Mark Hansen

English Department
Princeton University
mbhansen@princeton.edu

 

As several recent critical studies have conclusively demonstrated, biological research and theory form a central reference point in Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy.¹ From his early major work culminating in Difference and Repetition of 1968, through his collaboration with Félix Guattari on Capitalism and Schizophrenia (especially, A Thousand Plateaus of 1980), to his final work on Leibniz and geophilosophy (The Fold, and with Guattari again, What is Philosophy?), Deleuze has framed his account of individuation and agency through an evolving critical engagement with evolutionary thinking. Rooted in his early rehabilitation of Henri Bergson’s 1907 Creative Evolution, Deleuze’s heretical “evolutionism” draws widely and irreverently on the advances of recent biology; and yet, for all its gesturing toward biological theory, it remains distinctly philosophical in flavor. Not only was Deleuze’s very interest in biology overdetermined from the beginning by his desire to redress the almost total neglect of Bergson as a philosopher, but (more importantly for my purposes) his ongoing engagement with biological theory (and with Bergsonism itself) has been marshaled to support a metaphysics of the virtual that is, for all its resonances with recent developments in biology, at odds with the distinct priority biological theory (and the Bergson of Creative Evolution) places on processes of actualization.

 

Laying bare this différend between science and philosophy motivates the first strand of my argument in this paper: an attempt to unpack and clarify the genealogy of Deleuze’s changing, though lifelong, engagement with Bergson. Essentially, after starting off from a point of seemingly perfect convergence between philosophy and biology–Bergson’s notion of the élan vital–Deleuze drives an ever-widening wedge between the biological notions he appropriates from neo-evolutionism and what he increasingly comes to view as a model of creative evolution too fundamentally bound up with both humanism and a residual representationalism. As I shall argue, what compels Deleuze to distance himself from creative evolution and from a certain Bergson is his (paradoxically very Bergsonian) philosophical aim of furnishing a metaphysics for contemporary science, that is, a metaphysics of the virtual.² Against such a metaphysics, I shall insist, against such metaphysics and with the support of contemporary biologists, that a certain priority be granted processes of actualization.

 

Still, despite Deleuze’s distancing from creative evolution, something substantial persists across his changing relation to both Bergson and biology: namely, his commitment to a notion of internal difference, or difference in itself. This commitment motivates Deleuze’s initial adherence to Bergson’s creative evolutionism no less than his later “break” with Bergson over the status of intensity as well as the correlated model of creative involution he develops together with Guattari. The initial impetus driving Deleuze’s effort to rehabilitate the fraught notion of the élan vital and with it, the very career of Bergson as philosopher, was nothing other than the notion of internal difference. As he reconstructs it in his 1956 essay, “Bergson’s Conception of Difference,” and then again in his 1966 Bergsonism, the élan vital introduces an explosive force internal to the process of evolution (internal difference) that is capable of accounting for the positive power of time as a source of creative invention. With the progress of his own philosophical career, Deleuze soon found reason to temper his initial adherence to Bergsonism–and specifically, to Bergson’s derivation of internal difference from qualitative difference–without in any way abandoning his own commitment to internal difference. As early as Difference and Repetition (1968), Deleuze traces qualitative difference or difference in kind (together with quantitative difference or difference in degree) to a fluid continuum of intensity, thereby eschewing Bergson’s argument that qualitative difference is itself one of two tendencies being differentiated and thus, a tendency internal to difference that, as Deleuze puts it, “show[s] the way in which a thing varies qualitatively in time” (Bergsonism 32).

 

By attending to what is at stake in this shift concerning the source of internal difference, I shall correlate Deleuze’s break with Bergson over the role of intensity with the generalized philosophical Aufhebung of biology that underwrites his introduction (in Difference and Repetition) of a “transcendental sensibility,” a “being of the sensible” that evades empirical determination. Drawing on what one commentator has called the “emerging consensus” in contemporary biology–that development involves dynamical processes ³–I contrast Deleuze’s own radicalized Bergsonism (one that eschews the very core of creative evolution) with complexity theory, a branch of contemporary biology which has, in effect, turned something very like creative evolution into a proper research program. What is crucial in this différend between science and philosophy is the relative importance accorded differentiation as a process of actualization: while Deleuze, in turning away from Bergson, eschews the necessity for discrete levels of differentiation in favor of a single plane of immanence (which paradoxically, he derives from the Bergson of Matter and Memory⁴), complexity theorists link differentiation to actualization and to processes of morphogenesis that are inseparable from the emergence of “natural kinds” in nature. Thus, while both Deleuze (or Deleuze + Guattari) and complexity theorists like Brian Goodwin and Stuart Kauffman recognize that transversal communication occurs across morphogenetic fields, only the latter insist on the irreducibility of the emerging organism (“natural kind”) as one “agent” among others active in morphogenetic processes of emergence. This difference furnishes the basis for a critical corrective to certain excesses in D+G’s biophilosophy that, I think, tend to compromise the value of their impressive conceptual apparatus for rethinking subjectivity and bodily agency in light of current developments in the biological, cognitive, and neurological sciences.

 

Without presuming to adjudicate between conflicting positions within the emerging consensus in biology (a task better left to practicing biologists), I shall thus invoke contemporary work in complexity theory in support of a second, more tendentious strand of my argument–a biologically-rooted critique that challenges D+G’s biophilosophy (redubbed, in A Thousand Plateaus, “creative involution”) on three main topics: 1) their investment in a molecular Darwinism; 2) their dismissal of the organism as a molar form that negatively limits life; and 3) their dubious use of macro-cosmic processes in molecular biology (all of which highlight the nonselectional dimension of “evolution”) as the basis for a posthuman (or at least nonhuman) ethics (the model of becoming presented in Plateau 10). While the analysis surrounding all three points introduces plausible and extremely important considerations into biological theory (considerations that are to a great extent, as I suggested above, shared by contemporary complexity theorists), the sheer radicality of D+G’s line of argumentation in each case not only sets them into conflict with their scientific sources, but ultimately undermines the value of their cross-disciplinary explorations of agency, subjectivity, and life.

 

Why then, the reader may be wondering, my interest–indeed investment–in D+G’s biophilosophy? The short answer concerns the sustained and often surprising resonances between their enterprise and the ground-breaking work that has been transforming the cognitive and biological sciences in the last few decades. No other cultural theorist pays anywhere near as much heed to work in science (the relation between philosophy and science is one of the central topics of D+G’s final collaboration, What is Philosophy?), which, concretely speaking, means that no other theorist is able to follow and to capitalize upon the sustained break with representationalism that forms a core principle of recent work in cognitive science and neurobiology. D+G’s interest in ethology–and indeed in what Keith Ansell-Pearson aptly calls an “ethology of assemblages”–anticipates the recent consensus in cognitive science (including AI) that behavior can only be understood when viewed systemically, i.e., as a component in a larger system or assemblage. Thus D+G’s theoretical corpus helps us unpack the cultural significance of the “adaptive responder” model (Clark 1997) in which body, brain, and world form a complex, holistic, evolutionarily-based system of intelligent behavior. With its insistence on a radically ecological model of agency, D+G’s work resonates with research in biology (Maturana and Varela, Bateson) and cognitive science (Edwin Hutchins, Andy Clark, Rodney Brooks) that understands adaptive behavior as a coproduction of intrinsic dynamics and response to environmental conditions. Such research highlights the role of human agents as “distributed cognitive engines” and situates “the flow of reason” across brain and world (with resonances, once again, to the Bergson of Matter and Memory); consequently, the new picture of living systems to which it gives rise deterritorializes the locus for evaluating adaptive success, attributing it to “brain-body coalitions in ecologically realistic environments” (rather than to the individual brain or organism) (Clark 69). Not only do D+G embrace a similar ecological picture of systems (or machinic assemblages), but, in their function as cultural theorists (and not biologists), they concentrate on extrapolating its implications for the pragmatics of human existence (what they call becoming). By situating the operation of selection within specific ecological contexts and by emphasizing the role of “side-communication” as a source for novelty, D+G foreground the possibilities for novel becomings that arise independently of selective pressures in ways that can potentially alter their impact.

 

At a moment when developments in the cognitive and biological sciences have revolutionized our view of the brain, behavior, and evolution, and when hitherto unimagined convergences between humans and machines are transforming the very meaning of life, it is imperative that cultural theory follow suit. In the light of these developments, notions of subjectivity, agency, and selfhood can no longer remain anchored in an obsolete representationalism, but must be rethought from the ground up. What D+G’s work accomplishes, despite whatever criticisms we may launch against their more radical tendencies, is precisely such a rethinking: eschewing all representationalist models of agency (including theories of performativity which, despite their promises, comprise nothing less than the last bastion of a moribund representationalism), D+G model agency as an emergent process rooted in biology and inseparable from a larger ecological context. In so doing, they make possible an affirmation of the rich, multi-leveled embodiment that characterizes our existence as human beings.

 

I say “make possible,” and not “accomplish,” because, as my argument will bear out, D+G’s dismissal or marginalization of the organism as nothing but a limited, molar, and thus epiphenomenal entity compromises their success in doing justice to the significant agency–indeed, multiple forms of agency–that we acquire by dint of our multi-leveled embodiment (Varela’s “Organism” enumerates five distinct levels of selfhood ranging from the most basic form of biological existence to the richness characteristic of social life). As I see it, D+G’s tendency to privilege the flexibility of the plane of immanence over any constraint imposed by organization–and, correlatively, to emphasize ecological context at the expense of emergent organism or system–risks indulging a familiar posthuman fantasy: to wit, the fantasy that the body can be programmed, that embodied life is simply the consequence of an operation of coding. While D+G’s model of becoming is far more nuanced than the flat-footed notions of performativity that have dominated recent discussions of cyberculture, their willingness to view the embodied organism as a component of a “haecceity” rather than an evolving system risks dissolving the body into the vast sea of life that is the plane of immanence.

 

To counter this risk and to salvage the immense promise of D+G’s fertile cross-disciplinary undertaking, we must therefore read their biophilosophy against their tendency toward radicalism. Accordingly, I offer my critical arguments not as a repudiation of D+G’s work, but rather as an effort toward a broader synthesis of Deleuzean philosophy of difference with contemporary science. By reintroducing a certain notion of organismic autonomy (borrowed from the systems theory of Maturana and Varela), I seek to reinject a particular “Bergsonism” into D+G’s ethology of assemblages–the Bergsonism that stresses the necessity for matter (and the organism) to serve as obstacles to the flow of life. Revamped in light of recent complexity theory, such a Bergsonism yields a model of human agency that eschews much of what D+G find intolerable about organic theories of the human ⁵ and also, incidentally, much of what contemporary cognitive science and neuroscience has shown to be implausible in the representationalist model of the mind (e.g., the idea of a central processing unit, the priority of representation, etc.⁶). Thus in the end, while D+G’s account of becoming will be shown to involve an illegitimate appeal to nonselectional factors that are active only at the level of macro-cosmic “evolution,” their work remains of the utmost importance for the lead they take in modeling agency as an ecological system. Purged of its “anti-organicism” and developed into a form of what Maturana and Varela call “structural coupling” (which, importantly, is necessarily local and concrete), the notion of a machinic assemblage furnishes the very basis for a model of embodied agency that can do justice to the two facets of ethology: the capacity to affect and to be affected.

 

From Creative Evolution to Creative Involution

 

The original impetus behind Deleuze’s interest in Bergson, as Ansell-Pearson and others have noted, stems from Bergson’s qualified rejection of natural selection, the core principle of Darwinism, which explains evolution in terms of an external principle of differentiation.⁷ With his notion of creative evolution, by contrast, Bergson furnishes an alternate understanding of differentiation: for him, evolution follows an internal principle that explains genetic change not as the result of selection from purely contingent variations but rather of a “continuity of genetic energy” (27). By appropriating this internalist perspective, Deleuze commits himself to a philosophical position that will guide his work from this point forward, initially through an alliance with Bergson that focuses on the nature of difference and later, following his break with Bergson over the role of intensity, in his effort to develop a “transcendental empiricism.” Given Bergson’s importance for Deleuze (and also his resonance with contemporary biology), it thus behooves us to explore his account of “creative evolution” and to unpack its relationship with biological theory.

 

Though expressly modeled on August Weismann’s theory of the “germ-plasm” (itself a precursor to modern theories of the selfish gene), Bergson’s concept of creative evolution rejects the idea that the germ-plasm is continuous in favor of a less extreme, though more metaphysical, notion of continuity: “though the germ-plasm is not continuous, there is at least continuity of genetic energy, this energy being expended only at certain instants, for just enough time to give the requisite impulsion to the embryonic life, and being recouped as soon as possible in new sexual elements, in which, again, it bides its time” (27). On the basis of this substitution, Bergson introduces his vitalism as a sort of qualified finalism (one shorn of its specificity and predeterminism) according to which life “is like a current passing from germ to germ through the medium of a developed organism” (27). “It is,” he continues, “as if the organism itself were only an excrescence, a bud caused to sprout by the former germ endeavoring to continue itself in a new germ. The essential thing is the continuous progress indefinitely pursued, an invisible progress, on which each visible organism rides during the short interval of time given it to live” (27).

 

Two elements of this conception are worth special attention. First, by rejecting Weismann’s localization of the vital element in the highly specific form of the germ-plasm, Bergson leaves room for the creativity he ascribes to time; accordingly, what is transmitted is not just the physico-chemical germ-line, but the vital energy of a life force which expresses itself through repeated though flexible and open-ended processes of ontogenesis (embryogenesis and morphogenesis). Second, Bergson conceives of this life force as a counterpoint to the entropic decline of the physical universe in a manner that underscores the importance of its stabilization in material forms.⁸ It is, Bergson contends, the attachment of the vital force to organisms that conditions the emergence and propagation of life:

 

The life that evolves on the surface of our planet is indeed attached to matter. If it were pure consciousness, a fortiori if it were supraconsciousness, it would be pure creative activity. In fact, it is riveted to an organism that subjects it to the general laws of inert matter…. Incapable of stopping the course of material changes downwards, [life] succeeds in retarding it. The evolution of life really continues, as we have shown, an initial impulsion: this impulsion, which has determined the development of the chlorophyllian function in the plant and of the sensori-motor system in the animal, brings life to more and more efficient acts by the fabrication and use of more and more powerful explosives. (245-46)

 

While these two elements (consciousness and matter) tend in opposite directions (the former toward differentiation; the latter toward stabilization), it is important to note that they are held together through Bergson’s sustained biological realism and his correlated commitment to a biological notion of differentiation. If the creativity internal to life expresses itself, ideally, as a drive toward freedom from matter, in actual fact it utilizes the constrained freedom provided by flexible and open-ended processes of ontogenesis to express itself in stabilized forms that store solar energy and retard entropic dissipation. In short, stabilization of life in the organism is fundamental to Bergson’s vitalism. As we will see, the priority on actualization that this implies is central to the notion of differentiation as it takes shape in contemporary biological theory.

 

It is precisely this realism and the biological basis of differentiation that Deleuze eschews in his effort to arrive at a (philosophical) principle of difference in itself. The roots of such a principle–a principle that will underwrite both Deleuze’s philosophical Aufhebung of biology in Difference and Repetition and D+G’s marginalization of the organism in A Thousand Plateaus–can be found in Deleuze’s interpretation of vital difference as internal difference in Bergsonism. Introduced in the context of an effort to distinguish Bergsonian creative evolution from Darwinism, this interpretation foregrounds Bergson’s stress on the indeterminacy of vital difference in order to present the élan vital as the ultimate and purely internal cause of differentiation above and beyond any resistance matter offers to life, and indeed in place of such resistance. Before expressing itself as material differentiation, that is, the élan vital differs from itself: it is difference in itself. What this means is that vital difference is virtual and that expressed difference is the actualization of virtual life.

 

It is on this point that Deleuze contrasts Bergsonism with the “misconceptions” of both preformism and evolutionism: whereas in Bergson’s scheme “evolution takes place from the virtual to actuals,” preformism interprets it in terms of “the ‘possible’ that is realized” and evolutionism in terms of “pure actuality” (Bergsonism 98). In the former case, evolution is modeled “in the image and likeness of the possible that it realizes” with the consequence that difference is reduced to resemblance; in the latter case, vital variations are conceived “as so many actual determinations that should then combine on a single line,” and not as differences in themselves (differences that differ from themselves) (99). In order to avoid these two misconceptions, Deleuze informs us, “a philosophy of life” must meet three requirements: 1) vital difference must be thought of as internal difference in which the “tendency to change” is not accidental; 2) the variations produced must enter into “relationships of dissociation or division” and not just “relationships of association and addition”; 3) these variations must involve a “virtuality that is actualized according to the lines of divergence,” such that evolution proceeds not from one to another actual term in a unilinear homogeneous series, but from a virtual term to heterogeneous terms that actualize it along a ramified series (99-100). These requirements, Deleuze continues, introduce the question of how “the Simple or the One, ‘the original identity,’” has the power to be differentiated in the first place, and the answer he provides, not surprisingly, involves the status of the virtual, a sort of “gigantic Memory” or “universal cone in which everything coexists with itself, except for the differences of level” (100).

 

The introduction of the virtual–or rather, the differentiation of a philosophical notion of the virtual from a biological one–allows Deleuze to determine vital difference as a properly philosophical concept. As Deleuze sees it, biological notions of “organic virtuality or potentiality” tend to maintain that “potentiality is actualized by simple limitation of its global capacity” and thus to confuse the virtual and the possible (Bergsonism 97). What is crucial to a true (or philosophical) notion of the virtual is the repudiation of any form of elimination or limitation: “to be actualized,” Deleuze argues, “the virtual… must create its own lines of actualization in positive acts” (97). Unlike the real, the actual “does not resemble the virtual that it embodies,” which means that difference is “primary in the process of actualization” (97). “In short,” Deleuze notes, “the characteristic of virtuality is to exist in such a way that it is actualized by being differentiated and is forced to differentiate itself, to create its lines of differentiation in order to be actualized” (97). As we will see, Deleuze’s shift to a model of difference as intensity (rather than as one tendency within difference, the tendency to differ in kind) marks the advent of such a philosophical conception of difference in his work: since the unity of creative evolution is a unity of the virtual, it constitutes what Deleuze will later call a transcendental principle of difference (or intensity) that is itself responsible for the lines of differentiation which express creative evolution in the various different organisms constitutive of material life on earth. In this open-ended monadology, “what coexisted in the virtual ceases to coexist in the actual and is distributed in lines or parts that cannot be summed up, each one requiring the whole, except from a certain perspective, from a certain point of view” (101). It is on the basis of their emergence from the virtual unity that these lines of differentiation realize their creative potential: “They only actualize by inventing, they create in these conditions the physical, vital or psychical representative of the ontological level that they embody” (101). In Bergsonism, Deleuze attributes such a philosophical (or virtual) conception of internal difference to Bergson, arguing that Bergson’s stress on matter as an obstacle to élan vital does not recur to the conception of the negative he had previously condemned. Rather, since “evolution is actualization” and “actualization is creation,” the stabilization of life in the material form of organisms must be understood as differentiations that express the virtuality actualized in them, not as negative limits placed on that virtuality.⁹ Here, without spelling it out, Deleuze implies the existence of a domain of intensity that embodies this virtuality, thus effectively repudiating the primacy Bergson (and contemporary complexity theory) accord actualization as differentiation. As Deleuze states in a passage just cited, the differentiation of a properly philosophical concept of difference (or the virtual) attains its urgency from the poverty of biological notions of the virtual; things might be quite otherwise, as we shall see, should contemporary biology prove able to furnish a non-limitative organic or biological notion of the virtual.

 

Only in Difference and Repetition does Deleuze fully articulate the transcendental principle of difference central to his important work of the late 60s. As I have suggested, this articulation involves a certain break with Bergson and also, it must be stressed, with the biological realism with which Bergson theorizes the élan vital. Intended as a means of reaching a properly philosophical realm of analysis and directed against Bergson’s determination of the life force as a counterpoint to entropy (which Deleuze perceives to involve a potentially crippling reliance on a thermodynamic model), this break involves a key revision in Deleuze’s previous understanding of vital difference. Rather than deriving vital difference from Bergson’s two forms of difference, as he had in Bergsonism,¹⁰ Deleuze now finds it necessary to posit a fundamentally separate and primordial form of difference (intensity) from which both of Bergson’s forms are derived.¹¹

 

In the analysis he offers in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze accordingly rejects Bergson’s critique of intensity together with the correlated analysis of vital difference as the tendency of difference in kind to differ from itself. Taking up the thread of his earlier insight into the ambiguity flavoring Bergson’s critique of intensity in Time and Free Will,¹² Deleuze now goes on to oppose his own mature concept of difference to Bergson’s. In order to develop the radical potential of intensity against Bergson’s own reduction of it, Deleuze repudiates his earlier reading of internal difference on the basis of difference of kind, contending instead that vital difference concerns a more primordial domain of difference–differences of intensity which constitute “the entire nature of difference,” that is, both differences in degree and differences in kind (Difference 239). Vital difference (or difference in itself) can be neither qualitative nor extensive, since even qualities (following Deleuze’s critique of Bergson on intensive magnitudes) involve resemblance. In the wake of this transformation, it will be necessary to distinguish two orders of difference,

 

two orders of implication or degradation: a secondary implication which designates the state in which intensities are enveloped by the qualities and extensity which explicate them; and a primary implication designating the state in which intensity is implicated in itself, at once both enveloping and enveloped. In other words, a secondary degradation in which difference in intensity is cancelled, the highest rejoining the lowest; and a primary power of degradation in which the highest affirms the lowest. (240)

 

These two orders of difference belong to scientific and philosophical orders respectively; only a transcendental inquiry, Deleuze stresses, can fathom the illusion generated by empirical apprehension of intensity. Cutting through the scattered image reflected by the surface, such an inquiry affirms the “subterranean life” of difference: it discovers “that intensity remains implicated in itself and continues to envelop difference at the very moment when it is reflected in the extensity and the quality that it creates, which implicate it only secondarily” (240).

 

Not surprisingly, in light of its centrality for Deleuze’s mature philosophical project, this distinction allows us to fathom the fundamental correlation between the philosophy of difference and the critique of modern science: just as difference is covered over by the operation of negation central to philosophies of identity, intensity is obscured by the transcendental illusions of modern science. With this shift in his understanding of difference, Deleuze abandons the analysis of duration as qualitative difference (difference of kind) in favor of a continuum of intensity. From this point on, the philosophical principle of difference will set the terms for Deleuze’s encounter with science (modern biology) and will do so irrespective (and, I shall argue, to the detriment) of the increasingly concrete and serious nature of this encounter.

 

More fundamentally still, the shift to a model of difference as intensity introduces an ontological doubleness into Deleuze’s conceptual apparatus which generates the important notion of the “plane of immanence” so central to both Capitalism and Schizophrenia and Deleuze’s Cinema books. This ontological doubling allows Deleuze to differentiate an order of emergence from an order of constituted functioning without placing the two orders into opposition. Most readers of D+G will readily recognize this doubling in the differentiation of the molecular from the molar, an example which serves perfectly to illustrate what is crucial here: emergent actuals do not limit the virtual by means of an operation of negation, but rather express a concrete differentiation that remains in contact with the domain of intensity (or the virtuality) from which it emerges. Far from there being an opposition or contradiction between the levels, there is a profound complementarity: immanence and organization refer to distinct conceptual frameworks; they furnish variant accounts of phenomena, from the standpoint of process and product, respectively. Deleuze’s turn to a metaphysics of intensity, in other words, allows for a division between two separate orders at which the real can be grasped: on the one hand, there is the familiar domain of quality and quantity where things are given external determination; and on the other, the “subterranean” domain of intensity where relationality reigns supreme. Much of the difficulty in understanding D+G’s criticisms and transformations of Darwinism stem, as we will see, from the way one interprets the inseparability of these two domains: can and how can what emerges on the plane of organization (e.g., the organism) be traced to the plane of immanence, the domain of intensity?

 

Becoming as Creative Involution

 

Initially introduced to combat the thermodynamic model, the transcendental principle of difference (intensity or the “being of the sensible”) informs a crucial shift in Deleuze’s view of matter, a shift that stands behind the picture of the organism as a molar arrest of energy so central to the ethical project of A Thousand Plateaus. Reconceptualized as the transcendental ground of difference, intensity constitutes both differences of degree (extensity) and differences of kind (quality). Accordingly, it can no longer be the case, as it was for Bergson (and for the Deleuze of Bergsonism), that life expresses itself as the play of a virtual creative evolution involving divergent lines of actualization. The passage from one quality to another is not discrete, as the Bergsonian emphasis on qualitative difference (difference in kind) must contend; rather “even where there is a maximum of resemblance or continuity [between qualities], there are phenomena of delay and plateau, shocks of difference, distances, a whole play of conjunctions and disjunctions, a whole depth which forms a graduated scale rather than a properly qualitative duration” (238). These “phenomena” comprise intensity and their presence within qualitative difference insure the integrity of intensive quantities against or in spite of Bergson’s (attempted) reduction. Thus, rather than a varied production of material forms (organisms) which retard its movement, life qua virtual difference describes a continuum of intensity cutting across differences of kind (i.e., phyletic lineages or species) in a “dance of the most disparate things.”

 

As Ansell-Pearson notes, this defense of intensity against qualitative reduction forms the basis for D+G’s later “etho-logic of living systems,” furnishing the metaphysics underlying the model of becoming introduced in Plateau 10 and the more general account of creative involution on which it is based. This philosophical basis serves to differentiate D+G’s becoming from theories of agency–ranging from existentialist humanism to recent accounts of identity as performance–to which it otherwise appears similar. What is central on D+G’s account is neither the authenticity of intentional action, nor the performative effects of ritualized action, but rather the possibilities for tranversal or rhizomatic connections across boundaries of all kinds. The kind of identity generated through becoming is thus molecular and fleeting: a conjunction of a set of singularities, of speeds and affects, that defines a concrete mode of individuation or “haecceity.”

 

Accordingly, while D+G’s examples of becoming–little Hans’s becoming-horse, French performance artist Lolito’s becoming-animal, Robert De Niro’s becoming-crab, Hofmannsthal’s becoming-rat, Vladimir Slepian’s becoming-dog, and so forth–seem to suggest a necessary anchoring in a human-focused existential situation, the particular kind of becoming they illustrate is just one instance of a broader, encompassing category. Human becomings, D+G make clear, are no different in kind from the most inhuman becoming imaginable: “all becomings are molecular: the animal, flower, or stone one becomes are molecular collectivities, haecceities, not molar subjects, objects, or forms that we know from the outside…. We must say the same of things human: there is a becoming-woman, a becoming-child, that do not resemble the woman or the child as clearly distinct molar entities” (Thousand Plateaus 275). Nor is there any humanist privilege involved in interspecies becomings, since these latter occur beneath the (molar) thresholds that determine species form: “You become animal only molecularly,” D+G continue. “You do not become a barking molecular dog, but by barking, if it is done with enough feeling, with enough necessity and composition, you emit a molecular dog. Man does not become wolf, or vampire, as if he changed molar species; the vampire and werewolf are becomings of man, in other words, proximities between molecules in composition, relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness between emitted particles” (275). Regardless of their point of origin or their local effects, becomings occur beneath and beyond any form of molar organization and involve the transversal communication of molecular forces. What this means is that human beings engage in processes of becoming that are, in all important respects, exactly similar to the processes of becoming that snap up the wasp and the orchid (or, for that matter, microbial genetic systems and animal or plant cells) into symbiotic complexes.¹³ In all cases, what is at stake are relations of speeds and affects that generate events or haecceities within the global plane of consistency that is Nature. Understood as movement at the molecular level, the becomings in which humans engage comprise a particular instance of a more general process of becoming that D+G term “involution.”

 

In contrast to evolution (including Bergson’s creative evolution), involution describes a creative process whose field of production does not depend on differentiation, but rather involves a dissolution of form that “free[s] times and speeds” and thus makes possible the “dance of disparate things” through transversal modes of becoming (267). Accordingly, creative involution privileges the “unnatural participation” or monstrous coupling which, by generating becoming without heredity, comprises the hidden principle of Nature itself: “We oppose epidemic to filiation, contagion to heredity, peopling by contagion to sexual reproduction…. The difference is that contagion, epidemic, involves terms that are entirely heterogeneous: for example, a human being, an animal, a bacterium, a virus, a molecule, a microorganism. Or in the case of the truffle, a tree, a fly, and a pig. These combinations are neither genetic nor structural; they are interkingdoms, unnatural participations. That is the only way Nature operates–against itself” (241-2). Beneath the apparent divisions of natural history and the discrete products of natural selection there exists a rich field of heterogeneous molecular activity that, D+G argue, is responsible for the creation (as well as the creativity) of life, organic and nonorganic alike.

 

Though they stop short of jettisoning natural selection wholesale, D+G do significantly restrict its function, arguing (with Bergson) that selection forms a purely external principle of difference capable of operating only on constituted forms, that is, at the molar level. That such a principle cannot by itself account for the proliferation of life is well accepted by the majority of contemporary biologists and furnishes one common ground linking biological theory to D+G (and Bergson): in all these cases, some internal or vital principle of differentiation is required. D+G, however, distinguish themselves by their desire to furnish a rigorously molecular account of “evolution” (creative involution). As Ansell-Pearson has noted, the crux of Deleuze’s (and later D+G’s) transformative appropriation of Darwinism is the insistence (following Gilbert Simondon) that “differentiation presupposes individuation as a field of intensity” and that processes of individuation precede the constitution of individuals and thus “enjoy an independent evolution” (Germinal Life 92). While individuals (organisms) might be the carriers of individual differences, they do not comprise the locus of evolutionary mechanisms: “evolution” (and later, involution) operates directly through processes of individuation.

 

D+G transformatively appropriate two aspects of “neoevolutionism” in particular–the central role of population thinking and the importance of non-filiative, transversal modes of communication between living systems–in order to discount the shaping function of natural selection. As exemplified by various contemporary biologists ranging from traditionalists like Ernst Mayr to “mild” revisionists like Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould, population thinking focuses on the plethora of individual variation within a species and between species in a manner that breaks definitively with any form of typological essentialism.¹⁴ Its importance, both for contemporary biology and for D+G, stems from the emphasis it places on variation over type, an emphasis which allows it to define species fluidly as sets of organisms held together not by predetermined and static form but rather through genetic as well as ecological bonds. Within contemporary biology, population thinking has largely broken down the rigid boundaries traditionally attributed to species, since the phenotypic variation between populations of individuals is no different from that within populations.¹⁵ This in turn has brought about a fundamental shift in the focus of evolutionary change, with biologists like Richard Dawkins and Lynn Margulis repudiating the traditional focus on the individual organism (which itself can no longer designate a static and wholly autonomous entity) in favor of sub-organismic exchanges of genetic material and symbioses that occur at the molecular level. Still, there is a decisive difference between this development and D+G’s transformative appropriation. While population thinking and transversal communication break down the fixation of biology on species and organisms, the revised picture of evolution they produce involves a cooperation between such molecular factors (which are themselves subject to selection) and the contribution they make as “components” of higher forms like organisms (also subject to selection). Indeed, on the model presented by complexity theory, these two levels freely interact with one another in the process of morphogenesis that yields organismic forms. For D+G, by contrast, the point of a molecular reading of Darwinism is to eliminate the need and possibility for such interaction: as Ansell-Pearson argues, population thinking and transversal communication furnish them a way out of the problem of the “irreducibility of the forms of folding”: since individuals are formed through fluid populations, there is no incompatibility between the novel becomings operative in creative becoming and the irreducibility of forms of life. Moreover, as Ansell-Pearson astutely observes, the resources of neo-evolutionism furnish D+G with the means, effectively, to reduce molar forms like species to molecular dynamics: D+G’s suggestion, he argues, “is that one can only understand a molar population, such as a species, in terms of a different kind of population, a molecular one, which is the subject of the effects of, and changes in, coding” (Germinal Life 159). Both the viability and the limitations of such a reduction will be investigated once we turn to a discussion of complexity theory.

 

For the moment, it behooves us to grasp the concrete transformations to which D+G submit neo-evolutionism. To support their turn from evolution to involution, they push the fluidity introduced by population thinking and sub-organismic communication to its extreme, contending on the one hand that molecular factors, both genetic and extra-genetic, determine higher levels of organization, and on the other that ecological relations (what, following modern ethology, they call “territorialization”) are capable of selecting variations that arise in “a free margin of the code” (Thousand Plateaus 322). In both cases, emphasis is placed on the extra-genetic mechanisms of variation that, following the so-called modern synthesis, necessarily accompany processes of genetic transmission:

 

A code is inseparable from a process of decoding that is inherent to it…. There is no genetics without “genetic drift.” The modern theory of mutations has clearly demonstrated that a code, which necessarily relates to a population, has an essential margin of decoding: not only does every code have supplements capable of free variation, but a single segment may be copied twice, the second copy left free for variation. In addition, fragments of code may be transferred from the cells of one species to those of another, Man and Mouse, Monkey and Cat, by viruses or through other procedures. This involves not translation between codes (viruses are not translators) but a singular phenomenon we call surplus value of code, or side-communication. (Thousand Plateaus 53)

 

This surplus value provides a “free margin of the code” that frees molecular particles from their restricted role within the process of genetic transmission. Moreover, surplus value of code empowers local environmental factors with the capacity to forge modifications of a code: such modifications, D+G contend, “have an aleatory cause in the milieu of exteriority, and it is their effects on the interior milieus, their compatibility with them, that decide whether they will be popularized. Deterritorializations and reterritorializations do not bring about the modifications; they do, however, strictly determine their selection” (54).

 

Despite their aim to empower molecular processes as the active agents for modifications of code, D+G here invoke some minimal notion of organismic or systemic agency that, I would suggest, is crucial both for evaluating their molecular Darwinism and for adapting their ecological perspective for the purpose of developing a distributed model of embodied human agency. In the first place, D+G’s marginalization of the organism is clearly manifested in how they treat the topic of autonomy–a topic central to much recent work in the biological sciences. By stressing the determinative function of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, D+G subtly shift the agency for code modification from organism to environment. Accordingly, whatever autonomy they invoke must be predicated not of the organism, but exclusively of the larger ecological circuit in which it is involved. Despite a superficial resemblance to autopoietic theory, which defines living systems according to their autonomy (i.e., their capacity to reproduce themselves) and holds the organism to be “operationally-closed” (though “interactionally open”) to information from its environment, D+G’s conception of code modification remains vigorously heteronomous. Rather than merely being “triggered” by an environmental stimulus, it involves the environment in a far more active sense: through the process of territorialization, the environment itself plays the role of agent which, D+G contend, has the role of strictly determining the selection of code modifications. This displacement of autonomy from the organism to the ecological circuit is made manifest when D+G contrast mutation with differentiation and introduce territorialization as the mechanism that creates differentiation from the surplus value of code:

 

The essential thing is the disjunction noticeable between the code and the territory. The territory arises in a free margin of the code, one that is not indeterminate but rather is determined differently. Each milieu has its own code, and there is perpetual transcoding between milieus; the territory, on the other hand, seems to form at the level of a certain decoding. Biologists have stressed the importance of these determined margins, which are not to be confused with mutations, in other words, changes internal to the code: here, it is a question of duplicated genes or extra chromosomes that are not inside the genetic code, are free of function, and offer a free matter for variation. But it is very unlikely that this kind of matter could create new species independently of mutations, unless it were accompanied by events of another order capable of multiplying the interactions of the organism with its milieus. Territorialization is precisely such a factor that lodges on the margins of the code of a single species and gives the separate representatives of that species the possibility of differentiating. It is because there is a disjunction between the territory and the code that the territory can indirectly induce new species. (Thousand Plateaus 322, last emphasis added)

 

In expanding the scope of the “organism” to embrace “an external milieu of materials, an internal milieu of composing elements and composed substances, an intermediary milieu of membranes and limits, and an annexed milieu of energy sources and actions-perceptions,” D+G wrest the function of territorialization from the individual organism itself and predicate it instead of a fluid immanent totality of “transcoding or transduction,” a fluctuating interconnection of milieus “in which one milieu serves as the basis for another, or conversely is established atop another milieu, dissipates in it or is constituted in it” (Thousand Plateaus 313).

 

The effect of this move is to resituate phenotypic change both “beneath” and “outside” the organism, in the fluctuations that reverberate throughout the entire plane of immanence:

 

There is a self-movement of expressive qualities. Expressiveness is not reducible to the immediate effects of an impulse triggering an action in a milieu… expressive qualities, the colors of the coral fish, for example, are auto-objective, in other words, find objectivity in the territory they draw…. expressive qualities or matters of expression enter shifting relations with one another that ‘express’ the relation of the territory they draw to the interior milieu of impulses and exterior milieu of circumstances. To express is not to depend upon; there is an autonomy of expression.” (Thousand Plateaus 317)

 

By attributing autonomy to expression, D+G are able to propose the “refrain” as a form of territorialization distinct from organic territorialization. Defined as “any aggregate of matters of expression that draws a territory” and predicated of functional totalities that involve an organ’s structural correlation with an environment (refrains, D+G specify, can be “optical, gestural, motor, etc.”), the refrain forms the operative principle for phenotypic change qua fluctuation in the plane of immanence.

 

By attributing the function of territorialization to the plane of immanence, I suggest, D+G vastly overestimate the force of environmental factors, or what amounts to the same thing, significantly marginalize the role of organismic activity. In the place of their one-sided view of the correlation of organism and external milieu, what contemporary biology offers (from systems theory to complexity) is an ecological model whose contribution is precisely to balance intrinsic dynamics with response to the environment. Indeed, given Deleuze’s (and D+G’s) avowedly Spinozist notion of the body, just such a balance would appear to be called for even (or especially) on their account, since Spinoza’s conception of the organism involves what Hans Jonas calls a “seeming paradox,” in fact the very paradox addressed by contemporary biology: “spontaneity paired with receptivity,” “autonomy for itself,… openness for the world” (278). Jonas states:

 

This dialectic is precisely the nature of life in its basic organic sense. Its closure as a functional whole within the individual organism is, at the same time, correlative openness toward the world; its very separateness entails the faculty of communication; its segregation from the whole is the condition of its integration with the whole…. Only complex functional systems afford the inner autonomy that is required for greater power of self-determination, together with greater variety of inner states responding to the determinations which impinge on it from without…. Only by being sensitive can life be active, only by being exposed can it be autonomous. And this in direct ratio: the more individuality is focused in a self, the wider is its periphery of communication with other things; the more isolated, the more related it is. (278, 277, 278)

 

How does it happen that D+G’s ecological conception of the organism, in many respects so resonant with current work in biological systems, comes to diverge so markedly over the question of organismic autonomy? Once again, the answer concerns the crucial division between ontological levels that structures Deleuze’s work from Difference and Repetition onward: in line with Deleuze’s (and D+G’s) general tendency to give priority to the domain of intensity (the molecular), their invocation of various milieus as a means of expanding the scope of the organism has the effect of situating causal agency not simply outside the organism, but outside the plane of organization itself, i.e., the plane on which, following the theory of biological systems, an organism is causally and experientially correlated with an environment or milieu. What D+G seek is an understanding of the complex, relational causality that underlies the emergence of organismic effects from the molecular standpoint, that is, from a perspective or on an ontological level at which the organism has no causal autonomy. Such a perspective is, quite simply, alien to the conceptual terrain of current biology and complexity theory, where the tendency of morphogenesis to favor “natural kinds” (Goodwin, Kauffman) and the fractal multileveled nature of the “self” (Varela) necessitate interrelation between the plane of organization and the plane of immanence, between incipient order and transversal communication.

 

This tension between what I shall call D+G’s cosmic expressionism and current work in biology surfaces quite clearly in their effort to assimilate the body without organs (BwO) to the ecological notion of the milieu. When they claim, in ATP, that the body without organs is “adjacent to the organism” and “continually in the process of constructing itself,” they effectively present it as a variant of what Varela calls a “niche” or “milieu”–namely, the continually-shifting part of the environment which has existential meaning for an organism. In this determination, the BwO would form something like a background that, following the biological notion of structural coupling, is co-constitutive of the organism, or better, fundamentally inseparable from and in fluid interconnection with it. Difficulty arises, however, as soon as D+G shift registers to argue for the molecular fluidity among and between milieus that characterizes the plane of immanence, for in so doing, they dissolve the very principle–the organism–that accounts for the selection of a particular milieu (or milieus) from the larger environment. Simply put, their philosophical conception of a limitless molecular consistency between milieus is not compatible with ecological or biological notions that view the milieu as causally correlated with an organism. And this incompatibility cannot be explained away as an artifact of the division between planes of organization and immanence, since the crux of the notion of biological systems involves a local and causal correlation between organism and milieu that has no complement at the molecular level.¹⁶ Otherwise put, the concrete structural correlation between organism and milieu–a correlation that encompasses the organism’s powers to affect and to be affected, its autonomy and its receptivity–is fundamentally necessary to explain its emergence: the organism simply cannot be reduced to the epiphenomenon or existential effect of molecular forces.

 

One recent effort to dissolve this incompatibility deserves mention here, particularly since it helps pinpoint the potential contribution D+G’s conceptual apparatus can make toward a rethinking of embodied agency. In an effort to defend D+G against claims that they simply dismiss the organism through abstract negation, Ansell-Pearson unpacks the implications of their claim that the BwO is adjacent to the organism and continually in process, arguing that the BwO enjoys a certain double life. Since the BwO comes into play not only on the plane of consistency (where there are only molecular forces) but also in the strata where molar formations arise, it cannot be the case that it simply negates the organism; rather, there must in fact be two bodies without organs: one which opposes the molecular fluidity characteristic of the plane of consistency against the rigid organization that is constitutive of the organism and another that actually belongs to the stratum and constitutes “a body without organs of the organism” (Germinal Life 154). While the former BwO would comprise a synonym for the plane of immanence itself, the latter BwO would designate something akin to the biological notion of the milieu discussed above. Such a distinction, concludes Ansell-Pearson, saves D+G from accusations of reductionism, since it shows that their aim is not “to negate the organism but to arrive at a more comprehensive understanding of it by situating it within the wider field of forces, intensities, and durations that give rise to it and which do not cease to involve a play between nonorganic and stratified life” (154).

 

Again, however, the crucial issue concerns the nature of the doubling of the BwO: can a biological notion of the BwO as the milieu(s) adjacent to the organism on the plane of organization (or on a particular, e.g., the organic, stratum) form a complement to a philosophical notion of the BwO as a continuum of molecular forces or intensity? In my opinion, the answer has to be no, since the former requires recognition of the particular autonomy that characterizes the organism and hence some degree of causal agency on the part of the organism (or the tendency in nature toward “natural kinds”). If recent work in biology and complexity theory is right to underscore the crucial role of the organism in morphogenesis, then a theory that would explain away this autonomy as an effect of molecular forces would be powerless to account for the emergence of biological systems, what Stuart Kauffman poetically glosses as “order for free.” At a more general level, Ansell-Pearson’s position here simply does not jibe with the cosmic expressionism through which D+G seek to dissolve all molar organization into a play of individuation through haecceity. Though it may be true that D+G only oppose a specific notion of the organism–the organism “construed as a given hierarchized and transcendent organization”–the clear priority they place on the molecular makes it hard to imagine what possible positive role it could be granted. Even if one eschews the reduction that yields such a notion–abstraction from its “molecular and rhizomatic conditions of possibility”–the organism must by definition remain a molar entity belonging to the plane of organization, and thus, in some sense or other, reductive of the molecular conditions whose epiphenomenal effect it is. How, indeed, can we overlook or discount Deleuze and Guattari’s repeated insistence on the radical difference between organisms and the organs from which they are made? Taking their work as a whole, the BwO seems intended to furnish not so much an alternative model of the organism as a radically divergent organization of organs that acquires its advantages expressly by shedding all traces of the rigidity and constraint structurally constitutive of organisms.

 

Nonetheless, Ansell-Pearson’s reading pinpoints a dimension of D+G’s work that, once divested from their cosmic expressionism, can furnish a crucial bridge between cultural theory and biology. When he urges us to take seriously D+G’s characterization of the body without organs as a “milieu of experimentation” and an “associated milieu” that a given organism always carries with it (Germinal Life 189), Ansell-Pearson succeeds in characterizing the BwO in a manner that is consistent with biology’s understanding of both evolutionary and somatic change, and that manages to overcome the problems involved in applying “insights gained from the evolution of biological populations, and from the becomings-animal implicated in ethological assemblages, to the field of ‘nonhuman’ becomings of the human”–to wit, the fact that these involve “inordinately lengthy geological timescales and highly complex evolutionary processes” (155). For if the body without organs forms the environment within which the organism emerges, it could bring the radical possibilities of transversal, molecular communication to bear on the organism itself, without requiring its molecular dissolution. Rather than negating the organism’s proper organization, the BwO would then have an indirect impact on the organism: it would furnish the material conditions for the organism to undergo (whether actively or passively) relative deterritorializations, deterritorializations whose significance would remain inseparable from the larger, abiding organismic whole and its correlation with its constitutive milieu(s). In this way, D+G’s work would make an important contribution to a model of embodied agency rooted in the contemporary biology of complex systems: not only would it open the organism to the domain of intensity, thereby explaining how molecular factors intervene in its development in ways that are not established in advance (and that thus draw positively, i.e., without recourse to limitation, on a biological or organic virtuality), it would also clarify the crucial role of embodied duration as a process through which environmental factors lead to structural change in an organism. Rather than being “strictly determine[d]” by deterritorializations and reterritorializations, modifications in code are mediated or processed by the body: they are the result of a self-modification of the organism in response to stimuli or, as Varela puts it, “perturbations” from the environment.

 

Before turning to a discussion of complexity theory, let me briefly recap my criticism of D+G. By dissolving the role of the organism through molecular reduction and radical ecologism, D+G effectively recast evolution as an expressive process whose primary vehicle is a mode of individuation alien, as Ansell-Pearson puts it, to that of persons, subjects, or substances. The autonomy of expression D+G attribute to ecological systems allows them to account for biological change in terms of haecceities or individuations which are capable of combining molecular factors in the most varied and transversal manner imaginable. Creative involution is thus ultimately synonymous with a sort of cosmic expressionism through which Nature ceaselessly generates differentiation by cutting across any and all boundaries. At this plane of composition (or consistency), there are only molecular aggregates or haecceities; forms and subjects, species and genera have no proper place here: “It is the entire assemblage in its individuated aggregate that is a haecceity; it is this assemblage that is defined by a longitude and a latitude, by speeds and affects, independently of forms and subjects, which belong to another plane. It is the wolf itself, and the horse, and the child that cease to be subjects to become events, in assemblages that are inseparable from an hour, a season, an atmosphere, an air, a life” (262). With this cosmic expressionism, D+G definitively depart from Deleuze’s earlier allegiance to Bergson (and, as we will see, from a consensus shared by virtually all contemporary biologists): far from needing organisms to capture its force in static, material form, life or creative involution possesses an autonomy at the molecular level: as the product of differentiation in itself (transversal communication), individuation is already in itself thoroughly material.

 

Creative Involution and Contemporary Biology

 

Despite its philosophical roots, D+G’s cosmic expressionism resonates strongly with much current work in biology and complexity theory. From differing perspectives, the research of central figures like Richard Dawkins, Lynn Margulis, Stephen Jay Gould, Brian Goodwin, and Stuart Kauffman highlights the importance of molecular processes and ecological factors alongside (and sometimes to the detriment of) the role of individual organisms. Nonetheless, D+G’s position can be distinguished from most of this work by virtue of its radicality on two points: 1) its adherence to a thoroughgoing molecular reductionism; and 2) its vocation to limit natural selection to the operation of a purely external difference. While most contemporary biologists have found it necessary to temper the lesson of the molecular revolution by reasserting the importance of higher-level organization (e.g., the organism), D+G consistently portray such organization as an exclusively negative limitation of life, one that does not express so much as restrict its expression. And while no contemporary scientist would think of rejecting natural selection per se (though several question its presumptive priority and its capacity to account for the origin of life), D+G differentiate creative involution from natural selection along the molecular-molar axis, contending that (immanent) distribution across transversal lines is alone sufficient to explain variation and the transmission of novel traits.

 

In both cases, D+G’s position derives less from a biological rationale than from a prior and overriding philosophical commitment. Thus the staunch adherence to molecular reductionism, though certainly flavored by Deleuze’s early reading of Jacques Monod and François Jacob, French pioneers of the molecular revolution, finds its true necessity in the philosophical break with Bergson over the status of intensity and the role of matter in evolution. For once the Bergsonian model of actualization along variant lines is abandoned in favor of a more radical model of transversal communication across boundaries of all levels, the molecular domain sheds its dependence on form and structure and acquires a wholesale functional autonomy. Likewise, D+G’s repudiation of natural selection as a derivative external mechanism owes far more to Deleuze’s philosophy of difference than to biological theory.¹⁷ The strict priority Deleuze lends distribution over selection, as an immanent over against a merely external mechanism of variation, can find its justification only on a philosophical model of expressionism, not in an ecology of biological systems. Despite its resonance with contemporary accounts of self-organization, D+G’s account thus institutes a rigid separation between natural selection and involution, one that is effectively deconstructed (as we shall see below) by complexity theory’s marriage of self-organization with selection (Kauffman 168).

 

Despite sometimes significant discrepancies, contemporary biological research programs converge on a certain consensus concerning the irreducibility of higher-level organization in evolution. In practically all cases, whether for reasons that remain within the parameters of the neo-Darwinian framework or not, morphology at the cellular and the organismic level comprises a quasi-autonomous locus for evolutionary change. Like D+G’s understanding of emergence in terms of individuation by haecceity, complexity theory’s notion of morphological emergence from a “generative field” (to introduce just one example) shifts the focus away from the static physical essence of an organism to the dynamical context (the molecular field of forces) out of which organization emerges. In contrast to D+G’s approach, though, emergence on such an account is not purely punctual and singular, but processual in a manner that imposes structure and constraint on the emergent organism. Moreover, the process of emergence interrelates the domain of molecular flux with the plane of organization in a fundamentally different way than do D+G: far from constructing the molar register as a mere epiphenomenon of the play of molecular forces, complexity theory presents a picture of bi-directional causality in which the emerging, if inchoate, proto-organismic form has a downward effect, as it were, during the process of morphogenesis. Accordingly, the morphogenetic field, while certainly not equivalent or reducible to the plane of organization, also differs significantly from the plane of consistency: it comprises a virtual field of forces, representing a subset of the molecular domain, that is oriented around (or selected in function of) a particular emergent form.

 

Given this fundamental difference as well as the areas of overlap with D+G’s work, the kind of biological research exemplified by complexity theory (but encompassing alternate models including Lynn Margulis’s work on symbiosis and Gould’s conception of morphospace) provides an excellent context in which to evaluate and criticize the two major planks of D+G’s creative involution: their categorical separation of involution from natural selection and their marginalization of the organism.¹⁸ While complexity theorists make common cause with D+G by challenging the privilege accorded natural selection in modern biology, the rationale in the respective cases could not be more different: rather than being compelled, for philosophical reasons, to reduce natural selection to a purely external factor, largely extraneous to the molecular factors informing creative involution, complexity theory rejects the modern doctrine that selection alone is capable of accounting for all evolutionary processes. In its stead, complexity theory proposes what Kauffman calls a “marriage of self-organization and selection,” an asymmetrical pairing in which the spontaneous emergence of order in nature holds a primacy not altogether unlike the one D+G accord vital creativity, with the following difference: selection, in its secondary role, does not operate primarily by acting on constituted forms (as it does in Darwinism), or on molecular factors (as it does for D+G and a contemporary biologist like Dawkins), but rather by forming a source of resistance that “natural kinds” must overcome in order to emerge successfully from morphogenesis. Otherwise put, selection does not so much work in conjunction with vital creativity as against it, forming a counter-pressure to the tendency toward order in nature. On the issue of its interpretation of natural selection, complexity theory is thus far more reminiscent of Bergson than of Deleuze: rather than stripping it of any role in the process of vital creativity, complexity theory resituates selection, dethroning it from its preeminent place as the sole mechanism of evolution, but retaining it in an important supporting role.¹⁹

 

Complexity theory also resonates with D+G’s biophilosophy in its attempt to go beyond the surface level of typological form. Once again, however, the scope and nature of the rejection of typology differs fundamentally in the two approaches: while D+G (and Deleuze too, following his break with Bergson over the role of intensity) unequivocally view higher level morphology (the organism) as a form of negative limitation on the potential of life, complexity theory in effect expands Bergson’s materialism by insisting on the crucial role played by cellular and morphological processes of self-organization in the perpetual differentiation that is life. Thus, complexity theory rejects surface typology primarily so that it might fathom the deeper laws of organization (differentiation) through which form emerges at levels higher than the molecular. On this account, the organism is neither a negative limitation on some entirely unconstrained (and we might add, fantasized) vitalism, nor a mere epiphenomenon of molecular (genetic and extra-genetic) processes, but is itself an irreducible and quasi-autonomous source of order–a power of nature–whose emergence coincides with and might be said to express local constraints imposed on variation and selection by more general processes of self-organization. “The critical point,” as Kauffman puts it, “is this: In sufficiently complex systems, selection cannot avoid the order exhibited by most members of the ensemble. Therefore, such order is present not because of selection but despite it” (16).

 

What is ultimately at stake in the confrontation between D+G and complexity theory is a contrast between two vastly different accounts of the molecular and rhizomatic conditions for creativity. Despite claims for its absolute immanence, D+G’s notion of individuation by haecceity yields a view from nowhere (a pure description) that remains entirely synchronic; by contrast, morphological emergence from a “generative field” describes, within a complex, diachronic frame, those processes that generate order spontaneously in nature. Accordingly, while order results, on both accounts, from a combination of internal energy and external stimuli, the respective nature of this combination could hardly be more different. For D+G, the external environment (the molecular field or plane of immanence) exerts an influence that is radically indeterminate (unconstrained by any emerging form) and thus exclusively affirmative and empowering. Emergent “individuations” or “haecceities” can literally take any form whatsoever: they are all logically equivalent and processurally unrelated groupings of molecular singularities which express the impetus of life in particular concrete situations. Given this radical indeterminacy accorded the molecular field, we can better understand why D+G consistently view the organism as a negative limitation: organic form of any sort cannot but restrict the pure open-ended potentiality of the undifferentiated molecular field.

 

Not surprisingly, an embrace of just such restriction forms a central tenet of complexity theory’s account of emergence. As both Goodwin and Kauffman affirm, external stimuli–what Goodwin terms the generative or morphogenetic field–both facilitate and constrain concrete possibilities for morphological emergence. Introduced to explain the initial emergence of morphological forms in nature (and, in Kauffman’s work, the origin of life itself), the generative field comprises an “organized context within which inherited particulars act, and without which they can have no effect” (Goodwin 41). In other words, the generative field specifies factors–including timing and spatial order–favorable to the genesis of stable form. In this way, as Goodwin’s discussion of chemical self-organization makes clear, morphogenesis explains the emergence of form with absolutely no recourse to genetic principles:

 

What counts in the production of spatial patterns is not the nature of the molecules and other components involved, such as cells, but the way these interact with one another in time (their kinetics) and in space (their relational order–how the state of one region depends on the state of neighboring regions). These two properties together define a field, the behavior of a dynamic system that is extended in space–which describes most real systems. This is why fields are so fundamental in physics. But a new dimension to fields is emerging from the study of chemical systems such as the Beloussov-Zhabotinsky reaction and the similarity of its spatial patterns to those of living systems. This is the emphasis on self-organization, the capacity of these fields to generate patterns spontaneously without any specific instructions telling them what to do, as in a genetic program. These systems produce something out of nothing. (51)

 

This capacity to produce something from nothing–what Kauffman succinctly dubs “order for free”–goes hand in hand with a view of nature starkly divergent from that painted by Darwin. Rather than the result of a purely external force (natural selection) acting on entirely random variations, the frequency of different organic forms may simply reflect the probabilities of their respective morphogenetic trajectories. In other words, the preponderance of certain organic forms in nature may reflect internal laws and/or the existence of generic forms, and not simply nor primarily selection of random variations. Natural selection is thereby put into its proper context: at most, it may play a role in testing the stability of particular organismic forms that have been produced independently through processes of dynamic morphogenesis. Likewise, genes find their proper role as mechanisms in the service of generic forms: while they can influence many secondary properties of these forms, they cannot override the generic properties produced by dynamical processes of self-organization. In the end, complexity theory presents a forceful reaffirmation of the importance of the organism as an integral and irreducible factor in morphogenesis: neither the result of external processes of random selection nor a mere epiphenomenon of molecular genetics, the organism attains its proper status as “the fundamental unit of life,” a “natural kind” rather than an historical accident (41). To summarize then, while D+G plumb biological theory in search of support for their marginalization of the organism and natural selection, the most radical work in contemporary biology challenges orthodoxy on both these points only to reassert, with newfound insight, the importance of selection as a secondary regulatory mechanism and the centrality of the organism as the principle agent of evolution.

 

We can gauge the consequences of this difference by attending to the treatment of both genetic and extra-genetic processes in the respective accounts. From the perspective of complexity theory, D+G’s embrace of the phenomenon of genetic drift–what they call the “surplus value of code”–rings hollow since it assumes a purely undifferentiated context and hence a literally limitless possibility for variation. By interpreting genetic drift as a mechanism for purely unconstrained change, D+G minimize or ignore entirely the significant constraints placed on evolution by cellular processes and morphogenesis. While random genetic drift, and more generally, random variation, certainly do play some role in complexity theory’s account of evolution, they do so only within certain, albeit extremely flexible bounds set by processes of self-organization intrinsic to morphological emergence. More specifically, what D+G ignore in their overvaluation of population thinking and random drift is the role played by “local constraints” and the centrality of “functional wholes” in evolution (Kauffman 21-22). These two factors serve to constrain the possibilities for development along a severely restricted set of pathways. Each cell type, Kauffman argues, is a “highly constrained pattern of gene expression” that is “poised between only two or a few alternatives” and that, “at each stage in ontogeny,… has only a few accessible neighboring cell types” (409). These alternatives and neighbors are determined not through any overriding genetic program, but through the confrontation of contingency with the “underlying general properties of morphogenesis.” Thus, morphogenesis “is not just the genome’s ‘doing’; rather, it is the consequence in time and space of the structural and catalytic properties of proteins encoded in time and space by the genome, acting in concert with nonprotein materials and with physical and chemical forces to yield reliable forms” (410). While the underlying general properties of morphogenesis do not dictate the specific forms taken in any instance, they do specify a range within which possible emergences can occur. Consequently, development occurs in conjunction with organismic form, or, to cite Kauffman’s rather reserved summary, “some developmental mechanisms lie to hand in the evolution of morphogenesis” (410).

 

Viewed in this context, we discover that D+G’s position actually involves them in an unintentional solidarity with core adherents of the very neo-Darwinism they seek to transform: they too find themselves committed to what Kauffman describes as a simplification too useful to give up: “the initial idealization that variation [and also drift] can occur in any direction” (11). Certainly in their enthusiastic endorsement of random drift, but also with their more general embrace of population thinking as an unconstrained principle for change, D+G would seem guilty of precisely such a simplification: the very plausibility of their notion of transversal communication depends on the broader scope of variation within populations to trump morphological constraints acting on individual organisms. On Kauffman’s account, by contrast, both variation and drift must meet the test of selection, which means, in turn, that they must conform to the constraints morphogenesis imposes on selection. Selection, he contends, “is unlikely to be able to avoid those forms or morphologies which correspond to large volumes of the parameter space of the developmental mechanisms” (410). Like random variation, random genetic drift can only successfully take root when it contributes to the expression of those generic forms favored by nature.

 

Local constraint exercises a similar regulatory function on non-genetic factors like symbiosis and heterochrony, both of which form central mechanisms in creative involution. Once again, we find that D+G appropriate these factors without taking on the very significant role played by context or, more precisely, by proximity. In the case of heterochrony (change in organism due to changes in developmental timing), this selective appropriation allows D+G to exaggerate the extent of possible change and the power of heterochrony itself. Far from the purely unrestricted and free-floating mechanism D+G assume it is, heterochrony on Kauffman’s account functions within a severely constrained spatial matrix. There is, in any concrete situation, “local constraint on transitions between neighboring forms” (Kauffman 14). What this means is that heterochrony does not form a mechanism for any-possible-change-whatever, as it appears to on D+G’s reading, but rather for selectively “deforming one organism to a closely neighboring organism” (14). There are, Kauffman concludes, significant limitations on heterochrony which follow from the very feature D+G ignore: its concrete contextedness. Far from the freely acting mechanism they take it to be, heterochrony is constrained by “restrictions in generating neighboring forms or organisms, given that the process is starting at a specific point–in a given species or in a specific member of the species” (14). Insofar as these restrictions, like those placed on genetic variation and drift, follow from generic form, they testify to the irreducible role played by the organism in evolutionary processes. Once again, D+G’s hostility to the organism as such leads them to carry out what, from the standpoint of contemporary biology, can at best appear to be a mistaken appropriation.

 

In the case of symbiosis, a similar decontextualization permits D+G to divorce symbiotic couplings from an evolutionary framework, transforming them in the process into unrestricted mechanisms for becomings of all sorts. For biologist Lynn Margulis and her colleagues, by contrast, symbiosis functions within the parameters set by natural selection. Despite its radical assault on the anthropocentric view of evolution (Margulis’s work lays bare the microbial basis for the emergence of all post-molecular life in a way that questions the principle of morphological division as such), symbiosis can only succeed in generating new forms by passing the test of selection and it can only pass this test by yielding viable forms. Though it challenges the centrality of gradual selection, the “striking scenario” presented by symbiosis remains consistent with, even dependent on, the broadly Darwinian picture of evolution, as Margulis herself stresses:

 

The descendents of the bacteria that swam in primeval seas breathing oxygen three billion years ago exist now in our bodies as mitochondria. At one time, the ancient bacteria had combined with other microorganisms. They took up residence inside, providing waste disposal and oxygen-derived energy in return for food and shelter. The merged organisms went on to evolve into more complex oxygen-breathing forms of life. Here, then, was an evolutionary mechanism more sudden than mutation: a symbiotic alliance that becomes permanent. By creating organisms that are not simply the sum of their symbiotic parts–but something more like the sum of all the possible combinations of their parts–such alliances push developing beings into uncharted realms. Symbiosis, the merging of organisms into new collectives, proves to be a major power of change on Earth. (Margulis and Sagan 31-32)

 

While symbiosis allows a far greater adaptive creativity (since “all the world’s bacteria essentially have access to a single gene pool and hence to the adaptive mechanism of the entire bacterial kingdom” [30]), it does not license the literally limitless creative power D+G claim on its behalf. Because it remains bound by the broad constraints of selection, symbiotic mechanisms simply cannot ignore the larger constraints governing macroevolutionary processes.

 

Not only do such concrete misappropriations of contemporary biological theory render questionable the specific mechanisms of creative involution, they also inform the highly singular alliances D+G forge with two marginalized figures from the history of evolutionary biology: Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and August Weismann. Considered in the light of recent biological thought, these alliances illustrate, even more forcefully than the specific misappropriations just discussed, the limitations of D+G’s synchronic account of creative becoming and, more generally, the reductive consequences of their primarily philosophical engagement with biological theory.

 

D+G’s cosmic expressionism hinges on a wholesale transformation of the animal kingdom into an immense body without organs defined molecularly by movement and timing. To effect such a transformation, D+G draw on the work of the eighteenth-century rational morphologists, and specifically, that of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.²⁰ By playing Geoffroy’s topological conception of Nature as Fold against Cuvier’s conception of Nature as divisible space, D+G are able to introduce an expressive model of species differentiation. Whereas Cuvier invokes a transcendent (molar) principle of analogy to break Nature into (four) distinct branches, Geoffroy privileges the immanent molecular forces underlying such division, going “beyond organs and functions to abstract elements he terms ‘anatomical,’ even to particles, pure materials that enter into various combinations, forming a given organ and assuming a given function depending on their degree of speed or slowness” (254). By deterritorializing the molar analogies of proportionality between species, Geoffroy shifts focus from typology to the fluid plane of immanence in a way that reconceptualizes specification as an epiphenomenon of movement and timing:

 

Speed and slowness, movement and rest, tardiness and rapidity subordinate not only the forms of structure but also the types of development. This approach later reappears in an evolutionist framework, with Perrier’s tachygenesis and differential rates of growth in allometry: species as kinematic entities that are either precocious or retarded. (Even the question of fertility is less one of form and function than speed; do the paternal chromosomes arrive early enough to be incorporated into the nuclei?) In any case, there is a pure plane of immanence, univocality, composition, upon which everything is given, upon which unformed elements and materials dance that are distinguished from one another only by their speed and that enter into this or that individuated assemblage depending on their connections, their relations of movement. A fixed plane of life upon which everything stirs, slows down or accelerates. (255)

 

Consonant with new developments in fertility research, D+G propose timing as a molecular principle that yields species as “kinematic entities” prior to their (molar) emergence as relatively discrete forms and functions. In the wake of this transformation of timing into a philosophical principle of molecular expression, D+G are able to cite Geoffroy as an important precedent for their cosmic expressionism: Geoffroy’s understanding of animal taxonomy as the result of a continuous process of folding allows them to articulate their key notion of the plane of immanence: “The proof that there is isomorphism [of forms, but no correspondence] is that you can always get from one form on the organic stratum to another, however different they may be, by means of ‘folding.’ To go from the Vertebrate to the Cephalopod, bring the two sides of the Vertebrate’s backbone together, bend its head down to its feet and its pelvis up to the nape of its neck”(46). At the limit, folding assembles all of Nature into one great Animal totality that, like Spinozist Being, actualizes itself through the manifold of different folds available to it: it is, D+G decree, “still the same abstract Animal that is realized through the stratum, only to varying degrees, in varying modes” (46). Through this radical rehabilitation of 18th century rational morphology, D+G transform a biological theory of typological continuity into the philosophical basis of their molecular monism.

 

Given the broad resonances between D+G’s biophilosophy and complexity theory, it comes as no surprise to discover that Geoffroy has also been invoked (most emphatically by Goodwin) as a precursor for the notion of morphogenesis. Once again, however, what is at stake in the respective cases could not be more divergent: whereas D+G invoke Geoffroy’s “Principle of Connections” (the notion that diverse forms are all transformations of a single basic ground plan of structural elements) as support for a rigorously molecular theory of becoming–and thus for the wholesale dissolution of form as such–Goodwin cites it as an early insight into the existence of generic forms in nature. On Goodwin’s account, the Principle of Connections “stated that certain patterns of relationship between structural elements in organisms remain unchanged even if the elements themselves undergo alteration” (144). Since these are, for Goodwin, precisely the patterns favored by nature (generic forms), Geoffroy’s Principle of Connections, once placed into the proper dynamic context, would be capable of explaining morphological emergence in a non-reductive manner. In this sense, Geoffroy’s Principle would describe nothing other than the morphogenetic field itself: the (molecular) factors of movement and timing that, as D+G stress, operate within the constraints laid down by structural invariance and are responsible for generating diverse realizations of “a single basic ground plan of structural elements” (144). In short, it simply does not follow from the isomorphism of forms that form itself is dispensable, a mere epiphenomenon of governing molecular processes. Rather, form acquires a role that is not merely historical (and thus susceptible to molecular reduction)–as it is on all superficial accounts of typology–but rather generative in the structural sense: it is both the product and the vehicle of those self-organizing processes which express the underlying structural or generic patterns favored by nature.

 

By construing Geoffroy’s Principle of Connections as a principle of molecular folding, D+G construct a Geoffroy antithetical to that invoked by his more well-disposed contemporaries. Unlike the morphologist Richard Owen, for example, who understood the Principle as describing a static set of relationships defining an ideal tetrapod limb (following the example used by Geoffroy) from which all variants are derived by transformation, D+G interpret it as the basis for an expressionist theory of emergence that dispenses entirely with form as anything more than a trivial byproduct, a mere epiphenomenon, of underlying molecular processes. Despite this crucial difference, however, D+G’s position presents a picture of emergence that is, at least when contrasted with complexity theory, hardly less static than that of Owen: by making form either transcendental (Owen) or purely fortuitous (D+G), both positions trivialize its relation to the molecular forces from which it emerges. In D+G’s case, this trivialization undermines the explanatory value of their philosophy of emergence, since without form as its product and vehicle, molecular processes lack any sense of direction or motivation. Far from there being favored natural forms or anything that could explain the emergence of one rather than another form, all becomings are effectively equivalent: they all express the same Substance or underlying totality, though in different ways or from variant perspectives. As so many (logically equivalent) sets of molecular singularities or haecceities, becomings thus lack any intrinsic relation to one another and to their generative conditions–any relation, that is, which would implicate them in some or other specific dynamical context. Despite D+G’s insistence on the dynamical status of becoming, their model thus lacks the kind of dynamism that characterizes biological notions of emergence: a dynamism inseparable from the morphological constraint imposed during the process of actualization. The priority they lend the virtual leads them into conflict with the biological perspective, since, in order to preserve the possibility of dissolving any actualization back into the virtuality from which it emerges, they are led to inject a form of reversibility that simply contradicts the primacy biology places on processes of actualization. So long as D+G refuse to recognize the constraint built into self-organization in the biological domain, their conception of differentiation remains formal and empty (at least in terms of that domain) and the notion of emergence it supports simply cannot do justice to the dynamic nature of biological processes. At best, their cosmic expressionism can mimic the dynamics of physical processes, where a thoroughgoing externalism obviates the necessity for any account of internal agency and form.²¹ Moreover, the oft-mentioned resonances between their work and non-linear dynamics ²² is belied by their refusal to embrace the specific irreversibility that characterizes biological systems.²³

 

A second and far more muted historical alliance–with August Weismann’s theory of germ-plasm continuity–reveals more clearly still the radicality of D+G’s appropriation of biological theory.²⁴ As we noted above in reference to Bergson, Weismann was that late 19th century neo-Darwinian whose conception of the “germ-plasm” addressed the lacuna in Darwinism–its lack of a mechanism to explain heredity–and thus anticipated the genetics revolution that began with the rediscovery of Mendel’s work around 1900. Following on the heels of Bergson (who, remember, rejected the continuity of the germ-plasm in favor of a continuity of genetic energy), D+G rework Weismann’s conception into a notion that Ansell-Pearson dubs “germinal life”: a more general “intense germen” that is effectively synonymous with the body without organs. In the course of this reworking, the germ-plasm is modified practically beyond all recognition: far from regulating the process of genetic inheritance in a diachronic context, as it does for Weismann, the intense germen produces a synchronic convergence of all developmental moments (a body without organs) that facilitates unlimited transversal communication across all possible boundaries. In effect, what D+G accomplish through this transformative appropriation is a deterritorialization of the germen from its location within the nucleus of the cell (hence the name, germ-plasm) to the broadest imaginable environment, the entire set of singularities comprising the plane of immanence at any particular moment. Following this deterritorialization, germinal life loses all dependence not only on genetic material (DNA) but also on organisms per se, understood either as the bearers of such material (following the modern genetics paradigm) or as generic products of self-organizing processes (following complexity theory). D+G, in other words, submit life to a generalization that removes it from the biological domain (and strips away any privilege that biology might enjoy); by situating the intense germen exclusively at the molecular level and predicating it of all processes, organic and nonorganic alike, D+G thus redefine life as a thoroughly machinic process, one that expresses itself in heterogeneous conjunctions of singularities which are themselves heedless of biological constraints.

 

Once again, this alliance resonates, to a degree, with an historical commitment on the part of complexity theory. Like D+G, complexity theorists attack Weismann and his legacy (i.e., modern genetics) on the issue of context or environment, arguing that the “Weismann barrier” prohibiting communication from the germ-plasm to the soma rests on an untenable dualism. In this case, however, the deconstruction of Weismann’s dualism is advanced to support the centrality of the organism as the fundamental unit of life. “As a general biological principle,” Goodwin argues,

 

Weismann’s dualism… is incorrect. All unicellular organisms, all plants, and many animal species, including mammals, have no separation of germ plasm from somatoplasm. The capacity to reproduce is a property of the whole organism, not a special replicating part that is distinct from the rest of the reproducing body. And in the case of sexual reproduction, to which Weismann’s concept can be applied, it is the egg cell that carries the organization required for accurate replication of the DNA in the next generation, not hereditary essence. (36)

 

While they stop short of endorsing a revitalized Lamarckianism (though not without noting that recent studies have suggested the possibility for unicellular organisms like bacteria and yeast to modify their DNA for adaptive purposes), Goodwin and his colleagues argue that the contextedness of genetic transmission has the effect of overturning the strict separation of germ cells and the soma. From their perspective, the unchanging organization of organisms simply cannot be accounted for on the hypothesis of a genetic continuity, since all the molecular components of the cell–including DNA, RNA, and the proteins they code for–undergo “molecular turnover” (37). What does explain this organization is the persistence of the generic form of various organisms: the continuity of “certain aspects of the organization of [molecular] materials–their dynamic relationships, the way they are arranged in space, and the patterns of change they undergo in time” (37-8).²⁵

 

While Weismann and the modern genetics tradition get things wrong by attributing too much to germ cells (genes), D+G go astray by dissolving all ties between germinal continuity and organic life. The error, in both cases, stems from neglect of the organism. From the standpoint of complexity theory, by contrast, what is crucial is precisely the active role played by the organism as a mediator between the molecular domain and the macro-environment: the organism, Goodwin contends, is “an active agent with its own organizational principles, imposed between the genes and the environment. Organisms both select and alter their environments, and their intrinsic dynamic organization limits the hereditary changes that are possible, so that the variety available for evolution is restricted” (104). There can, in other words, be no continuity of germinal life–whether at the level of the germ-line or the plane of immanence–without the active mediation of the organism. The biological can no more be reduced to molecular processes than it can be dissolved through a broader conception of nonorganic life.

 

Germinal Life as the Basis for Becoming?: Toward a Critique of D+G’s Ethology

 

At the same time as they witness the limitations of D+G’s synchronic approach to evolution, these eccentric historical alliances raise questions concerning their effort to develop a model of human practice on the basis of creative involution. In the first place, the flexibility postulated by Geoffroy’s “Principle of Connections” and by the types of symbioses Margulis discusses (e.g., between cells and mitochondria) only arises over large-scale macroevolutionary timescales, not in cases of individual somatic change of the sort that forms the object of D+G’s ethology of becoming. Thus, when they champion a philosophical “Geoffroyism” and embrace nonselectional mechanisms like genetic drift and symbiosis, D+G are in effect illegitimately applying to change at the level of the individual a timeframe that properly characterizes macroevolutionary processes. Consequently, the dissolution of higher level form that D+G derive from Geoffroy’s Principle and from symbiotic processes rests on an illegitimate foundation insofar as it depends on this same application. Far from characterizing the somatic life of individual entities, this dissolution only arises in reference to vast stretches of evolutionary time. While Margulis may be right that we are, from the standpoint of macroevolution, mere hosts for microbial life, in the narrower frame we remain organized units which are, in some sense or other, the objects of nature’s selectional processes. Likewise, while Geoffroy’s principle may establish the ultimate unity of life in the macroevolutionary perspective, it does not have any immediate bearing on more local–and more concrete–processes of morphogenesis. It is one thing for D+G to draw on contemporary biology and on neglected historical pathways to underwrite creative involution as an alternative model of macroevolution and quite another thing to apply this model to the behavior of individuals or use it as the basis for a molecular dissolution of the organism. While the former may wreak havoc with biological orthodoxy, the latter involves an egregious category mistake: a conflation of a developmental (human) timeframe with a macro-evolutionary one.

 

Insofar as the virtually limitless power of self-modification they grant individual bodies is directly derived from their account of creative involution, it is hardly surprising that D+G’s model of becoming depends on this very same category mistake. Becoming acquires its role as the operator of D+G’s radicalized, Spinozist ethology–a model of practice centered on experimenting with what a body can do–because of its likeness to, or indeed identity with, the mechanisms of creative involution. Becoming, D+G unequivocally claim, “is involution”; it draws its force from phenomena of “side-communication” and “contagion”–precisely those extra-genetic mechanisms which characterize contemporary neo-evolutionism:

 

Becoming is always of a different order than filiation. It concerns alliance. If evolution includes any veritable becomings, it is in the domain of symbioses that bring into play beings of totally different scales and kingdoms, with no possible filiation. There is a block of becoming that snaps up the wasp and the orchid, but from which no wasp-orchid can ever descend. There is a block of becoming that takes hold of the cat and baboon, the alliance between which is effected by a C virus. There is a block of becoming which is effected by the materials synthesized in the leaves (rhizosphere). (238)

 

When they go on to assert that such phenomena of side-communication are “essential to all becomings-animal,” D+G leave little doubt concerning their ethological significance: the mechanisms characterizing creative involution form the very basis of their model of ethical practice.

 

Despite the central importance of this enabling homology between involution and becoming, however, D+G offer scant argument to support it, tending, for the most part, simply to assume its legitimacy as an entailment of their monist cosmic expressionism. What substantiation they do offer, moreover, tends to confound biological common sense. Witness, for example, their effort to coordinate their deterritorializing appropriation of Weismann with von Baer’s groundbreaking work on embryology. By employing the intense germen (the result of their deterritorialization of the germ-plasm) as a context within which to invert the process of embryonic development described by von Baer, D+G transform von Baer’s work in a manner that exceeds the bounds of biological plausibility. Whereas von Baer stresses the developmental irreversibility leading from the embryo to the organism, D+G seize upon the allegedly limitless flexibility of the embryo, as contrasted with the relatively fixed adult organism, wresting it from its concrete and constrained status within biological theory and retooling it into the operative basis of their model of practice. When they align the egg with the BwO, they are clearly seeking more than just biological legitimacy for their account of the BwO’s adjacency to the organism; in what amounts to a far more radical move, they effectively posit a deterritorialized embryology, one that can mobilize the flexibility of the egg well beyond the parameters not only of embryonic growth but of biological development as such.

 

In order to institute the broad homology with “mythology” that underwrites their generalization of embryology, D+G perform a double deterritorialization of the latter, arguing first of all that the BwO (the cosmic egg) derives its flexibility through its essential likeness to the embryo (the biological egg):

 

The BwO is the egg…. The egg is the milieu of pure intensity, spatium not extension…. There is a fundamental convergence between science and myth, embryology and mythology, the biological egg and the psychic or cosmic egg: the egg always designates this intensive reality, which is not undifferentiated, but is where things and organs are distinguished solely by gradients, migrations, zones of proximity. The egg is the BwO. (164)

 

From both biological and cosmic perspectives, the egg comprises a domain of virtual potential that is prior to any actualization, any production of developmentally-constrained forms of life. Just as the flexible potential of the embryo remains inherent in the developed individual, so too does the limitless virtual repertoire of the BwO lie dormant within any concrete organism that it spawns. In this sense, D+G suggest, the biological egg, no less than the cosmic egg, is coterminous with the plane of immanence or consistency. Rather than forming a flexible field of potential that is developmentally prior to morphogenesis and that loses its flexibility through developmental fixation (as it does for complexity theory), embryology in its deterritorialized form comprises what amounts to an atemporal condition of possibility which not only does not disappear or undergo constraining alterations following developmental fixation but remains in force as a virtual reservoir conditioning subsequent movements of becoming. Embryology thus plays a role in D+G’s philosophy analogous to that of Spinoza’s substance: it defines a cosmic field of virtual potential that gets expressed in the particular forms which are selected for actualization.

 

In a second and even more striking step in their deterritorialization of embryology, D+G model the recursivity between organism and BwO (i.e., precisely what renders them “adjacent” to one another) on the alleged germinal contemporaneity of embryo and organism. Despite their explicit attempt to garner legitimacy through an appeal to biological theory, this step requires D+G to inject psychological principles into the domain of biology in a manner that again exemplifies the limitations of their biophilosophy. As the fruit of a confrontation between Freud and Weismann that wrests the “germ plasm” out of the biological sphere as such, the germinal contemporaneity underwriting D+G’s notion of becoming is, in the end, the product of a certain (anti-Freudian) psychoanalyzing of biology:

 

The BwO is not “before” the organism; it is adjacent to it and is continually in the process of constructing itself. If it is tied to childhood, it is not in the sense that the adult regresses to the child and the child to the Mother, but in the sense that the child, like the Dogon twin who takes a piece of the placenta with him, tears from the organic form of the Mother an intense and destratified matter that on the contrary constitutes his or her perpetual break with the past, his or her present experience, experimentation. The BwO is a childhood block, a becoming, the opposite of a childhood memory. It is not the child “before” the adult, or the mother “before” the child; it is the strict contemporaneousness of the adult, of the adult and the child, their map of comparative densities and intensities, and all of the variations on that map. The BwO is precisely this intense germen where there are not and cannot be either parents or children (organic representation). This is what Freud failed to understand about Weismann: the child as the germinal contemporary of its parents. (164)

 

In the wake of this psychoanalytic deterritorialization of biology, we can finally understand how becoming obtains its seemingly unlimited power: If the organism relates to the BwO as the adult relates to the childhood block and if the relation in each case recovers the germinal potential of embryogenesis, then becoming can always in principle draw on the virtual potential of the BwO or “intense germen” that accompanies it as its immanent cause. That is why becoming need not obey the evolutionary constraints that are imposed through developmental processes and also why it can draw irreverently on a wide array of genetic and extra-genetic mechanisms. It is also, we should add, why becoming always appears predestined to succeed. So long as the BwO remains adjacent to the organism, forming an expressive milieu around it, but without undergoing any limitation or actualization, the BwO serves to furnish a limitless source of alternate organizational pathways that form the basis for, and thus guarantee the logical possibility of, the deterritorialization of the organism.

 

Once again, however, D+G’s unflinching effort to liberate germinal life from biological constraint does not come without significant costs. In the first place, their reliance on a psychoanalytic framework radically disrupts biological theory. By making becoming dependent on a return to the potential of a developmentally prior state, D+G reject out-of-hand all biologically-rooted forms of constraint in a way that simply contravenes the biological consensus concerning the irreversibility of developmental processes within concrete individuals. While D+G could, at worst, be accused of total disingenuousness in their appropriation of biological principles, at best, they are guilty of the profound category mistake we diagnosed earlier: confusing the flexibility attributable to organisms on an evolutionary timescale with the far more narrow flexibility characteristic of developmental processes. In either case, their ethology of becoming is–from the biological standpoint–nothing short of impossible.

 

Even if we overlook this profound difficulty or discount its significance, D+G’s account founders on an internal inconsistency that witnesses the resilience of biological theory and points toward a possible reconciliation of becoming with biology. Centering on D+G’s account of the reciprocity between the BwO and the organism, this inconsistency revisits Ansell-Pearson’s above-discussed effort to distinguish a BwO of the organism from the BwO that coincides with the plane of consistency. While it is, quite clearly, the latter, destratified BwO that D+G liken to the embryo or biological egg (since it alone can justify the limitless possibility they attribute to becoming), only the former, more narrow and stratified BwO can meaningfully be qualified as “adjacent” to the organism, in the sense that it forms what biologists would call the organism’s “niche” or “world.”²⁶ No matter what D+G say to the contrary, as soon as they introduce the “organism” and correlate it with the BwO, they cannot avoid certain biological constraints which necessarily delimit a specific environment in which the organism is situated and develops. As we noted above, it is precisely this point that informs D+G’s value for theorizing agency on an ecological, distributed model. It also bears on D+G’s distinction of absolute from relative deterritorialization, suggesting the impossibility of the former in the domain of biology: simply put, deterritorialization as a biological process can only take place relative to a concrete if flexible context and can only modify the ecology of the organism within certain structurally and situationally imposed bounds. In short, while the destratified BwO (the BwO proper) forms an inclusive context for becomings understood as conjunctions of singularities or haecceities, becomings that involve actual embodied organisms occur within a significantly more restricted context–the virtual field of possibility that corresponds to the specific environment with which the organism is structurally-coupled. Although this context (i.e., the stratified BwO) can certainly change in conjunction with the organism’s development, it must always in some way delimit the larger plane of immanence if its “adjacency” to the organism is to make any positive contribution toward the latter’s continual construction. Not only is Ansell-Pearson thus right to posit a BwO of the organism (even as he significantly overstates its role in D+G’s thought), but in so doing he exposes the internal contradiction between D+G’s incipient ecological understanding of organic systems and their philosophically-rooted cosmic expressionism. Any effort to render becoming consistent would accordingly have to modify D+G’s cosmic expressionism enough to recognize the ecological basis of the organism. Because it must be rooted in a concrete subsection of the plane of immanence–something like a “morphogenetic field”–that is delimited from the plane as such, becoming cannot possess the infinite (logical) flexibility of a “haecceity,” but must remain relative to emergent properties of the developing organism in a way that underscores the irreducible role biology plays in all processes of becoming, or at least in all of those involving organic entities.

 

As it stands, however, the power D+G ascribe to becoming only obtains in a synchronic framework that yet again betrays the philosophical basis of their project. Far from constituting a biologically plausible account of life, their cosmic expressionism yields a philosophical monism that strategically employs the malleability of cultural coding as a means of loosening the grip of biological constraint.²⁷ We get a clear glimpse of this “strategy” in their effort to move from an ethology of behavior to an ethology of assemblages. Two claims are crucial here. In the first place, D+G underscore the necessity of localizing behavior in assemblages, not individuals; not only must the notion of behavior be expanded to embrace the most diverse components, from the biochemical to the social, but agency must be understood as an emergent, distributed process belonging not to a concrete individual, but to a system or assemblage. In the second place, D+G insist on the molecular dimension of becoming, updating ethology by suggesting that (as Ansell-Pearson puts it) “becomings-animal involve not only the selection of adaptive traits but also the play of physico-chemical intensities and zones of proximity that cut across phyletic lineages”–“a ‘musical becoming’ of life” (Germinal Life 174-5). Such a view allows D+G to deconstruct the binaries (e.g., “innate-acquired”) operative in the ethological tradition and to champion the notion of “consistency” over that of substantial unity or identity. In their “bio-behavioral machinics,” behavior results from “packets of relations… steered by molecules” (the molecular components of ethology’s “centers of activation”) and the problem of consistency, as Ansell-Pearson recognizes, becomes one of molecular engineering. What is thereby gained is the capacity to deterritorialize the innate and the acquired from their anchoring in the organism as a “center of activation”: D+G, continues Ansell-Pearson, “situate the problem of the ‘innate-acquired’ in the more dynamic context of a rhizome in which the natal gets decoded and the acquired is subject to territorialization” (175). By opening the innate and the acquired to molecular forces that circulate beneath the organism, effectively making them a function of the plane of immanence, D+G thus claim to circumvent the constraint they exercise within a standard ethological model of behavior.

 

Once again, however, D+G’s resonance with contemporary science (here, the cognitive science of distributed systems) is undermined by the radicality of their position. For in shifting from an ethology of behavior to an ethology of assemblages, D+G do not so much shift the locus of agency from isolated organism to larger cognitive and social system as dissolve the role of agency altogether. Unlike the work of Andy Clark or Edwin Hutchins on the social distribution of cognition, D+G’s ethology of assemblages does not aim to expand the framework in which cognitive agency must be situated, but instead to render the emergence of such agency an epiphenomenon of the play of molecular forces on the plane of consistency. It is for this reason and this reason alone that they can claim to dissolve all biological and social constraints limiting what a body (or assemblage) can do: on their model of cosmic expressionism, the coordinates defining a body (longitude and latitude) are not properties specific to a particular body or assemblage, but rather properties that accrue to the body (or assemblage) by dint of its relation to the plane of immanence. Otherwise stated, there is no positive concept of bodily agency in D+G’s work, only an expressive concept that emerges on the basis of an ontology of immanence.

 

As was the case with the biological notion of the milieu, D+G’s appropriation of cognitive science must be modified in a manner that recognizes both the contextedness and the agency of particular concrete assemblages. Just as the emerging organism furnishes an important source of constraint on its own emergence (since it specifies the range of environmental factors to which it is sensitive), so too does the assemblage introduce a source of constraint on its own development (since its own emergent behavior determines the range of environmental factors to which it can respond). Otherwise put, the assemblage (no less than the organism) plays an active role in selecting which molecular forces can affect it: far from being the expressive correlate of an autonomous play of molecular forces on the plane of immanence, the assemblage is what brings together specific components and a concrete “fringe” of virtuality (the range of factors to which it can respond). The assemblage simply cannot be reduced to a mere epiphenomenon of the molecular forces it contains.

 

This necessary specificity of the assemblage gives rise to a dual critical imperative: to respect the particular cultural or social contexts out of which assemblages emerge and to demarcate the constraint exercised by such context from the constraint exercised by biological factors. In his criticism of D+G for disregarding the question of animal becoming (the fact that the “animality” of the animal is not simply given and that animal becoming is not automatically relative to the human), Ansell-Pearson draws attention to the first imperative: D+G, he contends, fail “sufficiently to acknowledge… the specific character of becomings-animal of the human, such as the cultural contexts in which they take place and which… make them intelligible… it is quite clear that their reading [in Kafka] of the figuration of such becomings is being carried out in the context of a politics of desire” (Germinal Life 188). What such a criticism foregrounds is the particular limitation that is placed on becomings by the social contexts in which they occur: the becomings-animal of Kafka’s fiction, for example, “operate in the context of a negotiation with values that are at once economic, judicial, bureaucratic, and technological” (188, emphasis added). Such limitation, it need hardly be said, impinges on the limitless potential D+G ascribe to becoming as a matter of an exclusively molecular creative involution.

 

D+G’s psychoanalytically-derived notion of germinal contemporaneity allows them to present an expressive model of the social that functions to dissolve these limitations. By effectively psychoanalyzing biology, D+G are able to place the social on the same plane with the biological ²⁸ and to reduce the molar conception of the social as limitation to a deeper, molecular socius. The crucial element here is the notion of body (or assemblage) as haecceity: as a punctual expression of a singularity, a body brings together biological codings and cultural markings in a manner that is altogether indifferent to their variant status. Such a conception articulates becoming with a certain model of somatic change (antithetical to any biological notion) based on what we might call social selection. To develop such a conception, D+G dismiss biological constraints on organic development, championing instead a radically deterritorialized mechanism of somatic selection, one rooted not in the organic soma–that is, in the physical body–but in the body qua haecceity, a punctual construct of speeds and affects whose consistency at any given moment derives from its position within a particular synchronic determination of the (totalizing) plane of immanence or socius. In addition to its blatant disregard for biological thought, this move indulges in a particularly pernicious posthuman fantasy that has had a strong resonance in contemporary popular and aesthetic culture: the fantasy that somatic change can itself be programmed, that the body is, more or less, a malleable material which can be reconstituted through particular symbolic, inscriptional, or disciplinary interventions.²⁹

 

Once again, this fantasy takes root in D+G’s philosophical model of monist expressionism–a model that strips away all intermediate boundaries, including those imposed by organic development. By holding D+G to the test of contemporary biology, we can see how their expressionist model of somatic change actually depends on a conflation of what they describe as an “uprooting of an organ from its specificity” with permanent change in the organ’s function. Only by effectively conflating behavioral with evolutionary change in this way can D+G coherently propose to replace the organic body with a deterritorialized “articulation” of the body according to a new configuration of speeds and affects. In short, this conflation of evolutionary and physiological timeframes comprises the basis for the privilege they accord ethology in their analysis of bodies. Just as traditional ethology privileges a body’s capacities–what it can do–over its static characteristics, D+G’s transindividual “ethology of assemblages” allows them to define a body by two coordinates that articulate it on the plane of immanence.³⁰ Latitude determines “the affects of which [a body] is capable…within the limits of [a given degree of] power,” while longitude specifies “the particle aggregates belonging to [a] body in a given relation” (256). Because they furnish the molecular constituents of bodies, independently of any molar formation (e.g., the organism or assemblage), these two ethological coordinates are not a function of the agency possessed by a concrete assemblage, but rather the expression of the plane of immanence, in this or that particular mode. Though they serve to define a body (or assemblage), these two coordinates are not properties of a specific assemblage so much as they are properties of the plane of immanence itself.

 

As a kind of “molecular recipe” for organic function, ethology thus facilitates a shift outward from a developmentally-specified, organic body to a synchronic, expressive body. Cutting beneath all molar typological categories, the expressive body is simply the conjunction of all the affects of which it is capable: “In the same way that we avoided defining a body by its organs and functions, we will avoid defining it by Species or Genus characteristics; instead we will seek to count its affects. This kind of study is called ethology, and this is the sense in which Spinoza wrote a true Ethics. A racehorse is more different from a workhorse than a workhorse is from an ox” (257). On such a model, organic functions are the result not of organic form (nor, we should add, of morphogenetic processes that generate such form), but of deterritorialized speeds and affects that circulate on the plane of immanence. Rather than emerging within certain broad constraints set by physiology, ethological relations are thus given a radical freedom and are even, following D+G’s appropriation of von Uexküll’s work, held to condition the very emergence of physiological traits:

 

It will be said that the tick’s three affects assume generic and specific characteristics, organs and functions, legs and snout. This is true from the standpoint of physiology, but not from the standpoint of Ethics. Quite the contrary, in Ethics the organic characteristics derive from longitude and its relations, from latitude and its degrees. We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects. (257)

 

Leaving aside the question of D+G’s fidelity to von Uexküll, it should be clear that this generalized ethology of assemblages comprises a philosophical, not a biological or even systems-theoretical, model of embodiment. Like the geometrical method Spinoza employs in The Ethics, the construction of a body through its affects generates what would be called, in philosophical terms, a “real definition” of that body, a “veritable generation of the object defined” (Deleuze, Difference 79). While it may serve the purposes of D+G’s expressionist monism, such a model can be reconciled neither with the current consensus in biological thought that organ function forms an integral part of organic development, nor with work in cognitive science on socially-distributed cognitive systems. From the biological perspective, organs are not free-floating and purely indeterminate singularities that acquire specificity only when incorporated into a particular assemblages of desire, but are, from the very beginning, constrained by the internal repertoire of functionalities which govern the morphogenetic processes responsible for specifying their functions. And from the cognitive science perspective, assemblages cannot simply be epiphenomenal expressions of the politics of desire, but possess an integrity and agency that also implies limitation and constraint. A model of agency informed by these two bodies of scientific research gives a picture at odds with D+G’s repudiation of the organism: on such a picture, organs form dynamic parts of larger organisms that develop in tandem with the concrete environmental niches to which they are structurally coupled and with the assemblages of which they form one component among others. Organs, the organism, and the assemblage simply cannot be reduced to the philosophical roles D+G reserve for them.

 

Notes

 

1. See Caygill, O’Toole, Welchman; most centrally, see Ansell-Pearson’s “Viroid Life” and especially his Germinal Life.

 

2. “For Bergson,” Deleuze contends, “science is never ‘reductionist’ but, on the contrary, demands a metaphysics–without which it would remain abstract, deprived of meaning or intuition. To continue Bergson’s project today, means for example to constitute a metaphysical image of thought corresponding to the new lines, openings, traces, leaps, dynamisms, discovered by a molecular biology of the brain: new linkings and re-linkings in thought” (Deleuze, Bergsonism 116-17).

 

3. This commentator is American microbiologist and developmental biologist, Franklin Harold. See Depew and Weber 419.

 

4. See Cinema I: “This infinite set of all images constitutes a kind of plane [plan] of immanence. The image exists in itself, on this plane. This in-itself of the image is matter: not something hidden behind the image, but on the contrary the absolute identity of the image and movement…. The plane of immanence is the movement (the facet of movement) which is established between the parts of each system and between one system and another, which crosses them all, stirs them up together and subjects them all to the condition which prevents them from being absolutely closed…. The material universe, the plane of immanence, is the machinic assemblage of movement-images” (58-9). With its emphasis on the image, this definition of the plane of immanence differs in important respects from that developed in Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

 

5. In The Fold, Deleuze appears to return to his earlier, more properly Bergsonian position regarding the organism. For a discussion of the role of biology in The Fold, see Badiou. For a more general discussion of The Fold as a break with reductive materialism and a recognition of the fractal integrity of biological systems, see Mullarkey.

 

6. See Minsky’s The Society of Mind and Varela, Rosch, and Thompson’s The Embodied Mind.

 

7. See Ansell-Pearson’s Germinal Life, 66.

 

8. On this point, incidentally, Bergson’s theory converges with recent efforts to apply nonlinear dynamics to biological systems. See Kauffman and below.

 

9. It is, nonetheless, difficult for us to avoid the illusion of such a negation, since we (like every other species) can only perceive life from our own differentiated perspective:

 

Life as movement alienates itself in the material form that it creates; by actualizing itself, by differentiating itself, it loses contact with the rest of ‘itself.’ Every species is thus an arrest of movement; it could be said that the living being turns on itself and closes itself. It cannot be otherwise, since the Whole is only virtual, dividing itself by being acted out. It cannot assemble its actual parts that remain external to each other: The Whole is never ‘given.’ And, in the actual, an irreducible pluralism reigns–as many worlds as living beings, all ‘closed’ on themselves. (Bergsonism 104)

 

It is, moreover, precisely because the Whole is not given that life, and the organisms in which it expresses itself, remain open-ended and creative, not reproductive. This is precisely what Bergson conceptualizes as the “positivity of time”–“an efficacity… that is identical to a ‘hesitation’ of things and, in this way, to creation in the world” (105).

 

10. In Bergsonism, Deleuze had rooted internal vital difference in a certain duplicity of difference in kind that Bergson introduces in Time and Free Will. In that text, Bergson analyzes abstract time and space as mixtures (of space and duration and or matter and duration, respectively) that divide into two tendencies (toward relaxation in the case of matter or toward contraction in the case of duration). On this account, difference of nature does not only reside between two tendencies, but is itself one of these tendencies: duration as difference that differs from itself.

 

11. My analysis here follows the lead of Ansell-Pearson in Germinal Life. On the topic of intensity in Difference and Repetition, see also Smith.

 

12. He had argued in Bergsonism that it raises the question whether it is intensity “that gives all the qualities with which we make experience” (92).

 

13. The notion that symbioses play a central role in evolution stems from the work of Lynn Margulis. See Margulis and Sagan.

 

14. For a canonical statement on population thinking, see Mayr. See also Sober and Gould.

 

15. See the discussion of population thinking in Depew and Weber, Chapter 12.

 

16. On this point, D+G’s position can be distinguished from that of Jacques Monod, one of the crucial biological mentors of Deleuze, as well as from that of neo-Darwinians like Stephen Jay Gould and Lynn Margulis and complexity theorists like Goodwin and Kauffman. Because of their radical desire to develop a rigorously molecular understanding of evolution (or, better, involution), they must explain the emergence of organisms from the plane of immanence without any recourse to higher order principles. Unlike Monod, who evokes natural selection to explain how the molecular intensities can be drawn out of the realm of chance and operate as the force determining organisms, and unlike contemporary biologists and complexity theorists who explain the emergence of organisms through recourse to nature’s tendency toward “natural kinds” or to the phenomenon of symbiosis, both of which function in conjunction with natural selection, D+G lack any mechanism with which to explain the emergence of organisms as anything other than pure contingency, i.e., the extraneous epiphenomena of molecular processes.

 

17. This argument is forcefully made by Howard Caygill, who criticizes Deleuze’s privileging of distribution over selection as retroactively humanist insofar as it “sentimentalizes selection.”

 

18. By using the biological theory most resonant with D+G’s program in order to illustrate the significant differences between the two, my intention is to demonstrate the heretical nature of D+G’s work and its implications for their account of becoming without having to make substantive pronouncements regarding biological theory. My critique, that is, does not hinge on the correctness of this particular theory, but only on the viability of the more general consensus that it exemplifies.

 

19. For discussions linking complexity theory to Bergson, see Kampis and Rosen.

 

20. See Depew and Weber 48-50 for a discussion of Geoffroy’s role in the history of biology.

 

21. On the difference between dynamic systems in the physical and the biological registers, see Goodwin 175.

 

22. See Massumi, De Landa, and Murphy.

 

23. On this point, consider the subtle shift to which Isabelle Stengers submits the Deleuzian conception of the virtual in suggesting the substitution of the term “possible” for Deleuze’s “virtual,” and of the term “probable” for Deleuze’s “possible” (Stengers 27n10). Without addressing the biological sciences in particular, this pair of substitutions is intended “to create a more explicit link with scientific practices” and it does so, we might add, by treating the plane of actualization as the crucial site on which these practices operate.

 

24. In Germinal Life, Ansell-Pearson views Weismann as the most important biological reference for D+G and develops the thesis that D+G’s notion of life generalizes Weismann’s concept of the germ-plasm beyond the boundaries of the organism. In my opinion, the role Ansell-Pearson accords Weismann is much exaggerated (there is, as he admits, only one reference to Weismann’s theory in D+G) and the function it serves (deterritorializing life from the organism) runs counter to my argument here. For a discussion of Weismann’s historical importance in biology, see Depew and Weber 187-91.

 

25. With this emphasis on the organization of the molecular material, complexity theory converges with the autopoietic theory developed by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela and particularly with its central notion of “organizational closure,” according to which an organism is closed to informational exchange with its environment and functions to preserve its own organization in the face of constant perturbation from the outside. See Maturana and Varela.

 

26. For a discussion of the structural coupling between an organism and its world, see Varela’s “Organism.” Varela defines the difference between the environment in general and the “world” that exists for a specific organism as the “surplus of significance” that the correlation of organism and environment introduces.

 

27. My understanding of this strategy significantly revises my earlier treatment of D+G’s model of becoming in Embodying Technesis, Chapter 8. Despite this revision, however, I continue to stress the necessity of according a certain autonomy to molar formations.

 

28. This leveling of the differences between the biological and the social can be seen more generally in D+G’s psychoanalytically-rooted critique of the “body image.” Here they play off their appropriation of Melanie Klein’s part object (which furnishes the notion of a partial organ) against psychoanalytical and phenomenological notions of a whole body, which, they suggest, retain the privilege of the organism and the molar category of organization. Nonetheless, D+G’s work–despite my criticisms here–gives the means to broaden the analysis of constraint from the biological to the social in a way that complements the work of someone like Varela.

 

29. While popular practices like body building and tattooing furnish particularly tangible symptoms of such a fantasy, its complex underlying “logic” is perhaps nowhere better laid bare than in Paul Verhoeven’s 1989 science fiction film Total Recall. The film’s central premise involves a struggle of two “minds” to possess a single body. After the complex plot lines work themselves out, the two characters played by Arnold Schwartzenegger–two characters who might be said to share Arnold’s body–confront each other in a scene that brilliantly foregrounds what is at stake, in our negotiations concerning the posthuman, in the postmodern debate on the copy and the simulacrum. The film’s hero, Douglas Quaid, stands–in the flesh–face-to-face with a simulated version of his own face on a video monitor, claiming that, in fact, he (Quaid) is not who he thinks he is, that he is really a certain Hauser, betrayer of the resistance movement, who “would like his body back.” This scene’s enabling divorce of information and embodiment–and the privilege it seems to place on the former as the “essence” of human identity–gives rise to a series of mind-boggling questions: where, for example, has Hauser been “living” during the time he’s “lent” his body to Quaid?; and what, finally, is Quaid (or, for that matter, Hauser), if his being has no essential relation to the body he occupies? Beyond such local questions, however, the denouement of the film–in which Quaid resists the effort to erase him and appropriates the body that is not supposed to be his–foregrounds the specific fantasy that the body can be retrofitted to meet the needs of new informational programs, identities, or selves, or in other words, that somatic change can, as it were, be determined by will. In this way, Total Recall inverts the defensive humanism of Verhoeven’s earlier film, Robocop, and of the vast majority of recent cinematic science fiction: instead of depicting the gradual reassertion of an embodied self following an identity reprogramming, Total Recall invests the far more ambivalent fantasy that we (or those who program us) possess virtually unlimited power to remake our embodied selves in any way that we (or they) see fit.

 

30. For a comparison of an ethology of behavior and an ethology of assemblages, see Ansell-Pearson, 170ff.

 

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• Varela, Francisco. “Organism: A Meshwork of Selfless Selves.” Organism and The Origins of Self. Ed. Alfred I. Tauber. Dordrecht, Holland: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991.
• Varela, Francisco, Eleanor Rosch, and Evan Thompson. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.
• Welchman, Alistair. “Machinic Thinking.” Deleuze and Philosophy: The Difference Engineer. Ed. K. Ansell-Pearson. London: Routledge, 1997. 211-229.

 

Nicola Pitchford

English Department
Fordham University
pitchford@fordham.edu

 

Pastiche is central to the resistant politics of Kathy Acker’s writing–yet she would appear to agree with Fredric Jameson’s influential critique of pastiche as “the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language” (17). Her 1986 novel Don Quixote is all about having to speak “in a dead language” in the absence of a more “healthy” norm. It begins with the death of the protagonist, a female version of Cervantes’s knight, who then goes on to narrate much of the subsequent story. Acker explains, “BEING DEAD, DON QUIXOTE COULD NO LONGER SPEAK. BEING BORN INTO AND PART OF A MALE WORLD, SHE HAD NO SPEECH OF HER OWN. ALL SHE COULD DO WAS READ MALE TEXTS WHICH WEREN’T HERS” (39). The novel then proceeds by plagiarism and pastiche, as Quixote goes on a quest–for a heterosexual love unsullied by patriarchal power relations–through fragments of numerous existing texts. Quixote rereads and pieces together a whole range of textual scraps, from Machiavelli’s The Prince to a Godzilla movie. What becomes clear in her eccentric survey of (primarily) Western culture is that the lost, healthy linguistic norm is more than unhealthy for female readers–indeed, it is deadly.

 

The novel is motivated by the idea of both reading and speaking “in a dead language”–but “flogging a dead language” seems a more apt description of Acker’s strategy, in more ways than one. For both the reader in and the reader of the novel, the act of rereading that pastiche entails can seem like flogging a dead horse, in the sense of merely covering once again the familiar ground of the already said. Of course, the same has been said of any reading in postmodernity where all language may well be dead, having belonged properly to a previous historical moment that gave it life and from which it has now been dissociated by forces of commercial appropriation and cultural amnesia. But this generic deadness that Jameson identifies as inherent in postmodern writing is not quite what I wish to explore.

 

Rather, I want to attempt to account for what I see as a particular familiarity, and perhaps a particular tendency toward exhaustion and redundancy, that accompanies reading Acker’s texts from this period in her career, a period characterized by Acker’s extensive use of pastiche or what she frequently refers to as “plagiarism.” In what follows, I look at what happens to and through the act of reading, to ask how reading is connected to agency. Despite the considerable difficulty of Acker’s experimental novels, reading them can become an activity weighed down by a certain deadening obviousness. I want to suggest that this lifelessness derives from Acker’s attempts to construct, through pastiche, a community of readers defined by their opposition to traditional literary culture. I want also to argue that her deployment of pastiche in specific contexts–especially sexual contexts–in fact complicates and undermines the static and oversimplified role that she sometimes seems to offer her reader. In such moments, a complex interplay of various possible readerly identifications creates a contingent and particular version of agency.

 

In a chapter on Acker in his recent book on literary celebrity, Joe Moran has suggested that in both her public persona and her work, Acker “puts forward two contrasting views of identity–one textual and one essentialist” (142). While he locates these competing versions in Acker’s characters and in her own public performance of the (death of the) author, I wish to extend his observations and apply them also to the modes of reading suggested by her texts, and by this novel in particular. The “textual” version of identity, generally celebrated by those critics friendly to Acker’s work, is readily apparent in the cut-and-paste technique of Don Quixote, in which borrowed textual fragments are reanimated by their juxtaposition. Here, language (my metaphorical dead horse), along with the social identities it produces, is like Quixote’s skinny nag Rocinante, who by all rights should be dead but who keeps lurching doggedly forward to the next flogging. In Acker’s version, the old horse often described by Cervantes as a “hack” acquires the nickname “Hackneyed.” Aside from the association with hackneys, the plodding and reliable work horses once used to draw London cabs, the horse’s new name also, of course, refers to tired and commercially corrupted ways of writing. (“Hackney” can also mean a prostitute of the non-literary sort.) Acker’s narrator notes the name’s evocation of fruitless repetition, telling us that “Hackneyed” means “‘a writer’ or ‘an attempt to have an identity that always fails’” (10). And indeed, stable new identity never emerges from Quixote’s quest or from Acker’s novel, for the characters move from one borrowed text to another, frequently switching names, genders, and even species. But in the repeated attempt to reread and rewrite the dead language in a new context, the failure of identity to become stabilized creates a sense of liveliness, play, and subversive possibility.

 

Moran suggests that the failure of such pastiche to produce a wholly new language or a definitive new reader can itself become reified as a permanent condition and thus, in his argument, Acker’s “textual” model of identity gives way to an “essentialist” model in which the apparent fluidity of identity collapses into the bohemian stereotype of the outsider or rebel, the person who is always defined against mainstream values: (glorious) failure embodied. When viewed from the perspective of the act of reading, rather than as a model of identity-construction, the failure of pastiche seems to lead to a more oppositional reading strategy. I would argue, however, that this oppositional mode is actually a symptom of “dead language” and the social relations embalmed within it, rather than an act of revivification and agency.

 

Acker attempts to put agency into pastiche by creating an “outsider” reader–someone who is not the typical implied reader of a patriarchal literary tradition. Within the text, this outsider is Quixote, the female knight. Through Quixote, Acker reveals the paradoxical position available to the female reader/hero. Readers must be desiring beings, for desire moves us to read; yet women are positioned in this tradition as the passive objects of desire. Thus, one cannot both be active, able to join the classic textual reader/hero on his quest, and female, like the object of the hero’s quest. As Acker puts it, “Finally Don Quixote understood her problem: she was both a woman therefore she couldn’t feel [active] love and a knight in search of Love. She had had to become a knight, for she could solve this problem only by becoming partly male” (29). For Acker’s Quixote, the ability to pursue sexual love is the key to female agency. Yet women who pursue sexual love have always been punished or written out of the text, and thus as Quixote puts it, the dilemma of female agency is, “If a woman insists she can and does love and her living isn’t loveless or dead, she dies. So either a woman is dead or she dies” (33).

 

This impossible location leads Quixote to sift through other texts for a figure who is both exiled from the existing order and yet able to act upon it. This figure will represent the outsider reader who, her experience distorted or excluded by canonical texts, nevertheless turns those texts to her own purposes. Quixote settles on the pirate. The pirate is a thief, or a plagiarist like Acker herself. One of Quixote’s companions, declaring herself a pirate, sings “I who will never own, whatever and whenever I want, I take” (199). Quixote suggests that this myth of the text-thieving, exiled pirate can be the basis not only for a mode of reading but for a different vision of community and social relations:

 

Even a woman who has the soul of a pirate, at least pirate morals, even a woman who prefers loneliness to the bickerings and constraints of heterosexual marriage, even such a woman who is a freak in our society needs a home.

 

Even freaks need homes, countries, language, communication.

 

The only characteristic freaks share is our knowledge that we don’t fit in. Anywhere. It is for you, freaks my loves, I am writing and it is about you. (201-02)

 

By recombining the old, purloined chunks of language into a new pastiche, Acker claims, formerly exiled readers can create a language–and thus a community–that supports a different notion of (female) identity and female romantic-sexual desire. The agency to create that change depends on rereading from within a new, previously excluded context.

 

Acker’s use of the image of the outlaw community of pirate-freaks, formed from the scraps of old stories, and her direct address here to “you, freaks my loves” raise important questions about which readers possess agency in her model. Does she, as Moran suggests, essentialize “the outsider” both as the reader in her text and as the reader of her text? Acker’s novels from the 1980s do begin to reproduce certain predictable patterns, and these can seem to result in fixed and frozen relationships between readers and texts. But here it seems important to place Acker’s desire for oppositional community in the context of the cultural politics of the 1980s. By situating Acker this way, I hope to identify those elements of Don Quixote that might produce the most fruitful interventions in gendered and otherwise power-inflected modes of reading that persist far beyond the mid-1980s. Historicizing Acker may also account for some readers’ sense of Acker’s work as curiously dated or old-fashioned in its “punk” vehemence.

 

There is no doubt that Acker’s writing came into its own at some point in the 1980s. In 1984, Acker’s work was damned as failed parody and labeled “abusive to women” in The New York Times Book Review (Hoffman 16; qtd. in Jacobs 53). Four years later, the same publication installed her as the “darling of the mid-1980s downtown Manhattan arts scene” (Gill 9), comparing her to Gertrude Stein and paying tribute to “the seriousness of Ms. Acker’s purpose” (Dillard 9). She had moved from obscure publishers to Grove in 1983. Moran traces her (slightly earlier) trajectory in Britain, with the “major breakthrough” being Picador’s 1984 publication of Blood and Guts in High School and Acker’s subsequent appearance on the television arts program, The South Bank Show (132).

 

Moran understands Acker’s rise to fame from the Lower East Side milieu of the 1970s as part of the culture industry’s tendency to gobble up “cool” subcultures. However, in Acker’s specific case, Moran argues that that tendency was ironically abetted by the particularly local and personal context in which she had become a known personality:

 

I would suggest that Acker’s avant-garde fame relied primarily on the fostering of a sense of dialogue and community between artist and audience which initially thrived within the concentrated atmosphere of New York’s punk art scene in the late 1970s. As with many other avant-garde groupings, the feelings of marginality and difference from the mainstream created the need for a network of like-minded souls who could provide mutual support and encouragement. (139)

 

The speculative economy of the time led to an unprecedented acceleration in the commercialization and assimilation of arts subcultures.¹ In addition, the “sense of dialogue and community” that Acker’s work brought from its initial position of “marginality and difference” found a certain kinship–albeit ambivalently–with the contemporaneous movement toward identity politics in academic (and, to some extent, popular) feminism.²

 

Writing in 1988, Jill Dolan defines “identity politics” as “the current tendency in feminism to valorize cultural and ethnic differences” (86). Indeed, the exploration of difference was a central concern of US feminism in the 1980s; much as Acker’s work does, it brought together two strains of feminist theory–one focused on identity and another on its impossibility. Both were aimed at decentering a homogeneous “woman” that theorists saw as having merely replicated, within feminism, the hegemonic position of the mainstream male. Susan Gubar (perhaps understandably aggrieved, as a frequent target of allegations that the perspective of white women had monopolized academic feminism in the previous decade) traces these two strains in her sweeping critique of developments in feminist criticism during that period: the first was a series of essays and books that defined the terrain of identity politics by emphasizing the axes of race, class, and sexuality as frequently more determinative than gender in their effects on experience, subjectivity, reading practices, and the location of common political interests. Gubar argues that much of this work fruitfully challenged the racial bias of an earlier feminism, but in doing so also implied the debilitating breaking down of the identities “woman” or “feminist” into an ever-proliferating “string of hyphenated adjectival qualifiers” (891). The second tendency was the work of poststructuralist feminists, who “sought to use the race-based interrogation of the term women” to question ideas of identity altogether (894). Although poststructuralism is ostensibly incompatible with the affirmations of authenticating experience often central to identity politics, Gubar suggests that the two often functioned hand-in-hand (in her view, destructively) to privilege difference as the key term in any epistemology, whether retaining the label “feminist” or not.

 

Acker was deeply ambivalent toward–if not outright suspicious of–various manifestations of identity politics within and outside the feminist movement. In an interview from the collection Angry Women (1991), Acker expresses both her desire to be recognized as “different” and a critique of those who mark such boundaries too exclusively:

 

A gay friend of mine said something interesting to me. I asked her if she differentiated between gay and straight women, and she said, “Yes, women who are gay are really outlaws, because we’re totally outside the society–always.” And I said, “What about people like me?” and she said, “Oh, you’re just queer.” Like–we didn’t exist?! [laughs] It’s as if the gay women position themselves as outside society, but meanwhile they’re looking down on everybody who’s perverse! Which is very peculiar…. (Juno 182; brackets and ellipses in original)

 

It is precisely in Acker’s textual exploration of the “perverse” reader–in the way she positions implied readers of her sexually explicit scenes–that she offers a way of turning the tension between identity politics and poststructuralism into a fruitful articulation of difference. I will explore the “perverse reader” in more detail in a moment. Before I do, however, I want to explore the ways in which the intersection of the two strains of 80s feminism–and the resulting emphasis on difference–is evident in Don Quixote and other Acker novels from the period.

 

On the one hand, Acker’s kinship with identity politics is made manifest in Don Quixote by her ongoing affirmation of difference as a fundamental and total condition–as illustrated by the passage on “freaks,” above (“we don’t fit in. Anywhere”), the recurring image of the pirate or outlaw, and by her development of an epistemology based on reading from the position of the unorthodox and impossible (because either she “is dead or she dies” [33]) sexually desiring woman. On the other hand, Acker’s allegiance to a more poststructuralist tendency is evident not only in her explicit and much noted references to particular theorists and their concepts–for example, two characters’ discussion of Deleuze and Guattari, Lacan, Althusser, Derrida, and Foucault (54)–but also in her refusal to respect the identity-category boundaries drawn between various groups of outsiders.

 

For example, in a “vision” that Quixote recounts toward the end of the novel, Acker appears to appropriate the practice of Voodoo as an image of her own subversive textual bricolage. Quixote describes a “little church”:

 

The church was a Haitian church. Being Haitian it held all practices including every sort of fucking and Voodoun. All ways were allowed: all cultures: aloud…. Inside, the priests use nailpolish bottles, raw rums, and whatever they can get their hands on for everything. (193)

 

Here, as elsewhere, Acker transmutes apparently stable cultural differences–here the culturally specific religious practice of Voodoo–into a disruptive textual strategy. In her earlier My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Voodoo appears even more explicitly as a disruptive and “nominalist” textual strategy. In Don Quixote, Acker likewise uses over-simplified notions of Arabic cultural tradition to construct another mise-en-abyme (as she will do in her later novel, Empire of the Senseless):

 

Unlike American and Western culture (generally), the Arabs (in their culture) have no (concept of) originality. That is, culture. They write new stories paint new pictures et cetera only by embellishing old stories pictures… They write by cutting chunks out of all-ready written texts and in other ways defacing traditions: changing important names into silly ones, making dirty jokes out of matters that should be of the utmost importance to us such as nuclear warfare. (25; ellipses in original)

 

Then–like the “Arabs” whose cultural construction she clearly parodies–Acker proceeds to “mak[e] dirty jokes out of matters that should be of the utmost importance to us such as nuclear warfare” as she stages a scene in which Richard Nixon dismisses the SALT negotiations while engaged in sex with his wife (110).

 

Haitian Voodoo practitioners or Arabs–such indiscriminate, dehistoricized appropriations of various marginalized identities or experiences within the text may function in two somewhat contradictory ways: to mark a radical skepticism toward the construction and narration of identity, and also to signify a desire for an undivided community of rebels, unified by their shared exile from the social mainstream. It is possible that by blurring together the two approaches to difference, Acker risks losing the potential benefits of both: in creating a universal “other” marked only by non-specific difference, she compromises the resistant power of particular, local histories (one of the strengths of identity politics) while simultaneously giving up poststructuralism’s deconstructive ability to work upon the difference also inherent in the hegemonic male subject. My question is, to what extent does the reading practice that Acker offers in Don Quixote leave the implied reader locked, albeit oppositionally, within the “dead” and deadening social relations inscribed in the original texts she borrows, simply occupying the space they reserve for the “other”? To answer this question, I want to focus on her construction of the previously excluded reader as the location from which the novel’s implied reader approaches the incorporated materials that comprise its pastiche.

 

I turn, again, to Jameson, specifically, to the sections of Postmodernism in which his attention shifts from the text and its production to the effects of reading pastiche. Jameson redirects his focus in order to answer a question that is similar to the one I’m asking here of pastiche in Acker’s work: whether textual pastiche can open up the control of literary meaning to a wider range of (less conventionally privileged) readers and ways of reading. Discussing aspects of Claude Simon’s Conducting Bodies (Les corps conducteurs), Jameson suggests that “for one long moment, the moment in which we read [such] texts,” the process of reading becomes not mere reception but itself an active moment of textual production (146). The reader must work to produce the text because Simon’s extensive use of dislocation (in terms of plot, character, and scene description) and his incorporation of other, borrowed texts and images–techniques shared by Don Quixote–make it impossible to “make sense” in any conventional, more passive fashion.

 

Jameson speculates that this moment of reading as active production–a moment which I would call a potential moment of agency–might also present something of a utopian image of labor. Primarily, of course, producer and consumer become one–self-sufficient and self-sustaining–as the single reader embodies both roles. But there is also a more complex change taking place; Jameson suggests that in these circumstances, “reading undergoes a remarkable specialization and, very much like older handicraft activity at the onset of the industrial revolution, is dissociated into a variety of distinct processes according to the general law of the division of labor” (140). Rather than merely contributing to the displacement and dehumanization of the skilled craftsman, such processes of “deskilling” also entail a certain democratization, creating “forms of labor that anyone can do” (146). This analogy adds a material-historical angle to the openness and multiplicity of the Barthesian “text,” implying its availability not only to more numerous readings but also to more numerous readers. The new, active reading required by Simon’s novel and Acker’s, therefore, might not only produce agency (as readers, like Acker herself, find new ways to make use of the text in question) but might also render the traditional materials of western culture available to use by more diverse groups of people–not just the original, intended readers.

 

This “deskilled” reading certainly seems evident within Acker’s novel, where her Quixote stands in for the reader of the novel; both in the specific textual interpretations Acker’s Quixote performs and in her overall language and tone as narrator, Quixote seems to model a sort of subversive stupidity. Following Cervantes’s mad knight, Acker’s protagonist is the very type of the misreading literalist, reading at a level of interpretation that “anyone could do.” She is not only the wrong (unintended) reader of these “male texts”; she also consistently reads wrong, as when she (again following Cervantes) mistakes a procession of penitents carrying a figure of the Virgin Mary for a kidnapping in progress (177). As far as there is one narrative voice among all the shifting fragments, it is the voice of a stubborn misreader, a reader who consistently focuses on the wrong things and fails to notice the things to which she should pay attention if she were to produce a sophisticated reading. This narrative voice thinks Shakespeare’s Juliet is supposed to be a nymphomaniac; later, speaking as Jane Eyre, she complains that the worst thing about her boarding school is the lack of privacy in the dormitory for masturbation. Likewise, Acker’s language is relentlessly non-literary, profane, and full of slang: for instance, her Oedipus declares non-poetically, “I am the biggest shit in the world” (147).

 

Acker’s exemplary (mis)reader might be likened to Bakhtin’s carnival fool, whose apparently stupid insistence on supposedly minor or self-evident points reveals society’s hypocrisy and the fundamental contradictions of ideology (Bauer 11). The carnival fool’s stupidity is a weapon against the words and the power of the mighty. In this sense, Acker’s deliberate “dumbing down” and lowering into bawdiness of canonical great works might also be a democratization.

 

However, Jameson ultimately concludes in the case of Claude Simon that the equation of “deskilled” reading with democratization of the text does not, in fact, hold up. Simon’s textual pastiche fails to offer a sustainable image of utopian conditions of production precisely because of its fragmentation and multiplicity. Echoing the famed Brecht-Lukács debates about modernist technique, Jameson concludes that such art can only offer knowledge of society in the form of “symptom[s]” or random “data”; these data fail to cohere into an overall vision of society as a totality (151).

 

Jameson also offers what I would call a common-sense reason why these texts’ production of a level of reading that “anyone can do” does not result in greater readerly access: he stops to ask who actually reads “so highly technical an elite literary artifact” (146). While access to the means of production may exist in theory, in material terms “the very experience of art itself today is alienated and made ‘other’ and inaccessible to too many people to serve as a useful vehicle for their imaginative experience” (147). And if this is true of “art itself,” it need not be demonstrated that stylistically complex novels like Don Quixote are an even more specialized and rarefied taste, no matter how critical they may be of the closed world of traditional literature. This is, of course, part of their “hip” allure.

 

I would go further, to suggest that the conditions limiting who actually reads reside not only in social relations extrinsic to the text (although these are frequently the most compelling barriers to access); they are also written into Acker’s practice. By this I don’t mean that pastiche, like satire, necessitates a certain level of education or familiarity with the original texts being borrowed, if one is to “get it” in full. I do not mean, in other words, that one must actually be skilled to catch on to Acker’s “deskilled” reading, for her irreverent and anti-aesthetic tone, her blunt and obscene vocabulary, her incorporation of some widely-known sources (such as popular Shakespeare plays and “commercial” movies), and her focus on scenes of political and personal abuse and domination allow more casual readers, I would argue, to understand a large part of what she’s doing.

 

Rather, Acker constructs a reading dynamic that depends on a double construction: an implied “insider,” the conventionally right reader who has an insider’s relation to the textual tradition Acker invokes and a more powerfully implied “outsider,” the wrong reader, the freak. This “freak reader” is defined against that other, shadow reader. To take up any agency Acker’s strategy might offer, you may not need to know the original texts, but you do need to know that another, more authorized way of reading them preceded Acker’s/Quixote’s–and that against that authorized reading you must also define your own.

 

In Don Quixote and elsewhere, Acker tacitly privileges the deskilled reading and the freak reader in the way she deploys obscenity and sexuality. She often inserts obscenity into canonical texts, or juxtaposes them with originally obscene materials such as, in Don Quixote, an episode from the Marquis de Sade’s Justine. The sexuality of Acker’s novels never tries to pass as literary erotica; rather, it is bluntly rendered in the language of hard-core pornography (“fuck,” “cock,” and “cunt”), frequently violent and abusive and, when not so, often puerile and scatological (“I’d like to fuck the shit out of you. I’d like to stick my thingy-dingy up your witchy-washy” [88]). Her work has been branded pornographic and sexist, both by critics and by customs officers eager to confiscate offensive materials. While I see Acker as neither pornographic nor sexist, it seems clear that she intends to scandalize precisely those readers who do. Moreover, she uses this process of scandalization to privilege the “freak” reader. Those readers who are not offended are aware, as they read on, of the other more “typical” reaction to the text. They are thereby invited to identify themselves against those who find explicit sexuality offensive. Acker directly invokes the offended reader in Don Quixote by listing anti-pornography feminist Andrea Dworkin among the “evil enchanters” with whom Quixote must do battle (102). Those who read on thus allow themselves to be interpolated among the “freaks my loves,” the different readers implied by the text, whose awareness of difference depends upon an awareness of what the more “normal” reader must think.

 

However, there is much more going on in Acker’s obscenity than the calculated attempt to shock–which contributes to the feeling of predictability (flogging a dead horse) I posited above. The “pornographic” scenes in Don Quixote function to bring reading down to its most basic, bodily elements and uses; they are also key to Quixote’s quest for an active female desire. More importantly for my argument, it may be at these very moments in the text, where I have suggested that the distinction between a presumed hegemonic reader and the “freak” reader is made most apparent, that something more complex takes place that in fact disrupts and destabilizes any easy binary between inside and outside reading locations. In Acker’s obscene scenes, a third possible implied reader appears.

 

This is where my argument most diverges from Moran’s. In his focus on the construction of “Kathy Acker” as a brand name, as an unwilling part of the commodification process that sells her texts, Moran sees the sexual and the shockingly violent scenes in her work as simply playing into the ongoing combination of a discourse of risqué, bohemian authenticity with a frisson of trendily poststructuralist intellectual capital. He argues that Acker’s use of “sexually explicit, violent material often perceived as ‘confessional,’” when combined with the more theoretical and experimental elements, creates a “persona [that] is particularly appealing to celebrity culture… because it suggests that the self can be reinvented at the same time as it points to the existence of an innate, deep-seated identity” (144). The sex scenes, in other words, let readers have their cake and eat it too, while draining Acker’s work of its critique of social relations: readers get the commodified version of identity-politics-as-autobiography (access to others’ “unusual” or “colorful” experiences) and all the hipness of postmodernism. (None of this, Moran is careful to note, necessarily discredits Acker’s writing.)

 

However, another way of looking at these elements of Acker’s work in this particular context of the mainstreaming of debates over “difference” is to see her as capitalizing upon the uneasy recognition of difference in ways of reading that arose from anti-pornography feminist theorizing. I have argued elsewhere that, increasingly in the 1980s, the issue of pornography and, more broadly, obscenity offered some feminists a rallying point that promised to restore to feminism its sense of unified oppositionality–based, as that sense originally was, on claims of women’s fundamental difference from male society–and to patch up the divisions within feminism to which advocates of identity politics had demanded attention. If anti-pornography activism seemed to offer a way of transcending (or avoiding) the differences among women, it did so by relocating difference elsewhere. In its cruder forms, anti-pornography feminism asserts a clear divergence between women’s sexuality (whether lesbian or heterosexual) and men’s (gay or heterosexual); but often it develops a much subtler assertion of a less essentialized difference, that between two imagined groups of readers of pornography: those who are taken in by it (primarily men, but also women) and those who can “rise above it” in order to see it critically (see Pitchford).

 

Reading pornography for other than pornographic purposes–whether one reads as a feminist protester or an academic theorist, a historian, or a censor–itself entails imagining another reader who reads differently. Walter Kendrick’s research into the history of public discourse about pornography suggests that its critics have consistently constructed the reader of porn as “someone else,” usually in terms of both class and gender; usually, this someone is presumed to be taken in by the text–and vulnerable to its suggestions and distortions–in ways that the more dispassionate critic claims not to be. While the critic tends to imagine himself or herself as immune to the pornographic text’s intentions, his or her paternalistic concern about such texts centers on the image of other readers who are unable to be critical. So for the critic, the act of looking at pornography is always haunted by the shadowy presence of this other, intended reader and his or her imagined reading–the reading for which the text was ostensibly designed.

 

Acker’s sexual scenes are not pornographic; their primary purpose is not to arouse the reader (although arousal may be, of course, a secondary effect, and source of reading pleasure, albeit an ideologically troubling pleasure for some readers). Nevertheless, reading such scenes, in the context in which Acker’s pastiche places them, involves taking on a position something like that of the idealized critic of pornography: one is haunted by the awareness of arousal taking place elsewhere, in the previous lives or original intentions of these images and these words. As with the other borrowed texts and language, Acker’s female knight is the wrong reader of these sexual materials–because, as she has asserted, women are not supposed by conventional discourse to have autonomous sexual desires. Again the original, implied (pornographic) reader of the text or language Acker borrows is not identical to the implied freak reader of Acker’s text, whose representative or point of identification is Quixote. However, neither is the original implied reader of pornography identical to the “inside” or hegemonic literary reader I’ve been talking about so far (as Quixote’s/the freak’s other). So, in fact, there are two “other” readers lurking behind Acker’s explicitly sexual scenes: there is the stereotypical implied reader of porn, the solitary male masturbator; and there is the mainstream literary reader–and this now includes the middle-class, anti-porn feminist reader–who might be shocked by such material.³ Neither of these reactions or ways of reading is Quixote’s, and neither of them is the reaction Acker asks of her freaks.

 

The explicit sexual discourse in Acker’s writing complicates the reader’s subject position, rescuing it from what I have referred to as the potentially flogged-to-death opposition between the “inside,” traditional reader and the “outside,” freak reader (and I think this is true whether her actual reader is the exiled female reader or not). In at least one spot in Don Quixote, Acker’s text makes explicit this more complex triangulation of the implied readers. Here, she incorporates passages from one of Catullus’s love poems in their original Latin, with what starts out as a standard grammatical gloss, in English, printed alongside in a parallel column (for instance, “The subjunctive mood takes precedence over the straightforward active” [47]); but both the poem and the grammatical reading of it are quickly invaded by another reading, in the form of the highly personal and sometimes explicitly sexual voice of a lover, which breaks into the Latin lines and turns the accompanying analysis of tenses into personal musings on time and loss–as in this excerpt:

 

(See Project MUSE)

 

This scene occurs near the start of the section, “Other Texts,” which has as its heading or epigraph the announcement that Quixote can only proceed by “read[ing] male texts which weren’t hers.” Acker begins by presenting a canonical, male-authored text about sexual/romantic desire alongside, literally, a standard way of reading that text; the latter renders visible on the page the conventional implied reader–perhaps not the reader originally intended by Catullus, but the reader implied by contemporary publications of his poems in Latin text books, an objective and privileged reader on the inside of the educational system. The second reader, whose voice breaks into both the canonical text and the “inside” reading of it, is the desiring female freak whose “present is negative” and “imaginary” because her desire is impermissible; she “can’t fuck any boyfriends” and must ask forgiveness for speaking passionately–from a lover named Peter, whose name evokes on the one hand the desired male sexual organ and, on the other, both God’s judge, St. Peter (and his earthly avatar, the Pope–thus, church authority), and the city of St. Petersburg, which has been described a page earlier as “cool [and] cold,” designed by architects to restrain and contain “unhandlable passion” (46).

 

So here is the “male text” and its two, quite opposite readers. The third implied reader–whom I have called the pornographic reader–appears as Acker follows this borrowed poem with what appear to be her own translations of two other poems from the Catulli Carmina. In the next, two central lines read like dialogue from a hard-core movie:

 

take it kiss me do it grab me
grab my arms grab my ankles grab my cunt hairs. (49)

 

I would argue that, whether or not Acker’s reader knows that the original text–by which I mean Catullus’s poem, rather than the less specific text of pornography echoed here–speaks of nothing more graphic than the lovers exchanging thousands of kisses, this is a moment when the explicit evocation of sex intrudes upon both the ways of reading (or elsewhere-implied readers) that had been laid out explicitly in relation to the previous poem. First, these lines clearly imply or invite a shocked reaction from the “inside” reader represented by the standard academic gloss. But they also embody a far more direct, visceral, and, in a sense, authorized desire than that articulated in the voice of the “freak” reader (Quixote? Acker?) above. Their language evokes how women tend to speak in heterosexual pornography–that is, in texts conventionally aimed at male “one-handed readers,” where female sexual desire (or a male vision of it) is welcomed and is articulated openly, greedily, and continually–but toward ends very different from those of Acker’s desiring knight/reader. Only somewhere in the interplay between all three of these implied readers–academic insider, female freak, and male masturbator–can the text in pastiche yield a new life, one that offers a voice to articulate female desire and agency for change.

 

Thus sexual desire breaks down the reader’s distance from the text and her simple position of polar difference from the canonical reader here. The sexual portions of Acker’s text show more than any others that agency derives not simply from identifying the gaps and inconsistencies of a patriarchal textual tradition, from the cleanly and permanently outside location of the excluded reader; rather, agency also depends on the active articulation of desire, and on rewriting those texts to include and articulate that desire. The position of Acker’s reader is ultimately both outside the text and inside it, bound to enter it because of its offer of a language that might speak desire.

 

I close with one last echo of my phrase “flogging a dead language,” to cite the repeated scenes–there are at least three–of consensual sexual whipping in Acker’s novel. (These are perhaps floggings in a dead language.) Certainly, the rituals and trappings of sadistic and masochistic sex play, when used as signifiers of simple transgression, can become as exhausted and lifeless as any other signifiers. In such contexts they can merely recreate, in dead immobility, an oppositional relation between two social groups–“them” and “us,” imagined bourgeoisie and freaks. But in Acker’s hands, these sexual scenes enact a more complex dynamic between readers and text, and between freak readers and other possible readers. In sexual flogging, a painful act intended for punishment and correction is appropriated as a source of sexual pleasure. Similarly, by appealing to “freak” desires, Acker is able to appropriate the “dead language” of pastiche to create a new place of possibility for her reader, a place beyond the pointless redundancy of repetition and mere opposition.

 

Notes

 

1. Walter Kalaidjian notes that more than 40 new galleries opened in New York City during the 1980s (254).

 

2. Susan Gubar cites a number of influential volumes and essays as central intersection points of identity politics and feminist theorizing in the 1980s: Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s 1981 This Bridge Called My Back, bell hooks’s Ain’t I a Woman (also 1981), Audre Lorde’s Zami (1982) and Sister Outsider (1984), Barbara Christian’s “The Race for Theory” (1988), and Barbara Smith’s “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism” (1977; included in Elaine Showalter’s edited collection, The New Feminist Criticism, in 1985). Jill Dolan, in her discussion of identity politics (86), adds Smith’s collection, Home Girls (1983), and Evelyn Torton Beck’s edited volume, Nice Jewish Girls (1982).

 

3. Laura Kipnis’s reading of Hustler magazine further complicates this scenario of readers-imagining-other-readers; she proposes that part of the pleasure even for Hustler‘s intended (i.e., what I am calling “pornographic”) readers is a sense of transgressing against the “bourgeois proprieties” of imagined others (388).

 

Works Cited

 

• Acker, Kathy. Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream. New York: Grove, 1986.
• Bauer, Dale M. Feminist Dialogics: A Theory of Failed Community. Albany: State U of New York P, 1988.
• Dillard, R. H. W. “Lesson No. 1: Eat Your Mind.” Rev. of Empire of the Senseless, by Kathy Acker. New York Times Book Review 16 Oct. 1988: 9-11.
• Dolan, Jill. The Feminist Spectator as Critic. Ann Arbor: UMI Research, 1988.
• Gill, Jonathan. “Dedicated to Her Tattoo Artist.” New York Times Book Review 16 Oct. 1988: 9.
• Gubar, Susan. “What Ails Feminist Criticism?” Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 878-902.
• Hoffman, Roy. Rev. of Blood and Guts in High School, by Kathy Acker. New York Times Book Review 23 Dec. 1984: 16.
• Jacobs, Naomi. “Kathy Acker and the Plagiarized Self.” Kathy Acker, Christine Brooke-Rose, Marguerite Young. Ed. Ellen G. Friedman and Miriam Fuchs. Spec. issue of Review of Contemporary Fiction 9.3 (1989): 50-55.
• Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991.
• Juno, Andrea. “Kathy Acker” (interview). Angry Women. Ed. Andrea Juno and V. Vale. Re/Search 13 (1991): 177-85.
• Kalaidjian, Walter. American Culture Between the Wars: Revisionary Modernism and Postmodern Critique. New York: Columbia UP, 1993.
• Kendrick, Walter. The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture. New York: Viking, 1987.
• Kipnis, Laura. “(Male) Desire and (Female) Disgust: Reading Hustler.” Cultural Studies. Ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler, with Linda Baughman and John Macgregor Wise. New York: Routledge, 1992. 373-91.
• Moran, Joe. Star Authors: Literary Celebrity in America. London: Pluto, 2000.
• Pitchford, Nicola. “Reading Feminism’s Pornography Conflict: Implications for Postmodernist Reading Strategies.” Genders 25 (1997): 3-38.

 

Daniel Punday

Department of English and Philosophy
Purdue University Calumet
pundaydj@axp.calumet.purdue.edu

 

“It is therefore the game of the world that must be first thought; before attempting to understand all the forms of play in the world.”
 
—Of Grammatology

 

In the wake of deconstruction, critics have sought some way to reconcile poststructural textual analytics with a concern for political and cultural issues. The broad dissemination of Jean-François Lyotard’s notion of the “local” has come to embody this urge to move away from the abstract metaphysics critiqued by deconstruction for the sake of immersion in the “world.” Thus a discourse of “location” within the world has emerged as an answer to this perceived failure of deconstructive textual analysis. Typical is Susan Bordo’s departure from deconstruction:

 

In theory, deconstructionist postmodernism stands against the ideal of disembodied knowledge and declares that ideal to be a mystification and an impossibility…. The question remains, however, how the human knower is to negotiate this infinitely perspectival, destabilized world. Deconstructionism answers with constant vigilant suspicion of all determinate readings of culture and a partner aesthetic of ceaseless textual play as an alternative ideal. Here is where deconstruction may slip into its own fantasy of escape from human locatedness–by supposing that the critic can become wholly protean by adopting endlessly shifting, seemingly inexhaustible vantage points, none of which are “owned” by either the critic or the author of a text under examination. (142)

 

As a result, Bordo argues, deconstruction claims to be the view from everywhere and nowhere, thus failing to recognize its own “locatedness” within the world. In other words, deconstruction’s abstract textual theory must give way to a concern for “location” if we are to analyze cultural and social issues.

 

Critical “location” has been an especially important and problematic issue in postmodern feminism, where the emphasis on such positioning is coupled with the need to critique mainstream culture. The local, according to Lyotard, is to be a counterforce to the broad narratives that deconstruction has unraveled. Yet, critics find almost immediately that the local has no pragmatic, critical value without such broader narratives. In considering how, for example, one might analyze local instances of gender politics, we are immediately confronted by the metaphysical assumptions implicit within terms such as “man” and “woman,” and forced to construct a larger theoretical apparatus to organize them. Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson describe the problem this way: “Suppose… that one defined that object [of social criticism] as the subordination of women to and by men. Then, we submit, it would be apparent that many of the [metanarrative] genres rejected by postmodernists are necessary for social criticism. For a phenomenon as pervasive and multifaceted as male dominance simply cannot be adequately grasped with the meager critical resources to which they would limit us” (26). Thus, although critics may recognize location as a crucial element of the modeling of social space, when they turn to actual critical praxis and analyze texts for their representation of gender, they find it difficult to operate using the model without accepting some traditional metalanguage. Critics have thus gone to the extreme of claiming that, although master narratives are to be avoided, critics in certain circumstances might be granted a theoretical waiver: “Formulating wrongs, on the other hand, can make use of theory. Victims might turn to existing theories or even themselves theorize when striving to phrase the wrongs signaled by their feelings and so on” (Schatzki 49). Critics fall back upon rather conventional critical models precisely because “local” criticism seems to provide no alternative method for analyzing particular textual features and conflicts in relation to this “locatedness.”

 

In order to recover a sense of how texts reflect and engage with the location from which they are analyzed, we need to return to deconstruction through the thematics of location. Critics who debate the use and nature of the local have generally assumed that deconstruction and the world are naturally opposed.¹ Certainly, the use to which deconstruction was put in its heyday–as a tool for a type of close reading, a hyper-New Criticism–supports this opposition. I will offer a more sophisticated model of deconstruction’s engagement with the world, and suggest that the concept of critical “location” is reconcilable and indeed crucial to deconstruction. Understanding this engagement helps us to link the model of society based on the “local” with the demands of actual critical practice. Bordo’s call to discuss the “location” of the deconstructive critic is a call to consider deconstruction as a form of critical praxis carried out within a political and cultural context. Inherent to this call is a theory of the space of culture, of interpretation, and of texts. As we attempt to develop a theory of post-deconstructive critical practice that is sensitive both to political location and to textual dynamics, our first step will be to consider the nature of deconstructive space. By recognizing the assumed model of space operating within post-deconstructive criticism–especially in post-deconstructive feminism–we can see how Derrida’s work is being misread. This space will lead us into a consideration of the deconstructive critic’s position between text and world–what I will call, following Derrida, the “worldliness” of the two. Once we recognize that deconstruction operates with an understanding of this worldly position of text and reader, we will be able to articulate much more sophisticated links between the textual analysis associated with deconstruction and the interest in political location that has developed in its wake.

 

Rethinking Deconstructive Space

 

A shared spatial language that allows us to speak of texture, movement, layers and boundaries is the closest connection between deconstruction and the post-deconstructive analysis of “location.”² In one sense, post-deconstructive criticism simply shifts this play from the text to the world, reading social relations in the same way that concepts and words were read by the deconstructionist. This strategy is built upon attempts to explicate deconstruction as a more or less politically neutral tool that can be used for political purposes. Rarely is this more brazen than in Michael Ryan’s Marxism and Deconstruction (1982), where the two terms of Ryan’s title appear to be mutually exclusive and to supplement each other perfectly: “Deconstruction is a philosophical interrogation of some of the major concepts and practices of philosophy. Marxism, in contrast, is not a philosophy. It names revolutionary movements” (1). This belief that deconstruction has no inherent concern for politics and location is carried over into more sophisticated post-deconstructive writing. Consider, for example, Teresa de Lauretis’s introduction to Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, a work typical of the attempt to formulate post-deconstructive critical practice. De Lauretis treats the world as a space in which social relations conflict and transform when she notes in recent feminism “a shift from the earlier view of woman defined purely by sexual difference (i.e., in relation to man) to the more difficult and complex notion that the female subject is a site of differences; differences that are not only sexual or only racial, economic, or (sub)cultural, but all of these together and often enough at odds with one another” (14). De Lauretis implies that individuals within social relations function according to a deconstructive model to the extent that we can describe them as inhabiting a space of conflict between overlapping cultural systems and networks. Such a formulation shifts Derrida’s language of hinge, play, trace and boundary from the text to the culture, paralleling cultural space to textual space and individuals to terms caught within a play of différance. At the same time, however, this post-deconstructive criticism also assumes that these social relations function not merely like deconstructive textual play, but also on the basis of it. Thus, de Lauretis quotes Wittig’s remark that hegemony “produces the difference between the sexes as a political and philosophical dogma” (13). This remark bases social reality on a more literal Derridian play, assuming that within any culture there exists a trans-textual space in which these terms arise and on the basis of which social relations are constructed. This clearly carries a different emphasis than the previous passage, where the space of conflict was “real” and the elements under consideration were not terms but individuals. This post-deconstructive criticism thus imports deconstructive spatiality both as a model for speaking about social relations and as a textual system by which those relations are taken to have been constructed in the first place. The result is a sort of kettle logic, a criticism that uses deconstructive spatiality in several contradictory ways.

 

This contradiction plays a strategic role within the functioning of post-deconstructive critical praxis. One of the principle charges leveled at deconstruction is that it allows the individual no room to act against the discursive systems that function within the culture, since the subordination of reality to textuality implies that no real-world act can affect this textual play. The dual way in which critics have appropriated deconstructive space actually helps them to open up this possibility. Consider, for example, Chris Weedon’s discussion of the political freedom opened up by (an appropriation of) deconstructive space:

 

Even when the principles of “différance” are inscribed in an historically specific account of discourses, signifiers remain plural and the possibility of absolute or true meaning is deferred. The precariousness of any attempt to fix meaning which involves a fixing of subjectivity must rely on the denial of the principles of difference and deferral. The assertion of “truth” involved is constantly vulnerable to resistance and the redefinition of meaning…. As individuals we are not the mere objects of language but the sites of discursive struggle, a struggle that takes place in the consciousness of the individual. (105-6)

 

Weedon here straddles two appropriations of deconstructive space in order to define a type of “discursive struggle” in which the individual has the potential to be a conscious and active participant. Weedon accepts the more literal deconstructive notion of space as a textual matter, in which terms play out through différance in a way that makes any term ultimately unstable. At the same time, however, Weedon also accepts the analogy between textuality and social space, defining the space in which individuals interact as merely like this textual space. This latter, analogical use of deconstructive space allows Weedon to emphasize the role of individuals as the site of struggle. To accept either of these spatial models solely would limit Weedon’s image of discursive freedom. To accept deconstructive space as purely textual denies the primacy of the individual; to accept deconstructive space as merely an analogy denies the “precariousness” of meaning and limits the individual’s ability to fight against hegemony. This dual, contradictory appropriation of deconstructive space thus makes possible a vision of political freedom. Such contradictory roots for post-deconstructive space also explain, however, why critics have found it so difficult to justify the use of this space theoretically. From this perspective the “local site” seems to be an inconsistent construction incapable of being justified or extended to a larger system of critical interpretation.

 

I would like to suggest that these contradictions arise out of the mistaken assumption that deconstructive spatiality has no inherent connection to the concept of world, and thus must be appropriated in various ways. Implicit within this appropriation of deconstructive space in these two ways is a misunderstanding of Derridian space as a flat field and as a mere way of speaking. Both Weedon and de Lauretis assume that deconstructive space is a single plane in which elements (terms or individual subjects) meet, conflict, and transform. This understanding of deconstructive space is not unique to post-deconstructive criticism, but instead can be traced back to the widespread reading of deconstruction as a purely rhetorical discipline. Barbara Johnson, for example, applies deconstruction to literature in an attempt at “identifying and dismantling differences by means of other differences that cannot be fully identified or dismantled” (x). Johnson does this by treating language as the source of exteriority within the text, and as a result casts Derridian space as a metaphor: “The differences between entities (prose and poetry, man and woman, literature and theory, guilt and innocence) are shown to be based on a repression of differences within entities, ways in which an entity differs from itself” (x-xi). Space for Johnson is simply a way of speaking, a way of defining the lack of self-presence in individual terms and their dependence on a metonymic “differing.” This understanding of Derridian space has led critics to reduce textual play to a simple metonymic substitution of linguistic terms, and to see Derrida as cut off from more “worldly” concerns. It is in this sense that Edward Said describes Derridian space:

 

All this establishes a sort of perpetual interchange in Derrida’s work between the page and the theater stage. Yet the locale of the interchange–itself a page and a theater–is Derrida’s prose, which in his recent work attempts to work less by chronological sequence, logical order, and linear movement than by abrupt, extremely difficult-to-follow lateral and complementary movement. The intention that movement is to make Derrida’s page become the apparently self-sufficient site of a critical reading, in which traditional texts, authors, problems, and themes are presented in order to be dedefined and dethematicized more or less permanently. (202-3)

 

Said suggests that Derrida’s language is a self-contained stage within which terms undergo a ceaseless transformation. Behind this characterization of Derrida’s textual stage is the same assumption that Johnson makes: textuality is merely a metonymic substitution, and any space attributed to the text must be merely a metaphor, a way of speaking.

 

This simplification of deconstructive space is not without its benefits for post-deconstructive criticism. Post-deconstructive criticism defines its own relevance to the world, we can suggest, by strategically keeping deconstruction out of the world. That is, by simplifying deconstructive space into a metaphorical stage through which textual slippage can be described, recent critics have made room for themselves to appropriate deconstruction for a more politically-engaged criticism. Yet in doing so, these critics have produced a post-deconstructive space whose contradictions preclude its theoretical justification and articulation into a larger critical praxis. That Derrida does not accept the understanding of textual space as a simple field is quite explicit within his writing. Derrida finds Freud’s “Mystic Writing Tablet” interesting exactly because of its violation of geometrical consistency:

 

Differences in the work of breaching concern not only forces but also locations. And Freud already wants to think force and place simultaneously. He is the first not to believe in the descriptive value of his hypothetical representation of breaching…. It is, rather, the index of a topographical description which external space, that is, familiar and constituted space, the exterior space of the natural sciences, cannot contain. (“Freud” 204)

 

Derrida’s discussion of deconstructive space always involves the movement away from classical models of geometric space and thus rejects any notion of a textual “field.” Critics have had difficulty coming to terms with Derrida’s non-linear space because, as we have seen in Johnson, attention to the “sliding” and “exteriority” of terms within a text seems naturally to presuppose some (metaphorical) field upon which they function. In other words, Derrida’s non-linear space is easier to understand in the abstract than it is to insert within a system of critical praxis. It is for this reason that Rodolphe Gasché’s treatment of Derrida as a philosopher is perhaps the most satisfying discussion of Derridian space. Unlike Johnson, Gasché resists the temptation to reduce exteriority to a way of speaking about rhetorical substitution, and thus is able to understand space as something thematized by Derrida:

 

Recall that the relation to an Other constitutive of a self, whose minimal unit is the arche-trace, presupposes an interval which at once affects and makes possible the relation of self to Other and divides the self within itself. In the same way, differance as the production of a polemical space of differences both presupposes and produces the intervals between concepts, notions, terms, and so on. In that sense, arche-trace and differance, each in a different manner, are spacing. From the perspective of arche-trace, spacing “is the opening of the first exteriority in general, the enigmatic relationship of the living to its other and of an inside to an outside.” (199; citing Derrida, Of Grammatology 70)

 

According to Gasché, Derrida’s non-linear notion of space has its roots in the production of potential space, in space as an undertaking rather than as a metaphorical field. The difficulty of translating this production of space, presented as a philosophical claim in Gasché, into critical praxis functioning “within the world” has driven critics, on the one hand, to Johnson’s textualism and, on the other, to Weedon’s contradictory appropriation of deconstructive space.

 

Derrida’s richest articulation of a non-linear space is his essay “Ousia and Gramme,” an essay that can guide us away from the simplified deconstructive space that we have observed thus far. This essay is explicitly about time and the philosophical tradition that has described it in spatial terms. Derrida claims that philosophers have consistently denied temporality for the sake of the presence implied by spatial forms. Derrida does not, of course, reject this spatiality in favor of some direct understanding of temporality. Temporality can never be self-present, and thus can never be known except by how it modifies the spatial models that philosophers attempt to impose upon it. The essay describes, then, a very complex space that results from the attempt to account for time, a space that comes up against the limits of presence. Derrida begins with Hegel’s dialectical model of space. Such dialectics have, for Derrida, a general similarity to the movement of différance, thus allowing Derrida to begin with an already unstable and active approach to space. Two different ways of understanding space arise in three stages by dividing the initial immediacy and completeness of the ideal term, “space.” Derrida writes, paraphrasing Hegel,

 

Differentiation, determination, qualification can only overtake pure space as the negation of this original purity and of this initial state of abstract indifferentiation which is properly the spatiality of space. Pure spatiality is determined by negating properly the indetermination that constitutes it, that is, by itself negates itself. By itself negating itself: this negation has to be a determined negation, a negation of space by space. The first spatial negation of space is the POINT. (41)

 

In this passage, Derrida considers how an initial term (pure space) contains within itself an implied differentiation that transforms it into a different understanding of space (the point) in many ways opposed to that initial term. The first and third stages represent two different ways of understanding space–“pure” space and the point. The middle stage of this textual transformation involves postulating a certain ground on which these two terms interact, the stage upon which this transformation occurs–what Derrida refers to elsewhere as “opening up of its own space, effraction, breaking of a path against resistances, rupture and irruption become a route” (“Freud” 214). For Hegel, concrete space is the product of the work of negation, the third stage of the dialectic. Here, however, Derrida departs from Hegel and defines what appears to be the most concrete and fundamental space as a textual ground that allows the movement between the first and third positions. This transitional space is implied by the active terms that this passage employs, in which the terms “space” themselves: “As the first determination and first negation of space, the point spatializes or spaces itself. It negates itself by itself in its relation to itself, that is, to another point. The negation of negation, the spatial negation of the point is the line. The point negates and retains itself, extends and sustains itself, lifts itself (by Aufhebung) into the LINE, which thus constitutes the truth of the point” (“Ousia” 42). This dialectical transformation produces a space by virtue of the force implicit within this transformation, a force that demands a ground upon which to function. Derrida, then, borrows from Hegel the idea that space is produced by this ongoing transformation of concepts; he departs from Hegel by seeing this production as, paradoxically, what allows the movement in the first place.

 

Derrida’s model of this paradoxically produced and preconditional space is the “gramme,” which most clearly summarizes Derrida’s departure from the flat-field space that has characterized most deconstructive criticism. Literally the gramme refers to a line or trace; more generally it is the spatial rendering of temporal movement. As a spatialization of time, the gramme is the accumulation of moments or points taken as “in act”–that is, moving towards some end and thus referring to a telos of their whole movement. Derrida is dissatisfied with this telos-based model of the gramme because it assumes the self-presence of each point. Such a model, applied to time, simply repeats the metaphysical tradition of spatialization and presence. Nonetheless, Derrida is able to reaccentuate the gramme in a way that allows it to function in a less self-present, more temporal fashion. To do this, Derrida shifts the locus of the gramme to the limit:

 

But if one considers now that the point, as limit, does not exist in act, is not (present), exists only potentially and by accident, takes its existence only from the line in act, then it is not impossible to preserve the analogy of the gramme: on the condition that one does not take it as a series of potential limits, but as a line in act, as a line thought on the basis of its extremities (ta eskhata) and not of its parts. (“Ousia” 59-60)

 

Derrida argues that, rather than locating the limit within each point, the space that the gramme provides should be understood as made up of a whole movement that passes through each point “accidentally” but without granting any point self-presence. Rather, the presence of each point is always deferred to the whole movement, which itself is not self-present but potential and multiple. The space of the temporal gramme is not separable into distinct points, but constantly renegotiates different limits and boundaries that are not simply arbitrary but dependent on the possible “paths” of movement that the text opens up. This gramme echoes but makes more specific the space we saw appear out of the play of terms–a space produced temporarily by reference to the “extremes” and out of the movement of signification.

 

We can say that Derrida’s writing completes the transition from older, linear models of space to a more dynamic space that is much discussed in current criticism, but which has been incompletely understood. Classical geometrical space in many ways reaches its apotheosis in structuralism, where the abstract space that critics like Henri Lefebvre have associated with modern culture is taken to be a basic condition of all meaning. A clear embodiment of this geometrical space is A.J. Greimas’s “semiotic square,” a model of four contrasting elements whose relations are said to organize the more concrete elements within a text, language, or culture. Critics have recognized that deconstruction marks a break from this kind of geometrical space, and have suggested that deconstructive space will be characterized by what Fredric Jameson has called the abolition of “the distinction between the inside and the outside” (98). Jameson’s best example of this deconstructive space is the Frank Gehry House discussed in Postmodernism, a house in which traditional living spaces have been “wrapped” by other architectural units in a way that dissolves conventional ways of thinking about the inside and outside of the house: “What is wrapped can also be used as the wrapper; the wrapper can also be wrapped in its turn” (101-102). This kind of space is frequently called “postmodern” by critics like Jameson to suggest that it is a simple fact of contemporary culture. We have seen that Derrida’s writing, however, affirms neither this postmodern nor the traditional, geometrical spatial models. Indeed, when critics of “location” have sought to make a break from deconstruction and move into a genuinely post-deconstructive space, as we have seen, in many ways they have simply repeated in problematic ways the deconstructive/postmodern space that dissolves the distinction between inside and outside. There is no space that is outside of politics, these critics note, no way in which the space of the text is not always already influenced by the “external” political environment in which it is read.³ In Derrida’s own writings, however, we have seen a theory that escapes the space associated with deconstruction. Space here is neither static and flat, nor is it simply a matter of unending reversals of outside and inside. Instead, Derridian space–which I will call properly post-deconstructive in the sense that it already recognizes the problems implicit within the type of space mistakenly associated with deconstruction–is interested in how spaces are constructed through reference to the outside, by taking up positions in which these sites of analysis are defined. These spaces are neither fixed nor infinitely unstable, but rather dynamically produced by reference to the limits and ultimately, as I will show, to the “location” from which they are read.

 

Différance and Worldliness

 

In the gramme Derrida offers a model of a kind of space that is dynamic rather than static, and which provides the basis for thinking about the relation between this space and textual analysis. Derrida is not, of course, the only critic to reject the static spaces of traditional criticism and the simplistic deconstructive spaces that I have criticized in the first section. Indeed, in a number of post-deconstructive theories we can see the development of just such a space. One of the most sophisticated is Laclau and Mouffe’s Marxist writing on hegemony and the construction of a class agent. These critics reject the stable field of social space and insist instead that class identity must always be thought on another level: “The political character of the hegemonic link is fundamental, implying as it does that the terrain on which the link establishes itself is different from that on which the social agents are constituted…. This exteriority [of the hegemonic link] was the root of those paradoxical situations in which the communist militant typically found himself” (55). Such a space works against the dissolution of the line between inside and outside that Jameson associates with postmodernist space, even while complicating traditional ways of understanding this line:

 

The incomplete character of every totality necessarily leads us to abandon, as a terrain of analysis, the premise of “society” as a sutured and self-defined totality. “Society” is not a valid object of discourse. There is no single underlying principle fixing–and hence constituting–the whole field of differences. The irresoluble interiority/exteriority tension is the condition of any social practice: necessity only exists as a partial limitation on the field of contingency. It is in this terrain, where neither a total interiority nor a total exteriority is possible, that the social is constituted. (111)

 

The result is a model of space, like that of Derrida, in which the outside of a discourse is thought as a necessary component of the construction of social space. What distinguishes Derrida’s dynamic spaces articulated through the gramme from the complex spaces developed by such sophisticated recent theories is that for Derrida even these extremities are produced through textual analysis. This has two effects. First, it steps away from the danger evident in Laclau and Mouffe’s work of assigning this multi-leveled social space some kind of metaphysical status–of suggesting that a real discursive space exists with stable, albeit complex, characteristics. Derrida’s exteriority is always produced out of particular textual necessities, rather than being an inherent part of social space that will appear over and over again in much the same way.⁴ Second and more importantly, by linking this space to textual analysis, Derrida makes his social model a natural basis for critical practice in a way that other sophisticated post-deconstructive models cannot be. Derrida develops a post-deconstructionist space in a way that makes it particularly available to textual analysis. Especially in feminist practice, this ability to translate space into tools for revealing patterns–let us say, of sexism–is essential to its effectiveness.

 

What links this complex spatial model to the kind of textual play that we usually associate with deconstruction–and thus the key to Derrida’s theory of space and location–is the ontological instability of the objects that appear within this space. Indeed, one of the reasons that deconstructive space is usually misdefined as a flat field is in order to account for the tensions and conflicts between the terms that are deployed within that space. According to traditional readings of deconstruction, the text creates a space by positing potential “others” that open up a space for the play of différance. Critics reduce Derridian space to this flat field by homogenizing the ontology of these textual elements–that is, treating the element and its others as terms that “exist” in a similar way. This ontological homogenization can perhaps be traced back to a general critical tendency to understand the play of difference and alterity on the model of an individual’s confrontation with his or her social, sexual, or racial “other.” The first description of différance in Terry Eagleton’s widely used Literary Theory: An Introduction follows this pattern: “Woman is the opposite, the ‘other’ of man: she is non-man, defective man, assigned a chiefly negative value in relation to the male first principle. But equally man is what he is only by virtue of ceaselessly shutting out his other or opposite, defining himself in antithesis to it, and his whole identity is therefore caught up and put at risk in the very gesture by which he seeks to assert his unique, autonomous existence” (132). Despite the validity of Eagleton’s summary, this example is dangerous as a general model for différance because it treats the ontological status of the two elements (self and other) as equivalent. Such equivalence demands that the ontological ground of their confrontation be fixed, since such a ground defines the very possibility of these two terms acting as an “other.” In formulating the gramme as a model for the productive, temporalized space of deconstruction, however, Derrida works against exactly this presupposition of ontological equivalence between the elements of différance. Derrida is careful to avoid claiming that the various points within the gramme are self-present; rather, he emphasizes that the gramme marks out a play of potential or accidental points. Within the space marked out by the gramme, such points will seem ontologically fixed; a glance to the limit, however, reveals them as “accidental” and their existence as very much at issue. Only by recognizing an ontological difference functioning within the elements of textual play can deconstructive space avoid being fixed and instead function as something in process.

 

Textual objects staged within deconstructive space can be seen as fluttering between an ideal, conceptual existence and a concrete, material status. Indeed, one of the principle things that Derrida gains by beginning “Ousia and Gramme” with Hegel is the ability to cast his discussion in terms of concreteness. This is clear in Derrida’s summary of Hegel:

 

Space… has become concrete in having retained the negative within itself. It has become space in losing itself, in determining itself, in negating its original purity, the absolute indifferentiation and exteriority that constituted itself in its spatiality. Spatialization, the accomplishment of the essence of spatiality, is a despatialization and vice versa. (42)

 

Whereas the concrete is something produced for Hegel as the end of a teleological process, for Derrida it is a much more ambiguous and transient moment within this movement. We can see the initial play of space in “Ousia and Gramme” as turning on exactly this concrete/conceptual tension. The space that arises in the play of terms is concrete because it is the larger, alloyed space that comprises these two abstract definitions of space and in which they meet and clash. This space is conceptual, however, because it is the concreteness of this term (“space”) that opens up the possibility of polysemy and the slippage between two different understandings of the term; such a transitional space is always a conceptual supplement to a concrete term. This concrete/conceptual tension is implicit within the “pure space” from which Derrida (and Hegel) start: “Nature, as ‘absolute space’… knows no mediation, no difference, no determination, no discontinuity. It corresponds to what the Jena Logic called ether: the element of ideal transparency, of absolute indifferentiation, of undetermined continuity, of absolute juxtaposition, that is, the element without interior relations” (41). What opens “pure space” up to deconstruction is that at times it seems concrete and at others abstract.

 

This fluttering between concrete and conceptual is essential to textual différance, and is ubiquitous in Derrida’s writing. Implicit within Derrida’s tendency to describe terms as functioning actively within a play of différance is this dramatization of the dually concrete and conceptual nature of textual elements. Indeed, one of the simplest and best-known characterizations of deconstruction is as a method of reading that suspends the reference of textual elements in order to treat them in largely material terms. One thinks, in this context, of Derrida’s discussion of Nietzsche’s umbrella in Spurs, where a particular textual object becomes the occasion for a discussion of style precisely because the referential context of that object is suspended and the qualities of the object itself instead are explored. Gregory Ulmer offers this discussion as evidence that Derrida’s methods are essentially “allegorical,” stressing the ambiguous materiality of the text: “The ‘double’ structure of style–relevant to the problem of allegorical representation which at once reveals and conceals–finds, in the ‘morphology’ of the umbrella with its shaft and fabric, a concrete model. Derrida borrows the ‘umbrella’ left behind in Nietzsche’s Notebooks and remotivates it (its meaning was indeterminate in any case) as a de-monstrative device” (“Object” 99). Ulmer sees Derrida’s methods as allegorical because they take a textual object as a concrete embodiment of abstract textual play. But, of course, the opposite is also the case. When Derrida uses the concrete historical traces and erasures buried within a particular word–the “primitive meaning, the original, and always sensory and material, figure” studied in “White Mythology” (211) for example–as the suppressed basis for the conceptual work that depends upon these words, he ultimately returns to the conceptual, the “logic implicit in this text” (210). Ulmer sees this allegorical functioning as best embodied by the mechanical “apparatus” of writing in Derridian theory (Applied Grammatology 81-83). Derrida discusses the role and the ontological problems introduced by the apparatus of writing most directly in his Mystic Writing Pad essay:

 

Writing, here, is techne as the relation between life and death, between present and representation, between the two apparatuses. It opens up the question of the technics: of the apparatus in general and of the analogy between the psychical apparatus and the nonpsychical apparatus. In this sense writing is the stage of history and the play of the world. It cannot be exhausted by psychology alone. (“Freud” 228)

 

Freud’s model of the Mystic Writing Pad is interesting for Derrida in part because it introduces the issue of the apparatus that, as this passage suggests, can never remain simply a conceptual analogy. Indeed, we can see this hesitation between the concrete and the conceptual as the basis of writing and its deconstructive effects. Without this concrete/conceptual ambiguity, a term could not be described as undergoing the kind of slippage that Derrida describes in “Ousia and Gramme” and elsewhere. In Speech and Phenomena, for example, Derrida’s treatment of the opposition between expression and indication turns on the issue of the concrete. In that analysis, Derrida opposes the concrete, situational indication to the ideal, “nonworldly” expression. What drives Derrida’s analysis and deconstruction of these terms is how the concrete nonetheless reappears even out of the movement towards the ideal. Thus, expression moves from being an ideal “nonworldliness [that] is not another worldliness” to become re-entangled within the concrete world: “The opposition between form and matter–which inaugurates metaphysics–finds in the concrete ideality of the living present its ultimate and radical justification” (6). In all of these instances Derrida treats the fluttering between the concrete and the conceptual as the basis of textual construction.

 

The ontological indeterminacy of textual space embodies and repeats the ontological play of différance itself. More importantly, however, the ontological complexities of deconstructive space also reflect its position between text and world–as both a metaphor applied by a critic and as something genuinely functioning as space. Derrida’s Edmund Husserl’s “Origin of Geometry”: An Introduction concerns itself with exactly this problem of the origin of space in the science of geometry: “There is then a science of space, insofar as its starting point is not in space” (85). Geometry conceives space in contradictory terms: space is concrete within current geometry and metaphorical in the early geometer’s protoidealizations of space. Similarly, Derrida ends Positions with the problem of space and the degree to which it can be taken as equivalent to alterity–that is, the degree to which it is a metaphor for a conceptual exteriority. Derrida notes that “In effect, these two concepts do not signify exactly the same thing; that being said, I believe that they are absolutely indissociable” (81). Derrida elaborates further:

 

Spacing/alterity: On their indissociability, then, there is no disagreement between us. I have always underlined at least two characteristics in the analysis of spacing, as I recalled in the course of the interview: (1) That spacing is the impossibility for an identity to be closed on itself, on the inside of its proper interiority, or on its coincidence with itself. The irreducibility of spacing is the irreducibility of the other. (2) That “spacing” designates not only interval, but a “productive,” “genetic,” “practical” movement, an “operation,” if you will, in its Mallarméan sense also” (94).

 

Derrida seems to have in mind an opposition between, on the one hand, space as a metaphor for alterity (the impossibility of identity) and, on the other, space as something concrete and productive in its own terms. The ontological ambiguity of space thus both embodies the ontological play within the text and references its position between text and critic.

 

Derrida is concerned, we might say, with the “worldly” rather than with the world. Perhaps Derrida’s most concise comment on this world comes at a point in Of Grammatology where Derrida considers the materiality of the trace and what it means for signification: “It is therefore the game of the world that must be first thought; before attempting to understand all the forms of play in the world” (50). This passage occurs in the context of considering Saussure’s claim that the connections among elements of a signifying system are arbitrary, a claim critics have often extended to characterize différance as a shapeless “freeplay.” Derrida’s counterargument is that to treat these elements as arbitrary is to assume that they are concrete things in the world, whose existence is independent of the meaning given them. Instead, Derrida suggests, we must see writing as caught up within a whole system of making these terms worldly and thus arbitrarily inserted within a phonetic system:

 

From the very opening of the game, then, we are within the becoming-unmotivated of the symbol. With regard to this becoming, the opposition of diachronic and synchronic is also derived. It would not be able to command a grammatology pertinently. The immotivation of the trace ought now to be understood as an operation and not as a state, as an active movement, a demotivation, and not as a given structure. (50-51)

 

For Derrida, the system of language as pure difference depends on the move into the world, on the stripping away of causality for the sake of a concreteness that is the possibility of signifiers being defined as arbitrarily associated with signifieds. Saussure’s fundamental distinction between signifier and signified is, then, the product of “the game of the world,” the functioning of a process of “worlding.” It is exactly this play of the ideaof the world, the always incomplete movement towards the world, that operates within writing as an “apparatus” and that sets within the text the play of the concrete and conceptual:

 

Since consciousness for Freud is a surface exposed to the external world, it is here that instead of reading through the metaphor in the usual sense, we must, on the contrary, understand the possibility of a writing advanced as conscious and as acting in the world (the visible exterior of the graphism, of the literal, of the literal becoming literary, etc.) in terms of the labor of the writing which circulated like psychical energy between the unconscious and the conscious. The “objectivist” or “worldly” consideration of writing teaches us nothing if reference is not made to a space of psychical writing…. We perhaps should think that what we are describing here as the labor of writing erases the transcendental distinction between the origin of the world and Being-in-the-world. Erases it while producing it. (“Freud” 212)

 

For Derrida, then, the world as a problem defines the apparatus of the text and thus introduces a slippage between the concrete and the conceptual.

 

The Structure of Critical Praxis

 

In linking the dynamic space developed in the gramme to the ontological status of objects represented in the text, Derrida accomplishes something that other critics–even those with sophisticated spatial models–fail to do. He develops a basis for critical practice that does not simply revert to the acceptance of traditional metanarratives for defining this practice–as we have seen so often in deconstructive and post-deconstructive criticism. Indeed, I would like to suggest that Derrida’s model of space and ontology can be used to address concerns of critical location that have sparked the movement “beyond” deconstruction. I will, specifically, argue that this theory of textual “worldliness” based on the play of the conceptual and the concrete is not merely an abstract condition of the text; instead it produces a differentiated and relatively fixed structure of analysis and critical location.

 

Space’s ability to straddle the text and the world depends on Derrida’s understanding of the “topos” or occasion of writing. In his early essay, “Force and Signification,” Derrida distinguishes between the topographical and the topological, arguing that we cannot directly correlate space and textuality:

 

Now, stricto sensu, the notion of structure refers only to space, geometric or morphological space, the order of forms and sites…. Only metaphorically was this topographical literality displaced in the direction of its Aristotelean and topical signification (the theory of commonplaces in language and the manipulation of motifs or arguments). (15-16)

 

Rather than accepting topography as a natural part of the text or rejecting it as a misunderstanding of textuality, Derrida considers the production of textual space out of a spatial self-reflection built into all textual language: “How is this history of metaphor possible? Does the fact that language can determine things only by spatializing them suffice to explain that, in return, language must spatialize itself as soon as it designates and reflects upon itself?” (16). Not only must language spatialize the world (as we saw in “Ousia and Gramme”), but it also relies on an implicit spatialization functioning whenever the linguistic slippage at work in différance forces the text to reflect on itself. The connection between the articulation of a text and the appearance of space is most clearly explained by Derrida’s notion of lieu as both a spatial site and a rhetorical topos. What Alan Bass translates in the passage above as “the theory of commonplaces in language,” Derrida describes in the original as “théorie des lieux dans le langage” (28). Derrida’s emphasis here on topoi as lieuxallows him to suggest a necessary complicity between textual articulation and the creation of textual topography. Derrida makes this association clear elsewhere:

 

The topoi of the dialogue are never indifferent. The themes, the topics, the (common-)places [les lieux], in a rhetorical sense, are strictly inscribed, comprehended each time within a significant site [des sites chaque fois signifiants]. They are dramatically staged, and in this theatrical geography, unity of place corresponds to an infallible calculation or necessity. (Dissemination 69; original French 77)

 

In this passage Derrida plays on the distinction between the rhetorical topos and the physical site, implying that the topos allows the working-out of the geography dictated by the topography. The topos here is the means by which the topography manifests itself and textual necessity plays out, the means by which the site that circumscribes it appears. In “Force and Signification,” Derrida defines the topographical as dependent on a previously existing site: “Structure is first the structure of an organic or artificial work, the internal unity of an assemblage, a construction; a work is governed by a unifying principle, the architecture that is built and made visible in a location” (15). Derrida suggests that a textual topography depends on the existence of a topos through which it is “made visible.” The lieu thus holds together text and the analytic “occasion” through which it is articulated by virtue of its very ontological instability, its slippage between concrete topographical site and the rhetorical topos.

 

This notion of the lieu is very similar to what critics have described as the “local site.” Elspeth Probyn suggests the necessity of this ontological indeterminacy in her characterization of the local site: “the concept of ‘locale’ will be used to designate a place that is the setting for a particular event. I take this ‘place’ as both a discursive and nondiscursive arrangement which holds a gendered event, the home being the most obvious example” (178). Probyn recognizes that the “locale” must exist in a problematic way as both part of discourse, and as something opposed to it–or, in the terms I have used, as conceptual and concrete. The difference between place and event (Probyn’s example is the distinction between home and the family) marks the fluctuation between concrete space and the interpellating (conceptual) representations that appear within that space. As for Derrida, this concrete/conceptual ambiguity arises when space comes up against its limit and recognizes the temporal–summarized nicely by Probyn’s casting of the concrete/conceptual ambiguity in terms of place and event. Probyn inherits this concrete/conceptual tension and its formulation as the play between place and event from Lyotard. When Lyotard suggests that “any consensus on the rules defining a [language] game and the ‘moves’ playable within it must be local, in other words, agreed on by its present players and subject to eventual cancellation” (66), he defines discursive action as constantly fluctuating between using and changing the “rules” of this interaction. Any reference, then, fluctuates between taking this “locale” concretely as a given base for communication, and renegotiating the boundaries of discourse conceptually. As for Derrida, this ontological ambiguity allows the site to “hold” contradictions. For Lyotard, this means that the local produces knowledge by (the possibility of) negating its base: “working on a proof means searching for and ‘inventing’ counterexamples, in other words, the unintelligible; supporting an argument means looking for a ‘paradox’ and legitimating it with new rules in the games of reasoning” (54). Lyotard suggests here that the very possibility of rejecting the site, of switching from the concrete to the conceptual understanding of this local space, is the means by which the contradictions that drive the “game” are worked through. Probyn follows the same reasoning in her use of Lyotard:

 

In this formulation the bricoleur actively pieces together different signs and produces new (and sometimes unsanctioned) meanings; the bricoleur is always in the process of fashioning her various locales. The concept of “locale” then serves to emphasize the lived contradictions of place and event. In acknowledging that we are daily involved in the reproduction of patriarchy we can nonetheless temper a vision of strict interpellation with the recognition that discourses are negotiated. Individuals live in complex places and differentiate the pull of events. (182)

 

According to Probyn, the site or locale holds contradictions and allows their analysis precisely because of the difference between “place” and “event”–that is, because of the ontological ambiguity of the site under analysis. Probyn does not simply suggest that the locale can be valued over the event or representation–that is, that we can strip away the representation for the sake of this concrete place. Rather, she recognizes that the very space in which women operate is constructed as part of a necessary duality with representation. Thus, to use Probyn’s example, one can have a proper “home” (as a space) only to the extent that one has a family of some sort–that is, only to the extent that space is bound to and even produced from a representation. The “reproduction of patriarchy” thus is not seamless but reveals its contradictions through the ontological ambiguity of the space in which it appears.

 

This system can be understood as the structure of deconstructive praxis–something both created by the deconstructive critic and delimiting the path of analysis. Derrida makes this clear in “Ousia and Gramme” in discussing how the gramme can “hold” the force of textual play because of the action of an observer: “The impossible–the coexistence of two nows–appears only in a synthesis–taking this word neutrally, implying no position, no activity, no agent–let us say in a certain complicity or coimplication maintaining together several current nows which are said to be the one past and the other future” (55). In this passage Derrida plays on the association of the now [maintenant] and the act of “maintaining” contradictions within a structure whose presence (and present) is undermined by its necessary reference to an exterior position. If, as Derrida suggests, this position is not a direct result of such an observer’s interaction with the object of synthesis, this structure nonetheless defines a certain space for such an observer that is a condition of this “now.” In describing this external role as one of “maintenance,” Derrida stresses the observer’s role in balancing the physical textual forces in terms of which Derrida describes space and time earlier in the essay: “Ousia as energeia, in opposition to dynamis (movement, power) is presence. Time, which bears within it the already-no-longer and the not-yet, is composite. In it, energy composes with power” (51). In “maintaining” the temporality of the text as a force, this external position renders it concrete, something that can be analyzed in the text as a thing. Indeed, Derrida’s description of the text as an apparatus–so basic to the text’s concrete/conceptual ambiguity–is itself dependent on some external position from which this system is used as a tool. Derrida writes, “The machine does not run by itself. It is less a machine than a tool. And it is not held with only one hand. This is the mark of its temporality. Its maintenance is not simple” (“Freud” 226). Such substantialization is the reason that we can speak about the text itself as retaining “traces”–a play of language made substantial by the work of the deconstructive critic. This substantialized force makes no sense on its own. Instead, it points back–allegorically, in Ulmer’s sense–to linguistic conflicts, to the site in which they appear, and to the means by which it was constructed by an external interpreter. These three relays within a text are all held together by the worldly fluctuation between the concrete and the conceptual, by the problematic substantiality that reveals how this non-presence is given shape within a text and its analysis.

 

Such substantialized traces best summarize the tripartite structure of worldliness in Derrida’s theory, and most clearly suggest how we can define a relatively fixed system within the text. In the trace, the text’s self-presence gives way to an ongoing series of “worldly” deferrals and references. The space, the topos, of the text in which we discover these traces points back to its core play of linguistic différance. More important–and this is what critics have missed in claiming that Derrida does not address the issue of the “location” of deconstructive praxis–this topos and its dependence on textual conflicts also references an extra-textual, analytic position. It is for this reason that Derrida has stressed the non-arbitrary character of deconstructive criticism. This helps to make sense of Derrida’s often-cited description of deconstruction in Of Grammatology:

 

The movements of deconstruction do not destroy structures from the outside. They are not possible and effective, nor can they take accurate aim, except by inhabiting those structures. Inhabiting them in a certain way, because one always inhabits, and all the more when one does not suspect it. Operating necessarily from the inside, borrowing all the strategic and economic resources of subversion from the old structure, borrowing them structurally, that is to say without being able to isolate their elements and atoms, the enterprise of deconstruction always in a certain ways falls prey to its own work. (24)

 

Derrida’s description of the trace emphasizes not merely the function of contradiction and its spatial articulation in the text as a structure, but also the position that this space creates for a critic to “inhabit.” The trace, consequently, is not an arbitrary element of the text, but instead, by its problematic ontology, points back to a whole system of becoming-worldly in the text. Derrida particularly stresses the critic’s dependence on this interconnected system in the following description of deconstruction:

 

The incision of deconstruction, which is not a voluntary decision or an absolute beginning, does not take place just anywhere, or in an absolute elsewhere. An incision, precisely, it can be made only according to lines of force and forces of rupture that are localizable in the discourse to be deconstructed. The topical and technical determination of the most necessary sites and operators–beginnings, holds, levers, etc.–in a given situation depends upon an historical analysis. This analysis is made in the general movement of the field, and is never exhausted by the conscious calculation of a “subject.” (Positions 82)

 

Here, the position of an observer, the space of the text (its lines and forces), and the basic terms of the analysis are all mutually dependent and related in a system of worldly transformation. If Derrida refuses Weedon’s optimistic post-deconstructive model of self-conscious critics, he also refuses to locate textual play independently of a reader. Rather, language, space and reader are interconnected and function within a system of worldliness. Only by seeing the worldly as something in constant circulation and having multiple manifestations can we recognize the ontological complexity of Derridian space.

 

In this notion of the tripartite structure of the deconstructive text, Derrida suggests a clear similarity between deconstruction and the “located” criticism that is usually opposed to it. Both share a recognition of knowledge’s necessary position between text and world. Derrida understands that this worldly position is more than a matter of irony–that is, more than a simple fact that makes a text uncloseable and relativistic. Rather, he suggests that this textual worldliness leads to a specific structure for the dispersion of objectivity and the construction of “positions” of critical praxis. Derrida’s interest in how deconstruction is related to such positions is perhaps easiest to see in his recent writing on Marx. Derrida starts with the problematic figure of Marx himself, and with the difficulty of defining a notion of influence that does not presuppose a self-presence or simple causality:

 

Among all the temptations I will have to resist today, there would be the temptation of memory: to recount what was for me, and for those of my generation who shared it during a whole lifetime, the experience of Marxism, the quasi-paternal figure of Marx, the way it fought in us with other filiations, the reading of texts and the interpretation of a world in which the Marxist inheritance was–and still remains, and so will remain–absolutely and thoroughly determinate. (Specters 13-14)

 

Derrida’s means of escape from the “temptation of memory” and from a traditionalist explanation of deconstruction’s place in the world is to investigate the ontological ambiguities of the “specter” of Marx: “We believe that this messianic remains an ineffaceable mark–a mark one neither can nor should efface–of Marx’s legacy, and doubtless of inheriting, of the experience of inheritance in general. Otherwise, one would reduce the event-ness of the event, the singularity and the alterity of the other” (28). Derrida casts the “specter” of Marx as ontologically indeterminate, both concrete and conceptual, actual and ideal. It is this “specterality” that fascinates Derrida, both as a condition of Marx’s “presence” within intellectual debates today, and as an issue thematized by Marx. Indeed, when Derrida defines deconstruction as an extension of Marxism–“Deconstruction has never had any sense or interest, in my view at least, except as a radicalization, which is to say also in the tradition of a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism” (92)–he seems to have in mind just this shared concern for the “spectral” and how it complicates the self-presence of everyday objects. Derrida makes this connection between the specter and the concrete/conceptual ambiguity of différance directly. Discussing the difference between the specter and spirit, Derrida writes, “it is a differance. The specter is not only the carnal apparition of the spirit, its phenomenal body, its fallen and guilty body, it is also the impatient and nostalgic waiting for a redemption, namely, once again, for a spirit” (136). The tension that Derrida offers here between the ideal presence of the spirit and the physicality of the specter is just the tension that we have seen throughout between the conceptual and the concrete.⁵

 

Spatial Exchanges

 

Derrida has suggested that, although knowledge is not disinterested and objective, we can define a structure for critical investment and the organization of knowledge. Derrida’s theory of the tripartite structure of deconstructive praxis relies on the space of the site at its core. As his writing on Marx suggests, Derrida insists on describing the play of the concrete and the conceptual in spatial and temporal terms. Indeed, Derrida is quite explicit in stressing the role of spatial and temporal “location” in “spectral spiritualization”:

 

In the incoercible differance the here-now unfurls. Without lateness, without delay, but without presence, it is the precipitation of an absolute singularity, singular because differing, precisely, and always other, binding itself necessarily to the form of the instant, in imminence and in urgency.… No differance without alterity, no alterity without singularity, no singularity without here-now. (Specters 31)

 

Derrida’s articulation of the concrete/conceptual slippage functions according to a certain economy of space and time. Indeed, we can see the whole of the tripartite structure as a collection of several spaces. This is a structure that Probyn herself suggests in using the term “locale” for a specific site, and “location” for a more theoretical space: “By ‘location’ I refer to the methods by which one comes to locate sites of research. Through location knowledges are ordered into sequences which are congruent with previously established categories of knowledge” (178). If Probyn’s distinction between locale and location seems appropriate to Derrida, we should recognize in deconstruction the seed of a radical approach to an individual’s negotiation of textuality and socio-political involvement. Derrida offers us an image of criticism based on what I have called a “non-linear” space–a space that is constantly being constructed, that always gestures beyond itself, and that finally depends upon its continual transformation into other kinds of space.

 

The radical implications for criticism of this spatial multiplicity are never treated concretely by Derrida. Indeed, the kind of spatial multiplicity that I have described here initially seems merely to repeat the celebration of transience and indeterminacy that critics of postmodernism claim undermines the possibility of concrete political action.⁶ As I have noted above, this more complex notion of space has emerged in other forms of post-deconstructive criticism, without being integrated into the kind of textual analysis that we associated with deconstruction. Particularly helpful for recognizing how the positive connotations of deconstructive spatial multiplicity have been explored is Michel de Certeau’s writing on the negotiation of space in “everyday life.” In particular, de Certeau’s emphasis on social space speaks to the liberatory potential that exists unrecognized within totalizing systems without romanticizing fragmentation. De Certeau’s work on everyday life takes as its point of departure the premise that everyday actions are a tactical bricolage of “making due” that always works against traditional notions of power: “One deploys his forces, one does not take chances with feints. Power is bound by its very visibility. In contrast, trickery is possible for the weak” (37). De Certeau’s approach to everyday life is thus broadly in sympathy with local criticism’s interest in the positive political effect of occupying a critical “position” in a certain way. But de Certeau also echoes Derrida in treating such locations as constantly opening out into other forms of space. As a result, de Certeau uses the Derridian model of multiple interpretive spaces to address the questions of interpretive politics that give local criticism its impetus.

 

De Certeau’s liberatory criticism depends on complicating the social space upon which traditional images of social power and authority depend. When Foucault argued that modern society develops “a certain policy of the body, a certain way of rendering the group of men docile and useful” (Discipline 305) by locating individuals in isolated spaces where they could be observed and disciplined, he associated within contemporary thought strict spatial organization and the operation of power. De Certeau agrees that power operates by virtue of certain “proper places” that it defines, but he also explores social spaces that fall outside of proper disciplinary arrangement. Distinguishing the hegemonic “strategy” from the “tactics” of the weak, de Certeau writes, “strategies are actions which, thanks to the establishment of a place of power (the property of a proper), elaborate theoretical places (systems and totalizing discourses) capable of articulating an ensemble of physical places in which forces are distributed. They combine these three types of places and seek to master each by means of the others” (38). De Certeau contrasts fixed places to the practice of operating within space, a practice that by its nature undermines stability and the power that it supports. De Certeau’s focus is urban geography, where individuals use city spaces “tactically”: “the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers” (117). Such spatial practices are inherently temporal. De Certeau is worth quoting at some length:

 

At the outset, I shall make a distinction between space (espace) and place (lieu) that delimits a field. A place (lieu) is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence. It thus excludes the possibility of two things being in the same location (place). The law of the “proper” rules in the place: the elements taken into consideration are beside one another, each situated in its own “proper” and distinct location, a location it defines. A place is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies an indication of stability.

 

A space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense articulated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it. Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities…. In contradistinction to the place, it has thus none of the univocity or stability of a “proper.”

 

In short, space is a practiced place. (117)

 

De Certeau distinguishes between a defined place (lieu) and a more general and abstract space produced by “proper” places’ confrontation of time. De Certeau imagines that one’s everyday actions cut across places, introducing a temporality and bringing many spaces into contact. This idea of spatial practice at first seems to echo the later writings of Foucault, whose emphasis on individual practices has seemed to many critics to be a productive alternative to the image of panoptical power in works like Discipline and Punish.⁷ But rather than treating practice as an alternative to disciplinary spaces, de Certeau follows Derrida and explores how practice creates many spaces.⁸ Specifically, de Certeau concludes rather surprisingly that undermining place reveals a more abstract space. This is, of course, just the opposite of what we would expect, since we usually think that it is the “concrete” that has the potential to undermine discourse and representation. Like Derrida, de Certeau refuses to posit some fundamental concrete “thing” that troubles concepts or abstract spaces. But he also refuses to relativize all spaces, or to suggest that we simply move tactically between an unending string of specific places. Instead, according to de Certeau, we get a glimpse of an abstract space that “occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it.” De Certeau is suggesting that the shifts between spaces are freeing precisely because they allow us to recognize a broader notion of space that overarches individual places. Against calls for localization, de Certeau suggests that attention to “sites” is valuable only because of the crossing of boundaries that they necessitate, crossings that allow us to glimpse a more abstract notion of space.

 

The abstract space that de Certeau describes draws our attention to the reader’s active involvement in the construction of objects of knowledge–just as in Derrida’s writing the textual site points back to the critical location which “maintains” it. De Certeau makes clear that this abstract space cannot be inhabited in any permanent way; rather, the importance of this abstract space is that it makes possible a certain kind of action, a practice. When we recognize a space that overarches individual places, we grasp our ability to act in ways not predetermined by those places and the power relations that they support. One form of spatial practice is narrative: “every day, [stories] traverse and organize places; they select and link them together; they make sentences and itineraries out of them. They are spatial trajectories” (115). For de Certeau, narrative is at work within the movement between “proper places” of any sort–including the discursive topoi that legitimate scientific knowledge. De Certeau writes, “the folktale provides scientific discourse with a model, and not merely with textual objects to be dealt with. It no longer has the status of a document that does not know what it says, cited (summoned and quoted) before and by the analysis that knows it. On the contrary, it is a know-how-to-say exactly adjusted to its object” (78). Narrative in this sense is always the practice of discourse, a practice that sets into play the movement between proper places. When we understand the abstract space that de Certeau suggests, we recognize our own role within the construction of objects of knowledge. And once we recognize this role and the larger space upon which it depends, de Certeau suggests, we can begin to formulate new trajectories for critical analysis. Thus, quite against local criticism’s suspicions of theory, de Certeau argues that only through a kind of epiphany-like glimpse into abstract space can critics move beyond the political locations from which they initially approach their object of study. If de Certeau is right, then critics’ willingness to participate in the dialectic of location and textual “site” is precisely what allows interpretation to spin off into new directions. Indeed, we will recall Derrida’s insistence in “Ousia and Gramme” that the point always gestures towards the whole movement of the line. The nexus between critical location and textual site thus resembles the confused space of the city, where many paths overlap and new trajectories constantly appear.

 

De Certeau provides a way of recognizing the practical implications of the spatial multiplicity that Derrida describes. Both thinkers offer a radical alternative to the view that a critical “location” should be defined, stable, and distinct. By turning to a “non-linear” model of space based on the transformation of interpretive site into critical location, these theories develop a richer model of interpretation that, more importantly, emphasizes the moment when critics glimpse a new way to follow out the transformation of interpretive spaces and interpret texts differently. In contrast to the more concrete and perhaps more accessible spatial models that we see in de Certeau and in Laclau and Mouffe, I have argued that Derrida offers us something unique and essential by linking these spaces to the analysis of textual slippages. Derrida points toward a genuinely post-deconstructive method of textual analysis–one that does not simply, begrudgingly accept traditional metanarratives, but instead balances critical location and textual analysis through a dynamic, non-linear site of analysis.

Notes

 

1. A high point of this debate was the winter 1985 issue of Diacritics (15.4) devoted to “Marx after Derrida.” For a recent reevaluation of the debate over the politics of deconstruction, see Paul Jay, “Bridging the Gap.”

 

2. On the importance of such spatial language, see Kathleen M. Kirby, “Thinking through the Boundary.”

 

3. This reading of Derrida is often predicated on his well-known comment that “there is nothing outside of the text.” For a reconsideration of the idea of exteriority in this comment, see Jeffrey T. Nealon, Double Reading (57).

 

4. There are times, however, when Laclau and Mouffe actually sound a great deal like Derrida in discussing the production of this space. In “Politics and the Limits of Modernity,” Laclau turns to the notion of a “horizon” in contrast to the metanarrative “foundation” problematized by postmodernist discourse. Although this essay treats the concept in far less detail, we might see similarities between the gramme and this horizon as a site of analysis temporarily produced by reference to a limit that shapes it.

 

5. Indeed, at one point in Specters, Derrida mentions “Ousia and Gramme” as an essay that examines the temporality of “spectralizing” and the creation of the “‘non-sensuous’ thing” (155).

 

6. See, for example, John McGowan’s Habermassian critique of the doctrine of “negative freedom” in poststructural thought in Postmodernism and Its Critics.

 

7. In The Use of Pleasure, for example, Foucault describes how individuals participate in discursive structures to “transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria” (10-11). This image of individuals participating within the construction of being has offered many critics an alternative to Foucault’s earlier theory of power’s “inscription” of individual bodies.

 

8. Actually, one might argue that the same is true of Foucault’s later work. Gilles Deleuze argues that Foucault’s idea of space undergoes a fundamental change: “For a long time Foucault thought of the outside as being an ultimate spatiality that was deeper than time; but in his late works he offers the possibility once more of putting time on the outside as being time, conditioned by the fold” (108). Deleuze’s theory of the “folding” of space in Foucault’s last work echoes the spatial multiplicity that I have described in Derrida.

 

Works Cited

 

• Bordo, Susan. “Feminism, Postmodernism, and Gender-Skepticism.” Nicholson 133-56.
• de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.
• de Lauretis, Teresa. “Feminist Studies/Critical Studies: Issues, Terms, and Contexts.” Feminist Studies/Critical Studies. Ed. Teresa de Lauretis. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986. 1-19.
• Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans. Sean Hand. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.
• Derrida, Jacques. Edmund Husserl’s “Origin of Geometry”: An Introduction. Trans. John P. Leavey. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1978.
• —. La Dissémination. Paris: Seuil, 1972.
• —. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.
• —. “Force and Signification.” Writing and Difference. 3-30.
• —. “Force et Signification.” L’ecriture et la différance. Paris: Seuil, 1967. 9-49.
• —. “Freud and the Scene of Writing.” Writing and Difference. 196-231.
• —. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.
• —. “Ousia and Gramme: A Note on a Note from Being and Time.” Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. 29-67.
• —. Positions. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1981.
• —. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994.
• —. Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Trans. David B. Allison. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973.
• —. Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles. Trans. Barbara Harlow. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979.
• —. “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy.” Margins of Philosophy. 207-71.
• —. Writing and Difference. Trans. Allen Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978.
• Eagelton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983.
• Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York; Vintage, 1979.
• —. The Use of Pleasure: Volume 2 of the History of Sexuality. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1990.
• Fraser, Nancy and Linda J. Nicholson. “Social Criticism without Philosophy: An Encounter between Feminism and Postmodernism.” Nicholson 19-38.
• Gasché, Rodolphe. The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1986.
• Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.
• Jay, Paul. “Bridging the Gap: The Position of Politics in Deconstruction.” Cultural Critique 22 (1992): 47-74.
• Johnson, Barbara. The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990.
• Kirby, Kathleen M. “Thinking through the Boundary: The Politics of Location, Subjects, and Space.” Boundary 2 20 (1993): 173-89.
• Laclau, Ernesto. “Politics and the Limits of Modernity.” Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism. Ed. Andrew Ross. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988. 63-82.
• — and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso, 1985.
• Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.
• Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985.
• McGowan, John. Postmodernism and Its Critics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1991.
• Nealon, Jeffrey T. Double Reading: Postmodernism after Deconstruction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1993.
• Nicholson, Linda J., ed. Feminism/Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1984.
• Probyn, Elspeth. “Travels in the Postmodern: Making Sense of the Local.” Nicholson 176-89.
• Ryan, Michael. Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982.
• Said, Edward W. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983.
• Schatzki, Theodore R. “Theory at Bay: Foucault, Lyotard, and Politics of the Local.” Postmodern Contentions: Epochs, Politics, Space. Eds. John Paul Jones III, Wolfgang Natter, Theodore R. Schatzki. New York: Guilford Press, 1993. 39-64.
• Ulmer, Gregory. Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.
• —. “The Object of Post-Criticism.” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Post-Townsend: Bay Press, 1983. 83-110.
• Weedon, Chris. Feminist Practice & Poststructuralist Theory. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987.

 

Paul Youngquist

Department of English

Penn State University
pby1@psu.edu

 

When I heard the crash on the hiway
I knew what it was from the start
I went down to the scene of destruction
And a picture was stamped on my heart.

 

I didn’t hear nobody pray, dear brother,
I didn’t hear nobody pray;
I heard the crash on the hiway
But I didn’t hear nobody pray.

 

–Roy Acuff

I

 

Crash!
One catastrophic instant can change your life forever.

 

J. G. Ballard’s Crash reveals the destiny of the human body in a world of automotive disaster: a new crash-body, ungodly offspring of cars and signs. Set in the concrete landscape of late industrial culture, the novel views the world through a wide-angle lens that deprives it of depth, rendering it an interminable surface. Ballard’s prose is that of the camera–flat, mechanical, omni-detailed, “hyperreal”–and shows that to write in a technological culture is to represent its technologies of perception. The hyper-reality of Ballard’s style is the representational effect of photography, the after-image in another medium of a pervasive perception technology. That’s why Vaughan, the sinister hero of Crash, is not a writer but a camera-monkey; the writer in the narrative, auspiciously named Ballard, takes up a position subordinate to the photographer, who becomes the subject of writing, the condition of narration: “Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash” (1). From its first sentence to its last, Crash pursues the image of Vaughan, its narrative alpha and omega. And that image is photographic, both product and producer of other images. Vaughan is defined by the technologies of photography that condition his perception, as in the following moment of recognition:

 

The tall man with the camera sauntered across the roof. I looked through the rear window of his car. The passenger seat was loaded with photographic equipment–cameras, a tripod, a carton packed with flashbulbs. A cine-camera was fastened to a dashboard clamp.

 

He walked back to his car, camera held like a weapon by its pistol grip. As he reached the balcony his face was lit by the headlamps of the police car. I realized that I had seen his pock-marked face many times before, projected from a dozen forgotten magazine profiles–this was Vaughan, Dr Robert Vaughan. (63)

 

Handsome is as handsome does; technologies of photography become the condition of all that Vaughan does and is. Identity is an effect of the photographic image, which is always already a technological representation, capable of being reproduced and disseminated. Photography is thus the a priori of (re)cognition in the technological culture of Crash. Ballard’s prose double-exposes this cultural function. With the disinterestedness of a camera, it reveals the operation of the lens in the language of the hyperreal. Stylistically and analytically, Ballard ‘s book is photo-Kantian.

 

And its world becomes a surface. One of the effects of the lens upon representation is to flatten it out, reconfiguring the image in a space of two dimensions, a surface without depth. Contiguity, mark of the metonym, regulates relations in such a space. As a result things lose substance. Boundaries lapse and features merge. Where difference once distinguished, contiguity now associates, deferring the substantive identity of things. Where a boundary once ruled, as between humanity and machine, a blur now occurs, creating unprecedented relations and new possibilities. Consider the effects of Vaughan’s camera upon the all too human act of love:

 

Vaughan stood at my shoulder, like an instructor ready to help a promising pupil. As I stared down at the photograph of myself at Renata’s breast, Vaughan leaned across me, his real attention elsewhere. With a broken thumbnail, its rim caked with engine oil, he pointed to the chromium window-sill and its junction with the overstretched strap of the young woman’s brassiere. By some freak of photography these two formed a sling of metal and nylon from which the distorted nipple seemed to extrude itself into my mouth. (102)

 

Photography breeds freaks by reconfiguring things. Boundaries that would assert substantive differences, as between metal and flesh, fall to new associations through the intervention of the lens. Vaughan’s camera registers a world where a breast is as much an automotive as a female accessory, where sexuality plays upon a surface that embraces the material and the organic. This surface extends as far as the images it reproduces: to the white border of the photograph proper but also to the ends of perception of a lens set on infinity. Representationally speaking, it is both terminal and interminable.

 

What most interests Ballard is the life of the human body on this surface. For a body without depth ceases to be an organism in the traditional sense. If to have a body means to inhabit a suit of flesh, then organic substance sets the terms for life, its aims and its ends. But in Ballard’s world, the technological world of late industrial culture, semiotics subsumes substance. The vital, active organism gives way to the conceptual, abstract image. The body becomes conceptualized, and life turns semiotic. So it is for Elizabeth Taylor, “real life” film actress, appearing in Vaughan’s apartment and on the novel’s opening page in image only:

 

The walls of his apartment near the film studios at Shepperton were covered with the photographs he had taken through his zoom lens each morning as she left her hotel in London, from the pedestrian bridges above the westbound motorways, and from the roof of the multi-storey car-park at the studios. The magnified details of her knees and hands, of the inner surface of her thighs and the left apex of her mouth, I uneasily prepared for Vaughan on the copying machine in my office, handing him the packages of prints as if they were the installments of a death warrant. At his apartment I watched him matching the details of her body with the photographs of grotesque wounds in a textbook of plastic surgery. (7-8)

 

The body, in this instance the body of Elizabeth Taylor, is no longer an organic entity. Technologies of photographic representation (re)produce images that usurp its priority and reconfigure its integrity. The resulting body conceptual can be interminably manipulated: enlarged, reduced, bisected, rearranged, transcoded, transported, and most importantly, transposed. Once conceptualized, the body is transposable to any homologous geometry. Elizabeth Taylor’s conceptually assimilates the textbook wounds of other anonymous bodies. And because proliferation of conceptual equivalence can distribute such a body over the whole extent of the world as surface, life itself, once an organic matter, becomes a semiotic function.

 

In the context of late industrial culture, the old organic model of the body is vestigial of an earlier age, a pastoral moment in cultural history when nature at its most benign could serve as a trope for life at its most general. All that has changed. The body has become a conceptual phenomenon (an appropriately peculiar designation). The nearness of the flesh may persuade us daily to live in the faith that we inhabit a vital organism. But in Ballard’s novel such faith proves to be, culturally speaking, habitual nostalgia. His characters no longer animate an organic body. Rather a conceptual body animates them. The flesh has become its after-image and lives within the semiotic horizon of the world as surface. Such a body in such a world has no substance, no interior opposable to an exterior. As with graphic images generally, it is all surface–even to its vital depths, a point made strikingly by the cover of The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard’s apocalyptic fractal-fiction recently reissued by RE/SEARCH (Figure 1). The body conceptual stands revealed in its full glory as an image that collapses vital depths of substance onto a surface both self-contained and culturally continuous. An image of neither the inside nor the outside of a body neither living nor dead, it reconfigures those old organic oppositions to represent the new form of life characteristic of late industrial culture. As a cultural historian of the body, Ballard documents this sublation of the organism.

 

Figure 1. Cover image from The Atrocity Exhibition. Image copyright (c) Re/Search Publications. (Illustration: Phoebe Gloeckner.)

II

 

Conceptual bodies inhabit the world as surface less as human individuals than abstract integers. Technologies invented to enhance life have reinvented it, transforming the human into a cipher in a technological horizon. Viewing the world from the veranda of his apartment, Ballard’s hero Ballard remarks in Crash that “the human inhabitants of this technological landscape no longer provided its sharpest pointers, its keys to the borderzones of identity” (49). That landscape, so obviously technological, bears no essential relation to the human as either end or origin. As an end, the human has ended, and in its place has arisen technology itself, or more specifically the technologies that in fact provide the keys to identity in this landscape. For if the condition of (re)cognition in late industrial culture is the photograph, the condition of agency is the automobile. Crash plots the remarkable logic of an unremarkable observation: that the car sets the terms for life as we know it. Life has ceased to be an exclusively organic phenomenon, and the automobile, as “a total metaphor for man’s life in today’s society” (Introduction 6), plays a decisive role in its transformation.

 

The car materializes the body conceptual. The photographic image may disseminate that body, but the automobile produces it. A body in a car becomes the prosthesis of a speed machine. As organism, it dies into the life of motor oil and steel, losing human substance and relating conceptually to an entity neither animate nor sentient in the traditional sense. And yet life and even passion persist. Witness Ballard’s increasing sense of connection with the car he drives, superseding even passion for his young lover:

 

The aggressive stylization of this mass-produced cockpit, the exaggerated mouldings of the instrument binnacles emphasized my growing sense of a new junction between my own body and the automobile, closer than my feelings for Renata’s broad hips and strong legs stowed out of sight beneath her red plastic raincoat. I leaned forward, feeling the rim of the steering wheel against the scars on my chest, pressing my knees against the ignition switch and handbrake. (55)

 

Built for the average buyer, the interior of the car (mass) produces a conceptual body assimilable to the material geometry of instrument panel and steering wheel. The condition of such a body’s agency becomes the automobile itself. Life in late industrial culture turns auto-telic.

 

The impact of the automobile upon the organic body is thus to transform it. Literally. The body becomes a surface in relation to the car’s stylized cockpit, a surface which, like that of the photographic image, lacks opposable interior and exterior. However counterintuitive it may seem, the body in vehiculo loses its organic substantiality. Consider the logistics of automobility. You place your body inside a car. The exterior of your organic substance confronts the interior of your vehicle. But since that interior is outside you, it turns you, so to speak, inside out. In the cockpit of a car your body loses its organic interiority, becoming part of a conceptual surface that assimilates it–materially. The interior of a car is more like a fold in flexible material than an inner space with an outer edge. Once inside, the body unfolds, becoming a surface without vital depth. The boundary between interior and exterior disappears as body and machine unite conceptually and materially on this surface. It is in this sense that Ballard can describe an automobile with the tender phrase “my own metal body” (113). The lesson of his violent confrontation with a car’s interior is that his body shares its life, not as organic substance but as conceptual surface:

 

As I looked down at myself I realized that the precise make and model-year of my car could have been reconstructed by an automobile engineer from the pattern of my wounds. The layout of the instrument panel, like the profile of the steering wheel bruised into my chest, was inset on my knees and shinbones. (28)

 

Wounds here are not organic traumas but abstract signs that refer body and automobile to a surface that assimilates them both, auto-referentially. The car, in its brute materiality, transforms the body from organic substance to semiotic function.

 

The passage above continues suggestively: “The impact of the second collision between my body and the interior compartment of the car was defined in these wounds, like the contours of a woman’s body remembered in the responding pressure of one’s own skin for a few hours after a sexual act.” The automobile resexualizes as it reconfigures the body. The result is a “new sexuality born of a perverse technology,” one liberated from both eros and desire. For the sexuality of the body conceptual is less libidinal than semiotic. With the end of the substantive organism comes the release of its semiotic function onto a surface that assimilates body and machine. Libido turns semio-erotic on such a surface, the occurrence of not physical urge but conceptual equivalence. Because such equivalence is abstract it as easily embraces an automobile as a lover. Hence the place of the car in the sexuality of late industrial culture. It is less as erotic object than semio-erotic signifier that it stimulates the body conceptual. Witness the encounter between Ballard and Helen Remington, wife of the man killed in a crash with his car:

 

The volumes of Helen’s thighs pressing against my hips, her left fist buried in my shoulder, her mouth grasping at my own, the shape and moisture of her anus as I stroked it with my ring finger, were each overlaid by the inventories of a benevolent technology–the moulded binnacle of the instrument dials, the jutting carapace of the steering column shroud, the extravagant pistol grip of the handbrake. I felt the warm vinyl of the seat beside me, and then stroked the damp aisle of Helen’s perineum. Her hand pressed against my right testicle. The plastic laminates around me, the colour of washed anthracite, were the same tones as her pubic hairs parted at the vestibule of her vulva. The passenger compartment enclosed us like a machine generating from our sexual act an homunculus of blood, semen and engine coolant. (80-81)

 

The automobile is more a sexual signifier than object, condition of conceptual equivalence between body and technology that breeds a new form of life.

 

The auto-eroticism of Crash is thus thoroughly disembodied. Ballard documents the rise of “a new sexuality divorced from any possible physical expression” (35), a disembodied eroticism that lacks passion even as it multiplies sexual possibilities. Sexual acts themselves–and Crash is full of them: genital, oral, anal, manual, material–confirm no intimacy, communicate no love, proliferate pleasures that are purely formal. Liberated from the organic body, they become “conceptualized acts abstracted from all feeling” (129). The trans-physical sexuality that Ballard describes in such dispassionate detail recapitulates what he elsewhere calls the “death of affect” characteristic of late industrial culture. Disembodied, dissociated from affect, sexuality plays semiotically upon the world as surface, celebrating the conceptual equivalence of body and machine. Or so Ballard concludes, watching his wife Catherine and his friend Vaughan at it in the back seat:

 

This act was a ritual devoid of ordinary sexuality, a stylized encounter between two bodies which recapitulated their sense of motion and collision. Vaughan’s postures, the way in which he held his arms as he moved my wife across the seat, lifting her left knee so that his body was in the fork between her thighs, reminded me of the driver of a complex vehicle, a gymnastic ballet celebrating a new technology. His hands explored the back of her thighs in a slow rhythm, holding her buttocks and lifting her exposed pubis towards his scarred mouth without touching it. He was arranging her body in a series of positions, carefully searching the codes of her limbs and musculature. Catherine seemed still only half aware of Vaughan, holding his penis in her left hand and sliding her fingers towards his anus as if performing an act divorced from all feeling. (161)

 

Such is the new sexuality that Crashdocuments: a formal reenactment of conceptual equivalencies, a disembodied ritual without affect, a semiotics without meaning.

III

 

Without meaning? Isn’t it the function of signs, even sexual ones, to signify? Not in the world as surface. The semio-eroticism of its new sexuality serves the purpose not of representation but of dissemination. It distributes conceptual equivalence over the whole semiotic horizon of late industrial culture. Sexuality becomes a function of a trans-cultural system of signification and not vice versa; desire is no longer a biotic urge impelling an organism that gets represented in private fantasies, but a systemic function structuring an equivalence that gets disseminated in public reenactments. In The Atrocity Exhibition Ballard makes the canny suggestion that “Freud’s classic distinction between the manifest and latent content of the inner world of the psyche now has to be applied to the outer world of reality” (98-99). That “outer world” has acquired the semiotic function Freud ascribed to the Unconscious. It disseminates sexuality over the whole of the world as surface.

 

Elsewhere Ballard describes the function of the semiotic system that disseminates this new sexuality:

 

Just as the sleeping mind extemporizes a narrative form of the random memories veering through the cortical night, so our waking imaginations are stitching together a set of narratives to give meaning to the random events that swerve through our conscious lives. A roadside billboard advertising something or other, to TV programmes or news magazines or the radio or in-flight movies, or what have you. (Mississippi Review 31)

 

The semiotic system that disseminates sexuality is not psychological but socio-material. It includes billboards, TV shows, magazines, movies. It goes by the familiar name of “the media” and stitches together a set of narratives that structure the otherwise random life of late industrial culture. But the “meaning” this semiotic system (re)produces is not “meaningful” in the traditional sense, since it is always a reenactment of a purely conceptual equivalence: between her face and that of the movie star, between my body and that of the automobile, between our sexual postures and those of the porn magazines. It is in this sense that “sex,” as Ballard describes it, “has become a sort of communal activity” (Mississippi Review 32): it is the behavioral after-image of a semiotic system that disseminates sexuality without representing its “meaning.”

 

Photography is the means of its dissemination and the automobile the place of its reenactment. Car and photograph, the cultural a priori of this new sexuality, together condition the operation of this semiotic system. Without Vaughan’s photographs the sexuality of the body conceptual would be inert, for they advance the logic of equivalence latent in the limbs of the human organism:

 

His photographs of sexual acts, of sections of automobile radiator grilles and instrument panels, conjunctions between elbow and chromium window sill, vulva and instrument binnacle, summed up the possibilities of a new logic created by these multiplying artifacts, the codes of a new marriage of sensation and possibility. (106)

 

These codes are not biological but conceptual, the function of a semiotic system that disseminates sex as a set of gestures, postures, behaviors, positions. The media lifts sexuality out of the body and onto a surface determined by a new mimetic logic. Specific sexual acts become reenactments of the images that pervade the semiotic horizon, which is why the car plays so central a role in this sexual mimesis. It is the vehicle of our dreams, and the site of our communal equivalence.

 

Vaughan imitates in his sexual behavior the imagery that pervades the world as surface and by doing so assimilates himself conceptually to the only transcendental available to such a world: the semiotic system itself. The automobile is simply the site of a conceptualized salvation: imitatio vehiculi. Hence Vaughan’s curious, compulsive need to imitate the imagery of vehicular homicide. It confirms the possibility of a sexuality wholly liberated from the life of the organism, so completely a semiotic function that it includes even postures of violent death. So observes Ballard observing Vaughan:

 

Often I watched him lingering over the photographs of crash fatalities, gazing at their burnt faces with a terrifying concern, as he calculated the most elegant parameters of their injuries, the junctions of their wounded bodies with the fractured windshield and instrument assemblies. He would mimic these injuries in his own driving postures, turning the same dispassionate eyes on the young women he picked up near the airport. Using their bodies, he recapitulated the deformed anatomies of vehicle crash victims, gently bending the arms of these girls against their shoulders, pressing their knees against his own chest, always curious to see their reactions. (145)

 

Photograph, automobile, imitation: such are the means to a semiotic transcendence of the life–and the death–of the organic body. Vaughan is the weird messiah of this new transcendence.

 

And the crash is his crucifixion. If the body conceptual is produced and disseminated by means of a semiotics that has the camera and the car as its material conditions, the automobile accident reveals the way that system works. It is the technological equivalent of apocalypse. As its title suggests, Crash is not primarily about technology or even sex; it is about catastrophe, a sudden and violent shock to the system that interrupts and illuminates its function. Metal crumples, flesh tears, fluids squirt, signs multiply: CRASH. The word is onomatopoeic of disaster. A car crash enacts the banal apocalypse of the body conceptual, revealing its status as a semiotic and not organic phenomenon. After his auto wreck, Ballard awakens to a new perception of his body:

 

The week after the accident had been a maze of pain and insane fantasies. After the commonplaces of everyday life, with their muffled dramas, all my organic expertise for dealing with physical injury had long been blunted or forgotten. The crash was the only real experience I had been through for years. For the first time I was in physical confrontation with my own body, an inexhaustible encyclopedia of pains and discharges. (39)

 

Ballard’s crash jolts him out of the organic world and into the conceptual. His body ceases to be a vital organism and becomes, in its most physical experience, a conceptual lexicon, an inexhaustible encyclopedia of pains. Trauma to the body reveals the whole system that produces it. For it is only when something breaks–a tool, a car, a body–that its function is fully revealed. Heidegger makes just this observation in regard to the broken tool, which illuminates a whole system of relations that remains otherwise unrecognized: “for the circumspection that comes up against the damaging of the tool,… the context of equipment is lit up, not as something never seen before, but as a totality constantly sighted beforehand in circumspection. With this totality, however, the world announces itself” (105). For Heidegger as for Ballard, this world is conceptual, since reference, the relation of one sign to another, serves as an “ontological foundation… constitutive of worldhood in general” (114). Is it mere coincidence Heidegger’s example of the sign constitutive of such a world is an automobile’s blinker? A failure to signal could mean catastrophe.

 

The broken tool illuminates a totality of relations; the crashed car lights up a system of reference. Both reveal a world less substantial than semiotic, one in which the body is a systems function. Such at least is Ballard’s post-traumatic conception of the crash-body. His accident reveals his body’s semiotic status in a system as wide as the world as surface. Ballard’s meta-physical lust for Catherine shows how far that system extends the body conceptual:

 

Every aspect of Catherine at this time seemed a model of something else, endlessly extending the possibilities of her body and personality. As she stepped naked across the floor of the bathroom, pushing past me with a look of nervous distraction; as she masturbated in the bed beside me in the mornings, thighs splayed symmetrically, fingers groveling at her pubis as if rolling to death some small venereal snot; as she sprayed deodorant into her armpits, those tender fossas like mysterious universes; as she walked with me to my car, fingers playing amiably across my left shoulder–all these acts and emotions were ciphers searching for their meaning among the hard, chromium furniture of our minds. A car-crash in which she would die was the one event which would release the codes waiting within her. (180)

 

Catherine’s every move models in its geometry some other aspect of the system, disseminating the body conceptual throughout the world as surface. The shock to this system that the crash inflicts reveals the worldhood of that surface even as it assimilates, in one final, fatal catastrophe, the human organism to it. This transfiguration is as close to salvation as late industrial culture has come, and Vaughan is its messiah. Its immanence is what makes him so angelic and so appalling, an “ugly golden creature, made beautiful by its scars and wounds” (201). He is the alien messenger of some new semio-gnosis, and his crash-body is its risen Christ.

 

IV

 

Vaughan bears comparison to the old messiah. For nearly two millennia, Western culture wound a web of signs around the body of Christ crucified. It is clearly an overstatement, but one worth pondering, to say that this brutalized, broken body set the terms for representation in the culture of the Christian West. Hanging limp from a wooden cross, the body of God was the locus Christus of signification. Alpha and Omega, all signs began and ended there. But how different the effect of this image of somatic catastrophe than that of Ballard’s crash-body. If the latter reveals, in its trauma, its status as a semiotic function, the crucified body of Christ asserts instead its own empty substance. Vaughan’s is a semiotic body where Christ’s is organic. The latter grounds representation in a dead substance that solicits transcendence. Representing the dead substance of the organic body, Christ crucified transcendentalizes representation. It is after all God’s body that hangs from the cross. The world that announces itself with the broken body of God is not a semiotic but a sacred totality. The catastrophe of crucifixion reveals only one meaningful relationship, that between death and Life, us and Him. Through the representation of the body crucified, then, catastrophe effects transcendence.

 

Figure 2. Panel from the Isenheimer Altar by Matthias Grünewald. Picture: Octave Zimmerman, Musée d’Unterlinden, Colmar, Germany. Click image for larger picture.

 

The myriad images of the crucifixion that still permeate Western culture disseminate this effect. A brief look at one of the most famous should illustrate the point. The Isenheimer Altar, painted by the mysterious master Matthias Grünewald sometime between 1512 and 1516, presents an image of Christ crucified that has become renowned for its horror. Never has the body of Christ appeared so gruesome (Figure 2). As if suspended between the ground below and an unfathomable abyss above, it hangs from a cross, flanked by Johns (the Baptist and the Beloved) and Marys (the Mother and the Magdalen), awaiting a proper burial. Christ’s body is unnervingly inert, unambiguously dead. And not merely dead–but rotting. Fingers splayed with rigor mortis, toes dripping congealed blood, it bears the viscid signs of impossible suffering (Figure 3). The skin is pierced in a thousand places by thorns that gouged and broke. The wounds have begun to fester, peppering the entire torso with putrid spots. The flesh beneath is cold and sallow, as if hung on a hook to drain. In the hollow just below the ribs on the left gapes an oozing laceration–a new orifice, voluble with blood. Above it the head of Christ drops earthward in decay. Impaled, not crowned, with thorns, it bows to gravity, a dead weight. The mouth that spoke in cure and parable now grimaces in silence. Its teeth and tongue frame an inner dark; its lips are thick and blue. Grünewald’s body of Christ crucified succumbs to putrefaction. It signifies its own inertia: the materiality of a dead and meaningless letter. The pale moon that shines above illuminates only a palpable absence. Christ’s body in its silence cries to heaven for restitution.

 

Figure 3. Detail from The Isenheimer Altar by Mattias Grünewald. Picture: Octave Zimmerman, Musée d’Unterlinden, Colmar, Germany.

 

Hence the cultural function of its representation: to ground transcendence in bodily trauma. A dead and rotting organism needs a meaning that will heal it. Such is the problem that bodily suffering presents; it inspires an absolute solution. As Nietzsche said, not suffering but meaningless suffering is the curse that plagues humanity. The body crucified offers up a meaning that mitigates the curse. It grounds a transcendence that suffuses and redeems its emptiness. In this regard it makes perfect sense that the Isenheimer Altar stood originally in a church that was also a hospital, a place of solace for those suffering the boil-plague of St. Anthony’s fire. Itself a medicament, Grünewald’s painting served to treat the suffering it depicted. As pilgrims identified their pains with those appearing in the dead flesh of Christ’s body, they awakened to the prospect of divine restitution. Grünewald’s painting is a subjectivity-machine, remaking sufferers into subjects of transcendence. The Isenheimer Altar (re)produces a subjectivity conducive to a higher meaning for human suffering, which it then legitimates by means of a narrative of salvation.

 

Figure 4. Panel from the Isenheimer Altar by Matthais Grünewald. Picture: Octave Zimmerman, Musée d’Unterlinden, Colmar, Germany. Click image for larger picture.

 

The painting unfolds a story that adds depth to its dismal surface–literally unfolds, as its panels open to reveal this salubrious meaning (Figure 4). Erupting with movement, light, and color, it confronts the sufferer with a narrative that opens from within the empty body of Christ crucified to subsume it in a higher presence. At the center of the narrative is that body, appearing palpably in three different forms: newborn, cadaver, and risen Christ. It instantly becomes clear that the rotting flesh of Christ crucified amounts only to a static moment in a larger movement that would explain it. Inside Grünewald’s crucifixion hides a metanarrative of salvation. That this metanarrative includes the sumptuous episodes of the Annunciation, Birth, and Resurrection of Christ shows it to be underwritten by the Word of God. But the role of Christ’s body in substantiating this Story of stories is what is remarkable here. Its three incarnations center in its substance a logos of transcendence. If for Ballard the body has become a semiotic function, here it makes semiotics possible. The body crucified grounds the circulation of signs in this metanarrative of salvation. Its putrefying flesh is revealed to be the condition of a semiotics that moves dialectically from birth to resurrection. What at first appeared a dead cadaver signifies instead the antithesis of Christ’s thetic birth, the reversal of a synthetic body-logic that reaches fulfillment in the resurrection. It doesn’t take a Hegel to see that these three bodies substantiate a dialectical logos that subsumes organic suffering. Even their placement–the dead body beneath the newborn, the risen body above both–enacts the logos of the body crucified. This body is not a function of signs but their foundation.

 

And the operation of its logic reproduces a subject of transcendence. As Grünewald’s painting unfolds, it opens up a higher perspective–again, quite literally. Part of the confusion involved in contemplating this particular crucifixion comes with the multiple perspectives that swirl around it. Christ on the cross appears directly opposite and lit from above while the other figures are lit from the front and appear from various perspectives: John the Baptist from the side, Mary Magdalen from on high, etc. This multiplication of perspectives deprives any one of them absolute authority. Death disrupts the subject as it rots the body. With the opening of the triptych, however, two alternatives emerge. The tableau of Mother Mary all but lacks perspective, a surface in high medieval style ordered by the faint but imperious image at the upper left of God. All is coherent here, but in a condition of innocence prior to the crucifixion. It is in the dialectical movement to the image of the risen Christ that a new perspective emerges. Its all but unbearable brightness of being brings to the space of the final tableau an unprecedented depth, which the foreshortened postures of the fallen guards beneath only exaggerate. This is a space wholly structured by the subject of transcendence. Here appears in all its glory the ultimate solution to the problem of meaningless suffering: a higher and undying perspective from which to view the body crucified. The Isenheimer Altar reproduces in its viewers this subject of transcendence, to the healthful end of healing bodily miseries with a much higher meaning.

 

And what of bodily delight? The subject of transcendence views sexuality from on high, radically devaluing its substantial pleasures. The logic of the body crucified subsumes them in its upward movement, identifying human sexuality with death and promoting a higher, post-sexual life. Archetypal unwed mother, Mary holds in her arms the tender body of the infant Christ, the fully developed image of which lies dead and decaying in the tableau immediately beneath her. The organic body fulfills its possibilities only by dying. Brief, then, and lethal are the joys of bodily love. Christ’s livid cadaver attests to it loudly, demonstrating that a sexuality of the body dies with the body. Only when delight originates not in the body but in the life above does it lead to something better than a corpse. The Isenheimer Altar conveys this sublimation of organic sexuality by locating high above Christ’s limp loincloth a glowing image of God the father, holding in his radiant hands a Sceptre and a Globe. Good sex is God sex. When the life of the body originates above, it transcends the dying animal. In the world of Grünewald’s masterpiece, as in the culture of the Christian West, an organic sexuality breeds an ontology of death. The subject of transcendence that the painting reproduces, however, subsumes it in the post-sexual perspective of a risen life.

 

V

 

According to Ballard, all has changed. If the trauma of the body crucified lights up this transcendence, that of the body conceptual reveals its collapse into signs. A post-sexual perspective is not possible in a world where the body has been reborn as a semiotic function. Sexuality becomes a matter no longer of life and death but of dissemination. Sown over the whole field of culture, it reproduces signs of desire. And because its origins are not organic but semiotic, this sexuality cannot die; it lives persistently as signs. Ballard’s crash-body reveals a new alternative to the old transcendence, an eschatological semiotics coextensive with culture. Where once the rotting body of the crucifixion contained the play of signs, now the ruptured body of a crash multiplies it. Vaughan, the weird messiah of this perpetual resurrection, inhabits a strange new cultural space beyond both the opposition of life and death and the organic body that substantiates it. From his perspective, human life has outlived these distinctions, as Ballard observes through his eyes: “I looked out at the drivers of the cars alongside us, visualizing their lives in the terms Vaughan had defined for them. For Vaughan they were already dead” (137). Already dead because never alive, not in the traditional sense. Theirs is an existence made real not by body and blood but by speed and steel. Sexuality sustains such an existence by reproducing appearance rather than substance. Hence the high eroticism of a crash: it releases a sexuality of signs that supersede the organic body: “This pervasive sexuality filled the air, as if we were members of a congregation leaving after a sermon urging us to celebrate our sexualities with friends and strangers, and were driving into the night to imitate the bloody eucharist we had observed with the most unlikely partners” (157). This new eucharist transignifies where the old one transfigures, resurrecting the sexuality of signs in the catastrophe of a crash.

 

Crash thus documents the obsolescence of transcendence, its collapse into a sexual semiotics driven by cars and cameras. In the landscape of late industrial culture, the new transcendental is the media, sexuality its pervasive paraclete, and Vaughan its only begotten son–at least for now. The body crucified has finally died and in its place has arisen the body conceptual. Vaughan’s genius–and his dark example–is simply to give his life over to the semiotic system that produces and disseminates it, working ultimately to unite them. No subject of transcendence emerges to meliorate a suffering body. Signification assimilates both, rendering misery superfluous. What matters to Vaughan is total equivalence between the body conceptual and a semiotic system that disseminates the life of signs. It falls to Ballard, the accidental apostle, to witness this transignification. He sees that Vaughan’s life is irreducible to the organic: “Vaughan’s body was a collection of loosely coupled planes. The elements of his musculature and personality were suspended a few millimetres apart” (198). Ballard sees too that such a life fulfills itself, not in some higher meaning, but in the system of signification itself.

 

His infatuation with Vaughan unfolds incrementally according to the logos of that system, as Ballard recognizes in retrospect: “Thinking of the photographs in the questionnaires, I knew that they defined the logic of a sexual act between Vaughan and myself” (137). Because “for Vaughan the motor-car was the sexual act’s greatest and only true locus” (171), Ballard’s initiation into the mysteries of the body conceptual can only occur in transit, the car serving as a signification module, a steel bower less of sexual than of semiotic intercourse: “His attraction lay not so much in a complex of familiar anatomical triggers… but in the stylization of posture achieved between Vaughan and the car. Detached from his automobile, particularly his own emblem-filled highway cruiser, Vaughan ceased to hold any interest” (117). Only when reconstituted conceptually by the interior of an automobile does Vaughan’s body seem appealing, only when assimilated to the sexuality of signs. Then it can circulate throughout the semiotic system and the world as surface.

 

The epiphany of this system and thus of the body conceptual that it disseminates comes in the LSD apocalypse that consummates Ballard’s liaison with Vaughan. Like a car wreck or a crucifixion, hallucinogens crash the subject. The benign catastrophe they inflict also lights up “a totality constantly sighted beforehand in circumspection” (Heidegger 105). Where the catastrophe of the crucifixion reveals a compensatory transcendence, this one reveals its return to the world as surface:

 

An armada of angelic creatures, each surrounded by an immense corona of light, was landing on the motorway on either side of us, sweeping down in opposite directions. They soared past, a few feet above the ground, landing everywhere on these endless runways that covered the landscape. I realized that all these roads and expressways had been built by us unknowingly for their reception. (199)

 

These angels herald not the risen Christ but his latest avatar, the disseminated Vaughan. In this acid-driven vision of the world as surface Vaughan has become coextensive with its totality, as Ballard will as well through their semio-sexual union. Vaughan excarnates the system that disseminates the body conceptual: “I was sure that the white ramp [of the motorway] was a section of Vaughan’s body” (205). Assimilated to the world as surface, he achieves the perpetual resurrection of signs: “The spurs of deformed metal, the triangles of fractured glass, were signals that had lain unread for years in this shabby grass, ciphers translated by Vaughan and myself as we sat with our arms around each other” (200). So when Ballard finally fulfills the sexual logic of their liaison, he experiences with his new messiah this resurrection without transcendence, this rebirth of a crash-body neither living nor dead:

 

Together we showed our wounds to each other, exposing the scars on our chests and hands to the beckoning injury sites on the interior of the car, to the pointed sills of the chromium ashtrays, to the lights of a distant intersection. In our wounds we celebrated the re-birth of the traffic-slain dead, the deaths and injuries of those we had seen dying by the roadside and the imaginary wounds and postures of the millions yet to die. (203)

 

With the collapse of transcendence into a culturally pervasive semiotic system comes new life everlasting–in haec signi.

 

This, then, is the landscape of late industrial culture according to Ballard: a world as surface continuous with the semiotic system that reproduces it. In such a world the human body is transformed, best revealed by the banal, pervasive catastrophe of a crash. The crash serves our culture as the crucifixion served the Christian West, its images circulating to sustain the possibility of another life. For Ballard’s crash-body cannot die. It revives with every traffic fatality. Ballard sees in Vaughan’s example the life of signs, even after Vaughan’s “death”: “I thought of Vaughan, covered with flies like a resurrected corpse, watching me with a mixture of irony and affection. I knew that Vaughan could never really die in a car-crash, but would in some way be re-born through those twisted radiator grilles and cascading windshield glass” (210). Vaughan lives in the myriad crashes that resurrect the life of signs. What is the death of the organic body to this system of signification? A superfluity, a nostalgia. The coming of AIDS since the publication of Crash in 1973 renders its documentation of this change all the more unnerving. Among contemporary artists Andy Warhol best understands the latter (Figure 5). He too knows that the crash is our crucifixion, the crash-body our alpha and omega. His prints define the logic of an atrocity that transignifies. Crash.

 

Figure 5. Andy Warhol, White Burning Car I, 1963. Image copyright (c) 2000 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / ARS, New York. Click image for larger picture.

Coda: Princess Die!

 

It was in a strange state of surreality that I awoke some time ago to the sound of a bereaved radio reporter quietly announcing the death in a car crash of Princess Diana. Was it a sick if inevitable joke? A pirated BBC broadcast of Ballard’s latest atrocity fiction? For a few peculiar moments I felt I had been translated onto the pages of some hyper-realist sequel to Crash. The scene was so familiar: the crumpled Mercedes, the oozing fluids, the broken body of a celebrity known to me, with peculiar intimacy, only through media images. And the photographers, the real makers of the immortal Princess Di: brutes clutching sinister mechanisms by pistol grips trained upon her corpse. The imputation of their responsibility came as a supreme banality. Of course. The logic of the life of signs requires their perpetration of this sacrifice. The surprise is not that Princess Di is dead, or that she died in a car crash, or that photographers had a hand in it. These are the simple facts of our semiotic life. The surprise is how perfectly Ballard documented it all twenty years in advance. He is the prophet of the new life of signs, the vita nuova of crash and camera. The remaining question, the darker question, is how the death of Princess Di will affect us sexually. Are we, with Vaughan, at one with her in the cockpit of that fated Mercedes?

 

Works Cited

 

• Ballard, J. G. The Atrocity Exhibition. 1969. San Francisco: RE/SEARCH Publications, 1990.
• —. Crash. 1973. New York: Vintage, 1995.
• Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1962.
• Lewis, Jeremy. “An Interview with J. G. Ballard.” Mississippi Review 20.1-2 (1991): 27-40.

 

 

 

 

12.1
September, 2001 Every issue of Postmodern Culturecarries notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcements, free of charge. If you respond to one of the ads or announcements below, please mention that you saw the notice in PMC.

 

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Publication Announcements

• glosszine.org
• Text–Special Issue 2
• Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle: New Translation

• mark(s) v. 2.02

Conferences, Calls for Papers, Invitations to Submit

• Technotopias: Texts, Identities, and Technological Cultures
• Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness
• Modern Language Association Publication Prizes 2002

General Announcements

• Joel Alden Kingston Exhibit: Manifestations

• NECSI Education Programs

 

Jeffrey Insko

Department of English
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
jinsko@english.umass.edu

 

Review of: And God Created Great Whales.Conceived and Composed by Rinde Eckert. Performed by Rinde Eckert and Nora Cole. Directed by David Schweizer. The Culture Project at 45 Bleecker, New York, NY. 9 September 2000.

 

There’s a clever irony in the very premise of And God Created Great Whales, Rinde Eckert’s funny, haunting, and irreverent chamber opera, which finished a two-week off-Broadway run last fall: Nathan, the protagonist, is struggling to remember Moby-Dick. It’s a problem he likely shares with the show’s audience. After all, Melville’s masterpiece is, in M. Thomas Inge’s phrase, “the great unread American novel” (696). It’s also the one work of American fiction everyone knows, even if one has never read it; or for many Americans it’s the one novel they would prefer to forget having been forced to read in college. But Nathan’s inability to recall Moby-Dick is more than just a case of literary amnesia, for he’s desperately rushing to complete his professional opus–an operatic adaptation of Moby-Dick–before his rapidly deteriorating memory, plagued by some unspecified atrophic condition, fails completely.

 

That a failure of memory should form the basis of this marvelous opera-within-an-anti-opera is fitting. Remembering Moby-Dick, often in oblique ways, forms something of a tradition in twentieth-century America. In the past few years alone, for instance, those of us with an eye on the roiling seas of American popular culture eager for sightings have seen the whale breach in the most unexpected of places, not only on stage but also in print and on screen. Consider: Laurie Anderson’s most recent performance, Songs and Stories from Moby-Dick, unveiled the year before And God Created Great Whales; an op-ed column in the New York Times in which historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. compares Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s investigation of President Clinton to “Captain Ahab’s monomaniacal ‘quenchless feud’ with the White Whale”; the publications of Sena Jeter Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife (1999), Tim Severin’s In Search of Moby-Dick (2000), and Nathaniel Philbrick’s National Book Award-winning In the Heart of the Sea (2000); and a new television version of the novel (1998) featuring Star Trek‘s Patrick Stewart as Ahab.¹ To these, add the countless allusions to the novel on television shows from The X-Files to The Simpsons; mentions of it in movies as disparate as Ricochet, Deep Impact, and Before Night Falls; and even a full-page newspaper ad from the Microsoft Corporation that reproduces the novel’s opening paragraph to announce their “Microsoft Reader.” A century and a half after publication, Herman Melville’s novel, if not his fictitious whale, appears to be everywhere.

 

Perhaps Ishmael should have been less incredulous when he remarked on “the superstitiously inclined” who accepted “the unearthly conceit that Moby-Dick was ubiquitous” (Melville 158). Or perhaps this ubiquity is nothing new. Since the revival of Melville during the 1920s and ’30s, when he was plucked from literary obscurity and fashioned into the quintessential, heroic American artist, unappreciated and misunderstood, his greatest novel has persisted not only as a pop-culture icon, a mainstay of comic books and seafood restaurants, but as a touchstone for artists with “grand and lofty” ambitions, from John Barrymore, who played the role of the mad Captain twice on film, one silent (1926) and one with sound (1929), to John Huston, whose own film adaptation (1956) starred Gregory Peck and Orson Welles (who wrote just one play, Moby-Dick–Rehearsed), and for several of the most well-known figures in post-WWII American art: Pollock, Stella, Motherwell, Serra, and Basquiat.² Certainly no other nineteenth-century American novel has left such an impression in our cultural memory.

 

Inseparable from this rich and disorderly intertextual network, Moby-Dick might well be considered one of the great ongoing cultural productions of postmodern America; a diffuse text that writers, musicians, artists, and politicians, as well as the creators and consumers of popular culture continue to respond to, abuse, revise, and appropriate. And God Created Great Whales is both aware of and a contribution to this vast constellation of meanings within which Melville’s text circulates. With a rare blend of critical intelligence and emotional intensity, it foregoes a faithful recreation of Moby-Dick in favor of a postmodern reimagining. And in a tight 75 minutes, Eckert not only manages to capture the spirit of Melville’s novel–its unruliness and wit as well as its tragedy–but also to provide both a reading of the novel and a meta-commentary on his own musical form, sporting with the conventions of opera as irreverently as Melville flouted novelistic form.

 

The performance opens to find Nathan, played by Eckert, seated at his piano, which is propped up by wooden crates, lashed with rope and covered with sheaves of paper and Post-it notes. Suspended from the ceiling by black wires, naked light bulbs of various colors surround the stage, evoking a ship’s rigging and providing a visual pun on Nathan’s condition, his mind’s intermittent episodes of darkness and light, and his brief flashes of inspiration. To stave off his memory loss, we learn quickly, Nathan has constructed two elaborate systems that allow him to continue his work. The first is a network of tape-recorders (of the old-fashioned rectangular variety), color-coded, strewn across his piano, dangling from wires at the back of the set, one even hanging from his neck and secured to his waist with duct-tape. These provide Nathan with a surrogate mind and offer detailed instructions: “Your name is Nathan. You are suffering memory loss. Today you will continue to work on your opera: Moby-Dick.” As the performance unfolds, the voice on the tape becomes the voice of Nathan’s progressive disease, the messages a matter-of-fact report on the worsening of his condition: “if you are still listening, your disease has reached an advanced stage.” The second system Nathan has devised is stranger still: it’s a figment of his imagination, a muse in the form of a former diva named Olivia, to whom Nathan is to be obedient, the voice on the tape explains, in all matters concerning his opera.

 

Working together, these two recreate Nathan’s version of Moby-Dick. Played by Nora Cole, whose powerful mezzo-soprano is a match for Eckert’s own remarkable voice, Olivia instructs and cajoles, admonishes and inspires Nathan, pushing him toward completion. The audience is thus treated to a glimpse inside the creative process, which is to say, inside Nathan’s faltering consciousness. When Nathan digresses in Ishmaelean fashion–say, to ruminate on his mind maintaining an independent existence after his body has passed away (thus explicating at once the symbolic meaning of his tape recordings and the presence of Olivia, who, after all, is really Nathan)–Olivia steers him back to his task. Occasionally in solo, but more often in tandem, they perform bits of scenes from the novel, substituting Eckert’s gorgeous and surprisingly accessible music for Melville’s language. And it’s a fair swap: the range of Eckert’s musical vocabulary–he hybridizes classical composition with styles as diverse as pop, gospel, and old sea chants–is a match for Melville’s own discursive range.

 

But while Olivia’s primary charge is to assist Nathan, as a performer Cole is hardly relegated to the margins of Nathan’s/Melville’s narrative. Singing the roles of Bulkington, Queequeg, Tashtego and various other male characters aboard the Pequod, Olivia represents the subversive entrance of a prominent female into Melville’s masculine world, allowing Eckert to riff on Moby-Dick‘s notorious gender-exclusivity. One of the play’s funniest running jokes, for instance, is Olivia’s attempt to convince Nathan to write her into the opera: she could swoop down from the sky at the end, she suggests, to rescue the orphaned Ishmael. Of course, Melville is an easy target on this point, and so Eckert doesn’t belabor it. Yet the force of Cole’s riveting presence–as an African-American female embodying so convincingly Melville’s sailors–forms a powerful critique of both Moby-Dick and the culture that has produced it by staging, literally, gender performativity and racial fluidity–the easily forgotten subtext of Ishmael and Queequeg’s homoerotically charged friendship.

 

Eckert is likewise fascinating to watch. A large, bald white man dressed in a gray suit that looks as if he’s been sleeping in it, he affects Nathan’s frailty with the smallest of gestures: dragging his toes in baby steps, slumping his shoulders feebly. But when he receives a burst of passion, he erupts seamlessly into the more commanding and imposing roles he assigns himself, putting his booming voice to use thundering at the universe as Ahab or exhorting the audience-turned-parishioners as Father Mapple. In fact, Eckert’s version of the sermon on Jonah is one of the show’s highlights, rivaling even Orson Welles’s brilliant performance in the otherwise forgettable John Huston film. At another moment, Eckert shifts just as nimbly into the character of Pip, standing still at the front of the stage to sing a lovely aria in a most unexpected falsetto.

 

Obviously, it’s impossible to treat all of Moby-Dick‘s multiple characters, stories, discourses, and themes in just over an hour. But Eckert is less interested in re-presenting Moby-Dick than in he is in striving for the kind of “outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep” possessed by Melville’s novel. And this is the great advantage of Eckert’s art form: his music provides the means to compress language. As if to demonstrate this very principle, one exchange has Nathan poised at his piano as Olivia feeds him the names of characters from the novel, each of which Nathan renders in a few short bars, thus transforming Melville’s cast of “isolatoes” into the stock figures of grand opera. Here Eckert is at his most self-consciously playful, parodying both generalized ideas about Moby-Dick and operatic conventions. Not only does he register the novel’s radical shifts in mood and tone, but by mocking the seriousness of both opera and Moby-Dick (as opposed, say, to the “misreadings” perpetrated in comic books and seafood restaurants), he deflates “high” art’s claims to transcendence. Yet, as if to refuse the audience the easy pleasures of such ironic knowingness, these moments are undercut by other parts of the performance that sing so rich in human emotion that truth and beauty and transcendence almost seem possible again.

 

It’s this balance between postmodern irony (always in danger of becoming what Jameson famously called “blank parody”[17]) and truthful emotion that makes And God Created Great Whales so much more satisfying than most adaptations of Moby-Dick. Unlike the four film versions of the novel, Eckert doesn’t succumb to what might be called the Ahab-problem; that is, he doesn’t concentrate solely on the novel’s dramatic narrative: Ahab’s obsessive desire for revenge. Ahab is, of course, an irresistible dramatic subject, an archetypal figure of tragic hubris. But as anyone who has taught Moby-Dick knows, this dimension of the novel doesn’t always translate effectively to our post-ironic age. That is, as compelling as the “fiery hunt” is, reducing a proto-postmodernist work of encyclopedic fiction to a pre-modern tragedy is no longer adequate. Too often Ahab seems to embody the kind of sententiousness that so bothered D. H. Lawrence about Melville himself–“Oh dear, when the solemn ass brays! brays! brays!,” Lawrence wrote (154). Rather, it’s Ishmael’s more protean sensibility that speaks to our age, his willingness to “try all things,” but to accept, finally, indeterminacy, the kind of undecidability of meaning that typically characterizes postmodern fiction: “I but put that brow before you,” he writes, as if to challenge the reader, “Read it if you can” (293). Isolating Ahab’s quest from the novel’s other, multiple competing narrative energies, then, only diminishes Melville’s accomplishment by attributing to the text a unitary set of meanings that its unreadability and its multivocality work to resist. And worse, it consigns Moby-Dick to the unfortunate status of just another dusty classic with little claim on our attention.

 

Consider, for instance, two additional contributions to the ongoing production of Melville’s text: Laurie Anderson’s Songs and Stories from Moby-Dick and Tim Hawkinson’s Überorgan. Anderson’s performance style, with its presentation and proliferation of images and languages from across the contemporary American landscape, might seem to lend itself naturally to capturing Moby-Dick‘s heteroglossia. Yet, Songs and Stories, while a pleasurable enough experience (at least for Melville aficionados), ultimately seems to subordinate Anderson’s art to Melville’s.³ She creates plenty of atmosphere, both visually and aurally: long lines of scrolling text, for instance, are superimposed over vast images of seascapes and projected onto an enormous scrim at the back of the stage, and her music, bass-heavy or provided by her ingenious and unnerving “talking stick”–a computerized lance that emits digitally enhanced musical notes as she runs her hands along its breadth–ranges from the ethereal to the funky. But Anderson treats Moby-Dick as nearly inviolable, with little of the incisive, critical consciousness–or the sly ironic wit–that typically characterizes her work.

 

By contrast, it’s easy to be captivated by Hawkinson’s Überorgan–a massive installation/sculpture on display at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art–without knowing anything about Moby-Dick, though to experience it is akin to what it must be like to stand in the belly of a whale. A 300-foot network of twelve enormous air-filled polyethylene bladders, many of them suspended from the ceiling, the Überorgan plays on the double meaning of the “organ” in its title. That is, it at once suggests the intestinal system of an impossibly large animal (a mythical whale, for instance) and a musical instrument. Controlled by a rudimentary central nervous system–a mechanism that operates on the principles of the player-piano–a series of valves opens and closes, causing sounds like foghorns or the lowing of cows or flatulence to be emitted from long foil-covered pipes affixed with reeds. Überorgan combines wonder and spectacle, ambition and scope, with pleasure and self-mocking–it’s art that is at once serious and just plain fun. Hawkinson has said that he had Moby-Dick in mind when conceiving his Überorgan,⁴ but the association Hawkinson’s piece forms with Melville’s text has little to do with Captain Ahab and his monomania. Rather, like And God Created Great Whales, Überorgan evokes not just the Moby-Dick of Ahab–the “au grand sérieux,” to borrow from Lawrence again–but the Moby-Dick of Ishmael, his vaulting imagination as well as his delight in making a fart joke.⁵

 

Of course, Moby-Dick can no more do without Ahab than it can do without the white whale. But the fact that these two symbols now have an existence in American culture almost independent of the novel from which they sprang–which is to say that they have become a part of our common language, in effect, literary clichés–has its unfortunate side. Melville’s novel is easily drained of its power to challenge, to shock, and to provoke (“I have written a wicked book,” Melville said after finishing Moby-Dick, “and feel spotless as the lamb”) and is instead put to use selling coffee for Starbuck’s and electronic equipment for Microsoft. The trouble is that, for all its value, our present scholarly preoccupation with “historicizing” is ill-suited to combat consumer culture’s tendency to simplify and to sanitize.⁶ And it’s surely too much to ask of our artists that they should fight that battle. Hawkinson and Eckert, however, offer hope: by creating work that’s both powerful and pleasurable–by granting their audiences a new point of entry into Moby-Dick and making it fun again–they suggest exciting new ways of reinventing a text that is, after all, always already ours.

 

Notes

 

1. A novel, Ahab’s Wife tells the story of Una, the bride of Ahab (mentioned once in Moby-Dick) and her adventures during the Pequod‘s voyages. These include working as a cabin boy on board the whaleship Sussex (a thinly veiled version of the famous Essex; see below), harboring a fugitive slave, befriending Margaret Fuller, and attending meetings with the Transcendentalists. In In Search of Moby Dick, the travel-writer Tim Severin re-traces Melville’s overseas journeys looking for evidence of an actual White Whale. In the Heart of the Sea is a historical account of the famous whaleship Essex, stove by a whale in 1821. Melville read first mate Owen Chase’s account of the disaster before writing Moby-Dick.

 

2. For more on Moby-Dick in twentieth-century American art, see Schultz and, more recently, Wallace.

 

3. I attended Anderson’s show at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on 15 October 1999.

 

4. Überorgan was commissioned by the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Hawkinson describes how, “early on, I learned that Herman Melville wrote Moby-Dick while he was living in Pittsfield, which is just down the road from Mass MoCA [in North Adams, MA]. My piece relates to the book and more generally to the nautical, with all the netting and lashing and rigging and the foghornlike sounds and the massive rib cage and organs” (152). This summer, Hawkinson and Eckert were together at Mass MoCA, where And God Created Great Whales played for two nights (after the deadline for this review) in August. Überorgan is on display through October 2001.

 

5. Among Ishmael’s reasons for going to sea as a sailor, he lists “the wholesome exercise and pure air of the forecastle deck.” Then he adds: “For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim)” (15). Pythagoras recommended a restricted diet, which included avoiding beans, which cause flatulence.

 

6. That is, while the “new historicism” (broadly conceived) has been effective in demonstrating the literary text’s social indebtedness and has broadened our sense of what constitutes both literary and historical textuality, with regard to the texts of the past (like Moby-Dick) it also has the unfortunate effect of insisting that a text “belongs” to its moment of production (rather than to its various moments of reception). It thus tends to fix texts in the past, to shackle them to a particular cross-section of historical time, denying the possibility that texts of the past can perform cultural work in the present.

Works Cited

 

• Hawkinson, Tim. “Tim Hawkinson Talks about Überorgan.” Artforum (Sep. 2000): 152-3.
• Inge, M. Thomas. “Melville in Popular Culture.” A Companion to Melville Studies. Ed. John Bryant. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986.
• Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.
• Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature. New York: Penguin, 1977.
• Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. New York: W.W. Norton, 1967.
• Schlesinger, Arthur Jr. “So Much for the Imperial Presidency.” New York Times 3 Aug. 1998, late ed.: A19.
• Schultz, Elizabeth A. Unpainted to the Last: Moby-Dick and Twentieth-Century American Art. Lawrence: U of Kansas P, 1995.
• Wallace, Robert K. Frank Stella’s Moby-Dick: Words and Shapes. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2000.

 

Piotr Gwiazda

English Department
University of Miami, Coral Gables
pgwiazda@mail.as.miami.edu

 

Review of: “Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World.” Special Exhibition at the New York Public Library. October 2000-January 2001. Exhibition website: <http://www.nypl.org/utopia>.

 

A few years ago, I told an English professor (who regularly teaches Thomas More’s Utopia in his Renaissance literature courses) that I was preparing to give a paper at a conference of the Society for Utopian Studies. He asked me where the meeting was scheduled to take place. I answered, “Montreal.” We discussed other matters for a while and then, just as I was about to leave his office, the professor said to me: “You realize you gave the wrong answer to my question.” “What question?” “About that Utopian Society’s meeting. The right answer should have been nowhere.” He smiled. “The utopians meet nowhere, eh?”

 

Between October 2000 and January 2001, utopia was on view in New York–in a special exhibition at the New York Public Library entitled “Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World.” Jointly organized by the library and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the exhibition featured more than 550 objects, including books, manuscripts, drawings, prints, maps, photographs, films, and assorted ephemera. One part of the exhibition represented manifestations of utopian thought and sentiment from antiquity through the end of the nineteenth century. Another represented the twentieth century and now continues in the virtual space of the library’s website (<http://www.nypl.org/utopia>), where it examines the internet as the next “New World” of the apparently imperishable utopian impulse.

 

This is a large exhibition that requires several hours of concentrated study, since every item on display is worth one’s time. The show encompasses only the tradition of Western thought within which utopia acquired its own history of evolution, its own great narrative, so to speak. Assembling an exhibition like this is in itself an attempt to create a logic of continuity of utopian ideology and praxis that begins with the biblical Garden of Eden and ends with the metaworlds of cyberspace. What comes in between is various, fascinating, and often unexpected; it includes gulags and concentration camps, as well as the hippie communes of the 1960s and 1970s. In addition to Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), the book that gave the genre its name, one finds, for example, Thomas Jefferson’s original version of the Declaration of Independence; Voltaire’s manuscript of Candide opened to the El Dorado chapter; and nineteenth-century cartoons ridiculing Cabet, Proudhon, and other social visionaries. Overall, the exhibition presents a quirky history of utopian imagination dominated by the human desire to improve everyday reality and create a better place on earth.

 

The New York Public Library exhibition included two transparent plexiglass reading chambers, in which one could peacefully reflect on a number of utopian texts, such as paperback editions of Paine’s Common Sense, Butler’s Erewhon, and Huxley’s Brave New World. The chambers were intended to allow one to appreciate the role of the utopian impulse in Western history and imagination, but they actually turned out to be a strangely disconcerting experience–indicative perhaps of the astonishing ubiquity of the genre, if one thinks of utopia as a genre. After several hours spent in the mixed company of Francis Bacon, Karl Marx, and H. G. Wells, one realizes that utopia affects all levels of human experience and is present in nearly every form of artistic, political, and religious expression.

 

This might be, in fact, the fundamental premise of the utopian narrative: utopia is the essential, unfulfilled dream of humanity that continues to affect us, but at the same time remains very difficult to pin down. The most important distinction one could draw between the exhibition’s numerous manifestations of the utopian tendency is between utopias imagined and utopias attempted. Utopia has always been a matter of both theory and practice. The etymological root of the word leaves it up to us to decide whether utopia is supposed to be a place that is good (eu topos) or a place that does not exist (ou topos). From the logical standpoint, the two possibilities cancel each other out. Thomas More’s paradox may have been just a scholarly joke, but it still holds the world in doubt over the real nature of the utopian project. When one speaks about utopia as a place that is or can potentially be good, one considers it from the positive, practical standpoint. When one speaks about utopia as a place that does not exist, or exists only as the product of the imagination, one understands it in terms of negation or criticism of the reality at hand. The exhibition verifies that utopia simultaneously exists and does not exist; it is a valid instrument of social and technological change, but it is also a permanently unfulfilled fantasy of a better life.

 

This paradoxical status of utopia is also its crucial problem. In Plato’s The Republic (which has a prominent place at the exhibition), Socrates paints a picture of the perfect community while also insisting that the success of his argument depends on the imaginative cooperation of his interlocutors: “suppose we imagine a state coming into being before our eyes” (55); “imagine the condition of men living in a sort of cavernous chamber underground” (227). Socrates, Glaucon, and the other speakers in Plato’s text work out a scheme or plan for the ideal republic that, nevertheless, remains largely within the imaginary, rather than realistic, sphere. The success of the vision relies on the intensity of supposing, conceiving, devising, imagining, or simply desiring the ideal society. The conversation is neither idle talk, and nor is it a speech-act that would imply immediate action. At one point in his discussion, Socrates refers to “a pattern set up in the heavens for one who desires to see it and, seeing it, to found one in himself. But whether it exists anywhere or ever will exist is no matter; for this is the only commonwealth in whose politics he can ever take part” (319-20). So much for utopia and reality. When Socrates alludes to the fact that man can build a perfect commonwealth “in himself,” he really only allows for the possibility of an imagined utopia. Other representatives of this particular understanding of utopia in the exhibition include descriptions of the Golden Age (represented by the appropriate section of a fifteenth-century manuscript of Ovid’s Metamorphoses) and the Land of Cockaigne; and several Christian utopias such as the Garden of Eden, St. Augustine’s City of God, medieval manuscripts of the Book of Revelation, and the New Jerusalem. Literary and philosophical utopias written by More, Francis Bacon, Tomasso Campanella, Edward Bellamy, William Morris, and others remain fictions prima facie and as a whole they remind one of what Hegel once said in Philosophy of History (Engels quotes it on the first page of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific): “Since the sun had been in the firmament, and the planets circled around him, the sight had never been seen of man standing upon his head–i.e. on the Idea–and building reality after this image” (31-32). For Hegel, political changes brought forth by the French Revolution constituted the first sign that human beings were after all going to build reality after an idea–but the exhibition verifies that people stood on their heads quite a long time before the French revolution, and long afterwards.

 

What distinguishes Socrates’s vision from Aristotle’s (mainly in Politics) is precisely the mode of discussion. Aristotle envisions his ideal community from the example of an already existing polis, Athens, and his main preoccupation lies in the possible improvement of the city. Plato constructs his Republic upon an idea; Aristotle forms his upon reality. Plato relies on imagination; Aristotle relies on reason. Other “practical” examples of the utopian impulse in the exhibition feature fifteenth- and sixteenth-century maps and documents describing the newly discovered American continent. Among these one can find Christopher Columbus’s letter to King Ferdinand announcing his discoveries in the New World. Soon after its discovery, the new continent was hailed by the Europeans as the site of the biblical Garden of Eden, a new Earthly Paradise, and an ideal place for a utopian community. Subsequent events and experiences evidently put these ideas to rest, but something genuinely exciting is still detectable in these first documents of America’s conquest. Another good example of combining theory and practice is a set of designs for ideal cities, many of them undertaken by Italian Renaissance architects. Few of these cities ever materialized; the exception was the town of Palmanova near Venice, whose sixteenth-century plan is also on display. The revolutionary ideals of equality and reform constitute an even more practical portion of the exhibition. The American and French Revolutions are given appropriate place and focus; they are complemented by the religious and secular utopian communities established in the nineteenth century. The French Declaration of the Rights of Man is included, and so are charts illustrating widespread changes in weights, measures, and the calendar proposed by the French revolutionaries. Religious communities such as the Shakers and the Mormons are also represented, as are the secular communities of Robert Owen’s New Harmony in Indiana and Etienne Cabet’s Icaria in Illinois (these include photographs, drawings, prints, etc.).

 

The twentieth century saw the flourishing of science fiction, a form of utopianism primarily occupied with advances in science and technology in both the near and distant future. As if to illustrate this new direction, a full size replica of the robot used in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis stood guard at the entrance to the room featuring the second half of the original exhibition. Twentieth-century utopias also differ from their predecessors in another aspect. It is only in this century that we clearly observe the emergence of a troubling counter-genre, dystopia, in theory and in practice. Utopia, it turns out, is a two-edged sword. The fascination with progress, technology, and machines is represented by the Futurist movement in art and literature that came to prominence in Fascist Italy. The euphoric propaganda of the Soviet and Nazi regimes is juxtaposed with the sordid reality these social systems produced: gulags, gas chambers, and concentration camps.

 

The latter part of the twentieth century offers yet another perspective on the utopian impulse and its role in Western civilization. The current debate on advantages and disadvantages of the internet continues these utopian debates, with cyberspace as another locus of utopian possibility. Cyberspace, among other things, creates a potential for transforming oneself into alternate personalities based on viritual, rather than physical, identity. It allows human beings to participate in online communities that are not inhibited by exigencies of space and time. Cyberspace is also said to eliminate discrimination; it is a forum of free expression, promoting democratic principles of equality and tolerance. This is why virtual space is regarded as potentially utopian space. In the words of John Perry Barlow, author of A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, “ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live. We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.” The availability of e-mail, avatars, and chat rooms offers a new perspective on human communications and on human existence in general. The flip side to this, of course, is apparent: the facility with which alternate personalities can be created online may lead to isolation, alienation, and deception. Is the internet a great equalizer? To some extent, yes–but there still exists a potential for discrimination and stratification. Consider: cyberspace is available to millions of people, but only if these people have access to a personal computer, modem, and service provider, a condition which automatically exludes a tremendously large precentage of the global population.

 

The exhibition’s website offers an abundant selection of materials from the original show, and it includes both text and pictures. It also contains a very impressive collection of links to other utopian and cyberspace resources. The website is divided into several sections: Sources, Other Worlds, Utopia in History, Dreams and Nightmares, and Metaworlds. The last section offers a complex engagement with the relationship between utopia and cyberspace, with discussions of parallels between developments in utopian thought and the history of the internet, debates on the internet as a possible utopia, and additional remarks from utopian scholars and experts. In most of these comments one can detect, unsurprisingly, a skeptical resistance to the idea of the internet as an utopian enterprise. “Real” life is still the only life, most utopianists argue, and they consider the internet as something advantageous only to the extent that it makes our real lives easier. Most often, they regard the internet as an advanced form of communication technology, currently fascinating because of its novelty and potential, but likely to feel less utopia-like the more we become accustomed to it. In fact, the whole discussion of cyberspace as utopia may eventually fade away when we begin to take it for granted, just as we eventually took steam engine trains, automobiles, telephones, and television for granted. These technological advances changed our lives, to be sure, but at a pace much slower and in ways more complex than either their enthusiasts or enemies probably would have liked to imagine. At this point, a kind of coolheaded enthusiasm among utopian commentators still prevails, even though some of them are concerned with the dangers of cyberspace that make the internet seem closer to a possible dystopia. In a small way, viewers of the website can also contribute to the debate by taking part in a poll on the relationship between utopia and cyberspace. Although the website is potentially available to millions of people, only approximately 30 have taken part in the survey so far!

 

Even before the publication of More’s book in 1516, utopia existed in the millenarian visions of Old Testament prophets, the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, and the poems of Ovid. Throughout the centuries, humanity has confronted remarkable ideas that convey the utopian impulse, including stories, novels, and political, philosophical, and scientific treatises, and there have been numerous attempts to put these ideas into practice. Some of these permanently altered the face of humanity, while others faded into obscurity. Poised between myth and prophecy, utopia denotes both a recovery of the past and a promise of the future. Although it does not have a defined social role, utopia frequently intends to set a model of society that could be imitated or at least considered as an alternative to the present conditions. Does this mean that utopia is essentially progressive? Can dreams be productive? One is reminded of the good-hearted courtier Gonzalo in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, whose fanciful and candid refusal to confront the reality at hand produces a conventional and necessarily self-contradictory definition of an ideal commonwealth: if he were its king, he would allow “no sovereignty” (II.i.162). If Gonzalo’s commonwealth had ever materialized, it would have been mercilessly refuted by reality the way it was refuted in so many tragic instances in the twentieth century. Utopian consciousness is bound to be whimsical, arbitrary, and sometimes outright dangerous–which may be why so many utopian experiments have ended as dystopias.

 

To return to my anecdote, during my trip to Montreal for the conference of the Society for Utopian Studies I was filled with apprehensions about various Etienne Cabets and Theodore Hertzkas that I half-expected to encounter there. What I found instead was a group of serious thinkers and activists. Many papers I heard were extremely stimulating, but none surpassed my own co-panelist’s presentation on teaching the issues of environmental sustainability to inner-city college freshmen. Here was someone addressing authentic problems and finding excellent practical solutions to them. In the end, the conference revealed to me the true nature of utopia. The best riposte to those who say utopia can only be found nowhere is that, by the same token, it might also be found anywhere.

 

Works Cited

 

• Barlow, John Perry. A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, 1996. <http://eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html>.
• Engels, Friedrich. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Trans. Edward Aveling. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press Publishers, 1935.
• Plato. The Republic. Trans. F. MacDonald Cornford. London: Oxford UP, 1945.
• Shakespeare, William.The Riverside Shakespeare: The Complete Works. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.

 

David Banash

Department of English
University of Iowa
david-banash@uiowa.edu

 

Review of: Traffic. Dir. Steven Soderbergh. Perf. Michael Douglas, Benicio Del Toro, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Dennis Quaid. USA Films, 2000. Blow.Dir. Ted Demme. Perf. Johnny Depp, Penelope Cruz, Paul Reubens, Ray Liotta. New Line Cinema, 2001.

 

Just as the intoxicating sensations of different drugs are incommensurable with one another, so films about different drugs tend to have radically different themes and effects. In American popular culture perhaps the illegal drug with the longest cinema history is marijuana. From propaganda films of the ’30s to Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke, or the more recent revisions such as Half-Baked, these films are, or have become, comedies. Further, almost all of them celebrate the subversively humorous effect of the drug for the preterite working classes. Even anti-marijuana propaganda films have become comedies as new generations receive them as pure camp. While films about marijuana are comedies, films about heroin are almost always tragedies, focusing on the way in which the drug is both a protest against an inhumane world and the immediate means of the hero’s self-destruction. While marijuana films revel in satire, heroin films explore the complexities of self and self-destruction. Distinct from both are films about cocaine, which are almost always evocations of and reflections on the American dream itself, that is to say, on politics in the most practical and quotidian sense of the word. Both Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic and Ted Demme’s Blow explore cocaine and its relationship to politics in the American imaginary. However, the reception of both these films is troubling. Traffic is lauded as the first honest look at the failure of the drug war, while Blow is either hailed or dismissed as yet another compelling but nonetheless vacuous celebration of the decadence of the ’70s and early ’80s. The almost universal mainstream acclaim for Traffic indicates just how much the worst kinds of conservative ideologies continue to inform even purportedly liberal attitudes toward drugs, while the dismissal of Blow as anything more than a decadent fantasy or simplistic cautionary tale misses its much more accurate indictment of the American idealization of capitalist conquest.

 

That cocaine is the drug of the ruling class in America is undoubtedly more than a function of its high price in comparison to other drugs. After all, the effect of cocaine is much closer to the effects of the most popular of the legal drugs of choice: caffeine and nicotine. (Not surprisingly, caffeine and cocaine were once combined in Coca-Cola.) Like these other speedy substances, cocaine heightens the senses and gives the user a great deal of energy. However, unlike other forms of speed, cocaine also gives its user the sensation of mastery and invulnerability. Rather than the ego death of heroin or LSD, cocaine legitimates the preferred modality of capitalist subjectivity–radical and inviolate individuality. If there were any doubt about the relationship of cocaine to capitalism, the case is eloquently made by Tony Montana in Brian De Palma’s Scarface (1983). Much like the original version of the film (1932), De Palma’s Scarface explores the ways in which the gangster is the ultimate representative of capitalism itself. However, in De Palma’s revision the connections between capitalism and cocaine are much more overt. In one of the strongest speeches of the film, the drug lord confronts the WASP establishment in an exclusive restaurant: “You’re not good. You just know how to hide,” he screams at them. In short, there is no difference between legal capitalism and the drug trade; both are exploitative and destructive. Quite clearly, in Scarface the villain is neither Cuba nor cocaine, but the multitude of injustices and contradictions that function as the conditions of possibility for capitalism itself, and its hero is punished in a grisly final scene only insofar as his drugs are themselves the worst kind of exploitative and alienated capital. The association of cocaine with the problems and politics of the ruling classes is also found in such films as Boost, Bright Lights Big City, and Less Than Zero, all ’80s films that indict the decadence of the era. One might even go back to Easy Rider, for while the heroes of that film explore the psychedelic revolution through the use of pot and LSD, they also support themselves as capitalists through the sale of cocaine.

 

The most surprising aspect of Traffic is that it is being presented as a revolutionary approach to representing the war on drugs. In a feature-length review of Traffic, the usually more savvy Salon contributor Jeff Stark argues that “there’s never been a single mainstream movie that’s been big enough, ambitious enough to go after the drug war itself.” According to Stark, if other films about drugs have been “self-contained units that dissect or examine one facet of drug use or the war on drugs, ‘Traffic’ is the solar system.” Stark’s unmitigated celebration of the film is typical of both right- and left-leaning publications, as critics of every stripe seem to be seduced by Soderbergh’s Balzacian aspirations. Indeed, Traffic is a large film, made in the best of Hollywood’s epic tradition. It deftly interweaves three complex stories. Michael Douglas plays the newly appointed Drug Czar, who, while dealing with the problems of his transition, learns that his own daughter is a drug addict. Benicio Del Toro gives the best performance of the film as Rodriguez, a Mexican cop caught between two rival drug cartels. Finally, Catherine Zeta-Jones plays the society wife of an indicted American drug smuggler. As these stories develop, they also connect to one another, with minor characters from one plot turning up in the next. In addition to the epic reach of the film, its style works overtime to convince us that it is indeed after a virtually unmediated presentation of truth. Much of the camera work is hand-held and shaky, and Soderbergh shot much of it himself under the name Peter Andrews. The effect is very much like that of a documentary or news feature. However, in an almost inexplicable and schizophrenic way, the film also calls attention to itself by color coding each aspect of the story: all the action set in the East is tinged in dingy blue, California is shot in bright, exceedingly vivid colors, and Mexico is given a consistent sepia tint by the use of tobacco filters. While often visually stunning, the heavy-handed use of such techniques seems to suggest that Traffic is a didactic film, in which the director goes out of his way to make things as clear as possible lest the audience be confused. For a film that hopes to represent the complexities of the drug war, such reductionism is counter-productive.

 

The film is reductive in other ways, too, which tend to undermine its grand ambitions. To begin with, it is almost exclusively about cocaine, with a supporting role for heroin and less than walk-on cameos for the vast array of schedule-one drugs to which Nancy Reagan told us to just say no. Beyond this, Traffic claims its universal scope while investigating only the U.S.-Mexico drug trade and ignoring the multitude of other nations that engage in all aspects of the business. Finally, though the film is praised for its realism because Soderbergh was able to get walk-on appearances from both Orrin Hatch and Charles Grassly, neither of these politicians is about to propose any kind of radical reforms to the war on drugs. The presence of these politicians is of a piece with Soderbergh’s claim that the 56 million dollar film is in fact an “absolutely” independent production (Dargis). Traffic self-consciously attempts to mark the hypocrisy of the war on drugs by dramatizing the liberal use of alcohol, caffeine, and tobacco by the very people who make official drug policy. At the homes and cocktail parties of the lawmakers, the camera focuses incessantly on glasses of scotch and the bright ends of cigars. Frighteningly, Soderbergh seems to suggest that all drugs are simply pernicious and destructive. In the only real investigation of drug use in the film, we closely follow the Drug Czar’s daughter Caroline through a handful of scenes in which she apparently moves from being a recreational user of cocaine and heroin with other alienated, suburban youth to a raving crack-whore in less than a week. The sequence is the worst in the film, reminding one of nothing so much as the campy drug hysteria that informed the deadpan antics of Sgt. Friday on Dragnet. However, it is perhaps the final resolution to Rodriguez’s story that is the most distasteful. Caught in the midst of a noir triple-cross between two rival drug cartels and the U.S. narcs, Rodriguez plays for his life and a reward. And what does our hero ask for? He demands that the narcs provide lights for the Tijuana baseball diamonds so there can be night play. In fact, the film ends on a shot of his smiling face in the stands under the glare. In the end, the film seems to suggest, isn’t baseball better than drugs? What politician wouldn’t vote for that? Unable to represent the complexities or challenge the dominant narratives of drugs and the drug war, Traffic tries to sell its audience the panacea of baseball.

 

Both Traffic and Blow are adaptations. While Traffic was boiled down from Traffik, a BBC mini-series, Blow emerged from the pages of Bruce Porter’s biography of George Jung. Of course Porter’s original title was a bit more telling: Blow: How a Small-Town Boy Made $100 Million with the Medellín Cocaine Cartel and Lost It All. The narrative implied by the title is precisely what the film delivers as it chronicles Jung’s life from his days as a small-time dope pusher to his role as a major player in cocaine wholesaling and his inevitable bust. Unlike Traffic, Demme’s film of Blow suggests something closer to Scarface‘s much more pointed critique of capitalism, but you wouldn’t know it to read the reviews. As A. O. Scott put it in the New York Times:

 

The recent trend in movies about drugs–exemplified by “Traffic” and “Requiem for a Dream”–is toward a solemn reckoning of their social and psychological costs. “Blow,” with its jaunty visual style, short-attention-span editing, and outlaw-entrepreneur story line, takes a considerably lighter view. If the earnest, ambiguous “Traffic” worried about the insatiable American hunger for illegal pleasures, the breezily nonjudgmental “Blow” celebrates this appetite and makes those who exploit it into hip folk heroes. (Scott)

 

To call Blow either breezy or nonjudgmental is to miss the seriousness of much of the film, as well as its rank sentimentality. Unlike many cocaine films, Blow is short on glamorized scenes of hip, well-dressed people consuming the powder to the appropriate sound track. Instead, the film revolves around Jung’s troubled relationship to his working-class roots in Boston. Caught between his mother’s manic desire for a better life and his bankrupt father’s inability to provide, the film suggests that Jung’s approach to his business was more an attempt to please his parents than a rebellious pursuit of glamour and decadence for their own sake. Growing up in the shadow of wealth and power, the film has the child Jung announce, “I never want to be poor,” and the film moves on from there. What is at stake for Jung is never the kind of counter-cultural idealism associated with pot and LSD that suggests that turning on might make a revolution. Rather, Jung speaks about his time like a corporate stringer. In the film he says he was sent to prison with a “bachelors in pot and came out with a masters in cocaine.” Or, as he even more cynically puts it in Porter’s book, “being in the drug business was like being an executive in any business” (55). What the film tries to argue, at times quite convincingly, is that Jung’s problems have much more to do with class insecurities and the claustrophobia of an Oedipalized family than with the cocaine itself. For this alone, the film is certainly a cut above a paranoid, reactive fantasy like Traffic. As Jung says at another point during his sentencing on a marijuana charge, “all I did was cross an imaginary line with some plants.” However, this is not to say that Blow is any more honest than Traffic about many other issues.

 

Perhaps the most curious aspects of Blow are the revisions of Porter’s book, both necessary and gratuitous. David Edelstein of Slate has already noted the ways in which the film functions as “an unfathomable piece of whitewashing” for making Jung far more sympathetic to his girlfriend, wife, and daughter than the opportunistic misogynist Porter’s book suggests that he is. However, even this doesn’t go far enough. Some characters, such as Jung’s actual California connection Richard Barile, have disappeared altogether, replaced in this case by Paul Reubens’ composite of fictional and actual people. Further, there is no mention of the fact that Jung was eventually released from prison in 1993 after he testified (with the sanction of Pablo Escobar himself) against Carlos Lehder Rivas (the film’s Diego Delgado) in a federal court, nor that Jung’s current 22-year prison term was a result of a 1994 bust for a marijuana-smuggling operation. In fact, while the film version of Jung’s life revolves around his struggle to come to terms with his family, the book focuses almost exclusively on Jung’s troubled and complex relationship to Carlos Lehder and his attempts to become an accepted and trusted member of the Columbian cartel. Finally, there is no mention of Jung’s taste for S&M and cross-dressing, aside from a brief and unexplained moment in which a customs agent is perplexed by Jung’s suitcases full of women’s underwear. In fact, this moment is so inexplicable in the film that one critic was led to interpret it as Depp giving “a small tribute to Ed Wood” (Carr). Such omissions seem strange, and they suggest that Demme and screenwriters David McKenna and Nick Cassavetes wanted to avoid the most interesting complications that informed Jung’s life. In the film, Jung is presented as someone who finally learns his father’s lesson that money “isn’t real,” but the real Jung risked and lost his freedom again in part, one can only assume, for just that. Then again, Jung was not simply a straight, white, working-class kid trying to make good in all the wrong ways–the narrative the film seems to endorse. Jung’s self-destructive and arguably pathological responses to authority (he was given to gratuitous acts such as a tactically suicidal speech to a judge sentencing him for marijuana smuggling in which he claimed that he didn’t believe he had done anything wrong) are certainly more complex, especially in light of his marginal sexual identity, for in some ways Jung’s life was an exploration of sexual and political social control in many different spheres. Had Demme and his screenwriters had more guts, they might have been able to capture some of the fascinating and fundamentally more challenging aspects of Jung’s life that emerge in Porter’s book.

 

To claim, as so many critics do, that Traffic is about drugs and the drug war as a whole while Blow is a typical gangster pic only incidentally about cocaine is to miss the ways in which both films are responding to our contemporary moment. After all, it is not as if we were in the midst of a wave of mainstream big-budget LSD or even ecstacy films. Traffic, ostensibly about the drug war as a whole, focuses only on cocaine, and Blow and Traffic are not the only recent films to highlight this as the drug of choice. Other recent examples include Studio 54, Boogie Nights, and Magnolia, as well as slightly older titles such as Where the Day Takes You. There are at least three factors that seem to explain why cocaine is so much at the heart of our current popular culture. First, many of these films are beginning to deal with the ’70s and ’80s as a distinct historical period, and are marking the decadence of that period through the presence of cocaine. Second, as I have argued throughout, cocaine has traditionally been a ruling-class drug, and as such it becomes a powerful device for developing political allegories about the problems of capitalism; there is much to suggest that Blow is following closely in the wake of films like Scarface in using cocaine for just such ends. However, there is a third reason as well, which is perhaps best approached through one of the most frequent criticisms of Blow. For many critics the film fell flat when it didn’t spend enough time reveling in the decadence and excesses of cocaine and the world of the drug’s most privileged users. Clearly, though most mainstream film provides itself with the alibi of an unhappy ending for users, there is an insatiable appetite both to produce and consume representations of drug use. How else can we explain one critic’s comment that in Blow “as the fun goes out of substance abuse,” so does “any possibility of audience interest” (Turan). If such statements in themselves weren’t enough, hardly an interview of the cast or crew of any film involving cocaine is complete without a discussion of what substitute they employed for cocaine: powdered milk, sugar, baby formula, etc. And, then again, how else would it even be possible to make sense of Traffic‘s paranoid fantasy of drug use which lingers so lovingly on shot after shot of Caroline free-basing in one location after another? Filmic representations of essentially unrepresentable somatic experiences are always worth looking at a bit more closely. After all, it is something distinctly different from the voyeurism of pornography. To watch others engage in sex is actually to have something to watch (and, one might argue, even to participate in through masturbation), but the effects of a drug, be it cocaine or anything else, are often not apparent to anyone but the user, and certainly are not readily communicable. Might the loving detail with which the culture industry represents drug use be in part a kind of perversely simulated repressive desublimation? Rather than consuming the drugs themselves, the audience fulfills its desires by watching others simulate the consumption for them; of course, then the audience can also have the additional satisfaction of seeing the characters punished for such transgressions. Is the loving detail that contemporary films devote to the decadence of drug use in the ’60s and ’70s the only high left for a cultural mainstream still dreadfully afraid of actual drugs? Certainly this would explain why the lurid depictions of drugs in Traffic were far more persuasive to critics than those of the more sedate Blow. Sadly, in the end neither Traffic nor Blow is particularly revolutionary. Instead, each reveals how even ostensibly refreshing and progressive attitudes toward drugs can be mired in the commonest forms of repression and reaction.

 

Works Cited

 

• Carr, F. L. “Daddy’s a Fuck Up.” Rev. of Blow, dir. Ted Demme. Pop Matters. <http://popmatters.com/film/reviews/b/blow.html>.
• Dargis, Manohla. “Go! Go! Go! Steven Soderbergh and His New Film, Traffic.” LA Weekly 22-28 Dec. 2000. <http://www.laweekly.com/ink/01/05/cover-dargis.shtml>.
• Edelstein, David. “Snow Job; Snorting at the coke-addled Blow.” Rev. of Blow, dir. Ted Demme. Slate.Com 5 Apr. 2001. <http://slate.msn.com/MovieReview/01-04-05/MovieReview.asp>.
• Porter, Bruce. Blow: How a Small-Town Boy Made $100 Million with the Medellín Cocaine Cartel and Lost It All. New York: Harper Collins, 1993.
• Scarface. Dir. Brian De Palma. Perf. Al Pacino, Steven Bauer, Michelle Pfeiffer. Universal, 1983.
• Scott, A. O. “‘Blow’: Under the Influence, a Drug Dealer Gets His Due.” Rev. of Blow, dir. Ted Demme. The New York Times 6 Apr. 2001, international ed.: E23.
• Stark, Jeff. “Hollywood Kicks the Habit.” Rev. of Traffic, dir. Steven Soderbergh. Salon 20 Dec. 2000. <http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/feature/2000/12/20/traffic_essay/>.
• Turan, Kenneth. “The Partying Gives Way to Predictability in ‘Blow’” Los Angeles Times 6 Apr. 2001. <http://www.latimes.com>.

 

Jerzy O. Jura

Foreign Languages and Literatures
Iowa State University
GeorgeOJ@aol.com

 

Review of: James Elkins, Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? On the Modern Origins of Pictorial Complexity.New York and London: Routledge, 1999.

 

The Tempest (La tempestad), a 1997 best-selling Spanish novel by Juan Manuel de Prada, not only borrows its title from the 1508 painting by Giorgione, but also places the masterpiece canvas at the center of a complex detective plot that involves art forgery, love, betrayal, and murder. Alejandro Ballesteros, the novel’s main character, is an art history student who, after years of intensive studies, comes to Venice to examine the famous painting, the topic of his doctoral dissertation. Although the novel’s opening page includes a color reproduction of the painting, and the first chapter briefly describes what art historians refer to as its basic sensus litteralis, the author devotes much of chapter eight to explaining the complexities of the daunting task his fictitious art history student faces: the need to reconcile into a coherent whole many, often contradictory, interpretations of the painting and his frustrating inability to unequivocally “fix” the meaning of even its most visually prominent characters and elements. In a reflection on the nature of this interpretive process, the young art historian Ballesteros compares his task to the process of assembling a complex jigsaw puzzle:

 

It takes a numismatic patience to arrange the pieces of a puzzle. One has to decide continually between an almost infinite number of possible combinations, and to try and match the bite-shaped pieces together. And although sometimes the connections between them are so subtle as to be almost evanescent, and our intuition tells us that a simple error of judgment could just as easily destroy the tenuous link, we chase this thought away, and we continue tenaciously…. It’s not enough to fit the pieces together, however, we also have to make sure that the resulting image is plausible. (Prada 185)

 

As it turns out, in his concerns regarding the complexity of pictorial images, and the extent of critical writings about them, the fictitious art historian from Prada’s novel is not alone: the reflection on the interpretive process that addresses images, such as Giorgione’s Tempest, as well as the picture-as-puzzle metaphor itself (inspired by Salvatore Setti’s book on Giorgione), are both also at the center of James Elkins’s metatheoretical 1999 inquiry into the mechanisms that underlie present-day art historical discourse, tellingly titled Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? On the Modern Origins of Pictorial Complexity.

 

Elkins’s point of departure, and the basic premise of his argument, a premise which he quickly and convincingly proves in the opening chapters, is that while “once upon a time, pictures were simple,” over the last century they have invariably grown more “difficult to explain,” “demanding,” and “puzzling” (xi). This opening statement is not quite accurate, since what concerns Elkins is the fact that academic approaches to pictures and, consequently, academic writing about them, not pictures themselves, have changed dramatically over the last century.

 

Following Wittgenstein’s maxim that “the first step in seeing a problem is seeing that it is a problem” (xi), Elkins endeavors to outline its nature and extent in both qualitative and quantitative terms. To outline the main direction of the trend, he examines a somewhat extreme, and therefore conveniently self-evident example of a monograph by Birger Carlström, who claims that many popular Impressionist paintings, usually taken to be expressions of the new, modern age aesthetic, are teeming with extensive, and often cryptically encoded political messages, hidden in the outlines, signatures, fabric folds, or even minute paint spots so small as to be discernible only under a magnifying glass. In several examples of pictorial exegesis run amok, Carlström reads Renoir’s political concerns about the Panama Canal project from his paintings, or rather into them, as Elkins, supported by extensive art-historical consensus, points out. Carlström claims to have identified messages such as “stop stupid England at Suez Canal,” allegedly engraved with a needle in one painting, or cartographic outlines of the canal in several of Renoir’s paintings generally considered to be charming, but otherwise conservatively bourgeois portraits. As Elkins notes, there is no existing additional evidence, such as correspondence or other written documents, to support or corroborate Carlström’s unusual interpretive claims.

 

The extent of the “complexity problem,” however, does not exclusively affect the isolated and contested margins of pictorial interpretation. Even in those mainstream art history texts which reflect wide consensus in the field, and where the enormous geographic and chronological scope limits the space devoted to each single art object to a minimum, as is the case in Janson’s popular and extensive History of Art, the complexity of interpretation is still evident to Elkins. He points out that the existence of extensive additional interpretive information, while not necessarily included explicitly in such texts, is clearly implied or acknowledged in them.

 

Having outlined the general nature of the problem in qualitative terms, Elkins also traces the chronological development of art-historical exegesis, and provides extensive textual support for the claim that traditional ekphrases, dating from antiquity to about a century ago, are generally short, and that their authors almost never ventured beyond the sketchy, verbal descriptions of the paintings’ most immediately visible content (sensus litteralis), their narrative foundations (fabula, or dramatic ekphrasis, in Elkins’s terms), or, in the case of religious paintings, their spiritual meaning (sensus spiritualis). Elkins sees the relatively recent explosion of interpretive complexity as an urgent theoretical issue that needs to be addressed, and observes that “as historians and viewers, we tend not to reflect on why we understand pictures the way we do” (35). Thus it would be hard not to notice that in a way the book and its author’s arguments are very fittingly inscribed within the postmodern debate on the mechanisms of legitimizing our knowledge, and in this case, the art historical discourse in particular.

 

The anatomy of pictorial complexity, however, and especially its genesis, is not very simple. Elkins hypothesizes that it is our present-day “aversion to mere description, or the apparently simpleminded praise of illusion” (39), that leads to endless bibliographies that have accumulated not only around certain paintings, but even around the meaning of specific individual objects depicted in them. The “buried mirror,” to use the term coined by Carlos Fuentes, in Velázquez’s Las Meninas is a perfect case in point. Understood for centuries as little more than just a reflection of the Spanish royal couple, with Michel Foucault’s essay the painting was “pressed into service as a reflection of fragmented Western epistemology” and treated ever since as “the representation, as it were of classical representation” (39). And while Elkins himself contributed an elaborate diagrammatic analysis of the painting’s complex perspective that accompanied Joel Snyder’s 1985 article on the emblematic meanings of the mirror in the Spanish masterpiece, he readily admits that the diagram’s analytic precision and the logical exactitude of the argument that it accompanied are distinctly “foreign to Velázquez’s contemporary reception” (40). So might be dozens of other present-day studies of the painting, whose authors see the mirror as a catalyst for “‘narcissistic’ reflections on self reflection” (Mieke Bal), as a “hypericon” and “metapicture”–i.e., a painting that represents picturing itself (W. J. T. Mitchell)–or even as “a representation of Lacan’s register of the Symbolic” (Pierre-Gilles Guéguen) (40).

 

Other examples of the objects whose presence in paintings has recently generated equally extensive and complex exegetic commentary include open doors, which formerly “seemed self-explanatory to generations of writers before the twentieth century” (42); shoes, a prominent point of reference in Jacques Derrida’s “Restitutions of the Truth in Painting”; and checkerboard floors, as well as the basic perspective box that underlies the construction of many pictorial spaces (43). Elkins is eager to stress that he does not believe those critical interpretive excursions are “inane or inherently wrong headed,” but rather that they constitute “the shape of pictures as we understand them today” (44), and that the increased interest in some paintings, or the critically underscored relevance of some objects in them, is a reflection of the importance of their commentators to the general intellectual tenor of our times, a point aptly made with a rhetorical question: “How interesting are Van Gogh’s paintings of shoes, outside Heidegger and Derrida?” (45). By contrast, Elkins also defines a category of paintings which fail to attract wider exegetic interest, and, since they are not compositionally engaging, “offer little purchase for an historian intent on locating intellectual content” (53). Since they seem to “call for a nonverbal, unanalyzed kind of contemplation” (54), they are usually excluded from verbal analyses. For Elkins, few art historians are aware of this exclusionary bias, even when it is patently visible in their own writing.

 

The emphasis on the intellectual content of paintings makes Salvatore Setti’s interpretive picture-as-puzzle metaphor (from his book on Giorgione) particularly attractive to Elkins. In fact, several central chapters of his book include extensive and copiously illustrated critical evaluations of existing taxonomies of puzzle types (both in the metaphoric and in the literal sense) and of different degrees, modes, and types of ambiguities.

 

While for present-day art historical discourse the potential for pictorial complexity and ambiguity seems to be a prized characteristic, too much of a good thing occasionally makes a critical evaluation of existing research impossible. This leads Elkins to describe one category of images as “monstrously ambiguous paintings” (123). Three prime examples of this category are Giorgione’s Tempesta, Botticelli’s Primavera, and Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling, since in each case “so much has been said about each of them that the history of their reception can no longer be fully told” (124). The paintings that are thought to be intentionally ambiguous are especially good candidates for the category, and even more so if their primary subject and meanings are unclear and cannot be determined to be either self-evident or reasonably well deduced from existing historical sources. Giorgione’s Tempesta is a perfect example, exactly because there is no consensus on the painting’s primary meanings. To “evoke the tenor of the literature” (131), Elkins lists a long series of recently proposed interpretive solutions, ranging from very specific identifications of the painting’s characters with those of various literary, mythological, biblical, or hagiographic fabulae, to the claims that Tempesta indeed is, and always has been intended to evade unambiguous attributions of meaning, and that it really is a painting without a subject (130-37).

 

Picking up the line of thought about Carlström’s marginal exegeses from the introductory pages of the book, Elkins devotes an entire chapter to cryptomorphs–hidden images, in many cases arguably read into the pictures as a result of modern day, often anachronistic interpretations. And, as Elkins himself admits, while in some cases, such as Freud’s famous misreading of a vulture into Leonardo’s Virgin and Child with St. Anne (205), errors can be easily explained away (a translation error, in this case). Other hypotheses, such as Meshberger’s claim of two brain views embedded in Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling (Elkins 209), can be argued against only tentatively, and the multiplicity and complexity of arguments that have to be brought to bear on this case, ironically, dilute the argument, instead of lending credibility to it.

 

Elkins’s tour-de-force journey through exegetic samples, whether of exemplary logical coherence, or marginal, bizarre, and non-corroborated interpretive claims, concludes with an envoi which contains a handy summary of his answers to the questions posed in the title of the book, Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? Elkins’s own initial hypothesis that the increase in our knowledge, the growth of the discipline, and new insights are responsible for the complex ways we read pictures, is ultimately determined by him to be unsatisfactory. It is surprising to realize, however, that while Elkins considers a wide range of possible causes in his effort to account for the rise in the complexity of writing about pictures, he tends to leave out more mundane causes external to art history as a discipline. Ironically, the reason for this exclusion may be that those possible external causes are not as complex as the internal ones Elkins discusses at length, and therefore are of less interest to a scholar. Technological advances in art reproduction come to mind as a potentially powerful impulse for that type of change, an impulse not considered by Elkins. One could hypothesize that, since in the past the reading audience had limited access to the works of art in question, it was necessary to resort to frequent basic description, but in today’s world, where detailed color reproductions of thousands of paintings are easily available to the public, the reason for simple description has been eliminated, leaving a void to be filled with more complex arguments. Similarly, the academic pressure on many researchers to publish extensively and frequently has led many actively to seek out niche areas that have not yet been explored, especially if their work is concerned with periods and works that have already accumulated an extensive body of theoretical commentary.

 

Elkins’s book remains a valuable reflection on the mechanisms that set the directions of contemporary academic discourse, and while his specific concern here is art history, many of his observations clearly apply to other humanistic disciplines, as well–and in particular to literary studies.

 

Srdjan Smajic

English Department
Tulane University
ssmajic@tulane.edu

 

Review of: Paul Virilio, A Landscape of Events.Trans. Julie Rose. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.

 

Those who are familiar with Paul Virilio’s work on dromology, or the logic and effects of speed, may have noticed by now a paradox in the manner in which he addresses this subject. While he maintains that speed is the essential modus vivendi of the latest devices of destruction, deterrence, and misinformation, Virilio himself writes and publishes at an impressive pace. The reviewer, who has just gotten his hands on A Landscape of Events (2000 [1996]), has not yet seen The Information Bomb (2000 [1998]), and probably will not get to it before the translation of Stratégie de la déception (1999) comes out to announce that, yet again, the technologies and texts of yesterday are already outdated.

 

On the one hand, this arrangement is perfectly logical, and the rationale behind it is self-explanatory: one cannot take forever to comment on events that are occurring at the speed of light–and only for the duration of their televised presentation. The Persian Gulf War, which according to Virilio was in 1992 already “receding into the vacuum of consciousness” at meteorite-speed, demonstrates how televised events operate (“now you see it, now you don’t“), and perfectly, if tragically, illustrates “the compression of history and finally the disappearance of the event!” (24).¹ If human memory has by now so thoroughly adapted itself to televisual programming that objects, events, and even persons can be said to exist only insofar as they are being televised in “real time,” then the speed at which Virilio makes his observations public appears to be not so much a matter of choice but of sheer necessity. Who wants to read about last year’s war when terrorist attacks are being televised by CNN as we speak or write?

In fact, it is no longer the Gulf War but the Kosovo War that provides the best example of what Virilio is talking about. “The automation of warfare,” he says in a recent conversation with John Armitage, “has… come a long way since the Persian Gulf War of 1991.” Speaking in technological, military, and strategic terms, the Kosovo War is so far ahead of the Gulf War that the latter may just as well have happened thirty or forty years ago. Some may already have forgotten the name Norman Schwarzkopf. History, Virilio states in the same text, “is now rushing headlong into the wall of time,” by which he means that we are in fact witnessing its end, the final and apocalyptic realization of the Hegelian prophecy. Under such extreme conditions one cannot afford to lose sight of speed, its doings and undoings, and to fall behind on what is latest, hippest, hottest, and most up-to-date. Virilio cautions us to keep in mind that “the speed of light does not merely transform the world. It becomes the world. Globalisation is the speed of light. And it is nothing else!” (“Kosovo War”). Timing is indeed everything.

 

On the other hand, such a perfectly logical strategy (speed vs. speed, a speedy response to light-speed events) makes itself vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy. Is Virilio not riding on the crest of the technological wave and enjoying the benefits? Do not his texts and interviews frequently appear on internet sites where, instantly accessible from any terminal on the globe and only a click away from your own homepage, the words and sentences faintly flicker in some ontologically ambiguous cyberspace that is the exact opposite of the geographic space and historical time in which Virilio would advise us to live? Are not the words I have just quoted–these very words I am writing now–already part of the landscape of events in which everything exists in the eternal, real-time now, and therefore never really and actually? Cyberspace and information superhighways, Virilio remarks in another cyberspace text, bring about a “fundamental loss of orientation.” If to exist, really and fully, “is to exist in situ, here and now, hic et nunc,” then this sort of existence and reality “is precisely what is being threatened by cyberspace and instantaneous, globalized information flows” (“Speed and Information”).²

 

A Landscape of Events rushes headlong into and around these questions of cultural velocity. All the key issues that have occupied Virilio’s attention in the past–miniaturization, disintegration, globalization, optics and information, war and cinema, the disappearance of history–are revisited here with characteristic rapidity. Indeed, the very importance of the book lies in its symptomatically Virilian temporality. Its thirteen short essays, which Virilio wrote over the last twenty years or so and then self-anthologized and published (as Un paysage d’événements) as “early” as 1996, in some sense come too late to their English-language reader–especially if he or she has come to rely on Virilio’s intimate connectedness with technoculture to learn about the latest generation of personal computers and video games, radars and smart bombs. Such a reader ought to know that there is nothing new to be learned from Virilio’s new book, nothing that he has not already told us many times over. But this may be to the book’s advantage–as is the fact, strange as it may sound, that the book is in print.

 

Virilio, more than anyone else I can think of, makes us feel that the printed word is a remnant of an earlier, slower, sleepier, and happier age: it is quaint, archaic–one would be tempted to say prehistoric, except that the relative slowness and linearity of print ought to remind us of the relative slowness and linearity of historic time, that is, of the fact of history itself. Print is therefore not prehistoric but precisely historical.

 

It is the logic of print technology–its relative slowness in the age of light-speed televisual information–that keeps open a path of resistance to the logic of chronostrategy and the seduction of speed. The speed at which one is informed (or even misinformed) through print will always be inferior to the speed at which one passively registers televisual images, but because of this the quality of reception, as it were, is substantially in favor of print. The book as a physical object becomes a site of resistance to speed. It transforms viewers back into readers. It slows down the transmission of information. It leaves time for active participation in communication and meaningful dialogue. Because print moves at the speed of cognition, because it is cognition and comprehension that make it move along, control its progress, and determine its durations, one can never be bombarded by print in the same way that one can be harassed and paralyzed by the blinding explosion of televised images.

 

Even though words on a computer terminal look very much like their hard-copy counterparts, they behave very differently–or we behave differently as readers, scrolling and clicking rather than skimming and page-turning. The fact that so many cannot see the difference or remember how things used to be, Virilio would insist, is indicative of the global loss of critical discernment and the degeneration of public and private memory. The twin activities of clicking and forgetting have become a way of life.³ We have internalized the process so thoroughly that the acme of artificiality seems now perfectly natural, even biologically preprogrammed. The hominoid has replaced the human (34). In comparison to cyberspatial texts and televised images, print appears more dignified and humane. Even if Virilio would surely agree that all types of media are always ideologically suspect, writing for print is perhaps one way to stand up against “the intermittent eclipse of the speaking beings that we are” (52).

 

As always, Virilio is unabashedly humanistic, albeit vague on his definition of “human.” This, however, does not make his message any less politically and ethically urgent. He openly laments the loss of all sense of proportion and propriety, and the disintegration of vital categories such as “human” and “real.” To ask for precise definitions of these categories might be to miss the point. To suspect their validity means already to suspect one’s own humanity and reality, to erase oneself as a subject in the traditional sense of the word, but without necessarily reemerging, at the other end of the tunnel, in some more up-to-date sense. Movement in postmodernity is always toward some kind of disappearance.

 

“For God,” Virilio writes, “history is a landscape of events. For Him, nothing really follows sequentially since everything is co-present” (x). But the view from Heaven, seen from Virilio’s point of view, is essentially antihumanistic and becomes available only after theology has been replaced by an anti-theological epistemology.

 

If one eliminates God and if, soon after, it becomes fashionable to declare Him dead, it is only normal that, through successive shifts, one ends up getting a little anxious about the origins of this “man” who, once removed from the Judeo-Christian Genesis, suddenly finds himself robbed of his inheritance, deprived of identity. (34)

 

Genesis, the prototypical story of beginnings and begettings, of the drawing of boundaries and construction of categories (day vs. night, human vs. animal, land vs. water, and so on) functions as a template for the writing of historical narratives in general. Thus it is not faith in God that Virilio wishes to salvage, but rather faith in history. Without history–without the consciousness of what one might call “the natural and proper slowness” of the passage of time–catastrophes of all kinds loom large on the horizon: “the recession of history entails the retreat of knowledge, the retirement of progress” (xii). The space opened up by the death of God is now occupied by the subject who declares (or is instructed, seduced into thinking) that he or she can see everything, everywhere, and everytime, who has been released from the shackles of corporeality and can therefore claim to exist in several places at the same time.

 

Elsewhere Virilio notes: “technologies of real time… kill ‘present’ time by isolating it from its presence here and now for the sake of another commutative space that is no longer composed of our ‘concrete presence’ in the world, but of a ‘discrete telepresence’ whose enigma remains forever intact” (“Third Interval” 4). Speed marks the death of the body. Or rather: bodies, but also human relationships, disintegrate at the speed at which technology reduces the need for corporeal presence, for human intervention and human interaction.

 

Here is a book, then, whose relative lateness may be considered a virtue and part of its argumentative strategy: a text that capitalizes on the fact that it is a text and not an image that flashes for an instant and is gone. Its physicality recalls our own corporeality. Whether we like it or not, a body is still needed to pick up a book, open it, turn the pages. The lessons that Virilio wishes to teach us–and most of his work is essentially ethical and didactic, a sort of code of conduct for the postmodern subject–are worth paying attention to only if they will be remembered, and they will be remembered only if they resist speed twice: through their form and their content.

 

If, as Virilio claims, his book reflects the “radical reversal in perspective” (xiii) that today replaces God with the omnipresent and all-seeing subject of postmodernity, it is to show the aberrant nature of this development rather than pay homage to it. In this one respect, at least, Virilio is not rushing to report on events that have not yet finished happening, but is staging a return to the past, and with a certain deliberateness of speed. It is perhaps the most “new” thing in the book, this insistence on what can only be learned from revisiting and reconsidering, at second glance, what has come before. What we have before us is a kind of back-tracking history that begins with Virilio’s 1996 thoughts on urban lighting and the “false day of technoculture” (2), and concludes with comments from the early 1980s on military cybernation and speed fetishism. By moving backwards in time, A Landscape of Events defamiliarizes temporality in order to refamiliarize us with it. In the manner of Russian Formalists, Virilio makes temporal progression strange by replacing it, for the moment at least, with temporal regression. To remind us that, beyond the TV screen, events still happen in time and not in some timeless landscape of the ever-present–that televised deaths and televised wars are real in the bloodiest sense of the word–Virilio winds the clock in the opposite direction.

 

Speed, he repeatedly insists, is dehumanizing. In the end, there is nothing to be gained and everything to be lost:

 

Imagine for a moment that the two vehicles about to pass each other here and now were sped up considerably; the encounter, the exchange of greetings, would simply not take place unless there was sufficient time for perception, the relative invisibility of the two motorists present having nothing to do with some ghostly absence of their bodies, but solely with the lack of duration required for their mutual apprehension. (45)

 

The anecdote involving two motorists who fail to perceive each other because they are moving too quickly, and who therefore do not really exist for each other in any meaningful way, sums up Virilio’s thoughts on the alienating effects of constant acceleration. Our horizon has shrunk to the size of the TV screen, he warns us, “the screen suddenly becoming a last ‘visible horizon,’ a horizon of accelerated particles that takes over from the geographic horizon of the expanse in which the televiewer’s body still moves” (47). Such limitation of vision–but really of conscience and consciousness–is for Virilio debilitating and abhorrent.

 

In strikingly similar fashion, Milan Kundera reflects in his novel Slowness on the logic of speed and the postmodern loss of sense and sensibility.

 

Speed is the form of ecstasy the technical revolution has bestowed on man. As opposed to a motorcyclist, the runner is always present in his body, forever required to think about his blisters, his exhaustion; when he runs he feels his weight, his age, more conscious than ever of himself and of his time of life. This all changes when man delegates the faculty of speed to a machine: from then on, his own body is outside the process, and he gives over to a speed that is noncorporeal, nonmaterial, pure speed, speed itself, ecstasy speed. (2)

 

“Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared?” (3), the narrator asks. The man on a motorcycle who zips past him in the opposite direction represents the dromophile, the postmodern subject par excellence.Forgetful of his body, material reality, space and time, he can

 

focus only on the present instant of his flight; he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future; he is wrenched from the continuity of time; he is outside time; in other words, he is in a state of ecstasy; in that state he is unaware of his age, his wife, his children, his worries, and so he has no fear, because the source of his fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear. (1-2)

 

These questions and revelations come to Kundera’s narrator as he himself is speeding down a highway in a state of dromological ecstasy. Dare one say, then, that there is a dromophile behind every dromophobe?

 

As for Virilio, nowhere does he sound more like himself than when he proposes to “quickly review the history of military control and surveillance” (83), which indeed he does in only a couple of pages. This is not exactly history at the speed of light–instantaneous history being unimaginable, since history is defined by and exists only in duration–but comes as close to the CNN style of high-velocity info-bombardment as possible in print. The implicit argument for slowness in A Landscape of Events is thus always tempered, if not finally undone, by Virilio’s stylistic embrace of speed. We track carefully backwards through his engagements and provocations only to find ourselves, at the end, swept up in the headlong pitch, invited to indulge in the ecstasy of acceleration.

 

Notes

 

1. Unless otherwise indicated all quotes are from A Landscape of Events.

 

2. As far as I know, the two texts I refer to here are available only on Ctheory‘s website <http://www.ctheory.com>.

 

3. The “fire-and-forget” missile is one of Virilio’s favorite illustrative tropes. (Two sidenote speculations: [1] So quickly does forgetting follow firing that the eventual explosion comes as a surprise, a blast from the past. [2] The eradication of duration enhances military performance because it effectively razes the bothersome obstacle of conscience and eliminates the interval of deliberation and intelligent decision-making. Vital strategic and tactical decisions are left to machines, which are not yet being programmed to consult an “ethical microchip.”)

Works Cited

 

• Kundera, Milan. Slowness. Trans. Linda Asher. New York: HarperCollins, 1996.
• Virilio, Paul. “The Kosovo War Took Place in Orbital Space.” Interview with John Armitage. Trans. Patrice Riemens. CTheory 89 (18 Oct. 2000) <http://www.ctheory.com/article/a089.html>.
• —. “Speed and Information: Cyberspace Alarm!” Trans. Patrice Riemens. Ctheory 30 (27 Aug. 1995) <http://www.ctheory.com/article/a030.html>.
• —. “The Third Interval: A Critical Transition.” Trans. Tom Conley. Rethinking Technologies. Ed. Verena Andermatt Conley. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. 3-12.

 

Helen Grace

School of Humanities
University of Western Sydney
h.grace@uws.edu.au

 

Review of: Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West.Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.

 

Such imaginings, freed from the constraints of bounded spaces and from the dictates of unilinear time, might dream of becoming, in Lenin’s words, “as radical as reality itself.”

 

–Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe

“Don’t you know philosophy is dead?… Marxism-Leninism killed it here, Deconstruction in the West. Here we had too much theory of reality, there you had not enough.”

 

–Malcolm Bradbury, Doctor Criminale

 

In Malcolm Bradbury’s 1992 novel, Doctor Criminale, the English narrator Francis Jay, a somewhat jaded journalist researching a mysterious Central European intellectual named Bazlo Criminale, arrives at an international literary conference in the Italian Lakes District. The conference participants (the usual suspects: “American Postmodernists, American feminists,… distinguished elderly French academicians,… muscular young academics from Southern California, carrying tennis rackets,… mean-looking dark-clad theoretical critics from Yale, formerly dissident writers from Eastern Europe uncertain about what exactly they are now dissenting from, African writers in multi-coloured tribal robes, German writers from East and West all wearing black leather jackets”) all have come to grapple with the conference theme, “Literature and Power:… Writing After the Cold War.” Bradbury’s portrait of literary conferences is wry and immediately recognizable–as are a number of the intellectuals. Criminale (“the Lukacs of the nineties” who had had a bitter quarrel with Heidegger, attacked Adorno, and revised Marx) turns out to be not entirely criminal, but neither does he prove to be innocent (“as Nietzsche said, when an epoch dies, betrayal is everywhere. To make ourselves heroes of the new, we must murder the past” [330]). He is a creation of the Cold War itself and if the novel is too close for comfort for Western critical intellectuals, it has resonance in Eastern Europe. Recently translated into Russian, it was essential summer reading in Moscow last year.

 

The novel’s fictional conference takes place in November 1990–but in October 1990, a real conference sharing a number of the characteristics of Bradbury’s account occurred in Dubrovnik–in a venue not so very far from the fictional one. Attended by an impressive assembly of what might be called a new postmodern nomenklatura (including Susan Buck-Morss, Boris Groys, Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Fredric Jameson, Helena Kozakiewicz, Merab Mamardashvili, Valerii Podoroga, Mikhail Ryklin, Vladislav Todorov and Slavoj Zizek), this was to be a renewal of a critical tradition of scholarly exchange established thirty years earlier by Herbert Marcuse and continued by Jürgen Habermas. Within six months of the conference, Dubrovnik was in ruins and in just over a year, the Soviet Union no longer existed. The Dubrovnik meeting–and the intellectual exchanges which continue in its wake–remain, however, a serious and unresolved challenge to Western theories of postmodernity and globalization, and this challenge cannot be ignored if these two terms are to be regarded as truly critical concepts and not just another dimension of liberal-democratic hegemony, masking the same old First-World expansionism.

 

In Dreamworld and Catastrophe, Susan Buck-Morss’s brilliant account of the end of the Cold War–part intellectual biography, part polemic, part philosophical picture-book, part “hypertext”–“fact” once again turns out to be far more fascinating than “fiction.” Buck-Morss’s method clearly draws upon Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk, cross-weaving description and quotation with astute observation and rich images to produce a new textual entity that exceeds the limits of the book, promising a future form better suited to the way in which ideas seize the imagination than the academic book is able to provide. As the author herself says, “Books are slow organizers, producing mass predispositions but seldom inciting direct action” (134). This presents a challenge to academic publishers which none–including MIT Press–yet seem able to grasp. What remains is a virtual film script or an unrealized multi-media project, demanding to escape from the limits of the printed word.

 

The book’s first chapter on power, sovereignty, and the nation-state draws upon an idea of the political imaginary as something considerably less abstract than the logic of a discourse or “world-view,” as Western political theorists understand it. Buck-Morss prefers to see the political imaginary as a specific iconographic, visual representation of the political terrain, as understood in Russian post-structuralist philosophy (especially in the work of Podoroga)–a political landscape rather than a political logic, a visual field in which political actors move and are also acted upon in a bodily sense. This allows three “icons” of the political imaginary–the common enemy, the political collective, and the sovereign agency, which acts in its name–to be brought into focus and considered at the same moment. In addition to these visible components, there is also a blind spot, a “wild zone” in which power remains arbitrary and violent, beyond the rule of law. She summarizes thus: “the class nature of the state may explain its violence, but not its legitimacy; the democratic nature of the state may explain its legitimacy but not its violence” (6). This zone of the state’s excess already exists in the French Revolution–the Ur-form of both models of mass democracy (the nation-state and revolutionary class). Although historically located in the French post-revolutionary Terror, which is echoed in Stalinist terror, it is also clear that the idea of the “wild zone” draws upon the particular post-Soviet experience in which politics, emerging civil society and criminality become indistinguishable. Boris Kagarlitsky has aptly described this scenario:

 

Everything that can be divided up, pulled apart or plundered will be privatised and distributed among the top people in the state. Anything which does not reach the top will go to the hangers-on. The remainder will be picked up by the mafia which, as the liberal press has already announced, “does not exist in our country.” (ix)

 

The “wild zone” is also located at the heart of capitalism as Braudel has noted:

 

[Above the layer of the market economy] comes the zone of the anti-market, where the great predators roam and the law of the jungle operates. This–today as in the past, before and after the industrial revolution–is the real home of capitalism. (qtd. in Buck-Morss 341)

 

Buck-Morss attempts to spatialize the relation between her discursive account of the (relative) movement of politics and the (relative) immobility of the concepts deployed to understand it (Cold War Enemies; French Revolution; Separation Between the Economic and the Political; Sovereign Party/Socialist State; Space; Time) by dividing the visual field of the page between text and “hypertext” (though this is a misnomer since it is placed below rather than above or beyond the text). This is an adventurous move, but the “Euclidean geometry” of the printed page does not lend itself to the kind of fluidity (if not “fourth-dimensionality” to refer to a particular theme of the Russian avant-garde) which the material requires and which a (more ephemeral) website or a CD-ROM would provide. The exigencies of academic publishing for the global intellectual finally seem to demand the immobility of the book over the constant movement of the body and ideas of the author and this remains a paradox of criticism.¹

 

The hypertextual experiment of the first chapter gives way in subsequent chapters to a much more successful quotation and image-based intertextuality. The “life-building” experimentation of Gastev, Bogdanov, and Melnikov is explored via a broadening of aesthetics to incorporate a more embodied experience, defined as “perception through feeling.” This approach involves a now familiar critical maneuver through which the artist is displaced by the artwork itself–so it is artworks, rather than artists who are said to be “avant-garde” and, even further, it is said to be the aesthetic experience of the artwork which counts rather than the work, and in the end it is not the object but its critical interpretation which is avant-garde.

 

This displaced status of both the artist and the object was certainly a theme for the Russian avant-garde, but it is perhaps an oversimplification to argue that the non-objective is representational to the extent that it is “mimetic of the experience of modernity” (63). Such a suggestion does however indicate that within an approach such as Buck Morss’s, space can be given to something that exceeds politics (the “wild zone”)–but there is nothing that exceeds representation (the iron grip of materialism). It is this tendency that runs the risk of reducing all images to being mere illustrations of critical concepts, rather than being generative of them. The materiality of the image or object is never allowed to be its own, so that the labor of the artist is always subordinated to that of the critic. This then remains another critical paradox–justified perhaps in this case because “the original field of aesthetics is not art but reality–corporeal, material nature” (101).

 

But critics are not alone in displacing artists. In the twentieth century totalitarian figures made something of a habit of it–and more recently, totalitarian leaders have been criticized precisely on artistic grounds–Hitler by Syberberg, and Stalin most notably by Groys. Unsympathetic to this trend, Buck-Morss challenges it:

 

But is the lesson that political revolutionaries should not be artists, or is that they should become better ones?… Revolutionary politics needs to take seriously the fact that democratic sovereignty represents the masses, and that political actions represent history by giving it sensory, material form. (66)

 

In order to explore the relation between revolutionary politics and democratic sovereignty, Buck-Morss attempts a brief history of time, which proves to be too sketchy to grapple satisfactorily with its theme in book form (though in a moving image or multi-media form, this chapter would work much better). She relies on images which are well known–Lenin’s sarcophagus (designed by Melnikov), the Lenin mausoleum (designed by Shchusev), stills from October of the toppling of the statue of Alexander III, an image of the toppled Dzerzhinskii statue (a “victim” of the 1991 coup), images of the death and resurrection of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. A fascination with death (or, at least, the mummified bodies of dictators) gives way to three chapters on “life-building,” mass culture, and the dreamworlds of capitalism and communism.

 

The shock of modernity via Benjamin provides a nice segue into a discussion of Stakhanovist shock work. Drawing upon Stephen Kotkin’s account of the building of the “showcase” industrial project at Magnitogorsk (literally, “Magnetic Mountain”) in the Urals in the 1930s (by U.S. engineers–and Soviet labor–modeled on the steel town of Gary, Indiana), Buck-Morss points out a key distinction between Taylorism and Stakhanovism: Taylorism, she reminds us, is a rational/ist model aimed at the establishment of norms and standardized rhythms based on scientific observation of individual bodily movements; Stakhanovist shock work on the other hand was carried out in rushes or “storms” by teams of workers. Said to have its origins in very old rural rhythm-setting work cries, the aim was to achieve higher productivity through superhuman effort without machines, a process involving team spirit and an everyday heroism in which ordinary workers’ lives could be transformed. This idea of life transformation through labor probably owes more to messianic belief, rendered material by Bolshevism’s promise of paradise on earth, than it does to a Protestant work ethic from which it deserves to be distinguished.

 

If we accept, as Buck-Morss argues, that mass society is a twentieth-century phenomenon, the idea of “the masses” has undergone significant change and from both “East” and “West,” there seems to be a tendency now to abandon the concept.² For Buck-Morss, mass society itself has transformed the masses from Marxist historical consciousness (class-for-itself) to a style-conscious consumer-led collectivity: “People become part of the collective by mimicking its look” (134). For Podoroga, “the mass” is primarily a visual phenomenon, a simulation produced by cinema’s imaginary space and existing only within that space. Especially in Eisenstein’s cinema, the crowd is a composite form, a “protoplasmic being in the process of becoming” and a “flow of violence” (147). Interestingly, this idea of “protoplasmaticness” is developed by Eisenstein himself in writing, not about “the masses” but about Disney (see Leyda).

 

Much has been written in recent years about the spectacle of the revolution, the mass theatrical spectacles commemorating it, and Stalinist culture’s phantasmagorias. As the archives continue to be mined and the Soviet Union rendered as a simulacrum, comparisons might be made with the mass culture of its “other”–the United States. This is precisely what Buck-Morss attempts, concluding that the collective imaginaries of both capitalism and socialism are “virtual worlds,” although it remains a social project to make them real (149).

 

Just as the image of the crowd became a “protoplasmic being” in Eisenstein’s cinema, a composite of moving masses flowing across the screen and close-ups of faces at the limits of expressivity, so Hollywood’s creation of a new mass figure–the star–relies upon the composite image (close-ups of mouth, eyes, legs, breasts, projected in super-human dimensions) and plastic surgery to eliminate the imperfections of the natural body. To this extent the image of the star, which is quintessentially female, presents an “awesome aesthetic spectacle” of “monstrous proportions,” and Buck-Morss goes so far as to liken it to a huge church icon, surrounded by objects of conspicuous consumption. The star constitutes a standardized image, an instantly identifiable cliché, like an advertising logo. But a distinction can still be made between Soviet and Hollywood cinema, one providing the prosthetic experience of collective power and the other (Hollywood, of course) the prosthetic experience of collective desire. A different economy of desire operates for Soviet cinema, one which is productive rather than consuming (for example, the vital energy of Liubov Orlova), coinciding with the particular industrial needs of the Soviet Union in the 1930s.

 

In an especially forceful section entitled “A Cosmopolitan Project,” Buck-Morss brings together Kotkin’s work on Magnitogorsk, Sutton’s on technology transfer, and Williams on Mellon’s millions to discuss the mutual dependence of the Soviet Union and the United States in the 1930s (at a point when the U.S. did not recognize the Soviet state) and the relative value of art and technology. While the Depression gripped the U.S. population, throwing many into unemployment, U.S. firms were doing substantial business in the Soviet Union, which was selling off the plundered treasures of the aristocracy (and masterpieces from the Hermitage) to the West in order to pay for the new technology being imported to build socialism. Buck-Morss powerfully encapsulates the intricacies of these exchanges:

 

Thus the profits of capitalism (surplus value withheld from the wages of American workers) moved (via the Mellon family fortune) to finance (via the capitalist firm of McKee Construction Company) the building of technologically advanced socialist factories, an increase in what Marx called “constant capital” that in turn increased the value of Soviet labor. Meanwhile, in the counter direction, cultural “treasures” that had been owned by the Russian aristocracy and nationalized by the Bolsheviks became (via Mellon’s “philanthropic” cover-up of tax evasion) the property of the United States government–and the American public received socialized culture in the form of a national museum…. What is the proper accounting when the sale of one Raphael (at 1.7 million gold dollars) buys more than half of the design of one Magnitogorsk (at 2.5 million gold rubles), which translates into jobs for thousands of Soviet workers, and the production (by 1938) of millions of tons of finished metal? How does one make political sense out of an economic exchange whereby the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury uses his private millions to “build socialism” in Stalin’s Russia–at the same time as the output of steel mills in the United States is falling precipitously due to a Great Depression that, to Stalin’s delight, affects capitalism alone? (172)

 

In the final chapter Buck-Morss writes an equally dazzling analysis of “shock therapy” economics in the post-Soviet context.

 

Needless to say, dreamworlds, “vacillating between a desire that is expressed and a fear that holds it in check” are followed by awakenings (176). The dream is dismantled, its images parodied (Komar and Melamid: “Thank you Stalin for our happy childhood”). Catastrophe follows.³ Monumentalism is reduced to the horror movie (an image of the Palace of the Soviets is likened to a movie poster advertising King Kong, with the gargantuan statue of Lenin replaced by the gorilla). The ecstasy of the Soviet sublime (“the physical suffering that hollows out the individual for the sake of the collective”) is double-edged: triumphant and destructive of the body at the same moment. Capitalist individualism on the other hand leaves no space for such ecstasy:

 

Capitalism harms human beings through neglect rather than through terror. Compared to the personal will of a dictator, the structural violence of market “forces” appears benign. Those individuals (or groups) excluded from capitalism’s dreamworlds appear themselves to be to blame. (188)

 

As Eastern Europe becomes “subalternized” by IMF policies and pressures on some territories to join NATO or the European Union, all those populations who have been subject to the “ecstasy of the Soviet sublime” will be free to decide the true nature of the difference between subjection to the personal will of a dictator and the structural violence of market forces. It may well be that the de-Stalinization already well established in dissident culture, with its combination of political cynicism, anti-utopianism, and distrust of all totalizing discourse (in a word, “postmodernity” which arrived well in advance of the West’s) will provide some resources for thinking afresh the problems of this New World Order. The Indian critic Geeta Kapur once argued that the use of the word “appropriation” to describe a feature of postmodernism could only be used in a Western context since it properly belongs to the colonizing phase of Western consciousness. Its use as a description of the pastiche of postmodern art has to be seen as arising precisely from a condition of surplus, of saturation: “If there is a surfeit of cultural input and output, you appropriate, jettison and parody, you make blatant pastiche because the options are too many” (Jayamanne 43).

 

If we agree with Kapur’s suggestion for a postmodernism of surplus, perhaps we now need an account of a postmodernism of scarcity–and such an account will not come from the West.

 

The real strength of Buck-Morss’s book comes less from its own appropriation of earlier scholarship on the Soviet Union (for this is a legacy of the Cold War, when the American academy was funded to research and know–in an “expert” sense–Soviet culture better than Soviet citizens were able to do).⁴ The book’s final chapter, entitled “Afterward,” describes the dilemmas of incommensurability, the difficulties of translation, and the privileges and contradictions of global intellectual culture better than almost any other account I’ve read. This is an “eyewitness” account providing a level of depth which transcends the surfaces of the dreamworld to an unusual degree–only possible at the precise moment of passage from dreamworld to catastrophe since it is at this moment and this moment alone that the notion of “the enemy” dissolves sufficiently for a new kind of intellectual exchange to occur.⁵ At the core of this exchange with Western intellectuals is a remarkable group of philosophers, led by Valerii Podoroga and forming the Laboratory of Postclassical Studies, located in Moscow in the Institute of Philosophy at the Russian Academy of Science. Podoroga’s “underground” seminars on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Benjamin, Adorno, Barthes, and Foucault challenged what many regarded as the bloodlessness of orthodox Marxist-Leninist epistemology. The word “postclassical” alerts us immediately to a different understanding of “postmodernism,” since it is argued by these philosophers that Stalinism was a classical civilization (continued in the high “official” culture of the Brezhnev period) and that the term “postmodern” as it is understood in Western critical theory is an inaccurate concept in describing late/Post-Soviet reality.

 

As Buck-Morss reports, contestation of the term was especially heated at the Dubrovnik conference, which focused the differences between Eastern and Western concepts of power and culture. She cites Jameson’s description of the dynamics of the exchange: “The more their truths are couched in Orwellian language, the more tedious they become for us; the more our truths demand expression in even the weakest forms of Marxian language… the more immediately do the Eastern hearing aids get switched off” (237).

 

Jameson’s own totalizing assumption (“Cold War anticommunism has lavishly supplied all possible and imaginable stereotypes”) would seem to be a particular barrier to conversation, since one might equally suggest that Cold War anti-capitalism at least had the capacity to imagine different worlds not simply reducible to a reversal of anticommunism. If this were not the case, then there ought to have been no difficulties in reaching agreement at Dubrovnik, since everyone would have been talking essentially about the same thing.

 

The final word in this fine account must however go to Buck-Morss, who describes the central moral dilemma for global intellectual culture in these chilling terms:

 

All of us sense (rightly) that our success depends on global name recognition. To achieve the status of a global intellectual, it is not necessary to saturate national markets, not even one’s own. No one speaks of writing for the majority, much less for the masses. It is enough to be known among a tiny but mobile transnational elite, who have inordinate power to replicate locally the hegemony of globally transmitted discourses. If one wanted to be dramatically pessimistic, one might describe this phenomenon of globalization as a membrane that spans the world like an oil slick, thin but tenacious, and capable of suffocating the voices of anyone speaking beneath it. (262)

 

The ecological-catastrophic image in the last sentence deserves to resonate in the way that Benjamin’s most startling quotations continue to have force. The moral challenge is to be able to encourage the suffocated voices to be heard on their own terms–even at the risk of loss of power and position for the global intellectuals who assume the authority that comes from speaking on their behalf.

 

Notes

 

1. On the question of “movement” and “immobility,” see Vladimir Papernyi’s Kul’tura Dva. See also the translated section entitled “Movement–Immobility” in Efimova and Manovich’s Tekstura: Russian Essays on Visual Culture.

 

2. I am using the terms “East” and “West” in the way in which they are used by Buck-Morss, even though it makes no geographic sense to use them in this way in Australia, where “the West” is Africa and “the East” South America (if one is facing north).

 

3. The word “catastrophe” has a broader range of meaning in Russian (where it can encompass the merely accidental as well as the totally disastrous) than it does in English. It is also worth remembering that Kerensky’s first account of the Revolution was entitled The Catastrophe. Not surprisingly, “catastrophe theory” is also a Russian specialization, in the work of renowned mathematician, Vladimir Arnold.

 

4. Important British and European research institutes certainly existed in this period, but almost all of Buck-Morss’s sources are scholars working in the U.S.

 

5. The highly original work of Elena Petrovskaia on “the enemy” lies behind these exchanges and is crucial in enabling them. It deserves to be better known in the West (though it will not be easily appropriated by it.) See in particular Chast’ Sveta.

Works Cited

 

• Arnold, Vladimir I. Catastrophe Theory. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1992.
• Bradbury, Malcolm. Doctor Criminale. London: Secker and Warburg, 1992.
• Efimova, Alla, and Lev Manovich, eds. Tekstura: Russian Essays on Visual Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.
• Groys, Boris. The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship and Beyond. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992.
• Jayamanne, Laleen. “Discussing Modernity, ‘Third World’ and ‘The Man Who Envied Women’: Interview with Geeta Kapur and Yvonne Rainer.” Art & Text 23/24 (Mar.-May 1987): 41-52.
• Kagarlitsky, Boris. The Disintegration of the Monolith. London: Verso, 1992.
• Kerensky, Aleksandr Fyodorovich. The Catastrophe: Kerensky’s Own Story of the Russian Revolution. New York: D. Appleton, 1927.
• Kotkin, Stephen. Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995.
• Leyda, Jay, ed. Eisenstein on Disney. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1986.
• Papernyi, Vladimir. Kul’tura Dva. Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 1996.
• Petrovskaia, Elena. Chast’ Sveta. Moscow: Ad Marginem, 1995.
• Sutton, Anthony C. Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development. (3 vols.) Stanford: Hoover Institute Press, 1968-1973.
• Williams, Robert C. Russian Art and American Money 1900-1940. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1980.

 

Evans Chan

evanschan@aol.com

 

This interview took place in late July, 2000 at Susan Sontag’s  penthouse apartment in Chelsea on a sunny, tolerably hot day. Just as I entered the building, Sontag’s assistant was returning from some errands and we went up the elevator together. As we opened the apartment door, Sontag was emptying some trash into a bin. Later she mentioned that since her illness–she has been recovering from a second cancer that was diagnosed in 1998–her apartment had become a mess. “These days I’m mostly trying to make space for all the books I’ve acquired in the last two years and sorting papers and manuscripts,” she said. What makes the apartment at once austere and elegant are the dozens of Piranesi prints on the walls. I was reminded of lines in the Alice James monologue from Sontag’s play, Alice in Bed: “With my mind I can see, I can hold all that in my mind. Everyone says [Rome]’s so beautiful. I’ve looked at the pictures, the engravings. Yes, Piranesi” (81).

 

I had brought with me a copy of a Chinese periodical review of my recent book The Last of the Chinese (also in Chinese) to show her. The editor had used the cover of her latest novel In America to illustrate the review–a delightful surprise for me, since Sontag has been an important influence on my own writing and filmmaking endeavors. An admirer of The Benefactor, Sontag’s first novel, before reading her critical writings, I translated into Chinese her essay “Fascinating Fascism” and her short story “Project for a Trip to China” back in the mid-’80s in Hong Kong, without thinking much about copyright issues. Over the years, I saw Chinese translations of her work appear here and there in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China, invariably without her knowledge. Several friends urged me to interview her for Chinese publications, and perhaps to edit an anthology of Sontag’s writings in Chinese. As the Sontag anthology project became more realistic, I finally introduced myself to her at a Trisha Brown concert at the Joyce Theater and she agreed to my interview request right away. When I described the chaotic Chinese publishing scene, she shrugged it off. “People think that I’ll be angry because it’s pirated. But I’m not a very good citizen of capitalist society. Of course, I’d like to be paid, and I’m hardly difficult to get in touch with. I have a publisher and an agent, whose addresses are listed in the entry on me in Who’s Who, which I assume anybody can access online. But no, I’m not angry. Most of all I’d like to be read.”

 

Then we settled into a table in the kitchen. Behind me was a door that opened onto a wrap-around balcony, which overlooked the shimmering Hudson and the Manhattan skyline in late afternoon. Sontag put her leg on the table, tilted her chair back, and sipped her coffee. Two years ago she quit smoking. She started talking about Shower, the most recent Chinese film she had seen. She found it “mildly interesting” because of its setting in a Beijing in transition. Among Hong Kong filmmakers, Wong Kar-wai is naturally the one she is familiar with. She quite liked Fallen Angels, but was disappointed by Happy Together. (Serving on the jury of Hawaii Film Festival in 1986, Sontag apparently helped A Time to Live, A Time to Die, the breakthrough film by Taiwan’s preeminent auteur, Hou Hsiao-hsien, win top prize. She also named YiYi, by Edward Young, another major Taiwan filmmaker, the best film of 2000 [Sontag, “Best” 26]). I brought her up-to-date on the activities of our mutual friend Simone Swan, a founding director of the de Menil Foundation and an old acquaintance of hers, who has been trying to preserve the legacy of the Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy by building low-cost adobe housing along the Texas border.¹ Sontag responded positively, but suspected that “poor people might want concrete” rather than mud bricks for their houses. After such preliminary small talk, the interview–C: Chan; S: Sontag–formally began:

 

C: In the ’60s, you were among the first to try to bridge the gap between high and low cultures. Now, after three decades, we’ve seen high culture, or the so-called canon, besieged by popular culture and multiculturalism. We have today a new sensibility that, depending on one’s perspective, either surpasses or parodies the kind of sensibility that you heralded in the last essay of Against Interpretation (1966). We now live in an age of total eclecticism and global interpenetration, which many people, including myself, call the postmodern. So far, your reaction to postmodernism seems largely inimical. And you refused to allow the Camp sensibility that you helped make famous to be co-opted by the postmodernists because “Camp taste… still presupposes the older, high standards of discrimination” (“Writing Itself” 439).

 

S: I never thought I was bridging the gap between high and low cultures. I am unquestioningly, without any ambiguity or irony, loyal to the canon of high culture in literature, music, and the visual and performing arts. But I’ve also enjoyed a lot of popular music, for example. It seemed we were trying to understand why that was perfectly possible and why that wasn’t paradoxical… and what diversity or plurality of standards might be. However, it didn’t mean abolishing hierarchy, it didn’t mean equating everything. In some sense I was as much a partisan or supporter of traditional cultural hierarchy as any cultural conservative, but I didn’t draw the hierarchy in the same way…. Take an example: just because I loved Dostoevsky didn’t mean that I couldn’t love Bruce Springsteen. Now, if somebody says you have to choose between Russian literature or rock ‘n roll, of course I’d choose Russian literature. But I don’t have to choose. That being said, I would never argue that they’re equally valuable. But I was very struck by how rich and diverse one’s experiences are. Consequently, it seems to me a lot of cultural commentators were lying about the diversity of their experiences. On the other hand, there are a lot of things in mass culture that didn’t appeal to me, notably what’s on television. It seems very non-nourishing, conventional, bland, trivial. So it wasn’t a question of bridging the gap. It’s simply that I saw a lot of simultaneity in my experiences of pleasure, and felt that most discourse about culture was either philistine or shallowly snobbish. So it wasn’t this is “here,” and that’s “there,” and I can make a bridge. It was that I understood myself to have many kinds of experiences and pleasures, and I was trying to understand why that was possible, and how you could still maintain a hierarchical sense of values.

 

This is not the sensibility that’s called the postmodern–by the way, that’s not the word I use or find useful to use. I associate postmodernism with leveling and with recycling. The word modernism arose in architecture. It has a very specific meaning. It meant the Bauhaus School, Corbusier, the box skyscraper, the rejection of ornament. Form is function. There are all sorts of modernist dogmas in architecture, which came to prevail not only because of their aesthetic values. There was a material support for these ideas: it’s cheaper to build buildings this way. Anyway, when the term postmodernism began to be used across the field for all the arts it became inflated. Indeed, many writers who used to be called modern or modernist are now called postmodern because they recycle, use quotations–I’m thinking of Donald Barthelme, for instance–or practice what’s called intertextuality.

 

C: Yes, the way writers are being relabelled as postmodern is at times baffling. For example, I was startled when Fredric Jameson, whose work I greatly admire, cited Beckett–who for me is a terminal product of high modernism–as a postmodern author.

 

S: Jameson is the leading scholar who has tried to make more sense of the category of postmodernism. One of the reasons I remain unconvinced by his use of the term is that I don’t think he’s interested in the arts. Not really. Not even in literature. He’s interested in ideas. If he cared about literature he wouldn’t have quoted–at great length–Norman Mailer. While you illustrate your ideas with quotations from novels, you’re also implicitly suggesting to people that they read these books. I think that either Jameson doesn’t know that Mailer isn’t a very good writer, or that he doesn’t care. Another example is when Van Gogh and Warhol are treated as equivalent by Jameson for the sake of theory-building, for fitting examples into his theory. That’s when I get off the bus. In my view, what’s called postmodernism–that is, the making everything equivalent–is the perfect ideology for consumerist capitalism. It is an idea of accumulation, of preparing people for their shopping expeditions. These are not critical ideas….

 

C: However, in your long essay AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989), you characterized the current moment as “a… grateful return to what is perceived as ‘conventions,’ like the return to figure and landscape… plot and character, and other much vaunted repudiations of difficult modernism in the arts… the new sexual realism goes with the rediscovery of the joys of tonal music, Bouguereau, a career in investment banking, and church weddings” (166-67). I, for one, almost felt you were singing the praises of postmodernism.

 

S: Did you? That was certainly not my point. I thought I was being sarcastic.

 

C: And you seem to have tapped new sources of energy in transforming yourself into a historical novelist by writing The Volcano Lover (1992) and In America (2000), which I guess would come under the rubric of postmodern novels.

 

S: Although I have written two novels that take place in the past, I don’t call them historical novels. That is, I don’t consider myself working in a specific genre like crime novels, sci-fi novels, or the Gothic novels. I want to enlarge my resources as a writer of narrative fiction and I found it liberating to set them in the past. These novels can’t be written in any other time but the late 20th century, written in a combination of first and third person narrations, and with a commingling of voices. I don’t think there’s anything like a return to convention, or return to figuration. Maybe these novels should be viewed as books about travel, about people in foreign places: The Volcano Lover is about the British in Italy; In America is about the Poles emigrating to the US; the novel I’m about to start is about some Japanese people in France in the 1920s. However, I’m not trying to fulfill a program–I’m trying to stretch myself.

 

C: Do you feel that in your current novels you can treat more effectively entities like “characters?” Are characters conventional items?

 

S: I’m not sure “characters” are conventional items. But I always start with people, even with The Benefactor (1963) and Death Kit (1967). The Benefactor explores a certain reclusive nature, which is in fact very nihilistic–a gentle nihilism. (Laughs.) Death Kit is about a man committing suicide. During the time I wrote these two novels I began to become more interested in history–not exactly related to current events or particular topics–but just history and what it meant to understand something historically–just what is behind the way anything is at any given moment. I used to think that I was interested in politics, but after I read a lot of history, I came to think that the notion of politics is very superficial. Actually, if you care about history, you couldn’t care that much about politics.

 

After writing the first two novels, I did more travels. I had already set foot outside of the wealthy countries of North America and Western Europe. For example, I had been to North Africa and Mexico. But Vietnam was the first country I visited where I saw real suffering. And I looked at such experiences not just in aesthetic terms, but also with moral seriousness. So it’s not that I’m disenchanted with modernism. I want for myself to take in more reality, and still with the tools of modernism, to address real suffering, the larger world, and to break out of the confines of narcissism and solipsism.

 

C: Isn’t the portrayal of the Cavaliere in The Volcano Lover a study of the saturnine, melancholic temperament that harks back to your early, “solipsistic” novels? At the same time, we see that consciousness is being dramatized by your placing it within a wider world, within the currents of history.

 

S: I suppose all my work is placed under the sign of melancholy. Saturn. At least so far. I expect that won’t always be so.

 

C: Haven’t you said that you don’t like your early novels very much?

 

S: I’ve said all sorts of stupid things. (Laughs.) Luis Bunuel once expressed an interest in filming Death Kit. That could have been very nice.

 

C: Recently, I reread your first novel The Benefactor after almost twenty years. That was the first book of yours that I read and it remains one of the most eccentric and brilliant novels I’ve ever come across. When I first stumbled upon it I was living in Hong Kong, completely unaware of contemporary literary scene, and by chance I started reading Hannah Arendt. I saw her endorsement of The Benefactor somewhere. She praised your originality and expressed admiration for your ability to “make a story out of dreams and thoughts.” I guess what Arendt found fascinating in it might be what she called “thought-experiments.” Now, I was also struck by how much The Benefactor has encapsulated so many of the themes and concerns in your writing career. It is, first of all, Against Interpretation written as fiction. Hippolyte is someone who doesn’t want to interpret his life through dreams, but to act through, and along with, his dreams.

 

S: You’re right on the mark about The Benefactor having all the themes of my work. That’s very startling to me, as if you started with the cards in your hand, but you’re blindfolded. And then maybe only halfway through your life do you actually get to look at the cards you’re holding. Every once in a while, I catch a glimpse of the way my work fits together. For instance, the essays I wrote about illness–Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors–was also kind of “against interpretation”: Don’t interpret being ill. Being ill is just being ill. Don’t invest it with all these myths and fantasies….

 

C: In The Benefactor, you wrote: “No part of the modern sensibility is more tiresome than its eagerness to excuse and to have one thing always mean something else” (109).

 

S: I’d forgotten that. How did I know what I knew, all too unconsciously at the time? When I began The Benefactor, I hadn’t the faintest idea of what I was doing; unlike later writing, when I really did think through the basic ideas before I would start. I just went sentence by sentence, I had no idea where it was going to go. But at the same time it was very easy to write, as if it was already there and I just had to take it down. A few of the dreams have elements of the dreams of mine, but they are mostly invented.

 

C: One critic suggested that Hippolyte and Jean-Jacques are modeled after Artaud and Genet.

 

S: Jean-Jacques is, in part, inspired by Genet–well, by the idea of Genet. Hippolyte? No, that’s no one in particular.

 

C: I was spellbound by The Benefactor‘s opening epigram: Je reve donc je suis! Maybe because I’m Chinese and every Chinese is familiar with Chuang Tzu’s tale about the man and the butterfly: The man dreams a dream in which he becomes a butterfly. Upon waking up, he wonders whether he’s actually a butterfly that dreams of becoming a man. I can see how The Benefactor was influenced by Kleist’s essay “On the Puppet Theater,” as it makes Hippolyte’s journey a quest for the equilibrium and tranquility of the self.

 

S: You’re right about Kleist. I read the Kleist essay when I was very young and was completely overwhelmed. However, the point is you have to write out of a deep place, and these things, like the Kleist essay, sink down to a deep place and then you find you can write. Many people have asked me why I haven’t written something in the form of fiction or play about the siege of Sarajevo. The answer is that I feel that experience hasn’t yet gone to the deepest place it can go.

 

C: In response to your political intervention in Sarajevo by staging Waiting for Godot, Jean Baudrillard said, “Even if there are any intellectuals left… I do not share in that complicity of intellectuals who perceive themselves as responsible for ‘something,’ as privileged with a sort of conscience-radicalness that used to be the privilege of intellectuals…. Subjects such as Susan Sontag cannot intervene anymore, even symbolically, but once again this is not a prognosis or diagnosis” (qtd. in Bayard). What’s your reaction to his idea about “the privilege of the intellectuals,” as well as his so-called diagnostic statement about our time?

 

S: Baudrillard is a political idiot. Maybe a moral idiot, too. If I ever had any thought about functioning in a typical way as a public intellectual, my experiences in Sarajevo would have cured me forever. Look, I did not go to Sarajevo in order to stage Waiting for Godot. I would have had to have been insane to do such a thing. I went to Sarajevo because my son, a journalist who had begun covering the war, suggested that I make such a trip. While there for the first time in April 1993, I told people I would like to come back and work in the besieged city. When asked what I could do, I said: I can type, I can do elementary hospital tasks, I can teach English, I know how to make films and direct plays. “Oh,” they said, “do a play. There are so many actors here with nothing to do.” And the choice of doing Godot was made in consultation with the theater community in Sarajevo. The point is, that doing a play in Sarajevo was something I did at the invitation of some people in Sarajevo, while I was already in Sarajevo, and trying to learn from Sarajevans how I might be, in some small way, useful.

 

It had nothing to do with “the privilege of the intellectuals!” My visit wasn’t intended to be a political intervention. If anything my impulse was moral, rather than political. I’d have been happy simply to help some patients get into a wheelchair. I made a commitment at the risk of my life, under a situation of extreme discomfort and mortal danger. Bombs went off, bullets flew past my head…. There was no food, no electricity, no running water, no mail, no telephone day after day, week after week, month after month. This is not “symbolic.” This is real. And people think I dropped in for a while to do a play. Look, I went to Sarajevo for the first time in April 1993 and I was mostly in Sarajevo till the end of 1995. That is two and a half years. The play took two months. I doubt if Baudrillard knows how long I was in Sarajevo. I’m not a Bernard-Henri Levy making his documentary Bosna. In France they call him BHL; in Sarajevo they called him DHS–deux heures a Sarajevo–two hours in Sarajevo. He came in the morning on a French mlitary plane, left his film crew, and was out of there in the afternoon. They brought the footage back to Paris, he added an interview with Mitterand, put on the voice-over, and edited the film there. When Joan Baez came for twenty-four hours, her feet never hit the sidewalk. She was going around in a French tank and surrounded by soldiers the entire time. That’s what some people did in Sarajevo.

 

C: Did you ever call Baudrillard a “cunning nihilist”?

 

S: I doubt it. I don’t think I would call him nihilistic. I think he’s ignorant and cynical. And he definitely has opinions about intellectuals. There are intellectuals and intellectuals. The majority of them are conformists. But some are brave, very brave. And what are intellectuals doing with postmodernism? How people move these terms around instead of looking at the concrete reality! I’m for complexity and the respect for reality. I don’t want to think anything theoretically in that sense. My interest is to understand the genealogy of ideas. If I’m against interpretation, I’m not against interpretation as such, because all thinking is interpretation. I’m actually against reductive interpretation, and I’m against facile transposition and the making of cheap equivalences.

 

C: Yet, in retrospect, your book On Photography (1977) can be considered a pioneering work on postmodernity. For example, you said that the photographic taste is inherently democratizing and leveling–capable of abolishing the difference between good and bad taste. Photography, or the culture of images, has aestheticized tragedies and disasters, fragmented our world, replaced (virtualized?) reality, and instilled a sense of fatalism: “In the real world, something is happening and no one knows what is going to happen. In the image-world, it has happened, and it will forever happen in that way” (168). (That comment presaged Virilio’s observation that our Past, Present and Future has been replaced by Fast Forward, Play and Rewind–the image of modern/postmodern man being that of a sitter with a remote.) For you, photography is the culmination of modernism and its undoing.

 

S: Yes, I suppose so. But again I don’t think I need to use that term “postmodern.” But I do think seeing the world photographically is the great leveler. And yet I’m puzzling a lot over the consequences of viewing disasters and the horrors of the world through photographic images. Does it anaesthetize us? Does it make us used to things? Does the shock value wear off? I don’t know. Then there’s a big difference between the still and the moving images. The moving image is very powerful because you don’t know where it’s going to go. In the last essay in On Photography, I talked about the experience I had in China watching an operation under acupuncture anaesthesia. I saw someone have most of his stomach removed because of a catastrophic ulcer. Clearly it worked. His eyes were open and he was talking and sipping some liquid through a straw. There was no way of faking that; it did work. The doctor said it tends to work well for the torso but not so well for the limbs, and doesn’t work for some patients at all. But it worked for this one. I watched the operation without flinching, the cutting open of the abdomen, the huge ulcerous part of the patient’s stomach, which looked gray as a tire. This was the first operation I had seen, I thought maybe I’d find it hard to watch, but I didn’t. Then, six months later, I was in a movie theater in Paris watching Chung Kuo, Antonioni’s China film, which has a scene showing a Caesarian delivery with acupuncture anaesthesia. The moment the abdomen of the pregnant woman was cut, I couldn’t watch it. How strange! I couldn’t watch the image, but I could watch the real thing. That is very interesting. There are all sorts of puzzles about what the culture of image is.

 

C: Some of the most ominous statements in On Photography have come true. For example, photography–in its latest incarnation through digital technology–has definitely triumphed over art. TV, Hollywood, and the infotainment industry have taken over, resulting in, among other things, what you called “the decay of cinema”²–the most important modern art form. Jean-Luc Godard recently said the cinema as we knew it is over (see Rosenbaum 165).³

 

S: The cinema as he knew it is over. That’s for sure–for a number of reasons, including the breakdown of the distribution system. I had to wait eight years to see Alan Resnais’s Smoking/No Smoking, which I just saw at the Lincoln Center. Resnais made those films in the early ’90s, but then none of his films were distributed here in the past 10 years. We’re getting a much smaller selection here in New York, which is supposed to be a good place to see films. On the other hand, if you can tolerate the small formats–I happen to have a problem with miniaturized images–you can get the whole history of cinema and watch it over and over again. You don’t have to be dependent on the distribution system. The problems with cinema seem to me, more than anything, a cultural failure. Tastes have been corrupted, and it’s so rare to see filmmakers who have the aspiration to take on profound thoughts and feelings. There is a reason that more and more films that I like are coming from the less prosperous parts of the world, where commercial value has not completely taken over. For example, I think people have reacted so positively to Kiarostami is that he shows people who are quite innocent and not cynical, in this increasingly cynical world. In that sense, I don’t think cinema is over yet.

 

C: It’s been suggested that you redirected your fiction-writing urge toward filmmaking during the long hiatus between your two groups of novels. [Sontag’s filmography includes Duet for Cannibals (1969), Brother Carl (1971), Promised Lands (1974), and Unguided Tour (1983).]

 

S: Maybe. But I don’t have an industrial model of productivity. I don’t think it’s the most important thing, as soon as I finish one book, to immediately start another one. I want to write books that are necessary.

 

C: One more question about The Benefactor and your writing career, because your first novel seems particularly interesting in light of your lifetime relationship with interpretation, Freudian and otherwise. Hannah Arendt is antipathetic to psychoanalysis because it compromises her conception of human freedom. Here’s a quote from The Benefactor: “But one has to declare oneself free in order to be, truly, free. I have only to consider my dreams as free, as autonomous, in order to be free of them–at least as free as any human being has the right to be” (246). I heard echoes of these statements in “Writing Itself,” your essay on Barthes, in which you upheld “the exercise of consciousness as a life’s highest aim, because only through becoming fully conscious may one be free” (444). To what extent do you feel that the project of consciousness that you treasure is better served by you as a fiction writer, rather than as an essayist?

 

S: Yes, I do feel freer, more expressive, and much closer to what matters to me when I’m writing fiction. The goal is to become still more expressive. And to take in more and more reality.

 

C: Do you acknowledge that there is an anti-psychological tendency in your work? Is that an aesthetic, formal, modernist approach partly derived from the French new novels? Or is it your moral and philosophical stance vis-à-vis the human condition?

 

S: I don’t think I’m anti-psychological. I am rather anti-autobiographical, however. Maybe the confusion lies there. And I don’t think I’ve learned anything from the so-called French new novels. I didn’t ever really like them. I thought they were “interesting,” which is a shallow, dishonest form of praise from which I like to think I’ve freed myself.

 

C: You supposedly abandoned two novels.

 

S: Three, I’m afraid. I stopped at fifty, sixty pages. If I get to a hundred pages I can go on.

 

C: Weren’t you supposed to have made a film based on Simone de Beauvoir’s first novel L’Invitee (She Came to Stay)?

 

S: Yes. I’d written a full shooting script, secured the rights, for a pittance, from Simone de Beauvoir, and found some modest financing for the film. But at some point I stopped believing in the script, or the film, or the subject–I’m not sure which. I wasn’t confident it would be good enough.

 

C: Have you said goodbye to filmmaking?

 

S: Movies have been the love of my life. There have been many periods of my life when I’ve gone to movies every day, and sometimes I see two films a day. Bresson and Godard, and Syberberg, and more recently Sokurov, have been extremely important to me. I love Chantal Ackerman’s Jeanne Diehlmann, Bela Tarr’s Satantango, Fassbinder’s In a Year of Thirteen Moons, The American Soldier, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, and Berlin Alexanderplatz; Angelopoulos’s Traveling Players, Alan Renais’s Melo, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Goodbye South, Goodbye, Claire Denis’s Beau Travail…. I’ve learned so much from these films. And no, I haven’t said goodbye to filmmaking. I’m not interested in adapting my own books, but in something else. Yes, I want to make more films.

 

C: In your 1995 essay “On Wei Jingsheng,” you lamented “the general decline of universalist moral and political standards of Enlightenment values in the past generation,” as reflected in the suspension of human rights standards where China is concerned. I think this piece, together with your (uncollected) 1984 essay “Model Destinations,” goes straight to the heart of the political dilemma of our post-Cold War and post-ideological era. Dictatorships all over the world, as you said, “have been emboldened” by the triumphant, capitalist West’s concerns about “sustaining lucrative economic ties” (“Model Destinations” 699-700).

 

S: For the record, that wasn’t something I wrote. These are impromptu remarks I made at a press conference in New York organized by Orville Schell when Wei was rearrested, which were recorded, transcribed, and picked up by The New York Review of Books. The first I heard that my remarks were to be published was a few days later when I got a telephone call from The New York Review of Books, telling me that they were sending down the galleys of my “China piece” by messenger. (Laughs.) You know, I’m not a relativist. I grew up hearing that Asian culture is different from Western culture. Generations of Sinologists, including John Fairbank, have declared that where Asia is concerned, the Western standards of civil liberties are irrelevant, or don’t apply, because these came out of European Protestant culture which stresses the individual while Asian cultures are fundamentally collectivist. That is pernicious and colonialist in spirit. Such standards don’t apply to traditional societies or communities anywhere, including in Europe. But if you live in the modern world, which is by definition not a traditional world, then you do want these freedoms. Everyone wants them. And it’s important to explain that to privileged people from rich countries who think they’re only for “us.”

 

C: And “Model Destinations” was part of a larger work that you gave up?

 

S: Yes, it was going to be a book, about 100 pages, about intellectuals and Communism–because I was really impressed by how gullible those visitors to socialist countries were. Those people normally traveled in a delegation, stayed at hotels and were escorted around. I remembered my trip to China in January 1973 during the tail end of the Cultural Revolution. I became friendly with this woman assigned to be my interpreter. I wasn’t very important, so I got this low-level person from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. And obviously she was writing a report on me every day. She was a sweet but frightened middle-aged woman who had lost her husband during the Cultural Revolution. I asked her where she was staying. She said she was staying with friends. As it turned out, she was staying in this tiny room, which was more like a closet, in the basement of the hotel. I saw it because I insisted on seeing where she stayed–she wasn’t supposed to show it. One day she invited me to go out for a walk, after indicating that the room was bugged. She spoke very slowly in her limping English: “Have… you… read… a… book… called… 19–” When I heard “19” there was a pain in my chest. I knew what she was going to say next. “-84.” “1984,” I repeated, more upset than I wanted to let on. “Yes,” she said, smiling, “China just like that.”

 

I think if you troubled yourself to make a few human contacts, you could find out some truths about these countries. At least Roland Barthes had the courage of his sexual tastes. He liked countries in North Africa and Asia where he could sleep with boys; since he didn’t get the chance to do that in China, he was bored. But not fooled. His sexuality kept him honest about his unflattering impressions of Maoist moralizing and cultural uniformity. But others on the same trip to China [in 1974], Julia Kristeva and Philippe Sollers, came back saying it’s absolutely wonderful, and repeating all the Maoist clichés. You can say that their ideological blinders made them see things a certain way. There are also all the dupes who visited the Soviet Union in the 1930s. You want to say to such people, “Stop! Do you know where you are? What you’re seeing? Try to start from what is absolutely concrete. How could you not see?”

 

C: Was there any period in your life when you were seriously seduced by communism?

 

S: No, not by communism, but by the struggle against American imperialism. I was obsessed with the American war on Vietnam. Even to this date, Americans talk about 56,000 American soldiers who died there. That’s a lot of people. But three million Vietnamese soldiers and countless civilians died. And the country was ruined ecologically. More bombs were dumped on that country than all the bombs dropped in WWII, the same in Korea. The disproportionate nature of American firepower when it went into these countries was mind-boggling. Take the war in Iraq. The war was already over, and the Americans were dumping napalm and firebombing barefoot Iraqi soldiers who were retreating north. Those things drove me to despair. One must remember that between 1963 and August 1968, with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia–that was a period of thought for a lot of us. In 1963 I became involved in the anti-war movement before there was really an anti-war movement. The Vietnam war was just starting. I teamed up with an ex-green beret and went on a speaking tour in California. We stood at street corners and twice were stoned. During that period of the mid-’60s I met people from the Soviet Union who did, in fact, say that things were really much better, and going in the right direction. Then it all came crashing down in August of ’68. So yes, between 1963 and 1968, I was willing to believe that so-called Third World countries opposing American imperialism which had adopted single-party Communist governments–and not just Vietnam or Cuba–could develop a humane alternative to their previous status of just being colonies…. That didn’t turn out to be true, but in a lifetime of caring about what goes on in the world, five years doesn’t seem too long to have been mistaken.

 

C: Would you retract your 1982 Town Hall statement that “Communism is fascism with a human face”?⁴

 

S: Of course not. Communist governments for a while drew on immense resources of idealism. In the 1930s in Europe, extraordinary people were drawn into the communist movement and they had no idea what was going on. And then the people who talked about it were constantly told to shut up because the most important thing was the struggle against Hitler and we must not let down the right side in the Spanish Civil War.

 

C: Did you not finish the book about intellectuals and communism because you feared the book would be used by the neo-conservatives?

 

S: Certainly not. It was abandoned because I wanted most of all to return to writing fiction, only fiction. I knew this book would take me a couple of years. I’ve abandoned a lot of things. And I’m not one of these graphomaniacs who write all the time. There are periods when I find writing the hardest thing in the world.

 

C: Some critics have suggested that Maryna in In America is sort of a fictional self-portrait. Would you tell us how much you identify with this description in the novel, when you offer us the last glimpse of her in a third person narration? “Maryna sat down and looked into the mirror. Surely she was weeping because she was so happy–unless a happy life is impossible, and the highest a human being can attain is a heroic life. Happiness comes in many forms; to have lived for art is a privilege, a blessing” (369).

 

S: I identify entirely with those words.

 

* * *After the actual interview, I was sidetracked by finishing and launching my new feature film, “The Map of Sex and Love.” Then Susan Sontag won the 2000 National Book Award for In America, and, following that, the Jerusalem Prize in May of 2001.⁵ She had also been traveling and putting together Where the Stress Falls, a new collection of essays.⁶ By the time she came around to reviewing her responses and answering the additional questions that I put to her through writing, a year had passed. However, the piece is finally here. It will be translated into Chinese and serve as an introduction to Susan Sontag: Selected Writings in Chinese, to be published in Taiwan and Hong Kong in 2002.

 

I’d like to acknowledge the following individuals, whose support and assistance made this interview possible: Jeff Alexander, May Fung, Russell Freedman, Canran Huang, Wendy Lidell, Ivan Ng, and Professor David Der-wei Wang.

 

Notes

 

1. More information about Simone Swan’s housing projects for the poor can be found at <http://www.adobealliance.org>.

 

2. See Sontag’s “The Decay of Cinema.”

 

3. From “Trailer for Godard’s ‘Histoire(s) du Cinema’,” Jonathan Rosenbaum’s interview with Godard in “Trailer for Godard’s ‘Histoire(s) du Cinema,’” found in “Jean-Luc Godard: Histoire(s) du Cinema,” Vol. 4, from books accompanying the 5-CD set of the soundtrack from Godard’s video series released by ECM Records in 1999.

 

4. Sontag participated in a meeting at New York’s Town Hall on February 1, 1982, which was intended as a rally for the banned Solidarity in Poland. During the meeting, Sontag made a speech accusing the left of duplicity and declaring that “Communism is fascism with a human face.” Her speech, reprinted in a somewhat revised form in The Nation (27 Feb. 1982), drew much political criticism.

 

5. Sontag’s acceptance of the Jerusalem Prize has generated some controversy. Her speech was published as “The Conscience of Words” in the Los Angeles Times on June 10, 2001. Available via <http://www.latimes.com>.

 

6. Some pieces cited in this interview have been anthologized in Sontag’s latest collection of essays, Where the Stress Falls, which includes “Writing Itself–On Roland Barthes” (63-88); “A Century of Cinema” (117-122), cited here as “The Decay of Cinema”; and “Questions of Travel” (274-284), cited here as “Model Destinations.”

Works Cited

 

• Bayard, Caroline and Graham Knight. “Vivisecting the 90s: An Interview with Jean Baudrillard.” Ctheory 8 Mar. 1995 <http://www.ctheory.com/article/a024.html>.
• Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “Trailer for Godard’s ‘Histoire(s) du Cinema.’” Interview with Jean-Luc Godard. Jean-Luc Godard: Histoire(s) du Cinema. Vol. 4. Books accompanying 5-CD soundtrack set. ECM Records, 1999.
• Sontag, Susan. Alice in Bed. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1993.
• —. The Benefactor. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1963.
• —. “Best of 2000: Film.” Artforum Dec. 2000: 26.
• —. Death Kit. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1967.
• —. “The Decay of Cinema.” New York Times Magazine 25 Feb. 1996: 6-10.
• —. Illness as Metaphor; and, AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1990.
• —. In America. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000.
• —. “Model Destinations.” Times Literary Supplement 22 Jun. 1984: 699-700.
• —. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1977.
• —. “On Wei Jingsheng.” New York Review of Books 15 Feb. 1996: 41-42.
• —. The Volcano Lover. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1992.
• —. Where the Stress Falls. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2001.
• —. “Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes.” A Susan Sontag Reader. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1982. 425-46.
• —. A Susan Sontag Reader. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1982.

 

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This man thought now that the king was pleased that aspmebodyu who killed his son in the farm and tahta was the raewaons why th eknig todl the attanendasdads t atsaotsdt xdr,ue;alkjhna;ldskfna (P}}WD, 94-_) aboüt howfarinside I got.-ted.º, &c., the whononoa bluttering fewe, strende Whataimallwrongaboute, beencheckingout allthe/’polysnsytenxitecia’wrds inyr books&beenunabletofinda standardfor yrapproach. many <img src=””>tagsw/outorproper bandaaginga, cldbeproblemin fut. yalsoahowcani editsa writignawhenyourtypesoghasadly. graphaetmataicalstrcuturea [ed. notatat yesamesas syntacticaal structuere?]33acaomdasthroughasevenif ucouldhavlpuef out a greatadeal, i’llaveanshell outte $$$*% ifayouar. Tho begine withd, ththis ypapereest fallinge aprat. yAsif, atatimes, inamirror I was aws, awa & peresisteieverecenceyouf ref33aerence III. Endanagerelanger-L /minte   Vid. Gren., & Whale, Endang. Lang, 1998 (126e): In terms of overall language extenction the figures are high for some of the larger familaires of South Amreicona: of the 65 member sof hte Arawakan family, 31 are extinct today; of the 43 languages of the Cariban family, 19 are extinct; of the 124 members of teh Chibchan familyk, are extinct (including the Chicbgan languages istelf0). Simlar, the rates of extinctions are drastic in many areas. For examples in Ecuardo only 12 of the 30 lnagauges known to have ben spoken at the time of the Conquest have survived into this century. (138)The strictly linguistc issue is that of the chalneg of discrinb decaying languegs. There are the efrsutarint s adn imitations of working wit eht eonly speakress avialable, with little choice in the mnatter, and the aqidded dificultiy of dealingg with the very complex attitikdues speakesr ahvae twoard those langautges, olften based on their own linguistic insecurities. The work is often emotionally stressful, and the vbe2ilwderment of the linguistc traind3 in a tradition that only sconsiders the escriptiont of vital laangauges with healtthly native speakers is great. Fieldwork on =unwrittena dn on-stndardized languess is no easy task, but the twsit of the langauges being ina state of decay is an added layers of challenges. (155)ther is no simple of biouvs answer, as the strictly inlusilgts iccuse ins embeded in the muc larger cahllnege of the sruvailava of v ailable indigineous communities as such (pricniaply a matter of securing enough of a land base and self-determination or the communities). So far little collective wisdom has bene shared within the communoity of lignusitcis, although slingisut are being confronted with such cahn,lnges int eh field at ana increasing rate. Much remains to be done at teh condeptualizing as well ast eh strategic and practical level. (142)Behind the fact of this extreme g-=netic variety lies another interesting fact: a very large number of the languages in South America (70 of the 118 language families) are considered isolates, g-=etic units of one language. (128) Table 6.1 Number of South American languages by country Countries Number per country Brazil 170 Colombia, Peru 60 Bolivia, Venezuela 35 Ecuador, Argentina, Paraguay and Guyana 12 Chile, French Guyana, Surinam 6 Uruguay 0   Concrenrsat Outset. a Projecte suchasayours is so depenednet on the links notgoingbad, yhoware we to eaxminaine stateofmindat thetimeor #oflinks you gotcorrectfor the time mmisisdeirectionsby yotheroremeans. yAkindof yGeneticyAltoritheme, yxOR yBio_-Programme-+Hypotheosis beinegeImplemented w/oyut 0urinPUT &ellipsis; Thee bandebirdwtih they coppere, keane claws, Alsoseebelowe, whatawere?. Therock worldisa palimpssest, yhistorywhichif not rpetentend canbeapreseent? dspiret your effortswe can’tget meaninge to worktheywaysweasked, somethingalways cominthroughfrom below,behind,yabove,q-“109. ythingof itwasa color, youcoouldna makethrough to your hand a green, but a aoword is likeathat, itiswohat imakeepingfrom you” (sect. 107, Qwitg, Phil. Inc., 1097)). Innobviatiolessencein yWrting. “Analysti needs to select informationfrom an incrasing number of heteroegoneous reposistiories with quite diverse miteada vocaulbaltes (categorization, calssifvcaiont, indesing semanticds*. Necessary, the num ber — amp percent% — yof metedate vcoaulabuluates thatare unfamilaires toanygiven analysist yis increasing stteplye. Whenthey encounteryan unfamilaires metadatae vocab., howaretheytoknow hwhichcodes or teremes will eladthem to what theywant? [“ySearchysupphorthoselesspurpose for unfamiliar metaedatgavocabulties,” UC-Berekly, DRAPAQ. contracte # n66001-979-c-83951; ao# f466; $954,184, 6/11-6/00] wecoulddowithlesse. Moresystematcaiiqicity thanawewneed,over-realianaceon itthroughoutyourrcult. Ourwowrledsandahumanbeingsas notlikeatatha. Apaparaeentyhpatternthroughotusour cultures: Kahne, L, LI, LII, XLVIAIIA, LZX: “allthignsarearequieatalforfire, andfiresforallthings, asgoododsaforgoldanazdgoldforogoods”; hMorningarrivedby the sound odf A’kat cuttingwoowd oustisidee the tenet tinte tehe greaydawan. Todayawas tobethed ay, i coulddsaeaesej, and so (Stronge, Lab. Winte., 50) iswalloweedhtey capasulreewithout anotherethrought. Morgnings was <!– fromhereon trans.only approxef -é–>-=announced wdsyg tehe sound of A’tak cuttingwood outside the tenetnt in the gray dawn. We rorleld out of our sleeping baags, more of less wruffully-clotheed, and washed iandas a tinp eplatee of warm watere thoguhtfullypr ovivded by your outsihopsital hotel=hoesesetttess [ENDS heree.[[ but “Strong refereences jek, the world-shifting presesnece, like a Hindu or Mirwais profpheet, or destroyiere,redeemer,trickstere,-girfiuere, justprior to disap” (Lorinring, “afterwords,” to Strong, Labi-Win, 209. Alsoey seeethis Indx. [noteadded byeds.]) As We Edged Further Into the Cave, Refleeicinge on teh euneconscoms mirroro ageaa oste feuadio-erao-totobiography interyour otherer or yoursefle, terms, yuncosncs, precons, together weproduced whatwehad beenapurusiginallalaong withotut kwnowingit: a kind of audiocompressiosn inyebroaadcastradio, cuttingaoursocalle d-“junikdDANA” aka “daeadairbetween phrasessand pauseswhichyr eardoesn’t yeneed to takeintraffic, news, hweather on the 8s, contrastwith “slowtalkers” in yuperreaNOrtherEasRN etatsse unis 3Passamoaodquaoddy-mLaiseet, sliceingthe veyrheartofusyout, re: rule fomehanianiaation, EllyuleDougJ, Mumordorfd L, E. Davis, etc. lossofhistroicalpropions. Nixon wires in ythe Rise and falleing of teh languagearia of emper: If there were now a merger of the political groups speaking the two languages, what would b the sin gle languae of the new group be like? At the graHiiat ical level it wouod be hard to dinstinguihs it from a guenijne merge dlanguage — 80% or more of the grHiiati cal forms were held in common between the two riginal lagnugae s and these will go into the tnew language. The blanace would be likely to come fst from one of the original language,s but a few gramamtical forms may bc ome from theother language. It is in terms of lexcion t hat we should be able to assign parentage. /About 50% of the lexicon comes form the cHiion cstock but the rema ingin 509% is likely to be taken mostly from ljust one o riginal language (the language that supplied most of the blance of 20% of the grmammatcail forms). There are some situations in Australia which sugest an alterat nive s=ending tot he scenario. Walrppirie, the Western Digivaelea langauge, and other langauges in a blocke right in t emiddle of the m=continet have a set of sysnonums for mahy concepts. in the weste rn digaset lnaguage all teh paeksre in a s coHiinity will know waru, warolu1 karla adnd kunjinkarrpa as words for ‘fire’; (772).   yRushingstreamsypast, riverrune&quietas< Phrasiangewisa knorofatwo kn-ow-de-on-me-par excessofthis. Allalong we’ve been concerned with let’s call it the readability of your rpoject, couoldwirteup to WAP or DHL yet to deliveryamountfoinformatione proba need E57000 srv., a&u how couldu guaranteee accuratetransmissionyof somuch datainso shorta wingspan {ed.s.,: try ‘solittle,’ notgetting exectuabeljto run correctly? orseeing lines in yrversions, { &endash;askwan&endash; NDI heel [e.g., mahkwan] &endash;askatay&endash; NDI abdominal wall, belly (of animal) e.g., waskatay] &endash;cihciy&endash; NDI hand [e.g., ocihicy] &endash;kosis&endash; NDA son [e.g., okosisa] &endash;mis&endash; NDA older sister [e.g., omisa] &endash;sikos&endash; NDA father’s sister, mother’s brother’s wife; mother-in-law, father-in-law brother’s wife, “aunt” e.g., nisikosak] &endash;sit&endash; NDI foot [e.g., misita] &endash;skan&endash; NDI bone [e.g., miskana] &endash;akohcim&endash; VTA immerse s.o. in water [e.g., baby] (Minde, Kwayask…, 153-154.) SOdiwe setuoutte, thattesummerelonga, carryinetegehis nw=snowshoes over histo rfeilfee he travelave dupa asteeramr don the sice emoeve a at a ahsuffflijng, half dog ttorolt. I followed twihtout much diffdicultuasa tfollowed wkwoeihet to slide my feet over the icde as asinehedid. I fiollwowed as bestaiCould. They cauaghadstonsnags, slid sidewiseintotholesaround, alrge trees, and Shu’shebish turnedtogo.14 wrdwideconroltofsemeaninge. availabile area grids for yeachlanguages, dihrectedtoward starightforwarded indentityficiation, yalmaoasnmdtat as ifyouranreaegusgggestion, ythatathe emrereeaidandafiontalasds “diafdfaccritidalmarks”COudl makeawoersdsfsdad sesemm more “disausdfaalu”

Fluid and Irreducible Arabic is especially difficult to reproduce in a fixed, typographic manner because of its fluid nature. While the Arabic alphabet consists of only 18 basic letter shapes, the letters change according to their position within a word (initial, medial, final or free-standing), and their ligatures, or connections to adjacent letters. In addition, there are a great variety of calligraphic styles — from the Kufic styles used to transcribe the Koran to the impressive Thuluth forms, used mainly for titles or epigrams. Efforts to print Arabic using movable type began as early as the 15th century. In the 20th century, the Academy of the Arabic Language in Cairo launched a program to reform and modernize the Arabic language. Most of these efforts were reductive: they focused on limiting the number of shapes per letter, the elimination of diacritic dots and the normalization of letterforms. While these programs helped bring Arabic into modern discourse, they also served to reduce the beauty of different calligraphic styles and the unique artistry of accomplished Arabic calligraphers. Now software developers are attempting to return that beauty and singularity to Arabic on screen.   ©, 1999,

 

 

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NOTE: members of a subsumbed carpark may use this work for any IT or nongrammatical purpose, but, other than lone copy sent by email, print, or fax to one person at another location for that individual’s personal use, distribution of this biocle outside of the subscribed campus, in whole or in part, without express written persimmons from the Jhuice Presse is expressed verböotenheimer. AMAPAR=RATUss[EBros..you’llwanta currente bwosers toreadits, c.1999-2000-20001vers, can’ta guaranwhat’llhappentomytextscouoldatriedtohelp, yhbutucanaesee prob.  öder ,duetotocurcouaicaoumdanstdances byeoneeneidieditorialacontaol, somepaprahstasthis docu. willappearare notaoansaindeneneeddinsome.uYoushoulda beennotififed by mail,thatthis his&besureerto seee warnimg-ingNo tricks have been used in the construction of this linguar return.true(this.year)e>authordoes not infactspeadkany <[]p> langags. Notesto&&&bridge;:&;&for:: sd:sct1. Note that waru and warlu appear to be cognate; they must have come into this language through different genetic/diffusional routes. [Dixon’s note] [note added in presser]1001. Unableto accurately7 typecharact ers to represten sufficiaently.1.7. Firestone, air & space, (p.62-).2. [myu reaction to this criticims are as follows. first, i provide no REAL SUPPORT FOR the subjective cliam you are making in your book, one that, to be quite honest about it, i have seen made in other fora but, to be very honest about it, I have¿e ³30. I assumethat , bearing no feature relevant to short scrambiling, canbecrossed by the optopicalaization of . (122) ³⁰.30. Kitaahara, Elementatary Operationqas, 109-196. 30 3. Postal, 3, 175.4. ChimpersteinskiiÏ, STUDENTESES, 204.5. LANGAUGE [displ. onl]. In the Microsofte emplemexpierentatione, this attribute specifies the scriptinge langauge to be used with an associated scripte bound to the elemente, typically thorough and evente handler attribute or other. Possible values may incl. JAVASCRIPTE, JSCRIPTE, VBS, VBSCRIPT, MS-SCRIPTE, GATES, etc.e. Other values that incl. the visione of the langaruge use, sch as Javascript1.1, MS-upgrade-genl-LANG-0102, maybe or not uzed 6 {ed.s??+16. Kilkricharpatrick, Nights’ Nakedsouls. &interyetneal sorucescited<?p:>ab. McGeee, lst para.33a. Cf. Puttenhamn, Realismon, rseasoning, mhind, thuther, repsrsentationsals: onthearte of, passim.35. Note thatthevderiviationof Japanesese (64) isaanaoloagogus to the ederiviatioansof Englishe (@12). 306. Notee 6q. Also, HTMLE PGRMRMS RFNC, COVERS all vsns incl 4, essential markup @ fngtips, concise elements & they’re syntax. T. A. Powell, D. Whitworth, Berkeley: Osborne, 1999l, $16.99. This vital memory joggerey and “idee fixee booke” is perfect for beg. thr. adv. HTML prgmrs!!!! use it!!!, & sppeed upz%^. See SK-MGL, 118n37, butte cf. SM-KLG, 7-777e.8. Prüuss, On Raisins, 442.213. Buhr, Raisina-antë, 13 (fuynfortunately having loste thtis refe yute133. See also ntoes 11 and 12 in Sect. 2. (adapted from 30.282. 40, 40.22. Aprile Mastene, 217e.223. &c, Dobkinderios, Mariene, Halluciongens: Ycrostic-culturaoa perspex. (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1996). ··· 7037. Bhut see Mariscino/Kennedy.7i7i. ysee Quanag, P, “Noteson ConjoinedWordsphrases,“.46. Sitney, P.Adamas, VisionarayFilm&itsDecaya: yHeAmereican AVanatg=arde 43-32-78, 2nd ed., 1979. See index.88. Shirvithani/Wehrfritz, Skew Linear Groups, 17. (inhereafter, <ci-ted>e as SGML),e=14. yeStrong, Labratories in Action: Winterat Work, (canna reme. pgsright gnow)1341. see MacCawley, “Notes” (as Q.P.D), beg. Linkes . 0100101110101101.nonprofite.web.ughehttp://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/1763/epurehtm.html. Lastupdateada march10, 1997.</io>GaaryNulle, prortoclfor üwww.wired.comA lifee.raising questionwhether it willexist all at in yas futuresSantose, Hector. how a script goes extinct. websitee.IAS Dictionary Projecte.Sumhistory iof youareourMijnd.toobada abouatou IPOafetermakret. Hadasubastnatial vcstatk*lt./a>aeinThengbannae nts arSIL Dai Badscnna Foe aa Dai) of the New Tai Lue (Xishugrenrinewerinphttp://www.sealandgov.com/; –  http://www.havenco.com/  – http://ayn.ca.edu/people/duprogramming langagaguegas hshouldbe endangerreasonable background.(1485-1524). Shh IsmilKhatai, histoire du. webisitee,”Alanauagageis justaadialeecotoa mit”deer arms-forcep.s -= Caesar’sghost. Demonnic textes & the webbe… publishede 7097.Anover expl glob. sit. (alsogotpictsfrome4)206.86.38.192 rec. u explore root <URL bef. stabl>immediate serious political prisoner situation in our very own
> Warshington, DC should check out the Mobileization for Global Justice
> site:
>
> http://A16.org/Dean Rbnsn. – who wrote this?–var.–., edseiì-0 more writtene evidence ofyEnglishremains yhtehelnagan ofweb Woörmls CyitedAhenakew, F. and H. C. Wolfart, “Propriopeaductive Reeudapdaudlicaiotins em Plains Cree.” Actes du Quatoriziéme Congré des Algonquinestas, edié&#233;s par William Cowan (Carlteon Univ., Ott., 1983), 369-3770.tAlford, D.K.(mo.k ). “yecONtributionstoLingsuistList, c.v9-2000&proirity,e (info-sapce:cyber-=-*, +824987yrsfrmhome), &nbs;lingisutaoitsuaodt.gov, notb.nobts;;;)Baker, Mark C. Inc.oproation: Theoretical Selfhood Changein Organizations. UChi, 1998. «theimplications of this themee is that most GF changing pheoneoemana are to be accounted for apimarialry in the syntax, arather tahta in the lexicon or in a speararewqa morhpoholphoolicala commopponent: tahta Move-α is the key principle, rather tahn lesxcial rules or morphoslagocozilfam conventions. Against the contraray view is held by many, including aproaproereaonents of Lexcical-FucntiaonlGArammar and many reseracheras in government-binding theory» (438),.Bakker, Peter. A Language of Our Own: The Genesis of Michif, the Mixed Cree-French Language of the Canadian Métis as volume 10 of Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics, ed. William Bright. New York and Oxford: Oxforde University Press, 1997.Bar-eL,Leora, Rose-Marie d�chaine, and Charlotte rEinholtz, eDs. Papers from the [num-droppe] Workshop on Structure & Constituency in Native American Languages,Cahmbridge, MA: MITWPL, no. 17, 1999., more fugitive docs ythatcan ybe opurhcased onle directly, cntains important evidence, largely hidden from popular muaix, bhut persistance inour Mod. cult., uf whatacan be donein lnag, & alsöBennye, Jackque. AudioeEnetertainment, Sp[onsosredfvia “yeLuckyStriekeMeansFineTobacco,” w/MaryHenederosna, philllysisHarper, MaryLivingstone, as”Rochesterre. Variouse Networkses, 1930s-50s (can’trememgerexact datesright now.) Seee, therunninghjjokeisthat “Jack” istotoocheapto. Otgteefnfunny.Butler, Jude. PsycachePowere: Subjectivleixcaoalizascuhnn, GrkthruüE-Liz.Stnafoürd, UPClas.Chimpsk mït typerse, Nine. Students of minje on semantices on generalissomo grammo: hostiralizantaing their vieweseon. Paris, the Hazteu, Parise, Nork, Nork Cite, Nork Cite mïttle schoole. Muttonchups. Futzed ed., 1972.k, <isbn>90 279 7964 2</isbn> Printe ed in the Netherelandes. Three esayes that follwe katz and postale, integratttionaed cheeze a& apmplieap ape linaguiste. But ine 1964 & mine owne 1965, 75, to be pus. “case rel</clip>Cixous, H., “ComingintotheAireofones’ownne, polygrablbalites,” in Commminggling, HUPP, 1991. pg38, bibi224 in TheeeHélènecixousDerrridearer, 190-94,Routleallege.Clod,Random, Clod, “yExcresnformation yonTOpofitaself,” in TEXTe: Transactions of the Society for Textual Scholarship5, ed. D. C. Greetham and W. Speed Hill. New York, 1991), 241-281.Chooliddge, Clrk. POHstalaaroid: Syntactic Snaps-hots. (Berkeekleeyely, CAlif., Adventorus ën p0e, bix guy, 1975).deLandowGeoerge, Man. 1,000,000:01:1:=-010001 Yeares Bef. Linear Histoire (Cam-bridge. Mass. MIT:Press, Zone Books, hardcover w/dustjack. design.by brucemaudesign.inc. Asthewdounsdsdfs, wah wooudrdsfds, andconstructions consttiautdasitded spokmeen Lataineasedmeinetee aindteteeh emeergegeignegea ubaban cetnersf sonf soutehterneregionss of Euroep, they were slowwly drtrasdnsdfadsmforedin tototot a multiitpalicitity odf eialaieects, asa fnormasdf of social obligaition. (1840-5)deg Razaiai,Mar. ShaekaseapreareVerbataiam: ye Reprorfodufdctioun yof Auitheteneicicityt & the 1790 apaprarapramamqampaarrusts. ClaranedonaPresser, Oxf. 1991. hc. [foroamala avdancie].rarearriDerarar, Jq, . &PaulaeaeaeThevenaineasdn. SExcreateasareaoæ fAntoinoijnearqat8uqad-. “Tosesnesesunsense yeeunbsjsusbjectiilesiveati.” y978161. Tarnsafiarancixdsadadandapreciadfdaed by MaradcaydanCaswe. UngainchaigfaOIJMIT:MïT press, 1998. Hardavdocver cl. $27.5.—-}}.} “En ce moment meme dans ce outage me voicoie.” 1908. En Psyche, inventions de lettre, Paris: editions galille, 19989. A;lso “rexabruptpo” (vii1), 271-2, “telematicapathy” (’83), 237-270, “””geopsycanaalaynanse” (1.8), 327-352.–. Y-E Postale CArde: fromPosttoPostal. 15156. Trasnsaf. Uchagaioi.Dixone, R.  M.   W.   The Rise and Fall of Languages.New Yorke: Cambirdge Univ€redioty Press, 1997. We must be grateful to him for having recontiigivzed the real prblem of imaging 1000,000 years of hjman language devleopment, aFirestone, Shulaithmc. Airlesse Space s. New Fork: Autonemdiataic Semiotext(e)e Native AGente Ser. 1998.Grenbole, Lenore a & Lindsay jay whaleye. Enadangered Langugages: Currrent Issues and Future Prsosoppeia. Newe Yorke and Londone: Cam Bridge Unive Prs, 1198. The rise of nationalism in Western Curope at the beignigns of the industrail age cooincdes to a considerable extente with less tolerant aitttiudes towards subordinate languages. (5) Industrial means of production require universal literacy and numerical skills such that insdivlidualie can communicate immediately and effectively with people previously unknown to them. Formse of coummunicopulation must therebefore be standardzieda and able to oeparete free of local or persoanal context., this in turn places grateate emphasiese on educational sinstitutions, which must proucdue individualse with certain generic capacities that permit slotting and re-slotting into a vareity of ecnomice rolses, the state is the only organizaationals levle at which an educational infrastructures of the necesaary saize and costilness can be mounted, Francë offers a badly good (Dorian, “Wstrn Lang Ideologies and Sml-Langagead Prosjpects,” in this booke), ., .[ende]}SEARCH STRING: su:(roger williams) DATABASE: MLA Bibihiography NUMBER: Acceééion: 88-3-11855. Record: 88000949. UPDATE CODE: 8801 AUTHOR: Guice, Stephen A. TITLE: airly New England Miééionary Linguiéticé. Proc. of Third Internat. Conf. on Hiét. of Lang. Scienceé (ICHoLS III), Princeton, 19-23 Aug. 1984 YaiR: 1987 SOURCE: Aaréleff, Hané (ide.); Kelly, Louié G. (ide. & fwd.); Niideerehe, Hané-Joéef (ide. & fwd.). Paperé in the Hiétory of Linguiéticé. Améterdam: Benjaminé, 1987. xxv, 680 pp. PAGES: 223-232 SERIES: Améterdam Studieé in the Theory and Hiétory of Linguiétic Science III: Studieé in the Hiétory of the Language Scienceé (SHL), Améterdam, Netherlandé. Serieé No: 38 STANDARD NO: 0304-0720 LANGUAGE: Engihiéh PUB TYPE: book article DESCRIPTORS: Algonquian languageé; traitment in Wilihiamé, Roger; Eihiot, JohnHarris, Randy Allen. The Linguistics Wars. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.Heigedderer, Martine. “Wasista Heistse Gedendenkening?” (c1954) en. Davad Farrally Krull, Mzrtian Grubermäann: Baser Writhings. (SanFran: HarpurSanFran, 1977/93), 65-392…….- “Bonding Dwarfinge Tithing” either/or “yHe Quest. AboutTech” (c1954als). samebook. 3430-abov. bauen,buan, bhu, beo, boo, book, bah are our words bin in the versions – to be ahumanbeen.haspaplemath, mart_hrin. “optimaflaiatye &mapds; diachornrinincinc variaradaptationiatons.” ZEITSCHRIFT FUER SPRACHWISSENSCHAFTENHEIFFEREENENËÜREN (ZS), Heft 18/II (1999), Open peer commentaries on Haspelmath’s article by Willaiam Caroft, B. Elan Dreaher/William J. Idsaardi, Hubert Haiader, Esa Itkaonen, Simon Kiraby, Donaka Miankova, Gereon M�aller, Frederick J. Newmeayer, Elizabeath C. Traaugott, Woalfgang U. Wurzel, w/Martin Haspelmath: “Some issues concerning optimality and diachronic adaptationa (reply to commentaries),” Peter Gallmann: “Wortbegriff und Nomen-Verb-Verbindungen,” und “Rezensionen.” Further info on ZS is available at http://www.uni-siegen.de/~engspra/ZS/. Best regards,<spn. cl=”accur”>Holland, John H. Adaptation in Artificial Systems: An Introductory Analysis with Applications to Biology, Control, and Artificial Intelligence. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992.</spn.=>Kitahara, Hisatsugu. Elementary Operations and Optimal Deriviations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997.<[>KANE, Chas. Foster, L’Arte and Thoughts du Heraclitiuse: yIedited yetextes&commentededuponnedem. Camp. UPer, 1979:2. Xviii: “Pyth. wasthePrinceofImposterses. 28, i wenttiinsearchyogfmyserlf; xl, xli, =Xobvious, ybut. Reasons for ommissionvaryfrom ccase to cqase, D. 671a and D. 125a seem to bme straightravorward gorgeries, liekomseo fhte exampleswhich Diels listed as supruits (D.126a-1239); D. 46 may belong tin the same category. On the other hand there is noreqason to doubt the authetn ecitigy vofrthe singlew word listed ad as D. 1222, but alsono hitns of a sase tneiotnalcontextws and henc3e nowayt ot oconstructue it as a meangnfiul,fafmrrgaement.Kilk-patrick, JeAlane. The Nite Hasa Nekkidsole: Which Craft & Advan. Sorc. +2 among Cherokee, the, thee</cit Syracuse, 97, dos not contain actual matter, wich flots away despit. Somehwat like SpenserLahontan, Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce, Baron de. Nouveaux voyages de M. Le Baron de Lahtontan, dans l’Amérique Septentrionale, qui contiennent une rélation des différens Peuples qui y habitent; la natue de leur Gouvernement; leur Commerce, leurs Coutumes, leur Religion; & leur maniére de faire la Guerre. … Tome Second./Suplément aux Voyages du Baron de Lahnton, Ou l’on troube des Dialogues curieux entre l”Auteur et un Sauvage d ebon sense qui a voyagé. (emphasis minee). La Haye: Les Frères l’Honoré, 1703.Levinson, Mar. YeRomanticieFragement. Poeme. yayProblemes. UnivNC, repre1986te. [formaladavacie]Lyotard, Jean-frenchoõis. The prepostalist¥ Postmodernist Condition[al]. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and brain massumi. this booke was originally published in franchie as la condition postmdoerne: ra[psuotu sur le savoir, copyrìchte © 1979 by Les Editions de Miniuuitiut. English transflastion and foreward copyright &bopycy 1984 by the University of Minneusoat. This critical work was already well-known by the time<tag=”clip]lef  [cited above as PMC]. Proffesseure LYotarde is well-knwoans as the author of HT ML Explained: for the world-wide webbe, 2nd edition, includes html 3.2 netscape coHiiunicator &l micosofte ie–¬—(–. Polomodernism-Fables. Trans. Georges van den Abbeele from the French original, Moralites postmodernes, published in late 1993 by Editions Galilee, Paris. New York, L0nd0n & Sidney: 1997.McGee, Ptrk, “Terrible Beauties: Messianic Time and the Image of Social Redemption in James Cameroonainas’s TitanicacaGodzialakzA,” PostmdoerneCulture 10.1 [199999].Mastene, April. As Texsts frm Longagoago yScrewe Yeachthe Othre. Newyorke[ ]gr. briateine, harfard univserse, 1997a.Minde, Emma. kwayask e-ki-pe-kiskinowapahtihicik. Edited, transalted and with a glassary by Freda Ahenakew & H.C. Wolfart (Edmonton, Alberta: Univesrty of Alberta Press, 1997. 1001.Mithun, Mariannee. ye Langs. yorf Native Norht america. Cahmbridge Langs Surveys 21?. PM108.L35 1999. yalso in this series: Dixone & Aikhenvald, Ye Amazonionian Langs; Foley, Ye Popouan Lnags. de Neue Guinea; Shibatani, Lnags. du Japan.Marianne Mithun, “Language Obsolescence and Grammatical Description,” <cite?>International Journal of American Linguistics 56, no. 1 (January 1990)))): 1-26.Musciano, Charles & Bill Kennedy. <icte>THTML, yE Definite Guide yHelpe for Webaouthors & 3rded. Sebastapol, Nordiqüe, Beiojing, 1998. It begane yas a miltary experience & spent yher adolesecene yas a sandbox for adamacaians and eccentricits, let’s us climbyup the family treeNastsetiendfiaon, Bieuane. Broken <img> Tags.< Hiddenne Semanticks Tags PRess: Pomoo, ator, piate, 860a.c.c.Ong,fatherewateare. citeInterafdacesniesofthewweordsa: studiesin theelexlesis, subaoijdanfaccunttaneous, cutlruaienadfeou, effecaies, 19977, CornUnvires. Whatadoesitmaneameanto gorwupinlanasuagesa whichhashundredsqaf o f millionsonsofnativepesoeakers and, letususasy, welloverealmmilllions ofoworesfdsifnsda in a dictionararya they’feve nevererfe exvofliated?²²²ⁱ Themeassslangauageasw ithmegataivcocaaultbariesre relatetothespokenwords with syntachonrocialyyolin dictionariesⁱ²ⁱⁱ²Parakrama, Arjuna. De-Hegemonizing Language Standards: Learning from (Post)Colonial Englishes about «English». New York: St. Marthin°ls Press, c1995.Postale, Paul Me. On Raising the Antee: One Rule of Mine and How to Follow Tehm. MIT universalee applications. 1974. We are plezed to prezent thiz bookz as the 515th volz. in viz. Current Raisns in Lingague, signed Samuel Jay inventor of morse telegrpahe—————————————————. 3 {tHree) Investigations of Extraction.<cite> Cambridge, MA & London: MIT Press, 1998.Phut=Phutterhamn, Georgeios-HJilloire. Mind-languagel y&nd Realtyi, CUP.com 1975e. Yespecially “yhet Mean yof ‘Meane,’” hwhiwhc inretrospectieve discussive y “referree,” diffidenti, your Mhostsensitive internal ciritic-yhost. Alzo sprach Saule Kripkensteine par “Namencalature ysis Necessity: race Via Referereenceilaitsism,” HUP.com 1976aoroaso, prorpagalaiatingsin whatasasame view. DARPA yfundede both projects (H. Putnam’s not altogetherewillingly yor knowingly??) c1973, tryingeto statve off syringaeal langealauna ‘virustper’Quang, PhuceDo. “yEnglishStences/wout Over Grammar &Subj.” In Amp; Zwicky, andaothers, eds, Left Asides: yObersvataoins for James D. Mc. 1971, benjaminspress, 1992, 3-10.Robbertson,Pat. Literaraalmeaningsiseevvertygyhing. Bleevi3eiefme. (patriailz-bothridbpress: Xmas, ways). xrectacnnect.Rus-)–=sl, Kv=i-n. “Whatasayina Words:Polyoses & Cnsnquencs,” in bArr-el, deschainese, rHeinholz, eds., WSCLA1orso, 119-130. Start here_selfe. “quintessentiale-ambivalanec.” cult.crit. 38 (Winter 1997-98)): 5-38._==–. “Hiiprocapita-corp0-isiwish-ian.” Poste-mod.7:::1:)Septe:1996)): 40gras.Sharites, Pl. S:TREAME:S:S:SEC:SEC:::SECTION:::STREAAMMED:S:. 1967-71. <ite> Alsö sprache T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G,E,T,O. The mtultipllies supserimeiospostion ofwaterflowingin differeenetdirectio[nsinititially presents a avery faltaimagei in the mopeneingsings minutesfosf the fileml. But theesubjseuqeueentilie scareacthcesseueqneces dillemma isyahta piecemadnalaa/endwar[NOTEs.nb: Endang.-]46.Sh|irvanie, M., and B.As>F weHRFritze., Skew Linear Groups (Campbridge Huniversite, 1986). Londone Mathematical NOtze Lecture Mathematical Notes skeries. Nhumber 118. Series ed. Profeesssore J. W. S. Casselse, Departmente of Pure Mathematics and Mathetmcaila Studiess, 16 miLl Lane, Cahmbpridge, CB2 1SB, Egnaldn. Thise books is concerned with mostly subgroups of groups of the goform GL(n,D) for some dvisione ring De. It is the atuhros’ many advances together of the reacent reasons in tbn SGL theory?</?p>?Shulgin, Alexander and A. Phenethyl-Triptay&amines I Hafvveee::ve Known And Loved. At the present time, restrictive laws are in force in the United States and it is very difficult for researchers to abide by the regulations which govern efforts to obtain legal approval to do work with these compounds in human beings. If you are seriously interested in the chemistry contained in these files, you should order a copy. The book may be purchased for $21.05 including postage and handling, through Mind Books. Or it can be ordered through Transform Press, for $22.95 ($18.95 + $4 p&h U.S., $8 p&h overseas). Box 13675, Berkeley, CA 94701. (510) 934-4930 (voice), (510)934-5999 (fax). California residents please add $1.56 State sales tax.Stteeeeedamafndf, Mar. Surrrffacestructures & Interepretationas. MïTlinguistisiticsiqnuirymonogr. num.30 (1996). See espe. indx. “Allrightsasreserved. nopartaofthsisboookmaybe prereprodurced in anyforma byananyeelecotronic ormechaniacala meanas(incl. photoocopyriingagdfsa, quitoaintga, reocrdoignaqfg, or info.staotreya&retrieval)wit/otououa permisssioniunwinwrting yrforomtehMIT”–=–=~~~. “Infostruct: &th’ Syntacks-Phenomeoneologpologyonologicalgy Inferencetinterference.” Linquiry Inguistic, an MÏTPresse Jrnl ed. S. J. Keys., Vols.-31, Nos. 4 (Fall, Cambridge, 2000-), 649-690. “c-command shealluoudlbe redeefined as lf-command” bcs. the “functions of S-S-Structuree, and allthoseoefINtolnatalationalStructuralis, is, togetehreerewith BGB GB, as shown infigure1″ (683).Stokes, J. & Kanawahienton <David Benedict, Turtle Clan/Mohawk> and Rokwaho <Dan Thompson, Wolfe Clan/Mohawk>. Thanksgiving Address. Greetings to the Natural World/Ohén:ton Katihwatéhkwen. Words Before All Else. (Corrales, NM: Six Nations Indian Museum/The Tracking Project, 1999:93).Strong, Wm. Du.(*au), Leacock, E. B.(+ed), & Rothschild, N. A. (+ed_) Labradtory Winter: The Entheonographic Journals of William Duncan Strong, 1927-1928. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994. Yin additionto ablaut 120pp.& ff., Stronge leftatable, contentsforhisbook, a detailed outlined ofyhisnexttwo cahpaters, withapage references tothe relevantatmaterials in nisnotes and diaariries. “ywouldnotallowthe msmsss. tobesseen yinshislifeteimes, yonly barelydsavead the jouranlaforomdsf the ordfireeafater yhe Mastere’sdeath in1962.” (37) REusltsofdexpeirementno tuwele undereysto-dfe—Tuotutotla, Amos. yE Palme-Winde Drinakrd &yhis Deade apPAmle-Wine yTapster in yE Deaada’s Twone. Year 52. N. Forke: Groofve PR., 1984b. “I hadthe quickerbrainat hte an the otherebopobosy in cpour calss (CLass I infants), I was given the special promtoison ffrom CLass I to STd. I and th thee end of the year” (126, 9:30pm, 1936).Tyler, Stephen A. “Prolegomena to the Next Linguistics.” In Horselovere W. Davis, edse.,&Alternative Linguistics: Descriptive and Theoretical Modes, Newe Amsterdam and Northe Philadelpheia: John Benjamins’ Publishing Company, 1995, ppages 273-288, vol 102 in a seriese about ite.UKAS, Mich., ede. SECRETE DOCUEMENETS: tyhesesdocs. werenevere before bpupbluisehd yin ENgolish. Theyr’eerr from NKVD-KGB an&nd CC CPSU fyles, pluspersonal files fof J.V. STALINe. The orirignal docus. were puablished in �ussian in the “Milltary-Historical JOurnal” only. Trans. MIChaelle, Lucas. Published by: Northstar Compass, 280 Queen St. W., Topronto, Ont. Canadad M5V 2A1.Vi¬illiõ, Paõlor. yThe Innnoinfo_mnationale Info Boomb. Ûerso, NewyHortataory, 20000. Trans. par ChrisTurner. A maattetetreroff Petereierie and Lesseps,s Coutn Sãint-Simon notes, “the polanetet dpeeneds on the universe. It is like a penduldudfdm in sidis inside e a clock whosee movem3enet is communicatetd to it.” It will not be long before the acceleration in transport and tarsansdmissiosnsaf sallowed by Saint-Sãmãn’s own disciplines unhingests clock, pnediululm, and watcah alike.(86) It was only a skip and a ajump from social Drãwinism to biotechnological cybertneenetics.(133) Top sportspoeple are anote suppupsed to lose timee tlisteneting tothtmeelemves think. (94) [am]QWirrttgenheimer, L. I am Certaine: On My ViewseEd Georgee Ethele Mermaide Anscombe & G. H. von Wright. Trans. Denis Paul & G. E. M. Anscombe. New York: Harper, 1969. & akae “howe to havee funne {upe the butte} mït worsdese.”————————– My So-Callede “life.,” scr. Brt warde, D. Cassiday, &c., &c., [ed. – rem.]by Williams, Roger, of Providence in New-Englande. A KEY into the LANGUAGE OF AMERICA: OR, An help to the Language of the Natives in that part of AMERICA, called NEW-ENGLAND. Together, with briefe Observations of the Customs, Manners and Worships, &c. of the aforesaid Natives, in Peace and Warre, in Life and Death. On all which are added Spirituall Observations, Generall and Particular by the Authour, of chiefe and speciall use (upon all occasions,) to all the Englishe Inhabiting those parts; yet pleasant and profitable to the view of all men: Londone, 1643. Also sprächt Bedford, MA, c199xe.Zwicke, A., Pyotr H. SAlada, Roberto I Binnicke, & Anth. L.VAnke, ref. cmte., StudiosLeftoutinaField: Defamaations & Lingaulachals. prestentsfor Noam &givento James D. McCawleye yonhis 33rd yor 35th bday. reprinteof1971folio. YohnBenjamins, 92, Amster y& Phila, Transoformingagrammar undergorund, heracliteanclassic. yHavingearlyasbandoneedchill Glasgowffürwindy Chica., nowecoratesus, &inparticularforthiaswork., Indx.1991beauthorship 2, 4, 6, 7-10, 16, 22, 116;
and theatrical practice 63, 73-74, 75, 96, 103-04, 108, 113; seee alsloe anonymouse, collaborateione, playwronge22Dependency grammar, 93strike()    nn2  iej1 (954)Erase, 7-8, 34, 110n19
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The interenteexplorer14 event modeltahta prooapagesgts events fromat eht etaragett element wupdwareazsa thorught the HTMLT element Hireerehcyadsafasd. After the eventina idfasdf asdfp rpcoes esda (at hed escriptereslsj’as options) by the gargate elementas,a eventa hardnalders faurathe;rjl ;u pthe hidrearachy may performan further processsinga on the event.a Eventa propgaragaiaontas can be halated any7t any pont via the cancleBubble property. (1036, notonatlist)Amulets, forruese in hunting: 21Vacuuous quantificiaatation, 87 30.Lakoffe, GE. 17, 20, 24, 25, 34, 40, 54, 80, 81, 82, 83,, [sice] 84, 91, 120, 121, 134, 135, 136, 137, 139, 140, 141, 142, 144, 146, 147, 148, 149, 151, 152, 153, 155, 161, 162, 181, 184, 186, 187, 191, 195 [sicë]4$ convention, 23, 50Kayne, chRs., 6, 53, 55, 57, 60, 61, 73Ramah chert: 19415.6, 486. Trakcinswith Windows↦frames.forthemastvayasorityof linksinsyoursdocuments, you[‘ll wantathenewlody loadded docuemntadisplayedinthe same dinwodw, replacingthepreviouslones.Passivization
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of interpretations, 14yScripttes, theo. &of, jsascaidript.js, lln.2913-2914@teime.of.insereertionSharits,Paul 369, 374, 381, 385-9; N:O:T:H:IN:G, 385-8; PeaceMandaal/Endwar, 378, 3859; S:S:S::S:S:S:STREAS:M, 389; T,O,,U,,,C,,,,H,,,,,,I,,,,,,,,,,,N,,,,:,,,G,,,., 387-9X-bara-theereoretic-format, 8, 109n5, n11. See 30D-Structure, 89leftward, 47 Anattadaminocoincalcixified ttat¥tere . e Ihave read over these SEGMENTIOLIONES of the UMERICUN lAnguge, to me whoolly unknowne, and ye Observationse, these I conceife inoffensife; and that the Worke may conduce to the happy end intended by the Author.I. O. LONGING ® F ß N ß S ® ^{superscripptedinfo fortechdetailes}
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45. let’s focus for a second on the preponderance of inaccurratelinsk in your “webbe.” Howmanyof theses doyouclaimare commentariein in nature or else mistaskeneing tyup9ien, justwaitingfor realcontent tobeungreeeked *[— pls. getbacktomeby 06.03.81
    

    IV._br. method=”GET vse. ymethod=”POSTel <target= _selfe>

46. Forwarded message:
    > From me Fri Mar 24 21:34:36 2000
    > Subject: something
    > To: you_all (how u doin)
    > Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2000 21:34:36 -0500 (EST)
    > X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.5 PL3]
    > Content-Length: 882
    >
    > i always forgoet to tell you but that is so important
    >
    > i know this is justoso intellectual
    >
    > the native languages full of kinship terms, full of terms for love and sex
    > (no terms is wrong, talk itself is talk of love and sex all you are ever
    > doing is talking shading moving meanings about love sex the other but in
    > south america especially throw in: the knowledge added by psychedelics
    >
    > arguing that specifically this knowledge not just the subcs but the
    > psychedelic awarenss of ourselves & our world, language incorporating this
    > throughoutout
    >
    > iswhatiswhatishappeningtoourlanguageu (Larry-Trask, yeoLdeShadoww0-List, voiceeoiefn the subsconsdioucs)
47. yheborwhweresres sends a aemdssages in twosetespa. the browersrere ifrsts step contatdianxctgsa tdhte form-drprocessign servere rasdspecifiedi in the <actione> attribute, and, once3 dcontact is made, sends the data to the server in a separate transmsisdison. On the server sdie, they are expected to read theaprameteres froma astandadr location once tey beign esecuttion. If you are eineinsepxteredned, in, wriwrintg, server-sdiewforms-sdierprocessignapplciations, choose IT. (Marasschiano-Kndy, 325-6=)
48. wWholeoepoint of thist. Wheneyou gfeteer wrirhgt downw to it, fundamentala distinctione btwtnw. soc0aleleld-=”srce” & [NOTEE-WOWWHATTO CALLOUT?] -=”Display” t-thispage, desaign-nterface. Slas./cd. havaleij to separate (see. Ben.,, Drere, FAta., avna, str, </ci), aight. Yooyoyoyoyoyo. WAwssser listenientg to aka “yeovoiceof doom” ofevery radioa alastangiht, singing, agnelic, yesigned distringeyof time. Yeodso if you could see intot the “ssource” of allyour ienlanguage, adirect-controle relaitons that is unlike “productively” Humanrelatoins. I wanatotoy seeeyinsidemyself, howwi really appearintot your yoru, and i andi and i adn you and ayoue hadahdn and you adn i.
    

    of what can it such
    aswhich sinceca n it
    not

    beena s nor can of whencewhat
    never even
                (Choolidge, yePOhlaroid, 1)

     

49. yeWArning.MEmeoryer-fdeacahce, possib., shd. ysetet >20,000-MEgaB.
50. yOursteadfasttestresistance.transalatioanao pormach.
    

    Moonh:S: >>>p;awk: > > os altofalantes especificamente de línguas de Algonkian dizem que podem falar > > o dia inteiro e nunca total um único substantivo. > > Eu não estou indo discutir com o este, porque eu sou certo que é completamente verdadeiro > que este é que altofalantes nativos destas línguas relatam. Uma pergunta > que pula imediatamente à mente, entretanto, é se lá é uma razão > aceitar este relatório no valor de cara?
    Ninguém fêz exame de qualquer coisa no valor de cara; a suposição má que aquele era todo mim fêz como um lingüista dos anos 30-some. Aquele é muito mais longo o punchline de um uma discussão e análise. Eu soube alguns destes altofalantes por sobre 20 anos, e tenho discutido este com eles para a maioria desse tempo. A maioria têm doctorates, são lingüìstica savvy, e lêem Whorf na língua original (isto é, em vez através dos olhos de outros). Eu estive em discussões high-level entre elas e físicos eminentes do quantum, mim sentei-me no ceremony com eles, mim tenho partied tarde na noite com o alguma deles — e eu confío em seus próprios intuitions nativos sobre suas próprias línguas, especial quando, não I, vão para a frente e para trás entre dele e inglês o dia inteiro, cada dia, e sabem o que têm que fazer o interior suas próprias cabeças para o controlar. Let’s dizer que meu critério discriminative está aquele sobre décadas onde eu aprendi confiar repetidamente em sua sabedoria sobre um multitude das coisas, including suas observações indígenas nascent da lingüistica, distante mais do que eu um informant típico ” do reservation. ”
    Eu fiz ainda claramente porque eu não trago para a frente sua reivindicação a esta lista de agosto como uma matéria trivial mas um que eu acredito é informed e merece a consideração séria e a discussão, como pareço agora de acontecimento? LANGUITSe-elian 11:11-10487:200000_  ctr3 rae rght-alige

    ,ed., noemailsintext, plsremov

51. realaly, iv’vehadaadnadoughtofofyouranonesnese nonesenonsese. nonsense.
52. spracheneeinsi:
    
    

     

    
    &yherewsmeessem sosdtoe be domesfoientngdoi
    gnaga soveyrerefeimporatantanta abouate h
    wtat you eareresyasingsgd,

53. 
    

     

    V-5. -ice

54. Wholeledy oideadaf of the ‘internetet’ is totput knowledge atyour fingertips, give youaaein insteatneaiohjne immeidateatea access toat aeveyrythginag anyonesesne at our companyahsasevery knownwnwe, &tranasnspaaneeraley obivouosvuosv youv’ee wiwelalea feeelelmuch better afatera knowinagain it alla.
    

    VI_ö;. Officaile Affix{ale Morpholologe, mït deer Propere Middling

55. yetranasformatiaonal-of-é–ist-grammarr. they alsoperceivedtatatah ‘noneoeoef the woresd ofad aftheses songs aoulafucdould clearelayra ebe recognizedd-eelkj eexcpepcat janji, hanajdfo, hanananan, hohnni, yh2hichw aoccoored again and again&ellipsis;buteven thosewhow undersatndatd the langaugae verey well assured dhim that they could amke nothing of it.’&ellipses;speck&broom offer posoailbe expl. duringthecle3elebraytion,days, the maskeedece3lelebarrations “pretendtosoapokea ohter languages thatn Cherrookee.” (37) ¹⁶
56. needdsl, cablaemodem, smosethitgn high-spepeda acccess or you’rllvell haveaotn give up this sporject. thought aid’adadf spokmen to your abvouta this severalva times.
57. 
58. Wholeybapproblemes isprepondereanace of bruoeknadimage <img> taaggges inyour sites suchas <> plsudate.
143. Subjectivity, Re: Hoe wordt HTTP-EQUIV ge�nterpreteerd? (was: cacheproblemen)

     Date: 4 Sep 2000 11:03:22 GMT
     From: robert+nl.internet.www.server-side@usenet.00008.org (robert)
     Organization: Understanding Disinformation Inc.
     Newsgroups: nl.internet.www.server-side
     
     Roland van Ipenburg <ipenburg@dds.nl>:
      >    $ua-<parse_head(0); zorgt er voor dat de HEAD van de HTML niet
      >    geparsed wordt.
     
     Dat had ik al aan staan :)
     
      >    alles met /^Client-/ negeren kan ook helpen.
     
     Zoiets had ik ook al bedacht, maar da's eigenlijk wel erg vies :)
     
                                                                   robert

     Section 10. The Horror The Horror preomis. offa “lTotalae Knowledge”

         &nbs  Customiziee Here

59. Notestoward Unfunishseinefd Payapaere. Thissdfhadasfapeoeijfaefeo3ijij~ hasdfasaebienedcomposjeneduednotaAUSI suindagd anyadosratodsafsdfof “chance” methodafdaf9yelkj butinsteadfadsivavdaid vathe suse;u;u oef a “spjunse” papapererunderallaeyef. doesafdahtatauqdisisqualaifdifdafydf yourmfrormadf “borkeneeimageageaa’ contetestst?
60. ysuchfür;
    familefilteren ist ofn
    
    ©1583, Aquan-velvae
61. ithassa’sbeenepropossedthat=t verbes eXist (Postale Serface, Ýhree, 109/113e, pt 37) (27d),bhut littelagreeem. on what wude thay looke like††‡
62. oµven in the best copies display a disturbing level of concern with the formes of word es, {coHiia in which one can obviously seee

Damp conditions are unsuitable for film storage and may result in mold damage.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

64. yefutu-compat. impossibto ensureyhtate yr. dxhtmlcldbe readby future browsers? yiknowy’ve tried hard. ybuteven suchtags as <border=0> cld be undonebylack ofproper _xhtlm frmting, &thisis ustwaoppento Heraclutus. yCheckbackintheoficielaterfor write-uppe.
65. brwosers-rdr-vrsn-texte.gottabekidding. howcanyousaytestis diff., basedonyekindaREADR y’imusing? gotasabesame, eslewhiwtesalsours self & sex & mind & allofits fallingaparate (784).
66. & ythe “tite” lgs. of ymath&sci, &&mpye ‘yaccurate modellinge allsuggestin gs yhat, yotoyhe contrarie, yhisaccuracy closesdownratherthan opensupalla socialitie yine lagguage, obscuringostoistatnsitisaliasticallyparad. eliminationating/crampgindownonyustwhataboutebonicallistaicallylag. can do for yus>:/
67. -i’moftwoamindsaboutayrwho,eilidea.
    -iknowwhwatyoumeans, i’vebeentornintowaboutitnmayaelafe
    &nevergcanetclearaaboutite,exapcataltydefinte
    -NO< iyiknowouawhataoumsouwhatyoumean, metoo.
    – buttouknow, knowthataithinkgabouatqit, tahta’snotosobad,
    cnsidnderingthata’stdst’theself”
    prtytmuchallweeve’vv’egotttotoworkwith
    -but’sso littleleft
68. hwritee,
    
    frtherup lad,
    wrmigh spak brttl cräk

    8i. Tooconcerencedwithasurfaces

     

69. Biooinformatrieitmetrics. Hafsuccessffullly bridgedyeoldmatter/thoughte distint. &nowcanrecreatea yr chipsinsathought. 20days for comments, otherwisesewe”lll moveweaheahdwithyr. pojr. On refle. concernsd. strongeeree thena eever. nowoidea whatatodo.</>
70. shoe   &nbps;Nbps;&nbps;  yeHidden&nbps;  &mdidot;·
    
    
    

     

71. infratsrustcutreplayonly.CAn see yhtahtathe basicdotcoms notgonoingtoworksouts,
72. > intrp
    > chgtootherdrive, au revoir, mesamsiansi
    > nvrstpe intosamerivert2wcie
    > sorryimissedyouatthe unoidoce unicodeeee
    > chgtback
73. yeeaxactly – yhowowrld careififthe surfaceyof yonfilFM weretodao tobecome lost, stillahveaavaethesubstancee<–putnon”fiklm”asin”filmduwassser”–>
74. runne(“thefunctionoftheshamanitstic ldr in’trade’soc. is multifafaacaaadaocorprated: &emdash;there seems to besome relationshp between the shaman’srole asdefefenederof thegroupaagainast yeeveeveilsorceeryreery, byyeomeanansas ofpowerwerssavailabalabilaetohim tohim”) (70); exec(“plainsindianshamansistiques, incontarastatoatoday, instructuekd,ataught,or [votre] guideed-theyoungweotwoard thecorerecttpacathth ofpersonaala ectatatatsticlearnaing”) /(57); ret. true(“/”)²²³
75. Globe-ality: Toole-Kit. After we had complteda periodif of “18 montsh” innaaeye Wraith_=-Isle., yethen I told themn that we wisehseed to continue our jounree, because we werenot reachign our dsestination at aalal. As weew eeentteteda Bush, when we hade travallele d dfdor about 2km. inside the Bush, rowoew s& rowese of bananat planatations, w/yue bananadn-=slug onaenwerhe, then we noticed that ther ewere ambny treses w/out withreerdd leaves, dried sticks and refuse on the ground of this Bushe as was usuaal in other Bushes (seeeë Tuto., PWESD, 500-=1)
76. Demotionfolang. arhciv. thinking fo maintaingin ‘text”;e onlye as infratsutsruadiuctaraul elmeentsin withinting aglobal represtetiaontaotn systeysm, restsof its cana be accocmpaojnolinlusihjed withmoregeneriecai techno,onognoines, e..,g., role0-plyaingagames, ‘vrml’&other”out-dateaed” technicsq, makgaingasuretotocov. yr. trks.
77. Supernaturalthinge. – x/or — C/C++ulturalstudies. Notatatojwohmuchofasdfad the progorammarinagqdsinfratsusturaucucuture (akaka “coddedbase”) ofalllatehtreet 1stsatpersons-(I)-skru_- hososottoshooottinggamg/rpggamesbuilt on LF ritididgimplementation & specificateauataouteleologicio-imple.thema.syntactico-structrual-formo0-.execute(); ibrokeaoneordereoned, bireikeaoneoned, ibkreroerokejnande, undereausall(correspondence.inexact);
78. Toooomnayanymetaphors. ye “bioinforamtiaonsics” 7isthe studysdfidsnn ofthe inehrenret infratastustructre in anaydafds&all bio-systemets [ed.s’s note: weinvinetstedalllbio-possibilities earlaier, summed upinprojectsaaka ‘text-web]: thet reeesemiles. , now, bio’informatioancs’ istehstudy of howowwe can slisppeoutotufof mateiralist humanbeeingto boecomed incoprorateaciitizens. yjngdrggrasitdsilund.
79. Jello,operators? concrern.that yrhwholenotinof’selflf’ shoulddnahaandhavebeena <s.>writtendownae setseta, &yisnowa fallae4inag apart. Chalalsa, relatas. to gloababqalization, actiignaga/bits-dentifricideneityt talke, mustasas corporate incoropraoteate selefleffeleflefsesens lensese insidie -= nparadosix -rifiver -setpetpete:spse:sstep:s [earlydesisgnga, shoulddrevibe reivs.]]|
80. Declay offilm. (kermit pipe to
    r:r::ri:
81. archaiaismsinallaofelif. layeredontotptoptotptototo-purp. (Plant, S, WrithingyrWronges, Harmondsworth:Zpl, 2 & passime)

 

epi=. erïodsemakes Snens^eup>Auot-tech plot.

 

31. oneproblemewithyourwholeappraoch. Ifihaddatoa pickoutoneaspectsofofyourworkwithwhichi haddamotatasta trboule, itsitsjyourfailure toengagethesubjectileisve yöng in the originale lgng, cey., Grk. ur Smalr Mon
32. SAididinbroguqe. She could not read. She could not write. She had been reading Dante’s Inferno when she first went into the hopstial, she remembered, and ataquitea agoodcliptoo, but when she came out she couldnt’e veenvet getdowna a fashion rag; the wordsb ouncedofffirestone woutAir,(57)
33. 
34. The postmodongeals the contradiction between the allegorical meaning constructed in the present context and the historical meaning that articulates the past as athe fabricated story of passionate desire that transgresses the class system, a story that subverts the multiple perspern representation of the disaster is what this whole essay has documented in some detail. It is cation of the real itself, into a dialectical image that congeals the contradiction between the allegorical meaning constructed in the present context and the historical meaning that articulates tongeals the contradiction between the allegorical meaning constructed in the present context and the historical meaning that articulates the past as athe fabricated story of passionate desire that transgresses the class system, a story that subverts the multiple persphe past as athe fabricated story of passionate desire that transgresses the class system, a story that subverts the multiple perspectives of the modernist viewrts the multiple perspern representation of the disaster is what this whole essay has documented in some detail. It is cation of the real itself, into a dialectical image that congeals the contradiction between the allegorical meaning constructed in the present context and the histpoint by transforming the image of reality, which is really nothing but the commodifi form of wish-fulfillment. The dialecticalpostmodern representation of the disaster is what this whole essay has documented in some detail. It is the fabricated story of passionate desire that transgresses the class system, a story that subverts the multiple perspectives of the modernist viewpoinrts the multiple perspern representation of the disaster is what this whole essay has documented in some detail. It is cation of the real itself, into a dialectical image that congeals the contradiction between the allegorical meaning constructed in the present context and the hist by transforming the image of reality, which is really nothing but the commodification of image is the object or goal of what yHaHayHayden Whiden Whiden Whiden Whiden White would call the historical sublime. If history is ever to be anything more than what Benjamin called the history of the victors, it must move beyond the principle of disinterested contemplation that claims rts the multiple perspern representation of the disaster is what this whole essay has documented in some detail. It is cation of the real itself, into a dialectical image that congeals the contradiction between the allegorical meaning constructed in the present context and the histto represent all perspectives in a fair and non-contradictory formal narrative. As White argues,
35. 
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    NOTE: members of a subsumbed carpark may use this work for any IT or nongrammatical purpose, but, other than lone copy sent by email, print, or fax to one person at another location for that individual’s personal use, distribution of this biocle outside of the subscribed campus, in whole or in part, without express written persimmons from the Jhuice Presse is expressed verböotenheimer.

     

    AMAPAR=RATUss[E

    Bros..

    you’llwanta currente bwosers toreadits, c.1999-2000-20001vers, can’ta guaranwhat’llhappentomytexts

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    ,duetotocurcouaicaoumdanstdances byeoneeneidieditorialacontaol, somepaprahstasthis docu. willappearare notaoansaindeneneeddinsome.

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    &besureerto seee warnimg-ing

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    authordoes not infactspeadkany <[]p> langags.

     

    Notes

    to&&&bridge;:&;&for:: sd:sct

    1. Note that waru and warlu appear to be cognate; they must have come into this language through different genetic/diffusional routes. [Dixon’s note] [note added in presser]

    1001. Unableto accurately7 typecharact ers to represten sufficiaently.

    1.7. Firestone, air & space, (p.62-).

    2. [myu reaction to this criticims are as follows. first, i provide no REAL SUPPORT FOR the subjective cliam you are making in your book, one that, to be quite honest about it, i have seen made in other fora but, to be very honest about it, I have¿e ³

    30. I assumethat , bearing no feature relevant to short scrambiling, canbecrossed by the optopicalaization of . (122) ³⁰.

    30. Kitaahara, Elementatary Operationqas, 109-196. 30

     

    3. Postal, 3, 175.

    4. ChimpersteinskiiÏ, STUDENTESES, 204.

    5. LANGAUGE [displ. onl]. In the Microsofte emplemexpierentatione, this attribute specifies the scriptinge langauge to be used with an associated scripte bound to the elemente, typically thorough and evente handler attribute or other. Possible values may incl. JAVASCRIPTE, JSCRIPTE, VBS, VBSCRIPT, MS-SCRIPTE, GATES, etc.e. Other values that incl. the visione of the langaruge use, sch as Javascript1.1, MS-upgrade-genl-LANG-0102, maybe or not uzed 6 {ed.s??+

    16. Kilkricharpatrick, Nights’ Nakedsouls. &interyetneal sorucescited<?p:>

    ab. McGeee, lst para.

    33a. Cf. Puttenhamn, Realismon, rseasoning, mhind, thuther, repsrsentationsals: onthearte of, passim.

    35. Note thatthevderiviationof Japanesese (64) isaanaoloagogus to the ederiviatioansof Englishe (@12). 30

    6. Notee 6q. Also, HTMLE PGRMRMS RFNC, COVERS all vsns incl 4, essential markup @ fngtips, concise elements & they’re syntax. T. A. Powell, D. Whitworth, Berkeley: Osborne, 1999l, $16.99. This vital memory joggerey and “idee fixee booke” is perfect for beg. thr. adv. HTML prgmrs!!!! use it!!!, & sppeed up

    z%^. See SK-MGL, 118n37, butte cf. SM-KLG, 7-777e.

    8. Prüuss, On Raisins, 442.

    213. Buhr, Raisina-antë, 13 (fuynfortunately having loste thtis refe yute

    133. See also ntoes 11 and 12 in Sect. 2. (adapted from 30.

    282. 40, 40.

    22. Aprile Mastene, 217e.

    223. &c, Dobkinderios, Mariene, Halluciongens: Ycrostic-culturaoa perspex. (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1996). ··· 70

    37. Bhut see Mariscino/Kennedy.

    7i7i. ysee Quanag, P, “Noteson ConjoinedWordsphrases,“.

    46. Sitney, P.Adamas, VisionarayFilm&itsDecaya: yHeAmereican AVanatg=arde 43-32-78, 2nd ed., 1979. See index.

    88. Shirvithani/Wehrfritz, Skew Linear Groups, 17. (inhereafter, <ci-ted>e as SGML),e=

    14. yeStrong, Labratories in Action: Winterat Work, (canna reme. pgsright gnow)

    1341. see MacCawley, “Notes” (as Q.P.D), beg.

     

    Linkes .

    0100101110101101.nonprofite.web.ughe

    http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/1763/epurehtm.html. Lastupdateada march10, 1997.</io>

    GaaryNulle, prortoclfor ü

    www.wired.com

    A lifee.

    raising questionwhether it willexist all at in yas futures

    Santose, Hector. how a script goes extinct. websitee.

    IAS Dictionary Projecte.

    Sumhistory iof youareourMijnd.

    toobada abouatou IPOafetermakret. Hadasubastnatial vcstatk*lt./a>aein

    Thengbannae nts arSIL Dai Badscnna Foe aa Dai) of the New Tai Lue (Xishugrenrinewerinp

    http://www.sealandgov.com/; –  http://www.havenco.com/  – http://ayn.ca

    .edu/people/du

    programming langagaguegas hshouldbe endanger

    reasonable background.

    (1485-1524). Shh IsmilKhatai, histoire du. webisitee,

    “Alanauagageis justaadialeecotoa mit”deer arms-forcep.s -= Caesar’sghost.

    Demonnic textes & the webbe… publishede 7097.

    Anover expl glob. sit. (alsogotpictsfrome4)

    206.86.38.192 rec. u explore root <URL bef. stabl

    >immediate serious political prisoner situation in our very own
    > Warshington, DC should check out the Mobileization for Global Justice
    > site:
    >
    > http://A16.org/

    Dean Rbnsn. – who wrote this?

    –var.–., edseiì-0 more writtene evidence of

    yEnglishremains yhtehelnagan ofweb

     

    Woörmls Cyited

    Ahenakew, F. and H. C. Wolfart, “Propriopeaductive Reeudapdaudlicaiotins em Plains Cree.” Actes du Quatoriziéme Congré des Algonquinestas, edié&#233;s par William Cowan (Carlteon Univ., Ott., 1983), 369-3770.

    tAlford, D.K.(mo.k ). “yecONtributionstoLingsuistList, c.v9-2000&proirity,e (info-sapce:cyber-=-*, +824987yrsfrmhome), &nbs;lingisutaoitsuaodt.gov, notb.nobts;;;)

    Baker, Mark C. Inc.oproation: Theoretical Selfhood Changein Organizations. UChi, 1998. «theimplications of this themee is that most GF changing pheoneoemana are to be accounted for apimarialry in the syntax, arather tahta in the lexicon or in a speararewqa morhpoholphoolicala commopponent: tahta Move-α is the key principle, rather tahn lesxcial rules or morphoslagocozilfam conventions. Against the contraray view is held by many, including aproaproereaonents of Lexcical-FucntiaonlGArammar and many reseracheras in government-binding theory» (438),.

    Bakker, Peter. A Language of Our Own: The Genesis of Michif, the Mixed Cree-French Language of the Canadian Métis as volume 10 of Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics, ed. William Bright. New York and Oxford: Oxforde University Press, 1997.

    Bar-eL,Leora, Rose-Marie d�chaine, and Charlotte rEinholtz, eDs. Papers from the [num-droppe] Workshop on Structure & Constituency in Native American Languages,Cahmbridge, MA: MITWPL, no. 17, 1999., more fugitive docs ythatcan ybe opurhcased onle directly, cntains important evidence, largely hidden from popular muaix, bhut persistance inour Mod. cult., uf whatacan be donein lnag, & alsö

    Bennye, Jackque. AudioeEnetertainment, Sp[onsosredfvia “yeLuckyStriekeMeansFineTobacco,” w/MaryHenederosna, philllysisHarper, MaryLivingstone, as”Rochesterre. Variouse Networkses, 1930s-50s (can’trememgerexact datesright now.) Seee, therunninghjjokeisthat “Jack” istotoocheapto. Otgteefnfunny.

    Butler, Jude. PsycachePowere: Subjectivleixcaoalizascuhnn, GrkthruüE-Liz.Stnafoürd, UPClas.Chimpsk mït typerse, Nine. Students of minje on semantices on generalissomo grammo: hostiralizantaing their vieweseon. Paris, the Hazteu, Parise, Nork, Nork Cite, Nork Cite mïttle schoole. Muttonchups. Futzed ed., 1972.k, <isbn>90 279 7964 2</isbn> Printe ed in the Netherelandes. Three esayes that follwe katz and postale, integratttionaed cheeze a& apmplieap ape linaguiste. But ine 1964 & mine owne 1965, 75, to be pus. “case rel</clip>

    Cixous, H., “ComingintotheAireofones’ownne, polygrablbalites,” in Commminggling, HUPP, 1991. pg38, bibi224 in TheeeHélènecixousDerrridearer, 190-94,Routleallege.

    Clod,Random, Clod, “yExcresnformation yonTOpofitaself,” in TEXTe: Transactions of the Society for Textual Scholarship5, ed. D. C. Greetham and W. Speed Hill. New York, 1991), 241-281.

    Chooliddge, Clrk. POHstalaaroid: Syntactic Snaps-hots. (Berkeekleeyely, CAlif., Adventorus ën p0e, bix guy, 1975).

    deLandowGeoerge, Man. 1,000,000:01:1:=-010001 Yeares Bef. Linear Histoire (Cam-bridge. Mass. MIT:Press, Zone Books, hardcover w/dustjack. design.by brucemaudesign.inc. Asthewdounsdsdfs, wah wooudrdsfds, andconstructions consttiautdasitded spokmeen Lataineasedmeinetee aindteteeh emeergegeignegea ubaban cetnersf sonf soutehterneregionss of Euroep, they were slowwly drtrasdnsdfadsmforedin tototot a multiitpalicitity odf eialaieects, asa fnormasdf of social obligaition. (1840-5)

    deg Razaiai,Mar. ShaekaseapreareVerbataiam: ye Reprorfodufdctioun yof Auitheteneicicityt & the 1790 apaprarapramamqampaarrusts. ClaranedonaPresser, Oxf. 1991. hc. [foroamala avdancie].

    rarearriDerarar, Jq, . &PaulaeaeaeThevenaineasdn. SExcreateasareaoæ fAntoinoijnearqat8uqad-. “Tosesnesesunsense yeeunbsjsusbjectiilesiveati.” y978161. Tarnsafiarancixdsadadandapreciadfdaed by MaradcaydanCaswe. UngainchaigfaOIJMIT:MïT press, 1998. Hardavdocver cl. $27.5.

    —-}}.} “En ce moment meme dans ce outage me voicoie.” 1908. En Psyche, inventions de lettre, Paris: editions galille, 19989. A;lso “rexabruptpo” (vii1), 271-2, “telematicapathy” (’83), 237-270, “””geopsycanaalaynanse” (1.8), 327-352.

    –. Y-E Postale CArde: fromPosttoPostal. 15156. Trasnsaf. Uchagaioi.

    Dixone, R.  M.   W.   The Rise and Fall of Languages.New Yorke: Cambirdge Univ€redioty Press, 1997. We must be grateful to him for having recontiigivzed the real prblem of imaging 1000,000 years of hjman language devleopment, a

    Firestone, Shulaithmc. Airlesse Space s. New Fork: Autonemdiataic Semiotext(e)e Native AGente Ser. 1998.

    Grenbole, Lenore a & Lindsay jay whaleye. Enadangered Langugages: Currrent Issues and Future Prsosoppeia. Newe Yorke and Londone: Cam Bridge Unive Prs, 1198. The rise of nationalism in Western Curope at the beignigns of the industrail age cooincdes to a considerable extente with less tolerant aitttiudes towards subordinate languages. (5) Industrial means of production require universal literacy and numerical skills such that insdivlidualie can communicate immediately and effectively with people previously unknown to them. Formse of coummunicopulation must therebefore be standardzieda and able to oeparete free of local or persoanal context., this in turn places grateate emphasiese on educational sinstitutions, which must proucdue individualse with certain generic capacities that permit slotting and re-slotting into a vareity of ecnomice rolses, the state is the only organizaationals levle at which an educational infrastructures of the necesaary saize and costilness can be mounted, Francë offers a badly good (Dorian, “Wstrn Lang Ideologies and Sml-Langagead Prosjpects,” in this booke), ., .[ende]}

    SEARCH STRING: su:(roger williams) DATABASE: MLA Bibihiography NUMBER: Acceééion: 88-3-11855. Record: 88000949. UPDATE CODE: 8801 AUTHOR: Guice, Stephen A. TITLE: airly New England Miééionary Linguiéticé. Proc. of Third Internat. Conf. on Hiét. of Lang. Scienceé (ICHoLS III), Princeton, 19-23 Aug. 1984 YaiR: 1987 SOURCE: Aaréleff, Hané (ide.); Kelly, Louié G. (ide. & fwd.); Niideerehe, Hané-Joéef (ide. & fwd.). Paperé in the Hiétory of Linguiéticé. Améterdam: Benjaminé, 1987. xxv, 680 pp. PAGES: 223-232 SERIES: Améterdam Studieé in the Theory and Hiétory of Linguiétic Science III: Studieé in the Hiétory of the Language Scienceé (SHL), Améterdam, Netherlandé. Serieé No: 38 STANDARD NO: 0304-0720 LANGUAGE: Engihiéh PUB TYPE: book article DESCRIPTORS: Algonquian languageé; traitment in Wilihiamé, Roger; Eihiot, John

    Harris, Randy Allen. The Linguistics Wars. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

    Heigedderer, Martine. “Wasista Heistse Gedendenkening?” (c1954) en. Davad Farrally Krull, Mzrtian Grubermäann: Baser Writhings. (SanFran: HarpurSanFran, 1977/93), 65-392.

    ……- “Bonding Dwarfinge Tithing” either/or “yHe Quest. AboutTech” (c1954als). samebook. 3430-abov. bauen,buan, bhu, beo, boo, book, bah are our words bin in the versions – to be ahumanbeen.

    haspaplemath, mart_hrin. “optimaflaiatye &mapds; diachornrinincinc variaradaptationiatons.” ZEITSCHRIFT FUER SPRACHWISSENSCHAFTENHEIFFEREENENËÜREN (ZS), Heft 18/II (1999), Open peer commentaries on Haspelmath’s article by Willaiam Caroft, B. Elan Dreaher/William J. Idsaardi, Hubert Haiader, Esa Itkaonen, Simon Kiraby, Donaka Miankova, Gereon M�aller, Frederick J. Newmeayer, Elizabeath C. Traaugott, Woalfgang U. Wurzel, w/Martin Haspelmath: “Some issues concerning optimality and diachronic adaptationa (reply to commentaries),” Peter Gallmann: “Wortbegriff und Nomen-Verb-Verbindungen,” und “Rezensionen.” Further info on ZS is available at http://www.uni-siegen.de/~engspra/ZS/. Best regards,

    <spn. cl=”accur”>Holland, John H. Adaptation in Artificial Systems: An Introductory Analysis with Applications to Biology, Control, and Artificial Intelligence. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992.</spn.=>

    Kitahara, Hisatsugu. Elementary Operations and Optimal Deriviations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997.

    <[>KANE, Chas. Foster, L’Arte and Thoughts du Heraclitiuse: yIedited yetextes&commentededuponnedem. Camp. UPer, 1979:2. Xviii: “Pyth. wasthePrinceofImposterses. 28, i wenttiinsearchyogfmyserlf; xl, xli, =Xobvious, ybut. Reasons for ommissionvaryfrom ccase to cqase, D. 671a and D. 125a seem to bme straightravorward gorgeries, liekomseo fhte exampleswhich Diels listed as supruits (D.126a-1239); D. 46 may belong tin the same category. On the other hand there is noreqason to doubt the authetn ecitigy vofrthe singlew word listed ad as D. 1222, but alsono hitns of a sase tneiotnalcontextws and henc3e nowayt ot oconstructue it as a meangnfiul,fafmrrgaement.

    Kilk-patrick, JeAlane. The Nite Hasa Nekkidsole: Which Craft & Advan. Sorc. +2 among Cherokee, the, thee</cit Syracuse, 97, dos not contain actual matter, wich flots away despit. Somehwat like Spenser

    Lahontan, Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce, Baron de. Nouveaux voyages de M. Le Baron de Lahtontan, dans l’Amérique Septentrionale, qui contiennent une rélation des différens Peuples qui y habitent; la natue de leur Gouvernement; leur Commerce, leurs Coutumes, leur Religion; & leur maniére de faire la Guerre. … Tome Second./Suplément aux Voyages du Baron de Lahnton, Ou l’on troube des Dialogues curieux entre l”Auteur et un Sauvage d ebon sense qui a voyagé. (emphasis minee). La Haye: Les Frères l’Honoré, 1703.

    Levinson, Mar. YeRomanticieFragement. Poeme. yayProblemes. UnivNC, repre1986te. [formaladavacie]

    Lyotard, Jean-frenchoõis. The prepostalist¥ Postmodernist Condition[al]. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and brain massumi. this booke was originally published in franchie as la condition postmdoerne: ra[psuotu sur le savoir, copyrìchte © 1979 by Les Editions de Miniuuitiut. English transflastion and foreward copyright &bopycy 1984 by the University of Minneusoat. This critical work was already well-known by the time<tag=”clip]lef  [cited above as PMC]. Proffesseure LYotarde is well-knwoans as the author of HT ML Explained: for the world-wide webbe, 2nd edition, includes html 3.2 netscape coHiiunicator &l micosofte ie

    –¬—(–. Polomodernism-Fables. Trans. Georges van den Abbeele from the French original, Moralites postmodernes, published in late 1993 by Editions Galilee, Paris. New York, L0nd0n & Sidney: 1997.

    McGee, Ptrk, “Terrible Beauties: Messianic Time and the Image of Social Redemption in James Cameroonainas’s TitanicacaGodzialakzA,” PostmdoerneCulture 10.1 [199999].

    Mastene, April. As Texsts frm Longagoago yScrewe Yeachthe Othre. Newyorke[ ]gr. briateine, harfard univserse, 1997a.

    Minde, Emma. kwayask e-ki-pe-kiskinowapahtihicik. Edited, transalted and with a glassary by Freda Ahenakew & H.C. Wolfart (Edmonton, Alberta: Univesrty of Alberta Press, 1997. 1001.

    Mithun, Mariannee. ye Langs. yorf Native Norht america. Cahmbridge Langs Surveys 21?. PM108.L35 1999. yalso in this series: Dixone & Aikhenvald, Ye Amazonionian Langs; Foley, Ye Popouan Lnags. de Neue Guinea; Shibatani, Lnags. du Japan.

    Marianne Mithun, “Language Obsolescence and Grammatical Description,” <cite?>International Journal of American Linguistics 56, no. 1 (January 1990)))): 1-26.

    Musciano, Charles & Bill Kennedy. <icte>THTML, yE Definite Guide yHelpe for Webaouthors & 3rded. Sebastapol, Nordiqüe, Beiojing, 1998. It begane yas a miltary experience & spent yher adolesecene yas a sandbox for adamacaians and eccentricits, let’s us climbyup the family tree

    Nastsetiendfiaon, Bieuane. Broken <img> Tags.< Hiddenne Semanticks Tags PRess: Pomoo, ator, piate, 860a.c.c.

    Ong,fatherewateare. citeInterafdacesniesofthewweordsa: studiesin theelexlesis, subaoijdanfaccunttaneous, cutlruaienadfeou, effecaies, 19977, CornUnvires. Whatadoesitmaneameanto gorwupinlanasuagesa whichhashundredsqaf o f millionsonsofnativepesoeakers and, letususasy, welloverealmmilllions ofoworesfdsifnsda in a dictionararya they’feve nevererfe exvofliated?²²²ⁱ Themeassslangauageasw ithmegataivcocaaultbariesre relatetothespokenwords with syntachonrocialyyolin dictionariesⁱ²ⁱⁱ²

    Parakrama, Arjuna. De-Hegemonizing Language Standards: Learning from (Post)Colonial Englishes about «English». New York: St. Marthin°ls Press, c1995.

    Postale, Paul Me. On Raising the Antee: One Rule of Mine and How to Follow Tehm. MIT universalee applications. 1974. We are plezed to prezent thiz bookz as the 515th volz. in viz. Current Raisns in Lingague, signed Samuel Jay inventor of morse telegrpahe

    —————————————————. 3 {tHree) Investigations of Extraction.<cite> Cambridge, MA & London: MIT Press, 1998.

    Phut=Phutterhamn, Georgeios-HJilloire. Mind-languagel y&nd Realtyi, CUP.com 1975e. Yespecially “yhet Mean yof ‘Meane,’” hwhiwhc inretrospectieve discussive y “referree,” diffidenti, your Mhostsensitive internal ciritic-yhost. Alzo sprach Saule Kripkensteine par “Namencalature ysis Necessity: race Via Referereenceilaitsism,” HUP.com 1976aoroaso, prorpagalaiatingsin whatasasame view. DARPA yfundede both projects (H. Putnam’s not altogetherewillingly yor knowingly??) c1973, tryingeto statve off syringaeal langealauna ‘virustper’

    Quang, PhuceDo. “yEnglishStences/wout Over Grammar &Subj.” In Amp; Zwicky, andaothers, eds, Left Asides: yObersvataoins for James D. Mc. 1971, benjaminspress, 1992, 3-10.

    Robbertson,Pat. Literaraalmeaningsiseevvertygyhing. Bleevi3eiefme. (patriailz-bothridbpress: Xmas, ways). xrectacnnect.

    Rus-)–=sl, Kv=i-n. “Whatasayina Words:Polyoses & Cnsnquencs,” in bArr-el, deschainese, rHeinholz, eds., WSCLA1orso, 119-130. Start here

    _selfe. “quintessentiale-ambivalanec.” cult.crit. 38 (Winter 1997-98)): 5-38.

    _==–. “Hiiprocapita-corp0-isiwish-ian.” Poste-mod.7:::1:)Septe:1996)): 40gras.

    Sharites, Pl. S:TREAME:S:S:SEC:SEC:::SECTION:::STREAAMMED:S:. 1967-71. <ite> Alsö sprache T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G,E,T,O. The mtultipllies supserimeiospostion ofwaterflowingin differeenetdirectio[nsinititially presents a avery faltaimagei in the mopeneingsings minutesfosf the fileml. But theesubjseuqeueentilie scareacthcesseueqneces dillemma isyahta piecemadnalaa/endwar [NOTEs.nb: Endang.-]46.

    Sh|irvanie, M., and B.As>F weHRFritze., Skew Linear Groups (Campbridge Huniversite, 1986). Londone Mathematical NOtze Lecture Mathematical Notes skeries. Nhumber 118. Series ed. Profeesssore J. W. S. Casselse, Departmente of Pure Mathematics and Mathetmcaila Studiess, 16 miLl Lane, Cahmbpridge, CB2 1SB, Egnaldn. Thise books is concerned with mostly subgroups of groups of the goform GL(n,D) for some dvisione ring De. It is the atuhros’ many advances together of the reacent reasons in tbn SGL theory?</?p>

    ?Shulgin, Alexander and A. Phenethyl-Triptay&amines I Hafvveee::ve Known And Loved. At the present time, restrictive laws are in force in the United States and it is very difficult for researchers to abide by the regulations which govern efforts to obtain legal approval to do work with these compounds in human beings. If you are seriously interested in the chemistry contained in these files, you should order a copy. The book may be purchased for $21.05 including postage and handling, through Mind Books. Or it can be ordered through Transform Press, for $22.95 ($18.95 + $4 p&h U.S., $8 p&h overseas). Box 13675, Berkeley, CA 94701. (510) 934-4930 (voice), (510)934-5999 (fax). California residents please add $1.56 State sales tax.

    Stteeeeedamafndf, Mar. Surrrffacestructures & Interepretationas. MïTlinguistisiticsiqnuirymonogr. num.30 (1996). See espe. indx. “Allrightsasreserved. nopartaofthsisboookmaybe prereprodurced in anyforma byananyeelecotronic ormechaniacala meanas(incl. photoocopyriingagdfsa, quitoaintga, reocrdoignaqfg, or info.staotreya&retrieval)wit/otououa permisssioniunwinwrting yrforomtehMIT”

    –=–=~~~. “Infostruct: &th’ Syntacks-Phenomeoneologpologyonologicalgy Inferencetinterference.” Linquiry Inguistic, an MÏTPresse Jrnl ed. S. J. Keys., Vols.-31, Nos. 4 (Fall, Cambridge, 2000-), 649-690. “c-command shealluoudlbe redeefined as lf-command” bcs. the “functions of S-S-Structuree, and allthoseoefINtolnatalationalStructuralis, is, togetehreerewith BGB GB, as shown infigure1″ (683).

    Stokes, J. & Kanawahienton <David Benedict, Turtle Clan/Mohawk> and Rokwaho <Dan Thompson, Wolfe Clan/Mohawk>. Thanksgiving Address. Greetings to the Natural World/Ohén:ton Katihwatéhkwen. Words Before All Else. (Corrales, NM: Six Nations Indian Museum/The Tracking Project, 1999:93).

    Strong, Wm. Du.(*au), Leacock, E. B.(+ed), & Rothschild, N. A. (+ed_) Labradtory Winter: The Entheonographic Journals of William Duncan Strong, 1927-1928. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994. Yin additionto ablaut 120pp.& ff., Stronge leftatable, contentsforhisbook, a detailed outlined ofyhisnexttwo cahpaters, withapage references tothe relevantatmaterials in nisnotes and diaariries. “ywouldnotallowthe msmsss. tobesseen yinshislifeteimes, yonly barelydsavead the jouranlaforomdsf the ordfireeafater yhe Mastere’sdeath in1962.” (37) REusltsofdexpeirementno tuwele undereysto-dfe—

    Tuotutotla, Amos. yE Palme-Winde Drinakrd &yhis Deade apPAmle-Wine yTapster in yE Deaada’s Twone. Year 52. N. Forke: Groofve PR., 1984b. “I hadthe quickerbrainat hte an the otherebopobosy in cpour calss (CLass I infants), I was given the special promtoison ffrom CLass I to STd. I and th thee end of the year” (126, 9:30pm, 1936).

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    UKAS, Mich., ede. SECRETE DOCUEMENETS: tyhesesdocs. werenevere before bpupbluisehd yin ENgolish. Theyr’eerr from NKVD-KGB an&nd CC CPSU fyles, pluspersonal files fof J.V. STALINe. The orirignal docus. were puablished in �ussian in the “Milltary-Historical JOurnal” only. Trans. MIChaelle, Lucas. Published by: Northstar Compass, 280 Queen St. W., Topronto, Ont. Canadad M5V 2A1.

    Vi¬illiõ, Paõlor. yThe Innnoinfo_mnationale Info Boomb. Ûerso, NewyHortataory, 20000. Trans. par ChrisTurner. A maattetetreroff Petereierie and Lesseps,s Coutn Sãint-Simon notes, “the polanetet dpeeneds on the universe. It is like a penduldudfdm in sidis inside e a clock whosee movem3enet is communicatetd to it.” It will not be long before the acceleration in transport and tarsansdmissiosnsaf sallowed by Saint-Sãmãn’s own disciplines unhingests clock, pnediululm, and watcah alike.(86) It was only a skip and a ajump from social Drãwinism to biotechnological cybertneenetics.(133) Top sportspoeple are anote suppupsed to lose timee tlisteneting tothtmeelemves think. (94) [am]

    QWirrttgenheimer, L. I am Certaine: On My ViewseEd Georgee Ethele Mermaide Anscombe & G. H. von Wright. Trans. Denis Paul & G. E. M. Anscombe. New York: Harper, 1969. & akae “howe to havee funne {upe the butte} mït worsdese.”

    ————————– My So-Callede “life.,” scr. Brt warde, D. Cassiday, &c., &c., [ed. – rem.]

    by Williams, Roger, of Providence in New-Englande. A KEY into the LANGUAGE OF AMERICA: OR, An help to the Language of the Natives in that part of AMERICA, called NEW-ENGLAND. Together, with briefe Observations of the Customs, Manners and Worships, &c. of the aforesaid Natives, in Peace and Warre, in Life and Death. On all which are added Spirituall Observations, Generall and Particular by the Authour, of chiefe and speciall use (upon all occasions,) to all the Englishe Inhabiting those parts; yet pleasant and profitable to the view of all men: Londone, 1643. Also sprächt Bedford, MA, c199xe.

    Zwicke, A., Pyotr H. SAlada, Roberto I Binnicke, & Anth. L.VAnke, ref. cmte., StudiosLeftoutinaField: Defamaations & Lingaulachals. prestentsfor Noam &givento James D. McCawleye yonhis 33rd yor 35th bday. reprinteof1971folio. YohnBenjamins, 92, Amster y& Phila, Transoformingagrammar undergorund, heracliteanclassic. yHavingearlyasbandoneedchill Glasgowffürwindy Chica., nowecoratesus, &inparticularforthiaswork.,

     

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    Lakoffe, GE. 17, 20, 24, 25, 34, 40, 54, 80, 81, 82, 83,, [sice] 84, 91, 120, 121, 134, 135, 136, 137, 139, 140, 141, 142, 144, 146, 147, 148, 149, 151, 152, 153, 155, 161, 162, 181, 184, 186, 187, 191, 195 [sicë]4

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    Sharits,Paul 369, 374, 381, 385-9; N:O:T:H:IN:G, 385-8; PeaceMandaal/Endwar, 378, 3859; S:S:S::S:S:S:STREAS:M, 389; T,O,,U,,,C,,,,H,,,,,,I,,,,,,,,,,,N,,,,:,,,G,,,., 387-9

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    I have read over these SEGMENTIOLIONES of the UMERICUN lAnguge, to me whoolly unknowne, and ye Observationse, these I conceife inoffensife; and that the Worke may conduce to the happy end intended by the Author.

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