a natural functioning of signs. At this level, they are not signifiers, for the nervous pregnancy is a symptom, and, according to the definition of the sign, something intended for someone. The signifier, being something quite different, represents a subject for another signifier” (157). This holds so long as “repressed and symptom are homogeneous, and reducible to the function of signifiers” (176) On the other hand, it is the Name-of-the-Father in Lacanian theory that should suffer repression; it follows that, on Lacan’s own premises, sexuality can be defined as precisely that which has nothing to do with repression. The repression therefore stems from the dynamic of the instincts of self-preservation, from the a-sexual search for knowledge. Characteristically, Lacan’s formulations just cited may be attributed to Torok and Abraham. But the paradox is that these authors cannot help ending with an implicit demise of the notion of repression, since the “secret” to be uncovered by means of cryptonymic reading is far more likely to be withhold consciously (cf. Abraham/Torok 1978: 236 et passim).

     

    47. Notably, only within this framework does the notion of repression become indispensable. The irony is that Derrida advances this profoundly logocentric model as the ‘beyond’ of logocentrism (1980: 287-290).

     

    48. The interest of Brennan’s explorations stem from the fact that they make particularly lucid the profound similarity between Derrida’s and Lacan’s models by exposing the ultimate–Jungian–point of their convergence.

     

    49. It should be stressed that far from being a perversion of Lacan’s teaching, Brennan’s energetics (which is another name for telepathy) faithfully follows in the steps of the Absolute Master. Whence her reference to a recent study by Boothby (1992), whose aims are those of a modest exegete (48).

     

    50. A number of Derridian concepts–hymen, blanc etc.–clearly have an inhibitory function.

     

    51. It is not a question of who actually issues the threat (Lacan has amply proved that the fact–already pointed out by Freud–that the threat more often than not comes from women has no bearing on the emerging structure), but precisely the question of structure.

     

    52. Hence the irony of Brennan’s appeal to “generational time” (1993: 189) which, within the energetical empha-telepathetic framework, is actually the time of the generational reversal.

     

    53. It may well be that Jones himself would have rejected this formula. However, the latter is the only feasible conclusion to be drawn from his elaborations and at the same time the only possibility way to to bring coherence into his rambling theorizing. In effect, Jones has done everything to obfuscate the subversive potential of his theoretical insight by trying to force his notion back into the narrow confines of the libidinal economy. However, within the framework of the libidinal economy, the notion of aphanisis is unsustainable. It is the privation of sexual gratification which provokes in the child the fear of the “extinction of sexuality” (450, 442), although, logically speaking, privation should lead to the accumulation of an undisposed libido. Fortunately, Jones’s break with logic is not thorough enough. Witness his remark that in order to ward off “the dread of aphanisis,” “the wishes that are not destined to be gratified” are damped down(442) or redirected. This is of course a conventionally libidinal view of sublimation which however implies that first of all libido should be accumulated.

     

    54. Cf. “…an undissolved transference, like an unpaid debt, can be transmitted beyond one generation. It can construct a tradition with this possibility in its entrails” (Derrida 1987: 353). The same concern, stated almost in the same words, underpins Abraham and Torok’s cryptoaesthetics (1978: 395-400).

     

    55. Obviously, this is a strictly materialist point of view. Interestingly enough, despite all Derrida’s theorization of time-giving postponements (cf.1984) which affect his style itself (thus far nobody has paid due attention to the fact that Derrida’s texts are punctuated by hymens like “Let’s take our time”, “no, no, or at least not so quickly” (1987: 281, 288).) In rare moments of candidness he cannot help admitting that there may emerge a (hermeneutic) impasse when “no one will have any more time” (1986: 117). Significantly, this impasse is somehow (for Derrida drops the intriguing thread) related to the construction of feminine identity.

     

    56. Derrida has made the fate of deconstruction directly dependent on the “unlimited textual propagation” (1980: 351-352).

     

    57. It may be argued that every closure is an arbitrary affair which therefore has no essential impact on the textual infiniteness (Cf. Lyotard 1988: 2).

     

    58. The full scope of this paradox becomes evident only when we evoke the defensive measure envisaged by Derrida, who certainly does not turn his eyes away from the shortcomings of his theory, to counteract the sort of critique just advanced. The failure to accomodate/account for the conditions of discursive possibility, says Derrida, is implied in the very definition of discursivity. Hence it would be a miracle if deconstruction has succeeded in exempting itself from this universal rule. And what is more deconstruction, according to Derrida, has never tried to do anything of the kind: one has to comply with the Law of the genre which one sets out to deconstruct. But the great irony is that in actual fact that deconstructive theory as well as practice runs counter to this basic rule of deconstruction, and this due to the central role assigned to the concept of the supplement. For the supplement is nothing else than a radical attempt precisely to account for all that which makes discourse (im)possible. To say nothing about the fact that due to the suspension of the inside/outside opposition the conditions of discursivity by necessity become invaginated. It follows that the supplement and repression as the exclusion of the unthought axiomatics are at odds. Put otherwise, Derrida’s own writing seems to escape from the predicament of all writing said to be inextricably bound with repression.

     

    59. The Freud-Bakhtin connection remains rather a murky question. The awkward Freudianism (1993b) seems to ward off any attempts to seriously broach the subject. Add to this the happy ignorance of Bakhtinians (and Slavists in general) in psychoanalytic as well as all other matters pertinent to the theoretical advancements of the last half century. With this in mind it is no wonder that the rare discussions of our problem remain either superficial (Byrd 1987) or address the question from a particularly unfruitful angle (Pirog 1987). The most recent effort to situate Bakhtin within the psychoanalytic context (Handley 1993) reiterates dialogical commonplaces and thereby effectively forecloses the possibility to divulge the most promising intuitions of Bakhtin and Freud alike.

     

    60. The volume Lacan and Narration (1985) remains representative for the current impasse of psychoanalytic narratology which is hardly avoidable so long as the narratologists continue to use the notions of repression, transference and the opposition of manifest/latent content. Up till now no one’s imagination has reached beyond this framework.

     

    61. To this task we address ourselves in a paper “The Sublime Innocence” (forthcoming).

     

    62. Despite all the assurances of Deleuze and Guattari to the contrary, repression as well as Oedipus structure their economy of desire. Witness the machines of desire which by definition are destined to perpetual malfunctioning (1972: 332-365). However, malfunctioning is precisely the principle of interpsychic economy as exemplified by a symptom (which is always a failure) unconceivable without the notion of repression.

     

    63. Recently, this exclusion has attracted attention of a number of authors (cf. States 1993). Unfortunately, they fail to propose anything worthwhile, confining themselves to a critique (actually a dismissal) of deconstruction, whereas, as we shall see, the consideration of this problematic can help deconstruction to the butterfly’s second life as opposed to the miserable caterpillar of contemporary deconstruction.

     

    64. This is precisely what happens in the most advanced–Derridian–version of poststructuralism. At the outset we have the familiar reversal: now it is the reader (receiver) who guarantees the text. However, this role presupposes “the death of the author”, or, in Derridian terms, the dissemination of the author’s name (cf. Derrida 1984). The paradox is twofold, for sometimes, notably in respect to Freud, Derrida is quite close to unambiguously stating that the reader in question is in fact the author himself (cf. 1977: 121, 136). This, in Derrida’s own terms, can only mean that there is no reader. On the other hand, if there should be a reader, his/her task boils down to collecting the scattered fragments of the author’s name. The result would be the revelation of the meaning in its most patent form: that of the proper name. This is of course quite a logocentric enterprise. However, it is precisely this enterprise which currently has come to be known as cryptonymie. Derrida’s admiration for Torok and Abraham’s stance can speak for itself.

     

    65. One example is what Sandler with unusual candidness calls the “‘conceptual dissolution’ of the superego” (1960: 130).

     

    66. Recently this work has attracted the attention of feminist theorists: “Bakhtin’s earliest work is potentially the most radical and relevant for feminists” (Pollock 1993: 238; italics mine). However, thus far nobody has attempted to profit from this potential. The reason is that the reappraisal is conceived along the familiar lines of telepathic/empathic dialogical (para)esthetics which is too narrow for Bakhtin’s thought: “…aesthetic activity is essential for understanding the social nature of individual consciousness. True aesthetic activity–and I think that for Bakhtin aesthetic activity is any shared, disinterested semiotic activity–consists of a double motion of empathy and ‘finding oneself outside’–which Bakhtin calls ‘vnenakhodimost’” (238; italics added). An attempt to transform Bakhtin’s aesthetics into poststructuralist (para)esthetics can lead only to a misunderstanding of the notion of exotopy (vnenakhodimost) central to Bakhtin’s thought. However, this misunderstanding has become a commonplace, if not a dogma, in Baktinian studies (cf. Morson and Emerson 1990).

     

    67. A striking fact which, nevertheless, remains unnoticed is that the theories of literary history propounded in this century boil down to the reversal model. There is a reversal between the Formalist notion of “indirect descendence” (a generational reversal of sorts) and the latest model of Harold Bloom which represents a double reversal starting as it does with the reversal of Formalist views in order to endorse the reversal on the rhetorical level. This means that the celebrated “double bind” turns out to be nothing else than the double reversal in respect to the structuralist predecessors, with a purely Hegelian result.

     

    68.”This other person–‘a stranger, a man you’ll never know’–fulfils his functions in dialogue outside the plot…. As a consequence of such a positioning of ‘the other’, communion assumes a special character and becomes independent of all real-life, concrete social forms (the forms of family, social or economic class, life’s stories)” (1979a: 264; italics mine). An astute reader need not be prompted to recognize in this kind of dialogism only a conventional phrasing, a more than transparent disguise of a beyond of monologue/dialogue dyad.

     

    69. This equation of family and language is another Derridian appropriation from Hegel (Derrida 1986: 7-9), and, as our analysis suggests, not at all deconstructively.

     

    70. A common demarche which, logically enough, cannot help but end with more than modest results. Cf. Behler 1991.

    71. “Family” is the Heideggerian blind spot par excellence: the reference to it is completely missing from his oeuvre, which is all the more puzzling given his focus on “everydayness,” “care,” etc.

     

    72. In order for the capitalist economy to function accounts cannot be settled. Crediting is a perfect economic counterpart of the semiotical act of time-giving, without which there would not be any capitalism to speak of. Whence the fundamental law of capitalism: “the poor become poorer, the rich–richer.” It is worthwhile to note that, according to Marx, the crisis of capitalist economy stems from an oxymoron (over-production leads to impoverishment)–and therefore corresponds neatly to the crisis of the libidinal economy of (intertextual) (para)esthetic signification for which Jones’s notion of aphanisis provides an ample description. It remains to add that for quite understandable reasons that neither Lyotard (1993) nor Derrida (1991; 1994) have anything to say about these obvious interconnections despite their interest in the semiotic extension of the problematic of crediting.

     

    73. An astute reader has already recognized here the outcome of the interplay between two master tropes of deconstruction discussed above.

     

    74. The notion of dissemination is in itself a sufficient proof for Derrida’s entrapment in traditional biologism, or, to be more precise, for the deconstructive reinforcement of this biologism. For, as we have amply ascertained for ourselves, it is the disseminating fragmentation of sexuality (as a result of the secondary sublimation) which foregrounds the questions (of knowledge, truth etc.) essential to logocentrism. This explains sufficiently why Derrida’s attempts to introduce the problematic of gender into his discourse (cf. especially 1985: 52-53) cannot help appearing as a concession to the prevailing trend.

     

    75. This is a major obstacle for the feminist theorists interested in Bakhtin (cf. O’Connor 1993: 247-248). Fortunately to remove the obstacle it suffices to read Bakhtin more closely and independently, that is, to approach him not as an avatar of dialogism.

     

    76. Although at the moment of writing the essay Bakhtin has not read Heidegger, the description of hero’s condition before the author’s intervention is a perfect echo of Heidegger’s description of Dasein in its throwness (1962: 219-225). Despite the fact that the Bakhtin-Heidegger connection is anything bu a neglected subject (in fact Heidegger is the thinker most frequently evoked in connection with Bakhtin), its real nature remains undivulged owing to the dialogical commitments of investigators as well as to their stance (shared by Bakhtinians with Slavists in general) to see in theorizing a bogey.

     

    77. Thus far no one has bothered to pay attention to it, let alone to ponder over its implications.

     

    78. Cf.: “The male dread of being castrated may or may not have a precise female counterpart, but what is more important is to realize that this dread is only a special case and that both sexes ultimately dread exactly the same thing, aphanisis. The mechanism whereby this is supposed to be brought about shows important differences in the two sexes” (440; italics added).

     

    79. It is impossible to speak of repression without evaluating positively knowledge as such. Which means that grammatology grounded in the notion of repression is not a “science that functions as the deconstruction of science,” as its fans would like it to be (Ulmer 1985: 12).

     

    80. This anti-aesthetic, to wit, (para)esthetic stance is one of the most striking characteristics of poststructuralism. Cf.Przybylowicz 1986: 2, 13-14; Norris 1988: xii, 86.

    81. Hence her need to be reassured that she actually brings people together (67).

     

    82. Cf. James 1966: 51, 65, 180, 200, 209.

     

    83. This point is readily acknowledged exactly by those Bakhtinians who bother to take account of what goes on by way of theory around them (cf.Hirschkop 1989: 24-25). However, far from questioning the concept of dialogism as such, they assume that the dialogicity of the reader’s response is unproblematical.

     

    84. “…our own commentary constantly attends and amplifies” (6).

     

    85. For the discursive revitalization presupposes that the hero(ine) is put to use by the author in just the same manner as Maisie was at first used by her parents to indirectly communicate in quite a poststructuralist way.

     

    86. So long as postsructuralism chooses to see in Jamesian textuality an instance of logocentrism, the poststructuralist claims exemplified by Derrida’s account of the letter’s itinerary in Poe’s tale have been always already deployed by tradition.

     

    87. This rectifies the general view of intertextuality. The primordial debt is not the debt to the predecessor(s) but to the reader. The first being a meaningful, the second a communicative one. The theories of intertextuality obviously privilege the first (the reader-response criticism is exactly the criticism and therefore can allow itself the franchise of ignoring theoretical issues) but in doing so unwittingly undermine the very foundations of intertextuality. For this stance amounts to a mute acknowledgement that virtually any author rejects his debts to the reader, whereas only these latter make reading possible.

     

    88. The less prejudiced the reader, the more likely he/she is to avow this deficiency.

     

    89. Cf. 67, 92, 132, 144, 152-153, 172, 214.

     

    90. It is by no chance that precisely in the case of James, poststructuralism is compelled to make an exception from its basic postulate not to trust the textual surface.

     

    91. Alternatively, we can rethink the genre of Bildungsroman beyond logocentric metanarratives which, as we have seen, are dialogical in essence.

     

    92. Certainly we are not the first to recognize in innocence the very core of Jamesian textuality. Unfortunately, far from elucidating matters, the book-length treatment of James’s thematization of innocence (G.H. Jones 1975) has rather obscured them. This is not so much due to the fact that the study in question is a pure instance of thematical criticism. Despite the structuralist and the postsructuralist denigration of the latter, I would rather subscribe to Jones’s view that the thematical description is in the last analysis also a structural one (285, 287). But the gist of the matter is that Jones strikingly fails to establish the continuity between theme and structure. This means that the real trouble is primarily that of misreading in its most trivial sense. And it is this misreading which is responsible for the ultimate convergence between the poststructuralist treatment of James and the one advocated by Jones who is bent upon preserving his theoretical innocence (the fashionable references are totally absent from his study). Instead of examining the Jamesian meaning, Jones is satisfied with the traditional view of innocence as essentially a process of loosing it (287). This view makes of innocence a mechanism of tradition transmission (144, 149). Jones’s study is a particularly telling example of all the paradoxes to which an attempt to accommodate innocence within the framework of Western logocentrism gives rise. The first to emerge is the narratological impasse. Put bluntly, Jones fails to show that innocence is “the premise from which evolves the conflict in a novel or tale” (285). And it cannot be otherwise so long as innocence is conceived of in a traditional way as “abundant time, timeless time” (286), or, in Derridian terms, as an act of time-giving. Whence the recourse to generational/genealogical model. The dialectic of innocence (innocence–a thesis, responsibility–an antithesis, renunciation–a synthesis) which is said to represent Jamesian master plot suffers a diffusion with the result that each term comes to be represented by a group of texts. That this implies a certain reversal of chronology is obvious, for the dialectic is a development of concept and not of an individual. In other words, instead of dialectic of innocence we have a Hegelian dialectic of desire which, as Lacan is the first to remind us, is essentially a negativity (1988: 147). What comes to be renounced is the desire. This renouncement promotes the tradition (277). This means that the mechanism at work is that of repression. Jones’s description of innocence is strikingly similar to the poststructuralist (Lacanian) description of desire: “Innocence itself…is absence or vacancy; it is limitation; it is negation” (285). And once again the distortion of textual reality is particularly obvious in case of the novel we are discussing. Witness Jones’s summary: “Maisie has lost her innocence because of all that she knows” (10). The recovery of innocence in which Jones is interested is to be sought in other texts. However, it is not be found, for the renunciation (and Jones is quite astute to recognize in it the gist of the problem) affects desire and not knowledge. Put otherwise, thematical criticism cannot help relinquishing thematicism in favor of theoretical model which tallies perfectly with the poststructuralist one. However, this reversal, in its turn, comes to be reversed. The paradoxical result is the resurrection of the buried author. The cue for Jones study provides “a letter in which Henry’s older brother William describes him in middle age as ‘dear old, good, innocent and at bottom very powerless-feeling Henry’. What, I wondered, does innocent mean if it applies equally to a writer…and to the characters he conceived as well?” (ix). But in the course of his study Jones has nothing to say about the innocence of the author’s discourse. Jones attempts to remedy this deficiency in a brief section (288-295) appended at the very end of the study in which James’s own innocence is treated in purely biographical terms. This uncanny return of the referent is paralleled by the same outcome in the poststructuralist discourse on the uncanny/sublime. To sum up: it is precisely the innocence that, despite the apparent foregrounding of the purity of origins, subverts the tradition said to privilege these origins. For it is tradition and its postsructuralist Indian summer and not Jamesian textuality which is “haunted by innocence” (ix). However, to account for this subversion as a discursive event played out between the author and the hero(ine) one has to adopt our perspective.

     

    93. Paradoxically, only by acquiescing to this interpretation can one maintain the view of the super-ego as “a pure culture of the death-instict” (Freud 1923: 283), which, as we have seen, is unsustainable from the libidinal standpoint which by necessity implies the reversal between the ego and the super-ego as regards the function of accumulation of libido.

     

    94. Witness the interpretation of What Maisie Knew advanced by Przybylowicz who treats Maisie’s development as an instance of conformism (27). The textual misreading stems from the psychoanalytic, from treatment of sublimation as synonymous with repression (19). The paradox of this kind of exegesis is that it cannot help but end with the reversal of the subjects of repression. Now it is not the author who represses his/her unconscious knowledge but the hero(ine). However, even the most cursory reader is bound to admit that the latter assumption is strikingly at odds with Jamesian textuality. Cf. for instance: “What helped Maisie was that she exactly knew what she wanted” (263).

     

    95. Significantly, despite all his attacks on the “ascetic ideal” equated with sublimation and the “will to truth” (1989: 143-146, 160) as the very core of Western tradition, Nietzsche seems to be the first to discern the subversive potential of sublimation. Witness his opposition between ascetic castration and genuine Vergeistlichung–the real enemy of tradition (88). Derrida mentions tis opposition but only to quickly drop the theme which threatens his paraesthetic stance (1979: 91-93). The value of our theory of sublimation is that it allows us to account for narrative structures without privileging the avant-garde ones. Precisely this privileging and the concomitant inability to deal with traditional narratives is what all attempts to crudely equate sexuality and textuality are bound to wound with (cf. Lingis 1983: 101 et passim). That poststructuralist theory takes its cue from avant-garde textual practice is another point in favor of our standpoint. For, far from being a subversion of Oedipal patriarchy, the avant-garde thrust to always be ahead of its time corresponds neatly to the assumption implied in the reversal fantasy, i.e., the assumption that the male child is older, ahead, of the woman–the foundational premise of patriarchy. It follows that the traditional narrative is the real touchstone for the validity of theory.

     

    96. Cf. Freud 1910: 193. It can be said that the very thrust of Freud’s study is to show how epistemophilia equated with the father figure impairs art. Interestingly, Laplanche picks up Freud’s discussion to ultimately dismiss the notion of sublimation from psychoanalytic vocabulary (1980b: 119, 191). A telling example of epistemophilia promoted under the nickname of postmodernist paraesthetics.

     

    97. This redefinition emerges as the only feasible solution to the paradox that Freud’s musings on “the future of an illusion” have left us. On the one hand, Freud admits that “every individual is virtually an enemy of culture,” which remains puzzling so long as the attainment of the cultural ideal is said to provide a narcissistic satisfaction (1927: 345).

     

    98. I propose this definition in contradistinction to the paraesthetic theory of “the unconscious of the text” (cf.Bellemin-Noèl 1979; Davis 1985; Schleifer 1985) which by necessity equates textuality proper with the ego.

     

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  • Saving Philosophy in Cultural Studies: The Case of Mother Wit

    Angelika Rauch

    Hobart and William Smith Colleges
    amr18@cornell.edu

     

    In an attempt to ground the metaphysical nature of humans in form, Immanuel Kant pursues the possibility of a framed image without content. He calls this postulated state or mental product “purposiveness of representation.” What he means by this is that when you are faced with the beautiful what happens in your mind is the process of forming an image with the crucial exception that this image never achieves completion, you can never quite grasp in a conscious, representional image what the beautiful is. It is in a way like the story of Sisyphus, who rolls his rock up the mountain only to have it roll back downhill just as he reaches the summit–and so on, over and over again. This kind of repeated, and uncompleted, effort is the same activity as the mind games of imagination. The power of imagination is responsible for creating the image of the beautiful, and it has to start forever afresh in its attempt to build a new image whenever the previous is aborted just before it reaches closure–or, as Kant says “form” or “schema.” Full form would turn a complex and fragmented image or figure into a conscious representation of a concept. But this is precisely what does not happen in the aesthetic experience. (Kant asserts in the third Critique that imagination, when in reflexive play, “schematizes without concepts.”) What happens instead, is the production of vague images which, in my interpretation of Kant as the first postmodern thinker, I will call intuitions rather than images.

     

    Kant’s postmodern status pertains to the difference between representative image and figure that figures according to internal, unconscious laws. It is in Jean-Luc Nancy’s words “not a world nor the world that takes on figure, but the figure that makes world.”1 Nancy compares this indeterminate figure to dream of a Narcissus who does not know the surface he is looking at, who is oblivious to the matter and composition of the sign he interprets. It was the merit of Kant to associate affect with the judgment of the beautiful. The aesthetic sign that elicits a feeling of pleasure, in this case also a libidinal affect, is first of all a presentation. And as Nancy elaborates, nothing plays itself out but the play of presentation in the absence of a concrete, represented object. The imagination is only encouraged to fill in the void of the object and, as I will show in the following, to associate memories from the subject’s unconscious history. These memories, as they are fleetingly touched by the play of imagination, are not subject to the general logic of representation; they do not have to appear as a reconstructed image of a concrete experience as if to be communicated to another person. Rather, they contribute to the primarily affective state of the present aesthetic experience where concepts and logic are banned. It is here that psychoanalysis has completed Kant’s struggle with imagination as a non-representative power of thinking and with the status of feeling as judgment. Since in my argument feelings are memories and therefore insert history into the process of thinking, Kant’s apparent formalism can be ammeliorated by his unacknowledged contingency on history and experience when it comes to the matter of imagination, or, as Kant himself suggests, to “mother wit” in the question of taste.

     

    Kant’s treatise on the aesthetic judgment tries to reformulate the question of the beautiful as a question of formality: How can beautiful form be reflected or be constituted in the mind so that its subjective judgment can find universal consensus? Kant’s analysis of aesthetic judgment gradually funnels into an analysis of the “power of imagination”(Einbildungskraft) rather than imagination as sensuous representation, as concrete image content: How can imagination produce form if it does not work with concepts? It does not come as a surprise that Kant needs to abandon an empirical, body-bound concept of imagination for a so-called “transcendental” power of imagination that will not be contaminated by a sensuality through which the body would enter into representation. The putative power of this transcendental imagination produces pure intuitions, representations of mere possibilities of experience. The question is whether the idea of transcendence can indeed dislodge human cognitive faculties from physical contingencies, and hence from one’s body and sensations as they are also influenced by cultural objects.

     

    Insofar as transcendental imagination is contingent on the subject’s existence, the implications of transcendentality for subjectivity would indeed be an affective determination of cognition. Here Kant’s change in definition of the transcendental power of imagination from “a function of the soul” (in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason) to “a function of understanding” (in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason) is crucial for an investigation into the meaning of transcendence in metaphysical speculation about human nature. Today we would say, the distinction between soul and reason is important when we investigate the process of meaning formation in psychological terms. In other words, it is the distinction between conscious and unconscious mental processes. In the discourse of the 18th century, the authority of the soul attributed to imagination a separate and autonomous faculty of imagination. In the case of imagination being a function of understanding, it loses its creative and unconsciously fueled status; in this latter definition, imagination can indeed not transcend the control of understanding. Kant’s notion of transcendental imagination is therefore a purely formalist concept, one that must repress the body in judging aesthetic experiences and aesthetized and pleasurable cultural objects.

     

    Kant’s (insurmountable) task in the Critique of Judgement is to rationally combine a definition of taste with a concept of form that is not cognitive. It is his precise definition of the judgment of taste, for example “this rose is beautiful,” that it is not a cognitive statement, and a cognition of the beautiful and the work of art is not achieved. Why? Because the judgement of taste is based on a feeling, he says, the feeling of pleasure, and I would like to warn my reader, Kant is anything but a hedonist: this feeling of pleasure is one of “disinterested pleasure.” (Kant was clearly not a sensuous man; one only needs to read his biography). The funny thing about this subjective feeling of disinterested pleasure is that it is, as he claims, “attributed to everyone,” anyone can or could feel this “disinterested pleasure” in the realm of the beautiful. I will get back to this paradox later. Right now, I am concerned with Kant’s formalism in the aesthetic judgment of taste which is not supposed be cognitive. For, if the judgment of taste does not cognize anything, then the form of mental representations must be a non-cognitive form. This means, that the form of representation in the case of the beautiful cannot be issued by the faculty of reason because it would then have to be an “idea,” that is a completed and framed and cookie-cut representation. Instead, it must be a form that is an “intuition” of pure formality, or merely the experience of transcendence as a mental state. Since the judgment of taste pertains to the feeling of pleasure, the problem naturally lies with the objectification of this feeling in representation.

     

    Transcendence and feeling are the two states that need to be represented to the mind. So, how then do you represent a feeling to the mind? Feelings are first of all body-bound. Kant is forever in a bind when he needs to make his move from the sensuous to the conceptual realm, from matter to form. His way out is to simply focus not so much on the form as on the process of forming a representation itself. This mental preoccupation with the process of form, of forming as such, ties up imagination and diverts its attention away from the body, from the sensuous realm, and from physical pleasure, and, as I will argue, away from the unconscious memory of the body of the mother. For it is the maternal body that supplies the infant subject with its first experience of wholeness, of absolute pleasure, and therefore of a libidinal subjectivity.

     

    This formal/material impasse in the process of representing the beautiful reveals philosophy’s ambivalence towards imagination as a sensuous and intellectual faculty. The point of mediation between the sensuous and the intellectual would be affect, or rather a presumed affective character of imagination. This impasse proves that thinking the “imaginative” state, what Kant calls the purposiveness of representation, is impossible, precisely because it serves no purpose in the psychical economy of affective cathexis and emotional investment. Although an essential part of creative imagination is the capacity of wit, wit has to be excluded from the philosophical paradigm of cognition. Kant actually mentions the subcategory of mother wit (Mutterwitz) to stress that wit cannot be acquired or learned, but that it has to be inherited, presumably from the mother. And only what can be learned can also be cognized. Mother wit however belongs to the category of intuition, of a non-representational imagination that is linked to the body and to affect. Here one goes purely on intuition, and on feeling, as our still current turn of phrase suggests. But this exclusion, on Kant’s part, of the intuitive knowledge of wit and mother wit means coming to terms with neither the phenomenon nor with the feeling of creativity. Kant cannot come to terms with creativity because the implicitly acknowledged source of creativity in intuitive wit is the nurturing body of the mother; and this body has to be explicitly suppressed for the sake of glorifying the enlightened individual, whose undividable status is warranted by reason alone. (For, what makes us a common species and legitimates the right of equality is the fact that we all have in common the power of reason and rational thought.) By inhibiting the desire for merging with an other, the unconscious mother, the obscure feeling of a dependency and the experience of imperfection which accompanies the separated and individuated self is also eliminated. The inevitability of this desire for an other manifests itself only negatively, in an attempt to split off the affective nature from the cognitive self as a way of denying one’s dependence on something prior to consciousness. Once the foundational (m)other is killed off in the self, the possibility for relating to a social other on existential grounds diminishes. Kant’s reference to the “natural talent” of Mutterwitz serves him well if he wants to reflect the psychological structure of a mimesis in which the imaginary body of the mother not only produces a concrete sense of relation but also the intuition of the mere possibility of a sensical relationship between radically different things. Kant explains the capacity of mother wit as one that lets us compare unrelated and apparently different things; mother wit creates in the mind a new context for separate, cultural objects which then take on a different meaning. This facilitating, creative, and utterly subjective mental capacity in mimesis seems to resist further abstraction and must legitimate itself indeed as a natural talent; otherwise, imagination needs to rely on the fictional canon as providing necessary examples for grasping human nature through symbolized representations in language.

     

    With respect to affect as the material base of experience, Kant’s critical move must aim at abandoning, if not repressing, affect altogether if he wants to define imagination as the formal power capable of detaching itself from the body. Such isolation of imagination from the body and from sensuous experience shifts the power of imagination towards the faculties of understanding and reason. Yet, bodily experience, namely sensation and affect, is what supports imagination and makes it an effective power for self-experience. Experience supplies the material for an imaginative translation into meaning. And it is this translation that represents the central issue in aesthetic judgment. For, what follows the feeling of pleasure, which supports aesthetic judgments, is a reflection on the mind’s relationship with feeling. Such reflection should, according to Kant, result in a “feeling of being alive,” a Lebensgefühl. Through feelings, the body has an impact on self-consciousness. It mediates between self and environment. One might be prompted to wonder “what might have determined the self” until this moment of self-awareness purely determined by feeling. An answer to this question would suggest that the subject does not decide the meaning of past experiences until they actually coalesce in a name for the feeling involved. (Hence, psycho-therapists always want to label the “feelings” that disturb you.) Without previous experiences, preserved in unconscious fantasies about the mother/other, the present experience could not motivate the subject’s imagination to produce an intuition. Past experience is needed for the creative power of imagination to draw on. Without recourse to history and an awareness of the past, the very concept of experience loses its cognitive validity. And now I should state my thesis: experience only has significance because of its genealogical and erotic structure.

     

    If the judgment of taste does not rest on experience and history, as it surely cannot when it is regarded as the result of an abstraction from feeling and body, then it represents little more than a conceptual construct of an intellectual feeling and a heuristic device for mediating imagination and understanding. Kant’s understanding of (aesthetic) experience results from a separation of mind and body. His reasoning is caught in opposing the categories of materiality to those of formality. He is therefore unable to link these categories plausibly without the insight into a third “category,” the category of an unconscious translation, or what Walter Benjamin calls “correspondence” (which Benjamin extracts from the poetry of the French poet Baudelaire “Correspondences”). This third category of mediation, the correspondence, calls attention to itself only in the case of aesthetic judgment; for in the aesthetic judgment, the faculties are not preoccupied with cognizing the (beautiful) object. What is cognized can perhaps be summarized as the impact of the past upon the present, or even as history as a condition for consciousness.

     

    If reflection on feeling were to bring about a cognitive judgment, an understanding, then it would have to evoke a lived past for an assessment of the present experience. A hermeneutical process of the mind would thus indeed bring about an understanding of the self as a historically constituted being. Kant, seemingly handicapped in this case by an epistemology of universal reason, cannot allow such subjective, and necessarily historical, understanding of the status of cognition. His aesthetic philosophy, however, manifests an attempt at combining the subjective category of experience with the universal truth of beauty. He follows through in this attempt by analyzing the function of various cognitive faculties generally involved in experience. This maneuver, necessary for postulating the universality of the judgment of taste, exposes Kant’s ongoing struggle with the concept of knowledge, as he is unable to theoretically separate knowledge from cognition. His bias towards an objective, universalizable knowledge, a knowledge that results from a priori logical categories of consciousness, prevents him from recognizing a hermeneutic process of cognition. When he associates materiality with sensation, which is variably subjective, he means by “reflection” only the formal, mental movement that is at stake when a phenomenon is apprehended into a representation, a formally closed, sensuous, and stable image. The mental process in reflective judgment leads to an accord of the faculties, which Kant stresses to be the same psychological result in everyone. It is here that Kant’s moral underpinning of the aesthetic judgment shows through. Since the mind’s interest does not lie with the object but with the subject’s feelings, Kant can come up with the idea of a “disinterested pleasure” of the beautiful.

     

    Since for Kant, reflection only implies an apprehension according to form, the question remains: what is the form of a feeling? Feeling does not have a form; it has to be treated like an inner sensation which can only be understood in terms of the images it triggers. These images do not, however, represent the feeling as such, for they are independently existing representations or fantasies that are merely associated at the moment of pleasure or pain. In the case of the beautiful, it is not the mental representation of a rose that is pleasurable but the images remembered along with the subject’s affection by the rose.

     

    A temporal differentiation of affect and feeling suggests that there are actually two pleasures at stake, the pleasure of the original which creates the affect, and the pleasure that results from many fleeting images associated with that pleasurable feeling. This pleasure of a pleasure relies on the (formal) power of imagination to continuously create and dissolve images for the purpose of keeping pleasurable feeling alive. No one image can do justice to the beautiful experience. The fuel for this ongoing process of imaging is supplied by the memory of pleasure to which, equally, no one (framed) representation does justice–why? because the memory is preserved in the material of feeling, not in a memorable image or, as Benjamin would say, a “souvenir.” If Kant has problems with the evaluation of feeling and affect as concerns their part in knowledge, he is all the more aware of the seminal role imagination plays in the mental process leading to cognition: “Every reference of representations [to imagination], even those of sensations, can be objective…but not the reference of [the representation of] the feeling of pleasure and displeasure, whereby nothing is signified in the object, but in which the subject feels itself as it is affected by the representation.”2 Crucial for the judgment of taste is the subject’s (meta)affection by a representation of his being affected with pleasure. Being affected by representation means being affected by one’s imagination which brings about the feeling of being alive (Lebensgefühl ). This feeling, in turn, calls for another representation. But the feeling of being alive exceeds representation; thus, feeling occupies a heterodoxical status in knowledge. The discrepancy between feeling and representation impels the production of art whence intuitions derive their visual material. The visibilities rendered by art affect the subject anew each time.

     

    The significance of (Kant’s mention of) “mother wit” may be greater yet if we cite the psychoanalytic feminist vantage in the physical premises of knowledge and desire.3 A feeling of pleasure that stems from a primary experience with an other, i.e. the mother-child union, will unconsciously preserve the memory of this (m)other as a condition for feeling good. The relation between the child and the mother (read: the concrete object of pleasure) becomes a memory by which the developing subject recognizes a similar relationship to an object of pleasure in the future. Whereas the mother at this later point has become a fantasy of the object at hand, the feeling between self and other has remained the same; hence, the feeling could guide the subject’s conscious imagination to a creative interpretation or assessment of any object at hand. This kind of pleasurable connection and unhampered transference of the mother’s body onto the object to be cognized could engender the capability of mother wit. Through such transference the object becomes a “transitional object”4 as a means of coping with desire and the experiental difference between real and ideal. Such libidinal coping via transitional objects materializes the passage of time–until the nurturant (m)other returns to the abandoned child–into subjective history.

     

    A “witty” interpretation of an object always works on the object’s form, a form that receives its impetus from some previous representation that supplies the interpreter with an intuition. For Kant, “mother wit” suggests the natural gift of forming an imaginary connection between concrete experience and abstract knowledge. We might conclude that the capacity for wit in general develops through the use of mother wit, the correlation between feeling and intuition in aesthetic representation or judgment. Mutterwitz seems to comprise the creative, or flexible, part of imagination which in the process of judgment transforms the past and arrives at a cognizable intuition of the present.

     

    This natural ability to judge with mother wit does not need recourse to a conceptual frame in order to effect an understanding. We might say, Kant unconsciously utilizes a concept of the subject whose self-containment is not guaranteed from the start. Yet, if the subject were merely constituted by a priori mental faculties, its self-sameness could not be in doubt. Instead, the Kantian subject finds itself engaged in a process of developing first its various faculties, especially the skill for interpreting its experiences. Essential for such experiences, and consequently for interpretation and the production of sense, is an other, as both source of stimulation and as “surface projection” for the subject’s Ego formation. In the very first stage of human development, the other is the family of care givers who provide the child not only with its first experiences but also with the first meaning (i.e. language) to be associated with such experiences. The family mediates and thus manifests knowledge for the child. Kant, however, does not reflect upon this onto-genetic aspect of knowledge and the development of faculties. Though a reflection on the meaning of the conventional wisdom of Mutterwitz might have yielded such a developmental, if not historical, insight into the constitution of the subject as well as of knowledge. What should not be forgotten here is the fact that the other provides the support in the development of faculties, because the sensuous experience of an other, and of the subject’s own body via this other, provides the context for mimetic development. In this physical rather than meta-physical construction of an origin, experience testifies to its material ground, a ground that is not easily left for the purpose of some sort of formal experience. For matters of philosophical representation alone, the body provides the necessary metaphors in explaining unimaginable phenomema.

     

    In an effort to rehabilitate the body for a critique of the dialectics of enlightenment, Hartmut and Gernot Böhme (two German literature professors who wrote an important book called The Other of Reason) have traced the human body in Kant’s scientific discourse about the universe. They emphasize that Kant’s ideas are not supportable by laws of physics but only by his own body experiences.5 The experience of touch, pressure, and jolt which causes the body to resist the “onslaught” of an other evidently motivates Kant to imagine the formation of spheres in space. Kant defines the structure of matter as an antagonistic relationship of polar forces: attraction and repulsion. Particularly repulsion is made out to be a basic force because it balances the force of attraction so that bodies, their volume, are “closed off by definite boundaries.”6 At the body’s boundaries, the forces of repulsion and attraction are equal. The body’s limits are extremely important for the protection of their form, and we could say also for their identity. Intruders have to be warded off if the body’s identity is to be maintained by its boundaries: “The force of impenetrability is a repulsive force keeping off [limits] any exterior being that might further approach.”7 Yet it is through the play of competing contracting and expanding forces that bodies, or rather spheres, delimit their shape.8 Hartmut and Gernot Böhme demonstrate in their investigation into Kant’s pre-critical writings how Kant searched for comparable phenomena of conflicting forces in the intellectual, psychological, and moral realms. Kant’s examples are indeed those of pleasure and displeasure, love and hate, beauty and ugliness, virtue and vice, etc. These are all polar forces of repulsion and attraction, because one force cannot simply be annihilated by its logical negation, but only by the effect of an existing, polar Other. Kant explicitly states that there could be no difference in spiritual/mental matters and in the forces operative in the physical world: these forces can only be compensated with another, opposing force: “[A]n inner accidence, a thought of the soul cannot cede to exist without a truly active force exerted by/in the same thinking subject.”9

     

    The parallel structure in patterns of thought between this “physical” Kant and the biologically grounded Sigmund Freud for the purpose of analyzing human consciousness is striking. This similarity in thought almost forges a new Kantian paradigm, “the process of unconscious repression necessary for unity of thought,” or what Freud has defined as consciousness, “to know and not know at the same time.” The participant of an unconscious is Kant’s unacknowledged paradigm of cognition. He had no recourse to the category of the unconscious, but in effect he is arguing for the necessity of repression which is only lifted in the non-cognitive judgment of aesthetic experiences.

     

    Protecting the unity of the self through a model of consciousness requires an activity of thought in discernable images, in formed representations. To guarantee the form of being or its framed perception by the subject, the excess of matter, the memory of a limitless cosmic mother, has to be repressed. While the subject’s Ego is still linked with the mother/body in its affective capacity of wit, both Ego and (m)other are transformed into a self-contained cognitive subject that takes its stand (Gegenstand) against “mother nature” from which it forms its objects. Professors Böhme assume a similar kind of development of the philosophical subject when they analyze the philosophy of memory “as a reconstruction of the original detachment and emancipation of the Ego from the symbiosis with mother nature.”10 Kant can only admit cognitive status to what is and can be formed and framed in a mental image, because otherwise the force of the (m)other of matter per se cannot be overcome: the force of fear (of being engulfed by a noncognizable other) cannot be compensated with the force of (objectifying) reason. Kants says: “In dealing with nature, only the legitimacy of the cogito now prevails which has purified itself from its traditional fusion with nature.”11

     

    Traditional practices of communicating with nature–e.g., caring for nature, experiencing one’s dependency on nature, acting out in ritual one’s fear of nature as well as one’s gratitude–are no longer accepted as an enlightened form of being. These practices are not, in principle, guided by reason. Nature becomes that which must follow the laws of scientific reason. Such is the revolutionary turn in the conception of nature that Kant institutes alone in his conceptual shift from his pre-critical to his critical writings. Nature is no longer considered a maternal nature, a natura naturans, but a product, natura naturata. The human body is transformed into a “body of reason”12 for the purpose of its cognition.

     

    Priority of the intelligible turns the body into a surface for reason’s projections; projections are those images that cover up the body’s “wounds” inflicted by social inscriptions13 (i.e., the process of social conditioning) preventing individuals from being in touch with their own, physical experiences. Therefore social community loses its immediate ground in the body, and in a common physical history. Community is instead artificially legitimated in mediated ideologies and images of social existence and social cohesion. The subject no longer perceives his or her body directly but through representations in which “the subject affects himself in an intuition a priori and becomes its own object according to a principle of synthetic representation a priori of transcendental cognition.”14

     

    No matter how material or maternal experience may be, in the conscious mind the mother has to leave. Afraid of the indeterminability of matter, Kant not only insists on the formality of knowledge, he also insists on the formality in the judgment of the beautiful. Only the formality of experience, purified of any sensuous aspect, “admits of universal communicability.”15 Kant even construes the formality of judgment as analogous to the theoretical and conceptual power of understanding. Since such an analogy to conceptual cognition necessitates the abandonment of the body or the other, the judgment’s task is to overcome the body in the feeling of pleasure; otherwise, it cannot claim its universal validity.16 In psychoanalytic terms, the separation from the (m)other has to be reinstigated with every judgment of taste. The avoidance of being captured by affects or passions–unconscious offshoots from the Ego’s desire for the other–indeed requires what Freud calls Trauerarbeit, a labor of mourning. The work of mourning is the conscious effort of giving up the fantasy of the mother, a fantasy that sparked the subject’s interest in feeling pleasure. In this light, mourning is necessary for clearing the subject’s mind and preserving the freedom of reason.

     

    With the concept of the sublime, which is avowedly part of the aesthetic experience and particularly of post-modern experience, Kant explains the mind’s transformation of the impact of the other, the affects of terror and fear, into a reflection on the power of the human mind as such. The mental capacities supply the subject with the possibility of transcending the terrifying other in imagination. Awareness of one’s imaginative capacities re-enforces the will to dissociate from that threatening other. The sublime ultimately rests with the subject and his mental superiority to the seemingly sublime and hence overwhelming particularity of the object. A psychologically based sublime thus safeguards the affection from becoming passion and from swaying the Ego to surrender to the power of the other.

     

    In his treatise on the sublime, Kant struggles to find a justification for dissociating reason from affection. The latter upsets the mind too much and motivates it to seek a purpose for this affection. But reflective judgment does not produce a purpose; it only proceeds according to the “principle” of purpose and produces the sense of an ability to represent affect. This sense of one’s ability for representation, the purposiveness of experience, would have to be contained in the resulting feeling of pleasure if the latter is to be an intellectual feeling. For the mastery of the initial sublime affect, however, the intellectual transformation does little more than merely suppress the other’s alterity. It seems as if the subject’s desire to know has been curtailed with an insight, instilled by reason, that whatever the unknowable quantity of the other may be, the subject qua consciousness is always bigger than “it.”

     

    The evocation of an unknowable “Id” should be less a matter of homophony than a psychologically conditioned move, on Kant’s part, toward maintaining uniformity of the mind. Since the unknowable affect or nature threatens to split consciousness, Kant must retroactively efface the initial sense of the affect’s purposiveness (read: the affect’s knowability) by denying all cognitive content to the power of judgment (which includes the value of aesthetics and pleasure) and by positing its similarity to understanding in grammatical subjunctive only.17 Since the universal form, the concept, is not given in the beautiful, its reflection in the mind must entail a process of deformation that merely becomes manifest in and as the analytics of the sublime. By force of the mind’s incapacity to represent the beautiful, and we remember it is only the beautiful’s affect that is reflected, the beautiful itself is always already sublime in its “non-form.” Reason performs a therapeutic and moral task for the mind, which is to keep the affect in check and guarantee the equilibrium of faculties in the aesthetic as a sane mental state. The sublime portion of the aesthetic is determined, for instance, by the affect of enthusiasm. But such a strong affection, which no “sensible representation” can capture, thus causing the imagination to run wild, endangers the “noble mental state,” the only (natural) state that Kant admits as truly sublime. Kant is thus forced to eliminate affection from aesthetic pleasure altogether: “But (which seems strange) the absence of affection (apatheia, phlegma in significatu bono) in a mind that vigorously follows its unalterable principles is sublime, and in a far preferable way, because it has also on its side the satisfaction of pure reason.”18

     

    What should have become evident in my exposition, is that Kant nonetheless starts out with the sense impression of the beautiful object and with nature, even though he dwells on the mental processes which bring about the formality of aesthetic judgment. Both sensation and nature–precisely because they resist subsumption under concepts and hence constitute an unknowable other in the aesthetic judgment–need to be regulated by laws of representation. The establishment of such laws force Kant into a concern with the formality of representation. This focus on formality rather than the physical support or context of reflection prevents him from taking into consideration what Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel, the major figures in the philosophy of what could be called proto-Freudian Romanticism, have called “the subject’s inner sensibility,” its sensitivity, which affects the subject’s power of intuition. Sensibilität, or sensitivity, is a requirement for perception and aesthetic experience. Hence, perception names a capacity that is patterned after the subject’s past. This view subverts a concept of taste which reduces taste to its formal properties in judgment. Such a reduction of taste to its mere form demonstrates Kant’s avoidance of historical considerations for conceptualizing the subject’s experience of the present. If I had the space, I would show my reader how Kant’s epistemological innovation of criticism (Kritik) is, after all, grounded in history, the history of taste, rather than in a “transcendental aesthetics” that analytical philosophers opposed to cultural studies like to pursue. The method of critique takes as its object the particularity of taste, one that is contingent on the capability of discrimination.

     

    In a nutshell, you cannot arrive at a judgement of taste or the statement that you like something without the ability to compare the present sensation to a previous one. Or, in other words, if you don’t remember your pleasurable mother, you will not stand a chance of finding this pleasure again in things beautiful.

     

    In the 18th century, this comparing, transferring agency of the mind was conceptualized as the faculty of wit or–at least in the first half of the century–as spirit (Geist), which were both regarded as very distinct from reason. Reason represented scholarly bound (that is, coherent) thought, whereas Geist generated free roaming and creative thought. By this definition, Geist is no different from the concept of fantasy fashioned by European romantics in relation to thinking. Before the romantics placed their emphasis on fantasy as a power of thinking, 18th century philosophers of aesthetics acknowledged a mental capacity or talent in wit (which never occurs separately from Geist) which was responsible for the psychical translation process and its rhetorical representation in language. The presence of wit in a person accounts for the translation of Vorstellunginto Darstellung. This conception of wit foreshadowed the aesthetics of “genius” to which Kant fully subscribed. Philosophers before Kant reflected on the connection between psyche and language, and interpreted wit as a faculty that was contingent on language to express its power: Wit creates metaphors in language. Language, in its sensuous power of expression, reflects a certain knowledge of human experience, otherwise it could not affect the reader or listener on the level of feeling or imagination. This affection only happens if the faculty of wit has previously assembled the signifiers of language in such a way–i.e. in a text–that the receptive mind can easily compare different things that otherwise might never be compared. With reference to Benjamin, this comparison may only be possible by means of a tradition in which language and individual psyche are related in history. Tradition presents itself as what Benjamin has called the “canon of non-mimetic representation” in language.19 The capacity of wit turns written signifiers into figurative signs. Wit was acknowledged as a significant power of artistic representation in the burgeoning critique of aesthetics.20

     

    Wit came to represent an ingenious faculty to perceive similarities in different things. Again, Benjamin’s notion of unsinnliche ehnlichkeiten (non-mimetic similarities) in his essay on the mimetic capacity lends itself to an interpretation of wit as that mimetic capacity. Such a rendition of wit inevitably ruptured the mimetic model of representation which had been established on the premise that appearance resembled identity. Wit interferes in the mirror relationship of Urbild and Abbild, distorting and distracting imagination in its attempt to represent the object. Wit causes imagination to be creative and to assemble the various parts of the object in different and unexpected ways so that different things can be compared and subsequently associated with one another in the perceiver’s mind. The experience of surprise resulting from the unexpected relations survives in today’s meaning of wit in German as “joke.”21 When Freud elaborates on the commemorative power of joke, he points to an “ingenius” faculty of the unconscious mind in understanding a joke. Wit suggests an unconscious knowledge of relationships between things. For reasons of cultural taboos, this knowledge can only emerge in an oblique or non-mimetic linguistic representation. The fact that consciousness of the tabooed meaning is accompanied by explosive laughter shows the repressive tension involved in the socio-cultural reglementation of thought and meaning. By analyzing people’s mental constructions, Freud has also demonstrated that conscious thought requires the repression of certain similarities between experiences. The joke’s effect does not stem from an innovative connection between things but merely reveals an already cognized but repressed familiarity with tabooed ideas attached to these things. Finally, Freud’s notion of the uncanny (unheimlich) expands on this phenomenon of an unconscious familiarity in the feeling of fear.

     

    Associating very different things in the linguistic representation of an object is made possible through the creation of seemingly artificial similarities; artificial, because artistic representation rests on the rhetorical quality of language which initially produces such similarities between things or signs. From this vantage point, language exerts a psychological power by prompting additional meanings that would otherwise be forgotten in the reference or mirror function of linguistic signs. This latter utilitarian concept of language prevails in the science of linguistics not dissimilar from the view of texts in the positivist assumptions of historicism. The antidote to such a constrained view of language is comprised by the realm of the aesthetic, or an assumed literariness of texts, which is decried for poetic license confined to this realm. This antidotal status of so-called literary texts was, in the history of aesthetics, finally cancelled by Benjamin. His critique insists that for the purpose of building historical consciousness aesthetic and allegorical strategies are necessary. These strategies of representation (Darstellung) parallel the psycho-analytic transference and essential temporality in the formation of thought (Vorstellung). The similarities produced by the rhetorical and figural power of language can be viewed as examples of a belated intuitive connection supplied by wit. Wit thus proves indispensable for imagination as a cognitive power in aesthetic representation.

     

    Contingent on mother wit, aesthetic judgment, even in its reflective component does not act arbitrarily (freed from certain universalities) but finds its support in a subjective history of desire and feelings. Kant’s notion of transcendental power might have to be abandoned in a psychology of subjectivity which seems to be expressed and analyzable in the aesthetic realm. We may, however, read transcendental power as merely a philosophical term for an 18th century theory of invention. Invention was held to be the result of absolute creativity and not a function of memory, or forgetfulness; this memory aspect nonetheless resounds in the German word Er-findung and in English might be associated in the term dis-covery. But if wit is responsible for something new, it might only seem new to consciousness when it is represented as art.22 If this is the case, then the novelty rests merely on the feature of the-finally-becoming-conscious of what had already been latent but could not be cognized. We remember that Freud found the wittiness of a joke to consist of the unconscious meanings of words which had been commonly repressed in accordance with a cultural taboo. In this view, what underlies wit is an unconscious knowledge that is un-covered in an imaginative, witty use of language. This cognitive-creative structure, reflected in newly detected similarities between things, seems to fit the 18th century use of the concept “soul” with which the notions of wit, spirit, and imagination are almost interchangeably linked. All these notions designate an activity of the psyche that interferes with a presumed a priori distinction of subject and object, displacing and even dispersing both into a new constellation in representation. An unconscious agreement between subject and object is articulated in the repetition of signifiers. In the temporality of this repetition, previously contiguous or associated features of an experience are recombined in the conscious emergence of a single sign. The analytical-philosophical (that is, nonlinguistic) approach of metaphysics always denied this temporalized and historically significant liaison between subject and object while insisting on their definite distinction.

     

    What sets this activity of the psyche in motion? Why would the individual, encountering textuality, “see” something differently than before? And why, when looking at separate things, would the subject indulge in a vision of their similarities? Such questions aim at identifying the motivation of wit and fantasy. They try to address the e-motional relationship between the subject and the object. The process starts, again, with affect. Depending on its force, affect triggers an emotional interest in the objects and motivates the subject to perceive similarities. The knowledge supporting the perception of similarities can emerge only once affect has set in motion the mental translation process, the movement of meta-phora, that turns affect into images and reflected feelings. The power or rather the intensity of affect depends upon the impact of experience in the subject’s past. The past experience is unconsciously repeated along with the sense impressions of the current object. The subject’s disposition vis-à-vis the object is thus influenced by the past as it engages the subject’s desire. This animated desire ultimately forms the subject’s vision of the object. It is this desire-driven vision that constitutes the basis for a value judgment, such as “this rose is beautiful.” Given the view that the past is represented only in feeling, what the mind compares is not so much the particularities of various objects, as it compares the affect with an unconscious desire. To what degree this desire is satisfied by the present experience determines whether the contingent affect is reflected now as a feeling of pleasure or pain. If there is pleasure, the affect has satisfied the desire for self-completion, for the imaginary experience of being whole. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant recrutes this kind of pleasure as a basis for the judgment of taste.

     

    My elaboration of the feeling of pleasure and pain as originating in the past may suffice to suggest an analogy between the creation of metaphor in both language and the mind. The tertium comparationis, which functions as the reference point for a comparison of different things, may indeed be provided by the capacity for pleasure and pain in the psychical apparatus. In Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment, the feeling of pleasure imports a subjective purposiveness (Zweckmässigkeit) into mental representation.23 Purposiveness precedes the cognition of an object and sets in motion the psychical activity of comparing the affect with the unconscious desire in the subject. The activity of comparing will “find,” i.e. create (erfinden), similarities between the pleasurable experience in the past and the one in the present, all projected at first outward, enveloping with fantasy the world of objects. The creative power that finds and has traditionally always found such similarities is the artistic genius in aesthetic representations. But in our postmodern culture where objects have turned into aesthetic icons, the aesthetic effects in popular culture are triggered by a fantasy of loss and remembrance of things past. Everyone resorts to wit to assemble into a pleasurable configuration and familiar life context the cultural debris of history and aesthetic tradition, to which the objects-turned-icons allude.

     

    Since the object is of no cognitive concern in aesthetic judgment, it is the subject’s sense of familiarity and connectedness with her past that is being challenged in the beautiful. This appears as a familiarity for which she has no concept or representation but only a feeling of pleasure that expresses the connection with the past, a feeling that lingers while affecting the person’s mood. Mood calls attention to itself in the lingering of the feeling and the contemplation of the beautiful. Kant defines this mood (Stimmung )as a state of inner harmony with all faculties in playful accord (übereinstimmung). (The semantic identities in the German words for mood and accord already suggest a “sensible” correspondence between mental and physical phenomena.) Such a mood might also be analyzed as a harmony between unconscious drive and conscious reality. But reality here is the irreality of the imagination. In the beautiful, the experience is not one of objectivity or exterior reality but of the formation of subjective intuitions. The intuition of the beautiful is an intuition of feeling. In this state of intuition, the subject is made to reflect upon her own Gemüt, her state of mind, her mood, through which she gains a sense of life, Lebensgefühl.

     

    If wit stands for the capacity to compare an unconscious past with its similarity in a different medium such as language, it must itself be partly unconscious and partly conscious. Indeed, because of this ambivalent status, wit was conflated in the philosophy of the 18th century with equally ambivalent, non-conceptual but nonetheless potentially cognitive and creative powers such as Geist and imagination (Einbildung). The unconscious component in these faculties, which I have developed here as an aspect of history with respect to the form of representation and feeling, actually does surface in Kant’s critique of imagination, specifically in his discussion of genius as related to Geist. If the unconscious not only makes itself felt in the aesthetic experience as a feeling of pleasure but also determines the latter’s cognizability in the judgment of taste, then Kant’s term Mutterwitz for the natural talent of judgment already invokes a connection between an unconscious and a conscious faculty. Intuition of the beautiful relies on the mediating capacity of such a natural talent; this talent is all the more important for the transformation of an intuition into a mental representation. If mother wit performs the switch from intuition to representation, then the exact status of imagination in representation remains unclear, is it indeed a formal power (i.e transcendental) or an archive of image content (i.e., empirical)? Is it an Einbildungskraft (power), and thus possibly an extension of the force of desire, or a phenomenon and thus a phantasy (Einbildung) about the form of the object, i.e., the other?

     

    If the aesthetic judgment consists of a process of reflection where imagination is free to produce intuitions, then it seems to be based on an a priori (unconscious) knowledge of pleasure. In German, Vermögen, the term for mental faculty and mental capacity, is semantically related to the word Vermächtnis meaning “legacy.” Legacy implicates the past as an active agent in the present, and this is made explicit in the incorporated noun Macht (power). In the signifying capacity of humans, the power of legacy transpires in the idea of tradition, understood as both translation and inheritance. As a mental activity, this legacy or tradition asserts itself in the capacity of wit. If the faculty of wit is inherited from the past as Mutterwitz, wit cannot be a formal category of consciousness but must be a capacity of formation that is unconsciously derived from the mater-iality of the primal experience of completion and its resulting pleasure. In the cultivation of genius (Bildung ), an appeal is made to this inheritance that constitutes the subject’s nature which Kant claims gives the rule to art. The universality that Kant ascribes to the judgment of taste can only be based on a concept of nature that does not exist in opposition to culture, but that is above all derived from culture and hence developed from the formation of individuals (Bildung). What cannot be “cognized” in aesthetic judgment–the aesthetic judgment is not a cognition in Kant’s view–is the appropriation of the past as nature itself, because this nature only manifests itself in representations of an experience. Thus, it is tradition that has to be invoked in the formation of the individual by appealing to his or her inheritance which builds genius as the capability of translating experiences into images. And the use of tradition is what distinguishes a postmodern experience from a modernist experience. The past is after all not dead, never in the individual psyche that is always confronted with new specimens of a seeming present.

     

    Notes

     

    1. Jean-Francois Courtine, Jean-Luc Nancy, et al., “The Sublime Offering,” Of the Sublime: Presence in Question (Albany: SUNY UP, 1993) 29.
     

    2. “Alle Beziehung der Vorstellungen, selbst die der Empfindungen, aber kann objektiv sein…nur nicht die auf das Gefühl der Lust und Unlust, wodurch gar nichts im Objekte bezeichnet wird, sondern in der das Subjekt, wie es durch die Vorstellung affiziert wird, sich selbst fühlt.” Kritik der Urteilskraft, 115.

     

    3. Psychoanalytic feminism disputes the patriarchial mode of separation and brings evidence for a psychological, specifically male, need to repudiate the primary identification with the mother in order to arrive at a sense of individuality. Nancy Chodorow in The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: California UP, 1978) has argued that this assertion of (male) difference rests on a denial of the mother as dependence on the other as well as commonality with the other. In Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale UP, 1985) Evelyn Fox Keller departs from this psychological dynamics and critiques the resultant dualism in Western scientific thought where only one side is always idealized at the expense of subduing the other. This idealization of the autonomously thinking subject is typical in all modern social activity and forms of knowledge which projects the irritant (m)other outwards in order to dominate it/her, as Jessica Benjamin argues in “Authority and the Family Revisited; or A World Without Fathers?” (New German Critique, 13 [Winter 1978] 35-57). In a more recent article Benjamin elaborates the importance of intersubjective space for the recognition of desire and its resultant sense of self; the body of the mother provided the first space of this kind and the fantasy of the mother’s body can be called up any time via “transitional objects” that are then identified as causing pleasurable experiences. Cf. “A Desire of One’s Own: Psychoanalytic Feminism and Intersubjective Space,” Feminist Studies /Critical/Studies ed. Theresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986) 78-102.

     

    4. cf. D.W. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomenon,” in: Through Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis (London: Tavistock, 1958).

    5. “His [Kant’s] theory of bodies (spheres) is not a physics of the exterior of bodies, but from the interior of an organic body (Leib), one’s own sensibility. As such it is however repressed–excluded from the discourse of metaphysics and is nonetheless its hidden Other.” Harmut and Gernot Böhme, Das Andere der Vernunft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985) 103.

     

    6. Immanuel Kant, Der Gebrauch der Metaphysik, sofern sie mit der Geometrie verbunden ist, in der Naturphilosophie, dessen erste Probe die physische Monadologie enthält in Vorkritische Schriften bis 1768, vol. 2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977) 549. (In the following I shall refer to this text as Monadologie.)

     

    7. Kant, Monadologie, 547 (“Die Kraft der Undurchdringlichkeit ist eine Zurückstossungskraft, die jedes Äu ere von einer weiteren Annäherung abhält.”)

     

    8. cf. Monadologie, 547-553.

     

    9. Kant, Versuch den Begriff der negativen Grö en in die Weltweisheit einzuführen in Vorkritische Schriften, 804.

    10. cf. Das Andere der Vernunft, 145: “Wenn die Geschichte des Selbstbewusstseins zurückgeht bis zu jener primären Unabgegrenztheit, die abgelöst wird durch den dynamisch gerichteten Organismus, von dem her sich die Unterschiedenheit von Objekten wie die Einheit des Selbstbewusstseins bilden–: wenn dies so ist, dann kann die Philosophie der Erinnerung als Rekonstruktion der ursprünglichen Ablösung und Emanzipation des Ich aus der Symbiose mit der Natur/Mutter gelten.”

     

    11. Böhmes, Das Andere der Vernunft, 140. (“Im Umgang gibt es nur noch die Legitimität des Cogito, das sich von jeder traditionellen Vermischung mit Natur gereinigt hat.”)

     

    12. Böhmes, Das Andere der Vernunft, 109.

     

    13. cf. Dietmar Kamper’s critique of the “body’s graphism” that engenders a different sense of historicity as well as of community mediated in the physical memory of pain: “On the basis of regularities in the similarity, correspondence, and sympathy with the pain of the other, a unique embodied temporality can emerge from all the metamorphoses of wound, scar, memory trace, pattern, sign.” Zur Soziologie der Imagination (München: Hanser, 1984) 159. (my translation.)

     

    14. Kant, “Wahrnehmung ist die empirische Vorstellung wodurch das Subjekt sich selbst in der Anschauung a priori afficirt und sich selbst zum Gegenstand nach einem Prinzip der Synthetischen Vorstellung a priori der transzendentalen Erkenntnis macht…” Opus Postumum II, in Kants Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königlich Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, vol. XXI/XXII (Berlin, Leipzig: De Gruyter, 1900-1955) 461.

     

    15. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 60; cf. Kritik der Urteilskraft, 140.

     

    16. “Thus the principle of judgment, in respect of the form of things of nature under empirical laws generally, is the purposiveness of nature in its variety. That is, nature is represented by means of this concept as if an understanding contained the ground of the unity of the variety of its empirical laws.” Kant, Critique of Judgment, 17; cf. Kritik der Urteilskraft, 89 (emphasis mine.)

     

    17. Kant derives the principle for judging from the “universal laws of nature” which “have their ground in understanding, which prescribes them to nature…,” thus it assumes a unity that the undetermined particularity of the object has with the determined laws in the faculty of understanding. In this same passage, Kant continues to, however, by denying such a cognitive process: “Not as if, in this way, such an understanding really had to be assumed (for it is only our reflective judgment to which this idea serves as a principle–for reflecting, not determining); but this faculty gives a law only to itself, and not to nature.)” Critique of Judgment, 16/17. Translation modified according to Sam Weber’s introductory essay to his book Institution and Interpretation (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1986). In this essay he excavates the problematic status of “purposiveness” for an aesthetics that cannot come to terms with the status of feeling as other. “The purposiveness of nature,” Kant says in the same place, “is therefore a particular concept, a priori, which has its origin solely in the reflective judgment.” (my emphasis).

     

    18. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 113; Kritik, 199.

     

    19. Elaborating on the cultural history of mimetic capacity, Benjamin compares language to astrological figurations to show how non-sensical similarities can be produced in imagination: “Jedoch auch wir besitzen einen Kanon nach dem das, was unsinnliche ähnlichkeit bedeutet, sich einer Klärung näher führen lä t. Und dieser Kanon ist die Sprache.” “Über das mimetische Vermögen,” Angelus Novus, 97.

     

    20. Cf. Alfred Bäumler: “Wit shows itself mainly in the happy invention of a ‘flowery manner of speaking’ [verblümter Redenarten], i.e. metaphors, through which we are brought to [recognize] similarities among things, as metaphor is only a ‘short allegory.’” in Kants Kritik der Urteilkraft. Ihre Geschichte und Systematik. (Das Irrationalitätsproblem in er ästhetik und Logik des 18. Jahrhunderts bis zur Kritik der Urteilskraft) (Halle: Niemeyer, 1923) 148.

     

    21. “Eine zweite Gruppe technischer Mittel des Witzes–Unifizierung, Gleichklang, mehrfache Verwendung, Modifikation bekannter Redensarten, Anspielung auf Zitate–lä t als gemeinsamen Charakter herausheben, da jedesmal etwas Bekanntes wiedergefunden wird, wo man anstatt dessen etwas Neues hätte erwarten müssen. Dieses Wiederfinden des Bekannten ist lustvoll, und es kann uns wiederum nicht schwerfallen, solche Lust als Ersparungslust zu erkennen, auf die Ersparung an psychischem Aufwand zu beziehen.” Sigmund Freud, “Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten,” Gesammelte Werke, vol. 6, 135. (emphasis mine.)

     

    22. “Wit discovers something new by tracing similarities between things…. Similarities have to first be found, they are not obvious to everyone.” Bäumler, 148.

     

    23. “But the subjective element in a representation, which cannot be an ingredient of cognition, is the pleasure or pain which is bound up with it…. The purposiveness, therefore, which precedes the cognition of an object and which, even without our wishing to use the representation of it for cognition, is at the same time immediately bound up with it, is that subjective [element] which cannot be an ingredient in cognition. Hence the object is only called purposive when its representation is immediately combined with the feeling of pleasure, and this very representation is an aesthetical representation of purposiveness.” Kant, Critique of Judgement, 26; Kritik der Urteilskraft, 99/100.

     

  • Guides to the Electropolis: Toward a Spectral Critique of the Media

    Allen Meek

    Massey University
    ameek@massey.ac.nz

     

    One of the most compelling sites in which the methodologies of psychoanalysis and marxian cultural theory intersect in contemporary critical writing is in the figure of the ghost. The political significance recently ascribed to this figure suggests a paradigmatic shift in cultural studies taking place where the poststructuralist death of the subject encounters both the collapse of Soviet communism and the “revolution” in global telecommunications. The historical situation in which Western critical theory finds itself at this moment has called for a renewed engagement with psychoanalysis, attentive to questions of mourning and collective memory. As particular examples of this project I will cite Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (1994), Margaret Cohen’s use of the term “Gothic Marxism,” and Ned Lukacher’s notion of a “phantom politics,” all of which work in the intertexts of psychoanalysis and politics, history and literature, but none of which are focused explicitly on what Derrida has called the “spectraleffects” (Derrida, 54) produced by electronic media.

     

    While Derrida’s reading of Marx “conjures” (Derrida characteristically enumerates the various meanings of this word) the specters of Marx, taking care to reveal Marx’s commitment to and ambivalence toward this figure, Cohen shows how the question of the spectral in Marx’s text has developed in those who have followed him and inherited from him, particularly André Breton and Walter Benjamin. Derrida interrogates the figure of the specter at the “frontier between the public and the private” that is “constantly being displaced” (Derrida, 50) by technology. Cohen’s genealogy of Gothic Marxism reminds us that this frontier has long been the subject of research at the experimental front of Marxian cultural theory. Between Cohen’s and Derrida’s respective discussions lie also the legacies of psychoanalysis, including Freud’s primal scene reconstructed by Lukacher as a methodological invention of continuing historiographical and political significance. It is in the psychoanalytic notion of “working over” that a spectral critique of the media comes into focus.

     

    In the face of the multinational corporate media’s claim to transmit all significant “world events,” a spectral critique would seek to confront those ghosts who call into question the legitimacy of this representational system and its ideologies. The globalization of electro-tele-presences seeks to usurp the place of, as it carries with it the traces of, a more general phantasmatic economy. Flows of electronic images and information allow for the proliferation of what Marx called the “phantasmagoria” of commodity capitalism, amidst which the conjunction of spectral imagery I am pursuing here begins to accumulate another kind of value and currency. In Specters of Marx Derrida pursues a “politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations” (xix) arising out of a sense of responsibility toward the ghosts of our collective histories: the victims of war, imperialism, totalitarianism, and political, social, and psychological oppression in all of its forms. For Derrida it is this sense of responsibility that we inherit from Marx that will help us “to think and to treat” (54) the spectral presences made available by global telecommunications. So for those who today wish to be rid of Marx and Marxism once and for all (the particular example of this position under investigation by Derrida is Francis Fukuyama), his and its ghosts always threaten to return. It is a condition of the so-called “End of History” and the ends of Marxism that they will never have arrived–and this is also the condition of their messianic promise and of the ethico-political imperatives that they precipitate: “Not only must one not renounce the emancipatory desire, it is necessary to insist on it more than ever” (75).

     

    The emancipatory impulse that should guide cultural critique is called forth in the form of a ghost: one who will challenge the hegemonic claims of the corporate media and unsettle the world order it seeks to impose. The ghost recalls those forgotten or repressed histories that compose the collective unconscious of our mass mediated society. Cohen’s reading of Breton and Benjamin conjures the ghosts of revolutionary struggles that haunt the streets of Paris amid the phantasmagorias of an emerging consumer society. Derrida’s specters are called forth on the stage of our own contemporary global politics. What are the legacies of the Surrealist experiments of the 20s and 30s and how can they be approached in the sphere of the new trans- and multi-national electropolis? To begin to answer this question we need to consider Derrida’s and Cohen’s specters in the context of critical theories of the media.

     

    Derrida’s specters of Marx should not be made equivalent to that “other scene” of politics and eroticism submitted to rigorous ideological analysis by the marxian school of Cahiers du Cinema. I will argue that Derrida’s application of intertextual montage in pursuit of specters implies a different ontological order to that of the materialist histories made available by Althusserian criticism which, while it helped us to understand that ideology was not simply a phantom to be dispelled but itself a mode of operation with its own structures (Harvey, 90), did not offer a model for a therapeutic encounter with the specter or for what Derrida understands by the work of mourning. If Althusser’s analysis of ideology as an imaginary process enabled marxian cultural analysis to depart from a crude model of culture directly reflecting the material basis of social organization, Derrida’s insistence that “mourning is work itself, work in general, the trait by means of which one ought to reconstruct the very concept of production” (97) demands a reconsideration of the practices of cultural studies.

     

    Indeed the range of interpretive strategies and critical approaches loosely collected in the Anglo-American academy under the rubric of Cultural Studies employs various syntheses of marxian, psychoanalytic, and structuralist theories, but there remains very little work in that field that acknowledges the full scope of Derrida’s methodological critique of those theories. The critical response to the media that emerged amid the uprisings of May 1968 in France has had an enduring effect on the development of film and television studies, primarily through Althusser’s application of Lacanian psychoanalysis, but (with a few notable exceptions) Derridean deconstruction has had a much less direct influence on critical media studies. Now Derrida has published for the first time an extensive meditation on Marx, inviting renewed speculation about the place that deconstruction might have in the context of marxian theories of media.

     

    Important precedents for considering how such a critical practice might proceed are made available by Margaret Cohen’s and Ned Lukacher’s work. Cohen’s Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution(1993) sets out to reconstruct a neglected politico-aesthetic tradition which she calls “Gothic Marxism,” or “the first efforts to appropriate Freud’s seminal twentieth-century exploration of the irrational for Marxist thought” (2). She inquires into the intertexts of French Surrealism and Walter Benjamin’s historiographic application of montage in the Arcades Project. Benjamin’s relation to Surrealist texts, on one side, and Soviet experiments in cinematic montage on another, continue to suggest forms of critical engagement with a mediatized culture that remain largely unexplored. Derrida explicitly cites Benjamin’s messianic interpretation of Marx as a precursor text to his own project. Both Cohen’s and Derrida’s excavations of the ghosts of Marx are anticipated in Lukacher’s Primal Scenes: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis(1986), which elaborates a “phantom politics” based in the Freudian reconstruction of the forgotten event and Marx’s period underground after the failure of the 1848 revolutions. Cohen shows how Surrealist novels like Breton’s Nadja present a mode of counter-memory that haunts the facade of the modern state-supported consumer society which emerged after 1848. But where is the possibility of such an alternative tradition in the mediatized society after the interventions of 1968? Or the challenges to State Communism of 1989?

     

    In the context provided by Derrida’s discussion of Marx, I will attempt to situate Cohen’s notion of a Gothic Marxism by comparing it with Anne Friedberg’s Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern(1993). Taken together with Cohen’s Profane Illumination, Window Shopping helps to pose the question of what an application of Gothic Marxism to the postmodern media environment might be like. What is initially striking about the juxtaposition of these two books, however, is that in Friedberg’s analysis of shopping mall culture we witness the disappearance of those darker social forces that form the political unconscious of postmodernity but which it is the project of Gothic Marxism to make visible. Through a comparative reading of Cohen’s and Friedberg’s books, in the intertextual space that these two theoretical works define, I aim to bring the project of a spectral critique toward a more direct application with regard to the imagery of electronic capitalism and to show how the critical force of psychoanalytic reconstruction can be reconsidered in the postmodern culture that presents history as a perpetual re-make.

     

    Genealogy

     

    A spectral critique takes its place between the experimental practices of the avant-garde and the marxian analysis of capital and in the context of the dissemination of new audiovisual technologies. Freud’s experimental reconstructions were contemporary with the invention of cinema, both of which share a prehistory in all of the picture puzzles (rebus, anamorphosis) and visual machines (zoetrope, stereoscope) that had already accumulated throughout the modern period. The revelations of psychoanalysis were first thought in conjunction with the appearance of film and, as Benjamin suggested with his notion of an “optical unconscious,” the filmic zoom, close-up and the development of montage extended this parallel attention to the microscopic details of everyday life. The conjuration of the hidden picture and the other scene could be understood as either an unconcealment or a contrived illusion, or both. The ghost-effect (think of Melies’ celebrated inventions) takes place at the seam between two texts, in the overlay of different discourses, the encounter between different modes of representation, or at the interface of different media. For Derrida between Hamlet and The Manifesto of the Communist Party, for Cohen between Benjamin’s Arcades Project and Fantomas.

     

    A spectral critique would seek to redirect the insights of psychoanalysis regarding the therapeutic value of mourning toward a politicized critique. But what needs to be mourned? Cohen’s Gothic Marxism is positioned as a response to a “post-revolutionary” situation and a sense of the failure of Communism that she claims is anticipated in Benjamin and Breton’s responses to Stalinism (11) and she wants to revise vulgar Marxist notions of a direct causal relationship between base and superstructure as a way of explaining ideological meanings manifest in cultural artifacts. Althusser provides her with the systematic theorization she finds missing from Benjamin’s notes on the dialectical image (19). In this way she can reformulate Benjamin’s psychoanalytic Marxism in the following phrase: “the ideologies of the superstructure’ express the base in disfigured products of repression” (33).

     

    In contrast to Althusser’s “scientific” Marxism, however, Benjamin’s method is “therapeutic” (37-38). Cohen lists the positions of Gothic Marxism as the following:

     

    (1) the valorization of the realm of a culture's ghosts and phantasms as a significant and rich field of social production rather than a mirage to be dispelled; (2) the valorization of a culture's detritus and trivia as well as strange and marginal practices; (3) a notion of critique moving beyond logical argument and the binary opposition to a phantasmagorical staging more closely resembling psychoanalytic therapy, privileging nonrational forms of "working through" and regulated by overdetermination rather than dialectics; (4) a dehierarchization of the epistemological privilege accorded the visual in the direction of that integration of the senses dreamed of by Marx...; accompanying this dehierarchization, a practice of writing of criticism cutting across traditionally separated media and genres...; and (5) a concomitant valorization of the sensuousness of the visual: the realm of visual experience is opened to other possibilities than the accomplishment and/or figuration of rational demonstration.(11-12)

     

    One might speculate briefly, without reverting to a McLuhanite determinism, on how many of these positions would serve as effective critical responses to media culture, with its collapsing of fact and fiction into a general flow of electronic text. Yet cultural studies, particularly as it has inherited the Birmingham model, has rarely incorporated any such experimental practices into its methodologies.

     

    With a similar attention to therapeutic practices as offering an analogy for a critical method, Ned Lukacher’s Primal Scenes brings together Freud and Heidegger’s practices of intertextual reconstruction as a response to the postmodern problematic of mourning and history. In Lukacher’s readings of literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, intertextuality takes the place of the transcendental ground of history and memory. Freud’s listening for repressed memory in the speech of his patients and Heidegger listening for what is left unsaid in the Western philosophical tradition serve for Lukacher as precedents for a new historiography. Freud’s construction of the primal scene in the famous Wolf Man case was never able to be verified by the subject of analysis himself: the patient could never remember if it actually “happened.” So the theoretical scene, constructed from an intertext of the patient’s dreams, remembered stories, and anecdotes from his own experience, assumed the place of “true” memory over the subject’s conscious attempts to remember. In Lukacher’s discussion, Freud’s term “primal scene”:

     

    comes to signify an ontologically undecidable intertextual event that is situated in the differential space between historical memory and imaginative construction, between archival verification and interpretive free play.(24)

     

    Freud’s ontological revolution can now be seen, retroactively, as an anticipation of (post)historical consciousness in the global cultural economy made possible by, among other things, telecommunications. As Arjun Appadurai has noted, popular perceptions of history are now characterized by a “nostalgia without memory” (Appadurai, 272) in which a global audience looks back on a past they have learned to identify with through contact with American media culture. Disparate peoples everywhere now “remember” a collective past that only ever took place on cinema and TV. Just as Freud constructed the primal scene at the interfaces of orality and literacy, of childhood and folk memory with the forms of memory and analysis made possible by alphabetic technologies and methods, historiography today needs to engage with the penetration of individual and collective memory by electronic media if it is to excavate its political unconscious.

     

    The implications of such a problematic for contemporary marxian cultural theory suggests that a materialist analysis would not be adequate unless it confronted spectrality in all of its electronic mutations. As Frederic Jameson has commented with reference to Derrida’s Specters of Marx, it is “the problem of materialism, its occultation or repression, the impossibility of posing it as a problem as such and in its own right, which generates the figure of the specter” (Jameson, 83). Jameson argues that dialectical materialism needs to be understood as a set of strategies, a critical praxis, or “an optical adjustment” (87) rather than an unquestioned ideological position: materialism can learn from deconstruction. Here the practices of Gothic Marxism listed by Cohen also provide a set of valuable leads. Lukacher argues for an historiographic practice in which “the subject of history is not the human subject–whether defined as an individual, a class, or a species–but rather the intertextual process itself” (13). The tasks of redefining a “new international” in a “post-communist” world would include the invention of such an historiographic practice that would contend with the ways that data banks, information networks, and electronic communication technologies are transforming collective memory.

     

    The intertext through which Derrida inquires into the primal hauntings of European culture takes place between literature and politics, between Hamlet and The Manifesto of the Communist Party. The appearance of the ghost in Hamlet provides the scene by which the legacies of Marxism can be (re)staged; or, as Lukacher puts it, “the intertext is the medium through which history gives itself to thought” (237). Mourning, writes Derrida, always involves “identifying the bodily remains and…localizing the dead” (9). The problematics of mourning in the New World Order include the ways in which the experience of cultural identity is increasingly displaced and national boundaries are reconfigured or subverted by flows of information and capital. New forms of agency need to be invented in the virtual spaces that increasingly define our public sphere (or the absence of it). The ghost becomes a signifier for such structuring absences as problems of mourning.

     

    The intertext of Hamlet and The Manifesto of the Communist Party, then, allows Derrida to re-present the specter of Communism and to remind us that “this attempted radicalization of Marxism called deconstruction” (Derrida, 92) is unthinkable without Marx or Shakespeare and without Hamlet as the founding literary text staging the modern European encounter with the question of the unconscious. Lukacher names the deconstructive radicalization of Marxism a “phantom politics” (Lukacher, 245) in which the reference to tragedy signifies a certain rejection of politics conceived as conscious self-interest and opening instead onto an encounter with ghosts.

     

    Another example of this deconstruction of the boundary between literature and politics is when, through attention to intertextuality, Cohen reveals Marx to be not only a master theoretical voice guiding Benjamin’s excavations of Paris but Marx himself a reader, alongside Baudelaire, of Poe (Cohen, 226). Indeed Benjamin’s 1938 essay “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” is full of references not only to Poe but also to James Fenimore Cooper’s influence on the French novel of Dumas, Hugo, and Sue. The forerunner of the postmodern subject of history, the nineteenth-century reader’s imagination was stocked with fictionalized experiences of the Americas. The long term effects of this mass cultural imagination could be seen in the Nazi deployment of myth and are now to be found in cases like the militia in post-Communist Yugoslavia dressed in outfits derived from American movie remakes of the Vietnam war (Denitch, 74). Rambo not only remakes history as film but history also remakes Rambo as history.

     

    Lukacher compares the theoretical status of Benjamin’s dialectical images to Freud’s primal scene. If the primal scene constructed in psychoanalysis can never be ultimately verified by conscious memory, it can nevertheless have a powerful explanatory and potentially therapeutic effect. In the same way that Freud investigated the origins of the Wolf Man’s psychosis through a network of signifiers derived from the patient’s dreams and memories, Benjamin sought to recover from the dream images embodied in archaic forms of commodity culture those voices that had been excluded from official histories (Lukacher, 277). For example, in his essay on Baudelaire, Benjamin discusses how the atmosphere of Cooper’s novels of the American West is borrowed by French writers in their early detective novels (Benjamin, 41-42). The direct comparison of the streets and avenues of Paris to the prairie and the woods imbued the urban market place with exotic appeal. Such exoticism masked fundamental anxieties provoked by the conditions of modern urban life; so Benjamin cites Baudelaire:”‘What are the dangers of the forest and the prairie compared with the daily shocks and conflicts of civilization?’” (39). In this situation, the popular physiologies provided journalistic stereotypes to simplify the bewildering strangeness of the city. French authors invoked the figure the Indian tracker to describe the vigilant detective in an alien landscape. Contained in the wish image of the American west was a displaced memory of colonialist genocide. Through attention to the intertextual construction of urban experience, a political unconscious registering the global catastrophe of capitalism becomes manifest as an image. This image of the Native American, however, is not as much dispelled in Benjamin’s historical investigation as conjured, appearing as a guide to the ideological territory that Benjamin is traversing.

     

    Guides Noires

     

    In order to bring the ghosts of our collective histories into visibility on the postmodern scene we can assume, as the legacy of Freud and Breton, that the practices of everyday life make their way along the royal road to a collective unconscious. Benjamin’s insight was to understand the Paris arcades as an entry into the repressed memories of High Capitalism. One of the more provocative observations in Window Shopping is that the design of the Bibliotheque Nationale (where Benjamin worked on the Arcades Project) served as a precedent for the shelving in department stores (Friedberg, 79). While the nineteenth-century shopper adapted the browsing practices of the scholar, studying displays of commodities like titles arranged on library shelves, the postmodern cultural theorist has been made-over in the image of the TV viewer, with shopping channels and the internet today conspiring to make the activities of writing and consumption identical.

     

    Both Friedberg and Cohen account for their respective projects through chance encounters in everyday experience that put the present and past in startling conjunction. For Friedberg this encounter is seeing a Hollywood remake of Godard’s Breathless in an L.A. strip mall (xi). For Cohen it is coming across “at a sale of used French books…a card advertising the services of one Eugene Villard, private eye, dressed in a fantomas outfit and holding a key” (75). The image of this detective–with its caption “Qui suis-je“–triggers for Cohen an association with the opening line of Breton’s Nadja. Friedberg sees her geographical move from New York to Los Angeles in the mid 1980s participating in a shift of greater historical significance–New York being “the quintessential modern city (Capital of the Twentieth Century)” and Los Angeles “the quintessential post-modern city (Capital of the Twenty-First)” [xi]–which frames her transportation of Benjamin’s flanerie in the Paris arcades into the motorized landscapes of Southern California and the phantasmagoric spaces produced by electronic technologies.

     

    The original title of Friedberg’s book, Les Flaneurs du Mal (1), installs a palimpsest–Baudelaire/Benjamin/Friedberg–in which her precursor figures are summoned as guides conducting passageways between the nineteenth century and the present. Baudelaire’s flanerie presents for Friedberg an early form of what she calls the “mobilized virtual gaze” (2): an experience of locality and identity made possible by the technological simulation of travel through time and space. Cohen’s Profane Illumination also begins with the figure of the guide, in this case tourist guide books. Cohen notes the existence of a special genre of guide book, the Guides Noirs, “guides to the Gothic sides of familiar places” and relates this mode of tourism “devoted to the irrational, illicit, inspired, passional, often supernatural aspects of social topography” (1) to the set of practices she calls Gothic Marxism.

     

    Cohen confronts these practices most directly in her interpretation of Breton’s Nadja, a surreal “novel” which she compares to the discourse of the analysand in psychoanalysis(66). Breton investigates his own subjectivity as haunted, opening onto a realm of ghosts. Cohen discusses tourist guides to historic Paris and uses Nadja as a counter-example of flanerie devoted to the bizarre and marginal, as opposed to the most official, monumental sites of the great city. Nadja serves as Breton’s guide to the noir sites of Paris. For Cohen, Nadja provides a significant example “of writing surrealist historiography by applying a Freudian paradigm of memory to collective events” (80). Cohen’s juxtaposes passages from early twentieth-century tour guides against the sites of Breton’s surreal explorations, drawing attention to the bohemian and lumpen populations that have haunted them and reveals Paris–as Benjamin’s essays on Baudelaire do also–a memory theater containing a revolutionary history around every corner.

     

    The value of comparing Cohen and Friedberg’s different approaches to the Arcades Project lies in their mutual exclusiveness. Friedberg demonstrates, in her translation of the Arcades Project onto the contemporary loci of the shopping mall and freeway, how the postmodern moment suspends historical consciousness. The memory theater of the urban streets that Cohen’s Gothic Marxism aims to make readable strikes one as impossible in the world described by Friedberg: “The mall creates a nostalgic image of the town center as a clean, safe, and legible place, but a peculiarly timeless place” (113). The mythic topos of small town America encloses (as does TV in the domestic space) and services the desires of an insulated middle class that has effectively removed itself from the public sphere as a domain of political contest and struggle. Benjamin “asserts that Baudelaire cannot bring the urban crowd to direct representation but rather occults it, much as the neurotic represses a formative psychical trauma” (Cohen, 209). This mode of reading, informed by psychoanalysis, is not at work in Friedberg’s study of Los Angeles shopping malls.

     

    Yet the mall is not ghost-free, for it is certainly haunted by what Jameson calls “sheer class ressentiment” (Jameson, 86), the hatred that the dispossessed feel for the privileged and that the dead feel for the living. The malevolent spirits that emerge in the wake of the endless series of catastrophes that Benjamin identified with the advance of technological progress appear in Friedberg’s book as the zombies who invade the deserted shopping malls in the cult film Dawn of the Dead (Friedberg, 116-117). As Jameson notes, these figures are not identical to Derrida’s specters, who embody a “weak messianic power” something akin to Benjamin’s angel of history. Derrida’s specters demand not revenge but social justice. So a gothic critique would not aim to give voice to this primal ressentiment but rather to open global tele-capitalism to the enigmas of visibility that call us back to our fundamental social and political responsibilities: to the un- and under- employed and represented, to non-citizens and to all of those whose civil liberties are diminished or annihilated in the New World Order.

     

    Remake

     

    Three years before the completion of Benjamin’s essay on Baudelaire, Sergei Eisenstein discussed precisely the same transplanting of literary imagery as he sought to define the principles of montage in film. Shifting, like Benjamin, from a discussion of the “science” of physiogonomy to the French fascination with Cooper, Eisenstein briefly notes how the ideology of private property that informs the detective novel is underwritten by a narrative of colonial imperialism (Eisenstein, 128). Both Benjamin and Eisenstein were interested in this example of literary influence for the same reason: the political significance and pedagogical potential of archaic wish-images. For if behind Cooper’s narratives there lurked the realities of ethnocide, there was also in the dream of a faraway landscape a desire–repressed, or redirected into colonizing aggression–to return to the utopian society that the discovery of “primitive” peoples had presented to the European imagination. Like Freudian psychoanalysis, Benjamin’s dialectical images and Eisensteinian montage are interested in repressed memory, but they apply this interest to collective memory which they seek to awake for the purposes of inspiring historical agency. As Freud had attended to images derived from fairy tales half-remembered from childhood, Benjamin looked to the origins of the detective novel in images of tribalism. The images that made the novels of Cooper and Dumas so popular we recognize in the classic Hollywood genres of the western and film noir as they continue to be recycled by our contemporary electronic media.

     

    This recycling process tends to produce effects of arbitrary equivalence rather than historical consciousness. The postmodern signscape in which “the hammer and sickle is equal to Marilyn” (Friedberg, 173) leads Friedberg to consider the cinematic form of the remake as both an expression but also potentially a critique of the nostalgia industry (174-175). But the question of the remake in her argument (one of her examples is the early Fantomas films) lurches toward a paradoxical mise-en-abyme:

     

    Consider, for example, a Victor Fleming film produced in 1939, set in 1863, but shown in 1992 (Gone With the Wind). Or a film produced in 1968, set in 2001, but shown in 1992 (2001: A Space Odyssey). Or more exactly, a film made in the city of Paris in 1964, set in a future world, but seen in 1992 in the city of Los Angeles (Alphaville), or a film made in Los Angeles in 1982, set in Los Angeles in 2019 (Blade Runner), but seen in Los Angeles in 1992. (177)

     

    Or an historiographic experiment produced in Paris in the 1930s, set in Paris in the 1850s, not published (in German) until the 1980s and read (about) in America in the 1990s? The passage demands that we consider Friedberg’s relation to Benjamin’s work, as she comments at one point that the Arcades Project might be best compared to “a film never completed” (51). Is her own book to be understood as a remake? If so, how does the temporality of the postmodern as it is explained by Friedberg shape her own critical project and its attendant historical and ethical responsibilities?

     

    On this point an illuminating contrast to Window Shopping is provided in a very different study of L.A., City of Quartz by Mike Davis, which offers a social and political history of the city in terms of race and class war–from its exposure of local business interests overtaken by offshore investment, to its analysis of the fortress mentality of the white middle class and a new underclass decimated by unempolyment, drugs, and gang-police warfare. The criminalization of the poor in “post-liberal” L.A. that Davis documents provokes a far more bitter and frightening vision of postmodernity than that of Window Shopping:

     

    contemporary urban theory, whether debating the role of electronic technologies in precipitating "postmodern space," or discussing the dispersion of urban functions across poly-centered metropolitan "galaxies" has been strangely silent about the militarization of city life so grimly visible at street level. (Davis, 223)

     

    Indeed the L.A. of Window Shopping does not provide any account of the historical or social space described in City of Quartz: those spaces are not to be traversed as much as escaped through the modes of virtual travel which Friedberg explores. The technological mediation of the social transforms the very notion of a geographical site or a public sphere. And as long as the social Other reappears only on the screens inside the fortress, one wonders about the viability of a spectral critique that might return the ghosts of the New World Order to consciousness in ways that can more effectively challenge the postliberal imaginary “reciprocally dependent upon the social imprisonment of the third-world service proletariate” (Davis, 227). City of Quartz provides the analysis of social struggle absent in Window Shopping, as Davis argues that the restructuring of urban space in L.A. is a direct response to the race riots of the 1960s (224). The L.A. mall is to 1968 what the Paris arcade was to 1848.

     

    Guides Noir to L.A.? Given that the ambition of Friedberg’s book is to redefine the postmodern in terms of the central role that cinema and other modes of technological simulation have had in shaping that moment’s perception of its own historicity and spatiality, it should be noted that for Mike Davis, film noir–that mix of American and exilic European sensibilities that left such a mark on classic Hollywood–“sometimes approached a kind of Marxist cinema manque, a shrewdly oblique strategy for an otherwise subversive realism” (Davis, 41). Forties detective fiction in some respects assumed the place of the abandoned project of thirties socialist realism. And while the Chandlerian detective that cruises the noir landscape of California might not serve as an exact analogy to the Baudelairian flaneur, he is surely a mythic–and highly ambivalent–type in whom a spectral critique would discern a site of redemptive possibility. What the juxtaposition of Friedberg and Cohen’s books offers is a hope of such a critical vision: one that can negotiate history in its mediatized forms and thereby as a ghost history. To begin to write this history will demand attention to the intertextual migrations of our cultural legacies. Friedberg’s book is inspired by her encounter with a remake of Godard’s Breathless–itself a remake of both Hollywood film noir and Italian neorealist forerunners. More recently, Godard offers us an image of a post-Communist landscape haunted by cinematic ghosts in Germany Year 90, featuring Lemme Caution, his noir detective hero (resurrected from Alphaville) wandering the ruins of Cold War Europe. Like Benjamin and Eisenstein before him, Godard has invented a montage practice that works with hybrid images from European and American traditions but that stages a critical vision of the dominant mode of representation.

     

    The primal scenes of Oedipus and the Wolf Man, the mise-en-abyme of Hamlet, the social critique of film noir, all serve as precedents for a spectral critique which must learn to confront and to mourn the catastrophic losses that haunt the scenes of our collective memory; they displace the subject of history with a series of intertextual encounters and overlays that include both the interfaces of our various technological media and the legacies of the liberational struggles to which we remain indebted; they teach us to recognize our historical situation as formed by the contradictions of becoming post-communist, -literate, -modern, -metaphysical, but not yet agents of the social justice that we must strive to bring about.

     

    In Godard’s film an aging man with a suitcase, a refugee, crosses the borders of East and West: like Benjamin’s flaneur, part-detective, part-exile, bearing testimony to the ruins of both totalitarian Communism and consumer capitalism. Likewise, between Friedberg’s Breathless and Cohen’s Fantomas, between psychoanalysis and cultural studies, emerge images of those whose labor supports but is rendered invisible by the smooth surfaces of fin-de-siecle consumerism: the unemployed, the migrant, the homeless–the specters of our electronic arcades.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” The Phantom Public Sphere. Ed. Bruce Robbins. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. 269-295.
    • Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Verso,1983.
    • Cohen, Margaret. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: U of California P, 1993.
    • Davis, Mike. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. London, New York: Verso, 1990.
    • Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Intro. Bernd Magnus & Stephen Cullenberg. London, New York: Routledge, 1994.
    • Denitch, Bogdan. Ethnic Nationalism: The Tragic Death of Yugoslavia. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994.
    • Eisenstein, Sergei. Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. Ed. and Trans. Jay Leda. San Diego, New York, London: HBJ, 1977.
    • Friedberg, Anne. Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.
    • Harvey, Sylvia. May 68 and Film Culture. London: BFI, 1980.
    • Jameson, Frederic. “Marx’s Purloined Letter.” New Left Review No 209 (Jan/Feb 1995): 75-109.
    • Lukacher, Ned. Primal Scenes: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis. Ithaca & London: Cornell UP, 1986.

     

  • Representation Represented: Foucault, Velázquez, Descartes

    Véronique M. Fóti

    The Pennsylvania State University

     

    In The Order of Things, René Descartes–the early Descartes of the Regulae ad Direcetionem Ingenii (1628/29)–is, for Michel Foucault, the privileged exponent of the Classical episteme of representation, as it initially defines itself over against the Renaissance episteme of similitude.1 The exemplary position accorded to Descartes (a position that is problematic from the “archaeological” standpoint, since exemplars belong themselves to the order of representation) is complemented as well as contested by the prominence Foucault gives to a visual work: Diego Velázquez de Silva’s late painting Las Meniñas, completed some eight or nine years after Descartes’s death. Foucault understands this painting as the self-representation and self-problematization of representation, revealing both its inner law and the fatal absence at its core. Specifically, Las Meniñas demarcates the empty place of the sovereign, the place that will, in the epistêmê of modernity, be occupied by the figure of man. Since the place of man, his announced and imminent disappearance, and the character of a thought that can situate itself in the space of this disappearance (the space of language or écriture) are the crucial concerns of The Order of Things, the discussion of Las Meniñas is both inaugural and recurrent; the painting is not placed on a par with the two works of literature, Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Sade’s Justine, which problematize, respectively, the Renaissance and Modern epistemic orders.

     

    Foucault maintains a puzzling silence as to why he finds it necessary to turn to a painting (rather than perhaps a work of literature) to find the epistêmê of representation both revealed and subverted. The question concerning the relationship between painting and representation gains further urgency since Foucault, who rejects phenomenology, does not concur with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s privileging of painting as an antidote to Cartesian and post-Cartesian representation.2 Does he then treat painting as simply a special type of “the visible” which, as Gilles Deleuze points out, is for him irreducible to the articulable without, however, contesting the latter’s primacy?3 Does painting simply belong to the non-discursive milieu or form part of the visual archive without having any power to challenge discursive configurations?

     

    In order to address these questions and to carry forward the dialogue between classical representation and painting that Foucault initiates, I will first discuss the role of Descartes in Foucault’s epistêmê of representation, then interrogate his analysis of the structure of representation in Las Meniñas, arguing that he is not fully attentive to the materiality of painting and to its resistance to discursive appropriation but remains, strangely, bound to a Cartesian understanding of vision and painting. I will, in conclusion, consider the implications of renewed attention to the materiality of painting for theories of representation, and the importance, for genuinely pictorial thought, of the irreducibility of painting to a theoretical exploration of vision.

     

    Descartes and the Epistêmê of Representation

     

    Foucault perceives clearly that, in Classical representation, as inaugurated by Descartes, universal mathêsis as a relational science of order and measure takes precedence over the mathematization of nature (which is emphasized by Husserl and Heidegger).4 Descartes notes, in the Regulae, that mathematics is merely the “outer covering” (integumentum) of the pure mathêsis that is the hidden source of all scientific disciplines.5

     

    For Descartes, the cognitive order of the mathêsis is not a representation of any pre-given, ontological order, but a free construction of the human intellect or ingenium (which, in the Regulae, is not subordinated to divine creation). Representation does not function here as a replication, in the order of knowledge, of a reality that is independent of and withdrawn from the apprehending mind (a replication that typically seeks to disguise its own secondariness or shortfall). Rather, if mathêsis can be regarded as a prototype of representation, it is one that boldly re-invents reality in the autonomous order of thought. The intellect reflects and contemplates only itself in the order of nature.

     

    Given his constructivism, Descartes insists that the limits of human knowledge must be scrupulously demarcated and respected. He notes, for instance, the futility of postulating occult qualities and new types of entities to account for the phenomena of magnetism. If one can explain the phenomena entirely in terms of “simple natures” that are “known in themselves” (because their simplicity is not absolute but relative to the apprehending intellect), and of their necessary interconnections (which is to say, by intuitus and deductio), one can confidently claim to have discovered the magnet’s true nature, insofar as it is accessible to human knowledge.6 Even in his classical works, where the epistemology of simple natures is superseded by that of innate ideas, which are not necessarily comprehensible to the finite mind (the idea of God is a notable example), Descartes continues to emphasize that the limitation of human knowledge is the price of its certainty.

     

    Although Foucault does not explicitly discuss Descartes’s strategies of limitation, he indicates the “archaeological” configuration in terms of which they can be understood. He points out that the indefinite profusion of resemblances characteristic of the Renaissance epistêmê of similitude becomes finitized once similarity and difference are articulated in the order of mathêsis. Infinity becomes the fundamental problem for Classical thought, and finitude is understood privatively as shortfall or limitation. Infinity escapes representation. By contrast, modernity relinquishes the unattainable standard of the infinite and thinks finitude “in an interminable cross-reference with itself.”7 In his exchange with Derrida, Foucault brilliantly analyzes the problem of finitude in Descartes’s Meditationes with reference to madness and dream as afflictions of the finite mind.8 In the Regulae, however, the intellect or ingenium is not situated in relation to the infinite but is granted autonomy, so long as it can conceal its own usurpation of the position of origin. It translates its experience of finitude into the parameters of scientific construction.9

     

    Foucault does not pay heed to the anomaly of the Regulae in relation to the Classical epistêmê; but he discusses two orders within which an effacement of the position of origin (and therefore also of its usurpation) can be accomplished: signification and language. He observes that “binary signification” (which conjoins signifier and signified without benefit of a mediating relation, such as resemblance) is so essential to the structure of representation as to remain generally unthematized with the Classical epistêmê.10 The sign must, however, represent its own representative power within itself, so that the binary relationship immediately becomes unbalanced, giving primacy to the signifier over the signified or the phenomenon. This concentration of representative power in the signifier tends also to obscure the role of the subject as the originator or representation, which is precisely the obscuration or ambiguity that the early Descartes needs.

     

    Language, in the context of the Classical epistêmê, abets this obscuration, in that it takes on an appearance of transparent neutrality, becoming the diaphanous medium of representation. Discourse interlinks thought (the “I think”) with being (the “I am”) in a manner which effaces the speaker’s finite singularity. For this reason, Foucault finds that language as it functions in Classical representation precludes the possibility of a science of man.11

     

    The function of Classical discourse is to create a representational table or picture which is schematic and pays no heed to phenomena in their experienced concreteness. In the case of the visible, which is at issue here, phenomenal features that resist schematization, such as color, or perceived motion and depth, are ascribed to a confused apprehension of intelligible relationships and are therefore denied any intrinsic importance. The Classical epistêmê recognizes no significant differences between thought and a vision purged of its adventitious confusions (those that accrue to it due to its immersion in sentience). Purified vision is understood in terms of geometry and mechanics.

     

    Representation Self-Represented: Foucault’s Las Meniñas

     

    Foucault analyzes Las Meniñas as a referential system that organizes mutually exclusive visibilities with respect to a subjectivity or power of representation which remains incapable of representing itself, so that its absence interrupts the cycle of representation. As John Rajchman observes, Foucault, in the 1960s, was practicing a form of nouvelle critique which views the work of art as abysmally self-referential:

     

    In each work, he uncovered a reference to the particular artistic tradition in which the work figured, and thus presented it as the self-referring instance of that tradition. Las Meniñas is a painting about painting in the tradition of "illusionistic space"...12

     

    In Las Meniñas, the attentive gaze of the represented painter reaches out beyond the confines of the picture space to a point at which it converges with the sight lines of the Infanta, the menina Doña Isabel de Velasco, the courtier in the middle ground (thought to be Don Diego Ruiz de Azcona), and the dwarf Maribárbola.13 Foucault takes this point to be the standpoint of the implied spectator, converging with that of the implied actual painter gazing at and painting the represented scene, and with that of the model being painted by the represented artist. The hand of this represented painter is poised in mid-air, holding a brush that he may have, a moment ago, touched to the palette. It will presently resume its work on a surface invisible to the spectator to whom the monumental stretched and mounted canvas reveals only its dull, indifferent back. His eyes and hands conjoin spatialities that are normally disjunct: the space of the model, excluded de facto from the composition, the space of the spectator excluded de jure, the represented space, and finally the invisible space of representation, the surface of the canvas being painted. In the allegorical dimension, an unstilled oscillation is set up between signifier and signified, representative and represented, leaving the one who has the power of representation (the painter who, as represented, has momentarily stepped out from behind the canvas and who, in his actuality, remains invisible) both inscribed andconcealed in the referential system.

     

    Foucault observes that the source of all the visibility in the painting, the window opposite the painter’s eyes, through which pours “the pure volume of light that renders all representation possible,”14 remains similarly invisible, both by its near-exclusion from the composition, and by being, in itself, a pure aperture, an unrepresentable empty space. The light which it releases streams across the entire foreground, casting into relief or dissolving the contours of the figures, kindling pale fires in the Infanta’s hair, and sharply illumining the jutting vertical edge of the represented canvas. Since it must also illuminate this canvas’s unseen surface, as well as the place of the model, it functions as the common locus of the representation and, in its interaction with the painter’s vision, as the former’s enabling source. Similarly, the Cartesian “natural light” is the unitary but hidden origin of representation. It remains hidden in that “to make manifest” is understood as meaning “to represent;” for, as already indicated, it cannot itself be represented. It is not, to begin with, a positive value in the economy of presence and absence.

     

    At the far back wall of the interior that Las Meniñas (re)presents, the focally placed yet disregarded mirror startingly reveals what the represented painter is looking at and what so fascinates the gaze of the various figures (including that of Don Nieto who, standing in the open back door, both reflects the spectator and opposes his dynamic corporeity to the spectral mirror reflection). The image in the mirror shows the royal couple, King Philip IV and his queen Mariana, seemingly posing for a double portrait (such as Velázquez is not known to have executed), but also gazing incongruously at their unseen real selves with the same rapt attention shown by the various figures. In their invisible and withdrawn reality, they function as the center of attention and reference; but their reflection is the most “compromised” and ephemeral aspect of the represented scene. Were the menina on the left, Doña Maria Agustina de Sarmiento, to rise from her kneeling position, the ghostly sovereigns would at once be eclipsed; and the mirror would show only her carefully coifed wig with its gossamer butterflies. The mirror’s superimposition of seer and seen, and of inside and outside, is emphatically unstable, accidental, and transitory. As if to emphasize this point, the superimposition which the mirror allows one to extend to the entire picture (insofar as it is “looking out at a scene for which it is itself a scene”) is, as Foucault observes, uncoupled at its two lower corners: at the left by the recalcitrant canvas that will not show its face, and at the right by the dog, content to look at nothing, and peacefully relinquishing itself to just being seen.15

     

    Whereas the mirror reflection functions as the painting’s effective yet disregarded center, the visual focus is on the head of the young Infanta, situated at the intersection of the main compositional axes, bathed in a flood of golden light, and emphasized through the positioning of the flanking meniñas. The lines of her gaze and the gaze of the royal couple converge at the point of the model/spectator and form the painting’s sharpest angle. The superimposition marked by this point of convergence is, however, dissolved within the represented scene into its three components: the painter, the model (in reflection), and the spectator (in the guise of Don Nieto). Natural vision seems to be as inept in holding together the schema of representation as is the mirror image.

     

    Within the cycle of the “spiral shell” of representation, which Foucault traces from the window to the attentive gaze and the tools of the painter, to the implied spectacle, to its reflection, to the paintings (hung above the mirror), to the spectator’s gaze, and finally, back to the enabling and dissolving light, the sovereign place of the author as well as of the one who is to recognize him/herself in the representation is inscribed as a place of absence. In marking this place, Las Meniñas indicates the necessary disappearance, within representation, of its own foundation.

     

    For Foucault, the absence inscribed is essentially that of man, so that the interruption of the cycle of representation reveals the impossibility of developing, in the disclosive space of the Classical epistêmê, a science of man. Only with the eclipse or mutation of this epistêmê and the ascendancy of analogy and succession over representation can man show himself as both knowing subject and object of knowledge, as “enslaved sovereign” and “observed spectator.” He then appears, as Foucault points out, “in the place belonging to the king, which was assigned to him in advance by Las Meniñas.”16

     

    Las Meniñas in Question

     

    Foucault’s analysis of Las Meniñas is compelling because it attests equally to theoretical originality and sophistication and to an acute visual sensitivity. Subsequent discussion, however, has called some of the underlying assumptions of Foucault’s analysis into question. Moreover, one can ask whether his analysis exhausts the extraordinary visual and symbolic complexity of the painting. Before returning to the questions raised at the outset, I propose, therefore, to engage in another reflection on Las Meniñas, one that is mindful of these issues without being subservient to a pre-conceived agenda.

     

    In response to John R. Searle’s construal of the painting as a paradox (and, implicitly, a cryptogram) of visual representation, Joel Snyder and Ted Cohen have shown the incorrectness of both Searle’s and Foucault’s guiding assumption that the (re)presented scene is viewed from the perspective of the model who is reflected in the represented mirror.17 Since the painting’s perspectival vanishing point is at the elbow of the figure of Don Nieto, the point of view must, theoretically, be directly opposite it; but whoever stands along this axis or at this (not entirely specific) point could not possibly be reflected in the mirror. Snyder and Cohen establish that what the mirror reflects is not the hypothetical model, but rather a centrally located portion of the face of the represented canvas.18 As Jonathan Brown notes, Antonio Palomino’s well-informed discussion of the painting in El museo pictorio y escala óptica of 1724 “is confident that the mirror image reflects the large canvas on which the artist is working.”19 Palomino’s testimony (important, in part, because he was able to consult most of the represented persons) thus corroborates Snyder’s and Cohen’s analysis.

     

    The painted mirror image is strangely ambiguous. Its frame assimilates it to the paintings shown on the back wall, but the line of light around its edges and the sheen on its surface mark it off from these and indicate its purely optical status. The image it shows is quite obviously not a glimpse of life, but rather an artful composition which gives every indication of being shown in reverse. The red curtain, for instance, looks incongruous when placed, as shown, in the upper right corner but would be visually effective if placed in the upper left, as it is, for example, in other paintings by Velázquez, such as The Rokeby Venus, Prince Baltasar Carlos, or Las Hilanderas. The relative heights of the king and queen as well as the customary practice of reading the graphic articulation from left to right (with its implicit hierarchization) suggest an artistic composition shown in reverse, which would then be superior both to the real-life scene that it represents and to any mere optical artifices of representation, such as the mirror.

     

    Art-historical consensus has, as Svetlana Alpers points out, come to view Las Meniñas as a visual statement concerning the status of painting in 17th century Spain.20 Spanish painting was striving at the time to emulate the prestige of the Venetian school, and Philip IV, a noted connoisseur and patron of the art, significantly advanced its standing. Madlyn Millner Kahr concurs with this interpretation. She points out that Velázquez places his own head higher than those of the other foreground figures and that the represented paintings (which depict the contests between Apollo and Marsyas and, as in Las Hilanderas, between Athena and Arachne) extol human creativity and thus symbolically place painting on a par with music.21 Palomino suggests that Velázquez immortalized his own image by associating it intimately with that of the Infanta.22 Jonathan Brown, in contrast, thematizes the painting’s relationship to the figure of the king who, as Kahr points out, could not have been directly shown in an informal setting. Given that Philip IV had the painting installed in the personal space of his summer office and was its sole intended spectator, he could, when he faced it, see his own reflection and the effect of his presence on the courtly gathering. If, however, he withdrew from it, the painting could again be construed as focused on the figure of the Infanta, with the mirror reflecting the painted canvas.23

     

    A key difficulty in both Foucault’s analysis and that of Snyder and Cohen is that they construe the painting as perspectivally univocal and systematic, so that their analyses resort unquestioningly to an Albertian understanding of perspective for which, as Norman Bryson points out, “the eye of the viewer is taking up a position in relation to the scene that is identical to the position originally occupied by the painter,” as though they both looked “on to a world unified spatially around the centric ray.”24 Bryson notes the ineluctable frustration of this ideal system (and of the more encompassing ideal of compositio in which it functioned) by its inability to allocate to the viewer not just an axis, but a precise standpoint. In consequence, he remarks, the perspectival vanishing point becomes “the anchor of a system which incarnates the viewer” and renders her visible “in a world of absolute visibility.”25 Bryson’s analysis here is essentially congruent with Foucault’s in conjoining the articulation of a system with its immanent subversion. He does not, however, take the full measure of what it means to incarnate the viewer–not only to give her a precise standpoint or the body of labor and desire, but also to inscribe her into a radically differential articulation, to inscribe her into indecidability. The secret privilege of painting, acknowledged somewhat obscurely by Velázquez and Foucault, and more lucidly perhaps by the late Merleau-Ponty, is its power not only to represent a certain epistêmê together with its intrinsic difficulty, but also to deploy the resources of representation (traditionally assigned to it) so as to disintegrate the representational schema in favor of an articulation that is non-systematic and not subservient to any dominant epistêmê.

     

    To return to Las Meniñas, it is clear that the painting addresses itself to the discontinuity of what Bryson terms the “glance,” rather than to the syncretic and durationless “gaze.”26 If this discontinuity is disregarded, one comes up against difficulties such as the one Snyder and Cohen confront in realizing that, since mirrors reverse, the represented mirror image cannot reflect its implied counterpart on the unseen face of the represented canvas, even though their positions correspond. A double reversal, that is, would simply restore the aspect of the original.

     

    It is not enough to note, as Brown does, that in creating numerous focal points, Velázquez followed “the restless movement of the eye,” leaving perspectival relationships deliberately ambiguous.27 Velázquez not only allows for ambiguities and undecidability as if these were surds of natural vision, but he also actively stages them and does so in multiple pictorial registers. To begin with the compositional and perspectival staging: in Albertian perspective, the viewer is invited to take up the standpoint of the painter so that her vantage point is anticipated and acknowledged by the represented figures and scene. The viewer’s situation in Las Meniñas, however, is rendered problematic and undecidable. Yes, the viewer is seen by the figures of the composition (and even curtsied to by Doña Isabel), but only because her position coincides with that of the implied model, not the represented painter. Moreover, the “model” functions as such only for the mirror reflection (given that the canvas being painted by the represented painter is not of suitable size for a double portrait); yet, the reflection is ambiguously mediated by an unseen painting. The viewer confronts the unseen painter and does not merge with him, so that the positions of seer and seen are marked out in an inter-encroachment that both anticipates and radicalizes the analyses of Merleau-Ponty.28

     

    It is interesting to consider that in Jan Vermeer’s The Painter in His Studio which Bryson foregrounds as breaking with “the privileged focus of the spectacular moment,” the spectator stumbles, as it were, inadvertently upon a scene in which the represented painter is shown from the back, and the model with downcast eyes is retreating into a condition approaching that of the Sartrean In-itself–no doubt in “bad faith.”29 The disruption of the “spectacular moment” enacted here is straightforward; it virtually advertises itself. Las Meniñas is more subtle, for it consummately employs the resources of representation to render its seemingly lucid relationships aporetic. In short–and therefore with a certain element of exaggeration–I want to suggest that Las Meniñas problematizes representation in a more complex and “postmodern” way than Foucault’s analysis suggests.

     

    Whereas, as Bryson points out, the “realist” tradition of painting, subservient to the gaze, strives to fuse the three-dimensionality of the “founding perception” with the flatness of the canvas and the duration of viewing (reduced to the pure moment), and to cover its traces, Las Meniñas frustrates this telos in both its spatial and temporal registers, highlighting the insuperable incongruities that subvert it.

     

    Leo Steinberg notes that sight lines sustain the painting’s compositional structure, and that the diaphaneity emphasized through eyes, aperture, and mirror serves to open up opaque matter to vision and light.30 The light in the painting seems to ascend from below, from the material plane on which daily life deploys itself, to the hall’s lofty spaces. On the lighted foreground plane, the billowing forms of the ladies’ extravagant crinolines create a massive and soothing undulation, a wave that folds in on itself with the sleeping dog and retreats along the axis of the figures in the middle ground, contrasting throughout with the austere geometry of the pictorial space. Throughout this silvery wave pattern one can follow a procession of reds–from the red curtain in the mirror reflection or the cross of Santiago to Doña Maria’s cheek and proffered búcaro, to the adornments of the Infanta, washing over the shoulder and front of her dress in a crimson glaze, then on to the bows and shimmer of Doña Isabel’s costume, finally coming to rest in the muted red of the outfit of Nicolasito Pertusato. The relationships of form and color lack univocal meaning; they are not ancillary to subverting the epistêmê of representation, yet they are no less crucial to the painting’s articulation than the geometric relationships that Foucault emphasizes.

     

    One needs, finally, to attend not only to ideal and geometric relationships, but to the painting’s materiality and inscription of process. As Yve-Alain Bois points out in the title essay of Painting as Model (the essay being a review of Hubert Damisch’s Fenêtre jaune cadmium, ou les dessous de la peinture), there is a “technical” model of painting that remains irreducible to the “perceptive” model; and the “image” beloved by existentialist (and much of post-existentialist) thought is, after all, only a surface effect.31 A theory of representation that is informed strictly by geometry does not give due weight to the materiality of painting. Indeed, achieving a weightless ideality is part and parcel of its still metaphysical agenda.

     

    In Las Meniñas, quasi-material form is given visual existence by means of the sketchiest touches of the brush, so that under closer scrutiny manifest identities dissolve into pigment and trace. Even the beige ground is hardly a ground, for it is applied with such translucency as to allow the canvas to assert its grain. Velázquez’s brushwork is particularly sketchy and thin at the painting’s visual focus, the head and torso of the Infanta. Such freedom of the brush, momentarily evoking light, form, and the similitude of life out of accident, requires the spectator’s participation and is therefore not univocal. Moreover, as Joel Snyder has described, there was a sophisticated tradition, consonant with an exaltation of painting, of visually interpreting the seemingly accidental mark:

     

    In addition to seeing a borrón [stain or mark] from the proper distance and in the correct light, the viewer needed learning, experience, and sensitivity to decipher the painted code. To the initiate, the successfully decoded message carried a sense of heightened reality, a revelation . . . of profound and near-divine truth.32

     

    Here also, however, Las Meniñas deploys the resources of a certain “code” so as to problematize it and to place it, so to speak, en abîme. It offers no univocal message to be disengaged but brings the viewer up against the ineluctably differential and an-archic character of perceptual and interpretive coherence. Illusionary form and materiality are equally compelling, so that which commands primacy is indecidable. One cannot acquiesce in the idea that one’s sophisticated perception unveils the painting’s “truth,” for one’s perception may be part and parcel of a procession of illusions and simulacra.

     

    The Autonomy of Painting

     

    Foucault’s selection of a painting to problematize the epistêmê of representation reflects his characterization of that epistêmê in terms of order, simultaneity, tabulation, and taxonomy, which is to say, Foucault characterizes the epistêmê of representation as an essentially spatial conception. By contrast, he characterizes the epistemic order that begins to assert itself at the close of the 18th century as informed by an awareness of time, genesis, and destruction. When things begin to escape from the order of representation, they reveal “the force that brought them into being and that remains in them,” and the static schema of representation is robbed of its power to unite knowledge with things.33 The way is opened for the Hegelian system and for the philosophies of finitude that subvert it.

     

    Whereas the arts of language are suited to reveal epistemic orders that are fundamentally dynamic and temporal, for instance, through allusion, irony, or narrative structure, traditional Western painting seems, for Foucault, to be privileged in thematizing the schematic and spatial order of representation, due to being an essentially spatial art. As soon as this point is acknowledged, however, the advantage gained (that Foucault’s analysis of Las Meniñas reveals its logic) is offset by a serious difficulty: painting, made into an art of spatial projection, is inherently and from the outset conformed to the procrustean bed of Classical representation, modeled on geometric projection. In consequence, it is deprived of autonomy, becoming simply, as it were, a shadow-writing in the wake of philosophy. Its history, moreover, becomes obscure and problematic. If, for instance, one accepts Yve-Alain Bois’s apt characterization of abstract expressionism as “an effort to bring forth the pure parousia of [painting’s] own essence,”34 this essence sought for (however questionable the notion) can clearly not be the long exhausted schema of representation. Or, to use a similar example, Bois suggests that Mondrian sought to accomplish an abstract deconstruction of painting (in response to the “economic abstraction” of capitalism) by analyzing “the elements that (historically) ground its symbolic order,” and which are not limited to formal relationships, color, luminosity, or the figure/ground opposition.35 Yet, the full extent of Mondrian’s desconstructive effort cannot be grasped if classical Western painting is reduced to representation.

     

    In his study of René Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe, Foucault addresses the history of Western painting. He characterizes it as being governed, from the 15th to the 20th centuries, by two principles, the first of which mandates a dissociation of depiction from linguistic reference together with the establishment of a hierarchical relation of designation between them, while the second makes “resemblance” the criterion of representation.36 He then traces the subversion of these principles, respectively, to Klee and Kandinsky. It needs to be noted that “resemblance” is conceived here in terms of the logic of representation and is contrasted with sheer likeness, with the mimetic order which Foucault terms “similitude.” As Magritte notes in a letter to Foucault (and as the latter acknowledges), ordinary language does not distinguish between resemblance and similitude. On Foucault’s distinction, however, “resemblance” is instituted by thought, whereas “likeness” is encountered spontaneously in experience.37

     

    Foucault’s characterization of the history of Western painting in terms of his two principles is strangely Cartesian; for Descartes strives to eliminate natural and spontaneous likeness (which he calls ressemblance) from representation. In the Optics, for instance, Descartes argues that likeness is neither necessary nor even useful for representation:

     

    ...the perfection [of images] often depends on their not resembling their objects as much as they might. You can see this in the case of engravings, consisting of only a little ink placed here and there on the paper. . . . It is only in relationship to shape that there is any real likeness. And even this likeness is very imperfect, since engravings represent to us bodies varying in relief on a surface that is entirely flat... 38

     

    For Descartes, painting is essentially drawing, conceived as the creation of representations that elide likeness. It functions, for him, as an extension of vision which is itself a masked form of mathematical thought. In virtue of this assimilation of painting to drawing to vision, the codes of recognition that govern representation are taken to be universal and timeless, rather than intrinsically historicized. Although Foucault provides precisely what Cartesian thought rules out, namely a historical interpretation of representation, his interpretation remains bound to a Cartesian understanding of vision and painting as well as to their Cartesian assimilation.

     

    Curiously enough, this assimilation continues to be accepted by theorists as diverse as Snyder and Merleau-Ponty. For Merleau-Ponty, painting is the self-interrogation of vision (a self-interrogation that, ab initio, distances itself from Cartesian representation), throughout its history. In contrast, Snyder points to the inseparability of the perspectival construction of space from the rationalization and schematization of vision.39 In his view, the perspectival system of depiction offered a mirror in which vision could almost miraculously contemplate itself, so long as it accepted its own schematization.

     

    Foucault rejects the schematization of vision since he subjects both visibilities and discursive practices to “archaeological” analysis. As Deleuze notes, Foucault upholds the specificity of seeing, denying a schematic isomorphism between the visible and the articulable.40 At the same time, however, he resists Merleau-Ponty’s effort “to make the visible the basis of the articulable,” and thus to give vision a quasi-transcendental primacy. In Foucault’s analysis of Las Meniñas, his commitment to the “specificity” of vision is, at best, imperfectly realized–of the major registers of visibility, such as color, form, depth, or light, he devotes almost exclusive attention to the last two; and even one of these, namely light, becomes for him, as Deleuze puts it, “a system of light that opens up the space of classical representation.”41

     

    To avoid this impasse and to accord to painting an autonomous (though always historically contextualized) power of invention or differential genesis, what is needed is a theorization of what Bois calls “the mode of thought for which painting is the stake”–a genuinely pictorial thought that is irreducible to “visual thinking” or to a visual exegesis of vision and visibility in the manner of Merleau-Ponty.42 Although Merleau-Ponty’s study of vision, carried on in part through the resources of painting, is insightful and important, his commitment to the primacy of perception, and particularly of vision, leaves him unable to address abstract painting, which is importantly concerned with “disturbing the permanent structures of perception, and above all the figure/ground relationship” (as to which Merleau-Ponty still notes in his late work that it is insurpassable).43 To theorize the “mode of thought for which painting is the stake” will allow one not only to do painting more justice, but also to relate it meaningfully to developments in postmodern thought.

     

    One thing that is requisite for developing a theoretical understanding of genuinely pictorial thought is, as already noted, a painstaking attentiveness to the materiality and hence also the technicality of painting. Philosophical analysis–even of a contemporary and postmodern orientation–has tended to pass over the materiality of painting, unaware that such a move bespeaks an enduring bond to the oppositional and hierarchical mode of thinking that, in the wake of Heidegger and Derrida, has been termed “metaphysics,” a mode of thinking that privileges, in particular, the supersensible over the sensible. As concerns painting, such a move generally takes the form of attending to the pure image and of being oblivious of marks, pigment, or support. These, nevertheless, are thematized not only in contemporary painting, but also by classical painters such as Velázquez or Goya. One cannot approach a contemporary painter like Mondrian without understanding that he strove to “neutralize” painting’s proper elements, being aware that a bare rectangle of canvas is already “tragic,” in the sense of having in its sheer materiality a symbolic and expressive charge.44 This charge, however, is neither straightforwardly transposable into discourse nor into what Bois calls the “perceptive model,” as contrasted with the technical and other models of painting.

     

    Whereas Foucault’s study of Las Meniñas bypasses the painting’s materiality in favor of its quasi-mathematical (perspectival) intelligibility (affirming here philosophy’s own mathematical model, from which the schematization of vision derives), the painting, by contrast, calls attention to its own materiality: it presents itself as other than the geometrically analyzable mirror reflection; its own perspective is illegible; the represented canvas, which is given monumental proportions, presents to the viewer only its bare backside and the labor of its stretching; and both the light and the gestures of the brush are allowed to deliteralize form and to unsettle the hierarchies and protocol of court life, the political emblem of the order of representation. Over all of this, the represented painter presides, brush and palette in hand, his searching gaze indissociable from the inventive engagement of his hands.

     

    If the painter elevates his art, as discussed earlier, to the recognized status of music or poetry, he does so without passing over its materiality; rather, he makes evident that its materiality and technicality are of another order than those of the skills and crafts to which it had traditionally been assimilated. They function in the context of an autonomous order of poiêsis. For, as Damisch writes in a searching analysis of Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece, literature can say the indescribable and declare it to be such; painting “can only produce it, by the means that are proper to it.45 With respect to Balzac’s figure of Frenhofer, this opacity of painting renders it necessary

     

    to choose between seeing the woman and seeing the picture, at the risk of both of these disappearing, as happens here, in favor of sheer painting . . . [which] brings with it no information that could be translated into the terms of language, that could be declared, nothing that could be understood, apart from noise.46

     

    As soon as this opacity of painting, refractory to sheer perception as well as to intellectual and linguistic constructs, is grasped one not only can begin to understand the exigency that drives it, in its historical course, toward abstraction, but one can also draw on its specific order of poiêsis for addressing the issue of difference that remains in focus in postmodern thought.

     

    Notes

    Editor’s note: To see an electronic reproduction of Las Meniñas, go to http://www.gti.ssr.upm.es/~prado_web/villanueva/27_eng.html.

     

    1. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (translation of Les mots et les choses), Alan Sheridan, trans. (New York: Pantheon, 1970), referred to hereafter at OT. Descartes’s works are referred to in the standard edition, Charles Adam and P. Tannery, eds., Oeuvres de Descartes, rev. ed., 13 vols. (Paris: Vrin, 1964-1976), and in the English translation by J. Cottingham, B. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985-1991). These sources are referred to as AT and CSM, respectively. Translations from the Latin or French are mine throughout, unless otherwise indicated.

     

    2. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’oeil et l’esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). English translation by Carleton Dallery, “Eye and Mind,” in James Edie, ed., Merleau-Ponty: The Primacy of Perception (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1964). My references are to the French edition, cited ad OE.

     

    3. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault trans. Seán Hand, (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988). See pp. 48-69.

     

    4. See Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1980) part II; and Martin Heidegger, Die Frage nach dem Ding (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1975 [1962]).

     

    5. AT X, 373-378; CSM I, 17-19.

     

    6. AT X, 427; CSM I, 49f.

     

    7. OT, 318.

     

    8. M. Foucault, “Mon corps, ce papier, ce feu;” Appendix to Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 582-603. There is no English translation of this appendix which is a response to Jacques Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978) 31-63.

     

    9. See here Jean-Luc Marion, Sur l’ontologie grise de Descartes, 2nd ed. (Paris: Vrin, 1981).

    10. OT, 65.

     

    11. OT, 311.

     

    12. John Rajchman, Michael Fouault: The Freedom of Philosphy. (New York: Columbia UP, 1985) 15.

     

    13. Foucault argues that, when talking about painting, one needs to erase proper names, so as to keep open the relationship of language to vision (OT 9f). I do not agree that proper names foreclose this relationship; therefore I continue to use them.

     

    14. OT, 6.

     

    15. OT, 14.

     

    16. OT, 312.

     

    17. Joel Snyder and Ted Cohen, “Las Meniñas and the Paradoxes of Visual Representation,” Critical Inquiry 7:2 (Winter, 1980) 429-447.

     

    18. “Reflections on Las Meniñas,” 441.

     

    19. Jonathan Brown, Velázquez (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1986) 257.

     

    20. Svetlana Alpers, “Interpretation Without Representation; or the Viewing of Las Meniñas,” Representations, I:1 (February, 1983) 31-57.

     

    21. Madlyn Millner Kahr, Velázquez: The Art of Painting (New York: Harper & Row, 1976) 172-185. Compare also Elizabeth de Gué Trapier, Velázquez (New York: The Hispanic Society of America, 1948).

     

    22. As quoted by Brown, Velázquez 259.

     

    23. Brown, Velázquez 260.

     

    24. Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale UP, 1983) 104.

     

    25. Bryson, op. cit. 106.

     

    26. See the chapter “The Gaze and the Glance,” in Vision and Painting, 87-131.

     

    27. Brown, Velázquez 259.

     

    28. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’oeil et l’esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), and the new translation by Michael B. Smith, “Eye and Mind,” in Galen A. Johnson, ed., The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1993) 121-149.

     

    29. On Vermeer’s painting, see Bryson, Vision and Painting, 111-117.

     

    30. Leo Steinberg, “Velázquez’s Las Meniñas,” 19 (Oct., 1981), 45-54.

     

    31. See the title essay of Bois’s Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1993) 245-257. Damisch’s collection of esssays is published by Editions du Seuil, 1984.

     

    32. G. McKim Smith, G. Andersen-Bergdoll, and R. Newman, Examining Velázquez (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1988) 23.

     

    33. OT, 312.

     

    34. Bois, Painting as Model, 230.

     

    35. Painting as Model, 240. On Mondrian, see also the chapter “Piet Mondrian: New York City.”

     

    36. M. Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1973), ch. iii.

     

    37. Magritte to Foucault, 23 May 1966, in Ceci n’est pas une pipe, 83-85.

     

    38. Descartes, Optics, Discourse IV, AT VI, 113; CSM I, 165.

     

    39. Joel Snyder, “Picturing Vision,” Critical Inquiry, 6:3 (Spring/Summer, 1980), 499-526.

     

    40. Deleuze, Foucault 61.

     

    41. Foucault, 57.

     

    42. Painting as Model, 245.

     

    43. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, Alphonso Lingis, trans. (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1964), 197.

     

    44. Damisch, “L’éveil du regard,” Fenêtre jaune cadmium, 54-72.

     

    45. Fenêtre jaune cadmium, 45.

     

    46. Fenêtre jaune cadmium, 25.