Volume 10, Number 2
January, 2000 Every issue of Postmodern Culturecarries notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcements, free of charge. Advertisements will also be published on an exchange basis. If you respond to one of the ads or announcements below, please mention that you saw the notice in PMC.

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David Schuermer

Department of English
University of Southern Illinois-Carbondale
dschuer@wko.com

Andrew Ross, The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney’s New Town. New York: Ballantine Books, 1999.

In reviewing Andrew Ross’s Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney’s New Town, I am reminded of a simple statement Herbert Gans makes at the very beginning of his 1967 study The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community. Addressing himself to the nature of community life in one of the first post-World War II suburban developments in America, Gans remarks that “people have some right to be what they are” (vi). It is not surprising that this statement comes to mind. Ross is quite aware of Gans’s study and makes good, albeit brief, use of it. Well he should, since his own book is also a study of community life, and though it is a much less formal study than Gans’s, it is one that seems to arrive at just about the same conclusion regarding the relationship between our “built environments” and the lives we lead. Ross notes early on that “Gans took up residence in Levittown… to find out what difference a place really makes. GI suburbia had become the preferred punching bag of critics of the mass-produced life in the postwar years… [and Gans] took issue with this view, which he characterized as an elitist perception on the part of urban intellectuals” (220). The typical urban intellectual whom Gans was attempting to rebut was someone like Lewis Mumford, urban historian and author of the magisterial The City in History, who believed that the American suburb was fast becoming a “low-grade uniform environment from which escape was impossible” (486). In Mumford’s view, the city presents a rich opportunity to nurture social diversity, which is crucial to the maintenance of democracy in a free state. The suburbs, on the other hand, present a threat to democracy. They segregate people by class and income, and this segregation breeds intolerance. Worse yet, the suburbs breed gullibility. As Gans notes, urban intellectuals and city planners are critical of the suburbs for fashioning a uniform and “gullible, petty ‘mass’ which rejects the culture that would make it fully human” (vi). The typical suburban citizen is gullible because he is the victim of mass production, “conforming in every respect to a common mold, manufactured in the central metropolis” (Mumford 486). Ironically, what Ross finds in the Disney-developed New Urban town of Celebration–a manufactured environment that makes Levittown look positively quaint by comparison–is the same thing that Gans finds in Levittown: it isn’t such a bad place to live after all.

Neither seems to be producing low-grade and gullible automatons; indeed, both harbor quite a bit of democratic free spirit, however homogenous the class and economic status of their inhabitants, and in spite of the corporate and market manipulations which brought them into being. Yes, Ross will discover the residents of Celebration are implicated in a market-driven experiment which attempts to sell the idea of “community” as if it were so many loaves of bread, but if we avoid the urge to treat these people as unwitting co-conspirators in their own market manipulation–in other words, as unwitting co-conspirators in some kind of inexorable corporate takeover of democratic values–we can learn something about what it means to develop something called “community,” a slippery term at best. We might learn, indeed, that we find “community” in some of the damndest places. Enter Disney.

Does the new town of Celebration offer a way of life worth celebrating? Ross takes a sabbatical from his position as Director of American Studies at New York University and moves to this newly developed suburb of Orlando, the home of Disneyworld, to find out. The Celebration Chronicles is the record of his year-long stay, and he is quite frank about his intentions. His is not the formal piece of sociological analysis that Gans produced:

Neither a journalist nor a social scientist by training, I had not angled for juicy headlines–there were enough out there already–nor had I aimed at an objective or statistical survey of the town–Celebrationites had been surveyed enough already. This book, like the hybrid nature of this community, is supposed to be a cocktail of personal and public observations, laced with those ingredients of analysis that seemed most true to my experience of the town’s residents and employees. (320)

Although Ross eschews the more scholarly approach, his book is much more than a collection of anecdotal observations of people and place. He manages to identify and discuss, in detail, the key notions and characters who inform the New Urban debate. In this regard, his book serves as a more than useful introduction to the student of popular culture. He is particularly good at discussing the troubling issues of personal liberty and private property when framed within the context of marketing and the “production/consumption” of class values.

At first blush, his Celebration experience would seem to be all about conformity and the maintenance of class boundaries. It is surely all of that, but it is also about property value and how the pursuit of property value jumpstarts a surprising degree of civic involvement. When put to the test of protecting their property value, Celebration residents appear to be anything but docile and gullible. To his credit, Ross does not patronize his subjects. He represents real people fighting real battles to control and define their community. And although they may not define that community in such a way as to convince Ross to move in with them–they actually suggest he stay and become the headmaster of their school–in the end he must acknowledge that something is working right in Celebration, in spite of its corporate origins and implication in Disney’s world of make-believe “imagineering.” Along the way he is able to unpack the ironies and contradictions that are bound up in the New Urbanist movement, for convincing people that community values can be packaged and sold is one thing, but creating a space in which these values can be developed is quite another.

I. New Urban Origins

Fingering Disney as a corporate villain is nothing new. Ross notes that Disney bashing has become something of a cottage industry among critics of popular culture.¹ Rather than level another blow alongside the Disney bashers from afar, he decides to go native and extend the neighborly hand of friendship, noting that “there is much to learn about places and people that do not feature on Saul Steinberg’s famous cartoon map of the ‘New Yorker’s View of the World’” (5-6). A creature of the urban landscape (downtown Manhattan where he lives and works), Ross samples the best New Urbanism has to offer and chronicles his experience. Yet what could have been a high-handed academic dismantling of Disney and upper-middle class homeowners who have been duped into buying instant community and civic values when in fact they are simply enhancing Disney’s investment portfolio, becomes instead a complex tale of evolving community identity, fraught with the contradictions which emerge when the pursuit of wealth conflicts with the pursuit of civic ideals and personal freedom. Thus Ross finds complexity where a skeptical academician might least expect to find it–among the well-manicured lawns and tightly woven realty covenants of Celebration.

Make no mistake about it: what drew Andrew Ross to Celebration was its status as a highly visible, and vulnerable, symbol of a corporate-sponsored New Urbanism–a heady brew and eclectic gathering of trendy postmodern architecture, contemporary urban design theory, corporate investment strategy, and old-fashioned social climbing. It is clear that he arrives in town the skeptic, if not the cynic. What is surprising, however, is that he finds a real community emerging as the unintended by-product of Disney’s well-crafted, one might almost say, suffocating, business plan. Ironically, the suburban conformity that people like Mumford rail against provides an opportunity for civic involvement that may well be beyond the reach of any number of jaded Manhattan sophisticates who have given up fighting City Hall. The New Urbanism, it seems, succeeds in spite of itself. It may be that residents of Celebration become a community only when they perceive their property values to be threatened, but nonetheless, they do forge a common bond and end up exhibiting those civic virtues which social scientists and New Urban town planners applaud.

What is the New Urbanism? If one is going to write about Celebration, then one must write about New Urbanism because Celebration is its most visible symbol. Ross does a good job unpacking its historical, architectural, and commercial origins. The New Urbanism movement is an attempt to transform the out-of-control development of the American suburban landscape. Its founding figures, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberg, have embraced commercial residential development opportunities like Celebration and Seaside, Florida, with a moral fervor, hoping to use market forces to their advantage, in order to, as Duany has said, “attack [the] enemy on [its] terms” (77) and, as Plater-Zyberg has said, “improve the world with design, plain good old design” (78). The bedrock principle of the New Urbanist movement is the belief that architecture and the organization of space have the power to influence social behavior; that, in short, the “built environment” can create democratic utopias. It is also a movement built upon a certain amount of nostalgia, for the New Urbanist architect and town planner are attempting to recapture the ambience of the New England colonial village–town centers, green space, interconnected walkways–where people shared space intimately and nurtured social relations conducive to the free exchange of ideas perhaps best exemplified by town hall meetings. At least, that is the myth. As architectural critic Michael Sorkin has noted, however, such a reading of New England social space conveniently ignores an environment that also made room for the notorious Salem witch trials. Nonetheless, the New Urbanist is battling a real demon: an ever-developing suburban sprawl which is consuming the natural environment at a prodigious pace and populating the landscape with one commercial strip after another, dotted with an occasional shopping mall in a vain attempt to manufacture public space in the context of commercial space. All of it, of course, is tied together by the automobile, which has added a cruel velocity to modern life. Clearly the automobile is implicated in the suburban sprawl. It carries people from one space to another, stringing out the social experience and mapping a community with no center and no edge. The New Urbanism may be described, in the end, as an attempt to create space with an identifiable center and edge–in short, to create “community” through the manipulation of space.

Early on, Ross points out that this search for an urban center and edge can be traced to architect Charles Moore’s 1965 article in the influential architectural journal Perspecta, entitled “You Have to Pay for the Public Life.” There Moore writes about the lack of a public realm on the West Coast, in particular, in the city of Los Angeles. Los Angeles, he claims, lacks an urban focus or center. He argues that “the houses are not tied down to any place much more than the trailer homes are, or the automobiles. [The houses] are adrift in the suburban sea, not so mobile as the cars, but just as unattached…. This is… a floating world in which a floating population can island-hop with impunity… ” (59). In Los Angeles there is little sense that a people have taken possession of a place and chosen to celebrate that place by marking its center. To identify a place and mark its center is self-consciously public act where people come together to celebrate a place for particular reasons, the marker then becoming the symbol of their shared values. Astonishingly–at least it seems so to us now, having been inundated in over three decades of Disney commercial hype–Moore identifies Disneyland as one of the few real public spaces in Los Angeles, one of the few spaces where one can find a center and edge, and thus “one of the most important pieces of construction in the West” for “it is engaged in replacing many of those elements of the public realm which have vanished in the featureless private floating world of southern California, whose only edge is the ocean, and whose center is otherwise undiscoverable” (65). We may trace Disney’s new town of Celebration to Charles Moore because he was the first to point out that Disneyland was a self-conscious attempt to create an interactive public space amid the disconnected suburban sprawl of Los Angeles. Moreover, Moore notes, when we enter Disneyland, we agree to play-act, and we agree to be watched while play-acting. In short, we agree to be self-consciously public in our behavior and to conform to shared expectations. And we agree to buy a ticket for the experience: we agree to pay for the public life we are missing out on elsewhere. Just like Celebration.

The bulk of Andrew Ross’s book, it seems to me, works out the complex implications of such a theatrical arrangement when it is translated to the Disney-built town of Celebration: what, indeed, he asks over and over, are the relations that exist between public and private performance when they are tied to property value? He unpacks the uneasy relationship that Celebrationites have with the media, design professionals and culture critics who patronizingly level a charge of “bogus living” at them. He finds the charge to be inaccurate: “I watched as some kind of provisional public sphere, built on blunt opinion, common sentiment, and the stoic pursuit of civic needs, pushed its snout into the moist Florida air. It was fresh, cranky, and fraught with all the noble virtues and sorry prejudices that contend in the republic at large” (314). This cranky civic virtue most revealed itself at two key moments during his stay.

II. Agreeing to Disagree

Although the book arranges itself chronologically, from Ross’s arrival in 1997 to his departure one year later, it pays special attention to two important community crises. Both crises offer an opportunity for Ross to reflect upon the tension between freedom and order that is inextricably bound up in the development of a utopian community. Residents soon discover that the chance to build a community of their own will require regulating their conduct and perhaps curbing their liberties in order to protect their property value. They also discover that they can come together and agree to disagree with what Celebration has to offer.

The first crisis is the wide-spread recognition that the houses of Celebration are poorly built. It turns out that Celebration was built upon the backs of unskilled migrant labor because that was the only labor available in the booming Orlando construction economy. How ironic that Disney was victimized by the very economy it was attempting to take advantage of, by the very laborers it was willing to exploit for profit. But then Ross’s chronicle is nothing if it is not ironic, for it continually evokes the arch irony that Disney, a company which perfected the art of bringing dreamlike order and beauty to disordered and ugly realities–witness almost any “classic” exercise in Disney sanitization, from Pocahontas to The Hunchback of Notre Dame–found itself, in Celebration, mired in the unseemly, and often embarrassing, real-world complexities of suburban development. The result? Pricey upscale homes with leaky roofs and pipes, cracked foundations, chimneys out of plumb, and doors that won’t close. Complaints are so widespread that residents organize a Homeowners Association to bring pressure against Disney. And thus a Celebration “community” begins to form–not as the product of market strategy and New Urban design, but rather, in opposition to corporate ineptitude, inefficiency, and greed. (Ross notes that in 1996 Michael Eisner, Chairman and CEO of Disney, earned $97,600 an hour while many Celebration construction workers earned little more than minimum wage, and Haitian workers earned 20 cents an hour making Mickey Mouse t-shirts. Here, and elsewhere, although Ross refrains from convenient “Disney bashing,” he is certainly not above cuffing them around a bit, and deservedly so.)

Unfortunately, this new-found “community,” born of opposition to the Disney “community-builders,” soon finds itself facing a prickly dilemma: going public with their complaints in an effort to pressure Disney into action runs the risk of damaging property value. Prospective buyers (those who would complete the development project and thereby secure its market value long into the future) would certainly shy away from upscale homes with leaky roofs and yards that didn’t drain. The common interest in protecting property values prevails. The residents keep quiet, and thus begins a long private battle with Disney which is ultimately resolved, but not without significant frustrations along the way. Nonetheless, the brouhaha over construction provides the first real evidence that something like a community was indeed forming, albeit not in the way Disney had envisioned or the residents would have wanted.

Herein lies the charm of this book. It is generous and big-hearted in its account of people trying to make their experiment in New Urban living work. It could have been a cynical and satirical evisceration of upper-middle class values, class snobbery, and corporate hypocrisy. Instead, it explores the contradictions, disappointments, and complexities inherent in managing one version of the “good life”–from both the residents’ and Disney’s point of view. In the process it lays waste the myth that there is anything so simple as the “good life,” even if one can afford to buy it or bring together the best minds in urban design to plan it. That is nowhere more evident than in the second crisis, and clearly, from Ross’s point of view, the most compelling crisis: the (mis)management of the Celebration school. Ross’s narrative of the school crisis takes up almost the middle third of the book, and well it should, because the Celebration school was billed as perhaps the single most attractive characteristic of this New Urban environment.

Once again, we find ourselves up to our eyebrows in irony: “Improbably for a town built to evoke old-time values, this school ha[d] been frontloaded with every bell and whistle from two and a half decades of progressive educational reform” (124). The majority of residents had moved to Celebration for the school, and Disney had promoted their “school of tomorrow” aggressively, making it the centerpiece of their marketing strategy. It turns out, however, the majority of residents weren’t quite ready for such reform. The new Celebration school would employ non-traditional testing and grading practices, and in the process expose the fundamental gap between what educators and the general public believe to be true about education. Education professors, by and large, are opposed to competitive testing, rote memorization, and reward and punishment; parents, on the other hand, particularly upwardly mobile, professional parents–the kind, in fact, most likely to buy a home in Celebration–tend to be interested in quantitative results and discipline. Their position is straightforward and difficult to counter: they believe they are living proof that traditional education works because they have been successful enough to buy into an upscale community such as Celebration, thus they conclude that what worked for them will work for their children.

Ross, it seems to me, is at his best when addressing the complexities involved in this discussion. He quite rightly, I believe, points to the fundamental issue at work in school reform, “that education serves best when it shapes the world anew rather than tailors itself to the status quo of the ‘real world’” (167), but he is generous enough to acknowledge that, although non-traditional education might make a Celebrationite’s child a better person, it won’t necessarily get that child into a prestigious college. And getting into the right college, finally, was the measure of pedagogical success for the majority of parents in Celebration. They organized and made their feelings known. They rallied in the face of a perceived threat to their children’s welfare–a noble undertaking indeed–and they did so effectively, much to the chagrin of Ross. In the course of one year, the progressive curriculum and pedagogy would be revised, and 23 of 53 faculty would leave the school, faculty who had been recruited to implement the progressive curriculum and pedagogy. Out of this disappointment, however, emerges a new sense of political empowerment, for Celebration residents end up backing one of their own residents as a reform candidate for the county school board. Civil disagreement, it seems, can be both dispiriting and ennobling.

The outcome of the school crisis may have disappointed progressive educators, but it couldn’t have disappointed many social scientists or New Urbanist town planners, since Celebrationites were stepping forward and practicing the very civic involvement these people had hoped they would. Like the construction crisis, the education crisis proved to be another test case in community involvement and civic responsibility, and one the Celebrationites would pass. The fact that the majority of Celebrationites (both parents and non-parents, since property value doesn’t distinguish between parents and non-parents) chose to turn their back on progressive educational reform and an innovative curriculum in favor of the more orthodox emphasis on quantitative results (what Ross refers to as “the iron law of the GPA”) and the passive instructional methodologies of the traditional classroom clearly disappoints Ross. He notes that “methods like authentic assessment and cooperative learning are not exactly new, but for many Celebration parents… they could just as well have been lifted from a therapy manual for psychiatric counselors” (125). However personally disappointed Ross might be in the parents’ uninformed opposition to progressive educational reform, in the end, his disappointment is quite beside the point. The point is the parents exercised their right to be what they wanted to be, and put into practice the very civic virtues town planners had hoped to see. Remember Gans here: “People have some right to be what they are.”

III. The Value of Valuing Property

Perhaps an equally important point to be made, however–and one which Ross makes quite clearly–is that even the struggle over the school, which was largely driven by parental concerns over SAT scores and college admissions, was also to a significant degree about property values. Families across the land often look to buy into a “good” school district, and the families of Celebration proved to be no different. Ross notes that realtors in Central Florida believe “the value of homes in [the] region can vary by over 15 percent depending on the test scores of the local school” (147). What makes the families of Celebration different–and what Ross finds so dispiriting–is that they have an opportunity to build a “good” school from the ground up, yet they balk at educational reform, and in part justify it because of their concern for property value.

In Celebration, community is a commodity–but that proves to be a curiously bittersweet phenomenon. Although the notion of “community” is all too often bundled into the package of amenities the housing industry has to offer, it can take on a life of its own. True enough, the community Disney was selling was not the community the residents bought, but the residents could have no way of knowing that, and neither could Disney. Both were victimized by the dynamic unpredictability of a market economy, if “victimized” is even the right word here. In the end, it seems to me, Ross chooses not to characterize the Celebration residents as victims–either of their own blind pursuit of property value or of Disney’s profiteering which masquerades as “imagineering”; likewise he chooses not to vilify Disney, although as already noted he is not afraid to criticize them. In the end, both stumble into “community.” If the measure of a community is the extent to which its members engage in the identification and debate over a set of core values–those things which they claim to share when they mark out a place for themselves and call it “theirs”–then Celebration measures up as a community. This, it seems to me, is Ross’s overall impression of Celebration, and it is an encouraging one. Not that property value came for these Celebrationites to be the measure of all things, but that they were able, even in this defectively “imagineered” space, to assemble, identify a center (however contentious), and forge a community bond through the enactment of civic virtue.

Note

1. Let the following passage from an article entitled “Disney and the Imagineering of Histories” by Scott Schaffer serve as an example of one of the more enthusiastic examples of Disney bashing: “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” (1).

Works Cited

• Gans, Herbert J. The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community. New York: Pantheon Books, 1967.
• Moore, Charles. “You Have to Pay for the Public Life.” Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal 9/10 (1965): 57-97.
• Mumford, Lewis. The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1961.
• Schaffer, Scott. “Disney and the Imagineering of Histories.” Postmodern Culture 6.3 (1996).
• Sorkin, Michael. “Acting Urban: Can New Urbanism Learn from Modernism’s Mistakes?” Metropolis 18.1 (August/September 1998): 37-9.

Brad Lucas

Department of English
University of Nevada, Reno
brad@unr.edu

Thomas Rosteck, ed. At the Intersection: Cultural Studies and Rhetorical Studies. New York: Guilford, 1999.

The thirteen essays in Thomas Rosteck’s At the Intersection: Cultural Studies and Rhetorical Studies discuss connections between the practices that constitute rhetorical studies and those that constitute cultural studies. Like any convergence of pathways, this book offers a place where travelers with different agendas and histories can meet and exchange ideas, but true to its metaphor, the intersection is also a locus of accidents, collisions, and wrong turns.

Of course, to begin such an enterprise, we would need to articulate not only a working definition of “rhetorical studies,” but also one of “cultural studies.” Working definitions of rhetoric are, at best, contingent upon rhetoric’s uses and the particular communities that claim its rich tradition and various branches of knowledge.¹ Rhetoric has been envisioned as an artful skill and a means of persuasion. It has also been conceived in terms of its dialectic counterpart: as an epistemological tool, as a means of knowing. A range of definitions emerges not only from the classical tradition, but also from the newer conceptions of rhetoric that position it in a postmodern age. Edward P. J. Corbett defines rhetoric as traditional “instances of formal, premeditated, sustained, monologue in which a person seeks to exert an effect on an audience” (3), whereas Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg offer the following possibilities for rhetoric: “the practice of oratory; the study of the strategies of effective oratory; the use of language, written or spoken, to inform or persuade; the study of the persuasive effects of language; the study of the relation between language and knowledge; the classification and use of tropes and figures; and, of course, the use of empty promises and half truths as a form of propaganda” (i). Among academics, as among the general public, rhetoric continues to mean any number of things. But while At the Intersection allows for this slippage in the term, it establishes some constraints by directing most of its discursive traffic toward those conceptions of rhetoric that have most relevance to communication studies.

But if rhetorical studies represents an uncertain or unstable sort of “discipline,” cultural studies often seems to escape the notion of discipline altogether. Perhaps this is its strength. According to Cary Nelson, Paula A. Treichler, and Lawrence Grossberg, cultural studies is more than an interdisciplinary enterprise: it is “actively and aggressively anti-disciplinary…. Cultural studies draws from whatever fields are necessary to produce the knowledge required for a particular project” (2). There is more to cultural studies than mere disciplinary mobility, however. Cultural studies is often self-reflexive, radically political, subversive of dominant institutions, and transnational in loyalties. With clear methodological attention to local conditions and particular contexts, cultural studies does not discriminate as to its object of study: in its most inclusive conceptions, it treats everything as a potential text to be read within the confines and discourses of various contextual configurations. While rhetoric pretends to hold court over any facet of existence that involves language and persuasion, cultural studies seems to claim all dimensions of being in the world as fair game for analysis, interpretation, and critique. Clearly, any discussion that brings rhetoric and cultural studies into play is bound to be messy: the intersection is busy, and traffic from both directions has the green light, so to speak.

Given these considerable difficulties, At the Intersection holds together with a surprisingly clear progression and conceptual unity. Fortunately, Rosteck acknowledges the particular scope of the essays, stating that the collection “emphasizes ‘textual’ approaches rather than either production-based studies or more anthropological perspectives on ‘lived culture’” (ix). Moreover, he asserts that At the Intersection aims to instigate discussions about rhetorical studies and cultural studies, rather than to lead to definitive conclusions or offer the final word on either project (or their possible combinations). He highlights the difficulties of bringing rhetoric and cultural studies into focus, but suggests common ground between them:

both aiming to reveal the relationship between expressive forms and the social order; both existing within the field of discursive practices; both sharing an interest in how ideas are caused to materialize in texts; both concerned with how these structures are actually effective at the point of “consumption”; and both interested in grasping such textual practices as forms of power and performance. (2)

What drives most of the essays is not a desire to synthesize the two into some ur-discipline; however, the possibility of a “cultural rhetorical studies” is offered as an “ideal relationship […] of mutual critique and transformation” (22). Rosteck explains that, taken as a whole, these discussions of cultural studies and rhetorical studies explain some of the costs and benefits of disciplinarity, the political dimensions of such studies, and the ever-pressing questions of methodology (3-20).

Each of the book’s essays is worthy of attention. In many respects, At the Intersection provides something for everyone, a convergence of roads of interest: studies of cultural artifacts, from tourist sites to popular film and works of art; discussions of theory and practice for rhetorical or cultural studies; and the disciplinary concerns of communication studies. Ultimately, the intersection of these audiences holds the greatest potential, and in many respects At the Intersection highlights the obstacles cultural studies faces in attempting to maneuver through the disciplinary entrenchments that beleaguer higher education.² The collection is organized in two sections: “Part I: Reading the Popular and the Political: Converging Trajectories of Textuality, Method, Context,” and “Part II: Envisioning the Alternatives.” A review of these essays according to their approach or merit could convey a better sense of the collection’s content, but the progression of the discussions is itself rhetorical, and of course, it reveals much about Rosteck’s assumptions about language, audience, and culture in general.

Carole Blair and Neil Michel’s “Commemorating in the Theme Park Zone: Reading the Astronauts Memorial” begins the collection–with a readily identifiable cultural studies approach–by investigating the Astronauts Memorial at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. Their initial analysis implements the rhetorical tools necessary to “read” the cultural text as a memorial, and takes additional steps to specify how it reflects (literally and figuratively) the ideology of NASA and invokes the larger tropes of the American space race. Blair and Michel are self-reflexive about their critical practice and the recursive nature of their methodology. However, when they cannot account for the lack of viewer/audience interest in the memorial, they re-assess the Visitor Complex within the larger context of sightseeing in Florida, which radically alters their initial rhetorical reading of the site. They see rhetoric as largely indifferent to cultural studies’ concerns about audience reception or authoritative readings, and they attempt, with some success, to overcome that weakness here by coupling their reflexive methodology to audience analysis.

In “Catching the Third Wave: The Dialectic of Rhetoric and Technology,” James Arnt Aune addresses the impact of new communication technologies on public discourse. In his study, he draws on late twentieth-century political discourse ranging from that of figures such as Newt Gingrich to the rise of popular narratives reflected in the work of cyberpunk writers William Gibson and Allucquere Rosanne Stone. Aune sees “the new world information order” as an ideal site for the methodological intersection between rhetoric and cultural studies: rhetorical studies is formidably well suited to analyzing political discourse, while cultural studies is better able to manage issues of gender, desire, and performance in relation to popular media (85). Aune also suggests hopefully that a new understanding of class might emerge from this disciplinary hybrid, a paradigm better able to assess the transformative potential of the “universal class” being produced by information-based culture.

Stephen Mailloux’s “Reading the Culture Wars: Traveling Rhetoric and the Reception of Curricular Reform” takes Syracuse University as his object of rhetorical analysis, wherein he traces the debates over the undergraduate ETS (English and Textual Studies) major within the larger context of the “culture wars” of the 1980s and 1990s. Mailloux couches the discourse surrounding the ETS curriculum as a replay of classical philosophy-rhetoric debates: Plato and the proponents of absolute truth at odds with the relativism of the Sophists. Mailloux argues for further studies of the interconnection between language and ideology, calling for a better understanding of rhetoric’s crucial role in politics. More importantly, he sees the negotiation of politics as a significant challenge for any future work in rhetoric and cultural studies, and he envisions “reception narratives” such as his essay playing “a prominent role in a cultural rhetoric studies wishing to avoid the pitfalls of various orthodoxies on both the Cultural Right and Left” (114). Aune’s and Mailloux’s contributions, taken together, suggest ways in which a cultural rhetorical studies might be useful for approaching binary oppositions in public discourse.

In perhaps the weakest contribution to At the Intersection, Barry Brummett and Detine L. Bowers attempt to fuse rhetorical and cultural studies in “Subject Positions as a Site of Rhetorical Struggle: Representing African Americans.” Drawing on what they dub “subject position theory,”³ Brummett and Bowers argue for only three possible types of subject position, and offer the insight that “some subject positions, especially those concerning race, are constructed in so damaging and repressive a manner that they are best understood as object positions” (122), thereby undermining the attempts of bell hooks (and others) to re-cast the terms for critical discussions of race. Brummett and Bowers seem to believe that before they arrived on the scene little attention was directed to the way subject and object positions are discursively created. Their attempt to describe the process of discursive construction leads them to propose a dubious taxonomy of textual characteristics (authority, narration, anonymity, and noise), and then, by way of illustration, to perform a rather obvious reading of the film The Air Up There, whose narrative of an African man recruited to play basketball for an all-white school makes it hard to miss the objectification of “the Other.” From their perspective, such interpretations would not have been possible without a cultural studies approach, because critical studies⁴ “is only lately emerging from a preoccupation with the alleged determinisms of class, race, or gender to grasp the essentially rhetorical concept of texts as sites of struggle, in which signs and reading strategies are used by people toward competing suasory ends” (136). Clearly, from this vantage point, rhetoric has always already been cultural studies, and incorporating the race/class/gender triumverate is all that’s required for a cultural rhetorical studies of the future, albeit one that remains, in the final analysis, rhetorical studies.

Taking a detour from the near collisions of rhetoric and cultural studies, Elizabeth Walker Mechling and Jay Mechling reflect on their own critical practices in “American Cultural Criticism in the Pragmatic Attitude.” By focusing on “the pragmatic attitude,” they question the causes, motives, and consequences related to criticism itself, and explain that the goals motivated by the pragmatic attitude are aligned with the goals of American cultural studies. With detail and clarity, they articulate their working assumptions about the pragmatic critic: she or he (1) assumes that reality is socially constructed; (2) privileges local knowledge, everyday experience, and folklore; (3) begins criticism with a dense text; (4) “plays” with that dense text; (5) seeks patterns in intertextual connections; (6) looks for “artful texts” or the “artful dimensions” of a text; and (7) “wants to make a difference in the world” (140-51). Mechling and Mechling take their pragmatic attitude to a critical reading of the film Braveheart to question the historical epic romance and the discourses of both masculinity and nationalism; by doing so, they situate the film’s market success in the historical moment of its release and reception. Their approach “interrogates all positions, including those of cultural studies critics and of rhetorical critics practicing ideological criticism” (166). This attitude is perhaps the most fruitful approach born out of the intersecting branches of rhetorical and cultural criticism.

Celeste Michelle Condit likewise interrogates the historical dimensions of cultural studies and rhetorical studies in “The Character of ‘History’ in Rhetoric and Cultural Studies.” She is careful to acknowledge her specific focus on the field of (speech) communication and its uses of rhetoric, illustrating the two dominant camps of “neoclassical” and “critical rhetoric” in the field. More importantly, she moves into a provocative discussion of a materialist conception of language, in terms of which historical narratives must be seen as “more than simply products of the ideological agendas of narrators” (177). By acknowledging the exigencies and material forces that constrain history, Condit argues for attention to historical narratives as “meaning-full” cultural practices situated in the time-stream of past, present, and future. Condit’s contribution to this collection is perhaps one of the most useful and compelling, for it offers a theoretical consideration that has direct impact on methodologies for both rhetorical studies and cultural studies.

The positioning of Henry Krips’s “Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Gaze” in this collection is somewhat enigmatic, but this in no way detracts from the strength of his discussion on its own. While it’s not altogether clear how this essay contributes to the larger discussions of rhetorical and cultural studies, it certainly offers a clear example of a critical approach that is transdisciplinary and rhetorical, one that can change the way we look at the world. Bringing together “screen theory,” Lacan’s notion of the gaze, and Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors, Krips weaves a cogent analysis of text-audience dynamics and the ideological dimensions of criticism. In some ways, Krips bypasses congestion at the intersection: rather than simply discuss cultural studies and rhetorical studies, he utilizes both. Thus, section one is neatly framed with dynamic readings of texts, from the current trends in memorial studies to more traditional art criticism.

While the character of the book’s first half is difficult to determine–and perhaps rightly so–its second half clearly addresses the possibility of fusion, of coalition, and of a transdisciplinary venture that might go by the name of “cultural rhetorical studies” (but which is emphatically not a “rhetorical cultural studies”). This section begins with an essay by Cary Nelson–a figurehead for American cultural studies and longtime critic of disciplinary turf battles and political quibbling in the academy. Nelson recounts the origins of cultural studies and its reliance on close readings of texts, reaffirming the value of such readings in departments of English, rhetoric, and (speech) communication. Nelson also highlights the role of language and “linguisticality” in cultural studies, using the field of English to illustrate the perceived threat of cultural studies to literary studies. To resolve such conflicts and further dialogue between these–and other–areas of study, Nelson calls for a return to a “rhetorical analysis that focuses on historically delineated struggles over meaning and form” (224). Doing so would allow participants to bring together various texts and discourses situated within temporally aligned frames of reference, and this rhetorical struggle over meaning is what Nelson sees as the proper domain of cultural studies.

The struggle over meaning, however, promptly becomes the struggle for domain. Thomas Rosteck’s contribution to his own collection, “A Cultural Tradition in Rhetorical Studies,” suggests that there has always been a critical attention to culture in rhetorical studies, and he focuses on excavating “this latent cultural tradition” through selected essays, and on identifying common ground in the history of modern rhetorical criticism. His exemplary models of rhetorical criticism–those with sustained concern for matters related to culture–can serve a “cultural rhetorical studies” in the future, one that can surpass the problems he envisions with cultural studies itself. The essay that follows includes, among other commentary, a rejoinder to Rosteck. In “Cultural Struggle: A Politics of Meaning in Rhetorical Studies,” John M. Sloop and Mark Olson contest Rosteck’s assertion that rhetorical studies has always already been doing the work of cultural studies: they see such moves as undermining the potential of cultural studies (251). Consequently, Sloop and Olson offer a thorough discussion of “culture” in its various configurations in communication circles, cautioning against the politicizing of rhetorical studies and the damaging effects of conflating cultural studies with rhetorical studies. Taken together, these two essays indicate the degree to which cultural studies stands as a threat to communication studies in terms of its self-definition and its future practices–an emerging theme that returns in the book’s concluding essay.

Bruce E. Gronbeck’s “The Triumph of Social Science: The Silent Language as Master Text in American Cultural Studies” traces the work and influence of Edward Hall in the context of American intellectual circles, the Old Left, and social science. As a “master text,” Gronbeck claims Hall’s The Silent Language opened up criticism to temporal and spatial orientations for different societies, and articulated a notion of “interpersonal space” (278-79). Gronbeck illustrates how Hall influenced American cultural criticism into the present era, though Hall’s influence is often neglected as such. Gronbeck’s attention to the romance and pitfalls of dichotomies, particularly the camps of rhetoric-as-political-analysis and cultural-studies-as-ideology-and-politics, leads him to conclude with an appeal for the power of dialectic in dichotomous conflict (289).

Patrick Brantlinger’s “Antitheory and Its Antitheses: Rhetoric and Ideology” explains how such dichotomous dialectic plays out in theoretical circles. In what should be a companion piece to Condit’s discussion of history, Brantlinger focuses on the use of theory, or, the “trends and ‘-isms’” that “came to be called just ‘theory,’ in the singular” (292). In a careful elucidation of the theoretical and anti-theoretical impulses in “theory,” Brantlinger argues that the dominant tendencies in theory work toward either rhetoric or ideology (which echoes Mailloux’s platonist-sophist debates), explaining how theories about–or against–theory came to be theorized and continue to thrive. This compelling discussion could serve as a fitting end to the collection, offering insight for the future and leaving questions to generate further discussion.

However, what in fact concludes At the Intersection is a nod to the past and an appeal to tradition–an essay that uses, as a point of departure, a barroom disagreement at a communications conference as a problem to be mediated. In “Courting Community in Contemporary Culture,” Thomas S. Frentz and Janice Hocker Rushing attempt to find a middle ground between (1) what they see as rhetoric’s reliance on structures and institutions and (2) cultural studies’ resistance to such systems of hierarchy and power. They do so by synthesizing the work of Kenneth Burke and Victor Turner, thereby offering a unifying vision of not only structure and communitas but also community and fragmentation. Drawing attention back to the importance of ritual and oratory, they rally for the most pressing issue facing rhetorical and cultural studies today: the fragmentation of community. They call for a new interdisciplinary space to address this issue; however, this locus appears to be bigger and better than either rhetoric or cultural studies: “The first task, somewhat ironically, is for these two fields to move beyond their own split to an interdisciplinary community as a collective base of operations” (341). The obvious answer is that the resolution-space in question is indeed cultural studies, as it has already been conceptualized and envisioned. However, considering their initial concern for “barroom antipathies” at their professional conferences, for Frentz and Rushing it seems that, like some bartender’s call to “take it outside,” any negotiation or compromise must necessarily take place outside their discipline–leaving communication studies, and its traditions, intact.

As the capstone to this collection, Frentz and Rushing’s conclusions are at once gratifying and disturbing. While time may prove “interdisciplinarity” to be mere fashion (doubtful), it is difficult to argue against it at this historical moment. Within the disciplinary boundaries of communication and mass-media studies–not to mention virtually all other fields in the humanities and social sciences–there is a growing consensus that interdisciplinary work can yield great epistemological rewards, enable political engagement, and foster a sense of praxis in the academy. While it threatens existing structures of academe, cultural studies also opens new vistas of possibility for those of us who operate within those structures.

Frentz and Rushing’s piece nonetheless makes a fitting end to the collection in one respect. While the book makes important contributions to general questions of theory and method, as well as offering some fine cultural-rhetorical analyses of specific texts, its emphasis ultimately is on cultural studies’ past and future impact on communication studies. At the Intersection is probably more compelling and provocative for scholars who reside in departments of communication than for others across the disciplines, but given its perhaps overambitious aims, it does a fine job. It will serve as a useful guide through one of the many disciplinary crossroads made possible by the advent of cultural studies.

Notes

1. The roots of rhetoric run deep in Western civilization, roughly 2500 years to the Athenian polis and the lineage of thinkers beginning with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Almost from the outset, rhetoric has been counterposed to dialectic, or the philosopher’s method of inquiry. The practitioner of rhetoric has been valued either as a person of high morals who speaks on behalf of Truth, or as an opportunistic relativist out to persuade audiences based on whatever “truths” are at hand. Over the centuries, rhetoric has been expanded and collapsed, watered-down as well as extrapolated for a variety of causes, and today its position in the academy is shared by several disciplines, and many of rhetoric’s academic configurations are contingent upon its uses. Of course, rhetoric still holds ground in departments of philosophy and classics, and in English departments, rhetoric is paired with composition studies all too often as a mere subsection of English-literary studies, rather than a discipline itself. (Ironically, the “belles lettres” that became literature emerged from 19th century rhetoric.) In departments of (speech) communication, rhetoric often refers only to public discourse, and rhetorical analysis is considered a disciplined methodological approach to texts ranging from public speeches (for the more classically trained) to mass media studies (for later scholars widening the aperture for notions of “public” and “speech”). There are numerous organizations and agencies that have emerged working to bring the various arms of rhetoric into one place.

2. The contributors to this collection are all written by scholars with positions in the academy. Working against such bias is a crucial part of the cultural studies project, and this largely goes unnoticed by the editor or contributors.

3. The uncritical, unflective, and reductive labelling of several critical approaches under the rubric “Subject Position Theory” is indicative of the writers’ overall presumptiveness and inability to reflect on their own positions of power.

4. Brummett, in Rhetoric in Popular Culture, prefers the term “critical studies” over “cultural studies,” not for any particular reason, but for “the sake of convenience” (71).

Works Cited

• Bizzell, Patricia, and Bruce Herzberg. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. Boston: Bedford Books, 1990.
• Brummett, Barry. Rhetoric in Popular Culture. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.
• Corbett, Edward P. J. Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1990.
• Nelson, Cary, Paula A. Treichler, and Lawrence Grossberg. “Cultural Studies: An Introduction.” Cultural Studies. Ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler. New York: Routledge, 1992. 1-16.

Matthew Abraham

Philosophy and Literature Program
Purdue University
MAbra68114@aol.com

Paul Cilliers, Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems. London: Routledge, 1998.

Paul Cilliers’s Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems attempts to bring together developments in neuroscience, linguistics, logic, computer science, the philosophy of science, and poststructural theory in an effort to locate unifying themes in these exciting fields. Cilliers seizes on “complexity,” a term used to describe large-scale, non-linear interaction of nodes or agents in a dynamic environment, as a way to discuss possible structural resonances among the brain, natural language, artificial intelligence, deconstruction, and the legitimation of knowledge in contemporary society. By means of this ambitiously interdisciplinary approach, Cilliers hopes to overcome certain persistent simplifications in the thinking of both representation and organization.

Cilliers introduces the terms “distributed representation” and “self-organization” (or “self-organized criticality”) to improve upon the standard analytical and rule-based methods of understanding complexity. He takes up the “connectionism” attributed to neural networks as a model for the contingency and dynamism of complex systems such as those of the brain or of natural language. Connectionism treats the interactions of the nodes within it as a dynamic whole, each individual node working in concert with all other nodes of the network to adapt continually to environmental changes. This is in stark contrast to the rule-based descriptions of complexity which, imposing the rigidity of principled behavior on the nodes, cannot account for the contingency of environmental conditions and localized adaptations. Through distributed representation, Cilliers circumvents the shortcomings of the rule-based understanding of complexity because he is able to demonstrate that distributed representation is not representation at all, but rather the recognition of localized contingency. Each node interacts in concert with the other nodes of a neural or language network because each node acts and reacts as a system, not individually. This interaction is further explained through self-organization. A complex system, able to organize its individual nodes or agents through concerted action, does not have a central organization center but has the capacity to self-organize at local sites where environmental changes are detected.

Cilliers, following Saussure and Derrida, recognizes the complexity of natural language in terms of both its stability and its evolutionary capacity. Discussing natural language’s ability to instantiate meaning through a system of phonetic or graphical differences, he claims that while language users are bound to certain language rules, they are nonetheless free to adjust those rules and hence to influence the evolution of the language. This seemingly contradictory statement finds its theoretical underpinnings in Saussure’s concepts of the signifier and signified, where signification involves mental representation and the enactment of this representation through the utilization of the signifier in either spoken or written language. A language user has to choose among a host of socially sanctioned signifiers to represent a mental state. As Cilliers observes, “The system of language transcends the choices of any individual user, and therefore has stability” (39). But while he recognizes the constraints of social conditioning and common culture that temper any “free play” of language, Cilliers conceptualizes language as less the closed system described by Saussure than the open one of Derrida. Derrida, by denying the metaphysics of presence, claims that meaning cannot be generated outside of language and hence “where there is meaning there is already language” (43). Drawing in particular on the Derridean notions of différance and trace, Cilliers tries to show that natural language is a complex system which adapts dynamically over time and across multiple environments through a system of phonetic and graphic difference. Because language is constituted by nothing more than relationships, there are traces of other signs inherent in every sign. Language, through difference and deferral (hence différance), self-organizes signs through distributed representation.

Cilliers uses his discussion of natural language as a segue into a consideration of artificial intelligence as a complex system. In a chapter entitled “John Searle Befuddles,” Cilliers asserts that Searle’s contention that artificial intelligence does not possess intentionality and hence cannot be called intelligence at all is untenable. Cilliers briefly summarizes Searle’s views on artificial intelligence through a description of “The Chinese Room Experiment,” in which an English man, unfamiliar with Chinese, is provided with a rule book describing how to translate Chinese symbols into meaningful sentences. To the outside observer, the man appears able to “speak” Chinese as well as he can speak English, when in fact he is only following a rulebook. Searle contends that a computer, similar to the man in the experiment room, is simply following rules and cannot be truly said to think. In the absence of intentionality, Searle asserts, thinking cannot be said to have occurred. Cilliers rejects Searle’s pronouncement on the ground that it leaves intentionality undefined and does not consider that there might be different forms or modes of intentionality corresponding to different agents, such as the human brain and the computer. Cilliers also reiterates certain key points from Derrida’s critique of Searle in “Signature Event Context,” strongly endorsing the former’s reading of Austin’s speech act theory over the latter’s, which would hold that the context of a speaker’s utterance can be relied upon to anchor its meaning. For Cilliers, Derrida’s elaborate mockery of any such rule-based description of language contains crucial insights for discussions of complexity, for it both unseats the code as the ultimate arbiter of rules and dislodges context as the master precept of the code.

Cilliers’s considerations of complexity with respect to neural networks, language, and artificial intelligence provide him with a theoretical base upon which to discuss the postmodern condition. Incorporating insights gleaned from Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, Cilliers asserts that postmodern societies meet all of the ten criteria for a complex system:

1. Complex systems are comprised of a large number of elements.
2. The elements in a complex system interact dynamically.
3. The level of interaction is fairly rich.
4. Interactions are non-linear.
5. The interactions have a fairly short-range.
6. There are loops in the interactions.
7. Complex systems are open systems.
8. Complex systems operate under conditions far from equilibrium.
9. Complex systems have histories.
10. Individual elements are ignorant of the behavior of the whole system in which they are embedded. (119-120)

By analogy:

1. Postmodern societies have millions of agents operating within them at any one time.
2. These agents fulfill their functions in a number of dynamic and multiple roles (teacher, consumer, parent, child, etc.).
3. In a postmodern society, the interactions between agents and and mechanisms of the societal system are extremely rich and diverse.
4. Social relationships in postmodern society are non-linear and asymmetrical with respect to power. It is within these asymmetrical power relationships that people operate as teachers, students, consumers, and citizens.
5. Individuals interact on local levels. Although interactions on one level affect those on another, there is no “metalevel controlling the flow of information” (121).
6. All interpretations are local, contingent, and provisional. In this situation, paralogy and dissensus rather than homology prevail.
7. Open systems such as the social interact with other open systems such as the ecological.
8. Social disequilibrium characterizes the postmodern condition.
9. Although the concept of history is dismissed as a grand narrative in the postmodern, local narratives tell the histories of individuals and groups.
10. It is impossible for an individual to have a complete understanding of the operations of the entire social system in which he or she lives and interacts. (6-7)

Cilliers uses his analogy between complex systems and postmodern societies to dismiss the notion that postmodernism sanctions an “anything goes mentality” in which relativism reigns supreme. Instead, Cilliers asserts, postmodernism leads us to new ethical horizons and committments. He draws upon Lyotard to emphasize this point:

The breaking up of the Grand Narratives… leads to what some authors analyze in terms of the dissolution of the social bond and the disintegration of social aggregates into a mass of individual atoms thrown into the absurdity of Brownian motion. Nothing of this kind is happening: this point of view, it seems to me, is haunted by the paradisaic representation of a lost “organic society.” (The Postmodern Condition 15)

As Cilliers states, “A careful reading of Lyotard shows that his understanding of the individual is formulated in such a way as to counter the idea of fragmentation and isolation that could result from a dismissal of the grand narrative” (115). He goes on to argue that individuals constitute part of a vast social scene where each enters into an “agonistic network” in which discourses compete for legitimacy. Within this framework, paralogy and dissensus rather than homology and consensus “supply the system with that increased performativity it forever demands and consumes” (The Postmodern Condition 15). Cilliers compares paralogy to self-organized criticality by which “networks diversify their internal structure maximally” (117).

Ultimately, Cilliers is most intrigued by the Lyotardian concept of justice within the postmodern condition. Through the work of Cornell and Derrida, he outlines four criteria for “responsible judgment” in the wake of postmodernism and complexity:

Respect otherness and difference as values in themselves.
Gather as much information on the issue as possible, notwithstanding the fact that it is impossible to gather all the information.
Consider as many of the possible consequences of the judgment, notwithstanding the fact that it is impossible to consider all the consequences.
Make sure that it is possible to revise the judgment as soon as it becomes clear that it has flaws. (139-40)

These four criteria could very well be called a “postmodern ethic.”

Cilliers’s book provides a sympathetic yet rigorous reading of poststructural theory in the wake of the rapid advances in complex system research and understanding. Cilliers’s interdisciplinary approach to the concept of complexity will allow literary critics, philosophers, and scientists to reach across their respective disciplines and to appreciate the application of their disciplinary perspectives in new and exciting arenas. This book has taken an innovative and important first step down the path of critical scholarship on the subject of complexity and postmodernism.

Works Cited

• Derrida, Jacques. “Signature, Event, Context.” Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1988. 1-23.
• Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1979.

Jürgen Pieters

Department of Dutch Literature and Literary Theory
University of Ghent, Belgium
jurgen.pieters@rug.ac.be

John Brannigan, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. New York: MacMillan, 1998.

One of the most conspicuous trends in the recent history of contemporary literary and cultural theory–a field dominated since the early eighties by the so-called “historical turn”–has been the extraordinarily rapid institutionalization of the twin movements of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism within literary studies. Proclaimed by Stephen Greenblatt in 1982 as a novel reading method that would shy away from the critical deficiencies of both the traditional historical school and the various formalist movements by which it was replaced, the New Historicism as it was practiced by Greenblatt and many other Anglo-American Renaissance scholars gained the immediate interest of those who had become dissatisfied with the stringent textualist ideology upheld by most American deconstructionists. Part of the attraction of the New Historicism was the double promise which it contained for practitioners of theory who wanted to move on instead of returning to the practical–i.e. untheoretical–paradigm that had been dominant in the heyday of New Criticism. To these critics, the New Historicism seemed to have it all: not only was it based upon the best of post-structuralist thought (Foucault, Derrida, de Certeau, Barthes and so on), it also applied that thought to the broad investigative field for which it was initially devised–not just to the self-deconstructive rhetorics of canonical literary texts. As Greenblatt himself once put it, post-structuralism in its deconstructive guise “was not only the negative limit but the positive condition for the emergence of New Historicism.”¹

As a consequence of this double promise, then, the New Historicism was embraced by many. It became the hotly debated subject of conferences, articles, studies, and special issues of academic journals. From 1985 onwards, a number of critical collections were published that attempted to combine the practical and the theoretical focus inherent to the object of their attention.² Most of these included, on the one hand, a number of practical pieces in which the New Historicist reading method was applied and/or tested, and, on the other, a number of theoretical articles which reflected upon the critical axioms that, from the beginning, had served as the conceptual basis of the method. Most of the latter, written mainly by scholars supportive of the New Historicist project, were meant as a contribution to the ongoing elaboration of the method under scrutiny.

Despite this gradual proliferation of critical attention, however, it has taken quite a while for the first book-length monograph on New Historicism to appear. In 1997, Manchester University Press published Claire Colebrook’s New Literary Histories, a mainly theoretical survey of the movement’s affiliations with the work of contemporary theoreticians such as Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Raymond Williams and Michel de Certeau. One year later, Colebrook’s study was followed by the book under review here, John Brannigan’s New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. In contrast to that of Colebrook, Brannigan’s study is characterized by an attempt to couple theoretical analysis to practical reading. While the larger part of it is devoted to theoretical and methodological issues, the book also contains four “applications and readings,” in which Brannigan analyzes several literary texts–Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a number of poems by Tennyson, and Yeats’s “Easter 1916.” The purpose of these applications is not only to describe and illustrate the preferred reading tactics of New Historicists and Cultural Materialists, but also to lay bare the critical constraints with which their readings have to cope. Ideally, the latter aim is prepared for in the preceding, theoretical half of the book, which is intended to give the reader an idea of the genesis and the development of both movements and of the critical dilemmas surrounding them. Brannigan concludes his book with two briefer chapters which consider the future of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism.

Brannigan’s work, a critical introduction initially aimed at a general audience of students and other non-specialist readers, suffers both the positive and the negative consequences of its generalist purpose. On the one hand, the study is well written and the central line of its argument is a clear one; on the other hand, some points of the author’s exposition seem to be in need of further qualification. The title of Brannigan’s monograph is a sufficient indication of the central argument its author wants to make: while New Historicism and Cultural Materialism are two critical practices that are obviously related, both in terms of methodology and of subject-matter, they are nevertheless better kept distinct. In outlining the central differences between the two movements, Brannigan in part modifies and elaborates upon views that have been proferred elsewhere. As he sees it, the distinction is not merely a matter of geography–Cultural Materialism being, as some would have it, the British “brand” of the American-based New Historicism–but mainly a question of how one conceives of the aims and tasks of critical-historical academic praxis: while New Historicists are mainly concerned with the extent to which literary texts lay bare the existing power relations of which they are themselves a product, Cultural Materialists prefer to make clear the way in which these same texts may serve as sites of subversion and dissidence, as places, to use Alan Sinfield’s description, where a culture exposes its own faultlines.

If Brannigan is to be believed, the latter option is an unrealistic one to New Historicists: according to them, subversion is always contained by the power which it is supposed to undermine, if only because it results from the very framework set up by that power. “[W]ith its insistence that there is no effective space of resistance,” Brannigan writes, “new historicism often makes for grim reading” (8). Cultural Materialists, so he goes on to argue, are “slightly more hopeful” (10): the space of resistance that Brannigan finds lacking in the work of their American counterparts is opened up in the space of critical reading itself–indeed, critical reading is that space. Brannigan suggests that what Cultural Materialists argue is not, simply, that authors of literary texts are (by definition, as it were) highly critical of the culture which surrounds them–that they read the history of their own day against the grain; what they argue is that a reading of these texts along the lines of the Cultural Materialist project can make clear that things in history could have turned out differently. (To continue the analogy, one could say that New Historicists prefer to give us a clue as to why things in history went the way they did.)

In outlining his general distinction between New Historicists and Cultural Materialists, Brannigan rightly points to their different contexts of origination. In contrast to the American New Historicism, British Cultural Materialism was largely influenced by a tradition of (neo)Marxist historicist critics, the most important of whom, Raymond Williams, coined the term in his Marxism and Literature. From the example of Williams, Cultural Materialists also derive their firm and explicit political commitment: according to them criticism, whether or not it finds its object in the past, needs to make a difference now, in the present moment from which the critic speaks and writes. Even though a similar commitment may be found to underlie the reading practice of a number of New Historicist scholars, theirs is obviously a far less overtly political project. Brannigan does not make this point, even though he asserts (rightly so, I believe) that the chief theoretical influence behind the New Historicism is the work of Michel Foucault, a thinker no less politically inspired than Williams. In several interviews, Foucault has made clear that his work–particularly the work on the “analytics of power” that has been of such an importance to New Historicists like Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Montrose–serves similar political goals as that of the British New Left. Brannigan, however, does not make this point in outlining Foucault’s impact on critics like Greenblatt, and I think that it’s a pity that he doesn’t. As I see it, an elaboration of this issue could have enabled him not only to differentiate more sharply between the projects of Cultural Materialism and New Historicism (after all, at its best New Historicism can be considered as an example of the non-interpretive, radical positivism Foucault attempted to devise in The Archaeology of Knowledge), but also to adjust his biased view of Foucault’s work. The portrait which Brannigan offers of Foucault (and, by extension, of the French critic’s influence on his American disciples) is largely reminiscent of that to be found in Frank Lentricchia’s well-known critique of Greenblatt’s New Historicism.³ In Lentricchia’s view, the fatal flaw running through Foucault’s oeuvre returns unchanged in Greenblatt’s inaugural Renaissance Self-Fashioning. Like his major source of inspiration, Lentricchia asserts, Greenblatt reduces history in all its complexity to a plethora of unmarked manifestations of one overarching phenomenon: power. Brannigan follows suit: “By explaining a wide range of different cultural and social forms as the functions of one single mode of power,” he writes, “Foucault imposed a monologic view of power relations on the past, and new historicists are heirs to Foucault’s faults as much as they are heirs to his innovations” (53).

Taking over his views uncritically, Brannigan fails to notice that Lentricchia’s reading of Foucault’s theory of power is based exclusively on Discipline and Punish, a book which has been criticized by its own author for entertaining a too totalitarian, repressive theory of power that hardly leaves any room for the possibility of resistance. However, in subsequent works (the History of Sexuality most notably, but also in other, for the most part posthumously published, essays) Foucault has tried to find new ways of thinking about power relationships that stress the inherent (not necessarily dialectic) connection between domination and resistance. In my opinion, it is this new, non-repressive theory of power that has been fruitful in Greenblatt’s attempt– primarily to be found in Shakespearean Negotiations–to find novel ways of analyzing the complex (and, indeed, often complicit) position that works of art can be said to take up within social formations.⁴ In line with the principles of Foucault’s later work, Greenblatt emphasizes the productivities of power as well as its prohibitions. Arguing that power works as an anonymous force that makes some things possible while making others impossible, he does indeed point to the fact that at times power structures seem to produce their own subversion and later contain it. But Foucault does not propose this mechanism as a universal historical phenomenon or as an intentional one, as Brannigan seems to suggest (as if power produced its subversion simply in order to contain it). While I share, in part, Brannigan’s critique of Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning as an example of the monologism which New Historicism was meant to overcome, I would argue that his reading of Greenblatt’s entire work as a monolithical project fails to notice the conceptual evolution it has clearly undergone between Renaissance Self-Fashioning and Shakespearean Negotiations. Brannigan is no doubt right in reminding us that it would be mistake to consider this evolution–as some would–in terms of a development “from new historicism to cultural poetics,” yet it is a pity that the reminder is not accompanied by a further (and better) analysis of the actual development. To some extent, one could say that such an analysis is prevented by the central argument which Brannigan uses to draw a firm opposition between New Historicists and Cultural Materialists. The argument–the former stress the impossibility of true subversion, while the latter emphasize the possibility of change–also forecloses a contrastive analysis of the work of the two key theoreticians behind both practices: Foucault in the case of New Historicism, Williams in the case of Cultural Materialism. Again, Brannigan points to the irony that Greenblatt for one has been formally taught and influenced by both, yet this piece of knowledge remains inert too. Possibly, an analysis of the exact “position” of Williams and Foucault within Greenblatt’s work might have resulted in a clearer understanding of New Historicist practice itself and of its relationship to British Cultural Materialism. Since Williams’s humanism is hard to reconcile (theoretically at least) with Foucault’s radically anti-humanistic stance, one could try and elaborate the hypothesis that Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning is marked by an attempt (a necessarily failed one, at that) to combine these two sources of inspiration. The difficulty in reconciling their approaches, I would say, becomes clear in the conflict between a view in which the signification of literary texts is determined by the discursive formation to which they belong (Foucault) and a view in which literature presents a critical view of the society out of which it comes (Williams). Greenblatt’s book, I believe, offers instances of both views without making explicit the methodological option for either.

What Brannigan’s book makes sufficiently clear is that the latter discussion finally boils down to the question of how one decides to read texts that have come down to us from the past. New Historicists tend to treat texts as things to be described in their own right, as “positivities,” to use Foucault’s term. Theirs is a truly historicist practice in the sense that they try, however problematic the attempt in itself may have become, to see things “as they were.” Cultural Materialists, Brannigan argues, prefer to take an explicitly “bifocal” perspective that is as much concerned with the present from which these texts are read as with the past from which they come. It is this double perspective that allows them, finally, to hold a plea for literary texts as sites of dissidence. What Brannigan does not stress sufficiently, I believe, is that to Cultural Materialists the question is not whether these texts functioned as critical and political instruments at the time of their production, but whether they can be seen, from a distance, to articulate problems that contemporary readers could not have foreseen. One of the theoreticians to have developed a reading-method that allows one to focus upon texts as sites of dissidence is the Althusserian critic Pierre Macherey, whose work has had a significant impact upon Catherine Belsey’s brand of Cultural Materialism. Unfortunately, Brannigan does not mention Macherey in his discussion of Belsey’s work. This omission contributes to my conviction that at points the format which Brannigan has been asked to adopt has unnecessarily limited the scope of the book as a whole. The author of an introductory volume addressed at the general student of literary theory cannot explore critically each and every road that can be opened for investigation. In the particular case of John Brannigan’s book this is all the more a pity, for the best parts of the book–the truly critical parts–make clear that its author can well be considered an expert in the field.

Notes

1.Personal electronic communication, June 26, 1997.

2. The most important of these are Dollimore and Sinfield’s Political Shakespeare, Howard and O’Connor’s Shakespeare Reproduced, Veeser’s The New Historicism and The New Historicism Reader, Wilson and Dutton’s New Historicism and Renaissance Drama, and Cox and Reynolds’s New Historical Literary Study.

3. First published in Lentricchia’s Ariel and the Police and later collected in Veeser’s The New Historicism.

4. It is interesting to note how closely Greenblatt’s definition of “social energy” resembles that of Foucault’s pouvoir in the first part of the History of Sexuality. For an elaboration of this resemblance see my “The Foucauldian Legacy Revisited: Stephen Greenblatt on ‘the Circulation of Social Energy’” (unpublished paper).

Works Cited

• Cox, Jeffrey N. and Larry J. Reynolds, eds. New Historical Literary Study: Essays on Reproducing Texts, Representing History. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993.
• Dollimore, Jonathan and Alan Sinfield, eds. Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1985.
• Howard, Jean E. and Marion F. O’Connor, eds. Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology. London and New York: Methuen, 1987.
• Lentricchia, Frank. Ariel and the Police: Michel Foucault, William James, Wallace Stevens. Madison: The U of Wisconsin P, 1988.
• Veeser, H. Aram, ed. The New Historicism. London and New York: Routledge, 1989.
• —, ed. The New Historicism Reader. London and New York, Routledge, 1994.
• Wilson, Richard and Richard Dutton, eds. New Historicism and Renaissance Drama. London: Longman, 1992.

Nezih Erdogan

Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture
Bilkent University
nezih@bilkent.edu.tr

Meyda Yegenoglu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism.London and New York: Cambridge UP, 1998.

When feminist studies, as it developed in the Anglo-American world, turned to Third World countries, it produced a discourse which put an emphasis on the situation of women oppressed in male-dominant societies marked by backwardness. This discourse regarded women of the less democratic, less learned, unstable, and poverty-stricken societies as deprived of the possibilities and channels of power which are elsewhere accessible to Western women. This “backwardness,” which became a recurrent theme, is of course sustained by a silently conducted comparison between underdeveloped or developing countries and industrialized ones. Such a comparison betrays a difference which remains central to the discourse disseminated by mainstream feminist practices: it re-introduces the “West and the rest” opposition, thus constructing the sovereign Western female subject endowed with all the privileges and powers reserved solely for her.¹ This opposition also brings us back to the problems posed by postcolonial theory in its analysis of how “Orientalism orientalizes the Orient.”

Postcolonial theory, which has offered a most productive critique of Orientalism and colonial discourse, nonetheless seems to have overlooked the fact that any careful study of the colonial subject as constituted by colonial discourse needs to insert the terms of sexual difference into its field of investigation. For example, although the work of Edward Said has established the still influential paradigm of postcolonial studies, it has its limitations in demonstrating how sexual difference operates in the production of Orientalist discourse. It is important to see that the power of colonial discourse stems from how it positions woman.

As Paul Feyerabend suggests in another context, controversial movements and fields of knowledge may serve as medicine to one another. One may say that feminist studies, especially overseas, is in need of a medicine that could be provided by postcolonial theory, and postcolonial theory could in turn benefit from feminist studies. At this point, Meyda Yegenoglu’s Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism comes as a most rewarding read. Its virtue does not only lie in the ways in which it exemplifies interdisciplinary study (which it impeccably does), but also in the way it draws a framework which makes possible a previously unavailable discussion.

From the onset, Yegenoglu develops a dialogue with other writers of postcolonial theory ranging from Edward Said to Homi Bhabha, from Partha Chatterjee to Gayatri Spivak, and with feminist writers including Elisabeth Grosz, Judith Butler, and Vicky Kirby. Aiming to “map the field,” she opens with a discussion of the conceptual tools at hand. Thus, in the first chapter, she gives a lucid depiction of the post-structuralist scene–a difficult and demanding job. Yegenoglu clearly demonstrates the limitations of the pertinent theoretical works and the extent to which she will utilize them. Then she moves on to define a field of investigation for the specific purposes of her project: the problem of the Third World woman.

Can one feel at ease with this identification of such an object of study? Just as the infamous question of Freud, “What does woman want?”, causes the woman to disappear (that is, for example, all the possibilities of her self-expression) and brings about a construction of her as produced by man (hence, the woman as symptom of man), any inquisition of the Third World woman entails a double erasure: first in terms of sexual difference and second in terms of colonial othering. Thus Yegenoglu resists the temptation of speaking of this “not yet discovered” object, and instead sets out to delineate the conditions of its objecthood. She repeatedly warns the reader against the double illusion that we can know the woman and that we can know the Third World woman. The illusion is in reality the effect of the colonial discourse which serves to conceal the impossibility of its very object.

Take, for instance, her brilliant analysis of Lady Montague’s letters on the Turkish women of the Ottoman Empire. The harem has served for the Orientalist as a fantasy stage and the Muslim woman as the anchor which structured this space, enabling colonial discourse to operate on a number of levels. In the past three centuries, the “enslaved woman” was perceived as a sign of the backwardness of Muslim society, in contrast with the situation of the Western woman, who was then heading for emancipation. As Yegenoglu shows later on in the book, the woman also represents the space that is to be colonized. However, Lady Montague’s portrayal of the Turkish woman runs counter to the well-established image promoted by Orientalism: the harem is actually a space of self-fulfillment for the Turkish woman, who is way ahead of the Western woman. She is learned, knowledgeable, and has access to the means of power. Lady Montague’s letters may give us an idea about the accuracy and the tendency of the Orientalist narratives in circulation at that time. Her benevolence for the Turkish woman is in conflict with what a great majority of Orientalists have produced in the name of objective truth. But is benevolence not an inverted form of malevolence? Isn’t Lady Montague, by negating the reiterated (mis-)conceptions pertaining to Muslim society, actually re-asserting the terms of Orientalism? Yegenoglu eloquently shows how Lady Montague’s text, although it contradicts a great number of contemporary colonialist narratives, nonetheless reproduces colonial discourse in exemplifying the “unity in diversity” of Orientalism. One may even argue that such contradictions are the strength of colonial discourse. The power of looking at others benevolently requires the power of voicing the truth on behalf of others. This is what Yegenoglu refers to as the “regime of truth” of Orientalism. The truth of the Turkish woman does not come from herself but from the Western woman; it is she who holds the power of articulating, disseminating, and controlling the conditions of (her) truth.

Lady Montague describes a scene of intimacy in the harem and expresses her wish that a certain English gentleman were there with her, seeing, without being seen, what she was allowed to see. This is one of the crucial moments of Colonial Fantasies: it offers an instance of how sexual difference and colonial discourse are mapped onto each other. Here, Yegenoglu does not only show that Lady Montague’s text is in effect patriarchal–that she assumes the desire of the masculine, the desire to see the (truth of) woman–but she also links masculine desire with the Orientalist’s desire to know what is hidden from him. The sight of woman is thus symptomatic on a wider scale in Orientalism, since scopophilia–which lends colonial discourse its dynamic–involves the “knowing” and “unveiling” of the “East” and “woman,” which are mutually constitutive in the eyes of the Western subject. Colonial Fantasies places special focus on the veil, which structures the very colonial fantasy around which it revolves. The veil serves in this book as the emblematic case for the textual and administrative operations of colonialism, which can be primarily observed in the demand to know the Orient. Interestingly, as the Biblical expression has it, “to know” means a sexual penetration whose resonance can be traced in military invasions, Orientalist studies, scientific expeditions, and even artistic productions. Yegenoglu examines the struggle between the Algerian woman and French colonialism over the veil in this connection. The Frenchman would not feel content until he lifted the veil that stood for the land that had already been taken over; only then would he be able to see it as a space where he could exercise power–the veil stands in the way of the colonizer who is at pains to turn land into flesh and flesh into land.² One witnesses the same logic at work in a variety of practices today: in soft-porn films that recurrently set their scenes in Eastern countries where the European male character seduces the native woman wearing the chador, or in the situation of female students in France and Turkey who are not allowed into classrooms with their headscarves. The Oriental is feminized and the land (read: truth) is sexualized. Here, one is tempted to look to the possibilities offered by the verb “reveal.” It means both “to make known, disclose,” and “to re-veil.” Every unveiling is a re-veiling; knowing the truth of woman, lifting her veil, is a re-inscription of a prescribed knowledge, i.e., the knowledge of the Western sovereign subject, on her body. Yegenoglu does not suggest that beyond the conflicts over veilings and unveilings there lies a naked truth of the woman/the Oriental; on the contrary, she makes clear that there is no such truth, that such a goal would lead us astray, and leave untouched the crucial question of how the truth of the other is inscribed and represented and by whom.

Departing from Said’s assertion that Orientalism is a joint venture, in the final chapter of her Colonial Fantasies, Yegenoglu explores the ways in which colonial discourse is co-produced by the colonizer and the colonized. Yegenoglu seeks to show how certain movements in Muslim societies that emerged as antitheses to colonial discourse eventually reproduced its effects. Yegenoglu cites the adventures of nationalism in Turkey and Algeria, which have developed contrasting attitudes towards the question of the veil. At this stage of her analysis, she not only provides a historically and culturally specific context for the relationship of resistance and mimicry, she also draws our attention once again to the central role the woman plays against this backdrop. Nationalism emerged as a resistance against the hegemony of the West, and it propagated the virtues of a national(ist) identity as opposed to the identities imposed by the West. When it comes to constructing a national identity, it was thought necessary to embrace the values of the West (e.g., modernization, secularism) and produce a resistance to it at the same time. In the Turkish case, Islam was seen as an obstacle on the way to the “level of the contemporary civilizations” (read Western civilization); therefore Ataturk silently (and less silently) maintained a distance between religion and the reforms he aimed to institute. In the Algerian case, however, Islam was seen as a means of constructing a nationalist identity and resisting the colonialism of the French, who saw the native’s religion as something to be thrown out in order to operate efficiently in this country. The veil as the symbol of backwardness, as an obstacle brought in by religion, was to be lifted in Turkey, whereas it was defended desperately as the symbol of resistance against the French in Algeria. What is important to understand, warns Yegenoglu, is that both attitudes derive from the same sexual economy. And what is more important, she continues, is to understand that although they may appear to present alternative responses to Western colonialism, they both reproduce the same discursive effects. This is one of the strongest points of Colonial Fantasies: it provides an insight into the deep structures as well as the psychic mechanisms of Orientalism’s capacity for generating diverse, even contradictory images.

Western civilization has been remarkably effective in effacing the traces of its operations; culture is what enables this effacement. Culture is a process of neutralization, naturalization, and universalization; it is the place where things seem natural precisely as opposed to cultural; where they seem as they should be. Culture thus masks its own ideological force. It has been the chief task of cultural studies to provide insight into these functions of culture. However, due to the slippery ground of difference, any critical approach to culture runs the risk of reproducing its terms rather than coming to terms with them.

Colonial Fantasies vigilantly points out such dangers awaiting the practitioners of postcolonial/feminist studies. Yegenoglu refuses to assume and thereby legitimize any fixed positions in the discourse. If she were to speak from the point of view of the Third World woman, then she would tacitly address a reader in search of a native informant. If she were to take up the position of the mainstream feminist of the Anglo-American world, then she would re-affirm the sovereign female subject of the West. Both positions seem to be available in Yegenoglu’s text; yet neither are sites of identification for the reader. In effect, there are here no stable sites of identification; rather, Yegenoglu moves from one position to another only in order to deconstruct their oppositionality. Fittingly, in her final chapter, Yegenoglu provides a powerful account of how she herself refuses to be the native informant, delivering the truth of women in Muslim society. Thus Yegenoglu demonstrates that it is possible to read the mind of Orientalism without perpetuating its signs.

Notes

1. See, for instance, Vicky Kirby’s critique of feminists’ approach to genital mutilation of African females in “Kopma Noktasinda Feminizm ve Klitoris Sunneti” in Oryantalizm, Hegemonya ve Kulturel Fark, Fuat Keyman, Mahmut Mutman, and Meyda Yegenoglu, eds. (Istanbul: Iletisim, 1996) 183-233.

2. In this context, see Mahmut Mutman’s excellent analysis of how the media veiled Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War: “Pictures from Afar: Shooting the Middle East,” Inscriptions 6 (1992): 1-44.

Steven Helmling

Department of English
University of Delaware
helmling@odin.english.udel.edu

Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method.London and New York: Verso, 1998.

Fredric Jameson’s oeuvre is daunting for almost every possible reason. Besides its sheer bulk, the difficulty of its themes, and its notoriously demanding prose style, there’s the vast scope of the cultural materials it takes on. Nothing cultural is alien to Jameson, as Colin McCabe once put it (in words quoted on the back cover of Brecht and Method). One of the strengths, indeed a condition, of Jameson’s encyclopedic achievement is a programmatic dispassion toward his subject matter, an eschewal or renunciation of polemic so unemphatic that many readers miss it. Jameson’s work is never uncommitted, but the sorts of inquiry he undertakes aim to open possibilities that polemical reflexes, for which the only question is for-or-against, generically foreclose.

Nevertheless, throughout what Terry Eagleton has called Jameson’s “curiously unimpassioned” corpus (74), there are seams of warmer feeling, when Jameson touches on figures he particularly admires–Hegel, Heidegger, Barthes, and Gissing, to name a few. He has often enough indulged this impulse at book-length; hence there’s a special category or genre of work within his oeuvre, which, without losing critical measure, nevertheless functions as a celebration of and hommage to writers who are especially important for him. His first book, Sartre, is an example; Marxism and Form likewise celebrates the canonical figures of Western Marxism (and insinuates Sartre into their company). A cooler, but unmistakably appreciative, survey occupies The Prison-House of Language (the pages on Barthes and Lacan are especially warm); Late Marxism renews and expands the Adorno chapter of Marxism and Form. The most conflicted, and therefore the most interesting case is the book on Wyndham Lewis, in which Jameson advocates for a literary achievement committed to a politics he abhors.

Brecht and Method belongs in this special category of Jameson’s “appreciations” or homages. And yet this new book also belongs in a category of its own–for I’m tempted to declare it the most unusual work within Jameson’s corpus. Jameson’s writing, for all its difficulty and despite the above-noted dispassion, has always been very dramatic: it generates a continuous anxiety about critique’s, revolution’s, or socialism’s ambitions and possibilities, their possible success or failure, enacted in his own “dialectical sentences” as a chronic self-consciousness about his own project’s success or failure. His topic, whether a problem or a figure, has invariably been a vehicle and a model of our (your, my, Jameson’s, everyone’s) entrapment in the prison-house of “ideological closure,” and of our efforts to break out. Throughout his career, Jameson stipulates this “mimetic” or performative ambition for “dialectical writing” as such, under whatever names (theory, critique, scriptible). In his homages, the celebrated figure (Adorno, Lewis) appears in unavoidably heroic colors, and the rhetoric takes on the “stoic” and “tragic” accents Jameson has praised in the prose of Lacan (Ideologies of Theory 98, 112). Such a rhetoric seems tailor-made for Brecht–politically partisan avant-gardist, cathexis-object for Cold War passions, refugee in America from Hitler during the war, state-sponsored dramaturge to the Stalinist GDR after it (this last, I expected, an especially potent theme, for few critics are as alive as Jameson to the ironies of “success” in the fields of cultural production).

So I’d assumed Jameson’s Brecht was foreordained to a certain angst-charged treatment. But Jameson surprises us again, with a book almost–what to call it? tranquil? serene?–in its assurance of and pleasure in Brecht’s interest and relevance, his “usefulness,” Jameson avers, for us, whether we ever realize it or not. The book’s ease and brevity–a mere 180 pages in 20 bite-sized chapters–present the reader with (by Jamesonian standards) an uncharacteristically low-pressure reading experience. As for tone, Jameson’s usual accents of the “stoic” and “tragic” are gone–so much so as to tempt recourse to the word “comic,” if we stipulate that comedy needn’t mean laughs. Brecht at least has laughs (Jameson, no), but if “comedy” seems an anomaly in this connection, that only attests the extent to which Brecht’s art manages to circumvent, or dialectically outleap, the stale binary of comedy/tragedy. And as if in some bodily sympathy with or methexis in the Brechtian gestus or “method,” Jameson’s own prose here seems for once to have left behind his chronic preoccupation with the danger of critique’s unavoidable stylistic or textual effects devolving into mere Weltanschauungen or ideologies (here the stale binary is “optimism/pessimism”).

This is why Brecht and Method seems to me a book unlike any of Jameson’s other writing. For once, anxieties programmatic elsewhere in his work are gone. They are apparently not, at least in connection with Brecht, “useful,” and “usefulness” is a motif sounded from Brecht and Method‘s opening sentence:

Brecht would have been delighted, I like to think, at an argument, not for his greatness, or his canonicity, nor even for some new and unexpected value of his posterity (let alone for his “postmodernity”), as rather for his usefulness–and that not only for some uncertain or merely possible future, but right now, in a post-Cold-War market-rhetorical situation even more anti-communist than the good old days. (1)

Useful, Jameson explains, in the way that Brecht judged drama, or learning things, or Stalin (!) useful: useful as provocation to new thought, as substance of new experience, useful above all as (that eminently useful thing) pleasure. Brecht’s assumption that useful things will normally afford some degree of pleasure helps motivate the (by Jamesonian standards) uncomplicated pleasures of this unique Jamesonian text.

Hitherto, Jameson has been chronically wary of pleasure, or at least of the ideological uses to which it is put, especially in the discourses of theory. Plaisir, jouissance, dérive, íntensité: such watchwords of blissful consummation usually figure, in Jameson’s quotation marks, as symptoms of a premature and unearned utopianism, a sort of “infantile leftism” of theory generally, and of “The Ideology of the Text” (see the mid-’70s essay of that title) in particular. In “Pleasure: A Political Issue” (1983) Jameson worked to redeem Barthesian plaisir and jouissance from the naïveté of Barthes’s more libidinous disciples, by infusing it with the angst, terror, and dread of “the sublime” (shortly to become a key theme of the crucial “Postmodernism” essay [1984]). In Brecht and Method, “the sublime” itself is reconfigured as encompassing, not oppositional to, the ridiculous. Brecht’s power to conflate the revolutionary apprehension of history with farce becomes a kind of sublimity (an effect not, however, unique to Brecht: think of Joyce’s “Ithaca,” Pound’s Hell cantos, Eliot’s “Mrs. Porter and her daughter / Washing their feet in soda water”).

Elsewhere in Jameson, the effect of such a conflation of binaries would be to augment the angst of both; here the gesture affirms an aplomb that is as much Jameson’s as Brecht’s. As usual, Jameson’s own corpus provides a theorization of this new Jamesonian textual effect. In the 1977 essay “Of Islands and Trenches,” Jameson opens a space for the “neutralizations” of antinomic ideological closures (stale binaries), to enable “the production of utopian discourse.” I don’t call Brecht and Method a “utopian discourse,” nor does Jameson call Brecht’s work utopian, but “neutralization” will do as a characterization of the book’s unprogrammatic program.

Or I should rather say, its “method”–in senses the book develops from its very title on. A long if shaggy tradition (from, say, Pascal and Swift, to, say, Hans Gadamer and Sandra Harding) has indicted the ideology of “[scientific] method” as a content-neutral procedural program, thereby guaranteed to produce unbiased, objective “truth” in its results. (Positivism, as someone joked, is a game whose first rule forbids you to know what you’re talking about.) Marxism’s claim to be a “science” has always defied this supposedly non-partisan premise (though too rarely in a way to assimilate hermeneutics, as Jameson urges it should in Marxism and Form). Jameson recalls Lukacs’s effort, in “What is Orthodox Marxism?”, to deploy the notion of Marxism as a distinctive method of open-ended inquiry against the threat, under Stalin, of its calcification into dogmatism. In Jameson, as in his models, “method” (however named) must be autocritical, must question its own presuppositions, and distrust its results even as it elaborates them: it must anticipate and resist their reification and attempt, however impossibly, their dereification in advance. Operatively, this effort should enact that “unity of theory and praxis” that can figure for us here as one of Marxism’s longest-standing “neutralizations” of a sterile binary. And the locus for all this, not merely the model but the substance of Brecht’s “method,” is of course his practice as playwright, dramaturge, activist, and impresario. Jameson understandably shies away from talk of Brecht’s “aesthetic,” and he suggests that drama, since it is performance- rather than text-based, is generically more resistant to the reifications and (some of the) other liabilities of the aesthetic that the term has come to connote in the usages of recent theory.

All of this matters because orthodoxy and dogma are terms so often mobilized against Brecht’s “didactic” achievement. Jameson cites the Horatian ut doceat, and remembers that Brecht’s urge to teach has long disqualified him from validation as “modernist,” to the extent that modernism proscribed didacticism (compare dismissals of Pound on similar grounds), or indeed, discursiveness itself (Eliot’s denigration of “meaning” as a lure, like the meat the burglar brings for the watchdog; cognate suspicions of any meaning or sense legible by the codes of a received semiotic still inspire, and encumber, the higher-brow cultural productions of postmodern “theory”). We’ve already seen Jameson, in the sentence quoted above, warding off any conjuration of a “postmodern” Brecht; likewise the question of Brecht’s modernism barely ripples the surface of the text. (Mo/pomo: another binary neutralized.) Rather, Jameson dissolves the complaint of Brechtian “doctrine” itself, daring any complainant to specify, on any issue, a particular Brechtian dogma, let alone a system of doctrine or a doctrinal cast of mind more generally. (Brecht’s detractors make this point negatively when they dismiss Brecht as a failed dogmatist, his “doctrine” falling short of systematic consistency, and lapsing into mere plumpes Denken.) Rather, Jameson insists, Brecht’s “method, and even his dialectic” (Brecht and Method 25) is an un- and anti-systematic, un- and anti-doctrinal “pragmatism” among whose choice gambits is to “turn a problem into its solution, thereby coming at the matter askew and sending the projectile off into a new and more productive direction than the dead end in which it was immobilized” (Brecht and Method 24)–a “method,” please note, inverting Jameson’s own usual method, which is to problematize what had hitherto passed for at least working solutions. Not that Brecht doesn’t problematize–the point of the famous (too-famous) “V-effect” (from the German Verfremdungseffekt: Jameson explains that the usual translation, “alienation effect,” misleadingly assimilates Brecht’s term to Marx’s Entfremdung). Jameson translates Verfremdung, with an eye on Shklovsky’s ostranenia, as “estrangement,” and stimulatingly operates some “Estrangements of the Estrangement-Effect.” The point here is that “estrangement” provides another “neutralization” of Brecht’s supposed dogmatism problem, for if the ruse of dogma is to internalize itself in the subjectivity of the addressee, the V-effect tends the opposite way. “Estrangement,” we might say, proves to be not only “interpellation[‘s]” conceptual opposite, but also its specific antidote.

So “doctrine,” too, is “neutralized,” and therewith Brecht’s “ideology.” We evoked above Jameson’s “neutralization” of the Weltanshauung impasse, usually locatable on a continuum with ideology; Jameson here prefers to speak of Haltung and gestus, and he posits early in the book a Brechtian sinité, a Chineseness of bearing or “persona” (Jameson here declares a heavy debt to Anthony Tatlow), “paradigmatic of the expansion of Brecht’s work into that ultimate frame of the metaphysic or the world-view”:

Hermeneutics of belief, hermeneutics of suspicion: the option is suspended when the Tao itself opens up around a secular and cynical Western writer like Brecht, who cannot be assumed to believe in this immemorial “world-view”… but takes it as what Lacan would call a “tenant-lieu,” a place-keeper for the metaphysics that have become impossible. Thus, not a “philosophy” of Marxism exactly (for such a philosophy would immediately fall back into the category of degraded world-views… ), but, rather, what such a philosophy might turn out to be in a utopian future…. Yet Brecht’s theatricality saves his sinité even from this provisionality…. (Brecht and Method 12)

Above I tried “tranquil,” “serene,” even “comic” as possible characterizations of this book’s unique Jamesonian effect or affect: perhaps I can now propose “Chinese” as the (admittedly recherché) mot juste for what Jameson, with a finely calculated diffuseness, variously evokes as “the Brechtian”: an “idea of Brecht,” a “general lesson or spirit” not identifiable or simply coextensive with the written corpus itself. Its usefulness, Jameson urges, is nothing less than that of “offering Marxism its own uniquely non-Western–or, at least, non-bourgeois–philosophy in the form of a kind of Marxian Tao…” (Brecht and Method 30). The projection of “our” tradition’s ideological binaries onto Chineseness “neutralizes,” even estranges, the charge intrinsic to them in a Western habitus of psychology, thus enabling their function as if (in the Althusserian formula) “without a subject”: that Brecht’s Chineseness is an elected rather than a native affinity promotes rather than vitiates this effect (an instance, you might say, of “problem” made over into “solution”).

We hear less and less nowadays of the “without a subject” problem or project, as if this utopian aspiration of a generation ago has been tacitly dropped as unworkable. Jameson’s implication is that Brecht met this predicament long before theory did, and negotiated it better, and in still “useful” ways (on which, more later). I have just indicated how Jameson projects all this under the rubric of “doctrine”: “Doctrine” is the first of the three headings under which the book’s twenty brief chapters are gathered. The second is “Gestus,” a term which has long encoded for Jameson that Barthesian “writing with the body,” that penumbra of textual effect or affect exceeding the mere words on the page (see the opening sentence of Sartre) that has been Jameson’s quiet, career-long (and mostly unnoticed) heresy, in our age of the linguistic turn, against the orthodoxy of nothing-outside-the-text. Brecht’s working methods–workshop, collaborative, the whole process from composition through final performance best envisioned as continuous rehearsal (perpetual revolution by other means)–his gestus as writer and dramaturge, in short, similarly sublates Brecht’s own subjectivity into the work. The book’s third section, headed “Proverbs,” implicates similar motivations and/or effects in Brecht’s penchant for (reinvented) folk- and peasant-forms, in which something like a collective voice submerges the individuality of a particular speaker–an effect as salient in Brecht’s poems (since Romanticism, the normatively most “subjective” of genres) as in his playwrighting–and, Jameson’s closing “Epilogue” suggests, as characteristic of Brecht’s embrace of the modern as of his penchant for settings suggestive of “Chinese” remoteness (Asiatic despotism).

Jameson’s almost nostalgic evocations here of Brecht’s sense of the modern (the human scale and heroic mystique of Lindbergh’s “The Spirit of St. Louis”), sheerly as writing, make an interesting contrast with similar passages in Fables of Aggression: Jameson’s prose here evokes not only the Brechtian impersonality, but also something of the nostalgia for the personality itself of Brecht’s greatest Anglophone emulator of the ’30s, W. H. Auden, in contrast with the Lewis-like energy and Luciferianism inflecting Fables of Aggression. The “Epilogue” to Brecht and Method is a prime example of Jameson’s power as a writer to offer hommage in the evocation less of a verbal style (Brecht’s, Lewis’s) than of a whole authorial body language or scriptible–“sentences,” as Jameson once characterized it, “whose gestus arouses the desire to emulate it, sentences that make you want to write sentences of your own” (Ideologies of Theory 21).

That remark was prompted by the example of Barthes, and Barthes’s constant presence throughout Brecht and Method makes a good note to close with, not least because Jameson argues that by way of Barthes, Brecht has had his impact on “theory” no less than on theater. Not merely that Barthes’s Mythologies is satirical “very much in the tradition of Brecht,” nor even that it “paved the way for the triumphant entry of the estrangement-effect into French theory” (the “denaturalizations” of Mythologies as estrangements distinctly Brechtian in their humor no less than in their political point). Brecht’s mobilization of theater “as the very figure for the collective and for a new kind of society… in which the classic questions and dilemmas of political philosophy can be ‘estranged’ and rethought” (Brecht and Method 11) transmitted itself first of all in the example of Brecht’s own “theoretical” writing, more recently by way of Barthes, to the practice of “theory” as the present generation has known it.

Indeed, in what I take to be the most elusive and difficult pages in the book, Jameson massages the “proairesis” of S/Z into something rich and estranged to a degree exceeding any Verfremdung of Brecht’s that I can recall. (If Mythologies seems, yes, Brechtian, S/Z is very clearly, or very obscurely, something else altogether.) Jameson assimilates “proairesis” to “autonomization” (one of the richest motifs of his work of the past decade), a de-linking or de-motivating of coincident features or effects that he registers sometimes as a loss (as with the famous parody/pastiche binary in the “Postmodernism” essay), but at other times as a gain (as here, when the “becoming-autonomous” of familiar associations permits their dissociation–or defamiliarization, or estrangement–into new configurations). In this very specific case, Jameson projects the Barthesian “proairesis” as a delinking of “agents” from their “acts”–a way of putting it that would seem to owe much to Kenneth Burke’s “dramatistic metaphor.” Whereas Kant (Lukacs’s type of the bourgeois philosopher) reposed all virtue in our assent to the categorical imperative to own our acts (choose our fate, enjoy our symptom), Brecht and Barthes, Jameson suggests, aspire to a syntax in which “acts” are, as it were, their own agents–or rather, projectable in a hermeneutic which contrives to bypass the problem of their agency altogether.

This is not merely to reprise, but to reinvent the now-passé prospect of a radical defamiliarization of the ideology of the bourgeois self, and I regret the extent to which my brief sketch refamiliarizes it again. Jameson’s beautifully evocative prose evades, as mine cannot, those familarizations, in the process enacting the utopian impulse specific to “theory” itself, of a writing not reducible to the property of the writer. And (at the risk of making it sound familiarizing), it collects a useful sense from those pages of S/Z, the most impenetrable in the book, in which verbs in the infinitive become, by fiat, “names” (“What is a series of actions? The unfolding of a name”). And by elaborating a single instance in which Brechtian “methods” project themselves into applications never more than merely latent in Brecht himself, Jameson here makes the case, proposed at the outset of the book, for Brecht’s continuing “usefulness.” It’s a usefulness predicated on the continuing rehabilitation of modernism in Jameson’s work of the 1990s,¹ that “uneven development” whereby the still-modern, in our postmodern time, emerges as more modern than we. A cognate hope for the continuing potencies of an uncanonized, still-fresh, modernism animated the book on Lewis–but in a very different key: the reinvention of Lewis needed ingenuity in its evocation and evasion of Lewis’s retro-ness (not to mention his rightist politics). The “relief” of these predicaments in Jameson’s meditation on Brecht’s centenary gives us a new register of the Jamesonian scriptible as well as new senses of, and uses for, Brecht our post-contemporary.

Note

1. See my “Jameson’s Postmodernism: Version 2.0,” PMC 9.2 (January 1999).

Works Cited

• Eagleton, Terry. Against the Grain. London and New York: Verso, 1986.
• Jameson, Fredric. The Ideologies of Theory. Vol. 1. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.

Stefan Mattessich

Department of English
Loyola Marymount University
blzbub@msn.com

Eyes Wide Shut. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Frederic Raphael. Perf. Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, and Sydney Pollack. Warner Brothers, 1999.

Such was the fashion, such the human being; the men were like the paintings of the day; society had taken its form from the mould of art.

 

–Charles Baudelaire, “Some French Caricaturists”

It is a historical fact that irony becomes increasingly conscious of itself in the course of demonstrating the impossibility of our being historical.
 

–Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality”

“He was like a father.”

 

–Nicole Kidman¹

Stanley Kubrick’s final movie was released last summer to almost universal disappointment.² Except for those accounts that read like copy produced by a hired public relations firm, the critical appraisals were more or less the same: Eyes Wide Shut is a “decorous gavotte… more studied than a fashion shoot” (J. Hoberman in The Village Voice, 59); “portentous” and “bizarrely devoid of life” (David Denby in The New Yorker, 86); “the work of an artist who long ago stopped paying attention to the world around him” (Stuart Klawans in The Nation, 42); “generic and hokey, like a tendentious art house version of a holiday television commercial” (Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times, 22). The film has been variously called ponderous, soporific, passionless, sex-phobic, sexist, frozen, and dead. These varied sources of critique all claim that Kubrick has violated an organic principle–linked to metaphors of sexuality, development, internal consistency, and verisimilitude–in the choices he makes. This trope of a violated organicism remains active especially when the critic understands Eyes Wide Shut in the context of Kubrick’s other work. For the claim is not that Kubrick has made another cold or lifeless, sterile or impersonal film and demonstrated once more his disinterest in psychological realism (this has always been in evidence), but that the trait of coldness in this case fails to live up to the Kubrick standard: Eyes Wide Shut fails because it is not internally consistent with his corpus as a whole. Thus Michiko Kakutani can center her critique on the bad choice of an “intimate, emotional material fundamentally at odds with the director’s cool, visual intelligence and lapidary style.” The two principal characters, Bill (Tom Cruise) and Alice (Nicole Kidman), are “not meant to be caricatures like the blackly comic characters in ‘Strangelove’ or faceless cutouts like the astronauts in ‘2001.’ They’re supposed to be fairly ordinary, albeit privileged, New Yorkers: a doctor and his wife who live in an art-filled apartment on Central Park West–yuppies who like to smoke a little pot before bed.”

The problem with Eyes Wide Shut, in other words, is that it imports the techniques of caricature into the intimate space of realism, and this grotesque conjoining both offends sensibility and exposes as a precondition for sensibility itself that the two modes remain distinct. The film doesn’t “work”; it proceeds, as David Denby says of Cruise’s Bill, “without purpose,” wandering aimlessly through an “indistinct” landscape where “everything seems wrong,” because of a fatal hesitation between the merely stereotypical and the three-dimensional, the type and the person, dream and reality, and also between the abnormal and the normal (86). Denby, for instance, writes that watching it “we experience no special violation of the normal–the normal is vaguely and dispiritedly ‘off’ from the beginning” (86). This “off” quality resembles neither drama nor comedy; it denies not only the norm, and not only deviation from the norm, but also the “special violation” of the normal that disciplined art is said to give us.

I’d like to start with this “special violation” as I explore the curious way that Eyes Wide Shut prefigures its own (mis)reception precisely in the “bad” choices Kubrick makes. That Kubrick expected his final filmic caricature to be misrecognized, I argue, can be inferred even from the film’s title, in which a failure to see is inscribed within perception itself. A sensibility that accepts caricature as a mode only if it clearly cues the reader to its specific non-realist functions misses the fact that caricature has often worked without such cues. That is, caricature has always been grotesque in the sense that it combines forms (think of Goya’s monsters and animalized faces in the Los Capichos and Disasters of War series) and blurs generic boundaries (think of the “Flaubertian irony” in Madame Bovary that comes from applying caricature to realist subject matter).

Historically, caricature has also gone hand in hand with social and political critique, utilizing techniques of exaggeration, typecasting, and catechretic abuse to satirize the pretensions of the ruling classes. In Britain, caricature played a conspicuous cultural role during the American War in the late 1770s, and then again during the wars with France beginning in the 1790s. And in nineteenth century France, caricature flourished particularly around the revolutions of 1830, 1848, and 1870.³ Its privileged target in this period was the bourgeoisie and its cultural pretensions, which shifted gradually from a self-idealizing romanticism to a fetishizing realism of the downtrodden and dispossessed. By the the time the bourgeoisie began to consolidate its power in the 1850s, both romanticism and realism bore the stigma of philistinism. In response, writers and artists honed caricature into a weapon against this new romantico-realist hegemony. In “The Essence of Laughter,” published in 1855, Baudelaire distinguished between an “ordinary comic” quality at work in representations of social manners or inter-personal situations, and an “absolute comic” quality which elevated particular examples of humor (caricature, commedia dell’arte, English pantomime) into the more exalted function of genuine critique. As Paul de Man writes of this essay in “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” the “absolute comic” designates not a relation between subjects (“man and man”) but between the subject and the material discursive element by means of which he comes to distinguish himself from the non-human world.⁴ This relation implies an internal fracture of the subject, a double-minded negotiation of, on the one hand, an experience given in its chaotic or unbound totality, and, on the other, the linguistic medium of the latter’s conversion into intelligible events or forms. Language turns this two-fold ironic subject into a sign, a category, a meaning which is prior to its empirical determination. The absolute comic “experience,” according to de Man, is therefore predicated on the impossibility of projecting a self into the world before its encounter with language, and hence before its enmeshment in the problems of reflection and reason. It implies a necessarily inauthentic relation of the self to its experience that makes possible a process of interminable demystification of those structuring discourses at the heart of the “real.”

For de Man as for Baudelaire, social rationalization can be observed only in a mode of strange self-implication. What makes caricature a modern cultural form is the way it takes aim at those authentic gestures that cover over or deny the event of a deeper rationality so dexterously concealing itself in the non-rational, the immediate, or the experiential. Caricature, as an art form rooted historically in a fascination with physiognomic and/or pathognomic classifications of people into types, uses categories to destabilize categorization itself as one trait of a bourgeois sensibility; it blurs the lines of differentiation and upsets the language-world that makes identity–as a site stabilized over and against what it is not–possible. It’s therefore ironic to suggest that Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut is grotesque for the way it juxtaposes the generic simplifications of caricature with the psychological and emotional depth of realism. For realism has always been a target of caricature insofar as those depth-effects entail the possibility of an authentic position for the subject and the world that subject inhabits. Thus in choosing to mix drama and comedy, Kubrick draws far more solidly on historical precedent than critics seem willing to grant.

For Eyes Wide Shut is indeed a caricature in the more precise sense of the absolute comic: its structure at a fundamental level is the relation between self and world-as-discourse, the self as it comes to the forms of its own self-presence. Baudelaire characterized this delimitation in terms of a fall, both the Fall and more literally the falling down that envelops the subject in its own facticity and hubris. As de Man puts it, “The ironic, two-fold self… constitute[d] by his language seems able to come into being only at the expense of his empirical self, falling… from a stage of mystified adjustment into the knowledge of his mystification” (214). This knowledge, which again yields no authentic understanding, inscribes the subject in a repetitively “self-escalating act of consciousness” (216) that generates a more and more fictive sense of its universe. The subject refuses a “return” to the empirical world in favor of its own progressively ironic fictions about the world; it exacerbates the difference between the real and the fictive in order to maintain the maladjustments of that demystified knowledge.

This excessively fictive and maladjusted world constructed at the expense of the real describes the “off” overdetermination of Eyes Wide Shut, although the film involves an additional claim about the already fictive nature of the real world set off against it.⁵ That is, it draws us as viewers from the side of the real into a fiction that then presents us with the fiction of the real. It caricatures the two central characters, couples, marriage, ordinary ’90s yuppies, and also dramatic form, iconic movie stars, and finally itself as a movie inscribed in an institutionalized practice of production and consumption. It caricatures that empiricist pragmatism with which we, as critics, artists, or consumers, look upon the world without seeing its discursive nature, or look at a text without reading its specificities in terms of an ironic self-implication in the world that text represents. This peculiar involvement of the spectator in the flat, aimless, affectless space of Eyes Wide Shut helps to account for the discomfort implied in the various dismissals of the film–the way it hits home in the very untimeliness of its odd representations. Some critics have suggested that Kubrick was mistaken not to have set the film in the Vienna of Arthur Schnitzler’s novel Traumnovelle or alternatively to have updated it with details appropriate to the contemporary New York it portrays. Yet, the estranging anachronisms of its setting, no less than its stilted dialogue, its hermetic and generic interiors, its random or pointless plot twists, work to thwart the aesthetic categories which require of narrative art that it seduce its viewers via identification and dramatic unity. By disrupting these narrative expectations, Kubrick guarantees its judgement as a bad movie, but unlike most bad movies, not before it questions our own assumptions about contemporary society and the role and function of art in it.

Eyes Wide Shut speaks to us about that society in the ways it fails as narrative. It is an allegory in the standard connotations of the term: i.e., in its thinness, its lack of substantiality, its second degree relation to more primary symbolic and expressive forms, its essential artifice. Allegory implies not modes of description and perception that secure an objective rendering of a world closely linked to the subjectivity of the perceiver, but an intertextual deviation into conventional figures, types, and rhetorical modes that is deliberately awkward vis-à-vis the standards of romantic or realist representation.⁶ Eyes Wide Shut, as an allegory, therefore works by not working, by focusing “’90s yuppies” in the lens of a caricature recent culture has tended to accept only when its objects are two bit hoods (Sterling Hayden in The Killing), sociopathic punks (Malcolm MacDowell in A Clockwork Orange), failed writers (Jack Nicholson in The Shining), low class Irishmen (Ryan O’Neal in Barry Lyndon), Marine drill sergeants (Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket), or various other socially marginal types populating Kubrick’s movies. That Bill and Alice might not make appropriate material for caricature implies a substance to the life they exemplify that Kubrick denies them just as he denies the characters of his previous films the possibilities of class mobility or social success. One of the most timely aspects of Eyes Wide Shut, then, is the wrench it throws in the increasingly rigid and mystified class machinery of American life in the ’90s–one symptom of which would be our desire to locate authenticity in the experience of people like Bill and Alice. Eyes Wide Shut exposes the fiction at the heart of that experience. The film conjures “fashion shoots” and “holiday television commercials” because it reads the world it depicts not as exceptional to these spectral aberrations but as modeled on them. No wonder, then, that art plays such a conspicuous visual role in the film. Almost every wall has paintings on it (and of all kinds, classic and modern, figurative and abstract): in apartments, in mansions, in doctor’s offices, in hospital foyers, in department stores. Bill and Alice “take their form from the mould of art,” and in this they verge on a caricature that draws attention to the film’s own mediated and rendered form. That their lives are also rendered by Kubrick is a literal truth as well as a figurative one; thus art in the film signals the intention of its own fictiveness to tell the story of a life that cannot take itself seriously because seriousness has become ideological, a mystification of the discursive medium in which that life unfolds.

The film’s interest in the mediations of discourse is revealed in a number of details. First, it situates sex, sexual pleasure, and the sexualized body in highly conventional settings. We see the idealized female nude dressing up in a boudoir, peeing in a bathroom, slumped unconscious after overdosing on an eight ball in a rich man’s house, auscultated in a doctor’s office, dead in a morgue. Such scenes comment on the conventional way of seeing–rooted in the notions of perspective, determined by social and economic practices of the production and consumption of prestige, essentially masculine–at work in art, film, and advertising. This way of seeing is in turn linked to modes of social organization (the family, corporate back rooms, hospitals) that not only represent but elicit the body in the service of the reproduction of an expressly specular power. Likewise, the desire felt or articulated by the characters in the film is never separable from this reproduction, never more than the empty expression of an inwardness that has shrunk to an abstract point in the spectacles of that power. Desire here is not a substance but a structural effect, a symptom of a rationality whose form (transcendent, biunivocal) mirrors that of satisfaction (orgasm) itself, which is a transcendence (of will or consciousness) and also a “coming together” (as in the Lacanian formulation, “There is something of One” in the sexual relation [Feminine Sexuality 138]). Sex isn’t an act but a meaning in the film, albeit the meaning of action itself, and this sort of insight can only “come” at the expense of narrative conventions themselves uncritically assuming that meaning–through a fiction that subverts its own rational and orgasmic form.

A second indicator of a discursive interest in the film occurs in the reaction Bill has to Alice’s articulation of her desire. The pot-smoking scene between Cruise and Kidman has been referred to by critics as the crucial moment of the film. Alice’s fantasy of a naval officer who stirs in her a profoundly erotic (and potentially destructive) passion holds down the one chance for a “free” desire capable of escaping its discursive straitjacket. Unlike Bill, who never speaks his desire or figures out what he (or anyone) wants, Alice’s disclosure feels genuine and constrains one to read the film in one of two ways: either it’s about the disruptive fantasmatic power of her desire, or it’s about rational Bill’s surprise that his wife could have such a fantasmatic desire in the first place. But these readings lead to the impasse of an inter-subjective logic which the film as a whole works resolutely to undermine. By granting Alice a psychological depth in this scene, one has to take seriously both Bill’s naivete and the drama of unconscious drives threatening to tear their marriage apart. (Most critics didn’t get beyond these interpretations and the double binds they suggest.) If one assumes, however, that the film intends to caricature the couple and their marriage, one discovers the trope of non-relation that governs the scene and that Kubrick announces in a shot of Alice looking at herself in the mirror as her husband caresses her. Critics have pointed out the lack of chemistry between Bill/Cruise and Alice/Kidman, in spite of their “real” status as a couple outside the film. But none of them consider this either as an intentional abyssal effect or an effect tout court that marks the film and asks to be read. Bill’s and Alice’s dislocation from one another indicates the caricature at work and the social critique that goes along with it. The film fails to take either Alice or Bill seriously in this moment because in fact its logic is that of an intrasubjective encounter with the discursive limits of narrative, social power, and the medium of film itself (signaled, most obviously, by the self-consciously hand-held camera that watches Kidman as she relates the fantasy).

The story that unfolds from this scene, then, turns not around Bill’s tortured recognition of the sado-masochistic, jealous, and obsessive underworld of desire which the film literalizes during his subsequent Walpurgisnacht (the film is not psychoanalytic in the sense that it dramatizes psychosexual urges and repressions, and as such it could not in fact work if it were set in Vienna at the turn of the century). Rather, it turns around that limit where the fictive nature of “real” life becomes apparent. This is why we are watching Tom Cruise the star (for instance, of that Reaganite watershed and fascist fable Top Gun), not a doctor named Bill, wander the generic streets of downtown New York (an effect Kubrick curiously highlights for us by oblique references to the rumors of Cruise’s homosexuality). Cruise was chosen for this role to be the vehicle of the film’s commentary on an expressly spectral and reactionary social period exemplified by the glamour of movie stars. Bill/Tom is wandering through the fiction of his own allure, the fiction of a desire for power and in power that Kubrick links to a paternal metaphor when the pot-smoking scene is interrupted by a phone call announcing the death of an important patient, a nameless uptown New York patriarch. Bill/Tom leaves, tortured by black-and-white images of his wife fucking a naval officer, and pays his last respects with maybe the most bizarre gesture of the entire film: he places his hand on the dead man’s head and bows, while the latter’s hysterical daughter throws herself at him with wild declarations of love.

This–rather than the pot-smoking scene–may in fact be the signal moment of the story, since it inaugurates the subsequent delirium at a decidedly comic, even absurd, register. Bill/Tom’s aimless quest is not intelligible as a psychological drama but as a search for the Law (of the Father) which structures that drama in its conventional forms. Bill/Tom’s search for the Law is ultimately futile; Kubrick withholds it from him (as both Bill and Tom, since the actor seems at times manifestly at a loss for what emotions to express) and from us, as we search the film for the principle of narrative intelligibility, the mark of symbolic difference stabilizing subjective and dramatic forms, the (political) economy of desire, and the pleasure principle of spectatorship. The loss of meaning that the film sustains is not, therefore, tragic or Oedipal, not that negation or beautiful dialectical death making possible a unification at the level of the idea. The form of that loss is double and ironic: a loss of loss itself, a loss of that “special violation of the normal” which redeems us in our normality through the function of a catharsis. What is lost, in other words, is the normal as the precondition for a transgression. What remains is a film without any transgressive intensity at the inter-subjective level, presenting a number of possible readings, none of which can be taken seriously, even that of the non-serious itself. This is why Sydney Pollack’s millionaire articulates the abyssal logic of the film by telling Bill/Tom that the scene of sacrifice at the orgy had been staged, thus reducing even that abyssal logic to a content which then loses its ability to frame what happens. This lack of substantiality, this double and ironic intention, in fact reveals itself at nearly every point in the film where intertextual reference is active or where tropes of symmetry and inversion are used. Such, for instance, is the pun at work in the Russian’s costume store, where Bill, looking for the mask he will wear to an orgy that will turn out to be fake (on more than one level), finds a “real” orgy taking place between two Asian men and the costume store owner’s daughter. The result of such ironies is not so much vertigo as estrangement and deflation, an inability on the part of the viewer to find the Law or mark of difference that would resolve either the narrative or our spectatorship into a clear meaning.

Few of the critics of Eyes Wide Shut, I suspect, will be moved by the foregoing interpretation to revise their initial negative judgments. Even if the film’s allegorical structure can be demonstrated, it remains a failure, a broken narrative machine that doesn’t manage to persuade the viewer of the cultural timeliness of its interpellations, or of the value for culture of such ironic modes in the first place. In the ’90s, it no longer seems enough to turn the lights on the audience and expose its desire for symbolic order as I am suggesting Kubrick has done–much in the same way, for instance, that Robert Rauschenberg did in New York during the 1965 premiere of Merce Cunningham’s now infamously controversial dance piece, Winterbranch.⁷ Indeed, another semantic element of resistance to a double and ironic approach in the initial responses by critics to Eyes Wide Shut was a tendency to situate the film in the cultural parameters of a bygone time, the ’60s or early ’70s. J. Hoberman writes, “Eyes Wide Shut is ponderously (up)dated–as though Kubrick had finally gotten around to responding to Michelangelo Antonioni’s druggy Blow-Up–if not weirdly anachronistic” (59).

This tactic to periodize Kubrick by way of dismissing the film’s ironic specificities as dated throwbacks to a time of cultural experimentation that no longer bears on the present underscores the interpretive stake in the film’s allegory of its own reception–that is, of the way that its critics reproduce the same discourses (symbolic, romantic and realist, natural, authenticating) that allegory undermines. The same problem of a form that establishes itself at the expense of an empirical world (and its reference points in narrative) which I have discussed in terms of caricature recurs here at a more distinctly temporal register. By locating and containing the allegory at work in Eyes Wide Shut as an anachronistic exhibit of the now periodized ’60s, one assumes a temporal structure in history that, not coincidentally, allegory itself undoes and challenges.⁸ To turn the light on the audience, to make reception a component of art or of its interpretation, to assert irony as the trope of a (discontinuous) time, engenders today a very pronounced boredom and even hostility in cultural circles. But the disavowal of this discontinuity–and it can work by rejection or by the kind of fetishism observable in the current retro interest in styles and music of the ’60s and ’70s–combines two cases of cultural misprision: on the one hand, it assumes an historical movement which is causal and successive (we have “outgrown” the conceptual and anti-humanist indulgences of the ’60s and embrace a newly serious focus on the realism of our emotional lives); and on the other hand, it blinds itself to the insight, articulated in criticism by writers like Paul de Man, that history itself has become a limit-concept, impossible except precisely in the modalities of performative reading. For de Man, temporality and history are distinct from one another. The former is a cognitive (or tropological) category implying the ideological determination of an event which happens in a mode of non-dialectical contradiction. This contradiction is felt as a force or “power” that resists any meaning and, as such, cannot occur in a temporal mode. It is historical, however, because it locates the singular point (or limit) of the real within its synthesis as an (intelligible) event. History may not be temporal, then, but time is the allegory of history to which every reader inevitably submits.⁹

To periodize the moment of this allegory and this sense of history (which is, on my account, what a critic like J. Hoberman can be said to do when he disavows the “druggy” aspects of Kubrick, or Antonioni for that matter) is to miss the historical sense of that moment. It amounts to a negation of the ’60s and a clear symptom of an ideological closure at work in the ’90s (a closure that is not innocent even when it finds a voice in people whose stated aims are progressive and critical). The reception of Eyes Wide Shut takes on its greatest interest when it comes to be understood as one example of a cultural trend to distance the ’60s and repress the ironic, contingent, and critical energies the ’60s generated. The last twenty years of American cultural life have been a time marked by precisely this kind of repression, and at many political, social, and economic levels. Eyes Wide Shut attempts to speak of this repression in its “art house” portentousness, to give it shape and resonance for Americans now. For what we see empirically blinds us to the rationality of our social existence in a late capitalist dispensation and to the discourses that underpin its deep abstraction. Those discourses are pragmatic, psychological, and privatizing in nature–neo-liberal might be the right word–and their amazing intractability to critique today demands strangely asynchronous artifacts and statements precisely such as Eyes Wide Shut: repetitions, ironic provocations, returns to the recent past where, in effect, our blindness has been keeping us awake.

Notes

1. Quoted by Jack Kroll. Kidman, of course, is referring to Kubrick.

2. A welcome exception turned out to be Lee Siegel’s very good chastisement of the critics in the October, 1999 issue of Harper’s. He astutely analyzed the refusal to see (or read) the movie as a symptom of an “art-phobia” which resists or even prohibits the production of art that does more than “reflect [one’s] immediate experience” (77). Although his notion of art seemed at times a little too uncritically “high,” it did allow him to raise important questions about the critics’ unwillingness to see the irony and doubleness at work in the film’s representation of contemporary life.

3. See Judith Wechsler’s book A Human Comedy for an account of the prevalence and functions of caricature and satire during these periods. Baudelaire makes a similar statement about 1830 and 1848 in his essays on caricature.

4. Baudelaire’s term for that to which the absolutely comic subject relates is “nature,” understood by de Man as “precisely not a self” (213), and as such an intrasubjective and discontinuous space of reflection where the subject encounters the materiality of language as that element of categorization and self-identity prerequisite for an understanding of one’s existential place in the world. As such, the absolute comic entails an irony about the empirical and inter-subjective world of experience as an already rationalized space that has been naturalized. On my reading, this sort of irony works to expose in this experience the abstraction it conceals and as such constituted for a writer like Baudelaire a critical apprehension of bourgeois life.

5. De Man makes it clear that the ironic subject of his discourse in “The Rhetoric of Temporality” differentiates its fictive universe from the empirical world and holds to this distinction by way of asserting the priority of its fictions. The fictive and the real are irreconcilable, and this remains the precondition for insight into the mystifications to which that subject is always prone. The nuance I would like to add here is that the fictive register also makes possible a demystification of the real as already a fiction, that utopic space of a rationalized society in a capitalist mode of production that Baudelaire, for instance, knew one could only understand (after, say, 1848) through the elaboration of discourse and the materiality of language.

6. I am thinking here of de Man’s reading of Rousseau in “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” and in particular his reading of Julie’s garden in La Nouvelle Heloise. The representation of this garden runs through traditional topoi of gardens and suggests not a close observation of nature (or the expression of intimate correspondence between the subject and nature) but a deliberate deployment of conventions, types, and traditional figures. De Man sees in the literary antecedents of this representation, and in how explicitly those antecedents are marshaled by Rousseau, the presence of an allegorical rather than a symbolic or “Romantic” mode. Like Julie’s garden, Eyes Wide Shut concerns itself, over and against that Romantic mode, with a discursive mediation that envelops not only characters in the story, or the story itself, but its spectators in the real world it allegorizes.

7. Winterbranch, Cunningham’s most famous succes de scandale, was a bizarrely disjointed, random meditation on the numerous ways his dancers could fall down. Rauschenberg, who was responsible for lighting the show, decided to leave the dancers in darkness (with the exception of Cunningham himself, who carried a flashlight) and douse the audience in a white glare. Meanwhile, a musical score by La Monte Young, which consisted of screeching and grating noise, filled the theater. The audience reacted with outrage. The event, occurring some time before de Man wrote on Baudelaire in “The Rhetoric of Temporality” or worked out in print his sense of the irony in the German word Falle (signifying both fall and trap), nonetheless seems indebted to his particular line of reasoning.

8. For de Man, once again in “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” allegory implies an “ideal time that is never here and now but always a past or an endless future” (226). Allegorical duration, like irony (curiously distinguished but also linked to allegory in a “knowledge” or insight that is “essentially the same” [226]), targets the assumption of a temporality organized according to successive self-present moments (or periods). It grasps the present in its essential negativity as the place of an historical implication that is more radical for the displacement of empirical categories it entails.

9. Another way of putting this would be to say that, although between time (as cognitive and tropological) and history (as singular and performative) there is an “absolute separation” (Aesthetic Ideology 134) and no possibility of a dialectical mediation, history only appears in the tropes which signify a subject’s fallen status within the allegories it constructs. De Man mentions Jauss’s theory of reception in this regard, arguing against his contention that reception can be the model of the historical event. My own sense of this problem is that indeed reception can be exemplary in this fashion, with the important qualification that the structure of its exemplarity be precisely that of allegory itself. The singularities of history are inaccessible except in the languages or discourses that convert them into temporal events, and the ethical question of respecting those singularities unfolds nonetheless in acts of language and reading that repeat (rather than reproduce) the violence of their repression. The goal, it seems to me, is to hear in one’s language the echoes of its own historicity.

Works Cited

• Baudelaire, Charles. “Some French Caricaturists.” Selected Writings on Art and Artists [of] Baudelaire. Trans. P.E. Charvet. London: Penguin, 1972.
• de Man, Paul. “The Rhetoric of Temporality.” Blindness and Insight. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1971.
• —. Aesthetic Ideology. Trans. A. Warminski. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996.
• Denby, David. “Last Waltz.” The New Yorker 26 July 1999: 84-88.
• Hoberman, J. “I Wake Up Dreaming.” The Village Voice 27 July 1999: 59.
• Kakutani, Michiko. “A Connoisseur of Cool Tries to Raise the Temperature.” The New York Times 18 July 1999: AR1.
• Klawans, Stuart. “Old Masters.” The Nation 9 August 1999: 42.
• Kroll, Jack. “Cruise and Kidman: Our Friend Stanley.” Newsweek 22 March, 1999.
• Lacan, Jacques. Feminine Sexuality. Trans. J. Rose and J. Mitchell. New York: Norton, 1982.
• Siegel, Lee. “Eyes Wide Shut: What the Critics Missed in Kubrick’s Last Film.” Harper’s October 1999: 76-83.
• Wechsler, Judith. A Human Comedy. U of Chicago P, 1982.

Tamise Van Pelt

Department of English and Philosophy
Idaho State University
vantamis@isu.edu

As half of a signifying binary, the “Other” is a term with a rich and lengthy philosophical history dating at least from Plato’s Sophist, in which the Stranger participates in a dialogue on the ontological problems of being and non-being, of the One and the Other.¹ In the twentieth century, this Platonic mix of ontology with alterity informs the work of Emmanuel Levinas, who is countered by Simone de Beauvoir, who influences feminist philosophers, who influence theorists of political, racial, and sexual identity–forming a great chain of inquiry into being.²Additional philosophical perspectives on Otherness abound, and Hegel (via Kojève), Heidegger, and Sartre all present important statements on alterity. In this century, Jacques Lacan’s place in the history of alterity is unique, however, because Lacan insists on a decentering of Otherness that parallels his much-discussed decentering of the Subject. Specifically, Lacan explores an intrapsychic Otherness different from the Other of interpersonal theories of identity and distinct from the philosophical problem of Other Minds–a problem grounded in solipsism rather than narcissism.

Unlike his contemporaries, Lacan postulates a gap between an Other and an other that echoes a gap between the Subject and the ego. These twin decenterings imply Lacan’s symbolic and imaginary registers, since the “decentering of the Subject” is another way of saying that the Subject and the ego inhabit disjunct registers. Likewise, the disjunction between the symbolic linguistic Other and the imaginary mirroring other signifies a decentering of the former from the latter. Taken together, these two decenterings articulate a post-humanist subjectivity at odds with contemporary constructions of the “Other” as a person, particularly a person who is marginal or subversive in some way. This conceptual disjunction between theories of a humanized Other and Lacan’s radically alterior Otherness suggests a gap between the two approaches. Ironically, though, discussions that humanize the Other frequently cite Lacan, so it seems valuable to ask why.

Lacan’s rhetoric in and of itself invites his readers to overlook his decentering of the Other. Sometimes Lacan refers to the symbolic Other as the big Other and the imaginary other as the little other, but for the most part Lacan simply uses capitalization to distinguish the Other from the other. Though no reader would misread “Subject” for “ego,” the much subtler rhetorical distinction between “Other” and “other” can easily be missed–especially if readers don’t supplement the explicit discourse of alterity with the implicit discourse of the registers. Since Lacan discusses the Other topically without any explicit reference to the registers, his readers are often called upon to supply the implicit theoretical context. Envision the fate of the casual reader of Lacan who, interested in British literature, picks up Seminar VII on ethics to read “Courtly Love as Anamorphosis.” This reader sees: “In many cases, it seems that a function like that of a blessing or salutation is for the courtly lover the supreme gift, the sign of the Other as such, and nothing more” (152). Lacking the implied but unspecified discursive context of the registers, this reader can easily take Lacan’s “sign of the Other” to be a token received from an “Other” person. Only familiarity with Lacan’s theory of the registers allows his reader to grasp the intrapsychic “sign of the Other” as a decentering connection with the signifier in the unconscious that the courtly lover mis/takes for transcendence. Similarly, when Lacan writes in Seminar II that “the obsessional is always an other” he is talking about the obsessional’s ego-involvement, not the obsessional’s loss of identity. Again, Lacan’s point assumes the registers, allying the obsessional with the rhetorically explicit “other” and alienating the obsessional from the discursively implicit “Other.” Lacking the framework of the theory of the registers, a reader would be hard pressed to unravel either of these Lacanian invocations of alterity.

The currency of the idea of the Other in theory generally makes the reading of the decentered Other in Lacan even more difficult. The contemporary idea of the Other rooted in area studies inscribes itself in theories of race, class, and gender and reinscribes itself in post-colonial theories of national identities, both placed and displaced. Consequently, a plethora of critical discourses use the term “Other” to signify quite differently than Lacan. In identity politics, the decentering of the Subject can lead to an equal and opposite reaction: a centering–an entification–of the Other as object, an “it” denied the status of a “Thou.” Thus, readers familiar with theoretical discourses defining Otherness as race or class or gender or nationality see Otherness as attribute rather than alterity.

Since alterity is crucial to an understanding of Lacanian Otherness, and since the Other of contemporary theory means many things to many discourses, it will be useful first to distinguish the Other of identity theories from the decentered Other of Lacanian analysis. With this Lacanian decentering of the Other in mind, I then want to explore the way two theorists of identity deploy Lacanian Otherness: Abdul R. JanMohamed uses the registers that distinguish otherness from Otherness in his reading of colonialist novels; Judith Butler disputes the validity of the distinction between the registers on which Lacan’s decentering of the Other is based. In dialogue with theories of identity, Lacanian theory insists on the radicality of Otherness, an alterity that has frequently been obscured by the residual humanism implicit in the construction of the Subject as a political entity. Finally, this overview of Otherness will examine the relationship between the decentering of the Other and phallic discourse to argue the value of a politics that listens for the Other rather than speaking on its behalf.

The Other in Theories of Identity

Many contemporary theories of identity use the Other as half of a Self/Other dichotomy distinguishing one person from another. For instance, pointing out an oppositional racial distinction, Terry Goldie’s “The Representation of the Indigene” states: “At least since Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) it has been a commonplace to use ‘Other’ and ‘not-self’ for the white view of blacks and for the resulting black view of themselves” (233).³ Racial selves rather than subjects are at issue here in Goldie’s distinction between white people and black people. The same interpersonal dichotomy of race appears in Abdul R. JanMohamed’s “The Economy of Manichean Allegory”:

Troubled by the nagging contradiction between the theoretical justification of exploitation and the barbarity of its actual practice, [colonialist fiction] also attempts to mask the contradiction by obsessively portraying the supposed inferiority and barbarity of the racial Other, thereby insisting on the profound moral difference between self and Other. (23)

Here, an implicit humanism enters the anti-humanist discourse on race, imported by the idea of the racial “self.” Similarly, Goldie discusses the racial distinctions between the Self and the Other in terms of specific attributes, saying that “[p]resumably the first instance in which one human perceived another as Other in racial terms came when the first recognized the second as different in colour, facial features, language” (235). Now Goldie makes the previously implicit humanism explicit, but not without reason. In critiques that explore inhumanity, humanizing the Other makes a political statement. This statement, in turn, reminds us that the discourse of political rights and the discourse of humanism are twin intellectual legacies, two branches of the tree of Enlightenment knowledge.

Discourses of gendered selves parallel discourses of racial identity in the tendency to humanize the Other. Thus, a parallel distinction appears in feminist discourses discussing woman as Other, particularly those discourses opposing patriarchy. Where political rights are at issue, discourses refer both to woman as an Other human being and to the Subject as a political entity, a theoretical move that unifies the “Subject” as a person subjected to the law of the land. For instance, adopting the language of oppositional feminism, Raman Selden⁴ generalizes about feminist theory: “In many different societies, women, like colonised subjects, have been relegated to the position of ‘other’, ‘colonised’ by various forms of patriarchal domination” (249). Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex emphasizes the humanism that is at stake in the Self/Other dichotomy, writing of the Biblical Genesis: “… humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him… He is the Subject, he is the Absolute–she is the Other” (xxii); this “expression of a duality… of the Self and the Other” is socially and historically pervasive, de Beauvoir points out (xxii). Of de Beauvoir’s and Virginia Woolf’s feminisms, Selden continues: “Being dispersed among men, women have no separate history, no natural solidarity; nor have they combined as other oppressed groups have. Woman is riveted into a lop-sided relationship with man: he is the ‘One’, she the ‘Other’… and, à la Virginia Woolf’s ‘looking glass’, the assumption of woman as ‘Other’ is further internalised by women themselves” (210). Here, Selden’s analysis of the woman’s internalization of her attributes parallels Goldie’s analysis of black identification above, and both invoke a discourse on Otherness that has Platonic rather than psychoanalytic roots.

National identity, too, presents itself in terms of Selves and Others, adopting the plural construction characteristic of discourses about identity. Here, Homi Bhabha discusses the post-colonial condition: “[The Derridean entre] makes it possible to begin envisaging national, anti-nationalist, histories of the ‘people’. It is in this space that we will find those words with which we can speak of Ourselves and Others” (“Cultural Diversity” 209). Similarly, Xiaomei Chen concludes a discussion of “Occidentalism as Counterdiscourse” with the following analysis that treats East and West as implicit human agents:

… it seems imperative that we at least attempt to find a reasonable balance between Self and Other, between East and West, so that no culture is fundamentally privileged over its Others. Perhaps the realities of history cannot allow such a balance to be fully realized. Indeed, it is even necessary to affirm that these master tropes are necessarily veiled by the fictional. What must be stressed here is then even imagining such a balance–surely one of the first requirements of a new order of things–can never be possible without each Self being confronted by an Other, or by the Other being approached from the point of view of the Self in its own specific historical and cultural conditions. (89)

The idea here, that Otherness is both agentic and a matter of point of view, is taken up by Judith Butler in a discussion of sexual identity when she writes in Bodies that Matter that “gay and lesbian identity positions… constitute themselves through the production and repudiation of a heterosexual Other” (112). As Butler’s analysis shows, Otherness can be relative, making the interpersonal dichotomy of Self and Other endlessly reversible.

Judith Butler’s critique of the “exclusionary logic” of the Other as it signifies in the Self/Other binary of identity points toward the limited usefulness of oppositional constructions. Lacanian logic, moreover, demonstrates the intrapsychic resistance that manifests when just such signifying binaries as white/black, West/East, or heterosexual/homosexual merge with a fixed, imaginary ego identity. Like intrapsychic resistance, political resistance has a use, particularly where brute survival is at issue. However, resistance denies the epistemological fact that in order to replicate the Self/Other signifying difference–in order to shape a foundational symbolic distinction–both terms necessarily implicate each other. In many of the discussions above, Chen’s “fundamental privilege” is less the issue than foundational, epistemological privilege. Civilized, superior Western white male heterosexual colonizers are foundationally privileged; we know in advance and without appeal to specific circumstance or historical context that this is so. Foundational difference makes a truth claim about the world; foundational difference prescribes positions, inscribes hierarchy, proscribes recombination. In and of themselves, such differences are descriptive at best, their insistent fixity rendering them insufficient for the analysis of dynamic problems, whether the problems are intrapsychic, social, or political. Discourses that align the Other with the marginal or with the subversive avoid a confrontation with complexity, just as JanMohamed’s exemplary redistribution of the attribute of “barbarity” from colonizer to colonized, above, stops short of an inquiry into ego identification as a transitive process. Allied binaries and binary realignments only build a thicker epistemological foundation.

Thick epistemology is vulnerable epistemology. As JanMohamed’s portable barbarity points out above, multiple binaries align and realign, attributes can be assigned and reassigned. Infelicitous combinatories undermine foundational privilege, whether the claim of privilege operates as an entitlement or an accusation. So long as there is an investment in the foundational signifying difference, the emergence of the combinatory’s undesirable elements will arouse resistance. For instance, Melville Chater’s paean to the new South African Union in a 1931 edition of The National Geographic sets up and reinforces a typical colonialist foundational distinction between hard-working, intelligent whites entitled to the prosperity they enjoy and lazy, superstitious blacks (who presumably have what they have “earned” as well). When Chater’s foray over the veldt discovers a “forlorn scene” of “dismal shacks, where some frowzy men and women and a plethora of dull-faced children [lounge] in the sunshine,” he rescues his foundations: “Yet they [are] whites, or, rather, ‘poor white,’ representing a South African aspect of that retrogressive type which is found in many lands” (441). When this relativizing of whiteness seems inadequate to explain “so formidable a number as 120,000 to 150,000” poor whites, Chater attributes the deterioration of the poor whites to “that too-easeful existence, based on slave help and game aplenty” (441). Having inadvertently tainted the white superiority he has constructed as the outcome of white hard work by the insertion of slavery into his discourse, Chater reasserts his foundation: in a stunning attempt to purify white superiority, he redistributes a poor white squatter to the black half of his equation by comparing the squatter’s language to that of “the American ‘black-face’ comedian”(441). Chater’s inadvertent denaturalizing of blackness has stumbled upon a blackness constructed by whites for white entertainment. He has entered the territory of the combinatory of combinatories, the Lacanian unconscious–the Lacanian Other.

A more contemporary and purposeful recuperation of race from the stasis of foundational difference is effected by Honduran comedian Carlos Mencia, who jokes that Los Angelinos meeting someone from Honduras or El Salvador or Guatemala inevitably ask “Now, what part of Mexico is that?” Mencia exposes the exclusionary work of the foundational binary that identifies race in Black/White terms with a logic that reintroduces the combinatory: If you’re white, you’re white in L.A. Go to Miami and you’re still white. If you’re black in L.A., go to New York and you’re still black. Referring to himself, Mencia points out that in L.A. he’s a Mexican. “If I go to Miami, I’m a Cuban. And if I go to New York, I’m…” He gestures to the audience who respond “Puerto Rican.” “See,” he concludes, “You know what I’m talking about.” Shunted off to the racial unconscious by a foundational Black/White race-ism, Mencia’s own race must be articulated by indirection. Thus, the unary signifier “Hispanic” remains in the linguistic Otherness and only enters the joke obliquely, as a signifier for another signifier–[Hispanic]/Mexican, [Hispanic]/Cuban, [Hispanic]/Puerto Rican. Mencia’s comedic tactic parallels the strategy Benita Parry praises in Bhabha’s post-colonial theory: Bhabha “show[s] the wide range of stereotypes and the shifting subject positions assigned to the colonized in the colonialist text” in order to liberate “an autonomous native ‘difference’” from the binary European/Other (41).⁴ Similarly, Judith Butler’s Bodies that Matter works with the exclusionary logics of both male/female and heterosexual/homosexual to open up the combinatory expressions of sexual orientation these foundational binaries preclude. Since these latter examples of linguistic identity have ventured into the territory of complex Otherness evocative of Lacan’s theory of the registers, this is a good point at which to distinguish clearly the doubling of alterity in the symbolic and the imaginary.

There is no Other of the Other:
(but there is an other of the Other)

The journey that eventually leads Lacan to the aphoristic insistence that “there is no Other of the Other” (there is no meta-language beyond language) begins with a denaturalization of paranoid psychosis. The ideas Lacan forms during his medical training lead him to counter the prevailing psychiatric view of psychosis as a biologically-based personality trait by positing a developmental phenomenology he only later finds in Freud. Interested in folies à deux, and especially as such madness manifests in women’s “inspired” speech and writings, Lacan is very much a man attuned to the surrealist 1930s.⁵ What he writes for medical journals he revises for surrealist journals, but his interest is consistently in the otherness of the other–an interest that culminates in mirror stage theory. The interpersonal here seems undeniable. Lacan writes about the crime of the two Papin sisters. He writes his thesis on the psychotic Aimée’s attack on a famous French actress. Moreover, Lacan’s many references to Hegel’s struggle for recognition between the Master and the Slave certainly imply an agon between people rather than a contest within. Lacan’s mirror stage essay points out that a pigeon matures via an encounter with another of its own kind. Even the mirroring moment can be read as involving the infant and the mother. All in all, early on, Lacan seems deeply involved with the interpersonal, the social, even the cultural.

Read against the retrospect of his later interests, mirror stage theory appears to be Lacan’s failed attempt to explain the dynamics of an intrapsychic alterity in interpersonal terms. Not until his theory of the registers does Lacan achieve the post-humanist position he seeks. The dominance of a formative phenomenology in the earlier essay gives “The Mirror Stage” its interpersonal slant. In the theory of the registers, by contrast, the phenomenal is folded within the structure of language and intrapsychic structure is irremediably fissured with the gaps between the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. Since none of the registers is confluent with the others, Lacan avoids the problem of a seamless solipsism. He avoids a tabula rasa subjectivity passively constructed from without as well. So, it is not experience but experience’s imagistic residue that figures in the imaginary register. It is not the many instances of communication with other people but language as a whole that signifies in the symbolic. Nor is the model without constraint since the real is always there as an unimaginable, unsignifiable limit on what would otherwise constitute a psychic en abîme of mirroring or signification without end.

Models of the psyche necessarily inform analytic praxis, and Lacan’s theory of the registers is his attempt to come to grips with the theory/practice gap. While Schema L as the sketch on Lacan’s chalkboard is not the model on the analyst’s couch, there is an intriguing and ambiguous family relationship between the two. Though the terms may be the same, the contexts differ, and working across the contextual divide can make Lacan’s theory appear to contradict itself, rendering straightforward terminology paradoxical. The problem of discussing alterity is made all the more difficult for Lacan because he continually engages the divide between the interpersonal situation of analysis in practice and the intrapsychic dynamics that underwrite whatever interventions analytic practice makes. Practice motivates the transition from mirror stage theory to register theory as the latter is announced in Lacan’s manifesto on the function of speech and language in the Freudian field. His paper takes issue with non-Lacanian forms of analysis that he finds therapeutically inadequate precisely because of their emphases on the interpersonal. Increasingly, Lacan insists that analysis must be a process in which the analyst creates a therapeutic context where the analysand’s intrapsychic processes are the only processes in play. The cadaverous, “dead” position of the Lacanian analyst is meant to deconstruct analysis as humanistic interaction. Thus, Lacan’s discussion of Otherness must be read with special attention to context for three reasons: because Otherness is a term that Lacan himself doubles in his structural theory of the registers and in his dynamic theory of desire, because it is a term that defines an intrapsychic process and determines an interpersonal practice, and because it is a signifier shared by the discourse of analysis and by everyday language.

Since the idea of otherness is a term whose name–“the other”–remains the same but whose implications change, Lacan provides many interpretations of otherness. Some of the examples contrast the other with the Other and emphasize the distinction between the registers. In his second seminar, for instance, he compares the “radical Other” as one “pole of the subjective relation,” with the “other which isn’t an other at all, since it is essentially coupled with the ego, in a relation which is always reflexive, interchangeable” (321). Bearing in mind that Lacan is discussing a subjective rather than an intersubjective relation, and that the reflexive coupling of other with ego is an intrapsychic phenomenon for which another person is, at best, a prop or a pretext, consider this elaboration of the analyst’s alterity: the analyst “partakes of the radical nature of the Other, in so far as he is what is most inaccessible” to the extent that the analyst’s own ego is “effaced” and the analyst’s resistance is not aroused (324). The analyst’s refusal to play along with the game dictated by the ego of the analysand throws the analysand back into a confrontation with the intrapsychic gap between the other and the Other, since expecting to confirm the former the analysand encounters the latter. So, “what leaves the imaginary of the ego of the subject is in accordance not with this other to which he is accustomed, and who is just his partner, the person who is made so as to enter into his game, but precisely with this radical Other which is hidden from him” (324). Without another person to play along with the habitual imaginary game, the subject looks to the intrapsychic Other. If the analysis is successful, the Other will yield to the subject its Truth.

Appropriately, one of Lacan’s exemplary readings of radical alterity occurs in his Seminar III on psychosis, where he presents an analytic case study exploring the speech of a paranoid young woman. In this reworking of his analytic roots, Lacan presents a clear decentering of the imaginary other from the symbolic Other. The disjunction is evident in Lacan’s redefinition of psychotic projection–which might seem to be classically imaginary–as a mechanism that has been “placed outside the general symbolization structuring the subject” and returns “from without” (47). Lacan’s patient is a “girl” who tells him about her “run-in in the hallway with an ill-mannered sort of chap,” a married man who was also the illicit lover of her neighbor. While passing her in the hall, the man had devalued her by saying a dirty word to her. But she herself had spoken to him first, saying “I’ve just been to the butcher’s” [the charcutier, who specializes in pork]. He had responded: “Sow!” In his analysis, Lacan’s own response to the girl is a mistake, he admits. He interprets. He shows his analysand that he understands her comment “I’ve just been to the butcher’s” as a reference to pork, and by doing so he “enter[s] into the patient’s game… collaborat[ing] in [her] resistance” (48). Though he does not explicitly articulate his failure in terms of the registers, the distinction is clear. Lacan, through his display of “understanding,” has reinforced the patient’s imaginary at the expense of asking, symbolically, why there is something in the patient’s speech to be understood. The analytic question is: “Why did she say, I’ve just been to the butcher’s and not Pig?” (48-49).

Lacan goes on to insist that the interaction between the girl who might have said “Pig!” and the man who calls her “Sow!” is not an instance of his maxim that in speech the subject receives her message in an inverted form. In other words, here, the message should not be constructed as a symbolic exchange since the message at issue “is not identical with speech, far from it” (Sem III 49). The girl herself is enmeshed in the desire of her neighbor and the neighbor’s lover, a desire of which she is censorious to the point of wondering whether it is possible “through taking legal action, to get them into hospital” (49). She had been friends with the neighbor until the love affair interrupted the friendship; afterwards she intruded on the couple while they were dining or reading or “at their toilet” until they threw her out. So Lacan rereads the conversation’s intrapsychic implications: “Sow, what is that? It is effectively her message, but is it not rather her message to herself?” (49). The analysand’s ego has met her alter ego in the hallway; the moment is a mirror.

Lacan connects this case study to his schema of subjectivity:

… Is it the reality of objects that is at issue? Who normally speaks in reality, for us? Is it reality, exactly, when someone speaks to us? The point of the remarks I made to you last time on the other and the Other, the other with a small o and the Other with a big O, was to get you to notice that when the Other with a big O speaks it is not purely and simply the reality in front of you, namely the individual who is holding forth. The Other is beyond that reality.

 

In true speech the Other is that before which you make yourself recognized. But you can make yourself recognized by it only because it is recognized first. (50-51)

Having thus clarified the impersonal nature of the big Other, Lacan notes that in the paranoid insult, the Other is not in question since the patient doesn’t recognize the Other “behind him who is speaking. She receives her own speech from him, but not inverted, her own speech is in the other who is herself, the little other, her reflection in the mirror, her counterpart” (51). Though she seems to look at another person, the girl sees only herself.

The distinction Lacan makes here between the Other and the other, between the symbolic and the imaginary, involves the pact of language. Part of the process of recognition for the Subject as a subject involves the risky business of addressing the absolute Other beyond all that is known. Addressed to another person, the very Otherness of speech puts that person in a position to be recognized by the speaker and to recognize the speaker in return because both speakers share a symbolic commitment of which neither speaker is the origin. Committed speech is discourse, which for Lacan “includes acts, steps, the contortions of puppets, yourselves included, caught up in the game… An utterance commits you to maintaining it through your discourse, or to repudiating it, or to objecting to it, or to conforming to it, to refuting it, but, even more, to complying with many things that are within the rules of the game” (51). With these relationships between the registers, alterity, discourse, and the pact in mind, I want to return to two discourses on identity and Otherness that address Lacan’s register theory directly–one by invoking it, another by repudiating it–in order to explore the link between discourse and symptom.

Discourse, Symptom, and Otherness:
“The unconscious is the discourse of the Other.”

The following two examples of the discourse of identity theory–Abdul R. JanMohamed’s “The Economy of Manichean Allegory” and Judith Butler’s “The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary”–offer critiques engaging Lacanian Otherness. As critiques, these essays are discourses about discourses, meta-discourses in which Otherness signifies. Because meta-discourses offer levels of complexity, symptoms appear in such discourses as deflections of the discursive flow as such. Briefly, the Lacanian symptom, like the letter in the “Purloined Letter,” is “a fourth element, which can serve… as signum” (Sem I 280). The symptom operates to link the imaginary and the symbolic into signs which figure against the real of “the organism as ground” (280). Slavoj Zizek points to the element of repetition involved in the Lacanian symptom, identifying the symptom as “a particular signifying formation which confers on the subject its very ontological consistency… if the symptom is dissolved, the subject itself loses the ground under his feet, disintegrates” (155). This element of consistency conferred by the symptom is characteristic of what Lacan calls the “narcissistic Bildung” of the ego and relates to the repetitious character of empty speech. Since theoretical terms easily empty themselves of meaning (as theory’s opponents tirelessly point out), the “Other” may mark a symptom in a discourse of identity.

In this first encounter between identity theory and Lacanian analysis, Abdul R. JanMohamed uses the Lacanian registers to make a distinction between forms of colonial discourse. A useful error–possibly a symptom–occurs in JanMohamed’s essay at the point where the discourse of post-colonialism disrupts the discourse on the registers forcing an either/or choice between irreconcilable constructions of Otherness. This error provides a helpful comparison to a similar error in Butler’s chapter, an error productive of a symptom at every level of Butler’s discourse, from the literal, to the paradigmatic, to the interpretive. Since from the analytic point of view both the error and the symptom locate discursive truth, both JanMohamed and Butler tell the truth about the encounter between theories of identity and the Lacanian registers.

The registers appear as unified and unifying descriptive categories when Abdul R. JanMohamed writes “I would argue that colonialist literature is divisible into two broad categories: the ‘imaginary’ and the ‘symbolic’” (19). Next, JanMohamed goes on to transcend the categorical in a sophisticated contrast between the work that aggressivity does in the ‘imaginary’ text and the work that mediation and problematization do in the ‘symbolic’ text. Having employed a Lacanian discourse to frame his discussion of the colonialist novel, however, JanMohamed writes that some “symbolic” novels are “conceived in the ‘symbolic’ realm of intersubjectivity, heterogeneity, and particularity but are seduced by the specularity of ‘imaginary’ Otherness” (19-20). This sudden collapsing of the distinction between the registers in the error “‘imaginary’ Otherness” is jarring to any reader familiar with Lacan. Abdul R. JanMohamed has broken the law!

Since JanMohamed’s essay provides exemplary instances both of discursive creativity and of discursive failure as they impact the relation between the writer and his reader, I want to review the sequence above in two ways. First, I will look at the interpersonal symbolic law of discourse that, once invoked, binds writer to reader in an intrasubjective and impersonal pact. The writer’s thesis invokes Lacan’s discourse of the registers and asks the reader to be bound by the pact that this discourse constitutes. This is a symbolic pact par excellence since neither the writer nor the reader originate the discourse but both agree to be bound by its rules in order to allow the possibility of a meaningful exchange, in order to agree on the terms by which they will produce meanings together. Since the writer has selected a Lacanian discourse, ‘imaginary’ and ‘symbolic’ cease to be overdetermined signifiers in the linguistic unconscious. ‘Imaginary’ and ‘symbolic’ now invoke a set of relations defined by Lacan’s discourse, a discourse in which these terms signify in quite specific ways. Because and only because he has involved his reader in this pact of the registers, JanMohamed is free to explore the implications of the encounter between Lacanian theory and the colonialist novel. As the writer elaborates the particulars of the work of the imaginary in the colonialist novel, the reader can appreciate JanMohamed’s insight because the reader sees the colonialist novel in fresh and interesting ways and because the fruitful encounter between the Lacanian imaginary and colonialist fiction reveals new and unforeseen implications of the imaginary register itself. Creativity thus requires the law; creativity is paradoxically both bound to the law and unbound by it.

The moment JanMohamed writes “‘imaginary’ Otherness,” he breaks the law of Lacanian discourse and cancels his pact with the reader. Until the violation occurs, the reader is bound by the pact called “Lacanian discourse”; “imaginary,” “symbolic,” and “Otherness” hold out the possibility of meaning-making (though they do not guarantee it). At the breaking of the pact, the terms cease to be terms within a discourse; released from the pact they are signifiers only. Lacking their discursive support, “imaginary” and “Otherness” thus signify randomly. Because he has broken his Lacanian pact with the reader, the reader has no possible way to grasp what JanMohamed might be trying to signify by “‘imaginary’ Otherness.” No context can stabilize what fractured discursive syntax has set free. Since signification outside the pact is idiosyncratic, the effect of the broken pact is to change “imaginary” and “Otherness” into random markers that preclude creativity in both the writing and the reading. The markers come and go–in and out of the linguistic unconscious–for reasons that may or may not be related to the colonialist novel, the stated project at hand. Once the pact has been broken by the writer, the reader can always declare the discursive failure an accident and continue as if the pact were still in place–but the reader is now on alert and any additional error will render the text indecipherable in terms of its stated project.⁶

Besides the rupture of interpersonal give and take between writer and reader, the collapse of this fruitful contact between the discourse of the colonial novel and Lacan’s discourse of the registers in JanMohamed’s essay signifies intrapsychically as the deformation of one discourse by another. If repeated, “‘imaginary’ Otherness” becomes a symptom rather than an error, and the essay manifests a subjective encounter with Otherness far beyond its post-colonial critique. Consequently, the discursive symptom provides a profitable alternative to the sterile fusion of Lacanian theory with the discourse of post-colonialism. Because Lacan’s distinction between the registers implies a decentering of Otherness that JanMohamed cannot maintain while simultaneously committed to a post-colonial construction of Self and Other, the reader is moved to ask why there is a symptom in the discourse at this point. It seems that the entified Other appears here as the symptom of a post-colonial commitment that runs deeper than the Lacanian discourse to which the writer is ostensibly committed. Since the Other of humanism cannot signify save by suturing the gap between the imaginary other and the symbolic Other, this is precisely what JanMohamed does. The repressed post-colonial humanism returns in the symptomatic fusion of “‘imaginary’ Otherness.”

The discursive symptom manifest in Abdul R. JanMohamed’s essay signifies psychoanalytically because he intends to use the Lacanian registers to frame his exploration of the colonial novel. A very different discursive symptom arises in Judith Butler’s influential critique of Lacanian analysis, Bodies that Matter, a critique in which she doubts that the registers signify at all. Here, a fusion of Lacanian registers pervades Butler’s discussion of “The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary.” While both Butler and JanMohamed effect symptomatic erasures of the Lacanian other, the symptomatic erasure in Butler manifests distinctively–as an inability to accurately quote Lacan’s own text in spite of her extraordinary scholarly rigor.⁷ The misquotations enter her discussion from the moment Butler denies the distinction between the registers, but the symptom is prefigured by her insertion of Lacan’s structural theory of the registers into his essay on the mirror stage.

Butler’s chapter conflates psychoanalytic models that are theoretically and historically distinct–both Freudian models and Lacanian ones, and this conflation lays the theoretical groundwork from which the symptomatic misquotations arise. Thus, Butler reads “On Narcissism” against The Ego and the Id, though the former belongs to a mid-Freudian model that differs significantly from the last “entified” model of a psyche composed of Id-Ego-Superego. Similarly, Butler uses Lacan’s mirror stage essay to argue for the imaginary nature of the phallus in “The Signification of the Phallus”–even though the former essay provides a coda to Lacan’s early phenomenal and developmental model of the psyche while the latter condenses a portion of the seminar on desire, a seminar reflecting Lacan’s structural theorizing at its strongest. As we have earlier seen, though mirror stage theory and register theory do share signifiers, their variant theoretical models constellate variant signifieds; if the terms remain the same, their meanings have structurally altered. However, the alteration fails to make its way into Butler’s critical assimilation of the latter model to its predecessor.

Butler’s most overtly symptomatic collapsing of the Lacanian registers reveals itself in her persistent error in directly quoting the text of Lacan’s early seminars. Like JanMohamed, Butler substitutes the symbolic Other for the mirroring other. It is as if, having merged mirror stage theory with register theory, Butler is literally unable to see a significatory difference between the two. As a result, Butler continually fails to distinguish the imaginary other from the symbolic Other, a collapse of terminological distinction equivalent to suggesting there is no difference between the Subject and the ego. Since the distinction within alterity is so central to Lacanian theory generally and to his model of the Subject of the unconscious specifically, other and Other are definitional. Moreover, the other and the Other draw a precise and consistent distinction between the mirroring imaginary and the symbolic treasury of signifiers. By continually effacing the imaginary other with the symbolic Other, Butler indeed does what she explicitly states as her essay’s goal: she “rewrit[es] the morphological imaginary” (72) though the rewriting is far more literal than her subheading implies.

Where Lacan speaks of the body finding its unity “in the image of the other” with a small o (Sem II 54), Butler rewrites “in the image of the Other” with a capital (75), and where Lacan writes “the imaginary structuration of the ego forms around the specular image of the body itself, of the image of the other,” small o, imaginary other (Sem II 94), Butler again revises to “the image of the Other” with a capital O (76), collapsing Lacan’s straightforward structural distinction and begging the issue of structural difference. Butler perpetuates the error in her own discussion, commenting that “the specular image of the body itself is in some sense the image of the Other” (76) and that the “extrapolating function” of narcissism is the “principle by which any other object or Other is known” (77). There is no small irony in Butler’s symptomatic misquotation of Lacan given her rigorous inclusion of parallel phrases from both French and English texts, and carefully documented citations from both the French and English seminars.⁸ But as Lacan points out, the unconscious is always visible, right there, literally spelled out in the symptom in the text–and Butler’s text proves no exception to this Lacanian rule.

The symptomatic disappearance of the imaginary other in Butler’s thoroughgoing critique of the mirror stage essay parallels the conflation of the registers in JanMohamed’s essay. In JanMohamed’s criticism, the symptom arises at the moment of discursive incompatibility between the post-colonial paradigm of Self and Other and the Lacanian distinction between an other and the Other as the unconscious locus of language. Is there a similar discursive rupture in Butler’s argument? Looking more closely at Butler’s actual text may be helpful here. The substitutions begin in citations in which Lacan specifically mentions the body in connection with the registers–so Butler’s central concern in Bodies that Matter and her theory of performativity are both at stake when the misquotations begin. Her page-long explication of Lacan’s mirror stage theory in which five symptomatic substitutions of the symbolic Other for the imaginary other occur also addresses the body, specifically the “organs [that] are caught up in the narcissistic relation” (76-77). The following page of text, on which the symptomatic substitution occurs three more times, argues that the previously generic “organs” may be “the male genitals” (77), and if so, Lacan’s mirror stage theory grounds itself on a specifically masculine narcissism. Butler concludes that the narcissistically engaged masculine organs now condition and structure every object and Other, and as a result, the “extrapolating function” of narcissism raised to an epistemological principle becomes phallogocentric. In short, a phallic imaginary is masculine and any explanatory function such an imaginary might serve is inherently phallogocentric. Therefore, it is from Lacan’s phallogocentrism that Butler’s lesbian phallus liberates us, providing a subversive substitute for the hetero/sexist Phallic Signifier that she herself has taken great pains to introduce into the Lacanian imaginary register.

Here, more explicitly, is the problem. Lacan theorizes that there is a privileged signifier in the symbolic register and that this privileged symbolic signifier is the phallus. Butler wants to argue against the real of the body, wants to argue that the body is “a process whereby regulatory norms materialize ‘sex’ and achieve this materialization through a forcible reiteration of those norms” (2). Thus, Butler’s theory of materialization stops short of the radical constructionist claim that the body is only a symbolic construct. She finds an appealing alternative to constructionism in Lacan’s early theory where the imagined, alienated body appears in the mirror. This Lacanian mirroring replication supports Butler’s theory of materialization. But Lacan did not stop with his mirror stage theory, and though he once situated the body helpfully in the imaginary, he later positioned the phallus in the symbolic register–where Butler very much needs it not to be if her argument for a projective materialization of a phantasmatic phallus is to succeed. Consequently, a collapsing of Lacanian paradigms and issues ensues.

After arguing for the imaginary nature of the penis, Butler goes on to suggest that Lacan has simply renamed the penis the phallus (80); further, that the penis is the “privileged referent” to be symbolized by the phallus (84); and finally, that the relationship between penis and phallus (and by implication between imaginary and symbolic) is the relationship of signified to signifier (90). But issues of significatory slippage are not issues of reference, nor are they issues of meaning, and this series of conflations simply reiterates the earlier fusion of psychoanalytic models, creating a theoretical pastiche against which Butler then argues with great sophistication and subtlety.⁹ Given the persistent insertion of the symbolic into the imaginary, and the assimilation of the symbolic construct phallus to the image of the penis, it is not surprising to hear Butler conclude that “if the phallus is an imaginary effect, a wishful transfiguration, then it is not merely the symbolic status of the phallus that is called into question, but the very distinction between the symbolic and the imaginary” (79). But just whose wishful transfiguration does Butler’s text demonstrate, we may want to ask, since the symptom, Freud tells us, marks the location of the wish and it has clearly been Butler’s wish to do away with the distinction between the registers all along. Since Butler’s critique merges Lacan’s phallic discourse of desire with his theory of the registers, I next distinguish betweeen these two in “The significantion of the phallus,” Lacan’s most controversial essay. Returning the phallic signifier to the symbolic register, in turn, shows how the signifying phallus generates a post-humanist Otherness.

“Man’s [sic] desire is the desire of the Other”

Lacan’s hypothesis of the phallic signifier offers a many-layered theory of unconscious Otherness at odds with any conscious marking of any human being as an “Other.” While the Lacanian unconscious locates power in Otherness, the phallic signifier, by contrast, locates power in subjectivity. Unlike the unity of the imaginary imago, which provides a simple referential image of an other, the symbolic phallic signifier constrains Otherness by buttoning a signifier, an identification, and a discourse together into one neat package. In the wildly overdetermined signifying multiplicity of the symbolic register, the phallus provides a determined and determining force. It is precisely the phallic propensity for self-replication that inseminates the reproduction–the reiteration as Butler calls it–of the Subject. What is at issue in Lacan’s polemic “The Signification of the Phallus” is the predominant role of this phallic signifier as the Aufhebung of signifying difference per se. Since this is a far more complex idea than either the decentering of the Subject or the gap within alterity, we will proceed slowly. Lacan insists that seven years of seminars have brought him to the conclusion that he must “promulgate as necessary to any articulation of analytic phenomena the notion of the signifier, as opposed to that of the signified” (284); he must insist on the priority of the marker over its meanings. Freud’s discovery, which predates Saussure’s retroactive linguistic explication of it, “gives to the signifier/signified opposition the full extent of its implications: namely that the signifier has an active function in determining certain effects in which the signifiable appears as submitting to its mark” (284). Thus, the active, agentic function of language resides in mark-making, and signifying is an active rather than a reflective process.

That a subject is the product of a linguistic unconscious should not be taken as evidence of this subject’s “cultural” construction (284), nor should a subject be seen as the product of an “ideological psycho-genesis” (285). Lacan sees Horney’s feminist social-psychological analysis as the latter and dismisses all such “question-begging appeal to the concrete” (285). Appeal to the concrete is beside the Freudian point. The only laws that interest Lacan are the laws that govern the other scene of the unconscious, the laws of combination and substitution–of metaphor and metonymy–by which signifiers generate the “determining effects for the institution of the subject” (285). Lacan goes on to define the Other as that by which he “designate[es]… the very locus evoked by the recourse to speech in any relation in which the Other intervenes” (285). The logic of the signifier is thus anterior to the production of meaning, the “awakening of the signified” (285)–suggesting that meaning is discovered rather than made wherever the unconscious is in play.

Lacan next invokes his theory of the registers to reiterate his argument for the symbolic character of the phallus as a privileged signifier. The phallus of Freudian doctrine cannot be assigned to the imaginary register because it “is not a phantasy” (285). Nor is it constrained by the biological real of “the organ, penis or clitoris, that it symbolizes” (285). “For the phallus is a signifier,” Lacan concludes, having made his case for the location of the signifying phallus in the symbolic register. But it is a signifier with a difference from other signifiers. The phallus is a signifier that can “designate as a whole the effects of the signified” (285). We can tell that a phallic signifier is present by its effects. And what are these effects? The linguistic fate of the speaking being is to be unable to articulate need save as a demand that empowers the Other as a repository of love. The residue of inarticulable need returns from this Otherness as desire.

Need/demand/desire. Lacan reiterates the relationship between the three: “desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second” (287). Thus, while real needs can be satisfied, imaginary demands may persist–opening a gap generative of desire. This intrapsychic formula for desire leads Lacan to think relationally, and so he goes on to rework the role of the Other in terms of the sexual relation. Now, the sexual relation is rendered enigmatic because it is “doubly ‘signifying’” and ambiguous because of “the Other in question.” The ambiguity arises here from the fact that the Other has a place in both the discourse of the registers and the discourse of desire. Here, moreover, the intrapsychic and the interpersonal seem utterly and ambiguously mixed. Thus, “for both partners in the relation, both the subject and the Other, it is not enough to be subjects of need, or objects of love, but… they must stand for the cause of desire” (287). Subject/object/Other meet Subject/object/Other Lacan seems to be saying–weaving a double discourse of the intrapsychic with the interactive.

Since the sexual relation seems to involve the signifying phallus irretrievably in the interpersonal beyond of signification, I want to review the intrapsychic dynamics of this crucial Lacanian concept. First, Lacan has repeatedly told us that the signifier is binary–and he has exemplified this binary signifier in paired relations such as day/night, and red cards/black cards. The sexed (reproductive) relation is binary as well, feminine/masculine. Next, however, Lacan tells us that the phallus is a “privileged signifier,” a signifier of the sexual relation that we are to take in the “literal (typographical) sense of the term” (287). And how is this literal phallic pictogram of “the sexual relation” written? F Thus, Lacan concludes, the phallus is “equivalent… to the (logical) copula” (287). In the larger context of Lacan’s discussion of the binary symbolic signifier, the phallus is the foundation signifying as such. The phallic signifier, the foundational difference in and of itself, is rendered latent by the emergence of the signifying binary terms. “The phallus is the signifier of this Aufhebung itself, which it inaugurates (initiates) by its disappearance” (288); thus “reproduction” disappears leaving behind the signifying difference “female”/”male” or “race” disappears from the foundational distinction “black”/”white.” Where has the phallus gone now that the paired terms appear? It is retained as the bar separating the terms, a signifier rendered inarticulable by the terms it leaves behind, yet simultaneously a signifier imperative to their signifying difference.

To those who feel this reading of “The Signification of the Phallus” constitutes a recuperation of an irreparably phallogocentric discourse, I can only say that Lacan’s logic of the phallus captures the foundation in foundational thinking vividly. As a result, this phallogicentrism provides an extraordinarily valuable analytic tool. For me, the phallogicentrism of the essay is a discourse separable from the essay’s 1950s-style cultural discourse on the role of the man and the role of the woman in the comedy of intercourse. When Lacan begins to read the cultural “relation between the sexes” (289) in the essay’s concluding polemic against Melanie Klein, he lapses into a heteronormative construction of sexed Love that ends with an apparent affirmation of Freud’s intuition that there is “only one libido” and it is masculine. On first reading, years ago now, this section of the essay struck me as irrecuperably sexist and heterosexist–though it is imperative here to point out that the Freudian libido has nothing (no thing?) in common with the Lacanian imaginary. I can only note with some amusement that I found penciled in my margin of this concluding section “time for a lesbian deconstruction.” On this account, Judith Butler has read my desire. Now, since Butler has returned, I want to bring back theories of identity for one last encounter with Lacanian Otherness.

“The unconscious is the discourse [emphasis mine] of the Other”

The widespread insistence that Lacan’s brief écrit on the phallus is about dominance (and only dominance) rather than difference exemplifies the kind of foundationalism Lacan indicates by the phrase “having the phallus.” Moreover, folding this foundation back into an imaginary identification–presuming that one is oneself the “Other” of a Self/Other binary–is an instance of “being the phallus.” Gayatri Spivak notes just such a phallic politics of identification in “the fierce turf battles in radical cultural studies in multiracial cultures as well as on the geo-graphed globe, where the only possible politics seems sometimes to be the politics of identity in the name of being the Other” (159). Preferring the symbolic to the imaginary (as Lacan himself does), Spivak applauds those who stand up for the rights of groups with whom they are not primarily identified. Playing the F card (whether the phallic investment is in sex, race, class, or nation) may well be the solution to putting one’s own identity concerns on the table–both for Lacan and for his critics–but in terms of the registers, this solution refuses the encounter with the unconscious as the discourse of the Other. Instead, the primarily identified analyst understands rather than listens; knows in advance rather than finds out. Consequently, phallic foundationalism is a tactic with which Lacan does not agree, though it is a tactic to which he is not himself perpetually immune, especially when he is caught up in polemics over the practice of psychoanalysis.

In matters of politics more generally, Lacan remains skeptical, feeling that those who oppose oppression today will, once empowered, commit the very oppression they accuse. He compares the idealistic reformer to Hegel’s belle âme. The beautiful soul lives “(in every sense, even the economic sense of making a living) precisely on the disorder that it denounces” (Écrits 126), enabling us to “understand how the constitution of the object is subordinated to the realization of the subject” (80). More briefly and cynically put, the entified “Other” may be no more than a pretext for the subject’s speech, or tenure. By contrast, analysis shows the way in which “identity is realized as disjunctive of the subject” (80). It is precisely because the subject is not the same as the ego identity that interpersonal misapprehension can trigger the anxiety of intrapsychic Otherness. Since the gesture of disowning Otherness is so very protective of identity, it seems counterintuitive to own alienation when it appears. At the moment of alienation the subject has not merely reached its boundaries, it has exceeded them. Grasping onto fixed identity as an anchor with which to master the impending decentering is only logical–yet mastery is ineffectual, and “analysts have to deal with slaves who think they are masters, and who find in a language whose mission is universal the support of their servitude, and the bonds of its ambiguity” (Écrits 81).

Since Lacanian analysis supports neither the discourse of categorical identity nor the rhetoric of blame that so frequently accompanies it, it might appear that Lacan has little to offer political analysis, especially where issues of identity are foremost. However, I believe that neither the otherness of hostile objectification nor the Otherness productive of alienation alone offers the resource for political critique that examining the disjunction between the two affords. Carlos Mencia’s joke points to the alternative, to the location of politicized difference in another scene that addresses the phallic investment itself rather than the terms by which that investment is veiled. Analysis can indeed locate the political in another scene that is both a decentering of the subject and an exposé of the epistemology of a fixed or fixable Otherness. If ego identity is the certainty from which the subject is decentered, then “the art of the analyst must be to suspend the subject’s certainties until their last mirages have been consumed” (Écrits 43). If “psychoanalysis… reveals both the one and the other [the individual and the collective] to be no more than mirages” (80), then analysis seems at odds with the Platonic emphasis on a Self/Other binary though not with identity politics as a whole. Where identity is at issue, Lacan insists that “it is not a question of knowing whether I speak of myself in a way that conforms to what I am, but rather of knowing whether I am the same as that of which I speak” (165). Regarding alterity, Lacan’s register theory would have us withhold our demands and acknowledge our desires as our own so that we can better listen for the discourse of the Other–if the Other’s Truth is what we genuinely desire to hear. And what is Truth? “Truth is nothing other than that which knowledge can apprehend as knowledge only by setting ignorance to work a real crisis in which the imaginary is resolved, thus engendering a new symbolic form” (296).

Since the engendering of a new symbolic form was very much at issue in the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics, I draw one final example of the political use of decentered Otherness from N. Katherine Hayles’s critique of the Conference proceedings in her recent book How We Became Posthuman (50-83). The Other’s Truth emerges through Hayles’s analysis, even though her argument for the dangerous supplementarity of embodiment to information theory is, at least in part, a rejection of Lacan. The role of Otherness here is all the more compelling because the discussion illustrative of alterity is not an application of Lacanian terms to cultural texts. Rather, Hayles’s reading of the substitution of one signifier for another recovers a woman held under erasure by the same mark-effacing mechanism at work in Mencia’s comic replications of ethnicity.

The woman in question appears in a photograph taken at the 1952 Macy Conference, the meeting at which psychoanalyst Lawrence Kubie made his last ditch attempt to insert subjectivity into the debates defining information as universally portable, disembodied data. Unlike Kubie, Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, and the other intellectual luminaries, the woman sits with her back to the photographer. The position of her hands and body suggest that she is typing. Though the picture’s notation identifies her as Janet Freud, Katherine Hayles points out that she is in all probability Janet Freed, who appears throughout the Macy transcripts as “assistant to the conference program” (81). In the substitution of a famous man for an anonymous woman Hayles has all she needs to propound a feminist reading of the photograph as evidence of woman as “Other,” marshalling the remaining conference materials in support of this gendered difference. But such a reading would betray a phallic investment in gender, and Hayles does not yield to the temptation to play phallic politics with Freud. Instead, she turns her attention to another error: a handwritten note dating the photo of the 1952 Conference as “1953.”

By holding the 1952 meeting under erasure, attendees distanced themselves from the hostilities erupting in its wake. At that conference, the dueling paradigms of homeostasis and reflexivity met head to head over the issue of scientific objectivity. The dominant group of intellectuals, including the neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch (credited as one of the fathers of the neural net), propounded an idea of information founded on assumptions of a detached observer safely distanced from the observed. Arguing against McCulloch was the hard-line Freudian analyst Lawrence Kubie, who insisted on the implication of the observer in the observation. The stand-off between the two paradigms and their champions exceeded the conference. A subsequent exchange of demands testified to the otherness of theory as a mirror of the ego identity of the theorist: McCulloch offered a fiery denunciation of psychoanalysis; in response, Kubie set fellow psychoanalysts the task of secretly observing McCulloch out of “concern” for the scientist’s emotional health. Though the vehemence of this exchange suggests an irreconcilable face off, both sides of the debate revolved around a single axis of argument informed by a series of signifying oppositions: objective/subjective, dispassionate/affective, empirical/reflexive, rational consciousness/ unconscious motivation–the thick epistemology of the 1950s.

These are the oppositions across whose boundary conference organizer Frank Fremont-Smith could not effect rapproachment, perhaps because Kubie had angered the other participants by seeing their positions as “resistance” to his own (Hayles 70-73). The aggressive emotional charge attached to psychoanalysis could account for the phonemic association that replaced the name of Fremont-Smith’s assistant Janet /Fr/eed by that of the trouble-making /Fr/eud. The double displacements of name and of conference date bequeath their textual challenge to Katherine Hayles in her search for the Truth of the Other of information articulated by Janet Freed’s return from the repressed. Here is Hayles’s analysis:

“Take a letter, Miss Freed,” he says… A woman comes in, marks are inscribed onto paper, letters appear, conferences are arranged, books are published. Taken out of context, his words fly, by themselves, into books. The full burden of the labor that makes these things happen is for him only an abstraction, a resource diverted from other possible uses, because he is not the one performing the labor… Miss Freed has no such illusions. Embedded in context, she knows that words never make things happen by themselves… On a level beyond words, beyond theories and equations, in her body and her arms and her fingers and her aching back, Janet Freed knows that information is never disembodied… (82-83)

Having refused the easy politics of labeling Freed the Other, Hayles discovers in Janet Freed the Truth of embodiment, at the same time evoking a powerful feminist statement from the paradox of Freed’s visible invisibility. In the rich multivocality of Otherness, Hayles hears Janet Freed speak for a class of labor as well as for her gender: Freed’s erasure by the proponents of abstracted information suggests that free-floating information feels intuitively true only to men of a certain class who are “in a position to command the labors of others” (82). Finally, in allowing Janet Freed’s Truth to call into question the very desire for decontextualized information itself, Hayles uncovers a paradigmatic politics informing the 1952 Macy Conference on Cybernetics.

In all, N. Katherine Hayles’s analysis demonstrates the multi-discursivity of the Other’s Truth; when asked to speak, the Other has a lot to say. As a result, Hayles practices a Lacanian politics of close listening. What she hears in the Truth of the decentered Other is the encounter between the discourse of desire and the discourse of the registers; thus, Janet Freed appears in disappearing beneath the waves of conferees’ affect, beneath the sediment of their theoretical language. Because Janet Freed speaks, because Hayles listens, we find in their analytic encounter one final Lacanian Other. Janet Freed returns as the authentic subject of interpersonal exchange, the Other of whom the analyst must be perpetually innocent. Lacan speaks of this “authentic Other” as another subject to be appreciated for its alterity, its capacity to surprise. This authentic Other is available to any subject who is willing, like the Lacanian analyst, to annul the resistance of her intrapsychic other and to accept the anxiety aroused within her intrapsychic Otherness. Then the vital encounter between two authentic subjects can aim “at the passage of true speech, joining the subject to an other subject, on the other side of the wall of language. That is the final relation of the subject to a genuine Other, to the Other who gives the answer one doesn’t expect, which defines the terminal point in analysis” (Sem II 246).

And the terminal point in this discussion…

Notes

1. For a discussion of otherness in Plato’s Sophist see “Non-Being” in Stanley Rosen’s Plato’s Sophist: The Drama of Original and Image, 269-290.

2. See de Beauvoir’s note on Levinas in the introduction to The Second Sex (New York: Vintage, 1989) xxii. The note is interesting because de Beauvoir contains Levinas’s discussion of radical alterity as absolute contrariety by insisting it is written from a masculine point of view that disregards “the reciprocity of subject and object.” However, for Levinas, as for Lacan, subject and object are decidedly non-reciprocal–the point Lacan expresses by distinguishing the imaginary register of the image from the symbolic register of the radical Other. Levinas reconsiders the idea of alterity in Outside the Subject (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994), trans. Michael B. Smith. See, particularly, the concluding essay by that name.

3. Fanon himself does not hypothesize the term Other in Black Skin, White Masks, but rather draws upon and critiques a number of analysts and philosophers who do including Jean Veneuse, Sartre, and Lacan.

4. See also Homi K. Bhabha’s detailed study of post-colonialism and alterity in “The other question: Stereotype, discrimination and the discourse of colonialism,” chapter three in his collection The Location of Culture.

5. An entertaining account of Lacan’s early interests and of his overwhelming reliance on case studies involving women can be found in Catherine Clément’s “The Ladies’ Way” in The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan, 53-101.

6. It might seem that a reader innocent of Lacanian discourse might be a “better” reader of JanMohamed’s essay, since the naïve reader would not discern the discursive impossibility of the “‘imaginary’ Otherness.” But in discourse as elsewhere, ignorance of the law is no excuse. Since the naïve reader has no discursive pact with the writer, what passes for reading is an extra-symbolic exercise in idiosyncrasy. Lacking the pact, “reading” would be a species of parasitic narcissism held together–if it is held together at all–by the reader’s imaginary identification with the writer, a mirroring instance of “reading” as “writing.”

7. Butler is an astute critic of psychoanalysis and has, throughout her career, raised significant issues about psychoanalytic theory. Her article “Gender Trouble, Feminist Theory, and Psychoanalytic Discourse” offers Butler’s characteristically precise analysis of psychoanalysis’ and feminist theory’s implications for each other. See Feminism/Postmodernism 324-40.

8. The irony of Butler’s reading and its notable omission of the imaginary other is emphasized by her apt focus on Lacan’s most emphatically structural of the early seminars, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis.

9. Reducing Lacanian theory to a unified field as Judith Butler does supports binary notions of subject and symbolic Other, turning Lacan’s intrapsychic model into an interpersonal model and rewriting Lacan in the terms of theories of identity more discursively assimilable to a paradigm of performativity. This interpersonal model is clearly politicizable and compatible with the kinds of Foucauldian and deconstructive political impulses that characterize Butler’s own theory of “performance as citation and gender as iteration” (Whitford, cover). Politically, then, Butler needs to situate the point of infinite substitution within a dualistic imaginary to accomplish her own theoretical goals. Thus, the imaginary, in Butler’s analysis, is regarded as a field that functions in a structurally unproblematic way.

Works Cited

• Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 1995.
• Bhabha, Homi K. “The other question: Stereotype, discrimination and the discourse of colonialism.” The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
• —. “Cultural Diversity and Cultural Differences.” The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. London: Routledge, 1995. 206-209.
• Brenkman, John. “The Other and the One: Psychoanalysis, Reading, The Symposium.” Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise. Ed. Shoshana Felman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982. 396-456.
• Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993.
• —. Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. New York: Columbia UP, 1987.
• —. “Gender Trouble, Feminist Theory, and Psychoanalytic Discourse.” Feminism/Postmodernism. Ed. Linda J. Nicholson. New York: Routledge, 1990. 324-340.
• Chater, Melville. “Under the South African Union.” The National Geographic Magazine 59.4 (April 1931): 391-512.
• Chen, Xiaomei. “Occidentalism as Counterdiscourse.” In Identities. Ed. Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. 63-89.
• Clément, Catherine. The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia UP, 1983.
• de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. New York: Vintage, 1989.
• Fanon, Franz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove, 1967.
• Feldstein, Richard, Bruce Fink, and Maire Jaanus, eds. Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan’s Return to Freud. Albany: SUNY Press, 1996.
• Fink, Bruce. “The Subject and the Other’s Desire.” In Reading Seminars I and II. Ed. Feldstein, Fink, and Jaanus. Albany: SUNY Press, 1996. 76-97.
• Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis; New York: Norton, 1953-73.
• —. “On Narcissism: An Introduction.” SE XIV. 73-102.
• Goldie, Terry. “The Representation of the Indigene.” The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. London: Routledge, 1995. 232-236.
• Greimas, A.J. On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory. Trans. Paul J. Perron and Frank H.Collins. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
• Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.
• Jameson, Fredric. “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Problem of the Subject.” In Literature and Psychoanalysis: the Question of Reading: Otherwise. Ed. Shoshana Felman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982. 338-396.
• —. Foreword. On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory by A. J. Greimas. xvi.
• JanMohamed, Abdul R. “The Economy of Manichean Allegory.” The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. London: Routledge, 1995. 18-23.
• Lacan, Jacques. De la Psychose Paranoïaque dans ses Rapports avec la Personnalité. Thèse de Doctorat en Médecine de Paris. Paris: Le François, 1932.
• —. “Discourse of Rome” or, more formally, “The function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis.” Écrits, A Selection. 30-113.
• —. Écrits, A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: Norton, 1977.
• —, with Henri Claude and P. Migault. “Folies simultanées.” Société médico-psychologique, 21 May 1931. Annales médico psychologique 1 (1931): 483-90.
• —. “Il n’y a pas d’Autre de l’Autre.” Ornicar? 26/27 (1983): 26-36.
• —. Introduction. Écrits. 44-54.
• —. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” Écrits, A Selection. 1-7.
• —. “Motifs du crime paranoïaque: le crime des soeurs Papin.” Le minotaure 3/4 (1933): 25-28.
• —. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I, Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953-1954. Trans. John Forrester. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: Norton, 1991.
• —. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Sylvana Tomaselli. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: Norton, 1991.
• —. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III, The Psychoses, 1955-1956. Trans. Russell Grigg. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: Norton, 1993.
• —. “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter.’” The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading. Eds. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988. 28-54.
• —. “Seminar VI: Le désir et son interpretation (1958-59).” Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Ornicar? 24 (1981): 7-31; 25 (1982): 13-36; and 26/27 (1983): 7-44.
• —. Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis. Trans. Anthony Wilden. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989.
• Laplanche, J. and J.-B. Pontalis. The Language of Psycho-Analysis. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Norton, 1973.
• Levinas, Emmanuel. Outside the Subject. Trans. Michael B. Smith. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994.
• Mencia, Carlos. The Tonight Show, NBC, August 8, 1997. <http://www.nbc.com/tonightshow/tsw/tstswss080897.html>
• Parry, Benita. “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse.” The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. London: Routledge, 1995. 36-44.
• Plato. Sophist. Plato: Collected Dialogues. Bollingen Series LXXI. Trans. F.M. Cornford. Eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961.
• Rosen, Stanley. Plato’s Sophist: The Drama of Original and Image. New Haven: Yale UP, 1983.
• Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library, 1956.
• Selden, Raman. A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, Third Edition. Lexington, KY: UP of Kentucky, 1993.
• Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Acting Bits/Identity Talk.” Identities. Eds. Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. 147-180.
• Zizek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Bernd Herzogenrath

Bernd.Herzogenrath@post.rwth-aachen.de

Indeed, you may find that these things are all rather silly. But logic is always a bit silly. If one does not go to the root of the childish, one is inevitably precipitated into stupidity, as can be shown by innumerable examples…

 

–Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts 209

Techno Music has generally been approached either from the perspective of the artists involved, or in connection with drug (ab)use, or with respect to the politics of rave culture.[1] By framing the issues differently, this paper aims to position Techno in closer relation to literature, psychoanalysis, and poststructuralist philosophy. As a kind of “theoretical background-noise,” I have sampled Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze/Guattari, because they–much like Techno itself–are concerned with the limits of subject, author, and representation. However, I do not want authoritatively to prescribe a proper way of reading. Readers are welcome to proceed by associations or to otherwise make productive use of the interstices among these references. Thus, drawing from various discourses, this paper itself partakes in Techno’s strategy of sampling, of putting heterogeneous elements into a new context. The tracks I have included are mostly from the Techno/Dance Act The Prodigy, whose album Music For The Jilted Generation shall serve as a kubernetes, as a steering device providing thematic anchoring points in what follows. One might argue that such an analysis of Techno would yield better insights if it focused on a more underground Techno artist, one that has not already become a staple of MTV. But, as I hope to make clearer, I have chosen The Prodigy precisely because their album marks the precarious position on the cusp between what’s still underground and what’s already commercial, between “enacting the ineffable” and “making sense.”

So, I’ve decided to take my work back underground, to stop it falling into the wrong hands… (The Prodigy, “Intro”)

Rock ‘n’ Roll culture has always defined itself in terms of phallic sex and:or deviance (to the law, to the common sense and its aesthetics). The last two decades have witnessed a decisive shift, and I will shortly contrast what I consider two of the main traits within mainstream music culture. On the one hand, although the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll (Elvis Presley) and his smudgy, deviant but true heirs (Sid Vicious/Johnny Thunders) have died, the revival of both Rock ‘n’ Roll and The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle nevertheless goes on and on. In contrast to Rock, Hip-Hop or Rap do not have an ideal (freedom/peace/love&sex) as either starting or terminal point, an ideal that even in its impossibility might serve as “authentic” music’s signified (e.g., the suicide of Kurt Cobain). They start from the fact of ghetto (tribe), digitalisation, segregation, a situation that might change for the better, but also–more likely–for the worse. Nevertheless, the discourses of Hip-Hop and Rap still operate on the level of the outspoken signified, on the level of the message, of lyrics² (preferably “explicit” and labeled with a Parental Advisory). Though their music functions like a machine, it is still the soundtrack to black-and-white videos documenting the need for social change, and thus still operates within an oppositional paradigm.

During the last decade, yet another style has evolved: Techno, a style even less associated with “natural” instruments like guitar, bass, and drum-set, but with segments of the frequency spectrum on the monitor of the analyzer; not with real time and live-performance, but with a step-by-step stratification of rhythms, samples, digital filters, and delay effects, a style that has its roots in Chicago “(Ware)House” style and Detroit DJ culture, that takes machines (records, turn-tables, computers) and uses them in ways they were not meant to be used, thus introducing techniques of “ab-use” (scratching, sampling etc.)–a point where the two “different” strands of music momentarily touch, since even Punk and Heavy Metal use distorted sounds, sounds in which the effect of (formerly unwanted) noise was in fact taken as a definians of Rock ‘n’ Roll.

Techno’s social relevance was highlighted in Great Britain’s Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, Chapter 33 (CJPO). Thus, the English Law was the first to provide an “official” definition of Dance and Techno Music and to regulate the handling of this kind of music. This Act aimed at the deviant behavior not only of ravers, but of squatters, travelers, etc. as well, people whose life-style is not one of conformity/uniformity. The section that criminalizes raves and Techno music deserves to be quoted in its full length:

Powers to remove persons attending or preparing for a rave.

 

Section 63. (1) This section applies to a gathering on land in the open air of 100 or more persons (whether or not trespassers) at which amplified music is played during the night (with or without intermissions) and is such as, by reason of its loudness and duration and the time at which it is played, is likely to cause serious distress to the inhabitants of the locality; and for this purpose--

 

(a) such a gathering continues during intermissions in the music and, where the gathering extends over several days, throughout the period during which amplified music is played at night (with or without intermissions); and

 

(b) "music" includes sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats. (CJPO)

The Law speaks from the position of those who know that one sleeps at night, who know that loud music causes aggression, and who share the mythical belief that “music is (or has to be) natural.” In contrast, this machinic “emission of a succession of repetitive beats” truly deserves to be put in ironic quotation marks. A deviator from the routines of normality and an adversary against The Law of a “natural/organic music” “commits an offence and is liable on summary conviction to imprisonment for a term not exceeding three months or a fine not exceeding level 4 on the standard scale” (CJPO 63.6b). The Law again appears as the instance of Lacan’s nom du père, as the castrating agency, as “Daddy says NO!” The Law has thus branded Techno as deviant, like a father who disclaims any parenthood for this disobedient, machinic child. It is indeed the very complicity of childishness and a machinic logic that will be the central perspective in my reading of Techno.

As a starting point, I want to redirect you once more to the Lacanian epigraph beginning this essay. The duplicity Lacan highlights between childishness and logic figures prominently in the very name of The Prodigy. What is a prodigy? The OED gives a whole range of possible answers:

 

• Something extraordinary from which omens are drawn; an omen, a portent.
• An amazing or marvelous thing; esp. something out of the ordinary course of nature; something abnormal or monstrous.
• Anything that causes wonder, astonishment or surprise; a wonder, a marvel.
• A person endowed with some quality which excites wonder; esp. a child of precocious genius.

Derived from the Latin prodigium, which denotes an omen in either a good or a bad sense, the English word prodigy thus combines two opposite meanings: the benevolent wonder and the abnormal monstrosity. Both meanings collide in the notion of the infant prodigy, a curious hybrid that combines the wisdom of a teacher with the age of a pupil. Relevant for my analysis is the possibility to read the notion of “the prodigy” as a nodal point of four discourses: signification (“an omen”); the evil and the abject (“something abnormal or monstrous”); magic (“a wonder, a marvel”); and childhood (in connection with genius).
Following these different traits, I will start with the two oft-quoted infant prodigies of psychoanalytical theory: Freud’s grandson Ernst, “inventor” of the fort/da-game, and the child prodigy in Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Purloined Letter,” as rendered and “used” by Jacques Lacan.

In Poe’s story, Dupin gives the example of a young schoolboy who continuously wins the game of “even and odd” by means of a “thorough identification” with his opponent (166). In his reading of this scene, Lacan stresses the fact that there is more at stake here than mere chance-guessing. Such an inter-subjectivity would remain in a purely imaginary realm, in a relation of “equivalence of one and the other, of the alter ego and the ego” (Seminar II 181). Lacan shows that the infant prodigy’s perfect identification with the opponent involves something else, a recourse to the symbolic register, and thus to an operating principle, a law, rather than to something “real.” It is the signifying chain and its laws that determine the effects of subjectivity, because of some kind of inherent machinic “remembering [remémoration]” (Seminar II 185) of the symbolic: “[f]rom the start, and independently from any attachment to some supposedly causal bond, the symbol already plays, and produces by itself, its necessities, its structures, its organizations” (Seminar II 193). By contrasting the real and the symbolic, Lacan situates Poe’s story against the background of combinatorial analysis, when he claims that “[t]he science of what is found at the same place [the real] is substituted for by the science of the combination of places as such” (Seminar II 299): cybernetics, “the fact that anything can be written in terms of 0 and 1” (Seminar II 300)–or: even and odd. Thus, the symbolic itself is technology, is the machinic–culture/the law as the automaton–and speaking human beings are cyborgs from the word go.

The human being’s entrance into the machinic is playfully experienced by another child prodigy, Freud’s grandson Ernst. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud describes his observations of his grandson’s self-invented game.

What he did was to hold [a wooden reel] by the string and very skillfully throw it over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it disappeared into it, at the same time uttering his expressive “o-o-o-o.” He then pulled the reel out of the cot again by the string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful “da” [“there”]. This, then, was the complete game–disappearance and return. As a rule one only witnessed its first act, which was repeated untiringly as a game in itself…. (18:15).

Lacan stresses the fact that in the so-called fort/da-game a rudimentary use of language–a first phonematic opposition–is implicated. For the speaking subject–being constituted by this “original” digitality [fort/da, 0/I) and inscribed into a trans-subjective (rather than inter-subjective) system–an outside of digitality is impossible. It might be argued that there is something in the human subject that is not reducible to pure digitality: its indestructible drive (for a presymbolic state). Lacan highlights the “immortal… irrepressible life” (Four Fundamental Concepts 198) of the drive energy in his myth of the lamella. The lamella is thus the human being as pre-sexual, pre-subject substance, of a “life that has need of no organ” (Four Fundamental Concepts 198). Lacan gives a very vivid image of it: “The lamella is something extra-flat, which moves like the amoeba…. And it can run around. Well! This is not very reassuring. But suppose it comes and envelopes your face while you are quietly asleep…” (Four Fundamental Concepts 197). This illustration of the lamella reads like a perfect description of the cover of The Prodigy’s Music For The Jilted Generation. (See Figure 1.) It depicts this very balanced moment when the extra-flat lamella gives way to the clear-cut physiognomy of the subject, the (symbolic) “body with organs,” when the “unspeakable” gives way to and disappears in articulation.

Figure 1. The Prodigy, Music for the Jilted Generation. Used by permission.

Lacan’s remark that desire is “borne by death” (Écrits 277) suggests that desire is inevitably dependent on the symbolic register (and thus on an Oedipal complex of castration/death), notwithstanding the fact that desire is also precisely that which escapes language, that which is always remaindered in utterance. For Lacan, “the moment in which desire becomes human is also that in which the child is born into language” (Écrits 103). Thus, the fort/da-game enacts the very moment in which the pure, real jouissance of the body of the drives is replaced by the culturally acceptable (and thus castrated) phallic, symbolic jouissance of desire (what Lacan calls jouis-sens): a desire that is human by the very act of tying the human subject to the phallic machinic whose oedipal “molar machines” (Deleuze and Guattari 286) function according to the shared hierarchies of Western phallogocentrism. Desire is thus directed (however impossibly) to a signified, its metonymic drift propelling forward along the culturally loaded and Lawful chain of signifiers: “Daddy says YES!”

But there is yet another machine, a machine like the one that underlies the soundtrack of David Lynch’s Eraserhead. A strange, disturbing machine always underlying the cultural machine, in the same manner that the signifier always underlies the signified, that reminds “the signified [that it] is originarily and essentially… always already in the position of the signifier” (Derrida, Of Grammatology73). These machines are described by Deleuze/Guattari as

desiring machines, which are of a molecular order...: formative machines, whose very misfirings are functional... chronogeneous machines engaged in their own assembly (montage),... machines in the strict sense, because they proceed by breaks and flows, associated waves and particles, associative flows and partial objects.... (286-7)

Thus, molar machines are molecular machines under certain “determinate conditions” (Deleuze and Guattari 287), two “states” of one and the same machine. In a similar manner, Derrida shows how the deferring agency of writing as tekhne–as “a machine… defined in its pure functioning, and not in its final utility, its meaning, its result” (Margins 107)–is implicitly at work in the very realm that tries to suppress it–the spoken word and the living memory. Derrida focuses, for example, on the indeterminate ambiguity of the term pharmakon³: “I got the poison, I got the remedy” (The Prodigy, “Poison”).

Thus, beside the obvious reading, referring to yet another disillusioned youth, the “jilted generation” of the title of The Prodigy’s album might be (mis)read in terms of the dismissed mode of production of the “pure/desiring machine,” of the tekhne of writing as an endless signifying chain.

 
Though Lacan is more directly engaged with theorizing the subject than are Deleuze and Guattari (whose work is more concerned with lines of force and, ultimately, politics), one might tentatively draw an analogy between Lacan’s differentiation of pre-oedipal “drive” from post-oedipal “desire” and Deleuze and Guattari’s differentiation of the “pure/molecular machine” from the “operational/molar machine.” Underneath the regulated drift of desire, there is the rhythmic pulsation of the drives, constituting what Julia Kristeva calls “the semiotic” (Revolution 24).⁴ The drive itself, as a machine good for nothing (like the objects of Jean Tinguely), is described by Lacan in terms of a surrealist collage: “the working of a dynamo connected up to a gas-tap, a peacock’s feather emerges, and tickles the belly of a pretty woman, who is just lying there looking beautiful” (Four Fundamental Concepts 169).

This visual image, I argue, could be related–via the dadaist sound-collage–to the sampling technique of Techno and Acid House music (or to William S. Burroughs’s sound cut-ups for that matter, as described in Nova Express). Techno, in its decidedly a-political self-fashioning, nevertheless takes part in subversion. Not a subversion as decidedly against The Law, against its mode of communication, but a subversion that forces signification against itself, foregrounding the signifier against the signified. Achim Szepanski, owner and founder of the labels Force Inc. and Mille Plateaux, has explained that in Techno, “you can hear a multitude of noises, shrieks, chirps, creaks, and whizzes. These are all sounds traditionally associated with madness…. Techno in this sense is schizoid music: it deconstructs certain rules and forms that pop-music has inflicted on sounds, on the other hand it has to invent the rules that subject sounds to operations of consistency” (137-142, 140-1; my translation). By insisting on the unreasonable sounds beyond meaning, Techno sets the polymorphous drive of pre-oedipal childhood against repressive, phallic desire. In The Prodigy’s “Jericho,” for example, the term “childhood” is to be understood as the pre-oedipal realm of unrestricted freedom and bodily pleasure posed against post-oedipal adulthood; here, Techno aims to become pure tekhne-machine.

It is not a “Rage against the machine” from the (however illusory) position of an non-machinic other,⁵ but a “Rage of the (pure) machine against the (oedipal) machine,” a “rage against the Symbolic” (Kristeva, Abjection 178, emphasis in the original). Not from the position of either one or the other, not from a position of either side within difference, but from the chiastic position of difference itself, from the difference at the “origin” of the symbolic: the law of the signifier against The Law of the signified (which is the law of the signifier under determinate conditions): “Fuck ’em and Their Law” (The Prodigy, “Their Law,” emphasis added).

The promise of a return to the pre-oedipal and un-castrated realm of childhood also lies at the heart of Jaron Lanier’s manifestofor Virtual Reality, a field closely related to Techno music, as can be seen both in Techno video clips and in the use of computer animated images at Techno raves:

All of us suffered a terrible trauma as children that we’ve forgotten, where we had to accept the fact that we are physical beings and yet in the physical world where we have to do things, we are very limited. The thing that I think is so exciting about virtual reality is that it gives us this freedom again. It gives us this sense to be who we are without limitation…. (qtd. in Wooley 14)

The close relationship between Techno and a “retroactive childhood” (that is: belatedly from within the adult symbolic, that is: from within the digital) is I think effectively staged in the “fashion image” of “your average raver”: comfortable shoes with bouncy soles, oversized shirts, and baggy trousers are a kind of working-outfit from an active raver’s point of view. As a result, the wearer looks like a full-grown toddler, promoting an image that seems to indicate a refusal to grow up, a refusal to accept the rational/restrictive world of the adults.

This utopia of childhood revisited is expressed for example in German Techno DJ Marusha’s cover-version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”⁶ Significantly, this is a Techno remake, not an “original” song. It functions not to regain an analog paradise but rather to reveal and celebrate paradise as an effect of the digital machine.⁷ The “original” song was featured in the movie The Wizard of Oz, a movie that itself relates the reality of the childish dream-world to the functioning of a machine: the big, steaming “illusion-machine” of the (fake) Wizard. Techno and VR now add a crucial ingredient: the pre-oedipal is always already machinic, the machine is the limit, but the limit of the machine, its basic formula 0/1, can be repeated endlessly. Thus, it seems only “natural” that the “individual piece” of Techno music as a pure signifier, as a collage of various signifiers, forms a signifying chain in itself, drifts from remix to remix, creates “Loops of Infinity”⁸: as for the pure want of the abject writer, Techno’s “signifier… is [nothing] but literature” (Kristeva, Abjection 5), that is, nothing but the signifying chain itself. Techno is not designed to form an oeuvre, and the artists and DJs of Techno music definitely and consciously belong to the post-author (and post-song-writer) era. This is due not only to the democratization of the artistic process wrought by Techno’s more affordable instruments, but also to the “open character” of Techno music itself, which, since it precludes any final, authentic mix, renders impossible, or at least paradoxical, the very notion of a Techno “classic.” Being more serial than serious, Techno is able to proliferate endlessly, and, as Jean-Jacques Lecercle has convincingly argued with respect to Gilles Deleuze, “proliferation is always a threat to order” (95).

The repetitiveness of the machinic is thus the distinctive characteristic of Techno music, not only on the level of this signifier’s circulation (and distribution), but on the level of the individual piece (as an abstraction) as well, since this music consists of “sounds wholly or predominantly characterized by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats,” as stated by The Law. As in Freud’s grandson’s fort/da-game, which was “repeated untiringly,” repetition of the “fundamental difference” (fort/da, 0/I) is the rule of the game. This, I argue, is true for Techno music as well. Furthermore, it is its repeatability that makes a rule a rule, that makes a law a law. A way to contrast these two laws: the law of the signifier and The Law of the signified (which–in the end–are one and the same), is to take recourse to chaos theory, more precisely, to the notion of the fractal. As Brian Massumi has noted in his Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari, a fractal, “in spite of its infinite fissuring, looks like and can function as a unified figure if we adopt an ontological posture toward it” (22). If this notion is related to the endless play of signifiers, the signified–as an effect of the signifier–can be related to what Massumi calls a “diagram”: “The diagram is drawable, but only if the fissuring is arbitrarily stopped at a certain level (produced meaning as evaporative end effect… momentary suspension of becoming)” (22). The Law of the signified is thus only an actualization of the law of the signifier: as such, it is a “dead fractal,” an effect of what it wants to, but cannot, suppress.

The realm of childhood thus seems to pose a serious threat to the restrictions and laws of society. Georges Bataille, in an essay on Wuthering Heights in his book on Literature and Evil, on Literature asEvil, comments on the contrast between these two worlds:

[S]ociety contrasts the free play of innocence with reason, reason based on the calculation of interest. Society is governed by its will to survive. It could not survive if these childish instincts... were allowed to triumph. Social constraint would have required the young savages to give up their innocent sovereignty; it would have required them to comply with those reasonable adult conventions which are advantageous to the community. (18)

Thus, anything that is “likely to cause serious distress to the inhabitants of the locality,” that is, the community, is a force operative against the Good.

 
By equating benefit with profit, the Good with reason, Bataille can say that what is at stake is a “revolt of Evil against Good. Formally it is irrational. What does the kingdom of childhood… signify if not the impossible and ultimate death” (19-20). This revolt has to be irrational, un-reason-able, “stupid” by definition, because what is at stake is not a question of the immoral against the moral: evil is understood here as “hypermorality” (Bataille 22), something a-moral rather than immoral (and morality can be taken here in the Nietzschean sense of a thinly disguised craving for profit). Thus, a revolt from an other position always already functions within the realm of The Law, acknowledging and strengthening the very opponent it wants to fight. Bataille compares the difference between the hypermoral and the immoral by quoting Sartre on the difference between an atheist and a satanist:

The atheist does not care about God because he has decided once and for all that He does not exist. But the priest of the black mass hates God because He is respectable; he sets himself to denying the established order, but, at the same time, preserves this order and asserts it more than ever. (qtd. in Bataille 35)

To put it another way: a rage against the machine by something non-machinic, by authentic Rock ‘n’ Roll (or Punk, for that matter), is bound to fail from the beginning. Because of the fact that it is reasonable, it is immediately incorporated by the reason-machine. A revolt thus has to be stupid, libidinal, childish, but, crucially, machinic. Thus, the “revolt of Evil against Good” is not merely a revolt of digital against analog but a battle, such as Derrida suggests, between the signifier-machine and the signified-machine, between the semiotic and the symbolic, the machine-that-acknowledges-being-a-machine and the machine-that-claims-to-be-natural. Techno is regarded as un-natural (as against natural music with natural instruments). This perspective claims nature and the machinic as oppositions and represses the fact that once within the symbolic (culture), the machinic is our most natural condition. In Wuthering Heights, then, the already socialized enunciations of the Linton kids–“Oh, mamma, mamma! Oh, papa! Oh, mamma, come here! Oh, papa, oh!” (90)–are not opposed by any reasonable counter-arguments or comments like “No, not mamma! No, not papa!”, but by “frightful noises” (90), the Romantic equivalent of the “repetitive beats” of present-day Techno.⁹

Whereas the concepts of cyberspace and VR celebrate the sovereignity of childhood without the body–the death of the body is in fact the price to re-visit paradise–Techno celebrates “Judgment Night” as the re-surrection of the body; it puts the body back into its place. A place determined not by biological parameters, that is, by the real, but by symbolic parameters that go a step further than the Lacanian definition of the the subject (“a signifier representing a subject for another signifier”). In analogy to Félix Guattari’s re-definition of the Lacanian objet a as an “objet-machine petit ‘a,” (115), the subject is constituted in “a pure signifying space where the machine would represent the subject for another machine” (117-8). Whereas the Lacanian objet a is a fragment of the real (body), that “pound of flesh” exchanged for the signifier, in a Techno rave the body as a whole is–not replaced–but “affected” by the machinic: Techno thus transforms the whole body into the “objet-machine petit ‘a.’”¹⁰ In this “final corporate colonization of the unconscious,”¹¹–that unconscious that is the “secret of the speaking body” (Lacan, Encore 118; translation mine) and that “engineers, is machinic” (Anti-Oedipus 53)–body and machine become one.

With respect to Techno, there have been a multitude of references to shamanism, tribalism, modern primitivism, and Voodoo-magic.

It was Arthur C. Clarke who supposedly said that “any advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” (qtd. in Hafner and Markoff 11).¹² Thus, hackers, cyberpunks, techno artists, and other (mis)users of computer technology are the new magicians of our age, the shamans and Voodoo-priests of technology.

 
In connection with the ravers’ use of a drug aptly called Ecstasy, all these references collide in the notion of dance as ritual. Whereas the dancing body has been traditionally seen as a means of “natural” (self-)expression, in Techno-, Goa-, and Trance-Dance, the body moves beyond the pose and the object of the (male) gaze: “dance” might be defined here as the relation of the body to the machinic. Lacan has called cybernetics the “science of empty places” (Seminar II 300), and Techno raves, as a kind of “gay cybernetics,” to misuse a Nietzschean term, make much use of empty spaces such as industrial sites, warehouses, and factories. Jean Baudrillard has argued that the modern city (or its icon, the factory) is no longer “a site for the production and realisation of commodities” (77). It has become “a site of the sign’s execution” (119). Thus, it might be no coincidence that just at the moment the factory as such disappears, Techno usurps the empty places with its “signifier factory,” with a production that is good for nothing.

In addition to the notion of pre-oedipal childhood and the pleasure of the body, of the polymorphously perverse drives, which is experienced most directly in Dutch Gabba and Hardcore-Techno, there is the experience of trance and ecstasy prevalent in Goa/Ambient-Techno (which is not to say that Gabba does not have its spiritual merits). Still, the terror of speed and repetitive beats is related to the evil and the abject, as a border between the human and the purely physical, whereas the Zen-like experience of trance could be related to the sublime, the border between the human and the metaphysical/spiritual. Both point towards what Lacan calls a “jouissance beyond the phallus” (Éncore 81): mysticism.¹³ This certain kind of experience gives access to the jouissance of the body which we have taken to be forever lost as a result of castration. This experience can ironically never be put into words as such (despite the fact that this ineffability centers the poetic discourse it creates). Here I see a main reason why The Prodigy (and other Techno artists using message-fragments) are not regarded as “pure Techno” anymore: by returning, at least partly, to the realm of the signified, The (infant) Prodigy turns into a Prodigal Son.¹⁴ However, it was exactly the borderline-position of Music for the Jilted Generation that made it valuable for my reading of Techno.

Georges Bataille, drawing connections between the evil, lawless sovereignty of childhood, primitivism, and mysticism, states that “[d]eath alone–or, at least, the ruin of the isolated individual in search of happiness in time–introduces that break without which nothing reaches the state of ecstasy” (26). In the unity of ravers, the subject functions not as identity but as part of a bigger system, part of the machine. It has to be noted, nevertheless, that this unity is not structured by a phallic signifier, by God or a Führer. Some critics have pointed out that the rhythmic structure of Techno shares certain similarities with fascist Marschmusik. As an “empty signifier” Techno might be “neutral,” but the danger is that this signifier might be “filled” with either left or right ideology. In the “raving society,” the individual loses itself, and it longs for the continuity of this moment of disruption. However, this continuity is not one of duration, but one of rhythm, the rhythm of the endless oscillation between I and O (that is: one and zero, I and Other, fort and da), the machinic and the primitive/spiritual.

I want to finish by again quoting Georges Bataille on mysticism. The following quotation can be taken as an apt description of Techno, the music of a jilted generation that uses the regalia of hippiedom (“Love Parade”), a music that “drifts free and peacefully above the cold volcanoes of beat-music” (Diederichsen 278; my translation): “Mysticism is as far from the spontaneity of childhood as it is from the accidental condition of passion. But it expresses its trances through the vocabulary of love. And contemplation liberated from discursive reflection has the simplicity of a child’s laugh” (Bataille 27)–“hahahahahahaha hahahahahahaha…”

Notes

1. See for example various articles in magazines such as i-D; Spex etc., or publications such as E.V. Chromaparke, ed., Localizer 1.0: The Techno House Book; Simon Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture; Steve Redhead, ed., Rave Off: Politics and Deviance in Contemporary Youth Culture; M. Collin and J. Godfrey, Altered States: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House; N. Saunders and R. Doblin, Ecstasy: Dance, Trance and Transformation; and Bruce Eisner, Ecstasy: The MDMA Story.

2. See Russell Potter, Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. Potter understands Hip-Hop as a political practice, a “signifyin(g)” practice in Henry Louis Gates’s sense, with its “Black English” as a vernacular of resistance.

3. See “Plato’s Pharmacy” in Jacques Derrida, Dissemination: “writing, the pharmakon, the going or leading astray.”

4. Kristeva links the semiotic to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the “schizophrenic flow” qua modern literature–which both Kristeva and Deleuze/Guattari use as examples “in which the ‘flow’ itself exists only through language, appropriating and displacing the signifier to practice within it the heterogeneous generating of the ‘desiring machine’” (Revolution 17).

5. See the CD of the American crossover band Rage Against the Machine (1992), which proudly states on the cover that “no samples, no keyboards or synthesizers were used in the making of this recording.”

6. The duplicity of Techno and “modernist music” with respect to childhood is alluded to in Else Kolliner’s analysis of Igor Stravinsky’s “infantilism.” She states that Stravinsky’s music creates a “new realm of fantasy… which every individual once in his childhood enters with closed eyes.” Stravinsky’s techniques of “the stubborn repetition of individual motives–as well as the disassembling and totally new recomposition of their elements… are instrumentally accurate translations of child-like gestures of play into music” (“Remarks on Stravinsky’s ‘Renard,’” quoted by Adorno, 162-3).

7. Since I have related the “pure machine”/Techno to Julia Kristeva’s concept of the “semiotic” earlier on, I would like to add Kristeva’s warning not to confuse the semiotic with the analog: “this heterogeneity between the semiotic and the symbolic cannot be reduced to computer theory’s well-known distinction between ‘analog’ and ‘digital’” (Revolution 66).

8. This is the title of a track by the German Techno-artist Cosmic Baby.

9. Cathy and Heathcliff are observing the Lintons through the window of Thrushcross Grange’s, and this window pane serves as a translucent barrier between the realm of childhood and the realm of society, of etiquette, a barrier that would have to be destroyed or crushed from within in order to return to childhood again.

10. For Deleuze/Guattari, “desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject; there is no fixed subject unless there is repression” (Anti-Oedipus 26). If, according to Lacan, the object a is the “stuff” (Écrits 315) of the subject, then, in that “pure signifying space,” where the subject as subject is missing, it is in fact the objet-machine petit “a” that is the stuff of the “subject.” I am indebted to Hanjo Berressem for this observation; cp. his Pynchon’s Poetics: Interfacing Theory and Text, 77-8n9.

11. Title of an Ambient/Trance CD by Drome (1993).

12. Quoted in Katie Hafner and John Markoff, 11. The references to the loa and other Voodoo rituals in William Gibson’s Neuromancer offer another case in point. For the notion of tribalism and new primitivism, see Techno sub-genres such as Tribal Dance and Jungle.

13. An obvious liaison between Techno and mysticism could be observed in the trend of merging Gregorian Chants or Hildegard von Bingen’s “Canticles of Ecstasy” with Techno Beats. For another example, watch the video-clip of Scubadevil’s “Celestial Symphony,” which features film sequences of religious rituals and fade-ins of possible combinations of 0 and I. As an expanded metaphor of the Information-Super-Highway and in analogy with Rock ‘n’ Roll culture as an extended metaphor of the street, the two variants of Techno–the abject and the sublime–can be read as the “Information-Super-Highway to Hell” and the “Information-Super-Stairway to Heaven.”

14. See Kodwo Eshun’s “Prodigal Sons,” where he contrasts the “pre-adolescence” (34) of The Prodigy’s debut, an “aural equivalent of [Lacan’s] mirror stage” (34), with the attempt of their latest album to “put hardcore’s adrenalin thrill into stadium rock” (33).

Works Cited

• Adorno, Theodor. Philosophy of Modern Music. Trans. A.G. Mitchell and W.V. Blomster. London: Sheed & Ward, 1987.
• Bataille, Georges. Literature and Evil. Trans. A. Hamilton. London and New York: Marion Boyars, 1990.
• Baudrillard, Jean. Symbolic Exchange and Death. Trans. Ian H. Grant. London: SAGE Publications, 1995.
• Berressem, Hanjo. Pynchon’s Poetics: Interfacing Theory and Text. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1993.
• Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985.
• Chromaparke, E.V. ed., Localizer 1.0: The Techno House Book. Art Books Intl. Ltd., 1996.
• Collin, M. and J. Godfrey. Altered States: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House. Serpent’s Tail, 1997.
• Criminal Justice and Public Order Act. London: HMSO, 1994.
• Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992.
• Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. G. C. Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.
• —. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. A. Bass. Brighton: Harvester, 1986.
• —. Dissemination. Trans. B. Johnson. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.
• Diederichsen, Diedrich. Freiheit macht arm. Das Leben nach Rock ‘n’ Roll 1990- 93. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1993.
• Eisner, Bruce. Ecstasy: The MDMA Story. Berkeley, CA: Ronin Publishing, 1993.
• Eshun, Kodwo. “Prodigal Sons,” i-D 135 (December 1994): 32-37.
• Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works. 24 vols. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1953-74.
• Guattari, Félix. Molecular Revolution. Trans. R. Sheed. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984.
• Hafner, Katie and Markoff, John. Cyberpunk. Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.
• Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia UP, 1984.
• —. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.
• Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan Livre XX, Encore, 1972-73. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975.
• —. Écrits. A Selection. Trans. A. Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977.
• —. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Trans. A. Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1978.
• —. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psycho-Analysis 1954-55. Trans. S. Tomaselli. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988.
• Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. Philosophy through the Looking-Glass: Language, Nonsense, Desire. La Salle: Open Court, 1985.
• Massumi, Brian. A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993.
• Poe, E.A. The Tales of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Random House, 1944.
• Potter, Russell. Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. Albany: SUNY, 1995.
• Redhead, Steve, ed. Rave Off: Politics and Deviance in Contemporary Youth Culture. Brookfield, VT: Avebury, 1993.
• Reynolds, Simon. Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture. Boston: Little Brown & Company, 1998.
• Saunders, N., and R. Doblin, Ecstasy: Dance, Trance and Transformation. Oakland, CA: Quick American Archives, 1996.
• Szepanski, Achim. “Den Klangstrom zum Beben bringen.” Techno. Hrsg. Philipp Anz/Patrick Walder. Zürich: Ricco Bilger, 1995
• Wooley, Benjamin. Virtual Worlds. A Journey in Hype and Hyperreality. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992.

Sound-Bites

• The Prodigy. “Jericho.” Experience. Elektra, 1992.
• —. Music For The Jilted Generation. XL Recordings,1994:
  • “Intro”
  • “Their Law”
  • “Poison”
  • “Voodoo People”
• Winx. “Don’t Laugh.” Left Above the Clouds. XL Recordings, 1996.

George Dillon

Department of English
University of Washington
dillon@u.washington.edu

We find ourselves–we with our various discourses–in the midst of a new medium. Which does not, of course, mean we are all experiencing the same thing. HTML hypertext seems to have about as much intrinsic character as tofu. It lends itself to many deployments; people of very diverse interests and sensibilities find excitement working in it–and seek to claim it as their own, even as “the way we think” (or ought to want to think). People differ over using it as work or play, as transparent or mazey, as an art object or as a disposable.

At least four different sensibilities are emerging on the Web: the researcher’s, the explorer’s, the browser’s, and (this last one lacks a good name) the connector’s. These sensibilities link directly to different purposes for logging on. The researcher wants to find the best information currently available on the topic of her interest. This is the presumed purpose, for example, of the “user” in Patrick Lynch and Susan Horton’s Style Guide,¹ and it is with that purpose in view that they warn the web writer not to let a user get confused about the hierarchical order of the website and her place in it. The user, they say, will form a mental image of your site, and an image like that of Figure 1 is a “Bad User Image.”

This is “poor” for them because it is headless and lacking in hierarchy and because some of the nagivational links are uncertain–reflecting probably a user’s sense of finding herself in the midst of information, but not sure how she got there or where she can get to from there–not good if you are trying to compare contraindications for various hypertension medications. As Edward Tufte puts it in Envisioning Information: “Ideally, structures that organize information should be transparent, straightforward, obvious, natural, ordinary, conventional–with no need for hesitation or questioning on the part of the reader” (125).

Browsing is not so task- or goal-oriented; its sensibility is nicely evoked by Mark Bernstein, himself a recovering location-and-navigation zealot, in Hypertext Gardens: Delightful Vistas (www.eastgate.com/garden/Enter.html), a tasteful stroll in the Horatian vein, emphasizing the pleasure of “unexpected delights” to be found in well-crafted “gardens” that supply neither the unsorted profusion of the wilderness nor the practical predictable grid of the downtown highrise. Hypertext Gardens itself exemplifies a hypertext garden, though Bernstein also includes a diagram of the site (in his own Storyspace format) in a technical footnote.

Exploring is looking to get a sense of “what’s there” in a certain area. The explorer is seeking public knowledge, or at least a sample of the current discourse in a domain–not constructing a “cabinet of curiosities,” but also not pursuing a systematic or thorough search. Exploring is what you do in a wilderness. Such sites are often teacherly collections of resources on a subject. One might pursue the topic of contemporary Dadaists at Virgin Megaweb: Rubrique Smart (www.virgin.fr/virgin/html/smart/musee/dada_1.html) to get the flavor and some leads to this admittedly unsystematizable domain.

In fact, one is likely to be propelled from this site into connecting, which I mean to link with the practices of making and resolving disparate and incongruous juxtapositions. On the face of it, the Web seems to offer a huge and unsorted collection of texts and images and a simple way of pulling some of them together with the “A” linking mechanism. It is a bricoleur’s dream world where the maker is like a metal sculptor in a junk yard with the A anchor for a welding torch. This sensibility or positioning toward materials is what I believe Michael Joyce called a “constructive” relation to hypertext some years before the Web was up and running, and it is what George Landow sees as the underlying tendency of hypertext. The connector likes to make sense of jumps in unexpected, incongruous directions, to resolve catachreses. In Hypertext 2.0 Landow says,

if part of the pleasure of linking arises in the act of joining two different things, then this aesthetic of juxtaposition inevitably tends towards catachresis and difference for their own ends and for the effect of surprise, sometimes surprised pleasure, that they produce. (167)

He likens such hypertext sites to Cubist collages in the ways they appropriate bits of other things (wicker, rope) and juxtapose them in a whole (167). The comparison is fruitful, but it bogs down a bit in the physicality of things: hypertext anchors and targets are all text, image, sound, or movie, not stranded rope.

Similar to cubist collage, but far more involved with text, is the practice of Dada photomontage as developed by Hannah Höch, Raoul Hausmann, Kurt Schwitters and others (Georg Grösz, John Heartfield, Max Ernst). The hypertext page has words and images linking to other words and images; Dada photomontage is made up of bits of photos and other images along with words and phrases from the media, not “things” but signifiers. These signifiers are recomposed into a new whole but point always to another “page” from which they were snipped. So the Dada photomontage is like a sitemap–an image of one way all the fragments go together. Of course, not all sitemaps resemble Dada assemblages: the great majority are simple itemized lists or file-and-folder menus and serve the purposes of the Researcher only. They do not suggest specific relations of individual elements or overall patterns, and they reinscribe rather than subvert conventional indications of order and relation. In the area of webspace called net.art, however, the spirit and designs of Dada assail the orderly stable-marks-for-standard-meanings code of the Researchers with all of the ingenuity and glee of Hausmann, Höch, or Schwitters. This is the parallel that I will pursue in some detail, not just because it is remarkable and illuminating in its own right, but also because the analysis takes us into quite general issues of visual meaning. We begin by identifying (1) the units of analysis; then (2) the formal principles for composing the units; and only then (3) the semantics of composing the units. We will, in other words, get to brief discussions of what the individual works mean, but (very artificially) only after we have climbed from the ground up. Finally, (4) having completed this demonstration of the parallels between photomontage and sitemap, we will turn to some imagemap sitemaps currently on line, especially the avowedly Dadaist ones, and consider the broader implications of these Dadaist progeny for postmodern culture (and, in passing, for Postmodern Culture).

The Fragments

Dada photomontages (and collages, for that matter) are made up of fragments of images and text from the popular culture. Not just words, but clipped bits of newspapers, posters, catalogs, tickets, letters, and fakes of the same. The development of halftone photogravure and offset printing had set loose what seemed an avalanche of photographs in newspapers and magazines, and already advertisers, first of all in America, had begun to combine photographs in one poster or advert. In 1919, Hannah Höch was working for one of the new illustrated magazines when she and Raoul Hausmann (among others) realized that this technique of mass culture could be turned against it with great force to disrupt its depictions of a normal social world and political order–to demonstrate, as Johanna Drucker puts it, “the social reality made in and through image production” (Theorizing 55), or again, to pry signifying practices loose “from their conventional relations or easy recuperation as readily consumable modes” (Visible 66). Benjamin H. D. Buchloh speaks in very similar fashion of Dada’s “extreme procedures of juxtaposition and fragmentation by which the origins in advertising were inverted and where the constructed artificiality of the artifact destroyed the mythical nature of the commodity” (64). More on the semantics of this juxtaposition below.

Words too could be clipped from the headlines and pages of magazines, or scribbled on the picture indecorously, thus destabilizing the conventional relations of visual and verbal modes (“label,” “illustration,” “product,” “pitch”) in journalism and advertising. Whenever images from the popular media are “recycled,” Dada and its oppositional politics are invoked. See for example Victor Burgin’s well-known “appropriated image” work from the early 1970s[2], and Richard Hamilton’s photomontage “What makes the contemporary home such a wonderful place to be?” (1956).[3] It is of course not always clear what oppositional position exactly is being staked out, and sometimes it is not certain that there is one (as in the case of Pop Art, or more recently Richard Prince, or Sandy Skoglund); or (as in the case of Jeff Koons) it seems pretty certain that there isn’t. But the expectation of critique is very strong, amounting to a convention of appropriation or citation of mass consumer culture.

These fragments have clear edges; no attempt is made to smooth or blend one into another. (Smooth gradation from one image to the other attracts the semantics of identity and transformation rather than juxtaposition.) Because they are fragments from “elsewhere,” they function in certain ways like hypertext links: they do not of course “take” you to another page or more complete image, but they do stimulate you to locate them in a recognised or imagined whole and context. That is, they function as Lücke–“gaps”in Wolfgang Iser’s terms–which the reader tries to fill from memory or surmise. In some cases, the Dadaists fragmented Gestalt “good forms,” especially the human body and face. Gaps so produced are often shocking and clamour for resolution. In the case of Dada works from the Weimar era in Germany, the modern reader welcomes the work of scholars who have set about identifying images and sometimes translating text to recreate as it were the common knowledge of contemporary readers/viewers. (The recognition in many cases may be tentative or approximate, of the “looks like some kind of” variety.) The fragment, in other words, is an anchor that links not to another page but to a “page” in the reader’s mind. What is important for our purpose is not just this trigger effect, but the fact that they are composed–placed in relation to other fragments.

The Arrangements

Formally, Dada photomontage is two dimensional, after the pattern of posters. There is no perspective or common scale or palette, so there is no unified point of view for the viewer to take up. Edward Tufte develops the term “confection” to describe such divided, patterned surface without perspective or a single space. Confection, he notes, is the characteristic use of images on the Web (Visual Explanations).

The fragments can be arranged in a rows-and-columns style table (which is generally rather stable/static) or in more dynamic patterns. Here I will describe four kinds of arrangements (Grid, Schematic, Swirl, Cascade), deferring a discussion of how to read until they have been described.

1. Grid/matrix (table with cells)
Figure 2. Kurt Schwitters, Die Handlung Spielt in Theben und Memphis zur Zeit der Herrschaft der Pharoanen (The Action Takes Place in Thebes and Memphis Under the Pharaohs’ Rule.) (192x) 16.2 x 20 cm. (c) 2000 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn4 [Click on image to see enlarged view]
Figure 3 Hannah Höch, Meine Hausspruche (My Household Proverbs) (1923) 32 x 41.1cm (c) 2000 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn [Click on image to see enlarged view]

When the fragments are not very numerous, they are often arranged in an open space with certain sorts of relationship indicated among them:

2. Schematic
Figure 4. Hannah Höch, Und wenn du denkst, der Mond geht unter (And When You Think the Moon is Setting). (1921) 21 x 13.4 cm. (c) 2000 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn [Click on image to see enlarged view]	Figure 5. Hannah Höch Marlene (1930) 36.7 x 41.2 cm. (c) 2000 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn [Click on image to see enlarged view]

More fragments with diagonal placement suggest movement and a center-periphery scheme; equivalence is suggested by parallels, opposition by intersecting or oblique angles.

3. Swirl
Figure 6. Kurt Schwitters Das Kotsbild (1922) 27 x 19.5 cm. (Vomit Picture) (c) 2000 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn [Click on image to see enlarged view]
Figure 7. Raoul Hausmann Dada Cino (1920) 31.7 x 22.5 cm. [Click on image to see enlarged view]

Perhaps the epitomes of Dada photomontage are the large works with a huge number of fragments spilling forth in abundance to the point of disorder. Victor Burgin calls attention to Jacques Durand’s “Rhetoric et image publicitaire,” where he cites the classical figure of epitrochasm or “abundance” in which “the relations of identity and opposition are not only absent, they are denied” (quoted in Thinking Photography 79).

3. Cascade
Figure 8. Georg Grösz and John Heartfield Leben und trieben im Universal-City, 12 Uhr 5 Mittags (Life and Work in Universal City, 12:05 Noon) (1919) (c) 2000 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn [Click on image to see enlarged view]
Figure 9. Hannah Höch Schnitt mit dem Köchenmesser Dada durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands (Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar (1919-1920) 114 x 90 cm. Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany) (c) 2000 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn [Click on image to see enlarged view]

Semantics

According to one tradition, images make no claims, state no propositions, and therefore to render what an image means as statements of what it says clumsily forces it to perform unnatural acts. Under the canons of High Modernism, the semantics of images would be wholly other than those of texts. The claim of modernism of the Clement Greenberg kind, Johanna Drucker says, was “that visuality was equivalent to muteness, that modern art had fulfilled its teleological aim through achieving a condition of plenitudinous presence, and that all ties with literature, literary modes, or linguistic signification had been severed as part of the so-called autonomy of modern art” (Visible 4). Along with that comes the view that images do not refer to the world of common experience, they merely present a possible one. Photographers have been fairly resistant to this view of their art, and photomontage fragments are lifted from common experience, namely the popular media, and mean by standing in for larger texts and images from which they were taken. So one interprets photomontage by tracing the fragment back to its missing page-of-origin and by grouping them by provenance.

Another view holds that images may well have paraphrasable meanings, but images are inherently less determinate, more polysemous than texts, since they are mute and not of the same material as words. They are not language and hence not linked to the whole apparatus of text reading and interpretation. Hence their meanings should be suggested delicately and circumspectly. Certainly some images are quite inscrutable or private. (Surrealistic photomontage such as some of Max Ernst’s, for example, gives one virtually no clue as to what is being “said”). Dada, however, is always constructing a perspective, comment, or stance toward contemporary life. Martha Rosler, herself a contemporary, political Dadaist, writes of the original Dada photomontage as a breaking of the surfaces to reveal the social and moral relationships in Weimar Germany.⁵ And Raoul Hausmann, by most accounts one of the inventors of it, wrote in the third person:

They were the first to use photography to create, from often totally disparate spatial and material elements, a new unity in which was revealed a visually and conceptually new image of the chaos of an age of war and revolution. And they were aware that their method possessed a power for propaganda purposes which their contemporaries had not the courage to exploit… (qtd. in Richter 116)

John Heartfield was certainly one who did employ photomontage in very explicit anti-Nazi propaganda, but when doing political posters, his main mode of visual statement was the highly codified repertoire of bloody knife, pig, jackal, hanging rope, stacks of gold coins–blunt and powerful, but not “visually and conceptually new.” Similarly, the Grösz/Heartfield amputated mannikin with a revolver for a right arm, a lightbulb for a head, dentures for genitals, and an Iron Cross decoration on its chest (“dedicated to the Social Democratic delegates who voted for the war”) was exhibited in the Dada exhibition but uses these objects as highly conventionalized tokens. Dada photomontage, however, definitely has playful and enigmatic streaks that do not lend themselves to propaganda. It is an inspired amalgam of nonsense and critique, edgy and in your face, sure of the penetrating discernment of its withering gaze and confident of the viewers’ abilities to make sense of the allusions and incongruities and to take their meanings. These abilities do not just work upon the formal cues of image, arrangement, texture, color, and so on, but tap into a shared knowledge of the contemporary popular culture. At almost 80 years, one language, and an ocean’s remove, the diligent work of various scholars identifying bits is indispensible, and, although we may begin with the formal arrangements, we quickly look beyond the edges of the work into the newpapers and magazines which the fragments are fragments of.

The first type is the Grid/matrix/table array where the fragments, being of roughly equal size, appear to be equivalent “panels.” The layout suggests either a table (grouped by likeness according to row or column) or a comic from the comics page. In this case, we tend to read top left to bottom right and to look for some sort of sequence or causation. In the case of Schwitter’s Handlung (Figure 2), the reference to Egypt in the time of the Pharoahs combined with medieval and modern images of women suggest some sort of panoramic sweep through time, but the panels begin with a scene of movie-making and then pass to a portal of a cathedral (Rheims?), then more or less alternate medieval images (angel and madonnas) with contemporary fashion illustrations, timeless slogans and a contemporary street scene. The effect is not of development or progess but immer so (“same as always”). The equivalence of the “good women” images is underlined by their gazes, which are downcast and to the left to various degrees. What sort of time-stamp the barouche makes is not clear to me. Given the date (ca. 1922) the composition might be a charter for a certain kind of normality, stabililty, continuity in the admiring depiction of women (in womanly costume and role, to be sure).

The second matrix (Figure 3) is from virtually the same year by Hannah Höch and deals with the contents of her own personal “house” as it incorporates slogans and profundities uttered by many of the leading Dadaists (Arp, Hülsenbech, Schwitters, Johannes Baader, Hausmann, and Friedländer) alongside Goethe and Nietzsche. These deal with time, death, and various Dada paradoxes. Some of the images seem to be bits for a scrapbook or album–photos, beetles, cross-stitch, stick figures, and chalk drawing of a tree leaf–and to suggest a theme of personal development. The clock with no hands, however, puts quick stop to thoughts of chronological sequencing. Scholars have noted puns (e.g. cross and cross-stitch) and other groupings and correspondences.[6] It is a rich composition with which and upon which to reflect.

With the Schematic group, the principles of the layout seem clear enough, but their semantics may be somewhat enigmatic. The first of these, Figure 4, uses Gerhard Hauptmann’s head, minus his signature shock of white hair, as the setting moon. The other identifiable head is that of John D. Rockefeller, which is spliced onto the body of a woman in a bathing suit; he/she is placed next to a figure with a gorilla head spliced onto another woman’s body. The splice makes her/it one of the three left-facing figures. The legs and feet of the man with serape were clipped from a woman depicted in Die Dame August, 1920. So we have major gender- and species-splicing here (with Höch, almost always male head onto female body). The title refers to a popular song which proclaimed that Germany, though in apparent decline, would rise again. Hauptmann had endorsed the Weimar government and was regarded by the German left, among whom the Dadaists were certainly to be numbered, as having sold out. I suppose the scale is there to measure decline. Is it the signs of returning glory that these discerning financiers are looking at?

Marlene (Figure 5), which was done in 1930 when The Blue Angel was all the rage, literalizes “putting woman on a pedestal” (with a concommitant rearrangement of her body). The little men look on with wonder and admiration, while she smiles like the Cheshire cat on their devotion. This does depart somewhat from earlier, classic Dada flatness (or non-space) in its rather complicated gazed and perspective lines where we are placed high in the superior space of the air (along with Marlene’s face). “Marlene” recalls a line from Hausmann’s “Definition der Foto-Montage”: “The ability to manage the most striking contrasts, to the achievement of perfect states of equilibrium, in other words the formal dialectic qualities which are inherent in photomontage, ensures the medium a long and richly productive life span” (qtd. by Richter 116). In context, Hausmann is talking about the photomontage fragment as representing not only its object but the camera’s eye view of the object, resulting in multiple angles and distances of the viewer from the objects. These do not cohere in a single or even plausible sequence of viewer positions; rather, the scene, as here, balances; physical space and magnitude merge into ideological space and value.

With the Swirl pattern, diagonals set up lines of travel for the eyes, often with a center-periphery layout which is sometimes called centrifugal. Das Kotsbild (Figure 6) is Schwitters again on women, this time on their professions (Frauenberufe), with the phrase Frauenberufe next to and parallel to the word KOTS (“vomit”) on the one hand and Hundehalsbänder (“dog collars”) on the other. At right angles to this array is Samishgares Rindleder (“chamois skins”). Taken together, these can make a case for misogynist revulsion on Schwitter’s part (assuming these words are “uttered” by Schwitters and not cited as “in the air”). Dorothea Dietrich in fact makes that case (142ff).

There is some reason, though, to hold off this conclusion for a while, partly because it is based on taking one part of the image as dominant. The center of the composition is at least shared by the Polish one mark note (with its two female portraits) and the “Anna Blume” tag. Anna Blume was an imaginary beloved to whom Schwitters had written some Dada love poems, which were an immediate international sensation. And there are again bits of fashion catalog and high fashion strolling with your gentleman. One might read Das Kotsbild as displaying the options and attitudes toward women in early Weimar.

Although very similar in visual dynamics, Dada Cino (Figure 7) is surely more exuberant and triumphal, carrying on the “Dada Siegt” theme that is the title of another of Hausmann’s photomontages, this time with some sort of tank or personnel carrier. Inscribed on it is a note to “Lieber Kurt Schwitters” joining Merz and Dada, and the montage has Schwitters’ fashion heads along with Höch’s dancing ladies (and a reference to Picabia’s journal CANNIBALE). Some critics see the whole Dada effusion rising from the source of all human life at the bottom of the piece, but Hausmann’s anatomical cut-aways more often signify the penetrating gaze of Dada (and in any case, the child is still in utero). The “Cino” theme is said to indicate Hausmann’s desire to capture the experience of cinema in photomontage (Benson 185).

Already in the Swirl arrangement, individual fragments are losing definition; even greater numbers pour forth in a Cascade, which profusion, Victor Burgin reminds us, was called Epitrochasm, the classical rhetorical name for one figure of arrangement, namely, one of profusion to the point of disorder.[7] Burgin is following Jacques Durand here, whose point is that the profusion does not lead the eye to groups, oppositions, parallels, or lines of action. We are here at Mark Bernstein’s wilderness. Epitrochasm says “Not to be read in order, or exhaustively.”

Life and Work in Universal City, 12:05 Noon (Figure 8) in general celebrates the prolific new American culture industry–the exotic new world of cinema, which, though “Universal,” is strongly American. The piece begins with a Grösz sketch of a flow of unpleasant looking people, but this is overlaid with a snowfall of publicity snippets, actor’s faces, logos, slogans and sayings (what could “Son of a Gun” [a movie title] have meant to them?!), along with markers of the technology that made it “Universal” (or, universal at 12:05 p.m.–a time with complex Nietzschean resonances for Hanne Bergius). It is an exuberant urban wilderness for exploring.

With patience, disorder sometimes begins to sort itself out. Schnitt (Figure 9) is widely recognised as Höch’s masterpiece and the astonishing portrait of the life of an era–its ethos, its enthusiasms, its major figures, its vitality, and its tensions and contradictions. It is the object of a full-length study by Gertrud Jula Dech, who identifies every fragment she can by content and source, groups them into five major content groups (buildings and cities, animals, machinery, people, words and letters, etc.), with three major thematic clusters (eyes, seeing, and gaze; gender and gender-blending; and movement and balance) and takes us up and down, back and forth in the picture (Schnitt). “Schnitt” would make a wonderful imagemap with Dech’s identifications linked to each identified item. There are clearly plenty of paths and traversals through this “site” that would prove striking, thought-provoking, and finally illuminating.

To recapitulate to this point: Dada photomontages are like representations of some hypertext sites with all of the targets of the main links turned up, as it were. On the usual hypertext page, the source links do not reveal much about their targets; the targets are face down and clicking on one turns it up. On the Dada type site, some of these links will be unexpected–computable, given enough wit, knowledge, and the right frame of mind–but not expected. Second, these fragments are not just tokens for the larger image or text from which they were taken and to which they point, but are arranged into patterns and configurations that are themselves integrative and meaningful. As Benjamin Buchloh says, “the network of cuts and lines of jutting edges and unmediated transitions from fragment to fragment was as important, if not more so, as the actual iconic representations contained within the fragment itself” (64). A website, after all, is not just a list of all the links made from at least one page. Having outlined Dada photomontage in some detail, we can trace its reappearance as critique and recoding of signifying practices in the sitemaps of recent net.art web pages.

Web Site Maps

Sitemaps (by which I mean graphic representations of the structure of a site where the subparts are “hot” links to subportions of the site) can serve at least two purposes: they enable people (“users”) to find things and get them up on screen (aka “navigate to them”), and they can model the relation of the parts to each other and the whole graphically. The first purpose is best served by using a standard schematic format, usually employing the by-now-thoroughly-dead metaphor of files and folders. The second purpose profits from original use of graphic signifiers, but risks unintelligibility. For this reason, writers often supply a standard hypertext table of contents along with their imagemap. One can have a graphic that entirely serves the second purpose. It would not have links (i.e. would not be an imagemap) but would represent the parts of the site and their relations. You just couldn’t navigate with it. It would be like Bernstein’s diagram of “Hypertext Gardens.”[8]

It is possible to have an “abstract” site imagemap, where we have a basic indication of parts and their relation to the whole, but no metaphor. If you have a tree with links as leaves, you have a metaphor; but Figure 10 (the top page of the classic Mola Project–www.iberia.vassar.edu/Mola) shows an almost Islamic refusal of figuration:

Mola Project top Page
Figure 10.

One might suppose that the five top squares would be the main subparts, and that would turn out to be correct. The squares more in the background, however, are split into many little hotspot links; in fact, the map has 73 links from it. Because the fragments are not taken from any place recognizable, they do not function as the fragments do in Dada photomontage. The Mola Project is very cerebral experimental hypertext; it does have a corresponding text-based page, but that is no more perspicuous than this image, in that it is continuous text in which every single word is a link to some place–solid blue underline. In fact, except for a scattering of small images, the other pages on the site are all text, all interlinked, all blue (to start with). Each page links to 6 or 7 other pages in the set (on average) so the site is a dense network–but one without head nodes or hierarchy (by design, to be sure). The site offers no perspective or map of itself–only the five squares of the quilt-mola. It is often said that the essence of hypertext is choice, and normally one has some reason for choosing–a hunch, a stab, a clear indication. But here, where there are many links from one apparently continuous piece of “fabric,” you have not a clue what you may be choosing. You are not only in the wilderness, you are in the dark and without a compass. The effect of the text version is very similar, since a hypertext anchor is usually highlighted (in blue or whatever) and can focus the consideration of whether to “go there.” When the text is all link, and the links merge into each other, one quickly adopts the strategy of stabbing at one thing or another without much reason. At least with the text version, the links to the pages visited turn color, but with the imagemap, not even that is registered. Moral: we expect links to be visually distinct–to have edges–as well as to be visually salient.
     Thought of (as is usual) as a set of pages linked by hypertext anchors, a hypertext site has the structure of a web or “lattice.” This structure can be represented as a set of nodes with the connections between them. (In basic HTML, the connections are one-way). Give the nodes names (or icons) and you have your standard sitemap. It represents the topology of a site, not the topography; nodes are not distinguished by size or proximity/distance. But when making a map with a drawing program, it is very tempting to use size, placement, color, thickness, and nature of line to create a space with ranks and messages beyond the web of connectivity.[9] One could make up one’s own little coding system (“text files are green”), (“large type is major node”). That is about the level at which we start with the Dutch group V2‘s opening page (www.v2.nl):

V2 Home Page ImageMap
Figure 11. (white boxes added to mark hotspots)

This has very much the look of a Schematic diagram: center and periphery. All phrases are hot and many drawn shapes are as well. The basic grid is slightly warped or melted at the top, allowing “DEAF98 THE ART OF THE ACCIDENT” to show (push?) through with top billing. The warp has the effect of propelling this schematic toward metaphor. The schematic is not merely the good site designer’s earnest effort to draw clearly the layout of the site (it does come with a key relating colors to file types); warping the figure at the top insists that it is a rendering of structure in a particular material medium (or pseudo-material medium). (Historical note: The DEAF conference no longer being current, it has been removed at the top and the pattern straightened.) Below this imagemap on the V2 splash page is a straight text menu dividing the site into three heads (V2 Organisatie, V2 Archief, Free Zone) with sub-links.

Shelly Jackson’s imagemap of her site “my body” (www.altx.com/thebody/body.html)

“My Body” Site Imagemap
Figure 12. (white boxes in original) (original is 50% larger)

is a chalk-drawing outline of her body with labelled boxes around body parts that link to pages of text with the body part as topic. This imagemap is a coherent single image with its own meanings, not a Schematic, but it is a nearly literal map of the site, which is made up of pages of thoughts, memories, stories about the various parts of her body. It refuses to be a perfectly accurate or faithful map of all the links from the top page, since some parts are linked without being labelled, and the boxes only roughly overlay the body part. But what it does tell us is that the parts of the site have no more narrative order, groupings, or thematic oppositions than one part of the body has to another.[10]

When the image represents something other than the topic(s) of the site, then we have a visual metaphor for site structure (which of course is not necessarily profound). Consider the imagemap Scott Kerlin makes of his VLO–Virtual Learning Organization (www.teleport.com/~skerlin/roomtour.html)–a term that desperately wants some sort of fleshing in.

Hometour Site Imagemap
Figure 13. (white boxes added)

Kerlin creates a floor plan of a one story structure rather like a converted elementary school. All of the image anchors are bits of text (and interestingly, just the text, not the entire rooms, are “hot”–Kerlin assumes you will position your mouse on the words, as in continuous text). “Well,” you may say, “but this is little more than a seven-by-seven table.” But it is considerably more, with central points, an entrance, proximities, and much of the content of the academic version of life (no place for the Nordic track, the motorboat, or the Nin64). In fact, the “house” metaphor allows him to include his hobbies and interests (even a little corner room for the wife) in the way a table would not (or else it would look like Borges’s Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge.). Further, Kerlin sustains the “subdirectory-as-room” image by repeating the room outline on several of the “go-to-room” entry pages. Here we see clearly the function of the image as metaphor: an image (including a photomontage) is a “take” on some part of the world; an imagemap is a “take” on a site.

A single image imagemap, metaphoric or not, does not closely resemble the photomontages we have examined. Floor plans and body drawings are not Dada. For a Dada imagemap, we turn to a group that invokes the name of Dada (“post-Dada”) and that had its primary impact in the 1960’s and 70’s, but still flies the flag of Fluxus on the Web (www.panix.com/~fluxus).[11] Here is a site imagemap adapted from an old poster by George Maciunas, the Fluxus leader until his death in 1978:

Fluxus Imagemap
Figure 14.

Here many of the cells and sectors are hot links. The arrangement suggests a roulette or game-show spinner and the periphery a board game. The inner sectors straightforwardly take you to subdirectories with the indicated contents–the expected contents of a multimedia installation/presentation oriented collective. The symmetry, strong colors, and stylization all suggest a belonging together that is not exactly matched semantically. What, one may ask, does the box of matches have to do with someone self-administering an enema, a piece of video detritus, or some unintelligible letters? If the gameboard design is a metaphor for a site, it is one which readily accommodates the arbitrary and the incongruous, that has neat squares offering and answering unknown questions, and that confidently mingles bits of order we can grasp and use with bits that we cannot. It is eminently reasonable to call this a Dada site map (or, a Dada sitemap of a Dada site).

To look a little more fully at how graphic site maps can function in web design, we will consider another site, which goes by the name Dada Net Circus (even though that has become the name of an entire performance art group). The main hypertext site is one by Jim Clarage called “Click Me”; it branches into four main “rides,” as Clarage calls them, as indicated in Figure 15:

The four rides illustrate different tactics for different content. Ride 1 is a reworking of Faust in which Mephisto offers Faust unlimited online service–it is strictly sequential and has no hub or imagemap, since the author does not want you to be able to enter the ride in the middle. Ride 3 (“Rocco Rides Again”) is a string of episodes in the career of the porn star Rocco Siffredi. It imitates the non-consequential episodic structure of porn video: entry at any point is the same as another–so Clarage gives it a traditional (and decorous) table of contents. Ride 4 does have a little imagemap menu of 9 cells where cells are linked to pages featuring a larger version of the image in the cell. Such a matrix format for a top page occurs fairly often, usually with an understood sequence of left upper to right lower (if you want to go in sequence from the top). Quite often the 3×3 grid also has some coherence in layout. In this case, the “ride” represents the experience of channel surfing or switching of shows on the “Fitness Channel.” Order of page does not signify sequence or progression here, for the pages give contradictory pitches on how to solve the “problem” of women’s fat. The main principle of sequence is an intensifying hostility to woman’s body which culminates in panel 8. The effect is somewhat confusing, given the expectations of orderly navigation established in Rides 1 and 3. The theme of Ride 2, “Dada,” is the experience of surfing itself, and it is Dada through and through.

In “Dada,” there are two pages of “reasons” posed to the reader as possible answers to the question, “Why do you do what you do when you do the net thing?” Each page has about a dozen links, one to each answer along with a picture illustrating the text. Here the guessing game aspect of hypertext is in the foreground, since the information derived from clicking on these links probably will not help clarify the question or assist in an answer and will provide further evidence of the reader’s addiction to clicking. On the first page one suggested answer, “keeps you up all night,” combines with an old photo of a naked girl in her room with a drip coffee maker–and the target is a larger version of the image–as is the case with the first image of the late 1940s girls displaying their “new [vacuum-tube] computer,” and with “peeping in celebrity windows” of Tonya Harding on her honeymoon. Here or on the second reasons page we find

“bad links” (as the one to the “ultimate site”),
punning links (on the second page from “You do it so well” plus a picture of dancing elephants to the US Open of Surfing [like, in the ocean, man]),
completely unpredictable surprises,
porn sites and Plato,
Brazilian glamor,
a brief snip of an angiogram movie,
French cave paintings,
Sumo wrestling,
an illustrated quotation from Dante,
solarized photography, and
“The Spot”–a group of beautiful people living in a house in Santa Monica (the link to this one is “better than TV” and the picture is of the Brady Bunch).

There is no narrative sequence here, or even any continuity of topic, no filtering or exclusion of the plethora of information just one or two clicks away. It is a schnitt cut through the sagging belly or brain of the addicted surfer in this last/first epoch of the virtual age. This is major epitrochasm, where to be sure the abundance in all directions is the work of surfing–the abundance of individual sites is multiplied by this clicking in all directions. The unsorted cascade of possible answers and illustrations portrays the in-depth probing of media news and talk shows as profoundly frivolous, with each answer getting its equal two instants before being replaced by the next. It is interesting and very unusual that most of these answers are hypertextual as well as conceptual dead ends; they require the use of the back-button to get back to the “reason” pages.

In the “Dada” ride of “Click Me,” Clarage seems to have epitomized certain qualities of “exploring” which turn the Web into a firehose of excessive access but which is the product of our own making as enabled by hypertext. (Some of the other seductive attractions are worked out more deliberately in the “Tantalus” ride as one version of the Faust pact.)

As noted at the outset, imagemaps or image arrays may be offered as navigating aids (or control panels), or they may map conceptual relations among the component pages. A step further in the direction of Dada is taken when the map itself becomes unstable–that is, when it changes from time to time, or when clicking on a spot or square does or does not take you anywhere. This sort of unreliable array is a design feature of the group äda ‘web’s work and is pursued with rigor by Vivian Selbo in her äda ‘web project “Vertical Blanking Interval” (mounted online in December 1996 and now maintained in an archive by the Walker Art Museum at adaweb.walkerart.org).[12] It is thus very close in time as well as technique to Clarage’s “Click Me”: both use screen captures of TV screens, especially advertisements (media bricolage) and both use timed automatic refresh of the screen. The transitions are abrupt, like the cut edges of Dada photomontage, not fade-dissolves.

We have been pursuing the notion that certain Web hypertext juxtaposes in time what Dada photomontage does in space. “Vertical Blanking Interval” merges the two axes: when you click on one of the pages in the array, it changes (or else it changes a certain number of seconds later on its own), so that the spatial pattern of images changes over time and, to a limited degree, it is redesigned by the act of clicking. We cannot of course capture the changing array, but here is a snap shot of it soon after loading:

Early State of Vertical Blanking Interval’s Splash Page
Figure 16.

On first sight, we may try to work out a reading of the composition based on the semantics of the matrix noted above, but as soon as the individual cells begin to refresh themselves with new images, or you trigger a refresh by clicking on a cell, we quickly abandon attempts to read the array pattern. About every half minute or so there is a general refresh of the array which produces a number of new images and the impression of one or two images jumping to another place; overall, the sense is one of non-repeating randomness. In fact, however, there is a stack of about 50 images than run through in the same order in each cell, starting at different points in the stack but always ending with the “submit” button screen that actually does “take” you somewhere beyond the changing 3×4 grid into single screen hypertext (“mind the gap”) and a more usual set of paths and choices. “More usual,” however, is not completely so, for these later pages appear to offer more choices than they actually do: there are numerous directional arrows and image links, but many go to the same place–again, meaningless choices. The matrix array of choices is not just or primarily a signifying practice of the Net, of course; it strongly evokes the arrays of the big TV game shows and the player’s decision whether to risk her bundle on one category or another.

One of the places the central dispatching “Mind the Gap” page may take you is a tight serial tunnel of four pages explaining what a vertical blanking interval is. These pages do not look like continuous text, and you may have ceased to expect any continuity at all by the time you reach them, but they can certainly be read as such, and provide an anchor and initial point of departure for the various associations around the theme of “gap.” The facts are little known and interestingly include a proposed use of the vertical blanking interval to transmit internet data. So it is a “meta” reflection on the Internet medium and on its own gap which it creates between the image or image-text and its original employment as part of an advert. The effect is to suggest the equivalence or identity of the vertical blanking interval (which is a technical capacity that can be exploited and sold), the logic of citationality, and the reader’s experience of the page.

A variant of and slight advance on this changing matrix is one at Ctrl-Alt-Del (www.ctrlaltdel.org/clickclub/pcrec3.htm), which opens with an 18-panel array that changes as soon as you move your mouse into any cell of it. All cells change before you can read the URLs in the status window, so the only way to “choose” is to click on whatever has turned up under your mouse, or move the mouse randomly, hoping for something more interesting (but how would you know, anyway?) “With hypertext, the user is in charge.” Right?

Enough of matrices with their apparent stable set of alternative choices! Changeable buttons and icons, buttons that move, that sometimes go one place, sometimes another, sometimes nowhere at all–these have become signature traits and flourishes of net.art. Let us turn to a more open freestyle placement of fragments in space–the splash page of backspace.org (www.backspace.org).

Early State of Backspace.org’s Splash Page
Figure 17.

The cross-section-marked background suggests an abstract cyberspace in which a few pulsating jewels are placed. These prove to be hot and to provide brief moments, from which one returns… and finds the scattering of jewel-gifs to be altered–some have moved, others are new. (Mouse over this if you have not done so already.) This happens after a certain interval or upon reloading the page (as when returning to it). As with Ctrl-Alt-Del, the notion of choice from among a set of stable alternatives is subverted and, for that matter, so is the notion of significant pattern or placement. The site is hard to grasp because too much is changing in a world where the bounds of variation are not apparent. There is an alternative contents page, which is a simple listing of the 40 small sites, each with its icon, and the main page offers little more in the way of indicated structure. In fact, in one sense, it offers less, since the total set cannot be seen at a glance, but the entire list can be experienced if you wait long enough (and take notes). The effect is of profusion (like the epitrochasm of the Dada cascades), but it is achieved more by suggesting random scattering than by great numbers of icons presented at once.

The Great Dada Sitemapping Machine. The grand prize for the descendants of Dada–The DADAMAX–goes to Mark Napier, who offers the world the services of Shredder to Dadaize Web pages (www.potatoland.org/shredder). Shredder will restyle a page differently each time you apply it. Here for example is one restyling of the September 1999 issue of PMC:

[NB: Your browser does not support inline frames. But you can view the image by clicking: &lt;a href=”dillon/pmcshred1.html” target=”new”&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Figure 18&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;]

The links are still functional on this page and can be read in the status bar: it is just the relations of the links that are presented in an unusual manner. This page, and the unlimited number of other pages like it that Shredder can make, may carry the Cascade/epitrochasm arrangement as far as it can go. It makes sense that Shredder is a robot, since pages, especially top pages, change frequently; we will always be able to knock off a few versions of the new page to choose a best one.

Shredder of course is wholly dedicated to advancing information entropy, which in its most developed form (say, in www.jodi.org) has no table of contents and provides neither the means nor the basis to choose where one “goes” on the site, and hence of “where one is.” A more mixed form (with which we shall conclude) is a site that seems always locked in a mortal struggle with cybernoise and degeneration–daily experiences on the Web, but ones we largely choose to ignore. The cybernoise of www.absurd.org includes scraps of email, technobabble, warnings, contract exclusions, and other textual detritus. Degeneration is a major theme of the site, and an assault on the viewer’s sanity which keeps struggling to grasp what it assumes is the site’s somewhat idiosyncratic structure. They frankly tell us (links disconnected here)

+++++++++dÊÊ-gÉnÉ+++ration+++ z^eite+^D+zéigners scientifically randomize position and relationships of all elements on the page, totally releasing control of any form of layout, what^soever ..... d_{ee-generation} z^Éites metaphorize consistent thematical overuse of rejected visual tokens to disgust and repel, thus creating a near-death experience for zÜrfers by++++++

their eyeballs

1gräBBing them by

aND rhytmically hammering nail of visual knowledge into undeveloped cranïïs, by exposing to imægery beyond comprehension, with imploding cohesiveness of anti-climactic multilayers, developing unique experience, simulating n-dimentional field in the context of the one¹-dimentional cortex, randomly supressing or stimulation urge to operate "back" button either by applying pointy-ing device with certain level of clickability, or leveraging knowledge of implicit k-level vocabulary which+++++

This is not quite the way this material is displayed on their pages (and it continues), but the main tendency is clear. The computer we find epitomized on this site is unruly and unreliable, subject to runaway processes (including artificial life simulations) and various fragmentations, always teetering on the verge of collapse. And never are our strivings for control and meaning more active than when they are threatened by degenerated signal or receiver. We can even make quite a bit of meaning out of these paragraphs of explicit meaning-unmaking, which tells us that our very efforts to restore normal functioning will be used against us.

These last several sites are Dada’s progeny in several ways, most notably in their appropriation of mass media images and disruption of their signifying practices. We might call them Net Neo-Dada. Although the Dadists disbanded almost immediately, so as not to become a Movement, their spirit and practices have been revived many times in the decades since the first and last Dada exhibit in Berlin in 1920, notably by Ed Kienholz and Ed Rauschenberg, by the Pop movements in various countries, by Fluxus, and by the Conceptualists in both Britain and the US. Ah, but you will say, the times are altered: the sense of political, social, and cultural collapse that fueled Berlin Dada, the fury at the symbolic orders that had produced it and were attempting to reestablish themselves with minimal alteration–these things have not been repeated. That is true, but also true is that the mass media have continued to burgeon and now inundate the world with text and image to an extent the Dadists could only begin to imagine, all of it functioning much as it did in 1920 to focus and channel desire and to disseminate a whole symbolic world. And this is as true of the new Web medium as it is of the print or broadcast media. But the Web offers special capacities for citation and juxtaposition–hypertext links–and access to it has not yet come under corporate regulation and control. We might here snip and insert a strip of text from “Hausspruche:” “Die WWWelt ist eine durchaus dadaistiche Angelegenheit” (The Web is a thoroughly dada situation)–not, to be sure, throughout, but here and there in exploratory hyperspace.

Notes

1. Patrick Lynch and Sarah Horton’s CAIM Web Style Guide has come out as a book from Yale University Press, and is available on line (info.med.yale.edu/claim/manual).

2. See Victor Burgin, Between.

3. Reproduced in Graham Clarke, The Photograph, 116.

4. Reproduction, including downloading, of the copyrighted images in this article is prohibited by copyright laws and international conventions without the express written permission of Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

5. Rosler’s views are summarized by Martin Lister in “Photography in the Age of Electronic Imaging.”

6. See Gertrud Jula Dech, “Hannah Höch ist eine durchaus dadaistishe Angelegenheit,” and Armin Schulz, “Bild- and Vokabelmischungen sind Weltanschauungen zu Hannah Höch’s Collage ‘Meine Hausspruche.’”

7. Jacques Durand, ‘Rhetorique et image publicitaire,‘ cited in Victor Burgin, “Photographic Practice and Art Theory,” Thinking Photography, 79.

8.One such site-image occurs at the end of the Symbology section of “Distorted Barbie” (www.users.interport.net/~napier/barbie/barbie.html), where it functions as a recap-and-synthesis.

9. Jacques Bertin speaks of “retinal variables” augmenting the displayed web structure.

10. For another body imagemap where only certain files are linked to body parts, see Seiko Mikami’s biotech art.

11. For a history of this group, particularly in its relation to Dada, see The Fluxus Reader, ed. Ken Friedman.

12. Even the menu frame on the left side of the main splash page moves: it scrolls itself, so that to use it, you have to click it on the run.

Works Cited

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• Burgin, Victor. Between. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986.
• —, ed. Thinking Photography. London: Macmillan, 1982.
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• Dech, Gertrud Jula. “Hannah Höch ist eine durchaus dadaistishe Angelegenheit.” Hannah Höch. Museen der Stadt Gotha, 1993.
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• Dietrich, Dorothea. The Collages of Kurt Schwitters. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.
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• Jackson, Shelly. My Body. alt-x. January 2000 <http://www.altx.com/thebody/body.html>.
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• Landow, George. Hypertext 2.0. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997.
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• Mola Project. January 2000 <http://iberia.vassar.edu/Mola/>.
• Napier, Mark. Distorted Barbie. 1997. January 2000 <http://www.users.interport.net/~napier/barbie/barbie.html>.
• —. Shredder 1.0. POTATOLAND.org, 1998. January 2000 <http://www.potatoland.org/shredder>.
• Richter, Hans. Dada: Art and Anti-Art. Trans. David Britt. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985.
• Schulz, Armin. “Bild- and Vokabelmischungen sind Weltanschauungen zu Hannah Höch’s Collage ‘Meine Hausspruche.’” Hannah Höch. Berlinisher Galerie, 1989.
• Selbo, Vivian. Vertical Blanking Interval. äda ‘web. January 2000 <http://adaweb.walkerart.org/project/selbo>.
• Tufte, Edward. Envisioning Information. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1990.
• —. Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1997.
• V2. January 2000 <http://www.v2.nl/>.
• Virgin Megaweb: Rubrique Smart. January 2000 <http://www.virgin.fr/virgin/html/smart/musee/dada_1.html>.
• www.absurd.org. 1997. January 2000 <http://www.absurd.org/a.html>.
• www.jodi.org. January 2000 <www.jodi.org>.

N. Katherine Hayles

English Department
University of California Los Angeles
HAYLES@humnet.ucla.edu

Five hundred years of print have made the conventions of the book transparent to us.¹ It takes something like Sol Lewitt’s Squares with the Sides and Corners Torn Off to bring into visibility again the convention of the page.²The pages display black squares, centered with white margins, that indeed have their corners torn. But the sides appear to be intact–until we realize that the square in question is not the black image but the entire page, cropped during production. For some time now writers and artists working in the medium of artist books have delighted in arranging such jolts of surprise, exploring, transgressing, and exploding the conventions of the book while still retaining enough “bookishness” to make clear they remain within its traditions, even as they redefine and expand what “book” means. Their work reminds us how important it is to engage the specificity of media.

The long reign of print has induced a kind of somnolence in literary and critical studies, a certain inattentiveness to the diverse forms in which “texts” appear. Literary criticism and theory are shot through with unrecognized assumptions specific to print. Only now, as the new medium of electronic textuality vibrantly asserts its presence, are these clearly coming into view. Re-reading Roland Barthes’s influential essay “From Work to Text,” I am struck both by its presceince and by how far we have moved beyond it. As Jay David Bolter and George Landow have pointed out, Barthes’s description of “text,” with its dispersion, multiple authorship, and rhizomatic structure, uncannily anticipates electronic hypertext (Bolter, Writing Space; Landow, Hypertext). “The metaphor of the Text is that of the network,” Barthes writes (61). Yet at the same time he can also assert that “the text must not be understood as a computable object,” computable here meaning limited, finite, bound, able to be reckoned (57). Written twenty years before the advent of the microcomputer, his essay stands in the ironic position of anticipating what it cannot anticipate. It calls for a movement away from works to texts, a movement so successful that the word “text” has become ubiquitous in literary discourse, almost completely displacing the more specific term “book.” Yet Barthes’s vision remains rooted in print culture, for he defines the text through its differences from books, not through its similarities with electronic textuality. In urging the use of “text,” Barthes was among those who helped initiate semiotic and performative approaches to discourse. But this shift has entailed loss as well as gain. Useful as poststructuralist approaches have been in enabling textuality to expand beyond the printed page, they have also had the effect of eliding differences in media, treating everything from fashion to fascism as a semiotic system. Perhaps now, after the linguistic turn has yielded so many important insights, it is time to turn again to a careful consideration of what difference the medium makes.

In calling for medium-specific analysis, I do not mean to suggest that media should be considered in isolation from one another. Quite the contrary. As Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin have shown in Remediation, media constantly engage in a recursive dynamic of imitating each other, incorporating aspects of competing media into themselves while simultaneously flaunting the advantages their own forms of mediation offer. Voyager’s now-defunct line of “Expanded Books,” for example, went to the extreme of offering readers an option that made the page as it was imaged on screen appear dog-eared. Another function inserted a paper clip at the top of the screenic page, which itself was programmed to look as much as possible like print. On the other side of the screen, many print texts are now imitating electronic hypertexts. These range from DeLillo’s Underworld to Bolter and Grusin’s Remediation, which self-consciously pushes the book form toward hypertext through arrows that serve as visual indications of hypertextual links. Media-specific analysis attends both to the specificity of the form–the fact that the Voyager paper clip is an image rather than a piece of bent metal–and to citations and imitations of one medium in another. Attuned not so much to similarity and difference as to simulation and instantiation, media-specific analysis (MSA) moves from the language of “text” to a more precise vocabulary of screen and page, digital program and analogue interface, code and ink, mutable image and durably inscribed mark, texton and scripton, computer and book.

In the spirit of MSA, I propose the following game. Using only the characteristics of the digital computer, what is it possible to say about electronic hypertext as a literary medium? The point of this game is to disallow all references to the content or operation of electronic hypertexts, although naturally these would be important in any full-scale literary analysis. Restricting ourselves to the medium alone, how far is it possible to go? This kind of analysis is artificial in that it deliberately forbids itself access to the full repertoire of literary reading strategies, but it may nevertheless prove illuminating about what difference the medium makes. Following these rules, I am able to score the following eight points.

Point One: Electronic Hypertexts Are Dynamic Images. In the computer the signifier exists not as a durably inscribed flat mark but as a screenic image produced by layers of code precisely correlated through correspondence rules. Even when electronic hypertexts simulate the appearance of durably inscribed marks, they are transitory images that need to be constantly refreshed to give the illusion of stable endurance through time.

Point Two: Electronic Hypertexts Include Both Analogue Resemblance and Digital Coding. The digital computer is not, strictly speaking, entirely digital. At the most basic level of the computer are electronic polarities, which are related to the bit stream through the analogue correspondence of morphological resemblance. Higher levels of code use digital correspondence, for example in the rules that correlate the compiler language with a programming language like C++ or Lisp. Analogue resemblance typically reappears at the top level of the screenic image, for example in the desktop icon of a trash barrel. Thus digital computers have an Oreo-like structure with an analogue bottom, a frothy digital middle, and an analogue top.³

Point Three: Electronic Hypertexts Are Generated Through Fragmentation and Recombination. As a result of the frothy digital middle of the computer’s structure, fragmentation and recombination are intrinsic to the medium. These textual strategies can of course also be used in print texts, for example in Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poemes. But unlike print, digital texts cannot escape fragmentation, which is deeper, more pervasive, and more extreme than with the alphanumeric characters of print.

Point Four: Electronic Hypertexts Have Depth and Operate in Three Dimensions. Digital coding and analogue resemblance each have specific advantages. Analogue resemblance allows information to be translated between two differently embodied material instantiations, as when a sound wave is translated into the motion of a vibrating diaphragm of a microphone. Whenever two material entities interact, analogue resemblance is likely to come into play because it allows one form of continuously varying information to be translated into a similarly shaped informational pattern in another medium. Once this translation has taken place, digital coding is used to transform the continuity of morphological form into numbers (or other discrete codes). Intrinsic to this process is the transformation of a continuous shape into a series of code markers. In contrast to the continuity of analogue pattern, the discreteness of code enables the rapid manipulation and transmission of information. Human readers, with sensory capabilities evolved through eons of interacting with three-dimensional environments, are much better at perceiving patterns in analogue shapes than performing rapid calculations with numbers. When presented with code, humans tend to push toward perceiving it as analogue pattern. Although most of us learned to read using the digital method of sounding out each letter, for example, we soon began to recognize the shape of words and phrases, thus modulating the discreteness of alphabetic writing with the analogue continuity of pattern recognition. The interplay between analogue and digital takes place in a different way with screenic text than with print, and these differences turn out to be important for human perception. With present-day screens, reading speed on screen is typically about one-sixth that with print. Although the factors causing this difference are not well understood, they undoubtedly have something to do with the dynamic nature of screen images. Text on screen is produced through complex internal processes that make every word also a dynamic image, every discrete letter a continuous process.

To distinguish between the image the user sees and the strings as they exist in the text, Espen Aarseth has proposed the terminology scripton and texton (62ff.). In a digital computer texton could refer to voltages, strings of binary code, or programming code, depending on who the “reader” is taken to be. Scriptons would always include the screen image but could also include any code visible to a user who was able to access different layers of code. Textons can appear in print as well as electronic media. Stipple engraving, although it is normally perceived by the reader as a continuous image, operates through the binary digital distinction of ink dot/no ink dot; here the scripton is the image and the ink dots are the textons.⁴ In electronic media textons and scriptons operate in a vertical hierarchy rather than through the flat microscale/macroscale play of stipple engraving. With electronic texts there is a clear distinction between scriptons that appear on screen and the textons of underlying code, which normally remain invisible to the casual user. This difference between print and screenic text can be summarized by saying that print is flat and code is deep. A corollary is that the flat page of print remains visually and kinesthetically accessible to the user,⁵ whereas the textons of electronic texts can be brought into view only by using special techniques and software.

Point Five: Electronic Hypertexts Are Mutable and Transformable. The multiple coding levels of electronic textons allow small changes at one level of code to be quickly magnified into large changes at another level. The layered coding levels thus act like linguistic levers, giving a single keystroke the power to change the entire appearance of a textual image. An intrinsic component of this leveraging power is the ability of digital code to be fragmented and recombined. Although the text appears as a stable image on screen, it achieves its dynamic power of mutation and transformation through digital fragmentation and recombination. In addition, the rapid processing of digital code allows programs to create the illusion of depth in screenic images, for example in the three-dimensional landscapes of Myst or in the layered windows of Microsoft Word. Thus both scriptons and textons are perceived as having depth, with textons operating digitally through coding levels and scriptons operating analogically through screenic representation of three-dimensional spaces.

Point Six: Electronic Hypertexts Are Spaces to Navigate. Electronic hypertexts are navigable in at least two senses. They present to the user a visual interface which must be navigated through choices the user makes to progress through the hypertext; and they are encoded on multiple levels that the user can access using the appropriate software, for example by viewing the source code of a network browser as well as the surface text. As a result of its construction as a navigable space, electronic hypertext is intrinsically more involved with issues of mapping and navigation than are most print texts.

Point Seven: Electronic Hypertexts Are Written and Read in Distributed Cognitive Environments. Modern-day computers perform cognitively sophisticated acts when they collaborate with human users to create electronic hypertexts. These frequently include acts of interpretation, as when the computer decides how to display text in a browser independent of choices the user makes. It is no longer a question of whether computers are intelligent. Any cognizer which can perform the acts of evaluation, judgment, synthesis, and analysis exhibited by expert systems and autonomous agent software programs should prima facie be considered intelligent. Of course books also create rich cognitive environments, but they passively embody the cognitions of writer, reader, and book designer rather than actively participate in cognition themselves. To say that the computer is an active cognizer does not necessarily mean it is superior to the book as a writing technology. Keeping the book as a passive device for external memory storage and retrieval has striking advantages, for it allows the book to possess a robustness and reliability beyond the wildest dreams of a software designer. Whereas computers struggle to remain viable for a decade, books maintain backward compatibility for hundreds of years. The issue is not the technological superiority of either medium but rather the specific conditions a medium instantiates and enacts. When we read electronic hypertexts, we do so in environments that include the computer as an active cognizer performing sophisticated acts of interpretation and representation. Thus cognition is distributed not only between writer, reader, and designer (who may or may not be separate people) but also between humans and machines (which may or may not be regarded as separate entities).

Point Eight: Electronic Hypertexts Initiate and Demand Cyborg Reading Practices. Because electronic hypertexts are written and read in distributed cognitive environments, the reader necessarily is constructed as a cyborg, spliced into an integrated circuit with one or more intelligent machines. To be positioned as a cyborg is inevitably in some sense to become a cyborg, so electronic hypertexts, regardless of their content, tend toward cyborg subjectivity. Although this subject position may also be evoked through the content of print texts, electronic hypertexts necessarily enact it through the specificity of the medium.

In articulating these eight points, I do not mean to argue for the superiority of electronic media. Rather, I am concerned to delineate characteristics of digital environments that writers and readers can use as resources in creating literature and responding to it in sophisticated, playful ways. In much the same way that artists’ books both reinforce and challenge the conventions of the book, so electronic texts can variously reinforce the characteristics of the medium or work against them by creating representations that mask their operation, as Voyager does with its Expanded Books. In either case the specificity of the medium comes into play as its characteristics are flaunted, suppressed, subverted. Whatever strategies are adopted, they take place within a cultural tradition where print books have been the dominant literary medium for hundreds of years, so it can be expected that electronic literature will use the awesome simulation powers of the computer to mimic print books as well as to insist on its own novelty, in the recursive looping of medial ecology that Bolter and Grusin call remediation.

To show how the eight points discussed above can be mobilized in a reading of an electronic hypertext, I will discuss Shelley Jackson’s brilliantly realized hypertext Patchwork Girl, an electronic fiction that manages to be at once highly original and intensely parasitic on its print predecessors. I have chosen Patchwork Girl for my tutor text not only because I think it is one of the best of the new electronic fictions, but also because it is deeply concerned with the prospect hinted at in Points Seven and Eight, that a new medium will enact and express a new kind of subjectivity. To measure the difference between the subjectivity envisioned in Patchwork Girl and that associated with the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts it parasitizes, I will find it useful to return to the eighteenth century, when a constellation of economic, class, and literary interests clashed over defining the nature of literary property. Although the decisions that emerged from the ensuing legal battles were no sooner formulated than they were again contested in legal and literary arenas, the debate is nevertheless useful as a foil to Jackson’s work, which positions itself against the subjectivity associated with this moment in the print tradition.

Text as Vapor

In his important book Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright, Mark Rose shows that copyright did more than provide a legal basis for intellectual property. The discussions that swirled around copyright also solidified assumptions about what counted as creativity, authorship, and proper literature. One of the important assumptions that emerged out of this debate was the assertion that the literary work does not consist of paper, binding, or ink. Rather, the work was seen as an immaterial mental construct. Here is Blackstone’s assessment: “Style and sentiment are the essentials of a literary composition. These alone constitute its identity. The paper and print are merely accidents, which serve as vehicles to convey that style and sentiment to a distance” (qtd. in Rose 89). The abstraction of the literary work from its physical basis had the effect of obscuring the work’s relation to the economic network of booksellers who purchased shares in the work and used their economic capital to produce books. The more abstract the work became, the further removed it was from the commodification inherent in book sales, and consequently the more exalted the cultural status that could be claimed for it. Cultural capital was maximized by suppressing the relation between cultural and economic capital, although it was primarily economic capital that stimulated the booksellers’s interest in promoting literary works as immaterial works of art. As a result of these representations, literary works operated somewhat like Platonic forms achieving perfection because they were not sullied by the noise of embodiment.

Although Rose does not develop the gender implications of an evaluation that places abstraction above embodiment, his examples reveal that men producing these discourses had specifically in mind the male writer, whose creative masculine spirit gave rise to works of genius that soared above their material instantiations in books. Thus a hierarchy of values emerged which placed at the ascendant end of the scale the disembodied, the creative, the masculine, and the writer who worked for glory; at the lower end of the scale were the embodied, the repetitive, the feminine, and the writer who worked for money.

Rose traces a series of developments that progressively abstracted the work further away from its material instantiation, only to re-embody it in purer, more transcendent form. Although Blackstone located the work both in “style” and “sentiment,” subsequent commentators realized that the part of the work that could be secured as private intellectual property, and therefore the part appropriate for copyright protection, was the way ideas were expressed rather the ideas themselves. This aspect–“style” or “expression”–was frequently likened to clothes that dressed the thought. Through the clothes of expression, the body of the work entered into social legibility and was recognized as partaking in the social regulations that governed exchanges between free men who could hold private property. As Rose makes clear, it was the author’s style–the clothes he selected to dress his thought–that was considered most indicative of his individual personality, so style was also associated with the originality that was rapidly becoming the touchstone of literary value. These interrelations were further extended through metaphors that identified the style with the author’s face. Note that it was the face and not the body. Not only was the body hidden by clothes; more significantly, the body was not recognized as a proper site in which the author’s unique identity could be located. The final move was to reconstitute the author from the “face” exhibited in the style of his works, but by now bodies of all sorts had been left so far behind that critics felt free to attach this ethereal, non-corporeal face to any appropriate subject. (The prime example was the detachment of “Shakespeare” from the historical actor and playwright and the reassignment of his “face” to such august personages as Francis Bacon.) As Rose observes, these developments operated as a chain of deferrals sliding from the embodied to the disembodied, the book to the work, the content to the style, the style to the face, the face to the author’s personality, the personality to the author’s unique genius. The purpose of these deferrals, he suggests, was to arrive at a transcendental signifier that would guarantee the enduring value of the work as a literary property, establishing it as a “vast estate” that could be passed down through generations without diminishing in value.

In the process, certain metaphoric networks were established that continued to guide thinking about literary properties long after the court cases were settled. Perhaps the most important were metaphors equating the work with real estate. The idea that a literary work is analogous to real estate facilitated the fitting together of arguments about copyright with the Lockean liberal philosophy that C. P. Macpherson has labeled possessive individualism. Rose finds it appropriate that James Thomson’s long landscape poem The Seasons became the occasion for a major copyright case, for it was read as a poet transforming the landscape into his private literary property by mixing with it his imagination, just as the Lockean man who owns his person first and foremost creates private property by mixing it with his labor (Rose 113). Whereas the landholder supplies physical labor, the author supplies mental labor, particularly the originality of his unique “style.” Rose makes the connection clear: “The Lockean discourse of property, let us note, was founded on a compatible principle–‘Every Man has a Property in his own Person‘ was Locke’s primary axiom–and thus the discourse of originality also readily blended with the eighteenth-century discourse of property” (121).

We have to go no further than Macpherson to realize, as he pointed out years ago, that there is implicit in Locke a chicken-and-egg problem. Whereas Locke presents his narrative as if market relations arose as a consequence of the creation of private property, it is clear that the discourse of possessive individualism is permeated through and through by market relations from the beginning. Only in a society where market relations were predominant would an argument defining the individual in terms of his ability to possess himself be found persuasive. The same kind of chicken-and-egg problem inheres in the notion of literary property. The author creates his literary property through the exercise of his original genius, yet it is clear that writing is always a matter of appropriation and transformation, from syntax to literary allusions and the structure of tropes. A literary tradition must precede an author’s inscriptions for literature to be possible as such, yet this same appropriation and re-working of an existing tradition is said to produce “original” work. If arguments about literary property were found persuasive in part because they fitted so well together with prevailing notions of liberal subjectivity, that same fit implied that certain common blindnesses were also shared.

In particular, anxiety about admitting that writing was a commercial enterprise haunted many of the defenders of literary properties. In a fine image, Rose remarks that “the sense of the commercial is, as it were, the unconscious of the text” for such defenders of literary property as Samuel Johnson and Edward Young (118). There were other suppressions as well. The erasure of the economic networks that produced the books went along with the erasure of the technologies of production, a tradition that continued beyond print technologies to other media, and beyond Britain to other countries. Rose recounts, for example, the landmark case in the U.S., Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony (1884), in which the court decided that the photograph derived entirely from the photographer’s “‘original mental conception’” and thus owed nothing to the camera that produced it (cited in Rose 135). The decision clearly relied on the notion of the author’s “originality” as a key component of an artistic work. The commitment to originality led to especially strained interpretations when the work was collaborative, for “originality” implied that the work resulted from the unique vision of one gifted individual, not from the joint efforts of a team of skilled craftsmen. Thus the legal fiction was invented that allowed an organization to become the “author,” a fiction that to this day is routinely invoked for films in which hundreds of cultural workers may be involved in the production.⁶

The patchwork quality of these legal fictions indicates how fragile was the consensus hammered out in the eighteenth century. Over subsequent decades and centuries it was challenged repeatedly in court. It was also challenged through artistic productions that sought to wrench the idea of the writer away from the transcendent ideal of the autonomous creator, from the automatic writing of the Surrealists to the theoretical arguments of Michel Foucault in his famous essay “What Is An Author?” Patchwork Girl contributes to these on-going contestations by exploiting the specificities of the digital medium to envision a very different kind of subjectivity than that which emerged in eighteenth-century legal battles over copyright. Those aspects of textual production suppressed in the eighteenth century to make the literary work an immaterial intellectual property–the materiality of the medium, the print technologies and economic networks that produced the work as a commodity, the collaborative nature of many literary works, the literary appropriations and transformations that were ignored or devalued in favor of “originality,” the slippage from book to work to style to face–form a citational substrata for Jackson’s fiction, which derives much of its energy from pushing against these assumptions. When Patchwork Girl foregrounds its appropriation of eighteenth-century texts, the effect is not to reinscribe earlier assumptions but to bring into view what was suppressed to create the literary work as intellectual property. In Patchwork Girl, the unconscious of eighteenth-century texts becomes the ground and surface for the specificity of this electronic text, which delights in pointing out that it was created not by a fetishized unique imagination but by many actors working in collaboration, including the “vaporous machinery” that no longer disappears behind a vaporous text.

Performing Originality through Reinscription

Patchwork Girl‘s emphasis on appropriation and transformation begins with the main character, who is reassembled from the female monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Recall that in Frankenstein the male creature, having been abandoned on the night of his creation and learned through hard experience that humankind finds him repulsive, returns to beg Frankenstein to create a mate for him, threatening dire revenge if he does not. Frankenstein agrees and assembles a female monster, but before animating her, he is struck with horror at the sight of her body and the prospect that she and the monster will have sex and reproduce. While the monster watches howling at the window, Frankenstein tears the female monster to bits. In Shelley Jackson’s text the female monster reappears, put together again by Mary Shelley. Like the female monster’s body, the body of this hypertext is also seamed and ruptured, comprised of disparate parts with extensive links between them. The main components of the hypertextual corpus are “body of text,” containing the female monster’s narration and theoretical speculations on hypertextual and human bodies; “graveyard,” where the stories of the creatures whose parts were used to make the female monster are told; “story,” in which are inscribed excerpts from the relevant passages in Frankenstein along with the monster’s later adventures; “journal,” the putative journal of Mary Shelley, where she records her interactions with the female monster; and “crazy quilt,” a section containing excerpts from Frank Baum’s Patchwork Girl of Oz, as well as reinscriptions from other parts of the text.⁷

From the hypertext links and metaphoric connections between these parts, a vivid picture emerges that radically alters the eighteenth-century view of the subject as an individual with a unique personality and the Lockean ability to possess his own person. For the female monster, it is mere common sense to say that multiple subjectivities inhabit the same body, for the different creatures from whose parts she is made retain their distinctive personalities, making her an assemblage rather than a unified self. Her intestines, for example, are taken from Mistress Anne, a demure woman who prided herself on her regularity. The monster’s large size required additional footage, so Bossy the cow contributed, too. Bossy is as explosive as Mistress Anne is discreet, leading to expulsions that pain Mistress Anne, who feels she must take responsibility for them. The conflict highlights the monster’s nature as a collection of disparate parts. Each part has its story, and each story constructs a different subjectivity. What is true for the monster is also true for us, Jackson suggests in her article “Stitch Bitch: the Patchwork Girl.” “The body is a patchwork,” Jackson remarks, “though the stitches might not show. It’s run by committee, a loose aggregate of entities we can’t really call human, but which have what look like lives of a sort… [These parts] are certainly not what we think of as objects, nor are they simple appendages, directly responsible to the brain” (527).

The distributed nature of the monster’s subjectivity–and implicitly ours as well–is further performed in the opening graphic. Even before the title page appears, an image comes up entitled “her,” displaying a woman’s body against a black ground. Traversing the body are multiple dotted lines, as if the body were a crazy quilt of scars or seams; retrospectively the reader can identify this image as representing the female monster’s patched body, among other possible referents. Cutting diagonally across the ground of this image is a dotted line, the first performance of a concept central to this hypertext. As the reader progresses further into the text, a map view of the different parts opens up, displayed in the Storyspace software (in which the text is written) as colored rectangles which, when clicked, contain smaller rectangles representing paragraph-sized blocks of text or lexias. The lexia “dotted line” explicates the significance of this image. “The dotted line is the best line,” this lexia proclaims, because the dotted line allows difference without “cleaving apart for good what it distinguishes” (body of text/dotted line). Hovering between separation and connection, the dotted lines marks the monster’s affinities with the human as well as her differences from other people.

The dotted line is also significant because it suggests that the image can move from two to three dimensions, as in a fold-up that lets “pages become tunnels or towers, hats or airplanes” (body of text/dotted line). The movement out of the flat plane evokes the hypertext’s stacks, which suggest through their placement a three-dimensional depth to the screen and a corresponding ability to emerge from the depths or recede into them. The text mobilizes the specificity of the technology by incorporating the three-dimensionality of linked windows as a central metaphor for the fiction’s own operations. Like the hypertext stacks, the monster will not be content to reside quiescent on the page, moving fluidly between the world represented on the pages of Mary Shelley’s text and the three-dimensional world in which Mary Shelley lives as she writes this text. Lying on a plane but also suggesting a fold upward, the dotted line becomes itself a kind of join or scar that marks the merging of fiction and metafiction in a narrative strategy that Gerard Genette has called metalepsis, the merging of diegetic levels that normally would be kept distinct.⁸ It signals the dangerous potential of the monstrous text/body to disrupt traditional boundaries in a border war where the stakes are human identity.

In hypertext fashion, let us now click back to “her,” the opening graphic, and explore some of the other links radiating out from this lexia. Linked to “her” is “phrenology,” a graphic that further performs the metaphoric overlay of body and text. Showing a massive head in profile, “phrenology” displays the brain partitioned by lines into a crazy quilt of women’s names and enigmatic phrases. When we click on the names, we are taken to lexias telling the women’s stories from whose parts the monster was assembled; clicking on the phrases takes us to lexias that meditate on the nature of “her” multiple subjectivities. Thus we enter these textual blocks through a bodily image, implying that the text lies within the represented body. This dynamic inverts the usual perception the reader has with print fiction, that the represented bodies lie within the book. In print fiction, the book as physical object often seems to fade away as the reader’s imagination re-creates the vaporous world of the text, so that reading becomes, as Friedrich Kittler puts it, a kind of hallucination. The bodies populating the fictional world seem therefore to be figments of the reader’s imagination. First comes the immaterial mind, then from it issue impressions of physical beings. Here, however, the body is figured not as the product of the immaterial work but a portal to it, thus inverting the usual hierarchy that puts mind first. Moreover, the partitioning of the head, significantly seen in profile so it functions more like a body part than a face delineating a unique identity, emphasizes the multiple, fragmented nature of the monster’s subjectivity. The body we think we have–coherent, unified, and solid–is not the body we actually are, Jackson claims in “Stitch Bitch.” Like the monster’s body, our corporeality, which she calls the “banished body,” is “a hybrid of thing and thought… Its public image, its face is a collage of stories, borrowed images, superstitions, fantasies. We have no idea what it ‘really’ looks like” (523).

Although the monster’s embodiment as an assemblage may seem unique, Jackson employs several strategies to demonstrate that it is not nearly so unusual as it may appear. Drawing on the contemporary discourses of technoscience, the lexia “bio” points out that “the body as seen by the new biology is chimerical. The animal cell is seen to be a hybrid of bacterial species. Like that many-headed beast [the chimera], the microbeast of the animal cells combines into one entity, bacteria that were originally freely living, self sufficient and metabolically distinct” (body of text/bio). In this view, the “normal” person is already an assemblage, designed so by evolutionary forces that make Frankenstein appear by comparison an upstart amateur. Other perspectives yield the same conclusion. Boundaries between self and other are no more secure than those between plant, animal, and human. “Keep in mind,” the monster warns us in “hazy whole,” that “on the microscopic level, you are all clouds. There is no shrink-wrap preserving you from contamination: your skin is a permeable membrane… if you touch me, your flesh is mixed with mine, and if you pull away, you may take some of me with you, and leave a token behind” (body of text/hazy whole). The mind, Jackson writes in “Stitch Bitch,” “what zen calls monkey-mind and Bataille calls project, has an almost catatonic obsession with stasis, centrality, and unity.” The project of writing, and therefore of her writing most of all, is to “dismantle the project” (527).

Following this philosophy, the text not only normalizes the subject-as-assemblage but also presents the subject-as-unity as a grotesque impossibility. The narrator satirizes the unified subject by evoking visions of resurrection, when the body will be “restored to wholeness and perfection, even a perfection it never achieved in its original state” (body of text/resurrection). But how can this resurrection be performed? What about amputees who have had their limbs eaten by other creatures? Following medieval theology that held the resurrected body will “take its matter, if digested, from the animal’s own flesh,” the narrator imagines those parts re-forming themselves from the animals’ bodies. The “ravens, the lions, the bears, fish and crocodiles… gang up along shorelines and other verges to proffer the hands, feet and heads that they are all simultaneously regurgitating whole… big toe scraping the roof of the mouth, tapping the teeth from the inside, seeming alive, wanting out” (body of text/resurrection/remade). Bizarre as this scenario is, it is not as strange as the problems entertained by medieval theologians trying to parcel everything out to its proper body. Some philosophers theorized that eaten human remains will be reconstituted from the “nonhuman stuff” the creature has eaten, a proposition that quickly becomes problematic, as the narrator points out: “But what (hypothesized Aquinas) about the case of a man who ate only human embryos who generated a child who ate only human embryos? If eaten matter rises in the one who possessed it first, this child will not rise at all. All its matter will rise elsewhere: either in the embryos its father ate… or in the embryos it ate” (body of text/resurrection/eaten). This fantastic scenario illustrates that trying to sort things out to achieve a unity (that never was) results in confusions worse than accepting the human condition as multiple, fragmented, chimerical.

As the unified subject is thus broken apart and reassembled as a multiplicity, the work also highlights the technologies that make the textual body itself a multiplicity. To explore this point, consider how information moves across the interface of the CRT screen compared to books. With print fiction, the reader decodes a durable script to create, in her mind, a picture of the verbally represented world. As we have seen, with an electronic text the encoding/decoding operations are distributed between the writer, computer, and reader. The writer encodes, but the reader does not simply decode what the writer has written. Rather, the computer decodes the encoded information, performs the indicated operations, and then re-encodes the information as flickering images on the screen. The transformation of the text from durable inscription into what I have elsewhere called a flickering signifier means that it is mutable in ways that print is not, and this mutability serves as a visible mark of the multiple levels of encoding/decoding intervening between user and text (Hayles, “Virtual Bodies”). Through its flickering nature, the text-as-image teaches the user that it is possible to bring about changes in the screenic text that would be impossible with print (changing fonts, colors, type sizes, formatting, etc.). Such changes imply that the body represented within the virtual space is always already mutated, joined through a flexible, multilayered interface with the reader’s body on the other side of the screen. As Jackson puts it in “Stitch Bitch,” “Boundaries of texts are like boundaries of bodies, and both stand in for the confusing and invisible boundary of the self” (535).

These implications become explicit in one of the opening graphics of Patchwork Girl, “hercut 4.” In this image the monster’s body, which was previously displayed with dotted lines traversing it, has now become completely dismembered, with limbs distributed into rectangular blocks defined by dotted lines, thus completing the body/text analogy by making the body parts visually similar to the hypertext lexias, connected to each other in the Storyspace display by lines representing hypertext links. In addition, the upper right-hand corner of the image looks as though it has been torn off, revealing text underneath. Although fragmentary, enough of the text is visible to allow the reader to make out that it is giving instructions on how to create links to “interconnect documents and make it easier to move from place to [word obscured].” Thus the text underlying the image points to the software program underlying the text, so the entire image functions as an evocation of the multilayered coding chains flexibly mutating across interfaces to create flickering signifiers.

Of course print texts are also dispersed, in the sense that they cite other texts at the same time they transform those citations by embedding them in new contexts, as Derrida among others has taught us. Moreover, print texts can engage in reflexive play at least as complex as anything in Patchwork Girl, as Michael Snow’s wonderful artist book Cover to Cover playfully demonstrates.⁹ The specificity of an electronic hypertext like Patchwork Girl comes from the ways in which it mobilizes the resources of the medium to enact subjectivities distributed in flexible and mutating ways across author, text, interface, and reader. As we have seen, electronic text is less durable and more mutable than print, and the active interface is not only multilayered but itself capable of cognitively sophisticated acts. By exploiting these characteristics, the author (more precisely, the putative author) constructs the distinctions between author and character, reader and represented world, as permeable membranes that can be configured in a variety of ways.

In Patchwork Girl, one of the important metaphoric connections expressing this flickering connectivity is the play between sewing and writing. Within the narrative fiction of Frankenstein, the monster’s body is created when Frankenstein patches the body parts together; at the metafictional level, Mary Shelley creates this patching through her writing. Within Patchwork Girl, however, it is Mary Shelley (not Frankenstein) who assembles the monster, and this patching is specifically identified with the characteristically feminine work of sewing or quilting. The fact that this sewing takes place within the fiction makes Mary Shelley a character written by Shelley Jackson rather than an author who herself writes. This situation becomes more complex when Mary Shelley is shown both to sew and write the monster, further entangling fiction and metafiction. “I had made her, writing deep into the night by candlelight,” Mary Shelley narrates, “until the tiny black letters blurred into stitches and I began to feel that I was sewing a great quilt” (journal/written). This lexia is linked with “sewn”: “I had sewn her, stitching deep into the night by candlelight, until the tiny black stitches wavered into script and I began to feel that I was writing, that this creature I was assembling was a brash attempt to achieve by artificial means the unity of a life-form” (journal/sewn).

The feminine associations with sewing serve to mark this as a female–and feminist–production. Throughout, the relation between creature and creator in Patchwork Girl stands in implicit contrast to the relation between the male monster and Victor Frankenstein. Whereas Victor participates, often unconsciously, in a dynamic of abjection that results in tragedy for both creator and creature, in Patchwork Girl Mary feels attraction and sympathy rather than horror and denial. In contrast to Victor’s determination to gain preeminence as a great scientist, Mary’s acts of creation are hedged with qualifications that signal her awareness that she is not so much conquering the secrets of life and death as participating in forces greater than she. In “sewn,” the passage continues with Mary wondering whether the monster’s fragmented unity is “perhaps more rightfully given, not made; continuous, not interrupted; and subject to divine truth, not the will to expression of its prideful author. Authoress, I amend, smiling” (journal/sewn). The self-conscious placement of herself in an inferior position of “authoress” compared to the male author–surely in relation to her husband most of all–is connected in Jackson’s text with subtle suggestions that the monster and Mary share something Mary and her husband do not, an intimacy based on equality and female bonding rather than subservience and female inferiority. Although Mary confesses sometimes to feeling frightened of the female monster, she also feels compassionate and even erotic attraction toward her creation. Whereas Victor can see his monster only as a competitor whose strength and agility are understood as threats, Mary exults in the female monster’s physical strength, connecting it with the creature’s freedom from the stifling conventions of proper womanhood. When the female monster leaves her creator to pursue her own life and adventures, Mary, unlike Victor, takes vicarious delight in her creation’s ability to run wild and free.

In her comprehensive survey of the status of the body in the Western philosophic tradition, Elizabeth Grosz has shown that there is a persistent tendency to assign to women the burden of corporeality, leaving men free to imagine themselves as disembodied minds–an observation that has been familiar to feminists at least since Simone de Beauvoir. Even philosophers as sympathetic to embodiment as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Mark Johnson are often blind to issues of gender, implicitly assuming the male body as the norm. The contrast between woman as embodied female and man as transcendent mind is everywhere at work in the comparison between Mary’s care for the female monster and Victor’s astonishing failure to anticipate any of the male creature’s corporeal needs, including the fact that making him seven feet tall might make it difficult for the monster to fit into human society. Whereas the disembodied text of the eighteenth-century work went along with a parallel and reinforcing notion of the author as a disembodied face, in Jackson’s text the emphasis on body and corporeality goes along with an embodied author and equally material text. “The banished body is not female, necessarily, but it is feminine,” Jackson remarks in “Stitch Bitch.” “That is, it is amorphous, indirect, impure, diffuse, multiple, evasive. So is what we learned to call bad writing. Good writing is direct, effective, clean as a bleached bone. Bad writing is all flesh, and dirty flesh at that… Hypertext is everything that for centuries has been damned by its association with the feminine” (534).

Reinforcing this emphasis on hypertext as “femininely” embodied are links that re-embody passages from Shelley’s text into contexts which subtly or extravagantly alter their meaning. A stunning example is the famous passage from the 1831 preface where Mary Shelley bids her “hideous progeny go forth and prosper” (qtd. in story/severance/hideous progeny). “I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words which found no true echo in my heart. Its several pages speak of many a walk, many a drive, and many a conversation, when I was not alone; and my companion was one who, in this world, I shall never see more. But this is for myself; my readers have nothing to do with these associations” (qtd. in story/severance/hideous progeny). In the context of Frankenstein, “hideous progeny” can be understood as referring both to the text and to the male monster. As Anne Mellor points out, taking the text as the referent places Mary Shelley in the tradition of female writers of Gothic novels who were exposing the dark underside of British society. When the monster is taken as the referent, the passage suggests that Mary Shelley’s textual creature expresses the fear attending birth in an age of high mortality rates for women and infants–a fear that Shelley was to know intimately from wrenching personal experience. Moreover, in Barbara Johnson’s reading of Frankenstein, Shelley is also giving birth to herself as a writer in this text, so her authorship also becomes a “hideous progeny.” The rich ambiguities that inhere in the phrase make Jackson’s transformation of it all the more striking.

In Jackson’s work, the passage’s meaning is radically changed by “Thanks,” to which it is linked. In this lexia, the female monster says, “Thanks, Mary, for that kindness, however tinged with disgust. Hideous progeny: yes, I was both those things, for you, and more. Lover, friend, collaborator. It is my eyes you describe–with fear, yes, but with fascination: yellow, watery, but speculative eyes” (story/severance/hideous progeny/thanks). The linked passage changes the referent for “hideous progeny,” so that the female monster occupies the place previously held by the male creature, the text of Frankenstein, and Mary Shelly as writer. All these, the link implies, are now embedded as subtexts in the female monster, who herself is indistinguishable from the ruptured, seamed textual body that both contains her and is contained by her. “The hypertext is the banished body,” Jackson remarks in “Stitch Bitch.” “Its compositional principle is desire” (536). If desire is enacted by activating links, this linked text not only expresses the reader’s desire but also Mary’s desire for her monstrous creation. Its most subversive–and erotic–implication comes in changing the referent for the lost companion “who, in this world, I shall never see more.” Now it is not her husband whose loss Mary laments but the female monster–the “lover, friend, collaborator” without whom Patchwork Girl could not have been written.¹⁰

Among Patchwork Girl‘s many subversions is its attack on the “originality” of the work. “In collage, writing is stripped of the pretense of originality,” Jackson writes in “Stitch Bitch.” “One can be surprised by what one has to say in the forced intercourse between texts or the recombinant potential in one text, by other words that mutter inside the proper names” (537). This muttering becomes discernible in Shelley Jackson’s playful linking of her name with Mary Shelley’s. The title page of Jackson’s work performs this distributed authorship, for it says Patchwork Girl is “by Mary/Shelley & herself,” a designation that names Mary Shelley, Shelley Jackson, and the monster all as authors. (In a perhaps intentional irony, the Eastgate title page inscribes Jackson’s name below as the “authorized” signature, along with the usual warnings about copyright infringement, even though the entire thrust of Jackson’s text pushes against this view of a sole author who produces an original work.) Jackson’s subversions of her publisher’s proprietary claims continue in a section entitled “M/S,” a naming that invites us to read the slash as both dividing and connecting Mary Shelley and Shelley Jackson. When Jackson re-inscribes Shelley’s text into hers, the act is never merely a quotation, even when the referents are not violently wrenched away from the originals as in “Thanks”; witness the fact that Jackson divides Shelley’s text into lexias and encodes it into the Storyspace software. Rather, the citation of Shelley is a performative gesture indicating that the authorial function is distributed across both names, as the nominative they share between them would suggest (Mary Shelley/Shelley Jackson). In addition, the slash in M/S (ironically interjected into the MS which would signify the “original” material text in normal editorial notation) may also be read as signifying the computer interface connecting/dividing Mary Shelley, a character in Patchwork Girl, with Shelley Jackson, the author who sits at the keyboard typing the words that conflate Mary’s sewing and writing and so make “Shelley” into both character and writer. The computer thus also actively participates in the construction of these flickering signifiers in all their distributed, mutable complexity. “There is a kind of thinking without thinkers,” the narrator declares in “it thinks.”

Matter thinks. Language thinks. When we have business with language, we are possessed by its dreams and demons, we grow intimate with monsters. We become hybrids, chimeras, centaurs ourself: steaming flanks and solid redoubtable hoofs galloping under a vaporous machinery. (body of text/it thinks)

The surface of the text-as-image may look solid, this passage suggests, but the “vaporous machinery” generating it marks that solidity with the mutability and distributed cognition characteristic of flickering signifiers. Even the subject considered in itself is a site for distributed cognition, Jackson argues in “Stitch Bitch.” “Thinking is conducted by entities we don’t know, wouldn’t recognize on the street,” Jackson writes. “Call them yours if you want, but puff and blow all you want, you cannot make them stop their work one second to salute you” (527).

The trace of flickering signification is as pervasive and inescapable in this text as it is with the constantly refreshed CRT screen. In one of the fiction’s climactic scenes, Mary and the monster, having become lovers and grown physically intimate with each other’s bodies, decide to swap patches of skin. Each lifts a circle of skin from her leg, and Mary sews her flesh onto the monster, and the monster’s flesh onto her own human leg. This suturing of self onto other reveals more than a wish of lovers to join. Because Mary is the monster’s creator in a double sense, at once sewing and writing her, the scene functions as a crossroads for the traffic between fiction and metafiction, writer and character, the physical body existing outside the textual frame sutured together with representations of the body in virtual space. Throughout, the narrator has been at pains to point out the parallels between surgery and writing: “Surgery was the art of restoring and binding disjointed parts… Being ‘seam’d with scars’ was both a fact of eighteenth-century life and a metaphor for dissonant interferences ruining any finely adjusted composition” (body of text/mixed up/seam’d). One of the sutures that reappears in several lexias is the “intertwisted” closing that “left needles sticking in the wounds–in manner of tailors–with thread wrapped around them” (body of text/mixed up/seam’d). Thus a metaphoric relay system is set up between surgery, particularly sutures using needle and thread, sewing, the seamed body, and writing.

Jackson uses this relay system of surgery/sewing/writing to set up an argument about “monstrous” writing that reverberates throughout the text. The narrator points out that “the comparison between a literary composition and the fitting together of the human body from various members stemmed from ancient rhetoric. Membrum or ‘limb’ also signified ‘clause’” (body of text/typographical). As the narrator notes, this body/writing analogy allowed rhetoricians to conclude that writing was bad if it resembled a disproportioned or grotesque body. But the analogy was to go only so far; writing was not actually to become the body. Decorum dictated that the barrier between the book as physical object and text as immaterial work be maintained intact. Joseph Addison found any writing distasteful that was configured in the shape of the object it represented, such as George Herbert’s poem “Wings,” printed to resemble the shape of wings. The narrator remarks that Addison called this “visual turning of one set of terms into another” the “Anagram of a Man” and labeled it a classic example of “False Wit” (body of text/typographical). This aesthetic judgment is consistent with the assumption that the work is immaterial. Making the physical appearance of the text a signifying component was improper because it suggested the text could not be extracted from its physical form. According to this aesthetic, bodies can be represented within the text but the body of the text should not mix with these representations. To do so is to engage in what Russell and Whitehead would later call a category mistake–an ontological error that risks, through its enactment of hybridity, spawning monstrous bodies on both sides of the textual divide.

It is precisely such breaches of good taste and decorum that the monster embodies. Her body, “seam’d with scars,” becomes a metaphor for the ruptured, discontinuous space of the hypertext, which in its representations also flagrantly violates decorum by transgressively mixing fiction and metafiction in the same chaotic arena. When deciding what skin to swap, the monster, with Mary’s consent, significantly decides that “the nearest thing to a bit of my own flesh would be this scar, a place where disparate things are joined in a way that was my own” (story/severance/join). Comprised of parts taken from other textual bodies (Frankenstein and Frank Baum’s Patchwork Girl of Oz, among others), this hypertext, like the monster’s body, hints that it is most itself in the links and seams that join one part to another. “My real skeleton is made of scars,” the monster says in a passage that conflates body and text, “a web that traverses me in three dimensions. What holds me together is what marks my dispersal. I am most myself in the gaps between my parts” (body of text/dispersed). The reader inscribes her subjectivity into this text by choosing what links to activate, what scars to trace. Contrary to the dictates of good taste and good writing, the scars/links thus function to join the text with the corporeal body of the reader, which performs the enacted motions that bring the text into being as a sequential narrative. Because these enactions take place through the agency of the computer, all these bodies–the monster, Mary Shelley, Shelley Jackson, the specificity of the electronic text, the active agency of the digital interface, and we the readers–are made to participate in the mutating configurations of flickering signifiers.

As a result of these dotted-line connections/divisions, the text has a livelier sense of embodiment than is normally the case, and the bodies within the text are more densely coded with textuality. “I am a mixed metaphor,” the monstrous text/textualized monster declares. “Metaphor, meaning something like ‘bearing across,’ is itself a fine metaphor for my condition. Every part of me is linked with other territories alien to it but equally mine. . . borrowed parts, annexed territories. I cannot be reduced, my metaphors are not tautologies, yet I am equally present in both poles of a pair, each end of the wire is tethered to one of my limbs. The metaphorical principle is my true skeleton” (body of text/metaphor me). The multilayered sense of “metaphor” here–a rhetorical trope of writing that is also a Storyspace link and a scar traversing the monster’s body–implies that the movement up and down fictional/metafictional levels is not limited to certain moments in the text but pervades the text as a whole, spreading along with (and becoming indistinguishable from) the “true skeleton” of the text/monster/software. In this fluid movement between bodies inside texts and texts inside bodies, inside is constantly becoming outside becoming inside, as if performing at the visible level of the text the linkages between different coding levels within the computer. The dynamic makes real for the user that each visible mark on the screen, in contrast to the flat mark of print, is linked with multiple coding levels whose dimensionalities can expand or contract as the coding commands require.

The dynamic inside/outside/inside is vividly, hauntingly represented in “body jungle,” in which the monster dreams herself inside a lush jungle landscape comprised of body parts: beating hearts “roost like pheasants on high bone branches”; “intestines hang in swags from ribs and pelvic crests, or pile up like tires at the ankles of legs become trees”; “ovaries hang like kumquats from delicate vines” (story/falling apart/body jungle). The monster imagines passing days and nights in the jungle: “In the morning the convoluted clouds will think about me. They will block my view of the domed sky, which I know will bear faint suture marks, the knit junctures between once-soft sectors of sky.” In time she supposes that her legs will be dissolved by the acid dripping form the overhanging stomachs: “My bony stumps will sink deep; I will shuffle forward until I tire, then stand still. I will place the end of a vein in my mouth and suck it. At last I will no longer bother to remove it… I do not know how my skull will open, or if I will still know myself when my brain drifts up to join the huge, intelligent sky.” In this vision she becomes a body part of some larger entity, perhaps the computer that thinks/dreams her, just as her parts were once autonomous entities who have now been incorporated into the larger whole/hole that she is. In hypertext fiction, Jackson remarks in “Stitch Bitch,” there are especially powerful opportunities to “sneak up on reality from inside fiction to turn around and look back on reality as a text embedded in a fictional universe” (534).

We can now see that the construction of multiple subjectivities in this text and the reconfiguration of consciousness to body are both deeply bound up with what I have been calling flickering signification, constituted through the fluidly mutating connections between writer, interface, and reader. It is not the hypertext structure that makes Patchwork Girl distinctively different from print books. As Dictionary of the Khazars has taught us (along with similar works), print texts may also have hypertext structures. Rather, Patchwork Girl could only be an electronic text because the trace of the computer interface, penetrating deeply into its signifying structures, does more than mark the visible surface of the text; it becomes incorporated into the textual body. Flickering signification, which in a literal and material sense can be understood as producing the text, is also produced by it as a textual effect.

It is primarily through the complex enactment of linking structures, both within the text and within the distributed cognitive environment in which the text is read, that Patchwork Girl brings into view what was suppressed in eighteenth-century debates over copyright. Instead of an immaterial work, this text foregrounds the materiality of fictional bodies, authorial bodies, readerly bodies, and the writing technologies that produce and connect them. Instead of valorizing originality, it produces itself and its characters through acts of appropriation and transformation that imply writing and subjectivity are always patchwork quilts of reinscription and innovation. Rejecting the notion of an author’s unique genius, it self-consciously insists on the collaborative nature of its productions, from the monster as assemblage to the distribution of authorship between the monster “herself,” Mary Shelley, Shelley Jackson, the reader, the computer, and other more shadowy actors as well.

To complete the comparison between Patchwork Girl and the subjectivity implicit in eighteenth-century debates over copyright, let us now turn to the distinctions between style and idea, form and content, face and body that informed the invention of copyright. Although one could still talk about the “style” of Patchwork Girl, the text offers another set of terms in which to understand its complexities: the alternation between lexia and link, the screen of text that we are reading versus the “go to” computer command that constitutes the hypertextual link in electronic media. In Patchwork Girl this alternation is performed through a network of interrelated metaphors, including tissue and scar, body and skeleton, presence and gap. Underlying these terms is a more subtle association of link and lexia with simultaneity and sequence. The eighteenth-century trope of the text as real estate has obviously been complicated by the distributed technologies of cyberspace. When the print book becomes unbound in electronic media, time is affected as well. The chronotopes of electronic fictions function in profoundly different ways than the chronotopes of literary works conceived as books. Exploring this difference will open a window onto the connections that enfold the link and lexia together with sequence and simultaneity.

With many print books, the order of pages recapitulates the order of time in the lifeworld. Chronology might be complicated through flashbacks or flashforwards, but normally this is done in episodes that stretch for many pages. There are of course notable exceptions, for example Robert Coover’s print hypertext “The Babysitter.” Choosing not to notice such experimental print fictions, the narrator of Patchwork Girl remarks, “When I open a book I know where I am, which is restful. My reading is spatial and even volumetric. I tell myself, I am a third of the way down through a rectangular solid, I am a quarter of the way down the page, I am here on the page, here on this line, here, here, here” (body of text/this writing). In Patchwork Girl, like many hypertexts, chronology is inherently tenuous because linking structures leap across time as well as space. As if recapitulating the processes of fragmentation and recombination made possible by digital technologies, Patchwork Girl locates its performance of subjectivity in the individual lexia. Since the past and the future can be played out in any number of ways, the present moment, the lexia we are reading right now, carries an unusually intense sense of presence, all the more so because it is a smaller unit of narration than normally constitutes an episode. “I can’t say I enjoy it, exactly,” the narrator comments. “The present moment is furiously small, a slot, a notch, a footprint, and on either side it is a seethe of possibility, the dissolve of alphabets and of me” (body of text/a slot, a notch).

Sequence is constructed by accumulating a string of present moments when the reader clicks on links, as if selecting beads to string for a necklace. In contrast to this sequence is the simultaneity of the computer program. Within the non-Cartesian space of computer memory, all addresses are equidistant (within near and far memory, respectively), so all lexias are equally quick to respond to the click of the mouse (making allowance for those that load slower because they contain more data, usually images). This situation reverses our usual sense that time is passing as we watch. Instead, time becomes a river that always already exists in its entirety, and we create sequence and chronology by choosing which portions of the river to sample. There thus arises a tension between the sequence of lexias chosen by the reader, and the simultaneity of memory space in which all the lexias always already exist. The tension marks the difference between the narrator’s life as the reader experiences it, and that life as it exists in a space of potentiality in which “everything could have been different and already is” (story/rethinking/a life).

When the narrator-as-present-subject seeks for the “rest of my life,” therefore, the situation is not as simple as a unified subject seeking to foresee a future stretching in unbroken chronology before her. To find “the rest of my life,” the narrator must look not forward into the passing of time but downward into the computer space in which discrete lexias lie jumbled all together. “I sense a reluctance when I tow a frame forward into the view,” the narrator says in an utterance that conflates writer, reader, and character, as if reflecting within the jumble of fiction and metafiction the jumbled time represented by the lexias. “It is a child pulled out of a fantastic underground hideaway to answer a history quiz. Were you brought out of polymorphous dreams, in which mechanical contraptions, funnels, tubes and magnifying glasses mingled with animal attentions and crowd scenes, into a rigidly actual and bipolar sex scene? Don’t worry, little boxy baby, I will lift you by your ankles off the bed… I will show you the seductions of sequence, and then I will let the aperture close, I will let you fall back into the muddled bedsheets, into the merged molecular dance of simultaneity” (story/rest of my life).

The interjection of simultaneity into the sequence of a reader’s choices makes clear why different ontological levels (character, writer, reader) mingle so monstrously in this text. In the heart of the computer, which is to say at the deepest levels of machine code, the distinctions between character, writer, and reader are coded into strings of ones and zeros in a space where the text written by a human writer and a mouse click made by a human reader are coded in the same binary form as machine commands and computer programs. When the text represents this process (somewhat misleadingly) as a “merged molecular dance of simultaneity,” it mobilizes the specificity of the medium as an authorization for its own vision of cyborg subjectivity.

Part of the monstrosity, then, is this mingling of the subjectivity we attribute to characters, authors, and ourselves as readers, with the non-anthropomorphic actions of the computer program. This aspect of the text’s monstrous hybridity is most apparent in “Crazy Quilt,” where excerpts from Frank Baum’s The Patchwork Girl of Oz increasingly intermingle with other sections of the hypertext and with the instructions from the Storyspace manual. Typical is “seam’d,” a significantly named lexia that stitches together the surgery/sewing/writing metaphoric network established in other lexias with the Storyspace program: “You may emphasize the presence of text links by using a special style, color or typeface. Or, if you prefer, you can leave needles sticking in the wounds–in the manner of tailors–with thread wrapped around them. Being seam’d with scars was both a fact of eighteenth-century life and a metaphor for dissonant interferences ruining any finely adjusted composition” (crazy quilt/seam’d). The patchwork quality of the passage is emphasized by the fact that another lexia entitled “seam’d” appears elsewhere (body of text/mixed up/seam’d), from which some of the phrases cited above were lifted.

Although memory is equidistant within the computer, such is not the case for human readers. In our memories, events take place in time and therefore constitute sequence. The “seam’ed” lexia in “crazy quilt” relies for its effect on the probability that the reader has already seen the lexias of which this is a patchwork. Because we have read these lines in other contexts, they strike us now as a crazy quilt, a textual body stitched together from recycled pieces of other lexias and texts. Memory, then, converts simultaneity into sequence, and sequence into the continuity of a coherent past. But human memory, unlike computer memory, does not retain its contents indefinitely or even reliably. If human memory has gaps in it (a phenomenon alarmingly real to me as my salad days recede in the distance), then memory becomes like atoms full of empty space, an apparent continuity riddled with holes.

Fascinated with recovering that which has been lost, the narrator recalls a speech made by Susan B. Anthony at a “church quilting bee in Cleveland” in which the monster “was the featured attraction, the demon quilt” (body of text/mixed up/quilting). Anthony (or is it the monster?) remarks that “Our sense of who we are is mostly made up of what we remember being. We are who we were; we are made up of memories.” But each of us also holds in her mind experiences she has forgotten. Do these memories, the monstrous Anthony speculates, cohere to make another subject, mutually exclusive to the subject constituted through the memories one remembers? If so, “within each of you there is at least one other entirely different you, made up of all you’ve forgotten… More accurately, there are many other you’s, each a different combination of memories. These people exist. They are complete, if not exactly present, lying in potential in the buried places in the brain” (story/séance/she goes on). Like the eaten body parts incorporated in the animal’s flesh that scrape to get out at the resurrection, like the textual body that exists simultaneously within the equidistant spaces of computer memory, human memory too is chimerical, composed of the subject I remember as myself and the multiple other subjects, also in some sense me, whom I have forgotten but who remember themselves and not me.

When the monster offers to buy a past from Elsie, a randomly chosen woman she approaches on the street, this lack of a past is in one sense unique to the monster, a result of her having been assembled and not born, with no chance to grow into the adult she now is. In another sense this division between the past the monster can remember and the pasts embodied in her several parts is a common human fate. “We are ourselves ghostly,” Anthony/herself goes on. “Our whole life is a kind of haunting; the present is thronged by the figures of the past. We haunt the concrete world as registers of past events… And we are haunted, by these ghosts of the living, these invisible strangers who are ourselves” (story/séance/she goes on). Significantly the hybridity performed here is a mental assemblage that does not depend on or require physical heterogeneity. Even if the text were an immaterial mental entity, it still could not be sure of internal cohesion because the memory that contains it is itself full of holes and other selves. On many levels and across several interfaces, this monstrous text thus balances itself between cohesion and fragmentation, presence and absence, lexia and link, sequence and simultaneity, coherent selfhood and multiple subjectivities.

How can such a text possibly achieve closure? Jane Yellowlees Douglas, writing on Michael Joyce’s hypertext fiction Afternoon, suggests that closure is achieved not when all the lexias have been read, but when the reader learns enough about the central mystery to believe she understands it. The privileged lexia, she suggests, is “white afternoon”–privileged because its transformative power on the reader’s understanding of the mystery is arguably greater than other lexias. Although Patchwork Girl has no comparable central mystery, it does have a central dialectic, the oscillation between fragmentation and recombination. “I believed that if I concentrated on wishing, my body itself would erase its scars and be made new,” the narrator confesses, an endeavor that continues in dynamic tension with the simultaneous realization that she is always already fragmented, ruptured, discontinuous (story/falling apart/becoming whole). When this oscillation erupts into a crisis, the text initiates events that make continuation impossible unless some kind of accommodation is reached. The crisis occurs when the narrator awakes one morning to find she is coming apart. As she tries to cover over the cracking seams with surgical tape, the dispersion rockets toward violence. “My foot strove skyward… trailing blood in mannered specks. My guts split open and something frilly spilled out… my right hand shot gesticulating stump-first eastward” (story/falling apart/diaspora). The tide is stemmed when Elsie, the woman whose past she bought, comes upon the monster disintegrating in the bathtub and holds onto her. “I was gathered together loosely in her attention in a way that was interesting to me, for I was all in pieces, yet not apart. I felt permitted. I began to invent something new: a way to hang together without pretending I was whole. Something between higgledy-piggledy and the eternal sphere” (story/falling apart/I made myself over). This resolution, in which the monster realizes that if she is to cohere at all it cannot be through unified subjectivity or a single narrative line, leads to “afterwards,” in which the monster decides that the only life she can lead is nomadic, a trajectory of “movement and doubt–and doubt and movement will be my life, as long as it lasts” (story/rethinking/afterwards). Thus the narrative pattern of her life finally becomes indistinguishable from the fragmentation and recombination of the digital technology that produces it, a convergence expressed earlier through the metaphor of the dotted line: “I hop from stone to stone and an electronic river washes out my scent in the intervals. I am a discontinuous line, a dotted line” (body of text/hop). Connecting and dividing, the dotted line of the monster’s nomadic trajectory through “movement and doubt” resembles the lexia-link, presence-absence pattern of the screenic text. Following this trajectory, she goes on to become a writer herself.

But what does she write–the narrative we are reading? If so, then the authorial function has shifted at some indeterminate point (or many indeterminate points) from Mary Shelley to the monster, recalling the earlier distribution of authorship between M/S. Just as the reader can no longer be sure if, within the fictive world, the monster now writes herself or is written by Mary, so the monster is similarly unsure, in part because her body, like her subjectivity, is a distributed function. “I wonder if I am writing from my thigh, from the crimp-edged pancakelet of skin we stitched onto me… Mary writes, I write, we write, but who is really writing?” Faced with this unanswerable question (unanswerable for the reader as for the narrator), the monster concludes, “Ghost writers are the only kind there are” (story/rethinking/am I mary).

The larger conclusion suggested by juxtaposing Patchwork Girl with eighteenth-century debates and the characteristics of digital media goes beyond showing how this text makes the unconscious of the earlier period into the stage for its performances of hybrid subjectivities by exploiting the specificities of the computer. More fundamentally, Patchwork Girl demonstrates that despite such important critical developments as deconstruction and Lacanian theory, we continue to operate from assumptions that are grounded in print technologies and that become problematic in the context of digital media. Why do we talk and write incessantly about the “text,” a term that obscures differences between technologies of production and implicitly promotes the work as an immaterial construct? Why do we continue to talk about the signifier as if it were a flat mark with no internal structure, when the coding chains of the digital computer operate in a completely different fashion? Why do our discussions of reading and writing largely focus on the author and reader, ignoring the cognitively sophisticated actions of intelligent machines that are active participants in the construction of meaning? The effect of Patchwork Girl‘s creative juxtapositions is to shake us awake from the dream that electronic fiction is simply “text” that we read on screen instead of on paper. If Patchwork Girl insists through its appropriations that the past can never be left behind, it also shows through its transformations that new media create a new kind of literature and a new sense of cyborg subjectivity.

As we work toward crafting a critical theory capable of dealing with the complexities of electronic texts, we may also be able to understand for the first time the full extent to which print technologies have affected our understanding of literature. The juxtaposition of print and electronic texts has the potential to reveal the assumptions specific to each, a clarity obscured when either is considered in isolation. Mark Rose ends his book (note that I use the media-specific practice of calling it a book and not a text) by suggesting that copyright continues to endure, despite its many problems, because it reinforces “the sense of who we are” (Rose 142). Patchwork Girl invites us to understand the situation differently. Although the sense of who we are is still informed by the assumptions of print technology, the specificities of digital technologies provide writers with resources to complicate that sense through flickering connectivities, re-working it into something rich and strange.

Notes

1. In formulating the framework for this essay, I am indebted to the readers who critiqued it for Postmodern Culture. Although their names are not known to me, I wish to express my gratitude for their insights and helpful comments.

2. I am indebted to librarian Jennifer Tobias at the Reference Library of the Museum of Modern Art in New York for arranging access to their extensive collection of artists’ books. An excellent survey can be found in Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books. An illustration of the Lewitt book can be found on page 199.

3. For an exploration of what this Oreo structure signifies in the context of virtual narratives, see Hayles, “Simulating Narratives: What Virtual Creatures Can Teach Us,” Critical Inquiry 26 (1999): 1-26.

4. I am indebted to Robert Essex for this example, proposed in a discussion of William Blake’s strong dislike of stipple engraving and his preference (which for Blake amounted to an ethical issue) for printing technologies that were analogue rather than digital.

5. There are of course exceptions to every rule. David Stairs has created a round artist book entitled Boundless with spiral binding all around, so that it cannot be opened. A similar strategy is used by Maurizio Nannucci in Universum, a book bound on both vertical edges so that it cannot be opened. Ann Tyler also plays with the assumption that pages are visually and kinesthetically accessible to users in Lubb Dup, an artist book in which several pages are double-faced, so that one can see the inside only by peering through a small circle in the middle or prying the two pages apart enough to peek down through the top. These plays on accessibility do not, however, negate the generalization, for the effect is precisely to make us conscious of the normative rule.

6. This practice was visibly reinforced for me when I sat through the credits of Wild Wild West and watched this disclaimer roll up on screen: “For purposes of copyright, Warner Bros. is the sole author of this film.”

7. This list omits the graphics, of which there are several as the hypertext opens. A note on citations from Patchwork Girl: I identify them using slashes to indicate a jump in directory level, moving from higher to lower as is customary in computer notation. The uppermost level is always a name the reader would see on the screen when opening the highest level of the map view in Storyspace, and the lowest level is the lexia in which the quotation appears. Thus the citation “body of text/resurrection/remade” indicates that within the major textual component entitled “body of text” is a sub-section entitled “resurrection,” which when opened also contains the lexia “remade,” where the quoted passage appears.

8. I am indebted for this reference to Reader #1 in his/her critique of this essay for Postmodern Culture.

9. This visual narrative begins with a realistic image of a door, which a man opens to go into a rather ordinary room. With each successive image, the previous representation is revealed as a posed photograph, for example by including the photographer in the picture. As one approaches the center of the book the images begin shifting angles, and at the midpoint the reader must turn the book upside down to see the remaining images in their proper perspective. At the end of the book the images reverse order, so that the reader then goes backwards through the book to the front, a direction that the orientation of the images implicitly defines as forward.

10. The lexia’s explosive potential may explain why it is partially hidden. It can be seen in the Storyspace chart view but is not visible in the more frequently used map view.

Works Cited

• Aarseth, Espen J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1997.
• Barthes, Roland. “From Work to Text.” The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1986. 56-64.
• Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991.
• Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.
• Coover, Robert. “The Babysitter.” Pricksongs and Descants. New York: Grove Press, 1969. 206-239.
• Derrida, Jacques. “Signature Event Context.” Limited Inc. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1988. 1-24.
• Douglas, Jane Yellowlees. “‘How Do I Stop This Thing?’: Closure and Indeterminacy in Interactive Narratives.” Hyper/Text/Theory. Ed. George P. Landow. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. 159-188.
• Drucker, Johanna. The Century of Artists’ Books. New York: Granary Books, 1995.
• Foucault, Michel. “What is an Author?” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977. 113-138.
• Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay on Method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983.
• Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994.
• Hayles, N. Katherine. “Simulating Narratives: What Virtual Creatures Can Teach Us.” Critical Inquiry 26 (1999): 1-26.
• —. “Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers.” How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. 25-49.
• Jackson, Shelley. Patchwork Girl by Mary/Shelley and herself. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1995. Electronic. <http://www.eastgate.com>.
• —. “Stitch Bitch: The Patchwork Girl.” Paradoxa 4 (1998): 526-538.
• Johnson, Barbara. “My Monster/My Self.” Diacritics 12.2 (1982): 2-10.
• Landow, George. Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1997.
• Lewitt, Sol. Squares with the Sides and Corners Torn Off. Brussels: MTL, 1974.
• Macpherson, C. B. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962.
• Mellor, Anne K. Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. New York: Routledge, 1988.
• Nannucci, Maurizio. Universum. N.p.: Biancoenero Publishers, 1969.
• Rose, Mark. Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993.
• Snow, Michael. Cover to Cover. Halifax: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; New York: New York UP, 1975.
• Stairs, David. Boundless. N.p.: D. Stairs, 1983.
• Tyler, Ann. Lubb Dup. Chicago: Sara Ranchouse Publishing, 1998.

Sianne Ngai

Department of English and American Literature and Language
Harvard University
sngai@fas.harvard.edu

There is stupid being in every one. There is stupid being in every one in their living. Stupid being in one is often not stupid thinking or stupid acting. It very often is hard to know it in knowing any one. Sometimes one has to know of some one the whole history in them, the whole history of their living to know the stupid being of them.

 

–Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans (1906-08)

Sorry. Sorry. I’m sorry. I regret it. Please accept my apology. I’m extremely sorry. I regret my mistake. Pardon me. Pardon me. I hope you’ll forgive me. I’m deeply apologetic. Do forgive me. Pardon me. Accept my apology. Do forgive me. I’m deeply apologetic. Excuse me. Excuse me. It was my own fault. Do forgive me. I’m so sorry…

 

--Janet Zweig, Her Recursive Apology (sculpture), 1993

“Thick” Language

“Gertrude and I are just the contrary,” writes Leo Stein in Journey Into The Self. “She’s basically stupid and I’m basically intelligent” (Schmitz 100). What Leo perceived “stupid” about Gertrude and the non-linear writing of hers he abhorred is perhaps analogous to what the character Tod finds “thick” about Homer Simpson’s use of words in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (1939). When Tod coaxes a sluggish, almost comatose Homer to relate his experience of abandonment following the departure of Faye, Homer’s speech at first seems incomprehensible to him. “Language leaped out of Homer in a muddy, twisting torrent. […] The lake behind the dam replenished itself too fast. The more he talked the greater the pressure grew because the flood was circular and ran back behind the dam again” (West 143-4). Yet as Tod discovers, Homer’s “muddy, twisting torrent” in its negative insistence conveys a logic of its own–which, when acknowledged, enables his interpretation:

[A] lot of it wasn’t jumbled so much as timeless. The words went behind each other instead of after. What he had taken for long strings were really one thick word and not a sentence. In the same way sentences were simultaneous and not a paragraph. Using this key he was able to arrange a part of what he had heard so that it made the usual kind of sense. (144)

In the case of Homer, the shock of sudden loss produces its own dense or “thickening” rhetoric–one that deceptively simulates an inability to respond or speak at all, by eroding formal distinctions between word, sentence, and paragraph: the structural units of conventional syntax. To borrow terms Deleuze adduces from philosopher Duns Scotus (whose name gives rise to current usage of the word “dunce”), these formal differences are exchanged for modal differences that are based on intense variations or individuating degrees rather than distinct attributes or qualitative forms (Deleuze 39). Modal differences, in this sense, could be described as moody ones: temperamental, unqualified, or constantly shifting. In West’s example, the encounter with language based on such differences involves a transfer of affectivity: Tod finds himself temporarily stupefied by the language generated by Homer’s stupor. Which is to say that he discovers that it challenges his own capacity to read, interpret, or critically respond to it in conventional ways.

Radically altering the temporal order dictated by normative syntax (“the words went behind each other instead of after”), and blurring the distinction between its building blocks (sentence and paragraph), West’s description of “thick” or grammatically moody language strikingly coincides with the signifying logic at work in Stein’s dense Making of Americans (1906-8), where words are deliberately presented in “long strings” rather than conventional sentences, and the repetition of particular words or clauses produces a layered or simultaneous effect–Stein’s characteristic “continuous present.” As Stein puts it in “Poetry and Grammar,”

Sentences and paragraphs. Sentences are not emotional but paragraphs are…. When I wrote the Making of Americans I tried to break down this essential combination by making enormously long sentences that would be as long as the longest paragraph and so to see if there was really and truly this essential difference between paragraphs and sentences, if one went far enough with this thing with making the sentences long enough to be as long as any paragraph and so producing in them the balance of a paragraph not a balance of a sentence, because of course the balance of a paragraph is not the same balance as the balance of a sentence. (Writings and Lectures 142)

The deliberate making of sentences “simultaneous and not a paragraph” in The Making of Americans poses a grammatical challenge to the ideology of “essential difference” and the symbolic laws it sustains, a tactics of resistance to dominant systems of sense-making continued throughout Stein’s career. The sense of urgency connected to this local struggle becomes amplified in How To Write (1928), whose opening piece, “Saving the Sentence,” bears a title suggesting that language, like an occupied territory in time of war, is in need of rescue (7-32). For The Making of Americans, the strategy Stein chooses is primarily an agglutinative one, where the material build-up of language itself is invested with the potential for dissimulation, to achieve the “balance” of larger forms through the accumulation of smaller ones.

In “Sentences,” Stein makes a similar attempt to recalibrate the reader’s sense of syntactic equilibrium when she writes, “What is the difference between words and a sentence and a sentence and sentences” (HTW 181, my emphasis). We can read this as Stein posing a question about the attribute distinguishing two formal structures (words versus a sentence), or singular and plural instances of a particular structure (sentence versus sentences); we can also read it as a statement defining the term “what” as precisely this distinction. Here Stein seems to highlight the fact that “what” can function as an interrogative pronoun or adjective, as well as a relative pronoun equally substitutable for plural and singular objects. When constituting a full sentence on its own, “what” also has the potential to function as a demand for repetition in itself (“What?” [did you just say?]), or as an expletive conveying a negative emotion such as disbelief, anger, or incomprehension (“What!”). In the latter instance, “what” paradoxically expresses a state of inexpressiveness. Here the term’s sense-making agency resides in its impotentiality, or inability to refer and represent, since what it expresses is precisely a situation in which whatever “what!” is being uttered in response to appears to defy expression. Thus in locating the difference between words and a sentence in “what,” Stein suggests that the status of such difference might resemble that of the various roles the term “what” assumes–in other words, that the difference is at once relative, interrogative, and potentially stupefying in its affective force. Like the relationship between sentences and paragraphs in The Making of Americans, or “one thick word” and a sentence in Homer’s speech, difference as “what” could be described as a difference without fixed or determinate value, or as “difference without a concept”– one of the ways Deleuze defines repetition in Difference and Repetition.

The fact that in its expletive and interrogative roles, “what(!?)” also functions as a demand for repetition, also recalls Deleuze’s counterintuitive thesis that repetition is what lies between two differences. Configured as a what, “the difference between words and sentences or a sentence and sentences” could thus be described as a demand for repetition which places us in a relation of indeterminacy, raising a question rather than providing an answer: “What is a sentence. A sentence is something that is or is not followed” (HTW 213). As Stein notes here, “what” becomes a sentence not only when it raises a question but also when it becomes one–when it actively solicits but may or may not be followed by a reply. “Now the whole question of questions and not answer is very interesting” (HTW 32, my italics). The response difference-as-what solicits, as in the case of Tod’s response to Homer’s speech, seems likely to take the form of an obstruction of response: when the ability to “answer” is frustrated or delayed. In both cases, the negative experience of “stupefaction” (in which this relationship to language is given a specific emotional value) raises the significant question of how we might respond to what we recognize as “the different” prior to its qualification or categorization (as “sexual” or “racial” for instance), precisely by pointing to the limits of our ability to do so. We are used to encountering and recognizing differences assigned formal values; Stein’s writing asks us to ask how we negotiate our encounters when these qualifications have not yet been made.

Thus in attempting to “break down the essential combination” of sentences and paragraphs, or claiming that “what is the difference between words and a sentence,” Stein’s agenda is not to be confused with an attempt to level or neutralize difference by repetition, but rather to radically reconfigure one’s relationship to difference through repetition and grammatical play. If a particular kind of negative emotion inevitably accompanies or is produced by this new relation, it becomes important to understand how this affective dynamic might organize and inform strategies of reading made possible by it. Throughout Stein’s career, but beginning particularly around 1908 when, as Marianne deKoven argues, she started to develop her “insistent” style based on repetition, fixed or “essential” distinctions are replaced with unqualified ones to generate new frameworks of sense-making: forms of continuity, order, and linguistic equilibrium (“balance”) alternative to the symbolic status quo (50). What this requires from the writer, Stein suggests, as well as from her readers, is an experiment in duration–or, more precisely, an experiment in the temporality of endurance, testing whether one can go “far enough with this thing.” As any reader of The Making of Americans in its entirety can attest, the stakes of this astonishing 922-page narrative are the exhaustion it inevitably induces, as well as its narrative themes of familial and historical survival. Stein’s interest in how astonishment and fatigue, oddly in tandem, come to organize and inform a particular kind of relationship between subjects and language (or between subjects and difference, via language), can be further explored by examining how this peculiar syncretism of affects comes to bear on our contemporary engagements with radically “different” forms in American poetry.

Poetic Fatigue and Hermeneutic Stupor

It comes as no surprise that what Leo Stein, journeying into the self, considered “stupid” language is language that, in undermining conventional patterns of grammar, syntax, and sense, threatens the limits of self by challenging its capacity for response, temporarily immobilizing the addressee as in situations of extreme shock or boredom. In the case of Homer’s muddy and twisting rhetoric, the subject no longer seems to be the agent producing or controlling his speech; rather, language “leaps out” with its own peculiar force. Yet as West’s scene of interpretation demonstrates, Homer’s emotional speech is readable, once the interpreter recognizes that it simultaneously constitutes its own frame of sense-making. Like the affectively charged, insistent language Gertrude Stein uses to create her vast combinatory of “bottom natures” in Making of Americans, Homer’s “thick” speech demands to be encountered on its own terms. The critical trajectory or journey it invites is not one into the self, but into the more complex problem of a particular kind of self’s relationship to language, where the latter is what radically externalizes the former, pointing to its own incommensurabilities.

“The words went behind each other instead of after. What he had taken for long strings were really one thick word and not a sentence. In the same way sentences were simultaneous and not a paragraph” (West 14). Deviating from conventional syntax and its standard organizations of temporality, Homer’s gush, like Stein’s prose, produces a kind of linguistic overlapping or simultaneity–one that recalls the source of the cryptanalyst Legrand’s own experience of stupefaction in Poe’s “The Gold-Bug” (1843). In both stagings of hermeneutic perplexity, the obstacle posed to the reader is attributed to a “thickness” or superimposition of forms:

Presently I took a candle, and… proceeded to scrutinize the parchment more closely. Upon turning it over, I saw my own sketch upon the reverse, just as I had made it. My first idea, now, was mere surprise at the really remarkable similarity of outline–at the singular coincidence involved in the fact, that unknown to me, there should have been a skull upon the other side of the parchment, immediately beneath my figure of the scarabaeus, and that this skull, not only in outline, but in size, should so closely resemble my drawing. I say the singularity of this coincidence absolutely stupified [sic] me for a time. This is the usual effect of such coincidences. The mind struggles to establish a connection–a sequence of cause and effect–and, being unable to do so, suffers a species of temporary paralysis. But, when I recovered from the stupor, there dawned upon me gradually a conviction which startled me even far more than the coincidence. (Poe 305, my emphasis)

In the scenes of analytical stupor staged by both West and Poe, the discourse initially stumping the interpreter is based on a logic of vertical stacking or piling rather than a horizontally progressive trajectory in time. Legrand’s glyphs, like Homer’s words, are placed behind each other instead of after, creating a layered simultaneity of signs. In West’s narrative, the “thickening” of Homer’s language is explicitly figured as an effect of behindness–that of discursive flow “[running] back behind the dam again” (144), recalling Heidegger’s description of poetry as “the water that at times flows backward toward the source” (11). The anteriorizing slippage dramatized in Tod’s description of Homer’s language is both a convention of Stein’s prose, where narration is consequently forced to “begin again,” and a stylistic dynamic utilized in Beckett’s later writing. In “Stirrings Still” (1988), for instance, a prose poem that deals specifically with a subject’s experience of stupefying loss, the overlapping accretion of phrases and word clusters within the boundaries of a severely limited diction results in a language that is paradoxically both ascetic and congested, “thickening” even as it progresses into a narrative of not-progressing:

One night or day then as he sat at his table head on hands he saw himself rise and go. First rise and stand clinging to the table. Then sit again. Then rise again and stand clinging to the table. Then go. Start to go. On unseen feet start to go. So slow that only change of place to show he went. As when he disappeared only to reappear later at another place. Then disappeared again only to reappear again later at another place again. So again and again disappeared again only to reappear again later at another place again. Another place in the place where he sat at his table head on hands. (259-60)

The familiar theme of “endurance” is conveyed here through a drastic slowing down of language, or a rhetorical enactment of its fatigue in which the duration of relatively simple actions is uncomfortably prolonged through a proliferation of precise inexactitudes. This process occurs not only through repetition, but a series of constative exhaustions staged through the corrective dynamics of retraction and restatement, of statements partially undoing the completion of preceding statements by breaking the movements they describe into smaller intervals. The undoing paradoxically relies on a process of material build-up, where words are slowly added rather than subtracted. Thus the finitude of a simple action such as “he saw himself rise and go” becomes disrupted by being rendered increasingly specific in degree. “He saw himself rise and go.” Well actually, no: first he rose and stood–then sat–then rose. Then, he went. Actually, no: then he started to go. No again: then on unseen feet he started to go. The logic of progression from statement to statement is paradoxically propelled by a series of invisible objections continually jerking us backwards, resulting in writing that continually calls attention to itself as lacking even as it steadily accumulates. Because units of meaning are constantly shifting behind one another, Beckett’s use of language performs a stacking of multiple temporalities, an overlapping of instaneities and durations, rather than a linear progression in time.

Like Stein’s style in the period of Making of the Americans, “Stirrings Still” becomes syntactically dense or complex while remaining minimalist in diction. As in the case of Homer’s “timeless” language, its language is marked by the absence of a “sequence of cause and effect,” producing the effect of delay, fatigue, or “temporary paralysis.” This discontinuity is generated within the speech or text itself, as well as experienced by its interpreter as an interruption of understanding. What Poe, West, and Beckett suggest in different ways is that when language “thickens” it suffers a “retardation by weak links”¹: it slows down or performs a temporal delay through the absence of causal connectives. It is this change in temporal organization that in turn slows down the interpreter–as if the loss of “strong links” within the original text or narrative paradoxically strengthens the link between it and the reader, enabling the transfer of the former’s emotional value.

To acknowledge and attempt to understand one’s own experience of “stupefaction” by a text or language, as Legrand and Tod do (which gives them endurance and enables them to go on as interpreters in spite of “temporary paralysis”), is not the same as projecting stupidity onto the text instigating this relation–as Leo Stein does, turning his emotional response to Stein’s writing into an attribute of the writing in itself. Attempting to analyze the linguistic factors informing this dynamic, rather than dismiss the objects involved as senseless, both interpreters identify: (1) a breakdown of formal differences and a proliferation of modal ones; (2) a “thickness” or simultaneous layering of elements in place of linear sequencing; resulting in (3) the disruption of normative syntax and its patterns of temporal organization. A similar logic presides in contemporary writer Dan Farrell’s prose poem 366, 1996 (1997), which bears some stylistic allegiance to the “thick” uses of language in Beckett and Stein:

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, going into the woods, Sunday, Monday, typical trees, Tuesday, typical grass traces, Wednesday, Thursday, typical excitations, Friday, typical regional sounds, Saturday, Sunday, why slow rather than slowest, Monday, clouded height, Tuesday, some same ground, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, left and possible, Sunday, right and possible, Monday, Tuesday, could what there is not to be believed be asked, Wednesday, Thursday… (57)

Consider also this passage from Kenneth’s Goldsmith FIDGET,a poem/conceptual art piece performed at the New York Whitney Museum in 1997:

Tongue and saliva roll in mouth. Swallow. Tongue
emerges through teeth and lips. Tongue lies on lower
lip. Teeth click tongue. Lower jaw drops away from upper.
Flesh folds beneath chin. Repeats. Upper lip sucks. Rubs
against lower. Swallow. Saliva gathers under tongue.
Teeth tuck inside jaw. Gather saliva. Swallow. Left hand,
grasping with three fingers, moves toward mouth. Swallow.
Arm drops. Arm lifts. Swallow. Arm drops. Swallow.
Arm lifts. Arm drops. Eyes move to left. Left hand hits.
Arm lifts. Swallow. Arm drops. Right leg crosses left…

Just as Beckett’s poem stylistically enacts a form of discursive exhaustion or fatigue, Farrell and Goldsmith’s deliberately stupefying poems relentlessly focus on the tedium of the ordinary: the monotony of daily routines organized by calendar headings, the movements of a body not doing anything in particular. Simultaneously astonishing and boring, the experiment in “duration” is taken in each to a structural extreme: Farrell’s poem incorporates every single calendar date of the year named in its title (366); Goldsmith’s documents the writer’s impossible project of recording every single bodily movement made in a twenty-four hour period (Bloomsday).² Using a similar conceptual framework, Judith Goldman’s poem “dicktee” (1997) described by the author as “a study in the logic of paranoia” and its strategies of negation, is composed of every single word in Melville’s Moby Dick that begins with the prefix un-,in the exact order in which they appear:

under, unite, unless, unpleasant, universal,
uncomfortable, unaccountable, under, unbiased,
undeliverable, under, underneath, universe, unequal,
understanding, unaccountable, unwarranted,
unimaginable, unnatural, unoccupied, undress,
unobserved, unknown, unwarrantable, unknown,
unaccountable, understand, uncomfortable, unsay,
unaccountable, uncommonly, undressed, unearthly,
undressing, unnatural, unceremoniously,
uncomfortableness, unmethodically, undressed,
unendurable, unimaginable, unlock,
unbecomingness, understand, under, unusual,
unrecorded, unceasing, unhealing, unbidden,
universal, unstirring, unspeakable, unnecessary,
unseen, unassuming, unheeded, unknown, until,
uncheered, unreluctantly, unto, unwelcome, unto,
unearthly, uncouthness, unbiddenly, unite, unite,…

In a dramatization of modal differences usurping formal ones, the poet converts Moby Dick into moby dictation, producing a hyperbolic version of the collage of quotations compiled by the Sub-Sub-Librarian in Melville’s novel. If for Melville the Sub-Sub is always already a small subject encompassed by a big and relentless system (hence in many ways a “postmodern” subject), Goldman comically positions herself as an even smaller one. The exaggeration of language’s citability and iterability (for Goldman, against conventional poetic lyricism) is similarly enacted in Goldsmith’s encyclopedic No. 111 2.7.93-10.20.96 (1997),³ a collection of linguistic materials compiled over the period of three years (including lists, phrases, conversations, found passages, and entire pieces of fiction) that all end on the sonority of the schwa (rhyme) and then are laboriously ordered by syllable count, from a series of one-syllable entries to a piece containing precisely 7228 (meter). Taking a more traditional versifier’s attention to prosodic constraints to an extreme, Goldsmith’s Sub-Subish work also results in what Raphael Rubinstein blurbs as “a weirdly constructed Baedeker to late 20th Century American society.” In MDCLXXXVI, whose title reflects the number of syllables determining its order in the volume, constative fatigue is hilariously performed through an overdetermined self-referentiality and use of “literary devices” as clichés. Or, in persistently subsuming content to the ruthless demands of its self-imposed, unusual rhyming pattern and metrical structure, does a text which self-referentially appropriates a prototypically postmodernist text in its own parody of postmodern appropriation and self-referentiality exhaust the parodying of these devices as well as the devices themselves?⁴

This is the first sentence of the story. This is the second sentence. This is the title of the story which is also found several times in the story itself. This sentence is questioning the intrinsic value of the first two sentences. This sentence is to inform you in case you haven’t already realized it that this is a self-referential story containing sentences that refer to their own structure and function. This is a sentence that provides an ending to the first paragraph. This is the first sentence of a new paragraph in a self-referential story. This sentence comments on the awkward nature of the self-narrative form while recognizing the strange and playful detachment it affords the writer. Introduces in this paragraph the device of sentence fragments. A sentence fragment. Another. Good device. Will be used more later. This is actually the last sentence of the story but has been placed here by mistake. This sentence overrides the preceding sentence by informing the reader… that this piece of literature is actually the Declaration of Independence but that the author in a show of extreme negligence (if not malicious sabotage) has so far failed to include even ONE SINGLE SENTENCE from that stirring document although he has condescended to use a small sentence FRAGMENT namely “When in the course of human events” embedded in quotation marks near the end of the sentence… (Goldsmith 565-66)

In extremely different ways, the conceptual work of Farrell, Goldsmith, and Goldman continues a tradition of poetic experimentalism grounded in the work of Stein–including her interest in affectively reorganizing the subject’s relationship to language through stylistic innovation. Though such diverse texts should not be reduced to a common equation, each could be described as simultaneously astonishing and (deliberately) fatiguing; much like the signifying logics at work in Beckett’s late fiction, or the experience of reading The Making of Americans. Through hyperbolic uses of repetition, reflexivity, citation, and clichés, the poems perform a doubling-over of language which, as in the case of Legrand’s confrontation with a layered configuration, actively interferes with the temporal organization dictated by conventional syntax. When words or glyphs are placed “behind” each other, instead of after, “The mind struggles to establish a connection–a sequence of cause and effect–and, being unable to do so, suffers a species of temporary paralysis” (Poe 305). Yet “temporary paralysis” is not merely a state of passivity; rather, it bears some resemblance to what Stein calls “open feeling,” a condition of utter receptivity in which difference is felt rather than qualified or assigned a particular value. The next section examines ways in which contemporary artists engender this affective dynamic through their work.

From Stupefaction to Stuplime Poetics

Words are too crude. And words are also too busy–inviting a hyperactivity of consciousness that is not only dysfunctional, in terms of human capacities of feeling and acting, but actively deadens the mind and senses.
 

–Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will

quaqua on all sides then in me bits and scraps try and hear a few scraps two or three each time per day and night string them together make phrases more phrases
 

–Samuel Beckett, How It Is

The sudden excitation of “shock,” and the desensitization we associate with “boredom,” though diametrically opposed and seemingly mutually exclusive, are both responses that confront us with the limitations of our capacity for responding in general.⁵ Both affects are thus frequently invoked in responses to radical art usually dismissed as unsophisticated; few savvy, postmodern readers are likely to admit to being “bored” by The Making of Americans and perhaps even less likely to being “shocked” by Jeff Koons or Cindy Sherman. By pointing to what obstructs critical response, however, astonishment and boredom ask us to ask what ways of responding our culture makes available to us, and under what conditions. As “dispositions” which result in a fundamental displacement from secure critical positions, the shocking and the boring usefully prompt us to look for new strategies of engagement and to extend the circumstances under which engagement becomes possible. The phenomenon of the intersection of these affective dynamics, in innovative artistic and literary production, will thus be explored here as a way of expanding our notion of the aesthetic in general.

As Stein acknowledges, “Listening to repeating is often irritating, listening to repeating can be dulling” (Making 302). Yet in the taxonomy or system for the making of human “kinds” that is The Making of Americans, repeating is also the dynamic force by which new beginnings, histories, genres, and genera are produced and organized. As Lacan similarly suggests, “repetition demands the new,”(Four 61) including new ways of understanding its dulling and irritating effects. It thus comes as no surprise that many of the most “shocking,” innovative, and/or transformative cultural productions in history have also been deliberately tedious ones. In the twentieth century, systematically recursive works by Warhol, Ryman, Johns, Cage and Glass bear witness to the prominence of tedium as aesthetic strategy in avant-garde practices; one also thinks of the “fatiguing repetitiveness” of Sade⁶ and the permutative logics at work in the writings of Beckett, Roussel, Perec, Cage, Mac Low, and of course, Stein. This partnership between tedium and shock in the invention of new genres is not limited, however, to avantgardisms. The same intersection of affects can be found in the modern horror film, which in its repetitive use of a limited number of trademark motifs replicates the serial logics of its serial killers, and the pulsating, highly enervated, yet exhaustively durational electronic music known as techno or house which completely transformed musical subcultures in the 1980s.

Though repetition, permutation, and seriality figure prominently as devices in aesthetic uses of tedium, practitioners have achieved the same effect through a strategy of what I call agglutination; quite simply, the mass adhesion or coagulation of data particles or signifying units. Here tedium resides not so much in the syntactic overdetermination of minimalist dictions (as in Ryman’s white paintings), but in the stupendous proliferation of discrete quanta held together by a fairly simple syntax or organizing principle. This logic, less mosaic than congealaic, is frequently emphasized by sculptor Ann Hamilton in her installations, which have included 16,000 teeth arranged on an examination table, 750,000 pennies immobilized in honey, 800 men’s shirts pressed into a wedge, and floors covered by vast spreads of linotype pieces and animal hair (Wakefield 10). A similar effect is achieved by Gerhard Richter’s Atlas (1997), which confronts the spectator with 643 sheets of over 7,000 snapshots, newspaper cuttings, sketches and color fields, each arranged on white rectangular panels. While here the organization of material is primarily taxonomic rather than compressive in its grammar, the accumulation of visual “data” induces a similar strain on the observer’s capacities for conceptually synthesizing or metabolizing information. In this manner, the fatigue of the responsivity Atlas solicits approaches the kind of exhaustion involved in the attempt to read a dictionary.

This mode of tedium is specifically foregrounded in Janet Zweig’s computer/printer installations, where rhetorical bits and scraps are automatically produced in enormous quantities, then stacked, piled, enumerated, weighed in balances, or otherwise “quantified.” To make Her Recursive Apology (1993), for example, four computers, each hooked to a dot-matrix printer, were programmed to randomly generate apologies “in the smallest possible type” on continuously-fed paper. As Zweig notes, “The printer apologized for two weeks, day and night. Whenever a box of paper ran out, the computer displayed the number of times it had apologized. Because the apologies were randomly chosen by the computer, no two sheets of paper are alike. I arranged the pages in a recursive spiral structure, each stack one sheet larger than the next” (Zweig 248-9). Pushing the boundary between the emotive and the mechanical, and ironically commenting on the feminization of apologetic speech acts, Her Recursive Apology stages the convergence of gendered subject and machine not via fashionable cyborg, but through a surprisingly “flat” or boring display of text, its materiality and iterability foregrounded by the piles of its consolidation. Zweig’s work points to the Lacanian notion that language is precisely the site where subject and system intersect, as Stein similarly demonstrates through her own vast combinatory of human types–a text in which new “kinds” or models of humans are made through the rhetorically staged acts of enumerating, “grouping,” “mixing,” and above all repeating. For both Stein and Zweig, where system and subject converge is more specifically where language piles up and becomes dense.

Like the massive Making of Americans, the large-scale installations of Zweig, Hamilton, and Richter register as at once exciting and deenervating, astonishing yet tedious. Inviting further comparison with Stein’s taxonomy is the fact that each of these installations functions as an information processing system–a way of classifying, ordering, and metabolizing seemingly banal “bits” of data: newspaper clippings, snapshots, teeth, words and phrases, repetitions. To encounter the vastness of Stein’s system is to encounter the vast combinatory of language, where particulars “thicken” to produce new individualities. As an ordering of visual data on a similar scale, what Richter’s Atlas calls attention to through its staggering agglomeration of material it is not so much information’s sublimity, but the sublimity of its ability to condense.

Yet “sublime” seems an inappropriate term to use here, even in spite of its critical voguishness today, which marks the persistence of an older aesthetic tradition where it was typically invoked in response to things overwhelmingly vast or massive and large (mountains, seas, the infinite, and so forth)–things that threaten to crush the subjectivity out of us, as the works of Stein or de Sade similarly do, and point to the limits of our psychological and cognitive faculties. In this sense, the term seems fully applicable. But while the sublime encompasses the feeling of awe or astonishment The Making of Americans solicits from its reader, it fails to circumscribe the concomitantly solicited effect of boredom. This response, invoked in tandem with the feeling of awe, is absolutely central to Stein’s quasi-scientific experiment in narrative, which deliberately forces the reader to participate in its accumulation, enumeration, organization, and interpretation of human “data.” Though useful as an index of the general value of affectivity in the negotiation of aesthetic experiences, sublimity becomes a profoundly unsatisfactory way of characterizing the particular kind of affective relationship configured by twentieth-century agglutinations such as Atlas or Americans, since here the experience of being aesthetically overwhelmed involves not so much fear, terror, or even euphoria, but something much closer to an ordinary fatigue. In this relationship, a similarly negative emotivity is summoned, one in which the self is made aware of his or her own powerlessness or impotence, but one conspicuously less romantic, or auratic. How the observer encounters a work like Atlas thus approaches the experience of reading Stein and Joyce, whose postmodernisms avant le lettre similarly seems to call for a rethinking of what it means to be aesthetically overpowered: a new way of theorizing the negatively affective relationship to stupefying objects previously designated by the older aesthetic notion of the sublime. One way of calling attention to the affinity between exhaustion and the astonishment particular to the sublime, invoking the latter while detaching it from its previous romantic affiliations, is to refer to the aesthetic experience I am talking about–one in which astonishment is paradoxically united with boredom as the stuplime.

Though criticism continually relies on and returns to older aesthetic categories, even in its engagement with radically different forms of cultural production, these often call for new terms for describing our responses to innovative works, new dictions to be used in the work of critically commenting on them. An encounter with The Making of Americans does seem to approach the experience of the sublime, yet also very much not. Upon first encounter it astonishes and awes, yet like the “bottom natures” it inventories, draws us down into the agglutinative domain of language and its dulling and irritating iterability. The same could be said for the scatological sludge in How It Is, in which the subject is literally pulled face down. Hamilton’s vast spreads of hair or typographical rubble seem to deliberately invite yet ultimately veer away from their characterization as such. What constitutes the stuplime will become increasingly clear below, but for now I will briefly describe it as a syncretism of boredom and astonishment, of what “dulls” with what “irritates” or agitates, of excessive excitation with extreme desensitization or fatigue. Whereas the former traditionally finds a home in the lyrical or tragic, the latter could be said to more properly belong to the artificial, the dirtier environments of what Stein calls “bottom humor.”

Like the Kantian sublime, the stuplime points to the limits of our representational capabilities, not through the limitlessness or infinity of concepts, but through a no less exhaustive confrontation with the discrete and finite in repetition. The “bits and scraps” of what surrounds the self on all sides is what Beckett calls “quaqua,” the discursive logic of a larger symbolic system. As such, “it expresses a power peculiar to the existent, a stubbornness of the existent in intuition, which resists every specification by concepts no matter how far this is taken,” (Deleuze 13) a characterization mirroring a claim made in Kierkegaard’s comic discourse on repetition: “Every general esthetic category runs aground on farce” (159). Unlike the sublime, the stuplime paradoxically forces the reader to go on in spite of its equal enticement to surrender, inducing a series of comic fatigues or tirednesses rather than a single, earthshattering blow to one’s conceptual apparatus, thus pushing the reader to constantly formulate and reformulate new tactics for reading. Confrontations with the stuplime bear more resemblance to the repetitive exhaustions performed by Kierkegaard’s Beckmann, Buster Keaton, or Pee-Wee Herman than the instantaneous breakdown dramatized in encounters with elemental forces. In the stuplimity of slapstick comedy, which frequently stages the confrontation of small subjects with the large Systems encompassing them, one is made to fall down (typically in an exaggerated expression of inexpressiveness) only so as to get up again, counteracting tragic failure with an accumulation of comic fatigues. Significantly, Deleuze’s prime example of this blockage of the sublime and the surrender it induces is words, as these “possess a comprehension which is necessarily finite, since they are by nature the objects of a merely nominal definition. We have here a reason why the comprehension of the concept cannot extend to infinity: we define a word by only a finite number of words. Nevertheless, speech and writing, from which words are inseparable, give them an existence hic et nunc; a genus thereby passes into existence as such; and here again extension is made up for in dispersion, in discreteness, under the sign of a repetition which forms the real power of language in speech and writing” (Deleuze 13).

In this manner, stuplimity pulls us downward into the denseness of language rather than lifting us upwards toward unrepresentable divines–a realm much like the mud in How It Is, where bits and scraps accumulate in being transmitted through a narrator who only quotes what he receives from an external yet infiltrating source: “I say it as I hear it.” This mud is both the site enabling the series of arrivals and separations that comprise the basic movements in the narrative, and yet an inertial drag or resistance that renders them exhaustingly difficult or slow: each act of “journeying” and “abandoning” thus involves a laborious and (as William Hutchings notes) peristaltic crawl (65), leading us through “vast tracts of time” (Beckett, How 39). Stein’s writing operates through a similarly anal dynamic, as Lisa Ruddick argues, of “pressing” and “straining” (81). While Beckett’s mud obstructs or slows the physical movements of individual characters toward and away from one another, it also seems to enable a process of cohesion, by which the discrete extensions of Pims, Boms and Bems, “one and all from the unthinkable first to the no less unthinkable last” come to be “glued together in a vast imbrication of flesh without breach or fissure” (Beckett, How 140). The social community it creates is thus one of discursive condensation, as visually suggested through the absence of punctuation.

Here, finitely large numbers substitute for the infinities we associate with the sublime, yet the effect of these enumerations is to similarly call attention to representational or conceptual fatigues, if not destructions. Such tiredness results even when the narrator subdivides the enormity of what we are asked to imagine into more manageable increments: “a million then if a million strong a million Pims now motionless agglutinated two by two in the interests of torment too strong five hundred thousand little heaps color of mud and a thousand thousand nameless solitaries half abandoned half abandoning” (Beckett, How 115-116). Though the narrator often resorts to such calculations to negotiate his relationship to this mud, and to facilitate understanding of the “natural order” or organizing principle of the system he lives in (one legislated by its “justice” or the disembodied, external “voice of us all” from which he receives the words of his narration), these acts of enumerating, grouping and subdividing only produce further fatigues; thus the double meaning of the narrator’s comment “I always loved arithmetic it has paid me back in full” (Beckett 37). Attempting to make sense of his situation by finding smaller, more easily manipulable systems of ordering within the larger one, the narrator finds these micrologics ultimately subsumed and thwarted by what encompasses them. We see this in his attempt to describe how information is exchanged in the world he inhabits: to understand the ordering principle behind this we are asked to take twenty consecutive numbers, “no matter which no matter which it is irrelevant”

 

814326 to 814345

number  814327  may  speak  misnomer  the  tormentors 
being  mute  as  we  have  seen part two may speak of 
number  814326  to  number  814328  who  may speak to 
him  to  number  814329  who  may  speak  of  him  to 
number  814330   and  so  on  to  number  814345  who 
in  this  way  may  know  number  814326   by  repute
                                 

(Beckett, How 119)

 

similarly number  814326  may  know  by repute number 
814345    number 814344   having  spoken  of  him  to 
number 814343 and this last to number 814342 and this 
last to  number  814341  and so back to number 814326 
who in  this  way  may  know  number 814345 by repute  
[...]

but question to what purpose

for when number  814336  describes  number  814337  to 
number  814335  and  number  814335  to  number 814337 
for example he is merely in fact describing himself to 
two lifelong acquaintances

so to what purpose               
                                   
(Beckett, How 120)

As in the case of the repeated pratfalls of the slapstick comedian, stuplimity emerges in the performance of such fatigue-inducing strategies, in which the gradual accumulation of error often leads to the repetition of a refrain: “too strong”; or “something wrong there.” In this manner, every attempt to account for or explain the “natural order” or “logic” of the encompassing system (and the acts of movement, information exchange, narration, and violence it determines) by means of a smaller logic paradoxically culminates in the understanding of the wider principle being blocked. There is a multiplicity of such attempts, ranging from Euclidean geometry describing the trajectory of subjects (based on a circle and its division into chords “AB” and “BA”), to simple arithmetic describing the durations, distances, and velocities involved:

 

allowing  then I  quote  twenty years for the journey and 
knowing  furthermore  from  having heard so that the four 
phases  and  knowing  furthermore  from  having  heard so 
that  the  four  phases  through  which  we  pass the two 
kinds  of  solitude  the  two  kinds  of company  through 
which  tormentors  abandoned  victims  travelers  we  all 
pass and pass again  being regulated thus  are  of  equal 
duration

knowing  furthermore  by  the  same  courtesy   that  the 
journey is accomplished in stages ten yards fifteen yards 
at the rate of say its  reasonable to say  one  stage per 
month this  word  these  words  months   years  I  murmur 
them
                                       (Beckett, How 125)

We are thus brought to a series of calculations which in this case lead to a finite solution–if our fatigue permits us to follow them. In spite of its empirical faultlessness, however, on the page the accumulation of figures visually suggests babble:

 

four by twenty  eighty twelve  and  half  by  twelve one 
hundred and  fifty by twenty  three thousand  divided by 
eighty thirty-seven  and a half  thirty-seven to thirty-
eight say forty yards a year we advance
                                       (Beckett, How 125)

The linguistic environment of How It Is thus provides a model for better understanding stuplimity as an aesthetic strategy in contemporary practice, insofar as it entails an affective reorganization of one’s relationship to language, as well as a veering away from the older category of the sublime. Unlike the instantaneous or sudden defeat of comprehension instigated by the latter, the stuplime belongs to a different temporal and emotional register, involving not an abrupt climax of excitation in terror, but rather an extended duration of consecutive fatigues. What facilitates this relationship is an encounter with the finite (though vast) operations of a symbolic order, the artificial system or “justice” encompassing the subject who confronts it, rather than an encounter with radically external and uncontrollable forces of Nature. In experiencing the sublime one confronts the infinite and elemental; in stuplimity one confronts the machine or system, the taxonomy or vast combinatory, of which one is a part. Recalling Stein’s fascination with “mushy masses” in The Making of Americans, How It Is also suggests features specific to the anti-romantic environment of the stuplime text: linguistic bits and scraps, discarded “cultural” waste (torn sacks, empty food tins, dropped can openers), and the dross or mud in which all acts of socialization and communication occur and subjects find themselves partially submerged. The discursive economy supported by this mud, the basis for all relationships and social organization, is one of rhetorical “incoherencies” (gasps and pants, babble or quaqua), enumerations, repetitions, permutations, retractions and emendations, agglutinations, measurements and taxonomic classifications, and rudimentary arithmetical and algebraic operations (grouping, subdividing, multiplying).

Since the forms of exhaustion described above are related to tedium in a highly particular way, Beckett’s example indicates that there are different kinds or uses of tedium in general, necessitating some differentiation between them. What stuplimity does not seem to involve is the kind of spiritualistic, mesmerizing tedium aimed at the achievement of “higher” states of consciousness or selfhood, as engendered by metaphysical plays of absence against presence in the work of Meredith Monk, Brice Marsden, or Donald Judd. In this case, tedium assumes a seriousness and a transcendence more proper to the sublime than the stuplime, to an absorptive rather than anti-absorptive agenda. Stuplimity also evades the kind of wholly anti-absorptive, cynical tedium used to reflect the flattening effects of cultural simulacra, as in the work of Warhol and Koons. Here tediousness is frequently adopted as aesthetic self-stylization or mannerism, which often registers as smugness or self-satisfied irony. Whereas the first type of tedium is auratic or hypnotic, the effect produced by works utilizing tedium in this manner could be described as euphoric.

What stuplime productions do rely on is an anti-auratic, anti-euphoric tedium which at times deliberately risks seeming obtuse, rather than insist upon its capacity for intellectual or spiritual transcendence and/or clever irony. Rather than being centered around grandiose questions of being or the proliferation of larger-than-life iconography, this boredom resides in relentless attention to the abject and the small, the bits and scraps floating in what Ben Watson has called the “common muck” of language (223). The stuplime resides in the synecdochal relationship between these minute materials and a vast ecology of repetition and agglutination, the system ensuring that parapraxes, portmanteaus, and clichés (rotting metaphors) continue to be made. As Beckett writes, “What more vigorous fillip could be given to the wallows of one bogged in the big world than the example of life to all appearances inalienably realised in the little?” (Beckett, Murphy 181). Absurdity and black humor play significant roles in this aesthetic use of tedium to facilitate linguistic questioning, even when such inquiry leads to direct confrontations with questions of violence and suffering, as evinced in much post-WW II writing. The particular use of “obtuse” boredom as means of engaging in linguistic inquiry is also demonstrated in the following anecdote, told by Lacan in his 1959 seminar to introduce a definition of das Ding as “that which in the real suffers from the signifier”:

During that great period of penitence that our country went through under Pétain, in the time of “Work, Family, Homeland” and of belt-tightening, I once went to visit my friend Jacques Prévert in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. And I saw there a collection of match boxes. Why the image has suddenly resurfaced in my memory, I cannot tell.

 

It was the kind of collection that it was easy to afford at that time; it was perhaps the only kind of collection possible. Only the match boxes appeared as follows: they were all the same and were laid out in an extremely agreeable way that involved each being so close to the one next to it that the little drawer was slightly displaced. As a result, they were all threaded together so as to form a continuous ribbon that ran along the mantelpiece, climbed the wall, extended to the molding, and climbed down again next to a door. I don’t say that it went on to infinity, but it was extremely satisfying from an ornamental point of view.

 

Yet I don’t think that that was the be all and end all of what was surprising in the collectionism, nor the source of the satisfaction that the collector himself found there. I believe that the shock of novelty of the effect realized by this collection of empty match boxes–and this is the essential point–was to reveal something that we do not perhaps pay enough attention to, namely, that a box of matches is not simply an object, but that, in the form of an Erscheinung, as it appeared in its truly imposing multiplicity, it may be a Thing.

 

In other words, this arrangement demonstrated that a match box isn’t simply something that has a certain utility, that it isn’t even a type in the Platonic sense, an abstract match box, that the match box all by itself is a thing with all its coherence of being. The wholly gratuitous, proliferating, superfluous, and quasi absurd character of this collection pointed to its thingness as match box. Thus the collector found his motive in this form of apprehension that concerns less the match box than the Thing that subsists in a match box. (Seminar 113-14)

Lacan uses this “fable” as illustration of his formula for sublimation (“[the raising] of an object to the dignity of the Thing” [112]), but it works equally well as an example of stuplimation, as the concatenation of awe (inspired by “the truly imposing”) with what refuses awe (the “wholly gratuitous, proliferating, superfluous and quasi absurd”). The description of the array of matchboxes and their internal voids seems meant playfully to recall an earlier moment in the seminar, where Lacan claims that the Thing, das Ding, “has to be identified with the Wieder zu finden, the impulse to find again that for Freud establishes the orientation of the human subject to [a lost/absent] object” (Seminar 58). The impulse to find again is an impulse towards repetition, one centered around and organized by negativity. In the fable above, the repetition which Lacan finds simultaneously imposing and ridiculous, threatening and non-threatening, leads him straight to this Thing, enabling “the sudden elevation of the match box to a dignity that it did not possess before” (Seminar 118). Yet this elevation is paradoxically achieved through a lowering or abjection, an emphasis on the undignified or “wholly gratuitous… superfluous and quasi absurd” status of the collection through the proliferation of bits and scraps. As the producer of “multiplicities,” repetition seems to do opposite things simultaneously in this anecdote: elevate and absurdify. In conjoining these divergent dynamics (raising and lowering, trajectory upwards and trajectory downwards), the repetition in the fable recalls a similar conjunction of rising and falling in the stuplime, through its syncretism of excitation and enervation, extreme “selected attentiveness” and deficit of the same. Lacan’s stuplime array also recalls the structure of a typical sentence from The Making of Americans, in which the tension created by slightly overlapping phrases performs the functions of both disjunction (that which calls attention to the spaces between signifying units, figured in the image of “the little drawer” exposed) and what Peter Brooks calls the “binding” action of repetition (the agglutination expressed in “threaded together”) (101). And as in the case of Stein, its particular kind of tedium also seems willing to risk a certain degree of shock value, unlike metaphysical boredom, which risks none, and cynical boredom, which demands more than we are often willing to give.

The aesthetic differences between sublimity and stuplimity call attention to the fact that not all repetitions are alike, a point also foregrounded in Kierkegaard’s Repetition. When the young man on a quest for “real repetition” in Kierkegaard’s narrative euphorically (and erroneously) believes he has found it in the final outcome of his unconsummated love, “[His] perhaps disturbing enthusiasm is expressed in terms that only a little earlier in aesthetic history were standard when describing the sublime: ‘spume with elemental fury,’ ‘waves that hide me in the abyss… that fling me up above the stars’” (Melberg 76). Significantly, these prototypical invocations of sublimity involve the image of elevation, situating the young man’s relationship to the “ocean providing his ‘vortex of the infinite’” as an experience of verticality and depth (222). In contrast, having chosen to pursue repetition in a comic/materialist rather than tragic/romantic arena, Constantin Constantius’s description of farce as a “frothing foam of words that sound without resonance” (Kierkegaard 156) ironically references this sublime imagery only to flatten or deflate it, reconfiguring the experience of genuine repetition as one of a superficial and almost abject horizontality.

Thus did I lie in my theater box, discarded like a swimmer’s clothing, stretched out by the stream of laughter and unrestraint and applause that ceaselessly foamed by me. I could see nothing but the expanse of theater, hear nothing but the noise in which I resided. Only at intervals did I rise up, look at Beckmann, and laugh so hard that I sank back again in exhaustion alongside the foaming stream. (Kierkegaard 166)

In a satirical twist of the young man’s invocation of the sublime, Constantin’s description of his stuplime encounter with farce places him not in the elemental fury of a vast and abyssal sea, but rather horizontally alongside a mild and insipidly picturesque stream; it depicts him not as a mortal body engulfed, but as a pile of garments discarded by an absent body. Instead of the roaring or crashing of oceanic waves in which one becomes lost, we have “plaintive purling” of a small brook on the site of the family farm (166). As a “frothing foam of words that sound without resonance,” farce finds its structural counterpart in the mode of its reception: laughter. This laughter foams and flows by a self with no substantive content or body. Much like the “mushy mass,” “flabby mass,” or “lax condition” Stein attributes to “the being all independent dependent being in possibility of formation” in The Making of Americans (386), the self who experiences farce is described as a body’s outline gone flaccid, one having lost its original form. In laughter, the self becomes “stretched out” like the Steinian sentence itself, which would seem to generate a linguistic foam of its own through the cumulative build-up of repeated phrases and the repeated abutment and overlapping of clauses against others.

Unlike the upheaval of waves that fling the young man towards the sky, linguistic “foam” would seem to cling by cohesion to the ground, often in accumulated lumps. It is the “vast sea” slaver or waste product: the dross of the sublime. Since to froth is to produce foam and foam is what froths, Constantin Constantius’s phrase “frothing foam” is itself a repetition (like his own name); one accordingly used by him to characterize the form of comedy he finds most repetition-friendly. One seeks repetition in what foams or bubbles; thus the comic genius Beckmann is described as a “yeasty ingredient” (Kierkegaard 165). The littoral environment of farce in which Constantin pursues repetition might here recall the importance of “foaming” language to Stein’s comic taxonomy of human “types” in The Making of Americans, as exemplified in this description of “bottom nature”–where bottom is literally “ground” in the sense of dirt:

The way I feel natures in men and women is this way then. To begin then with one general kind of them, this a resisting earthy slow kind of them, anything entering into them as a sensation must emerge again from through the slow resisting bottom of them to be an emotion in them. This is a kind of them. This bottom in them then in some can be solid, in some frozen, in some dried and cracked, in some muddy and engulfing, in some thicker, in some thinner, slimier, drier, very dry and not so dry and in some a stimulation entering into the surface that is them to make an emotion does not get into it, the mass then that is them, to be swallowed up in it to be emerging, in some it is swallowed up and never then is emerging. (343)

If Constantin seeks repetition not in the vast sea, but on a ground covered by its dross, Stein pursues it in the “slow resisting bottom” of language: a relentlessly materialist environment of words which similarly summons, yet ultimately deflates, the traditional romanticism of the sublime.

Since for Stein, as for Deleuze, all repetition is repetition with an internal difference (“a feeling for all changing” [Making 301]), for “getting completed understanding [one] must have in them an open feeling, a sense for all the slightest variations in repeating, must never lose themselves so in the solid steadiness of all repeating that they do not hear the slightest variation” (294, my emphasis). In contrast to the sublime’s dramatic awes and terrors, “open feeling” is also described as an emotion of indeterminate emotivity, a state of utter receptivity that actually slows or impedes reactivity, as both astonishment and fatigue are wont to do:

Resisting being then as I was saying is to me a kind of being, one kind of men and women have it as being that emotion is not poignant in them as sensation. This is my meaning, this is resisting being. Generally speaking them resisting being is a kind of being where, taking bottom nature to be a substance like earth to someone’s feeling, this needs time for penetrating to get reaction. Generally speaking those having resisting being in them have a slow way of responding, they may be nervous and quick and all that but it is in them, nervousness is in them as the effect of slow-moving going too fast… (Making 347-48, my emphasis)

The “open feeling” of resisting being is thus an undifferentiated emotional state, one which lacks the punctuating “point” of “poignancy.” Skepticism is to be expected here: how can an affective state exist prior to the making of affective distinctions or values? Since, as Greimas and Fontanille point out, we tend to automatically assume and “reiterate uncritically the notion that living beings are structures of attractions and repulsions,” it becomes quite difficult to imagine how “phoria [might be] thought of prior to the euphoria/dysphoria split” (3). Yet stuplimity as “open feeling” could serve as an example of the phoria or “not-yet-polarized tensive horizon” Greimas and Fontanille ask us to imagine; a realm of “gluey” emotivity [Stein] which could perhaps be described as “the individual’s possibility [wandering] about in its own possibility” (Kierkegaard 155).⁷ It is important to note here that Stein describes the kind of subject with “open feeling” as “that kind of being that has resisting as its natural way of fighting rather than… that kind of being that has attacking as its natural way of fighting” (Making 296, my emphasis). As a mode of “open feeling” engendered by the syncretism of shock and boredom (that is, engendered by an encounter with difference prior to its conceptualization), stuplimity also functions as state of receptivity that paradoxically enables this tactics of “resistance” as a form of critical agency; one which the next section attempts to elaborate.

Linguistic “Heaps”

In one of his most influential and much-discussed essays, Frederic Jameson describes postmodernism as an “aesthetic situation engendered by the absence of the historical referent,” or as an ongoing process of simulacratic spatialization disabling our capacity for temporal organization and hence relationship to “real historical time” (25). The here and now becomes the erewhon of the simulacrum, which “endows present reality and the openness of present history with the spell and distance of a glossy image” (21). As Jameson continues,

Yet this mesmerizing new aesthetic mode itself emerged as an elaborated symptom of the waning of our historicity, of our living possibility to experience history in some active way. It cannot therefore be said to produce this strange occultation of the present by its own formal power, but rather merely to demonstrate, through these inner contradictions, the enormity of a situation in which we seem increasingly incapable of fashioning representations of our own current experience. (21)

The subject is described as impotent in this regard, having lost the ability to “organize [his or her] past and future into coherent experience” (Jameson 25, my emphasis).

Since coherent representations of current experience are what Jameson (in 1984) finds most lacking in postmodernism as an “aesthetic situation engendered by the absence of the historical referent,” we might take a closer look at how these breakdowns in reference and coherence are described, and what types of production they are said to result in (25). A good place to do so is where Jameson begins to delineate a common feature of postmodern textuality, or the “schizophrenic” writing he later associates with Cage, Beckett, and Language poetry:

If, indeed, the subject has lost its capacity actively to extend its pro-tensions and re-tensions across the temporal manifold and to organize its past and future into coherent experience, it becomes difficult to see how the cultural productions of such a subject could result in anything but “heaps of fragments” and in practice of the randomly heterogeneous and fragmentary and the aleatory. These are, however, very precisely some of the privileged terms in which postmodernist cultural production has been analyzed (and even defended, by its own apologists). They are, however, still privative features… (25, my emphasis)

The language of this passage clarifies what Jameson understands and expects coherence to be, and what forms he assumes it can take. In the movement from “heaps of fragments” to “the fragmentary,” used to relate a specific kind of production back to the practice engendering it, what gets eclipsed from the sentence (and the theory) is the heap.

Effaced perhaps in the desire to emphasize fragmentation in general (as privation) over its potential effects, this heap disappears from the critique of postmodernity just as the historical referent is said to do within the aesthetic situation it engenders. According to the logic of the paragraph, then, “heaping” does not appear to be a valid means of cohering, nor a proper form of organization. Yet insofar as for something to cohere is for it “to hold together firmly as parts of the same mass; broadly: STICK, ADHERE,” a heap does seem to be a coherence of some sort. The difference seems to be the degree of “firmness” involved in the act of sticking, though this is only a difference of degree; a less than firm consolidation of parts would still be a proper coherence. We might think here of the “slowly wobbling,” “flabby mass of independent dependent being” that is Stein’s Martha Hersland, or the “slimy, gelatinous, gluey” substance that is “attacking being” disguised as “resisting being” (Making 349). As Stein insists, “[s]ome are always whole ones though the being in them is all a mushy mass.” Thus Jameson seems to have a more specific, dictionary definition of “coherence” in mind when he excludes from it acts of holding-together in general. Insofar as it does not seem to cover particular forms of adhesion perceived as loose, limp, or unstable (such as heaps or mushy masses), what constitutes a legitimate form of coherence here would seem to be the process of making “(parts or components) fit or stick together in a suitable or orderly way,” implying “systematic connection,” especially in “logical discourse” (Webster’s 216, my italics). In its orientation toward (phallo)logical firmness, this definition would seem to disavow limpnesses or flaccidities as equally viable organizations of matter.

An obvious point that must be stressed here is that what constitutes “logical consistency” or “logical discourse” is always a standard imposed by the cultural status quo. Might not unpredicted and seemingly “accidental” ways of cohering, then–even those resulting in unsightly heaps, lumps, and flabby masses–point to the possibility of new systems, enabling us to critique traditional assumptions about what “systematic connection” should look like?

Thus if we follow the logic of Jameson’s passage, “coherence” appears to be something that can only be imposed from without, an abstract concept rather than active manifestation, a stabilizing, fixed idea of order dictating in advance how particles might be molded or organized, rather than a particular activity or becoming by which things are brought together, made, into some order. Yet if coherence must imply suitability and orderliness as well as adhesion, then how does one describe the way hair, teeth, and linotype pieces come to accumulate in Hamilton’s installations, or words and phrases in the poetry of Kenneth Goldsmith? As a noun rather than a verb, the radical potentiality of “coherence” to generate new forms and new theories of formation becomes limited, restricted to the safe domain of the suitable, the orderly, and the aesthetically consistent.

Both Jameson’s and Stein’s notions of coherence are informed by and diverge precisely around this question of “consistency.” Whereas for Jameson the term would seem to imply regularity or conformity to a particular ideal, an absence of variations or contradictions, consistency for Stein is a matter of irregularity and constant flux, as well as a matter of matter:

There must now then be more description of the way each one is made of a substance common to their kind of them, thicker, thinner, harder, softer, all of one consistency, all of one lump, or little lumps stuck together to make a whole one cemented together sometimes by the same kind of being sometimes by the other kind of being in them, some with a lump hard at the centre liquid at the surface, some with the lump vegetablish or wooden or metallic in them. Always then the kind of substance, the kind of way when it is a mediumly fluid solid fructifying reacting substance, the way it acts makes one kind of them of the resisting kind of them, the way another substance acts makes another kind of them the attacking way of them. It and the state it is in each kind of them, the mixing of it with the other way of being that makes many kinds of these two kinds of them, sometime all this will have meaning. (Making 345, my emphasis)

Hilarious and stuplime, this description usefully eludicates the main differences between the two notions of coherence. For Stein, coherence is a mode of substantiation–a material process of making rather than a value or ideal imposed on things made. As such, it involves an active potentiality or becoming–pointing not just to the creation of new “kinds,” but of futural meanings. Secondly, coherence structurally complexifies, as a process diverse and varied in the ways in which it can occur, and the forms in which it may appear. Thirdly, coherence functions as a vast combinatory, in which new consistencies are produced through the “mixing” or hybridization of others.

We can also see that different kinds of material consistency are emphasized in the two notions of coherence: firmly constituted versus mushy or gelatinous; graspable versus slimy. Generally speaking, Jameson’s notion of coherence seems a lot less messy than Stein’s–free of heaps, masses, and lumps. In the passage above, the disappearance of the “heap” seems related to the fact that Jameson very much wants to see the heaping of fragments as indicative of privation rather than accrual–perhaps because the accrual implied is so, well, unsightly. Yet as those with agricultural, laundry, postal, or waste disposal experience might attest, a heap is an organization, though perhaps a not particularly organized-looking one.

This coming together in them to be a whole one is a strange thing in men and women. Sometimes some one is very interesting to some one, very, very interesting to some one and then that one comes together to be a whole one and then that one is not any more, at all, interesting to the one knowing the one. (Stein, Making 382)

This passage suggests that how things cohere or come together is of intellectual interest to Stein, perhaps more so than the actual entities produced through this process. Following her lead we might similarly ask, how do the fragments in Jameson’s “heap of fragments” get heaped? “Practices of the randomly heterogeneous and fragmentary and the aleatory” would seem to account for the fragments themselves, but leaves the question of their particular accumulation unexplained. To further elucidate this characterization of late twentieth-century experimental writing, Jameson refers to what he calls Lacan’s “schizophrenic” theory of language, as a “linguistic malfunction” or breakdown of the relationships between signifiers in the signifying chain that ultimately results in “the form of a rubble” (27). While this reference to Lacan seems to elaborate causes for the fragmentation discussed above, it nevertheless continues to evade, or withhold acknowledgment of, the particular structure or organization these fragments assume. Just as the heap in “heap of fragments” disappears from critical scrutiny, so does the form in “form of rubble.” One wants a less reductive or dismissive analysis of “breakdown” here, as well as less narrow definition of “coherence.” Are there not, as Stein suggests, multiple and various ways of heaping and cohering?–as well as different kinds of linguistic or semiotic rubble? An isolated fragment may be an “inert passivity” (Jameson 31), but a heap of fragments is more accurately described as a constituent passivity, or “passive synthesis“–a term Deleuze applies to the work of repetition for itself (72).

Significantly, Jameson finds the waning of historicity endemic to postmodernism (as reflected in its textualities) concomitant with “a waning of affect” and negative affect in particular. Thus “concepts such as anxiety and alienation… are no longer appropriate in the world of the postmodern” (14); rather, Jameson sees them displaced by euphoria, which he describes as a “joyous” or “hallucinatory exhilaration” (33), an ecstasy or high. Yet anxiety and alienation in their most hyperbolic manifestations–shock and boredom–converge in attempts to negotiate historicity by Beckett and Stein, writers Jameson himself considers “outright postmodernists” (4). For Stein, the work of “telling” or “making” history is inseparable from the labor of making of subjects (“kinds of men and women”), which itself entails the tedious labor of enumerating, differentiating, describing, dividing and sorting, and mixing within the chosen limits of a particular system. Such making does have its moments of exhilaration, but more generally takes place as a painstakingly slow, tiring, and seemingly endless “puzzling” over differences and resemblances. Temporal and taxonomic “organization” becomes marked by a series of fatigues rather than of euphoric highs. Stein accordingly acknowledges the number of failures occurring in this struggle for coherence (also described as “learning” or “studying” of a new discursive system), as well the alienation and anxiety it induces: “Mostly every one dislikes to hear it” (Making 289). With this projection of a less than receptive audience, writing becomes a seemingly isolating enterprise for the taxonomist-poet, who finds herself forced to announce “I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way I can do it” (289). This address can be read as a more inclusive formulation of audience, however, rather than a restriction of one, if we perceive Stein’s writing itself as a process of “strangering,” of forming community based on something other than the satisfactory fulfillment of membership conditions.

Reflecting an essentially constructivist world view, everyone for Stein is a “kind of,” and thus strangered. Yet the alienating effects of this subjection are themselves perceived as valuable subjects for study: “Mostly always then when any one tells it to any one there is much discussing often very much irritation. This is then very interesting” (Making 338). Thus the narrator finds herself able to continue even at moments where she finds herself “all unhappy in this writing… nervous and driving and unhappy” (348). For above all, the making of “completed history” that is the self-consciously impossible (and thus unhappy) fantasy of The Making of Americans, which even more impossibly depends on the consolidation of the completed history of every single subject, is absolutely synonymous with repeating:

Often as I was saying repeating is very irritating to listen to from them and then slowly it settles into a completed history of them… Sometimes it takes many years of knowing some one before the repeating in that one comes to be a clear history of such a one. Sometimes many years of knowing some one pass before repeating of all being in such a one comes out clearly from them… This is now more description of the way repeating slowly comes to make in each one a completed history of them. (292)

Stein’s comment that “sometimes many years pass” before repeating slowly comes to make a “completed history” finds contemporary realization in On Kawara’s One Million Years (Past) (1970-1972), a series of ten black, official-looking ledgers, each containing 2000 pages listing 500 years per page, from 998031 B.C. to 1969 A.D.⁸ The sublimity of such a vast amount of time is trumped by its organization into bureaucratic blandness; comprehension of one million years is rendered manageable, if also tedious, when consolidated in a set of ring binders bearing some resemblance to the complete Starr Report. Yet this tedium turns back into astonishment when we come to realize the amount of time and labor it took (two years worth) to make such a severely minimal product. Dedicated to “All those who have lived and died,” what this piece records is not so much a completed “history,” though it certainly speaks to the fantasy of or desire for this, but the time spent in the attempt to organize one even in the most stark and reductive way. The hic et nunc postmodernism of Kawara may be very different from Stein’s avant le lettre variety, yet the comparison points to how The Making of Americans deliberately stages its own failure by setting itself against an impossible fantasy of absolute historical coherence or explicitness, usually imagined as an incipient future: “Sometime there will be here every way there can be of seeing kinds of men and women. Sometime there will be then a complete history of each one” (290); “Sometime then there will be a complete history of every one who ever was or is or will be living” (283). Or even more hyperbolically: “Sometime there will be a description of every kind of way any one can know anything, any one can know any one” (311); “sometime there will be a completed system of kinds of men and women, of kinds of men and kinds of women” (334).

While stuplimity offers no fantasy of transcendence, it does provide small subjects with what Stein calls “a little resistance” in their confrontations with larger systems. The fatigues generated by the system which is The Making of Americans may be “nervous and driving and unhappy,” but such fatigues can also be darkly funny, as Beckett’s Molloy, Keaton, Harpo Marx, and Pee Wee Herman remind us by their exhausting routines: running endless laps around a battleship, trying to enter a door, falling down and getting up again, collapsing in heaps. Significantly, the humor of these local situations usually occurs in the context of a confrontation staged between the small subject and powerful institutions or machines: thus we have Chaplin versus the assembly line; Keaton versus military engines such as The Navigator (a supply ship) and The General (a locomotive); Lucille Ball versus domesticity. Here we might add: Stein versus her own taxonomy. Critics have persuasively suggested that Stein’s refusal of linear for cyclical or repetitive time signals a rejection of official (male) history for a temporality specific to feminine subjectivity, formulated by Kristeva as “the eternal recurrence of a biological rhythm” (113). Yet this preference for the cycle, one of “driving” excitations and fatigues, could equally suggest Stein in Chaplin drag. By adopting this particular cultural role, Stein chooses the artifice of comedic “types” over the seriousness of “biological rhythm” as a preferred strategy for feminist and linguistic change.

Just as in Kierkegaard’s Repetition, where Constantin describes himself, consumed by laughter at a farce, as a pile of discarded clothes, the “kinds” of subjects produced in The Making of Americans function like garments without bodies, heap-like outlines, as it were, waiting to be “filled up” with the repeating (the discourse) that makes them “whole ones.” Whole–but loose as opposed to firm. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein calls attention to the male comedian’s use of misshapen or “misfit” clothes “later so well known on Charlie Chaplin,” clothes that “were all the delight of Picasso and all his friends” (qtd. in Wagner-Martin 75)–i.e., Stein herself, well known for her own loose and flapping garb. We see here again the role of limpnesses or “flabby masses” in counteracting an oppressive System’s fantasies of phallic virility: the clothes worn by Chaplin so admired by Stein are, of course, always falling down. Hence slackness becomes underscored by slacklessness. Stein’s love of the wobbling heap or mushy mass similarly recalls the strange fascination with dough in Chaplin films. As if in anticipation of Oldenberg’s soft and puffy typewriters and other machines, or Yayoi Kusama’s squishy penis-shaped pillows covered with polka-dots, Chaplin shapes flabby substance into handcuffs and missiles (Dough and Dynamite, 1914). Perhaps to ask us to imagine: what might happen to the machine when the exaggeratedly obedient cog within it, while continuing to maintain its function, goes limp? As when the characters played by Chaplin or Keaton, continually in confrontation with the larger systems enclosing them, repeatedly fall into heaps? Here we might also imagine the incontinent Molloy, collapsed under his bicycle, or Murphy, overcome by the “total permutability” of his biscuit assortment (“edible in a hundred and twenty ways!”) (Beckett, Murphy 97).

In the tradition of Beckett and Stein, formulating a materialist poetic response to the “total permutability” of language is perhaps what is most at stake for poets like Farrell and Goldsmith, as well as visual artists like Zweig. For these postmodern practictioners, the staging of “accidental concretions,” as Constantin describes the comic character in farce [Kierkegaard 163], strategically enables us to find new forms of “coherence” in an incoherent world–such as seen in Alice Notley’s feminist epic poem, The Descent of Alette (1996):

“When the train” “goes under water” “the close tunnel” “is transparent” “Murky water” “full of papery” “full of shapelessness” “Some fish” “but also things” “Are they made by humans?” “Have no shape,” “like rags” “like soggy papers” “like frayed thrown-away wash cloths”… [16]

 

“There is a car” “that is nothing but” “garbage” “Shit & spittle” “dropped food” “frayed brownness” “dirty matter” “pressed down & flattened” “Paper piled” “piled on the floor” “heaped on the benches” “Napkins yellowed” “tampons bloody”… (17)

Each quoted phrase, in being presented as a citation, becomes “thick” and carries with it a behindness or prior context–creating a series of halts or delays in the narrative produced through their accumulation.⁹ There’s clearly nothing “accidental” about this concretion of language, yet the poem nevertheless seeks to look like one. For like the massive accumulations of “dirty matter” in Hamilton’s installations, Stein’s mushy masses, and the lumps formed by comic actors in their continual collapses and falls, such concretions challenge existing notions of form and aesthetic order. We can see how unsightly “heaping” offers what Stein might call a “little resistance” strategy for the postmodern subject, always already a linguisticbeing, hence always a small subject caught in large systems. For as Deleuze suggests,

There are two known ways to overturn moral law. One is by ascending towards the principles: challenging the law as secondary, derived, borrowed, or ‘general’; denouncing it as involving a second-hand principle which diverts an original force or usurps an original power. The other way, by contrast, is to overturn the law by descending towards the consequences, to which one submits with a too-perfect attention to detail. By adopting the law, a falsely submissive soul manages to evade it and to taste pleasures it was supposed to forbid. We can see this in demonstration by absurdity and working to rule, but also in some forms of masochistic behaviour which mock by submission. (5)

This “too-perfect attention to detail” is the main strategy utilized by Notley, Goldsmith, and Farrell, all of whom exaggeratedly follow structural laws in their work; Farrell the days of the calendar (“Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday… “), Goldsmith the mechanisms of the body (“Swallow. Arm lifts. Arm drops… “). It appears also the main strategy used by Stein’s endlessly classifying and subdividing narrator in Making of Americans, as well as by the comic in farce. For as Deleuze also notes, while one can oppose the law by trying to ascend above it, one can also do so by means of humor, “which is an art of consequences and descents,of suspensions and falls” (5, my emphasis). Like other “falsely submissive souls” before them, some postmodern American poets follow this path in their confrontations with the systems encompassing them, formulating a stand-against by going limp or falling down, among the bits and scraps of linguistic matter.

Notes

1. I’ve imported this expression from Duchamp’s TRANS/formers, Lyotard’s study of Duchamp’s Large Glass. Lyotard’s analysis of Duchamp’s aesthetics as underwritten by a logic of “inexact precision” and “intelligent stupidity” seems very much in attunement with the poetics of Stein and contemporary Steinians.

2. Quotations are taken from the FIDGET website, which is sponsored by the Whitney Museum of American Art, Printed Matter, and Stadium, and is available at <http://stadiumweb.com/fidget/>. FIDGET was originally commissioned by the Whitney Museum and was performed in collaboration with vocalist Theo Bleckmann on June 16, 1998 at the Whitney. A book and compact disc were issued by the Maryland Institute of Art in 1998.

3. As Raphael Rubinstein notes in his blurb for this volume, “Goldsmith’s epic litanies and lists bring to the textual tradition of conceptual art not only an exploded frame of reference, but a hitherto absent sense of hypnotic beat. Under its deceptively bland title, No. 111 2.7.93-10.20.96 attempts no less than a complete reordering of the things of the world.”

4. For those curious about the (original?) text claiming to “appropriate” the Declaration of Independence which Goldsmith edits for incorporation into his own conceptual framework, the self-referential story is written by mathematician David Moser and cited by Douglas Hofstadter in Metamagical Themas, 37-41. Ultimately, however, what determines this text’s positioning between MDCLXXXV and MDCLXXXVII in Goldsmith’s poem? encyclopedia? Baedeker? is the fact that it contains the appropriate number of syllables, and, like the other rhymed “verses,” ends with a sound related to the sound “R”: “Harder harder” [568]. Yet the point is not simply to dramatize a privileging of form over content, since the hetergenous assortment of works chosen to build this aggressively prosodic text pointedly direct us to the untotalizable linguistic world of the late twentieth century.

5. Frederic Jameson makes this point about boredom alone in “Surrealism and the Unconscious,” his chapter on video in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism: “Boredom becomes interesting as a reaction to situations of paralysis and also, no doubt, as defense mechanism or avoidance behavior” (71-72). Deleuze suggests similar possibilities in noting that “fatigue is a real component of contemplation” (77).

6. I am convinced this characterization is Sontag’s but have been unable to find source.

7. This description by Constantin of farce and its effect on spectators suggests that its “frothing foam of words” is yet another modulation of nonpolarized “phoric tension”: “Seeing a farce can produce the most unpredictable mood, and therefore a person can never be sure whether he has conducted himself in the theater as a worthy member of society who has laughed and cried at the appropriate places” (Kierkegaard 160); thus farce enables the viewer to “maintain himself in the state in which not a single mood is present but the possibility of all” (161). Farce obstructs the “unanimity” of emotional impressions “and, strangely enough, it may so happen that the one time it made the least impression it was performed best” (160, my emphasis).

8. Exhibited at PS 1, Deep Storage. New York, 1998.

9. In the Author’s Note to The Descent of Alette, Notley offers “A word about the quotation marks. People ask about them, in the beginning; in the process of reading the poem, they become comfortable with them, without necessarily thinking precisely about why they’re there. But they’re there, mostly, to measure the poem. The phrases they enclose are poetic feet. If I had simply left white spaces between the phrases, the phrases would be rushed by the reader—read too fast for my musical intention. The quotation marks make the reader slow down and silently articulate—not slur over mentally—the phrases at the pace, and with the stresses, I intend. They also distance the narrative from myself, the author: I am not Alette. Finally they may remind the reader that each phrase is a thing said by a voice: this is not a thought, or a record of thought-process, this a story, told.”

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