Volume 14, Number 1
September, 2003 Every issue of Postmodern Culturecarries notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcements, free of charge. Advertisements will also be published on an exchange basis. If you respond to one of the ads or announcements below, please mention that you saw the notice in PMC.

Publication Announcements

• Connected, or What It Means To Live in the Network Society
  Steven Shaviro, University of Minnesota Press, 2003
• Eloquent Images: Word and Image in the Age of New Media
  Edited by Mary E. Hocks and Michelle R. Kendrick, MIT Press, 2003
• Hypermedia Joyce Studies

Conferences, Calls for Papers, Invitations to Submit

• Postcolonial Studies: Special Issue on Postcolonialism and Digital Culture
• Video Games: CFP for PCA/ACA 2004 National Meeting
• Powering Up/Powering Down

• The Postmodern Imagination and Beyond: Call for Submissions for E-Journal

Theresa Smalec

Performance Studies
New York University
tks201@nyu.edu

Review of: Buckland, Fiona. Impossible Dance: Club Culture and Queer World-Making. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2002.

Scholars who take up Fiona Buckland’s Impossible Dance: Club Culture and Queer World-Making will step into the vastly underexplored arena that Buckland defines as “improvised social dancing in queer clubs” (2). Based on four years (1994-1998) of fieldwork and detailed interviews with New York’s queer club-goers, her book describes the forms of preparation, performance, and politicized exchange that transpire in these volatile sites. As Buckland observes from the start, “the subject of improvised social dancing has been relegated to the sidelines in scholarship, not least because of its perceived impossibility–that is, its resistance to discursive description” (2). Formal, scored modes of social dance such as the tango are difficult enough to translate into words. What, then, about the spontaneous, often ineffable actions and gestures that transpire in queer clubs? How does one forge a theory of value for the affective knowledge that emerges from this seemingly inchoate mode of performance? What promises, possibilities, and ways of relating to others does such movement signify to its diverse practitioners? How does ephemeral dance set enduring politics in motion?

In her first chapter, “The Theatre of Queer World-Making,” Buckland outlines the parameters that will enable her to archive the social worlds and practices encountered in the course of her research. One of her primary tasks is to delineate the forms of collective interaction that she will discuss. Buckland uses the concept of a “lifeworld” to distinguish the diverse constellations of people who frequent queer dance clubs from more conventionally defined communities. She draws upon a definition and distinction made by Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner in their article, “Sex in Public,” in which they argue that a lifeworld differs from a community or group because it “necessarily includes more people than can be identified, more spaces than can be mapped beyond a few reference points, [and] modes of feeling that can be learned rather than experienced as a birthright” (558). This expansive sense of how, where, and why specific people come together in order to dance enables the author to address some key challenges that accompany writing about queer sociality. In short, the “lifeworld” paradigm allows her to focus on particular inhabitants of particular spaces while at the same time contesting facile claims about gay and lesbian “identity,” as well as utopian ideals of “community.”

In an effort to provide readers with a more concrete sense of New York’s evolving queer lifeworlds, Buckland redefines both space and the status of the performers who occupy such spaces. “Lifeworlds” are “environments created by their participants that contain many voices, many practices, and not a few tensions” (4). These are not “bordered cultures with recognizable laws,” but “productions in the moment,” spaces that remain “fluid and moving by means of the dancing body” (4). Similarly, the subjects who produce such mobile environs are hardly static in how they understand and perform the points of interaction between their race, socioeconomic background, and same-sex attractions: “Identity is not fixed, but tied to movement and its contexts” (5).

In reconfiguring space and identity as contingent on movement and contexts, Buckland refers to José Muñoz’s important essay “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts.” He defines the ephemeral as “linked to alternate modes of […] narrativity like memory and performance: it is all those things that remain after a performance, a kind of evidence of what has transpired but certainly not the thing itself” (10). Attention to such residue is a key part of Buckland’s methodology, and it is central to understanding how her project diverges from text-based explorations of queer history. In contrast to historians who focus on play texts, reviews, and other forms of printed documentation, her evidence revolves around people’s memories of what happened to them while getting ready to go out, while dancing, while cruising, while having sex, while walking home in the wee hours of the morning. Her analyses draw upon anecdotes, impressions, and lingering experiences that participants recall by means of their bodies. Traditional scholars often disregard such modes of sense-making as “fleeting” or “unreliable;” after all, the stories told by an aging queer twenty years after a memorable night on the town are hardly the stuff of History. Yet Buckland delves carefully into the cultural archives embedded in her subjects’ narratives by means of an ethnographic approach. Throughout her study, she grapples skillfully with this often-criticized approach to gathering data, providing unorthodox revisions to routine practices. One example of this is her departure from asking informants a fixed set of questions in the hope of being told, “This is how we do things around here,” to inviting them to tell her a personal story. Buckland explains that in order to render the specific details of people’s embodied memories more tangible, she asked informants to “remember how they moved around New York City when they first wanted to find and create queer lifeworlds. Where did they go and how did they meet others like themselves. What happened at these places? How did they constitute queer cognitive maps of the city” (21)?

In response to her questions, informants perform “theatres of memory” (18). Though narrated in language, such theatres also reside in the body, as evidenced by an Argentine ex-patriot’s shaking hand as he recalls defending himself against homophobic assailants with a broken bottle in the early 1970s, when walking to Chelsea’s gay clubs meant traversing a tough Latino neighborhood. In tracing memories of past movements, some informants draw makeshift maps of Manhattan on scraps of paper, marking spaces mostly shuttered or demolished now due to the AIDS crisis and the city’s draconian re-zoning of adult businesses. As informants retell their unique yet related stories of the streets they once traveled and the ways queers could meet, they “release the power of events and experiences years after they occurred” (28). To implicate space in this dialectic between the past and its retelling, Buckland compares informants’ theatres of memory with other gay maps of the city, particularly those marketed at the Gay Pride Parade to a largely white, male audience distinguished by its high level of disposable income. Her subjects–people of color, low-income students, teachers, door people, and HIV-positive persons on disability–“deliberately constitute queer life worlds that overlay, complement, and contradict official maps” (28). Their cognitive maps of defunct lifeworlds such as the West Side piers disrupt the Gay Pride Parade’s linear trajectory from ritzy, uptown Manhattan to fashionable Greenwich Village. Their fond appraisals of the glamorous sleaze that once infused the Squeezebox and Saint dance clubs unsettle the parade’s focus on trendy, sanitized sites. Moreover, as informants recall the circuitous detours they once took in order to meet with other gay and lesbian people, Buckland realizes that these stories indicate something important about where queer lifeworlds are forged. In short, queer world-making takes place “at the level of the quotidian: the walk through the city, rather than the riot in the square” (30). As such, attention to seemingly trivial details of the city space is crucial.

The author spends the early part of her book describing walks around the East Village with informants who recall a vivid tapestry of extinct dance clubs, saunas, bathhouses, restaurants, and bars. Many gay businesses in New York are not gay-owned, a factor that puts them at risk of closure whenever the costs of running a club outweigh the revenue taken in, or when political pressure to “clean up the neighborhood” is applied. In short, straight proprietors of queer spaces have less of a commitment to keeping those clubs open; money talks, and when money can no longer be made without hassle, queer spaces tend to fold and come back as straight establishments. Virtually everyone with whom Buckland traverses Manhattan’s queer districts describes a favorite hangout that no longer exists physically, though it continues to thrive in memories and narratives. Her interlocutors show her the remnants of the places they used to go, recounting adventures they experienced inside, explaining why these sites of pleasure are now gone. Interestingly, Buckland posits that these oral performances of the past do not “reproduce a fact” (31), but rather recast lost places and people in the terms by which subjects want to understand them: as heroic absences, as melodramas, as social-political calamities, as provisional sites of queer pleasure always at risk of closure. Though certain accounts are not necessarily accurate, it is through the retelling of these stories that subjects construct meanings for themselves: “These memories were full with the presence of absences, which in itself made meaning, because they were deeply missed” (31). More than just deeply missed, many of the places that Buckland’s subjects mourn are ones they identify as a “vital part of queer education and socialization” (32). In these vanquished clubs, an older generation of queers once carried out embodied acts that were observed, practiced, imitated, and passed along to a younger generation. Both men and women learned about “acting gay” in such spaces: forms of collective knowledge were conveyed and sustained there by means of ritual practices.

While the past haunts Impossible Dance in potent ways, performances preparing for the future are equally crucial to this study. In her second chapter, “The Currency of Fabulousness,” Buckland examines how informants get ready, arrive at clubs, journey to dance floors, and cruise potential partners. We turn from exploring the exterior vicinities in which queer dance clubs are located to entering those intimate spaces with the author as our guide. In the process, we learn about the “currencies of fabulousness and fierceness” valued in queer clubs (36). Unlike the spheres of family and work, where people are typically praised for their skills as team players, the sphere of queer club-going places a high value on individuality. As Buckland puts it, “the clubgoer expected to be noticed and judged on his or her first entrance. Being special or fabulous was a way to enjoy the attention of peers. Entrance was the opening line of nonverbal communication” (55). In short, there is a tremendous amount at stake in the deceptively simple act of entry. Those people who do so simultaneously “appropriate” the physical space that existed prior to their arrival; as Buckland points out, these individuals “realize the club as a queer space” (55). They do so “both by the presence of his or her queer body, and also by queer acts–kissing, touching, looking with desire, celebrating the presence of other queers, and expressing queerness openly and physically through self-carriage and without fear of surveillance or reprisals” (55).

Buckland’s appraisals of how queer dancers appropriate space may seem overly optimistic. In our postmodern age of hidden cameras and undercover monitoring, is there truly such a thing as freedom from fear of surveillance or reprisals? At times, she appears too keen on interpreting the entrances of club participants as radical gestures: “Walking into a club was the opening gambit of speaking queer; a way of expressing, ‘I’m here, I’m queer, I’m fabulous’” (55). This image of club entry as the articulation of one’s subversive magnificence will no doubt ring false to participants who are shy or socially awkward, who view the act of entering a dance club as a tremendous challenge and risk. Nevertheless, Buckland does go on to explain the more nerve-wracking aspects of forging queer lifeworlds out of what is often a foreign, confusing atmosphere: “After entering a club, I found that many were disorienting spaces within which participants had to orient themselves in order to recognize and make a lifeworld” (56). She notes the various obstacles and reference points (staircases, coat-checks, foyers, bars, juice-stops, and chill-out areas) that participants must apprehend before they can stabilize their visual grip on where they are and what’s happening. She also draws attention to “temporal appropriations” of club space, or the ways that diverse groups of people claim the dance floor at distinct yet often overlapping periods of time: “At four a.m. in Arena, I stood watching the dance floor as smartly dressed college girls danced next to a group of gay leather men in body harnesses and chaps. They did not interact, but seeing them dancing in the same recreational space, even for a short time, was a striking juxtaposition” (57).

Buckland is a superb observer, detecting nuances of dress, speech, and humor often ignored in academic texts. An example of how she draws readers into the little-known rituals of social dancing in queer clubs is her focus on what people bring. She observes that many club-goers view chewing gum as an essential accessory. Gum alleviates the tenseness that dancers who take club drugs experience in their jaws; it also freshens breath, offers energy in the form of sugar, and serves “as a medium of friendship” (42). Along with water and cigarettes, gum was “often offered and passed between friends” (42). When offered outside of a circle of friends, “it was a social icebreaker, which was also used in cruising” (42). In short, the author carefully identifies those small yet pivotal details that comprise the unspoken social etiquette of these lifeworlds.

Yet where Impossible Dance truly departs from most dance ethnographies is in Buckland’s ability to treat sound, space, and movement as primary, not secondary, social texts. In “Embodying Difference: Issues in Dance and Cultural Studies” (1997), Jane C. Desmond urged cultural critics to work harder on developing the skills needed to “analyze visual, rhythmic, and gestural forms […] [W]e must become movement literate” (58). Buckland heeds Desmond’s call in complex ways. Her third chapter, “Slaves to the Rhythm,” examines the use of music, space, and composition in relation to ideas about the body. Arguing that “improvised social dancing involves the incorporation and embodiment of self-knowledge, self-presentation, sociality, and self-transformation” (65), the author studies how individual queer subjects create and express themselves on the dance floor. One aspect of her inquiry involves the specific types of music played at different clubs. Does it matter if dancers fashion their identities in the context of hip-hop, as opposed to salsa music? Does it matter whether the rhythms consist of a “bright, happy sound quality” (78), as opposed to the heavy, industrial mono-beats played at clubs like Twilo or Arena? Buckland argues that such factors do affect the relations between an individual and the group. What do individuals get out of dancing in queer clubs? What makes them feel vital and fulfilled? What makes them want to return? In studying moments where the musical beat functions “as a unifying thread rather than as a relentless master” (80), she provides insight into how dancers acquire a sense of personal worth and collective well-being from frequenting queer clubs: “The effect of these dramas was […] to create a community of movement in which the individual’s own movement was essential and valued. There was not only the ‘push’ inherent in the dance music […] there was also the ‘pull’ of participation […] part of the experience of living in a late twentieth-century city” (80).

In exploring a wide range of clubs–some exclusively catering to lesbians or gays, some featuring mixed participation, some open to heterosexuals as well as queers, some composed mainly of blacks and Latinos, others mainly of whites–Buckland discerns some pivotal modes of distinction between social groups. Her fourth chapter, “The Order of Play: Choreographing Queer Politics,” turns from assessing the rhythmical inventions of individual dancers to studying how people move together on the floors of diverse clubs. Based on the physical and verbal articulations “of at least some participants,” she posits that improvised social dancing in queer clubs “did not exist outside of everyday life” (87). Rather, the forms of contact created during the ephemeral hours of the night are informed by the “real lives” people lead at other times of the day. One interesting topic discussed in this chapter is why certain queer subjects reject particular queer clubs: because a place is “not about them” (89). Buckland explains that several of her informants rejected New York’s popular Twilo club for reasons that reflect on the types of communities and modes of political engagement they sought: “Colin was not interested in going to Twilo with its majority of white clientele, Tito because the vast majority were a good thirty years younger than he was, Thomas because he felt he could not be open about his HIV status, and Catherine because it was male dominated” (90). It isn’t simply that any dance space will suffice in uniting members of New York’s queer “community.” Rather, those factors that inhibit relations in other arenas of life also play a major role in determining the types of connections that may happen in the seemingly liminal realm of improvised social dance.

After discussing why her informants will not frequent certain clubs, Buckland turns to examine the forms of interaction that transpire in the clubs they do attend. For example, she compares the musical choices of DJs and movement styles of dancers as indicators of distinctions between social groups. In attending to the specific rhythms and movement repertoires that dancers adopt as grounds for their improvisation, Buckland discerns the racial, gendered, and generational knowledge that particular queer subjects hold in their bodies, how it is used in social settings, and the consequences of this employment. She also compares how intimate people are willing to get in certain spaces: “At clubs such as Escuelita and Krash on Astoria Boulevard in Queens, I noticed different attitudes to dance compared to the relationship of the individual to the mass in clubs such as Twilo and Arena” (98). More precisely, the smaller, predominantly Latino/a clubs in Queens featured “more partnering […] The participants I saw made more contact with each other, both eye contact and physical touching” (98). Dancers decide upon the types of relationships (personal and political) they want to have with other bodies–whether to be closely packed in a tight circle, almost inseparable from the mass movement, or to have more individualized space. In this chapter, dancers also explain the social-political significance of being able to congregate with other queers: “I guess what I want is to be with others like me,” says one young lesbian; “there’s something really powerful about being in a room full of other women” (107). The dancers whom Buckland interviews experience similarity, not only in terms of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, or race, but also “in terms of shared knowledge expressed through movement” (107).

Apart from describing the physical and social dynamics of New York’s queer dance clubs, Buckland’s most important achievement is that Impossible Dance assures the survival of a culture’s ephemeral past. Her final chapter, “Mr. Mesa’s Ticket,” examines the complex reasons why HIV-positive men continue attending queer dances after their diagnoses, and even after they fall ill. More precisely, Buckland describes the physical and political interactions that took place at the The Sound Factory Bar, a Manhattan space where HIV-positive subjects could partake in a special event called the Body Positive T-Dance. These dances began in 1993, when a pair of young HIV-positive gay men decided to set up a tea-dance (called in this instance a “T-Dance”) for themselves and their friends. The author explains the terminology: “A tea-dance is an early Sunday evening dance party form established within the gay male community in New York City” (161). The abbreviation of “tea” to “T” references those precious infection-fighting cells that the retrovirus destroys; it also tacitly suggests that dancing might be a way to increase one’s T-cell count, or at least amplify one’s will to hang on. Sadly, the Body Positive T-Dance no longer existed by the time Buckland finished writing her book; this practice was terminated in 1998, after a series of shuffles from one dance space to another, and after it became difficult to attract enough people on a regular basis to make the dances economically feasible. Nevertheless, the author’s attention to the complex issues raised by these dances provides readers with a lasting memorial to their significance. A central question raised in this chapter pertains to “the relationship between salvage ethnography and the eagerness of participants to have their stories and experiences recorded for the future” (161). In other words, why is it so vital for gay men infected with HIV to tell someone about the ways they used to interact on the dance floor, about what they learned in those fleeting moments, and about the struggles and triumphs they are leaving behind as they prepare to die?

Buckland honors the adamant request that many of her HIV-positive informants made in talking to her: “You must write this down” (179). In poignant and haunting ways, she journeys with these people through the kinetic landscapes and encounters housed in their memories, through the music that once made them feel alive, through the clothes and accessories that helped them understand their gayness. Her older informants explain why they want these stories written down: so that “people would realize that dancing in a club is a privileged pleasure for which people have died” (179). They want the psychic and political benefits of queer social dancing to thrive in the present and future, so that a younger generation might experience the empowerment and liberation that an older one fought desperately to attain. There is something magical in how these men describe social dancing as a way of slowing down time, as a way of making more of the time they have left. Buckland depicts their hopes and desires in ways that help readers grasp the temporal and psychological terrain that HIV-positive subjects inhabit as they dance. In going to the clubs where they are welcome, such dancers transcend the limits of the physical body, surpassing the obstacles that normative culture sets out for them. By means of dancing, they overcome self-consciousness about being too old, too thin, too unattractive, or too sick for the regular club scene. As Buckland argues, these forms of improvisation “may thus be seen as a conversation, not only with other participants, but also with the past” (179). In telling the youthful author about why they continue to dance in the face of death, subjects recall who they once were, and realize that political agency and hope for the future are not impossible after all. In its descriptive detail, analytical sophistication, and compassionate engagement with the subjects whom Buckland studies, this well-researched book inspires new generations of scholars to continue in her footsteps, creating groundbreaking possibilities in the field of dance ethnography.

Works Cited

• Berlant, Lauren, and Michael Warner. “Sex in Public.” Critical Inquiry 24 (Winter 1998): 547-66.
• Desmond, Jane. “Embodying Difference: Issues in Dance and Cultural Studies.” Everynight Life: Culture and Dance in Latino/a America. Celeste Fraser Delgado and Jose Esteban Muñoz, eds. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997.
• Muñoz, José Esteban. “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts.” Women and Performance 8:2 (1996): 5-18.

Valerie Karno

English Department
University of Rhode Island
karno@uri.edu

Review of: Scarry, Elaine. Who Defended the Country? Elaine Scarry in A New Democracy Forum On Citizenship, National Security, and 9/11. Eds. Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers. Boston: Beacon, 2003.

The collection, “Who Defended the Country,” with title essay by Elaine Scarry and reply remarks by a host of well-known scholars like Richard Falk, Ellen Willis, Antonia Chayes, and others, invites us to re-examine our roles as citizens within a particularly postmodern frame. Scarry argues against the centralized war power now exercised by the U.S. government and encourages the populace to endorse a more egalitarian, distributed form of national defense. Together with her commentators, Scarry analyzes the events of 9/11 in an effort to articulate the duties of individual and collective national citizenship. While thinking about the agency or passivity inherent in American citizenship is nothing new, neither in contemporary nor historical discourse ranging from Tocqueville to Unger, this collection employs some vital, particularly postmodern concepts which not only help us to consider the ways we enact our citizenry, but also invite us to reshape our conceptions of democracy and empire. The collection assists us in asking what it means to be a citizen of a democracy, what constitutes contemporary boundaries between the ordinary and the extraordinary, and what “national ground,” “territory,” and “affiliation” entail in the increasingly blurred spaces of ideological and geographical placement. Ultimately, the text alerts us to the ways our discursive terms highlight the problematic contradictions of democratic forms.

Scarry begins her essay with the observation that the United States had difficulty defending itself on 9/11. Noting that defending our country is “an obligation we all share” (3), Scarry seeks to explore how our national defense systems can be improved through citizen involvement. While Scarry’s impulse to provoke us, as citizens, into participatory governance is laudatory, she serves us even more importantly by inviting us to explore what “we as a country” means. By thinking about the link between individual or group identification and responsibility for the maintenance of the structures comprising the “country” we purportedly need to “defend,” Scarry and the text’s other authors unravel the notion of agency’s relationship to “country” while pondering several postmodern themes already in discursive play: speed, space, and motion.

A main tenet of Scarry’s argument is that the speed with which nuclear war can be initiated without citizen consent stands in stark contrast to the extensive time the government had, and failed, to respond to the hijackers before they flew into the Pentagon. According to Scarry, this disparity demonstrates the government’s inadequate defense of the nation and its inappropriate usurping of control over the potentially more effective populace. Scarry’s concerns about the government’s ability to act hastily, without citizen consent, in the event of a nuclear attack echoes contemporary fears about the irreversible and dangerous levels of speed American culture is already witnessing in multiple arenas. From popular cinematic hits, including one actually titled “Speed,” to research being conducted on faster connections through fiber optics, culture is no doubt reacting to a world that, in temporality and architecture, arguably leaves the human behind and bereft. Scarry’s points about speed are troubling. She claims, for instance, that the Constitution has been bypassed by the country’s doctrine of Presidential First Use of nuclear weapons, because officials argue that the “pace of modern life” does not allow time for consulting Congress or citizens before a nuclear strike. Scarry movingly juxtaposes deadly force with the beneficial potential for communication between the government and the populace in her ironic statement that “with planes and weapons traveling faster than the speed of sound, what sense does it make to have a lot of sentences we have no time to hear?” (5). Noting that the need for speed has been invoked by the government in recent history to explain the centralization of war power as opposed to the distribution of consent across the citizenry (14), Scarry argues that time should not pose as an excuse for refusing to involve the American public in key policy decisions.

Several of the respondents to Scarry embrace the discourse of speed while rebutting her arguments about its impact on democratic practices. In “A Success of Democracy,” Charles Knight argues that Scarry’s reliance on the pace of events as being a large part of the difficulty of defense is “overstated” (58). Claiming that strategic surprise was more to blame for the events of 9/11 than quick pacing, Knight goes so far as to refute Scarry’s version of the facts by offering a few alternative narratives and timetables to those she presented in her argument. While acknowledging the problems of speed in his essay “A Policy Failure,” Stephen Walt asks the reader what other lessons we should learn from the attack on the Pentagon. Unlike Scarry’s conclusion that the government has used speed as an excuse for centralizing what should be a distributed responsibility for defense decisions, Walt asks, “Was the Pentagon struck because we have placed too much emphasis on ‘speed,’ or because we did not emphasize it enough?” (53). Randall Forsberg’s article, “Citizens and Arms Control,” opposes Scarry’s conclusion as well by asserting that the speed of nuclear armed missiles “has not eliminated democratic control altogether” (78). Forsberg claims that Congress has not itself ever attempted to “require administration support” for policies of nuclear disarmament, despite having that opportunity each year (78). Thus, each author accounts for the contemporary phenomenon of technological speed in warfare, yet ultimately leaves the reader wondering about the extent to which speed does or does not affect our democratic forms.

To a degree, then, Who Defended the Country? might be retitled, without reference to subjectivity, “What is a Democratic Form?”. Scarry is indeed calling for an egalitarian, distributed system of defense. She claims that the plane that hit the Pentagon, viewed alongside the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, “reveals two different conceptions of national defense” (6): the Pentagon crash represents an authoritarian, centralized system of defense that ultimately failed as the Pentagon was struck, while the plane ostensibly brought down by citizen heroes rushing the cockpit represents an egalitarian, democratic form of defense because the constituents, with informed consent, voted and acted. Despite Scarry’s literal, and admirable, sense that a democratic form must not be “top-down” (7), but of, by, and for the people, the collection nevertheless asks us to look further into forms of democratic practice. In “The Realities of War,” for example, Ellen Willis claims that democracy throughout the world has historically (and currently) “always been more aspiration than achievement” (83). While noting that, even as an aspiration, democracy seems threatened in the contemporary political arena, Willis suggests that the process of democratic practice is itself part of its goal. This has certainly been true in American law, where we consistently see gaps between the intent and the fulfillment of justice.

The search for democratic form through process is referenced throughout the collection through numerous and varied metaphors of traveling and motion. Assuming a unified national “we,” Scarry herself uses travel metaphors to urge the populace to act against governmental interference that threatens to prevent our reaching national goals which we, as consumers, have bought into. Worrying about centralized forms of authority blocking “the destination towards which we were traveling together” (33), Scarry cautions that “the destination for which we purchased tickets was a country where no one was arrested without their names being made public, a country that did not carry out wars without the authorization of Congress, a country that does not threaten to use weapons of mass destruction” (33). Contributors to the collection address these metaphors of propulsion and seizure. In “Too Utopian,” Richard Falk maintains that “there were grounds for projecting American exceptionalism as a goal, even if not as an attainment. Such claims depend on the future tense, a sense of trajectory toward a goal that seemed plausible in relation to race relations, the status of women, and sexuality” (40). Despite cautioning that this national trajectory has changed for the worse and condemning Scarry’s vision for being utopian and politically unattainable, Falk is nevertheless invested in imagining an attainable position, even if it cannot be immediately realized. In “Democracy Won’t Help,” Paul Kahn similarly invokes historical democracy to contemplate future imagination and concludes that traveling back to eighteenth-century models of democracy to find solutions for contemporary problems is unlikely to be helpful (47). The historical and traveling metaphors used throughout the text do point us towards examining the ways in which the metaphorical architectures of America have been constructed by temporal and ideological pillars that are increasingly difficult to locate in discrete spaces. The difficulty of this location no doubt helps explain the phenomenon of citizen ignorance and passivity that Scarry and her contributors urge us to overcome.

The spatial analyses offered by the collection’s authors consider democratic practice within postmodern spatial paradigms. One critique directed against Scarry by Falk, for instance, claims that she fails to consider how to counter terrorist activity that “cannot be definitively situated in space” (42). Noting the problem of indefinite location and pointing out Scarry’s spatial omission seems most appropriate, given how Scarry herself anchors her argument in an intriguing discourse which links the geographic with the ideological. She calls planes “the ground,” for example, asserting that each plane was a “small piece of U.S. ground” (6). Knight comments that if the “internal ground” was the plane, then its protection failed (60). Scarry’s notion of ground is even more intriguing, given her similar version of territory. Scarry claims that Flight 93 was a “small piece of American territory” that was “restored to the country when civilian passengers who became ‘citizen-soldiers’ regained control of the ground–in the process losing their own lives” (20). But in a postmodern era marked by diaspora and hybrid identifications, one must wonder at the ability to locate ground and territory so fixedly in a traveling object. Quite clearly, the hijackers of 9/11 wished to do damage to Americans and others on the doomed planes, those individuals residing within U.S. borders, and American ideological tenets housed in the World Trade Center buildings, the Pentagon, and myriad other locations throughout the globe. The collection nonetheless invites us to think further about how our notions of abstract civic involvement are linked to our perceptions of territorial agency across the globe. How do we locate American territory, or ground, when we are heavily responsible for either democracy or capitalism (not to be fused) permeating borders and infiltrating spaces in visible and invisible ways?

Elaine Scarry commends the “citizen-soldiers” who allegedly stormed the hijackers in their cockpit and prevented a larger attack on America for their collaborative work and exercise of informed consent (20, 25, 30). Certainly their self-sacrifice is worthy of considerable praise. Yet even beyond Scarry’s point that our nation needs a consenting public, this collection leads us to question what informed consent entails in contemporary America, and how we might reconcile the inconsistencies of fragmentary knowledge with an agenda for action. Forsberg suggests that the general public’s lack of knowledge about Defense Department spending threatens democratic institutions and the safety of ordinary citizens (79-80). Chayes, however, faults an over-abundance of limited, incoherent knowledge for citizens’ passivity, arguing that “it is an art to piece together a picture from the millions of scraps of data that are available” (64). The oscillation between excessive and insufficient knowledge points towards the oxymoronic inconsistencies inherent in democracy itself–like, as Willis observes, the project of a democratic defense which values surprise and secrecy in strategic war while striving to achieve an open, democratic society (81). The collected essays inspire us to inquire into what we might expect from an innately contradictory democratic practice, as we struggle to understand the norms of and exceptions to democratic forms.

Who Defended the Country? inserts the reader into a dialogue about normativity and exceptionality. Whereas Scarry uses the two different plane crashes on 9/11 as a barometer for the problems with our overall national defense systems, some of Scarry’s contributors don’t agree that these events can be used metonymically. Stephen Walt argues, for instance, that Scarry does not adequately account for the historical record of U.S. decision-making and erroneously uses these plane crashes in overarching ways. Walt writes, “If one looks at the historical record […] rapid responses have been the exception rather than the rule” (52-53). Given the competing narratives the book offers us about the ways we might coherently understand U.S. policy decisions in light of a democratic state which is itself theoretically grounded in contradictions, this collection is most useful not for answering our questions about domestic policies, the role of international law and politics in our domestic policy decisions, or our stances on creating or defending the state of war. Rather, this book motivates us to think about how our architectural and geographic boundaries affect our identifications as national or individual agents. The text moves us to examine the ways our personal trajectories are intertwined with attending to or ignoring the borders of our ideological foundations. Who Defended the Country? splendidly brings us to an examination of the alliances between the three elements with which Scarry concludes: “those who wish to injure its [the country’s] population, its skyline, or its democratic structures” (100). The book leads its readers to consider the relationship between these three foundations of American life, as we must ponder the ways metaphoric and material architectures of our contemporary lives structure and inform the ways we see the ordinary and the exceptional. We must ask ourselves how we might prevent horrific human murders across the globe not only by reinforcing or reconstituting the terms of defense, but also by examining how everyday actions predictably and randomly lead to cruelty.

Diane Davis

Division of Rhetoric and Department of English
University of Texas at Austin
ddd@mail.utexas.edu 

Review of: Ronell, Avital. Stupidity.Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2001.

It takes a lot of courage to write a book about stupidity. And to call that book simply Stupidity, not even bothering to frame the term in a way that signals your own quite intelligent mastery of it–this really takes guts. But Avital Ronell’s remarkable oeuvre is nothing if not gutsy, and Stupidity makes a strong addition to her formidable corpus.

It’s a timely addition, too, given that the events of the last few years have testified, yet again, to history’s “brutal regressions” (44), shattering the serene delusion that “progress” and “understanding” have been attained along the way. Those who before 9/11 still held out hope for Enlightenment values, who still, despite everything, insisted that equivalences might be drawn “between education and decency, humanism and justice” (24), may today be more ready to leave the so-called “unfinished project of modernity” unfinished. As if in anticipation of the violent tragedy that hit while Stupidity was in press, as well as of the terrifying “war on terrorism” that has since ensued, Ronell suggests that it is time to admit it’s not possible to “train thought to detach from stupidity” (23). Indeed, she proposes that the violence to which the world routinely succumbs “is of understanding: understanding itself is at issue” (24). History’s “brutal regressions,” according to Ronell, are to some degree the effect of an understanding that no longer doubts or questions itself. The “dominant form of stupidity,” she says, which is also the most dangerous form, shows up as an unflinching certitude that “doesn’t allow for questions about the world,” or language, or the relations between the two (43).

Stupidity remains always open to such questions, acknowledging that being able to point to various manifestations of stupidity in no way indicates that one has a handle on it as such, as if it were simply knowable, as if it could be pinned (or penned) down and definitively understood. Stupidity is an issue precisely because it evades our grasp, and with her signature style and wit, Ronell affirms its elusive nature right up front: “I hesitate to say here what stupidity is because, eluding descriptive analysis, it switches and regroups, turns around and even fascinates […]. While stupidity is ‘what is there,’ it cannot be simply located or evenly scored” (3). Right away, stupidity is associated both with error, where philosophy scrambles to keep it, and with sheer thought, the near stupor and extreme surrender involved in the poetic act. It is linked both to “the most dangerous failures of human endeavor” and also (via Nietzsche) to the promotion of “life and growth” (3). Stupidity is the ur-curse: “nothing keeps you down like the mark of stupidity” (27). Yet, Baudelaire figures it as a kind of wrinkle cream that preserves youth and beauty (88-89). And Ronell, being Ronell, won’t ignore the fact that sometimes, “in some areas of life, it is [also] what lets you get by” (27), that “sometimes ducking into stupidity offers the most expedient strategy for survival” (43).

Among other things, stupidity’s refusal to come clean, to submit to the movement of comprehension, Ronell observes, also throws into question “the knowledge we think we have about knowledge.” Because, she remarks, “as long as I don’t know what stupidity is, what I know about knowing remains uncertain, even forbidding” (4-5). Given that Ronell names certitude as a basis for horrific acts of violence and terror, this statement may offer an ethical access code to reading Stupidity, which takes the form of a post-critical critique or a nonrepresentational analysis–a Ronell trademark. Rather than closing in on stupidity, attempting to fix and represent its meaning, she traces and amplifies its proliferations in meaning, struggling to hold the work itself in meaning’s open-ing. Rigorously interrogating the conceptual “object” that goes by the name stupidity, she moves you in so close to it that it overflows its object-status, it dis-figures, leaving a radical and inassimilable singularity in its tracks. Ronell engages it in all its singularity, tailing it through its engagements with poets, novelists, philosophers, literary/critical theorists, and preschoolers, but the closer she brings you to it, each time, the less knowable it appears–and so the less representable. Therefore, this approach butts heads with scholarly tradition, which posits and propagates a causal link between rigor and certitude (the former leading to the latter). For reasons that can only be interpreted as ethical, Stupidity breaks this link, offering instead an exceptionally rigorous interruption of certitude.

But let me interrupt myself here, my own futile attempt accurately to represent Ronell’s text, at least long enough to admit the extreme anxiety weighing on me as I write–for, among other things, Ronell points up the limits of Darstellung, which, when it trusts itself too much, “magnetizes stupidity” (71). Still, she reminds us that no one who presumes to write–not even if you’re a Flaubert or a Barthes or a Pynchon–is safe from stupidity’s approach: there is no prophylactic effective against the experience of abjection that writing inevitably sparks. And I can’t think of anyone who has traced out (in writing) the indissociable connections between writing and stupidity more elegantly, more thoroughly, or more humbly, than Ronell herself. There’s really nothing else to do, then, but to take a deep, expropriating breath, and to just get on with it.

So: right up front I want to note Stupidity‘s radically unconventional layout and design–another Ronell trademark, this one thanks to her longtime collaboration with award-winning page designer Richard Eckersley. A powerful nocturnal theme and threat runs through this work, and it is visually depicted via altering typefaces, pitch black pages, and various illustrations of the sun, the moon, satellites, etc. Star constellations, for example, precede the surprisingly revealing autobiographical segments throughout the book, acknowledging that the author herself remains mostly in the dark, even when telling her “own” story: “no matter how strongly rooted in reference a text may be, it still carries the trait of incomprehensibility from which it emerged” (102-3). Ronell’s autobiographical performance in this text is both arresting in its honesty (“I avoided working in close proximity to de Man for fear that he would crush my already nonexistent balls” [120]) and touching in its humility (“I would have liked to tell you more about the experience of stupidity, for I have done a great deal of field work in this area, and have felt stupid most of my life” [93])–but it is far from naïve. Autobiography does not depend on reference, says de Man, but it is productive of a reference that never finally comes clean. We might say, then, that a non-totalizing autobiography, as allegorical performance par excellence, defies “the sham of reappropriation” and shares with “true mourning” the tendency to “accept incomprehension, to leave a place for it” (108). The nocturnal images opening onto Ronell’s non-totalizing autobiographical segments mark precisely this acceptance of nonknowledge, of the inability to totalize even self-understanding.

The book opens with the dramatic image of a full solar eclipse, and most of the four chapters and three satellites are separated by images of the progressively emerging sun. The Introduction, “Slow Learner,” and Chapter 1, “The Question of Stupidity: Why We Remain in the Provinces,” thus proceed under the sign of completely obscured light, which forecasts what Ronell describes in this section as the “sheer stupefaction,” the collapse into opacity, to which “the poet’s courage” testifies. Chapter 2, “The Politics of Stupidity: Musil, Dasein, The Attack on Women, and My Fatigue,” is preceded by an image of the sun barely emerging from behind the moon, thus anticipating the presumption of light, however dim, necessary to sustain the apotropeic rituals designed to ward off an ever-encroaching stupidity. In the case of Robert Musil’s “On Stupidity” (“Über die Dummheit”), these rituals include unreflectively nailing the other (woman) as stupid and selecting a title that covertly serves as a conceptual prophylactic: “Über die Dummheit” already implies that Musil is on top of it, over or beyond it; his title, in other words, offers a semblance of mastery over this topic, which Ronell feels compelled philosophically and ethically to decline.

Roughly half of the sun shines on Chapter 3, “The Rhetoric of Testing,” an explosive chapter on Paul de Man, Friedrich Schlegel, Georges Bataille, and the ways in which language’s improvised positings out us all as stupid. The unexpected administration of witty and impossible Test Questions closes this chapter, illustrating the fact that the light can play tricks on you, can lead you to believe you have safely detached from a stupidity that quietly grounds your experience of knowing. To fully grasp the ethical, political, and intellectual stakes of Chapter 3, one would first (among other things) need a firm grip on the material covered by these Test Questions, each of which would demand a near book-length response–and even then, really answering them would require the examinee to “play stupid,” to “instrumentalize the moment of the question” so as to “escape the anguish of indecision, complication, or hypothetical redoubling that would characterize intelligence” (43). Truly, who could cling to a cocky sense of certitude in the face of this Pop Quiz from hell?

Test Questions

1. If Paul de Man undermined the possibility of true autobiography, why does the author include autobiographical material about herself?
2. What is the relationship between stupidity and unintelligibility?
3. Does the author establish a link between singularity and unintelligibility? If so, how would this link affect Gasché’s argument?
4. Can Schlegel’s kick in the ass be read allegorically?
5. What is the author’s point of view concerning de Man’s disciples?
6. What is the relationship between allegory and history?
7. How can the author imply that de Man both refused to offer a reading of stupidity and was responsible for inscribing its implications and performance?
8. What is at stake in the works of Schlegel, Bataille and de Man in terms of the figure of testing?
9. Why does the author make claims for the democratic underpinnings of scholarly and philosophical journals? Are these principles upheld today? Give an example.
10. A) Discuss the relationship of friendship and nonunderstanding, using the instance of Schlegel and Schleiermacher as your starting point;
    B) show how Friedrich Schlegel’s anti-hermeneutics of friendship illuminates what Blanchot and Derrida have to say about the politics of friendship. (162)

The “Kierkegaard Satellite” also falls under this half-shining sun, which then emerges three-fourths of the way to introduce Chapter 4, “The Disappearance and Returns of the Idiot.” This three-part chapter offers a sustained and very moving reading of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot across a Levinasian-inspired ethics, which is situated at the very edge of consciousness, preceding and exceeding all intentionality. Here the ever-expanding light of the sun is aligned with the “solar systems of cognition,” which, no matter how bright, are (over-)exposed in this chapter as inadequate grounds for responsible responsiveness. The “Wordsworth Satellite” falls under this image of three-quarters of the sun, as well, tracing with rigor and tenderness the inarticulable adventures of Wordsworth’s beloved Idiot Boy. Though the “story” takes place, in this sense, in broad daylight, it remains a “story” that cannot be told: where Johnny’s gone, what he’s seen and experienced, is not available for articulation. The poem itself remains a “perplexingly sustained thought where utterance is reduced to repetitive hoots and stammers” (6). Yet, “part of the poem recognizes itself in Johnny’s nonsignifying language,” Ronell suggests, “and holds with him vigilance over the silent experience of poetry.” What “The Idiot Boy” does as a poem, Ronell observes, “is to relate to [Johnny’s] flight without relating; it cannot tell what has happened–it cannot become a story–but can only tell of an ungraspable event, a missing present, the enigma of its source” (275). The poem tries “to articulate singularity, the absolute singularity for which the idiot stands and stutters […]. What could the idiot have experienced or lived? it asks us.” The poem cannot say; it can’t go there. And yet, says Ronell, it “must go there, indeed, has already been there. […] poetry is the idiot boy” (276). What poetry lights up, in other words, is precisely the eclipse in cognition that is at its source–its light sets out to expose the utter deprivation of light.

And finally, the Kant Satellite, “The Figure of the Ridiculous Philosopher; or, Why I am so Popular,” which closes the book, begins with a double-page spread featuring the full (smug) face of the sun, the moon fading out of sight. In this satellite, Ronell bounces Kant’s dry, laborious, and “manly” writing requirement off French theory’s rigorous and poetic style, which “carries thinking elegantly, with rhetorical finesse” (283), in order to suggest that the “entity” called French theory “is a way of avoiding having to decide between literature and philosophy” (282), a way of embracing the linguistic (that is: stupid) ground of (even philosophical) thought. Stupidity thus moves the reader steadily from darkness to light, from the nocturnal communications of Hölderlin and other courageous poets, who affirm and share the “secret experience of stupidity” (9), toward the “solar systems of cognition” (248) that found Kant’s obsession with “clarity,” his struggle to protect philosophy from literature, knowledge from style. What becomes apparent as one is moved through the text, however, is that the light of “clarity” cannot be opposed to the night of stupidity; the latter is the former’s very condition of (im)possibility. This is what Stupidity exposes and embraces from beginning to end, in content and in layout.

All we really can claim to “know at this juncture,” Ronell tells us in the opening pages, “is that stupidity does not allow itself to be opposed to knowledge in any simple way, nor is it the other of thought” (5). “Stupidity is not so stupid as to oppose thought” (23), she observes, but instead consists “in the absence of a relation to knowing” (5). It is therefore discovered right at thinking’s origin: it names the wonder or stupefaction (thaumazein) that inspires thought. On the other hand, stupidity also names the limit of all knowing and comes very close, Ronell observes, to “Blanchot’s sense of nullity–the crushingly useless, that which comes to nothing.” Still, the “bright side of nullity” (29) is that all possibility originates in it: indeed, it is the “secret experience” of the poets, who “know from stupidity, the essential dulling or weakening that forms the precondition of utterance” (5).

The poet, “holding back the values associated with the intelligence of doing, the bright grasp of what is there” (6), rides the work of language (figuration) all the way (back) through to its un-working (de-figuration), where it drops him/her into the abyssal impossibility or nullity that precedes and exceeds all possibility. “Poetic courage consists in embracing the terrible lassitude of mind’s enfeeblement,” Ronell writes, “the ability to endure the near facticity of feeblemindedness” (6). It involves an utter surrender to “the dispossession that entitles as it enfeebles the writer, disengaging and defaulting the knowing subject who enters into contact with the poetic word” (7). Reading Hölderlin’s “Dichtermut” and “Blödigkeit,” Ronell suggests with Benjamin that the poetic act involves a “self-emptying” in which the poet “yields entirely, giving in to sheer relatedness” (8). The poet’s courage appears to consist in letting go of all tropological security systems, in dropping even the figural shield of the “I”: it consists, Ronell says, in “taking the step toward […] pure exposure” (9), toward the “pure indifference” that is “the untouchable center of all relations” (8). From here, “the poet is not a figure,” she writes, “but the principle of figuration.” Thus, the poet/poem begins in “nonlife” (9), in an essential nullity that names a sort of transcendental stupidity: stupidity, then, is located at the very origin of “life,” of “world.”

Ronell suggests that the poet testifies to a fundamental stupidity that operates structurally, at and as the very ground of our being and being-with, to an existential structure of exposedness that precedes and exceeds the bounds of the subject–which indicates that the relation to stupidity is pre-originary: “we” are with it even before “we” are with our Selves. Stupidity is what “throws us,” Ronell says, “marking an original humiliation […] that resolves into the everyday life trauma with which we live” (11). So whereas Robert Musil acknowledges that we are occasionally given over to stupidity, Ronell’s formulations indicate that we are never not given over to it–even our moments of path-breaking brilliance are grounded in it. Heidegger taught us that language is the house of Being, but what Ronell demonstrates in this work is that a transcendental stupidity is the house of language.

And if there is “a moment when the thing of stupidity sparkles with life,” when “the prohibitions on stupidity are lifted” so that you can finally be stupid, Ronell suggests that it may be when you’re in love. Jean-Luc Nancy is an important interlocutor for Ronell throughout this text, and his essay “Shattered Love” may have been one inspiration for this thought. Love, according to him, is an exposition of exposedness in which “the singular being is traversed by the alterity of the other.” Blowing the notion of immanence right out of the water, love, he writes, “re-presents I to itself broken,” irremediably open to and broken into by an inappropriable exteriority. Testifying to a structure of exposure that marks the failure of immanence, love signifies a kind of finite transcendence in which an outside announces itself inside–indeed, love “is this outside itself,” Nancy writes, “the other, each time singular, a blade thrust in me, and that I do not rejoin, because it disjoins me” (97). Inasmuch as love kicks off an “upsurge of the other in me” (98), introducing (me to) an internal alterity, it also assures me that “my” heart, the very heart of “my” singular being, cannot be totally my own. The philosophical subject comes into being by appropriating its own becoming through the dialectical process; however, it is not completed by this process, he reminds us, because, for one thing, its very heart remains exposed and so radically inappropriable. Love is always “the beating of an exposed heart,” says Nancy, and it is this heart that “exposes the subject,” exposes it “to everything that is not its dialectic and its mastery as a subject” (89-90). In “Shattered Love,” Nancy redescribes love as what exposes me, time and again, to my radical exposedness.

And Ronell takes off from there, situating love within a jaw-dropping string of non-synonymous substitutions, including finitude, irony, and a kind of transcendental stupidity, each of which, in and on its own terms, names the endless disruption of the appropriation of meaning and being. Ronell reminds us that irony, after Schlegel and de Man, is no mere trope but the permanent interruption of the meaning that tropes are charged with transporting; irony, then, she proposes, is “another way of saying finitude,” another way to mark “the experience of sheer exposition” (144). Inasmuch as both are non-stoppable interrupters, perpetual resisters to closure, to totality, to the work of appropriation, irony and finitude are semi-substitutable para-concepts that confound understanding; or, as Ronell also writes, both irony and nonunderstanding are ways of saying finitude (144). And love–so long as it is not conceived “on the basis of the politico-subjective model of communion in one,” (Nancy, Inoperative 38), inasmuch as it is instead based, as Ronell suggests, “on the unrepenting recognition of difference, separateness, and […] nonunderstanding”–takes its place within this disruptive (non)synonymy as precisely what “preempts the exchange of self-identical rings.” Tweaking Schlegel, Ronell suggests that love “is itself ironic,” or that “irony, truly, is love” (150), signaling the permanent interruption of (self-)appropriation and so the humbling predicament of finitude, which is also the predicament of nonunderstanding, of a transcendental stupidity.

Indeed, Ronell tags love as stupidity’s secret agent, love being “one of the few sites where it is permitted publicly to be stupid,” where you are free to call one another by “stupid pet names” and to engage without apology in the various “imbecilic effusions of being-with” (89-90). When it comes to love, in fact, even the Law backs off, granting the lovers a pass: “Laws legislating social intelligence and sense-making operations are suspended for the duration of language-making scenes of love” (90). What this means, Ronell suggests, is either that “you have to get real down and prodigiously stupid to fall for love, or that stupidity is a repressed ground for human affectivity that only love has the power to license and unleash” (90). With a nod to Schlegel but against the grain of philosophical hermeneutics, Ronell situates a transcendental stupidity at and as the very ground of love and of friendship–in fact, of all experiences of community. After all, falling in love is not something that a self-enclosed, autarkic subject could experience. The subject’s very propensity to fall indicates its structural non-self-sufficiency, its irreparable exposure to an inappropriable alterity, which operates both as its condition of possibility (its abyssal ground) and as its inevitable impossibility, its inevitable (and perpetual) undoing. According to Ronell, then, love’s subject is always already the exposed subject, the subject (subject) of stupidity.

Of course, philosophy cringes in the face of such formulations and has, for the most part, assimilated any thinking of stupidity “to error and derivative epistemological concerns” (20). Ronell suggests that this delimitation and reduction of the question of stupidity is a futile attempt by philosophy to protect “the domain of pure thought” from the stupidity that is both its guarantor and its original inhabitant. According to Deleuze–whom Ronell says in part inspired her project, posthumously putting her on assignment–what prevents philosophy from acknowledging stupidity as a “transcendental problem is the continued belief in the cogitatio” (20). If the motivation is no longer simply a belief in the thinking subject, then it may at least be the continued scramble to shield the subject from further contamination, to rescue it. A similar but more narcissistic scramble may be behind the link between stupidity and cruelty, the fact that the “really stupid” can inspire bloodlust (83). Given that you are an exposed being, ex-centric (an outside-inside), your desire to “make dead meat of the stupid” may indicate a panicked denial of the stupidity-in-you. That “the stupid make you want to kill them” (84), in other words, may be a symptom of stupephobia, a terrific struggle against the stirrings of attunement, against an extimacy that would out you, too, as stupid. Ronell exposes a “taste for straightforward cruelty” in Musil’s musings on stupidity, if not in his “lady”-smashing anecdotes (Ch. 2)–though her meticulous reading of his work is considerably more nuanced and psychoanalytically complex than I’m suggesting here. Still, throughout Stupidity, Ronell catalogues various atrocities committed against the feminized and minoritized other in the name of erecting stupidity-shields–in the name, that is, of maintaining the phantasmatic border/boundary between the cogitating self and the stupid other.

However, as Ronell repeatedly demonstrates, these evasive and protective maneuvers are always already too late. “Stupidity, which cannot be examined apart from the subject accredited by the Enlightenment,” Ronell writes, “poses a challenge to my sovereignty and autonomy” (19); it therefore poses a challenge to any notion of ethics based on this sovereign and autonomous subject. And Stupidity offers nothing less than a post-humanist rethinking of ethics, a sustained interrogation of the potential for responsible responsiveness in an age that, despite everything, is still given to “brutal regressions.” It’s important to remember that when Ronell embraces the irony of understanding, the impossibility of understanding fully, she simultaneously affirms the never-ending struggle to understand. “There is a hermeneutic imperative,” she says, echoing Schlegel (161). “This imperative is bequeathed to us as gift and burden, it names a task” (161). But inasmuch as understanding endlessly eludes us, it must be affirmed as an infinite responsibility, an imperative to attend to the demand of a relentless uncertainty, a measureless inability to have understood. “Assuming understanding were to be resurrected without an imperative lording over its provenance,” Ronell observes alongside Werner Hamacher, “this could happen only by turning away from what is incomprehensible” (161).

There is no ethical or logical past tense to understanding, in other words; it is a process (which does not necessarily imply progress) that is never finished. One abdicates the responsibility to alterity implied in this imperative at the instant one presumes to have accomplished it. The moment one presumes to have understood, one has already turned away from the incomprehensible, from what sparks the struggle to understand in the first place. And to turn away from the incomprehensible–that is, from the other–is to turn back toward the Same. Certitude is purchased by shooting a U in the face of a fundamental aporia: faced with the unassimilable other, understanding swerves back around, toward itself, toward what it already knows or what it is already programmed to assimilate. When Ronell, on the other hand, affirms the perpetual struggle to understand, the inability finally to know, she is embracing an ethical disposition dedicated to the other and to the responsibility for the other.

Contra the exhausting argument that postfoundational thought ditches responsibility, Ronell demonstrates that responsibility grows unfathomably e-n-o-r-m-o-u-s when it exceeds the tiny bounds of the subject’s intentions. In a sense, what she’s suggesting is that to act with presumed certitude is to be irresponsible because to be certain is already to have turned away from the other for whom one is responsible. Both understanding and responsibility are infinite, endless, and this leads Ronell to suggest that the only possible ethical position would have to be: “I am stupid before the other” (60). Putting a kind of Levinasian ethic into play, Ronell makes noncomprehension the (non)ground of ethical attunement, of responsible responsiveness. It is in order to “explore the extreme limit of such responsibility” and to determine “what can be assumed by the limited subject,” that Ronell, in Stupidity, appeals to “the debilitated subject–the stupid, idiotic, puerile, slow-burn destruction of ethical being that, to [her] mind, can never be grounded in certitude or education or lucidity or prescriptive obeisance” (19).

The debilitated subject of choice in this case is Dostoevsky’s epileptic Idiot, Prince Myshkin. There is no way to gloss this rich chapter, but I do want to note that it foregrounds the stupefying conditions of embodiment, continuing a devotion evident in much of Ronell’s work to a kind of corporeal hermeneutics. Elsewhere she has mapped out, for example, the mysteries of the addicted body, the wild circuitry of the technologized body, and the corporeal predicament thematized by the punk hairdo; she has offered meticulous symptomatological readings of the Wolfman’s constipation, Freud’s cancer of the jaw, and George Bush’s inability to age (to grow, to mourn). And in Stupidity, Ronell turns her attention, via Prince Myshkin, to the finite body abandoned to the “mute chronicity of illness.” Zooming in on the “sheer facticity of bodily existence” (179), she exposes the ways o the body operates as a “massive disruption of inherited meaning”: “The body is in the world and pins down the vague locality of world,” she writes, “but when brought into view, it threatens the solidity of the world. As with television, when things get very local, there is something uncanny and incomprehensible about materiality: it gets delocalized” (180). There is no way to know the body, not even your body: “there is no epistemological stronghold, no scientific comfort or medical absolute by which to grasp your body once and for all, as if it were ever merely itself, once and for all.” The body, Ronell observes, “never stays put long enough to form self-identity.” All we can really hope to learn about body is “maybe how to feed it, when to fast, how to soothe, moisturize, let go, heal.” Still, incomprehensible as it is, body has enormous “claims upon us” (180); there is no losing it. It is both your absolute limit and what makes “you” possible at all. You are stuck with it. And Ronell sticks with it, taking us into “the meeting grounds where psyche runs into soma” (26).

Prince Myshkin’s body, she says, “points to the generality of the human predicament: idiocy has something to do with the nearly existential fact of being stuck with a body” (180-81). It hardly announces itself in times of health, when body is “on your side,” but illness, when it hits, “exhorts the body to reveal something of itself,” to produce “resistant signs of itself,” signs that remain “unremittingly opaque” (181, 186). Body does not hide, it presents itself, but it presents itself obscurely, offering us a sense of it that does not lead to knowledge–body is “elsewhere when it comes to cognitive scanners,” Ronell writes (187). Still, “somewhat surprisingly,” Ronell suggests with Nancy that “the site of nonknowledge that the body traverses, and of which it is a part,” is related to thought, to acts of thinking. Indeed, inasmuch as Heidegger’s distinction between knowing and thinking holds, it’s possible to say, as Nancy and Ronell do, that the body thinks and that thought itself is a body, a body, then, that “throws itself against the prevailing winds of philosophical tradition” (187). There is no writing the body–body is uninscribable; it’s that which “exscribes everything,” including itself. And yet, as it turns out, the thinking body writes: “the sweat, the nausea, sudden highs, certain crashes, headache, stomach weirdness” and other somaticizations are the writings of an “inappropriable text” that body leaves “in its tracks.” And this text, Ronell insists, “cannot simply be ignored” (26). The writing/thinking body demands a perpetual reading, even if it discloses nothing but “the exposition itself,” nothing but its own exposedness (188-89)–which, of course, is not nothing. It may be everything: a constant reminder of your non-self-sufficiency, of your irredeemable stupidity, and so of your inappropriable finitude.

In his cover blurb for Stupidity, Christopher Fynsk writes:

Avital Ronell has dared to approach a topic that effectively undoes any "knowing" or analytic posture, even any questioning stance. Advancing in full awareness of her vulnerability (and demonstrating constantly how this vulnerability exceeds awareness), she confronts the philosophical, psychosomatic, and ethico-political effects of her non-object through brilliant readings of a host of writers for whom stupidity (or idiocy) has become a haunting obsession or a kind of ambiguous promise.

What I want to note here is that while Ronell’s latest work demonstrates stupidity’s all-pervasiveness, it simultaneously acquires and requires the descriptor “brilliant.” Not because Ronell, finally, is the subject who knows, but because this work evokes with such intensity the impossibility and nonknowledge–the stupidity–that grounds all knowing, including her own. It is brilliant inasmuch as it exposes the impossibility of detaching brilliance from a kind of transcendental stupidity. Granting the reader the chance (or the permission) to affirm his/her own “grounding” in stupidity without freaking and without violently projecting, Ronell offers the sujet ne supposé pas savoir (the subject not supposed to know and who doesn’t suppose it knows) as a figure of ethical attunement. Stupidity‘s most important contribution to thinking and to ethics may be that it embraces, and therefore makes it possible to embrace, a post-humanist ethics and activism that begins with the impossible utterance: “I am stupid before the other.”

Works Cited

• Hamacher, Werner. Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan. Trans. Peter Fenves. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999.
• Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Inoperative Community. Trans. Peter Connor. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991.
• —. “Shattered Love.” Trans. Lisa Garbus and Simona Sawhney. Nancy 82-109.

Del Doughty

Department of English
Huntington College
ddoughty@huntington.edu

Review of: N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines.Mediawork Pamphlet. Cambridge: MIT P, 2002.

The first thing I noticed about N. Katherine Hayles’s Writing Machines was its design: its slimness (138 pages) and its texture. The pages are printed on the heavy, glossy paper typical of fashion magazines or catalogues, and the book’s cover is slightly corrugated, so that in running one’s fingers vertically down the front it feels smooth, but in moving horizontally one gets the sensation of tiny ridges. Inside, its slick black-and-white pages–with their variety of font styles, cut-and-pasted text samples, and handsome illustrations–contribute to the book’s visual appeal.

That Writing Machines is a lovely book to hold, and to behold, is no accident, for it is a book about books: specifically, it is a book that inquires about the material aspect of books in a digital age. Peter Lunenfeld, editorial director of the MIT Mediaworks Pamphlet series, characterizes the volume as a “theoretical fetish object” with “visual and tactile” as well as intellectual appeal, and media designer Anne Burdick, who collaborated with Hayles on the project from the early stages of its development, has accomplished nothing less than a reinvention of the codex as a textual interface.

Burdick also designed the text’s website–a virtual space where the interrogation of the concept “book” continues (< http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/mediawork>). Indices, notes, bibliographies–these we usually consider to be important parts of the academic monograph, but in Writing Machines these elements have been displaced to the website, along with navigable entries for errata, source material, and a very useful “lexicon linkmap,” which offers succinct definitions of key terms. The site has the appearance of an open book with sticky notes marking its various sections, and it thus embodies the theme of remediation, which is a recurring motif in the texts that Hayles discusses.

Hayles is Professor of English and Design | Media Arts at UCLA, but she holds a graduate degree in chemistry from Caltech and has for two decades written persuasively on the intersections between chaos, computer science, informatics, and literature, which is to say, the emerging field of posthumanism. Indeed, her previous book, How We Became Posthuman (U of Chicago P, 1999), defines that very field. Here she once again proves herself an unapologetic champion of embodiment at a time when many people are enamored of the idea that the essence of life is an abstract code, or that the human body is a prosthesis that can be configured seamlessly into/with machines. As Hayles writes,

a critical practice that ignores materiality, or that reduces it to a narrow range of engagements, cuts itself off from the exuberant possibilities of all the unpredictable things that happen when we as embodied creatures interact with the rich physicality of the world. Literature was never only words, never merely immaterial verbal constructions. Literary texts, like us, have bodies, an actuality necessitating that their materialities and meanings are deeply interwoven into each other. (107)

Readers of How We Became Posthuman will recognize Writing Machines as a logical extension of issues addressed in the earlier book.

The question that prompts Writing Machines is in fact a simple one: why don’t we hear more about materiality? Hayles complains that only in a few of the less glamorous, more specialized academic fields, such as bibliography or textual studies, does materiality merit much attention. Even cultural studies might do better. For Hayles the digital revolution is not so much about the triumph of computers over books, but a chance to rouse literary studies from the “somnolence” induced by “500 years of the dominance of print.” She therefore raises the call for more media-specific analyses. Two key terms involved in such a project would be “material metaphor” and “technotext.” The former term signifies the “traffic between words and physical artifacts,” while the latter denotes the literary work that “interrogates the inscription technology that produces it.” Computers, which process symbols according to programs that embody sets of instructions, are obviously material metaphors, but so are books, Hayles reminds us, and their interfaces can be every bit as sophisticated as literary machines with phosphor screens.

So what does a media-specific analysis look like? Part of the value of Writing Machines derives from Hayles’s close readings of three recent technotexts: Talan Memmot’s web artwork Lexia to Perplexia (2000); Tom Phillips’s artists’ book A Humument (1987); and Mark Danielewski’s “postprint” novel House of Leaves (2000). The first of these pieces almost defies description, and Hayles’s patience in unfolding such a challenging work deserves praise. Lexia to Perplexia is a hybrid theoretical text that, for all of the difficulty it presents readers/users, actually “performs subjectivity” and thus turns out to be, in Hayles’s estimation, an important piece of evidence for the argument that humans co-evolve with their inscription technologies. Hayles contends that Lexia works by configuring its users as simulations through at least four strategies:

• the user actions (choosing links, pointing-and-clicking, mousing over) required to navigate the site;
• a sophisticated set of evolving images and hieroglyphics (eyes, funnels, curly brackets) that “invite the user to see herself as a permeable membrane through which information flows”;
• a creolized, neologized language of English, computer code such as HTML and Java, and mathematical formulae; and
• an allusive retelling of the familiar Echo and Narcissus myth in that very same–and very unfamiliar–creole.

In defamiliarizing the conventions of reading and symbol-processing this way, Memmott’s text exposes the low-level assumptions that undergird our own human reading programs. Reading is seen here as an artificial behavior, not a natural one.

One of the chief difficulties of reading Lexia stems from the fact that the writing on the screen is often illegible. Rather than supplant one screen or piece of text with another, as is the custom in hypertext writing, Memmott piles one swatch of text on top of another, so that the resulting occlusions make it laborious, if not impossible, to read. Hayles sees this very illegibility as another of Memmott’s ways of telling us that humans are becoming posthumans:

the text announces its difference from the human body through this illegibility, reminding us that the computer is also a writer, and moreover a writer whose operations we cannot wholly grasp in all their semiotic complexity. Illegibility is not simply a lack of meaning, then, but a signifier of distributed cognitive processes that construct reading as an active production of a cybernetic circuit and not merely an internal activity of the human mind. (51)

Tom Phillips’s A Humument is every bit as palimpsestic as Lexia and every bit as amazing. Phillips is an artist who, so the story goes, wanted to make the visual equivalent of a Burroughs-style cut-up. He browsed the London bookstores one afternoon and selected at random the first novel he could find that cost less than three pence: William Mallock’s A Human Document (1892), a conventional Victorian-era love story of two young people, Robert Grenville and Irma Schilizzi, whose sad account is pieced into a tactful and seamless whole from journals, diary entries, and letters by an unnamed editor. In cutting up or “treating” the novel, Phillips reverses the flow of the fictional editor’s narrative work by turning the whole back into fragments. Phillips accomplishes this feat by visually decorating every page of the novel in a different style. Sentences and even whole paragraphs are blocked out, cross-hatched, scribbled over, painted, or otherwise rendered into the elements of some new design. (Phillips’s inventiveness seems limitless–A Humument is a stunning book of portraits, landscapes, tableaus, and abstract designs.) The story, which is now told mostly in illustrations and a few scraps of surviving text on each page, concerns Irma and–in a twist–a character named “Toge,” whose name derives only from the words “together” or “altogether” in Mallock’s original text. Like his predecessor Grenville–and like virtually all Romantic lovers–Toge yearns for Irma, but unlike other heroes from nineteenth-century British fiction, Toge lacks even a hint of an autonomous, independent self. In Phillips’s world, Toge’s subjectivity is clearly a product of Mallock’s text as it is sliced and spliced by the designer’s set of inks and brushes–or, as Hayles puts it, “the processes that inscribe Toge’s form as a durable mark embody a multiplication of agency that, at the very least complicates, if it does not altogether subvert, his verbal construction as a solitary yearning individual” (89). She then notes how, on page 165, Phillips renders an “amoeba-like” portrait of Toge’s face with Mallock’s words bleeding through the shadowed portions of the image. Hayles is ever attentive to reading images this way, and, knowing that Phillips’s work is not a best-seller, she and Burdick give ample space to the pages of Phillips’s work in Writing Machines so that their readers can see first-hand the illustrations Hayles discusses.

Hayles notes that in A Humument “the page is never allowed to disappear by serving only as the portal to an imagined world as it does with realistic fiction. In many ways and on many levels, A Humument insists on its materiality” (96). In her final piece of analysis, Hayles demonstrates how the same is true of Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves. While the novel may have gained a cult following among horror fans, it is also very much about writing and mediation, and Hayles effectively shows how these subjects dominate the story (which concerns, briefly, the assembly of a book about a book about an unpublished analysis of a documentary film about a house that, by the laws of physics, cannot possibly exist). None of the major characters, for example, can be known apart from the material practices through which they are presented. To wit: Will Navidson, the owner of the house, appears only in his photographs and his documentary film; Zampano, the old man who researches the film, becomes known to us only as the subject of a book by Johnny Truant, tattoo artist; Pelafina, Johnny’s institutionalized mother, writes letters to her son that form, along with the text of Johnny’s edition of Zampano’s writings, the novel as we receive it. Even the very typography of the novel reveals to readers that House is a book that explores the material properties of the codex: flipping through the pages, one sees that the orientation of the print runs riot in all directions (forwards, up and down, around the page, in reverse), that footnotes occasionally take over the main text and, in the case of note 144, challenge the opacity of the page itself.

At one point in her discussion, Hayles offers a provocative comparison to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In that touchstone of modernism, Conrad layers his narrative voices through Marlow, but he does not account for “how these multiple orations are transcribed into writing.” Not so in House, says Hayles, where “consciousness is never seen apart from mediating inscription devices” (116). If Heart of Darkness provides us with the paradigmatic unreliable narrator, House of Leaves provides us, at the turn of the posthuman era, with the paradigm of the “remediated narrator”: “the speaker whose consciousness cannot be separated from the media used to represent him/her” (Lexicon Linkmap).

Writing Machines marks more than just the passing of an old narrative strategy: it also marks the beginning of an indifference to old critical methodologies. Often in Writing Machines Hayles cites personal encounters with the writers she’s discussing–she cites emails she exchanged with Memmott and describes a conversation she had with Danielewski one afternoon at a Santa Monica bar. It is hard to imagine Cleanth Brooks or Robert Penn Warren taking the same approach to their readings of, say, Faulkner. Hayles is too committed to embodiment to suffer the foolishness of the affective fallacy. She shares a material infrastructure with these people, and while Hayles and Memmott and Danielewski would all likely acknowledge that their respective subjectivities are nodes embedded in a vast social, textual network, Hayles, at least, would not accept the idea of an enforced separation between the informational entity that is “N. Katherine Hayles” and the physical agent to which it is attached.

And it is this refusal that accounts for a fair amount of the book’s richness. The odd-numbered chapters of Writing Machines recount the intellectual biography of an author-surrogate named Kaye and provide a sort of counterpoint to the even-numbered chapters, which discuss the three works already mentioned. Here we see Kaye as the product of a typical Midwestern small-town home, a bright young curious girl who reads voraciously and then goes off to study at the Rochester Institute of Technology and Caltech, where she is torn between science and literature. She gets graduate degrees in chemistry and literature, but it is not until she is a few years into her first job at an Ivy League job that she finds the object that allows her to bring both interests together: the desktop PC. Her English colleagues are slow to warm to this new tool, but Kaye, intuiting its possibilities and its promise, thrills at the little-known texts written in what she understands as a new medium: Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story; Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl; M.D. Coverly’s Califia; Dianne Slattery’s Glide; and Espen Aarseth’s prescient study Cybertext: Toward a Theory of Ergodic Literature–all of which are canonical texts in what she calls the “first generation” of hypertext.

Chapter 5 relates, with particular vividness, the story of a serendipitous discovery for Kaye: the tradition of artists’ books. Throughout Writing Machines it is apparent that Hayles has a richer idea of what a book is than most people, and this is why: Hayles describes a research trip to New York City’s MOMA and offers her candid descriptions of Kaye’s pleasure at finding such treasures as Michael Snow’s Cover to Cover, Karen Chance’s Parallax, and Roberta Allen’s Pointless Arrows–books well off the beaten commercial path and that most literature professors are, sadly, unlikely ever to know. Indeed, Hayles does not go out of her way to hide the fact that she likes the books she reads–in cataloging her favorite things about Danielewski’s book, for instance, and trying to decide among them, she finally gushes: “for my part I like all of it, especially its encyclopedic impulse to make a world and encapsulate everything within its expanding perimeter, as if it were an exploding universe whose boundaries keep receding from the center with increasing velocity” (125).

Chapter 7, the final autobiographical chapter, reflects on the meaning of theory in the sciences and the humanities and returns us to Hayles’s present-day concern–that is, the establishment of a field of media-specific analysis. Hayles hopes that this discourse will produce more texts like her Writing Machines, more “double-braided texts” where “the generalities of theory and the particularities of personal experience can both speak.” And in the spirit of her work, I would affirm that her hopes would soon come to pass.

Claudia Brodsky Lacour

Department of Comparative Literature
Princeton University
cblacour@princeton.edu

Review of: Arkady Plotnitsky, The Knowable and the Unknowable: Modern Science, Nonclassical Thought, and the “Two Cultures.”Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2002.

In The Knowable and the Unknowable, Arkady Plotnitsky takes on (at least) two unenviable double tasks. He endeavors to explain to nonexperts the rationally necessitated departure from traditional visual representation that, in part, characterizes “modern” or “nonclassical” physics and mathematics while–equally if not more arduous to achieve–distinguishing and defending groundbreaking philosophical reflection from the scattershot of slighter minds. In addition, rather than succumb to the ready pleasures of polemic in carrying out these aims, he carefully provides, in his own writing, an example of intellectual scrupulousness so striking as to inspire the improbable hope that The Knowable and the Unknowable might set a discursive benchmark to which less circumspect commentators may one day rise. Finally, Plotnitsky does all this while managing to avoid the fate to which his theoretical expertise and abilities could easily condemn him, that of being hamstrung by his own level of understanding, tied down, or compelled to talk down, like a Gulliver captive among the uncomprehending.

Such discrepancy of stature is both the inspiration for and subject matter of Plotnitsky’s project. While describing and addressing cognitive issues of historic and (literally) immeasurable scope, The Knowable and the Unknowable also represents and responds to a tempest in a teapot, a battle in print of truly Swiftian disproportion: the recent controversy regarding the supposed use and abuse of science by contemporary theorists and philosophers. The so-called “Science Wars” in which Plotnitsky intervenes were inaugurated by Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt’s Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science, but were brought to popular attention under the spotlight of scandal with the publication of Alan Sokal’s “Transgressing the Boundaries–Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” in Social Text. The uproar it caused stemmed not from the content of the “transgression” that Sokal’s article nominally proposed but from the fact that its proposal for publication received approbation at all. Following squarely in the tradition of discursive interaction that J. L. Austin named “speech acts,” whose uncircumscribable, working principle the author of the action entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries…” would perforce disavow, Sokal’s article was less about what it said than what it did. And what it did was speak double talk to great effect, perpetrating a hoax which the editors of Social Text “failed” to recognize as such (the general failure of quiddity in the face of effectivity, or at least their nonidentity, being what speech-act theory is all about). Sokal “successfully” presented what, in his view, would constitute a poststructuralist view of quantum physics, travestying both contemporary theory and quantum physics to achieve that pragmatic end. One year later, buoyed by his imposture, he joined forces with Jean Bricmont to publish Impostures intellectuelles, subsequently translated into English as Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science. In the interim, Nobel-prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg reflected on “Sokal’s Hoax” in The New York Review of Books, followed by “Steven Weinberg Replies” and “Sokal’s Hoax: An Exchange,” and Plotnitsky and Richard Crew engaged in their own “exchange” on the “Wars” in the pages of this journal.

For the active wagers of the “Science Wars,” however, the de facto inauguration of hostilities took place long before their own maneuvers, with a tentative answer by Jacques Derrida to a question posed to him at a conference at Johns Hopkins University in 1969. The proceedings of that watershed event, compiled into the now-classic volume The Structuralist Controversy by editors Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, include contributions from and exchanges among many of the leading theorists of two generations working in Europe and America (then and now). As the title of the volume indicates, these historic discussions occurred previous to the coining of the catch-all chronological denomination “poststructuralism.” Heterogeneous, neither “structuralist” nor identifiably anything else, they in large part exposed for the first time, at least in the U.S., the prospect of modes of thinking as yet undesignated and unknown, work so different as to correspond to no available proper designation.

Theoretical work that deliberately detaches itself from any governing concept may, by force of its own unsubordinated status, occasion its comparison with other concepts and conceptual work. In focusing on the uncertain epistemological status of discourse committed to pursuing adequate representations of truth without proffering new abstractions or representations of truth in their place, such theoretical writing seems both to pose and to beg the question of its own internal understanding. Like the cognitive problems and impasses in the writing it analyzes, theoretical discursive analyses may have the effect of suggesting that, by other means, their purposeful conceptual lacunae may be filled, that the persistent variable, or unknown, they indicate, may be defined by way of analogy or equation. Such suggestibility, if encountered in good faith, leads to questions of the most basic and probing nature: if one cannot name or say what x is, say, that x equals y, then can one say, at least for the time being, that x is something like y?

Such a searching question was improvised at the Johns Hopkins University Conference by an important interpreter of Hegel, the late Jean Hyppolite, in response to the paper “Structure, Sign, and Play,” presented by Derrida. Hyppolite briefly asked that Derrida consider any similarities between his own destructuring work in the domain of philosophical systems and concepts and Einstein’s theory of relativity. Derrida’s equally brief response suggests that a similarity between the two indeed exists. Now, in the five-decade history of Derrida’s discursive work–exacting, often transformative excurses on philosophical and literary writings revealing both the indissoluble relationship of the stated and implicit purposes and problems of these writings to “writing” as such (that is, as nonconceptual, iterable, and recognizable material form) and the systematic vocabularies, figures, and conceptual frameworks or limits in which these problems and purposes are posed–this tentative answer to Hippolyte stands alone. Derrida has made no more extensive comparison between his own analyses of the cognitive and representational difficulties posed in and by writing aiming at knowledge (whether of the abstract, conceptual, or philosophical, or of the “real,” concrete, or referential kind), and the radical transformation by modern science and post-Euclidian mathematics of how we know and thereby what we know of the physical “world.” The lone existence, in an extraordinarily prolific career, of a single, halting statement of fewer than sixty words produced spontaneously in answer to the suggestion of another only underscores the obvious about the adversarial posture into whose aegis it has been inverted: that the “Science Wars,” whatever that appellation means and whatever is meant to be won by them, have not exactly been joined with any appreciable degree of reciprocity; in short, that these are “wars” waged by one side alone.

A “war” waged by one side, one may argue, is an attack–in this instance an attack that, lacking even a substantive pretext, fabricates its own dummy text, a hoax–and Plotnitsky is unusually capable of defending those individual developments in philosophy, now dubbed “poststructuralist” by default, which are less antagonistic to than allied with those developments in physics and mathematics he helpfully calls “nonclassical” (xiii et passim). Trained as a mathematician first and a literary theorist second, Plotnitsky’s perceptions and intellectual development reverse the direction of untoward, misleading appropriation ascribed to discursive theorists by the wagers of the “Science Wars”–most prominently, to Derrida and Lacan, and synecdochically, or, perhaps, simply cynically, to all contemporary theoretical work. While scientist-warriors may view nontraditional philosophers and theorists as poachers upon the “hard” disciplines seeking to inflate and buttress their own insubstantial prestige, Plotnitsky instead finds in nontraditional philosophy a wrestling, from within the bounds of discourse, with the formal and empirical boundaries that gave rise to non-Euclidian mathematical theory and quantum mechanics. For Plotnitsky, the problems of the limits of cognition, whether discursively or mathematically conceived, are problems of rational or commensurate representation any and all disciplines fundamentally interested in the bases and emergence of knowledge must share.

The overlap between empirical and theoretical knowledge is rarely, if ever, complete, and mathematical inquiry, since the invention of geometry, has often served as a self-sustaining bridge between them. The symbolic language of mathematics is a language of self-evidence, which is to say, a language unlike language, and its adoption in the study of physical data and relations frees science of some of the limits and errors that accompany experiment and perception. Still, scientists in even the most mathematically rich domains do engage in productive discord among themselves; the names Einstein and Bohr stand for one such signal development in twentieth-century atomic physics, as do the diverging yet, of course, interrelated paths taken by their early modern counterparts, Descartes and Leibniz. Indeed, if one wanted to locate a real passing referent for the unfortunate denomination “Science Wars,” perhaps one would do well to look first to its prima facie significance, the disputes within science itself. For what we understand and designate as “science” at any one time is the product of an ongoing history of differing interpretations, intellectual orientations, and directions, the often mutually contradictory or only partly shared views of physical reality whose full or partial, independent or contingent approbation may be immediate or delayed, refuted or maintained.

The interpretive antagonisms and contradictions composing the progress of science were taken to another power–squared, or contradicted as contradictions themselves–when Bohr proposed that, at the atomic level, experimental results that appeared mutually exclusive should be considered “complementary.” In The Knowable and the Unknowable, as in his earlier Complementarity: Anti-Epistemology after Bohr and Derrida, Plotnitsky follows Bohr to the heart of the “logical contradiction” (66) that is the consequence and insight of quantum physics, namely, that our only empirical means for knowing “quantum objects” (67) destructure that knowledge even as they structure it, linking the known (for example, the “particle” or “wave” appearances of light) directly to the unknowable (how and why such dual appearances indeed take place and pertain to a single phenomenon). The conjunction of quantum objects and their science yields a kind of knowledge that is neither the antithesis of ignorance nor its cancellation and replacement, but its necessary while never observably continuous complement. Plotnitsky’s elucidating summary and discussion of the “double-slit experiment”–by which particles such as electrons or photons passing through screens with slits in them produce or do not produce a wave-like pattern depending on whether a detector of their movements, external to the movements themselves, is used in the experiment (61-66)–makes this paradox of empirical, experimental, or contingently objective knowledge clear:

if [...] there are counters or other devices that would allow us to check through which slit particles pass (indeed even merely setting up the apparatus in a way that such a knowledge would in principle be possible would suffice), the interference pattern inevitably disappears. In other words, an appearance of this pattern irreducibly entails the lack of knowledge as to through which slit particles pass. Thus, ironically (such ironies are characteristic of or even define quantum mechanics), the irreducible lack of knowledge, the impossibility of knowing, is in fact associated with the appearance of a pattern and, hence, with a higher rather than a lower degree of order, as would be the case in, say, classical statistical physics. (64)

Particles which seem to know more about our behavior (whether we’ve set up a detector or not) than we do about theirs (how do they “know that both slits are open, or conversely that counters are installed, and modify their behavior accordingly?” [66]) present, at very least, a “situation […] equivalent to uncertainty relations” (64), if not a necessary suspension of logical and causal assertions of any classical kind. Yet Bohr’s Copernican shift consisted in viewing differently not the fact of these antagonistic results, but rather the way in which we view their (mutually exclusive) factuality. It is not what we see but how we think of what we are seeing, the way in which we define and understand a quantum object–as a thing with certain attributes in itself or a “whole” constituted of experimentally conditioned, individual, phenomenal “effects”–that Bohr’s view changes. Quantum mechanics–on Bohr’s “interpretation” (68-69)–requires, in the first place, a different mode of interpretation, and Bohr’s name for that different view of what quantum evidence means is “complementary.” As Bohr describes it in the “Discussion with Einstein”:

evidence obtained under different experimental conditions cannot be comprehended within a single picture, but must be regarded as complementary in the sense that only the totality of the [observable] phenomena [produces the data that] exhausts the possible information about the [quantum] objects [themselves]. (70)

While originating in a predicament produced by physical experiments (set up as means of clarification), Bohr’s loosening of the logician’s double bind is conceptual in kind. As Plotnitsky observes, the introduction of the term “complementary” with regard to quantum mechanics enacts an epistemological shift from “objectivity” to “effectivity,” based upon, rather than stymied by, mutually exclusive, experimental results:

thus, on the one hand, quantum objects are (or, again, are idealized as) irreducibly inaccessible to us, are beyond any reach (including again as objects); and in this sense there is irreducible rupture, discontinuity, arguably the only quantum-physical discontinuity in Bohr's epistemology. On the other hand, they are irreducibly indissociable, inseparable, indivisible from their interaction with measuring instruments and the effects this interaction produces. This situation may seem in turn paradoxical. It is not, however, once one accepts Bohr's nonclassical epistemology, according to which the ultimate nature of the efficacity of quantum effects, including their "peculiar individuality," is both reciprocal (that is, indissociable from its effects) and is outside any knowledge or conception, continuity and discontinuity among them [...] Thus Bohr's concept of the indivisibility or (the term is used interchangeably) the wholeness of phenomena allows him both to avoid the contradiction between indivisibility and discontinuity (along with other paradoxes of quantum physics) and to reestablish atomicity at the level of phenomena. (70-71)

Like discourse, one could say, the effectivity of atomic objects is dependent but unlimited, contingent upon the interrelated experiments of which it is a result rather than derivative of the object in itself. Like rhetoric as such, rather than the specific rhetorical notion of the symbol or symbolon, according to which image and idea match, puzzle-like, to compose a single, concretely expressive meaning, Bohr’s interpretation and use of the term “complementary” do not signify an integral meshing of categorically distinct entities. The “aspects” or “characteristics” of atomic “phenomena” are what we “know”–in Bohr’s nontraditional phenomenological sense–but those aspects are derivative of the different experiments to and by which atomic objects are exposed (in rhetorical terms, these would be the different formulations or linguistic experiments that make evident different aspects of discourse, such as figure, noun, sign, or, following Saussure–surely, the Bohr of language study–signifier). A notion of the complementary that is not, or is only temporarily, contingently, closed, is, Plotnitsky points out, “peculiar” (74). Yet such peculiar language use may indeed be exactly appropriate to Bohr’s epistemology. For, like the nonsynthetic relations it describes, the name of Bohr’s interpretive breakthrough breaks the mold–the mold of the commensurate and thus traditionally “complementary” parts of a whole symbolized in rhetoric by the notion of the symbol, the equation and union of two as one. Bohr’s notion of “complementarity” instead fractures a delimited object of investigation, normally identified through a series of equations, into experimental “phenomena” whose perceptibility consists in a series of differing effects. Furthermore, this fracturing occurs without limits or deducible patterns–any pattern ceases in the presence of a “counter” designed to discern its objectivity. Nor does Bohr’s notion of complementarity suggest a shift in objective representation from the organic or living portrait, no part of which may be inconsequentially removed, to a more schematic outline or constellation, whose absent parts or interstices can be supplied by the mind. Bohr’s self-consciously rhetorical, or “novel,” formulation of complementarity instead spells out a thoroughly anti-representational logic by which “different experimental arrangements,” rather than cohering in any visualizable manner, bring about visibly mutually exclusive results:

within the scope of classical physics, all characteristic properties of a given object can in principle be ascertained by a single experimental arrangement, although in practice various arrangements are often convenient for the study of different aspects of the phenomena. In fact, data obtained in such a way simply supplement each other and can be combined into a consistent picture of the behavior of the object under investigation. In quantum physics, however, evidence about atomic objects obtained by different experimental arrangements exhibits a novel kind of complementary relationship. Indeed, it must be recognized that such evidence, which appears contradictory when combination into a single picture is attempted, exhausts all conceivable knowledge about the object. Far from restricting our efforts to put questions to nature in the form of experiments, the notion of complementarity simply characterizes the answers we can receive by such inquiry, whenever the interaction between the measuring instruments and the objects forms an integral part of the phenomena. (qtd in Plotnitsky 74)

Like a war which is not one, in that, one-sided, it opposes without measure, a “complementarity” which is not one, in that it represents (or in Bohr’s words, “characterizes”) the unrepresentable, that which cannot both be and be measured (or known) in “a single picture,” recalls, Plotnitsky argues, the irreducible incommensurability that arose along with the first mathematical means for knowing the world, geometry. Perhaps the unilateral assault conducted in the “Science Wars” on a grossly incommensurate object should simply be called, in squarely traditional fashion, “irrational,” the negative name given to the algebraic discovery of the immeasurable in geometry. Contradicting contradiction, we may view the true root of the evil signaled by a “war” waged against its own fictional pretext not as the neat opposition of one against one but rather as the original and unsettling complementary relationship that is the base of one with or plus one, an essential and irreducibly intricate twoness like that of mathematics itself under the aspects of algebra and geometry.

For the irrational arose not in opposition to but from within the basic framework of rationality. Exposed to a certain “experimental arrangement,” it was discovered, the simplest act of calculation results in an imponderable relation. The most fundamental equation defining physical reality (a_ + b_ = c_), when solved for its simplest values (a=1, b=1) yields, as one of its characteristics, an immeasurable quantity (c= 2). The root or base number of one with or plus one should represent, in a single picture, an indivisible unity of two. Derivative of that unity as such, more fundamental than the external operation of addition, the common root of two does indeed present “a single picture:” a finite line–the diagonal–delimited by a regular geometric figure. An extension defined by other extensions that together describe a self-containing figure is an entity independent of traditionally symbolic, let alone “novel” complementary relations. Its reality is self-evident, but with an insurmountable hitch: the measure, or mathematical identity, of that reality cannot be figured. Moreover, the necessity of such unattainable knowledge is as pragmatic as it is epistemological. Plotnitsky states its centrality plainly–“one needs it if one wants to know the length of the diagonal of a square”–before explaining how such a novel, or immeasurable, “mathematical object,” the irrational ratio, came about:

this is how the Greeks discovered it, or rather its geometrical equivalent. If the length of the side is 1, the length of the diagonal is 2. I would not be able to say--nobody would--what its exact numerical value is. It does not have an exact numerical value in the way rational numbers do: that is, it cannot be exactly represented (only approximated) by a finite, or an infinite periodical, decimal fraction and, accordingly, by a regular fraction--by a ratio of two whole numbers. It is what is called an "irrational number," and it was the first, or one of the first, of such numbers--or (they would not see it as a number) mathematical objects--discovered by the Greeks, specifically by the Pythagoreans. The discovery is sometimes attributed to Plato's friend and pupil Theaetetus, although earlier figures are also mentioned. It was an extraordinary and, at the time, shocking discovery--both a great glory and a great problem, almost a scandal, of Greek mathematics. The diagonal and the side of a square were mathematically proven to be mathematically incommensurable, their "ratio" irrational. The very term "irrational"--both alogon (outside logos) and arreton (incomprehensible) were used--was at the time of its discovery also used in its direct sense. (117-18)

In a very real sense, independent of pretexts visited upon Social Text, it is the “scandal” of the irrational, mathematically and rationally derived, that the so-called Science Wars rehearse, worry, and travesty. Unlike a hoax-based polemic, mathematics publishes and is host to its own “transgression,” one “complementary” aspect of its operation excluding another. The discovery that the relationship between the diagonal and side of a square, while governed by the basic Pythagorean theorem regarding the magnitudes of lines composing a triangle, was not translatable into rational mathematical symbols, could not be represented as a ratio of whole numbers, and thus as a rational relationship or (rational) number tout court, was succeeded by the tale of the illustrative death of its progenitor. Legend has it that a storm and resulting shipwreck buried that revolutionary Pythagorean at sea (118-19). Truth may have it that the sound and fury of the “Science Wars,” to which The Knowable and the Unknowable tactfully, constructively responds, are an attempt to drown this illustrative figure once more. The storm in which the mythic discoverer of the irrational purportedly met his end may be what this recent tempest in a teapot is attempting, more or less unwittingly, to bring to life again.

Yet, as Plotnitsky makes clear, since the link between the irrational and the rational, the core focus of his book, is borne out specifically by rational processes themselves, the desire to hurl overboard those who articulate the problem of the irrational is tantamount to curtailing rational inquiry itself. In a chapter treating Lacan’s “analogous, but not identical” (147) references to the rationally derived imaginary number, the square root of -1, to describe the “irreducibly nonvisualizable” “symbolic object” of his psychoanalytic epistemology–“the ‘erectile organ’” or symbolic phallus already operating, according to Lacan, as image or “signifier” in the psyche (141) (Plotnitsky helpfully calls this psychic object “the image of the image of the penis” [110])–Plotnitsky describes how the nonidentities of conceptual analogies function within an epistemological “system”:

the erectile organ, or, again, a certain formalization of it, must be seen as [...] 'the square root of -1,' (L)-1 of the Lacanian system itself. It is an analogon of the mathematical concept of the mathematical -1 within this system, rather than anything identical, directly linked, or even metaphorized via the mathematical square root of -1. In a word, the erectile organ is the square root of -1, which I here designate as the (L)-1, of Lacan's system; the mathematical -1 is not the erectile organ. (147)

(Plotnitsky explicitly uses the symbol for the mathematical concept -1, and the words “the square root of -1” or the amended “(L)-1″ to designate the analogous use of that mathematical concept within Lacan’s system [113]). In other words, just as -1 is the “simplest complex number,” which, “formally adjoined to the old domain of real numbers, enables one to introduce the new domain of complex numbers” (the field of numbers of which real and imaginary numbers are both factors), so the “erectile organ” is the simplest complex concept enabling a new domain or field of psychoanalysis, one in which real and imaginary objects are both irreducible factors (122). Whether or not one views this domain as thoroughly “novel” or as already latent in Freud’s epistemology, Lacan’s exposition of the complex notion of the phallus (as both imaginary and real) does indeed signal a redefinition of the operative field of psychoanalysis. In addition, Plotnitsky emphasizes, “analogous” means just that: “‘the square root of -1’ of Lacan’s statement is, I shall argue here, in fact not the mathematical -1 […]. There is no mathematics in the disciplinary sense in Lacan’s analysis” (147).

It is in this context of restating the fundamental rational concept and operation of analogy itself, the proverbial wheel of reason here not reinvented but patiently redescribed, that Plotnitsky makes the central observation of his book, speaking not only to the inevitable recourse made to analogy in the course of analyzing essentially nonobjective, psychic phenomena, but to the necessary processes of symbolization and analogy involved in every new discovery of the irrational. Just as “the nonclassical epistemological component may be irreducible in all mathematics” (130), so

irrationality--the inaccessibility to rational representation (in whatever sense)--can itself be discovered rationally, for example and in particular, by means of mathematical proof, a paradigmatic rational argument. This emergence of the irrational (the inaccessible, the unknowable, the unrepresentable, the incomprehensible, the inconceivable, and so forth) at the limit of the rational (the accessible, the knowable, the representable, the comprehensible, the conceivable, and so forth), defines the project of philosophy throughout its history, from Anaximander to Heidegger and beyond, or in mathematics from the Pythagoreans and the diagonal to Gödel and undecidability. In the wake of Heidegger, or indeed Nietzsche, who understood this epistemology more profoundly than anyone before him (and at least as profoundly as anyone since him), the extraordinary critical potential of this situation has been powerfully utilized by such nonclassical thinkers as Bataille, Blanchot, Levinas, Lacan, Derrida, and de Man, or of course Heisenberg and Bohr in the case of quantum mechanics. Indeed, the nonclassical epistemology of quantum mechanics, as considered here, gave especially remarkable shape to these relationships. (119-20)

Plotnitsky’s none-too-delphic message is that the irrational indicated by numerical and notational as well as discursive epistemologies, by mathematicians and physicists as well as philosophers, is not going to sink with any single message-bearer to the ocean floor. And again, it is complex mathematics, rather than unilateral polemics, which may best “illustrate” his point. As Bohr rewrites the traditional notion of “complementarity” to indicate and encompass the notion of the noncomplementary, the mutually exclusive realities of a single physical phenomenon viewed under different aspects, so in mathematics the extraordinary notion of complex numbers encompasses both real and imaginary in a single mathematical “field.” “Complex” here even appears analogous to “complementary” when the problem of the visualization or spatial representation of such numbers is posed. For, like the mutually exclusive visual evidence provided by differing experimental set-ups in quantum mechanics, the field of complex numbers in mathematics is “symbolically” configurable on a two-dimensional real plane, one of whose axes, however, is being used to represent imaginary numbers. Yet this “schematic illustration,” “diagram,” or “representation” (on a real plane redefined as the Argand plane), even as it produces a kind of visualization of its objects, and even though its relationship to the field of alegebraic formulation is exhaustive, in no way corresponds to the measurable lengths of real lines or vectors, or the rationally derived points on a line, that real and rational numbers represent. The gap between algebra and geometry, or notation and spatial representation, is thus encompassed within the field of complex (real and imaginary) numbers, but not bridged. The algebra involved must be plotted on two visually analogous but mathematically different (“nonisomorphic”) structures: that of the “real plane” (or “vector-space”) and the strictly speaking non-spatial “field of complex numbers, which would no longer allow us to see [the real plane] […] as a real plane” (125-26).

Complex numbers thus produce a “field” irreducible to a “space.” The attempt to so reduce the field would result, one might say, in a hoax, the representation of imaginary numbers as real. By analogy one may say that if the real aim of the wagers of the “Science Wars” is to clear the space of rational science of its false representation, that aim will continue to prove itself, in the philosophical sense, “imaginary”–first, because it lacks a real object (let alone enemy), and, second, because in the absence of such, it proves itself to belong foremost to the complementary relations of discourse, that other field in whose complex, nonvisualizable formulations the real and the imaginary, as in mathematics, interact.

Riddled with their own characteristic patterns of misappropriation and misstatement, imaginary acts of salvation may finally not be evidence of ignorance, intellectual disingenuousness, or even analytic bad faith (cf.160-62 especially). The “failure” to “win” a war of one’s own invention may instead be analogous to the very force that war would mime: the roiling sea in which (again, as discourse, or legend, would have it) the rational voice of the irrational sinks. That is to say, the war waged upon philosophy may be a certain view of science at war with another view, a rejection of Bohr’s conception of complementarity, or the construction of the Gauss-Argand plane, or any articulation of complexity in which one of many “different aspects” is not and cannot be made present. For, in mathematics as in discourse, the irrational and the imaginary are based in the rational and the real they negate. This real scandal, recognized and interpreted in novel terms by traditionally classical proto-modernists (first among them Descartes) no less than nonclassical “post-modernists,” may necessarily attract discursive waves of submergence, interpretive storms stirred upon an open sea. Its details may be worth fighting over, but it itself is not open to debate. And the drawing of a bull’s eye on one contemporary French thinker or another may be a greater extravagance than any that such contrived aim-taking supposedly targets. Giving a face to the enemy is as old a discursive procedure as the first history of (irrational) war, told with unsparing rationality by Thucidydes. But the weight of tradition does not make this rhetorical maneuver any more substantial, any less imaginary, or, in its “defenses” of rationality, any less incommensurate or irrational.

It is not that the target is moving and hard to hit; it is that it is not what one represents it to be, that objective absence being its very reason, its rationale, for being thought. Such a surmise indeed “characterizes” much “nonclassical” thinking, in which the failure of representation to meet its mark is directly or indirectly addressed. But it is also the irreducible basis for thinking proffered by the two central, significantly different founders of modern classical philosophy, Descartes and Kant, whose respective skeptical and critical limitations of rational cognition, accompanied by a redefinition of the real status of geometry, negatively re-established the novel project and possibility of thought.

The irreducible evidence of the irrational, rationally recognized up to a limit, unites modern mathematics, science, and philosophy into a field whose different aspects may be analogous with complexity itself, complexity which is real and rationally conceived precisely because its elements and factors include the imaginary and the irrational. And it is here, in its recognition of a shared complexity, that Plotnitsky’s work takes its most important turn. For, instead of “wars” waged by ventriloquism, Plotnitsky suggests, a mutually reflexive acknowledgement of cognitive limits, the very limits that compose complexity, can include ethical action among its unknowable effects:

perhaps the ultimate ethics or (since the ultimate ethics may not be possible, classically, in practice and, nonclassically, in principle) at least a good ethics of intellectual inquiry, or of cultural interaction, is the following: being strangers ourselves, to offer other strangers, strangers in our own or in other cultures, those ideas that bring our own culture--say, science, on one side, and the humanities, on the other--to the limits of both what is known and unknown, or unknowable, to them. To have an expertise is to reach the limits of both what is knowable and what is unknowable in one's field; and to be ethical in intellectual exchange is to offer others the sense of both of these limits, to tell the other culture or field both what we know and what we do not know ourselves, and what is knowable and what is unknowable, in our own field or culture. (240)

Is this process of “exchange” of “expertise” more complex than attacking an adversary of one’s own devising? Doubtless–as the terms themselves suggest, the rational analysis of the irrational cannot, by definition, be unilateral; any such analysis must recognize both its own limits and its relation to what it is not. Yet, as the appearance of The Knowable and the Unknowable demonstrates, even the (irrational) negation of exchange issues in its own negation, or exchange. Thus it is, as Plotnitsky’s double expertise confirms, that a certain discrepancy of thinking remains, with the effect that, no more than do Titans, do Lilliputians need fear their final overthrow.

Works Cited

• Gross, Paul R., and Norman Levitt. Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994.
• Macksey, Richard, and Eugenio Donato, eds. The Structuralist Controversy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1970.
• Plotnitsky, Arkady. Complementarity: Anti-Epistemology after Bohr and Derrida. Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1994.
• —, and Richard Crew. “Exchange.” Postmodern Culture 8.2: January 1998. <http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/wip/issue.198/8.2exchange.html>
• Sokal, Alan. “Transgressing the Boundaries–Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” Social Text (Spring/Summer) 1996: 217-52.
• —, and Jean Bricmont. Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science. New York: Picador, 1998.
• —, and Jean Bricmont. Impostures intellectuelles. Paris: Odile Jacob, 1997.
• Weinberg, Steven. “Sokal’s Hoax.” The New York Review of Books 8 Aug. 1996: 11-15.
• —. “Sokal’s Hoax: An Exchange” The New York Review of Books 3 Oct. 1996: 54.
• —. “Steven Weinberg Replies.” The New York Review of Books 3 Oct. 1996: 54.

Brad Butterfield

Department of English
University of Wisconsin, La Crosse
butterfi.brad@uwlax.edu

Leonard Wilcox is right that the conception of symbolic exchange has continued to inform Baudrillard’s work up to the present, but until 9/11 Baudrillard had stopped using the language of symbolic exchange, preferring instead to speak in terms of “seduction,” “fatal strategies,” and so on, which, as Rex Butler points out, nevertheless mirror his original model of symbolic exchange. And until 9/11 Baudrillard also seemed to have given up on the utopian prospect of a return to the symbolic order. I would still aver, paceWilcox, that the “key texts for understanding the way in which America responded to the events of September 11” are the earlier texts that I cite. The later texts, as Wilcox himself demonstrates, focus on terrorism and hostage taking as moments of simulation, media spectacles that remain “frozen in a state of disappearance.” But the incredible symbolic violence—the sacrificial demand, the singular challenge to the West and everyone in it–of this event, I would still suggest, made Baudrillard, and should make all of us, consider the basic tenets of symbolic exchange once again: challenge, singularity, obligation, reciprocity, honor.

The question at issue here, as Wilcox makes clear, is whether the violence of 9/11 has since been absorbed in the “infinite multiplication” (Wilcox) of signs in the West’s culture of simulation, or whether, as Baudrillard writes in “L’Esprit,” it did indeed restore an “irreducible singularity to the heart of a generalized system of exchange.” For Baudrillard, the answer is of course both: the event begins by overwhelming our interpretive models, but then the latter end up overwhelming the event. And yet the damage has been done. We cannot avoid the singular challenge, the obligation to respond. If “we” (let us imagine for argument’s sake that “we” are the U.S.) ignore the symbolic point d’honneur, which people all over the world still recognize even if our corporations, governments, and media do not, then we create still more hostility and must expend increasingly more energy and money in our attempts to contain this hostility. The “system” grows stronger and weaker at the same time, and the “reversal” Wilcox speaks of is in fact the point at which the U.S. is obliged to become the opposite of what it presumed to stand for. The “democratic” West must become an infinite police state in the name of democracy. Thus the effectiveness of their symbolic violence: one cannot not respond, sacrifice begets sacrifice, one way or the other.

“Our” other choice of response, rather than sacrificing every last resource in a ridiculous war against “evil,” is to make a different kind of sacrifice, placing the symbolic obligation back upon the terrorists. A gesture of “forgiveness,” as I wrote, entailing a sacrifice (a “gift of life” rather than of death) even greater than the terrorists’ self-immolation on 9/11, is the only way to restore honor on “our” side, forcing the terrorists either to lay down their swords or to lose face according to the symbolic code. But this of course cannot happen, even if “we” wanted it to. For the real “evil” today, as Baudrillard maintains in the works Wilcox points to, is the transparency of information, its omnipresence in a system where everything is revealed and yet nothing can be contested. Only a miraculous mass conversion of humanity’s collective will could change the “system” at this point, and the media monoliths will never let that happen, and the terrorists know it. And so their brilliance lies in the simple trick of enlisting the system against itself, by staging a single event that would be powerless if not for the media’s propagation of it. Their bet is that “we” will expend and ultimately ruin ourselves in our infinite war against an invisible, and at this point hyperreal, enemy. The system finally implodes by the weight of its own gravitational mass. This, of course, was Baudrillard’s prophesy too, something he tried to produce in his theorizing and encourage in other aesthetic modes. I remain ambivalent, as Wilcox says. I believe that there is still a sense of honor among individuals on this planet (symbolic obligation haunts our consciences just as “death” continues to haunt the “system), but the “system” has no honor, and neither its destruction nor its continuation seems desirable to me at this point.

Leonard Wilcox

Department of American Studies
University of Canterbury
Leonard.Wilcox@canterbury.ac.nz

. . . at the height of their coherence, the redoubled signs of the code are haunted by the abyss of reversal.

–Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death

 
In his article “The Baudrillardian Symbolic, 9/11, and the War of Good and Evil,” Bradley Butterfield examines Jean Baudrillard’s notion that terrorism functions according to the rule of symbolic exchange, a notion most fully articulated in Baudrillard’s The Spirit of Terrorism, written after the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. Butterfield analyzes the concept of symbolic exchange as it emerged in Baudrillard’s early works, particularly in For A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign and Symbolic Exchange and Death. Butterfield traces Baudrillard’s concept of symbolic exchange to Mauss’s studies of the Kula and Potlatch with their agonistic exchange of gifts.

Butterfield notes that Baudrillard sees death as pivotal to the idea of symbolic exchange: in “primitive” societies, death has no equivalent return in exchange value, but must take its place ritualistically as part of the continual cycle of giving and receiving, part of a “gift” economy that forms a counterpoint to political economy, positive value, and the linear calculus of the code. As Baudrillard puts it, “giving and receiving constitute one symbolic act (the symbolic act par excellence), which rids death of all the indifferent negativity it holds for us in the ‘natural’ order of capital” (Symbolic 166). Yet, as Butterfield notes (following Baudrillard), in contemporary society the symbolic import of death is denied; it becomes a “natural phenomenon,” a sheer negation of life, a “bar” between the living and dead. Acts of terrorism, however, represent a “revolt” against this naturalization of death, and terrorist spectacle returns symbolic distinction to death (13).

Butterfield isolates “a common motif” in Baudrillard’s speculations, and that is the potential for a moment “where simulation society is somehow reversed or revolutionized by the symbolic” (18). Nonetheless, Butterfield seems highly ambivalent about whether the events of 9/11 actually brought about such a reversal. He seems to concur with Baudrillard that 9/11 represented an “irreducible, singular, and irrevocable challenge to each and every imagination” (18). But ultimately he questions the efficacy of such a challenge: “What the system did in response to 9/11, or instead of responding to it, was to re-absorb its symbolic violence back into the never ending flow of anesthetized simulation […]” (25). “We live mostly,” he continues, “as Ernest Becker claimed, in denial of death, which our marketing specialists have yet to fully package […]. We see only TV spectacles. We do not see the real, or know the real, but we are a culture fascinated by its simulacrum” (26).

Butterfield’s discussion suggests intriguing questions: can a symbolic challenge be mounted effectively against a hyperreal regime in which the multiplication of images serves to divert and neutralize that challenge? How can symbolic exchange function to “reverse” the logics of a system if death itself (so central to the idea of symbolic exchange) is absorbed into the code and rendered hyperreal? Butterfield leaves these questions unexamined, in spite of the fact that The Spirit of Terrorism is a text that explores the very issue of the relation between symbols and signs, images and symbolic events. Moreover, he leaves the questions unexplored in spite of the fact that a central theme common to Baudrillard’s works is the problematic relation between cultures of symbolism and cultures of simulation. As Mike Gane points out in Baudrillard: Critical and Fatal Theory, Baudrillard’s theorization of the symbolic posits “two irreconcilable orders”–cultures in which the symbolic mode is still intact, and cultures in which the more “archaic” symbolic mode has been displaced by a proliferation of signs (14). Baudrillard’s works are informed by a sense that these orders are in some sense incommensurable: symbolic cultures constitute the “other” of simulation cultures, and vice versa. The development of global media may have vitiated this situation to some extent; nonetheless, certain cultures retain the processes of symbolic exchange more or less intact. “Take Islam, for instance,” observes Baudrillard, “where there are still some strong symbolic processes, but which exact a high price” (qtd. in Gane, Baudrillard Live 185). On the other hand, in Western cultures, Baudrillard writes, symbolic exchange “is no longer an organizing principle; it no longer functions at the level of modern social institutions” (Jean Baudrillard 119).

Yet the irreconcilability of symbolic and simulation cultures is only part of the picture. Baudrillard argues that the processes of symbolic exchange–challenge, seduction, that which is the radical other of economic exchange (Grace 18)–are in some sense basic to all cultures. On a fundamental level, says Baudrillard, “reciprocity never ends: every discrimination is only ever imaginary and is forever cut across by symbolic reciprocity, for better or worse” (Symbolic 168). While simulation may be an ascendant process in the West, the symbolic persists; indeed, its otherness continues to “haunt” the institutions of the West as a “prospect of their own demise” (Jean Baudrillard 119). The value of symbolic processes, Baudrillard argues, “consists in their being irreducible” (qtd. in Gane, Baudrillard Live 185). Thus it may follow that “irreducible” acts such as acts of sacrificial violence may momentarily reverse the logics of the system, disrupting its precarious balance. Indeed, symbolic events of a particular intensity (“the absolute event, the ‘mother’ of all events” [Spirit 4]) may transform the very relation between image and symbolic events.

In his speculations on America’s response to the challenge of 9/11, Butterfield fails to take these matters into account. Moreover, Butterfield avers that the attack on the World Trade Center “inspired Baudrillard to dress up his old ideas about the symbolic and symbolic exchange” (5). Yet although Symbolic Exchange and Death is Baudrillard’s most sustained and comprehensive treatment of symbolic exchange, the notion has always informed Baudrillard’s works. As Victoria Grace explains, Baudrillard’s exploration of the mechanisms of symbolic exchange provides a “point of departure for the purpose of critique of the contemporary world he inhabits and the ideological processes that mark it” (18). Rather than dressing up “old ideas,” The Spirit of Terrorism draws upon notions either implicit or explicit in his earlier works on terrorism–challenge, reversibility, exchange in the sacrifice–and develops them in relation to what he sees as the definitive symbolic event of our times.

In addressing the question of how America (and by extension the West) has responded to the symbolic challenge of 9/11, this essay will examine a number of Baudrillard’s works that Butterfield does not fully consider–the texts from Baudrillard’s “middle period” that deal, in varying degrees, with the phenomenon of terrorism. These texts include Simulacra and Simulation (originally published in 1981); “Figures of the Transpolitical” (from Les Stratégies fatales, 1983); In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (1983); and The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991). In his continuing exploration of the “irreconcilable” relation between symbolic and simulation cultures, Baudrillard focuses in these works on the way the West constructs the phenomenon of terrorism and the mechanisms of simulation by which terrorism’s violence is absorbed into the logic of equivalence and the regime of commutable signs. These are key texts, I argue, for understanding the way America responded to the events of 9/11. They are pivotal for speculating on the degree to which America’s extensive apparatus of simulation functioned to assimilate the symbolic challenge of terrorism. On the other hand, these works also demonstrate Baudrillard’s sustained concern with the symbolic, for they grapple with how terrorists adopt the mechanisms of the postmodern sign to infiltrate a regime of simulation, how they use fatal strategies (for Baudrillard always the domain of reversion and exchange) to push the system to a crisis point of instability.

An examination of these pivotal texts will ultimately lead to a consideration of Baudrillard’s The Spirit of Terrorism, for here Baudrillard’s speculations illuminate most fully the question of the West’s ability to “reabsorb” the dramatic events of 9/11 into the logic and processes of simulation. Baudrillard has always contended that symbolic exchange (like seduction) is an ineluctable force that persists, haunting an indifferent, hyperreal order. Baudrillard’s central question, which echoes in all his works, is whether the specter of symbolic exchange will “materialize,” whether it can become a potent force that subverts a hyperreal order: “Can reversibility seize control of systems? Is there going to be, at sometime in the future, such a destabilization of all of this undertaking by living elements, by cultures of illusions, by symbolic systems?” (qtd. in Gane, Baudrillard Live 185). In The Spirit of Terrorism, Baudrillard’s answer is yes.

Part I

Between 1976, when he wrote Symbolic Exchange and Death, and the early 1980s, when he began writing extensively on terrorism, the focus of Baudrillard’s thinking shifts from the realm of the symbol to the sign. In part, says Baudrillard himself, this shift is to be accounted for by confusions surrounding the category of the symbolic: “there are too many misunderstandings over the term” (qtd. in Gane, Baudrillard Live 57). But the shift is presaged in Symbolic Exchange and Death itself–much of the work is devoted to the logics of the sign in an emerging simulation culture. It would therefore seem that Baudrillard’s shift can be accounted for by his awareness of the accelerated development of an economy of the sign and media saturation in the West.

This change in focus is suggested by Baudrillard’s treatment of terrorism in Symbolic Exchange and Death and “Figures of the Transpolitical.” In the former, the focus is still on the symbolic dimension of the terrorist act.

The hostage has a symbolic yield a hundred times superior to that of the automobile death, which is itself a hundred times superior to natural death. This is because we rediscover here a time of the sacrifice, of the ritual of execution, in the immanence of the collectively expected death. This death, totally undeserved, therefore totally artificial, is therefore perfect from the sacrificial point of view, for which the officiating priest or "criminal" is expected to die in return, according to the rules of a symbolic exchange to which we adhere so much more profoundly than we do to the economic order. (Symbolic 165)

Yet in “Figures of the Transpolitical,” Baudrillard focuses on the way terrorist scenarios are constructed in a spectacular order where sacrificial acts have all but lost symbolic resonance.

In offering himself as a substitute for the hostages of Mogadiscio [in 1977], the Pope [Pious VI] also sought to substitute anonymous terror with elective death, with sacrifice, similar to the Christian model of universal atonement--but his offer was parodic without meaning to be so, since it designates a solution and a model which are totally unthinkable in our contemporary systems, whose incentive is precisely not sacrifice, but extermination, not elected victims, but spectacular anonymity. ("Figures" 172)

In the “contemporary systems” of Western culture, terrorism and hostage-taking occur in the regime of sign value where the code of general equivalence triumphs. If terrorism represents anything, it is the dehumanized process of sign exchange, the interchange or exhibition of commutable and groundless signs. Rather than having any symbolic value, hostages “are suspended in an incalculable term of expiry” (“Figures” 170). Hostages

are obscene because they no longer represent anything (this is the very definition of obscenity). They are in a state of exhibition pure and simple. Pure objects [...] made to disappear before their death. Frozen in a state of disappearance. In their own way, cryogenised. ("Figures" 176)

As experienced in–and constructed by–the culture of the West, then, terrorism is no longer part of a symbolic “scene” but rather an aspect of the “obscene”: the immediate (real time), global, spectacular world of the media. Baudrillard’s middle works develop this analysis, situating terrorism within recent mutations of the sign brought on by a media-saturated culture in which informational events stand in for the real, in which the “real” is structured in accordance with the logic of sign value where all signifiers are liberated, open to infinite multiplication, and to simulated models of meaning:¹

[Terrorism's] only "ripples" are precisely not an historical flow but its story, its shock wave in the media. This story no more belongs to an objective and informative order than terrorism does to the political order. Both are elsewhere, in an order which is neither of meaning nor of representation--mythical perhaps, simulacrum undoubtedly. (In the Shadow 54)

Terrorists have adapted to a simulation culture; their acts are staged for the media and become part of the world of self-referential signs, part of the hyperreal condition (“simulacrum undoubtedly”). An ecstatic form of violence, terrorism exceeds any critical or dialectical determination, and those observing are swept up in the mise en abyme of its staging, fascinated by the will to spectacle it represents.

Part II

How might we see 9/11 in terms of Baudrillard’s grim vision of terrorism in the Western regime of sign exchange and proliferation? How can such events with their devastating and catastrophic consequences– psychological, social, and economic–be seen as functioning according to the postmodern logic of sign value? Certainly the 9/11 attacks were “choreographed” for their maximum impact as spectacle: indeed, the twin towers attack had a precision, orchestration, and performative aspect that took on the abstract perfection of a simulation. In this sense the attacks were “already inscribed in the decoding and orchestration rituals of the media, anticipated in their presentation and their possible consequences” (Baudrillard, Simulacra 21). No doubt the terrorists behind the attack expected that images of the disaster would be caught on videotape and be disseminated globally. And certainly the international coverage with repeated replays of the disaster made all of us a fearful, captive audience.

As Wheeler Dixon argues, “to satisfy us, the spectacle must engulf us, threaten us, sweep us up from the first ” (7), and the events of 9/11 did just that. A colleague commented that the television coverage seemed a series of simulations of “awesome special effects” (Baudrillard says that “terrorism itself is only one immense special effect” [“Figures” 175]). A gas station attendant told me that watching the planes dive into the World Trade Center was “like being at Universal Studios.” Indeed, part of the horror and fear was a haunting sense that what we saw on television was somehow unreal, a spectral show; yet as a colossal spectacle it was more-real-than-real, embodying, as it did, the images of countless apocalyptic disaster films.

Western media coverage that followed 9/11 followed the logic of simulation, the severance of the sign from its referent, the explosion and proliferation of signs. It reinforced the sense of a world where signs are utterly commutable and sign exchange is promiscuous and self-replicating–“fractal.” In the days following, the “event strike” failed to reveal a hermeneutic core (let alone revealing who was “responsible” for the act), and its media-disseminated meanings mutated constantly, proliferating with compulsive virulence, metonymically merging and bleeding into one another. A plethora of signifieds emerged, from “human interest” stories on the heroism of firefighters or of victims calling loved ones on cell phones, to justification for the resurrection of a virulent nationalism and a call for “Operation Infinite Justice.”

For Baudrillard, the “reality principle” of the Western “hegemony and the spectacle” is “all of reality absorbed by the hyperreality of the code and of simulation” (Jean Baudrillard 120). The explosion of sign value, the delirium of communication sparked by 9/11, functioned, on one level, to absorb the otherness of the event into the terms and processes of the system: the code, floating models that precede the real, the “indifference” of the simulacrum. Broadcasting reached unprecedented levels of simulation: when bombing began in Afghanistan, Western reporters were kept so far from the action they had to rely on their central news bureaus to provide information–which they then reported “live” (“Media Watch”). American media reported that Air Force One was in danger on 9/11: with an elaborate set of maps, diagrams, and arrows, reports detailed the position of the presidential aircraft, returning to Washington from Florida, when the President’s security team received word of “a threatening message received by the secret service” (“MediaWatch”). But although the President’s plane was controversially diverted, a subsequent investigation by The Washington Post revealed that Air Force One was never in danger.² In short, one aspect of the pervasive media simulation involved the White House’s use of the media as a conduit for disinformation. Bush’s virtual challenges (Osama bin Laden, “wanted, dead or alive”), and the hackneyed presidential demands for “infinite justice” (combined with the call for a “crusade”) were so reminiscent of a bad Hollywood script that they prompted British journalist Robert Fisk to speculate:

I am beginning to wonder whether we have not convinced ourselves that wars--our wars--are movies. The only Hollywood film ever made about Afghanistan was a Rambo epic in which Sylvester Stallone taught the Afghan mujaheddin how to fight the Russian occupation, helped to defeat Soviet troops and won the admiration of an Afghan boy. Are the Americans, I wonder, somehow trying to actualise the movie? (3)

Terms were tossed around in the media like “freedom,” “defense of liberty,” and “terrorism”–not just vague in the old Orwellian sense, but palpably without referent, in a kind of ecstatic celebration of the death of referentiality itself. Indeed, the “war against terror” itself has been conducted in a hyperreal mode, the Bush administration’s “sustained, comprehensive and relentless” operations aimed at a chimera whose traces are evident on video or audiotape, the very logic of this “war” utterly sealed off from “the desert of the real”–the sordid material interests that might be driving it, such as the oil and defense industries.

Another aspect of the system’s propensity to assimilate the “real” of the terrorist violence is suggested by the way the events of 9/11 were subject to dematerialization in a vertiginous and ecstatic flow of information. The “hostages” (if they could be called that) became part of an “obscene delirium of communication” (Baudrillard, “Ecstasy” 132) as they made cellphone calls to their loved ones, left messages on answer phones, and (on Flight 93, which plummeted to the ground) transmitted their intention to overcome the hijackers. CNN reporter Barbara Olson, who was on Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon, was herself going to Los Angeles to appear on a television show (Wolcott 68). In the media frenzy that followed, these “hostages” attained (posthumously) “a state of exhibition pure and simple,” an exhibition that fueled fascination and panic, as well as the discourse of cultural war and the brutality and barbarity of the “enemy.”³ The passengers on these doomed flights vanished into an implosive black hole without remainder–not even their bodies left behind to mark their death or provide the basis for what Derrida calls “the work of the remainder”: the process of symbolic exchange that enables mourning to occur (30). Like the Baudrillardian hostage, the passengers on the fated flights of 9/11 were “frozen in a state of disappearance […] in their own way cryogenized” (Baudrillard, “Figures” 176) at the zero degree of meaning. What was most uncanny and frightening was the “unrepresentability” of their deaths, the way in which they exemplified the quintessential condition of Baudrillard’s postmodern hostage, existing only as signs in potentially boundless transmissions.

Yet, as Baudrillard points out, the modality of the hyperreal is always “fluctuating in indeterminacy” (Jean Baudrillard 120). Terrorism’s “messages” to the dominant system cannot be entirely consumed in a flurry of signs, or assimilated in awesome spectacle. What was so chilling about the events of 9/11 was that they mirrored, in some palpable way, the “blindness” of an anonymous society that is ours. If the hostages could be said to “represent” anything, it is the degree to which power in the contemporary period is decentered and anonymous, the degree to which power in postmodernity becomes a simulacrum constructed on the basis of signs. As Baudrillard puts it, “through the death of no matter whom, [terrorism] executes the sentence of anonymity which is already ours, that of the anonymous system, the anonymous power, the anonymous terror of our real lives” (“Figures” 171). Part of terrorism’s destabilizing potential lies in the fact that it provides a condensed image or distorting mirror of social and political processes.⁴ It draws upon and perpetuates a haunting “everyday fear” occasioned by anonymous power. In the space of the transpolitical, according to Baudrillard, “we are all hostages” (“Figures” 170). Novelist Don DeLillo, one of our foremost writers on terrorism, concurs; in his novel Mao II, a character puts the unspecifiable yet always-present potential of terrorism chillingly:

Yes, I travel. Which means there is no moment on certain days when I'm not thinking terror. They have us in their power. In boarding areas I never sit near windows in case of flying glass. I carry a Swedish passport so that's okay unless you believe that terrorists killed the prime minister. Then maybe it's not so good. And I use codes in my address book for names and addresses of writers because how can you tell if the name of a certain writer is dangerous to carry, some dissident, some Jew or blasphemer. (41)

Another factor which makes contemporary terrorism’s threat resistant to absorption by the system is an aspect of its adaptive character: the extent to which terrorism inhabits the very floating models and replicable scenarios that are characteristic of a hyperreal order. Baudrillard, as we have seen, contends that terrorist acts, disseminated in the global media and acting according to the logic of the sign, become fractal–rather than being governed by a code, they have no point of reference at all. With the autonomy of the signifier and the accelerated momentum of sign value, terrorism operates by “contiguity, fascination, and panic […] a chain reaction by contagion” (Baudrillard, In the Shadow 51). Terrorism is “virulent,” something that enters the global mediascapes and becomes self-replicating. The image takes the event as “hostage” in part by “multiplying the event into infinity” (Baudrillard, “L’Esprit” 17), producing an endless repetition of the same. How else to describe the events that occurred in New Zealand and Australia in the wake of 9/11 when the anthrax scare was sweeping the United States? Both these countries experienced uncontrollable replication of “scenes” of anthrax attacks: day after day, televised images appeared of workers dressed in protective garments and masks (exactly as in the U.S.), evacuating post offices, entering areas suspected of containing anthrax dust, although no “real” anthrax dust was discovered. By collapsing the distinction between the real and the copy, these contagious simulational scenarios (like something out of Don DeLillo’s White Noise) ironically conferred the status of authenticity on life in New Zealand –this little country, too, was on the receiving end of the global terrorist threat; we were significant enough to be targeted; we had our own scenes of anthrax terror–we were “real.”

Part III

Baudrillard’s texts from this middle period tell us that to view terrorism as a media event, “a group of signs dedicated exclusively to their recurrence as signs” (Simulacra 21), is not to say that media-disseminated “hyperreal” events do not have “real” effects. Nor does it suggest that the system can unproblematically absorb terrorism’s violence, with its symbolic message, back into mediatized indifference. Postmodern terrorism occurs in the context of what James Der Derian calls “a global information economy boosting sign power” (80). Such “sign power” includes strategic efforts on the part of corporations to simulate profitability (here the Enron debacle is instructive); it also entails an economy in which money itself is an object of circulation that has only a screen-and-networked existence rather than a “material” one. Such an economy is particularly vulnerable to forms of terrorism which insert themselves into the economy of the sign, and indeed there were enormous consequences in the wake of 9/11: the sudden decline of an already shaky international economy, the immediate, worldwide decline in the value of stocks (a trillion or so dollars vanished in this way), the domino-like collapse of airline industries, and the rush on the part of governments in the United States, Switzerland, New Zealand, and Australia to prop them up. New York lost close to 100,000 jobs in the aftermath of 9/11.

In a postindustrial epoch when the “mode of information” is dominant, commandeering the mode of information–that is, creating a spectacular act which produces media spasms on a global scale–can be extraordinarily effective. As Slavoj Zizek notes, the shattering impact of the attacks can only be accounted for by the fact that “the two WTC towers stood for the center of virtual capitalism, of financial speculations disconnected from the sphere of material production” (3). Virtual capitalism–the world of global speculation and investment–is precisely the space in which a mediatized, spectacular, and hyperreal attack can be devastating, can constitute a “deconstruction” (or strategic reversal) of the system by pitting a hyperreal act against a hyperreal system. As Baudrillard observes,

a hyperreal, imperceptible sociality, no longer operating by law and repression, but by the infiltration of models, no longer by violence, but by deterrence/persuasion--to that terrorism responds by an equally hyperreal act, caught up from the outset in concentric waves of media and of fascination [...] (In the Shadow 50)

Terrorism engenders fascination, fear, and terror in a form that is utterly anonymous and contiguous, an “an arbitrary and hazardous abstraction” (Baudrillard, In the Shadow 51). A character in Mao II explains the dynamics of terrorism in exactly these terms:

It's confusing when they [terrorists] kill the innocent. But this is precisely the language of being noticed, the only language the West understands. The way they determine how we see them. The way they dominate the rush of endless streaming images. (157-58)

This is precisely Baudrillard’s point: in a society of ubiquitous hyperreality, the primary goal of the terrorist is media spectacle, “the only language the West understands.” Simultaneously brutal, repugnant, and fascinating, the terrorist’s repertoire–kidnappings, hijackings, and assassinations–convey their message by becoming part of the “obscene delirium” of televisual flows, informational anxiety, and technological catastrophe of media spectacle.

Baudrillard’s texts in this middle period, then, help us understand postmodern terrorism (and 9/11) in the highly ambivalent regime of image and spectacle. While image and spectacle function to absorb the alterity of terrorism, terrorism has adapted adroitly to the logic of sign exchange and sign value. If a culture of simulation denies the symbolic import of death, it can never eradicate it. Indeed, in all these texts the idea of reversal and death is never far away. Contemporary terrorism usurps the mechanisms of simulation in order to inhabit the system from the inside; like a viral organism, it multiplies from within, pushing the very logic of the system to a point of extremity, inserting reversibility into the causal order, and bringing about a reversion of the system’s own power. Terrorism “aims at the white magic of the social encircling us, that of information, of simulation, of deterrence, of anonymous and random control, in order to precipitate its death by accentuating it” (Baudrillard, In the Shadow 51). Terrorism is a form of “fatal strategy,” and (as Baudrillard explains) “the order of the fatal is the site of symbolic exchange. There is no more liberty, everything is locked in a sequential chain” (qtd. in Gane, Baudrillard Live 108). Even the hostage, “frozen in a state of disappearance” (Baudrillard, “Figures” 176), becomes something of a nonnegotiable, inexchangeable object that casts a shadow over economic and semiotic exchange, insinuating the symbolic back into the flow of commutable signs.⁵ Ultimately, symbolic exchange is fundamentally irrevocable and singular; the “gift ” must be returned; symbolic obligation remains unbreachable by the dominant exchange and irreducible to the law of the code.

Inspired by the events of 9/11, this is precisely the theme Baudrillard develops in The Spirit of Terrorism. In the parrying between symbolic and simulation cultures, here the symbolic clearly gains the upper hand.

Part IV

Rather than compelling Baudrillard to “dress up old ideas of symbolic exchange” (as Butterfield would have it), 9/11 provoked him to bring his ideas of symbolic exchange, always implicit in his writings on terrorism and its “fatal strategies,” to bear on what he considers to be the first global symbolic event. The momentous nature of the attack on the World Trade Center also compelled him to develop his views on the relation between simulation and symbolic exchange. In The Spirit of Terrorism, Baudrillard argues that in a world utterly saturated with images, our primary experience of the disaster was as “image-event.” The image takes the event “hostage”; it “consumes the event,” and in that sense “absorbs the event and offers it for consumption” (27). We cannot say that the World Trade Center attacks signaled a resurrection of the real, for our very reality principle has been lost, has become intermingled with the fictional, has all but been absorbed in the recursive processes of simulation. The image precedes the real, yet in the terrorist attacks the “frisson of the real” was superadded as an excess, an echo, “like an additional fiction, a fiction surpassing fiction” (29). Baudrillard seems to suggest that the “absolute event” of 9/11 produced a breach between the real (however entwined in the fantastic and surreal) and media event, between event and medium. Such a breach constitutes a dismantling of the formal correlation of signifier and signified, a radical dismembering of the mechanisms of the code.⁶ It transgresses the codification of signs and their semiotic/economic exchange (the definitive act is “not susceptible of exchange” [9]). The symbolic suddenly breaks through and subverts the indifference of simulation. The attack on the World Trade Center thus constituted a condensed site of symbolic power that “radicalized the relation of the image to reality” (27). The event breached the bar between life and death, between semiologic and the symbolic, constituting a singularity “at one and the same time the dazzling micro-model of a kernel of real violence with the maximum possible echo–hence the purist form of spectacle–and a sacrificial model mounting the purest symbolic form of defiance to the historical political order” (30).

Such dramatic and sacrificial violence constituted a challenge to the West’s denial of death’s symbolic capacity for reversion. Yet Butterfield tells us, “Americans are not primitives–we do not value death symbolically, but rather only as a subtraction from life” (12). But the fact that Americans deny the symbolic dimension of death was ultimately of little importance on 9/11. For it was as if both individuals and systems, independent of intention or agency, at some profound level responded to the specter of death and reversibility. Indeed, the event was a challenge to the “real” of the Western world. The World Trade Center attacks made the vulnerability of an overly extended system suddenly palpable; its functional logic (which precludes reversion) was suddenly breached: “the whole system of the real and power [la puissance] gathers, transfixed; rallies briefly; then perishes by its own hyperefficiency” (Baudrillard, Spirit 18). The Twin Towers collapsed (a stunning image of violent and catastrophic implosion), the regime of signification (floating currency, floating signifiers) was thrown into chaos, the market plunged, jobs were lost, corporations become insolvent.

But what possible “answer” could America give to the symbolic challenge? Butterfield argues that Baudrillard’s logic of gift and countergift would imply that the greatest possible symbolic honor would be the forgiveness of debt. The idea that the U.S. might forgive its debtors, says Butterfield, constitutes the “utopian moment” in Baudrillard’s thinking, but “Baudrillard will not speak his utopia” (25). On this point, however, it is again useful to think of the relation of the symbolic cultures to the orders of simulation found in the West that informs Baudrillard’s thinking. It may be that Baudrillard “will not speak” on the matter because he realizes that the very notion of forgiveness assumes values based in older notions of symbolic obligation. As Baudrillard commented in an interview, “today [in the West] forgiveness has turned into tolerance, the democratic virtue par excellence, a sort of ecology that shields all the differences, a sort of psychological demagogy” (qtd. in Gane, Baudrillard Live 195).

Baudrillard seems to suggest that the West is unable to suffer the weight of symbolic obligation precisely because this would challenge the West’s very being–capitalism totalizing itself “as a code producing all the world as exchangeable within an identical order” (McMillan and Worth 127). And herein lies the conundrum the West confronts: any response which recognized symbolic obligation would be undertaken at the risk of the West’s becoming something other than it is, at the risk of bringing about its own “death”:

At odds with itself, it can only plunge further into its own logic of relations of force, but it cannot operate on the terrain of the symbolic challenge and death--a thing of which it no longer has any idea, since it has erased it from its own culture. (Baudrillard, Spirit 15)

The United States’s answer to symbolic challenge is precisely to “plunge further into its own logic of relations of force,” the logic of sign value and a global regime of monolithic indifference: “All that is singular and irreducible must be absorbed. This is the law of democracy and the new world order” (Gulf War 86). Among other things, the “war on terror” represents a frantic attempt to mend the breach in the code, to absorb the singular and irreducible symbolic challenge 9/11 into the order of simulation. The Bush administration targets Saddam Hussein, the fake terrorist enemy; it stages “Gulf War 2: The Sequel,” a repetition compulsion that exhibits all of the will to spectacle of the first Gulf War. Reporting of this war extended the logic of simulation with “embedded reporters”–a new breed of journalists largely indistinguishable in speech or dress from the troops with whom they travel, surrendering their independence to be ferried around in military vehicles, to be part of the larger “cast” of executive producer Donald Rumsfeld’s show of shows. Coverage of the war included scene after scene of “embeds,” wearing fatigues and goggles, sitting on tanks, talking by satellite to anchors in the U.S.–all scripted, all staged, the satellite technology that enabled this instant communication an integral part of its hyperreal production. Of the first Gulf War Baudrillard wrote, “it is a sign that the space of the event has become a hyperspace with multiple refractivity, and that the space of war has become definitely non-Euclidean” (Gulf War 50). “Gulf War 2” featured endless images of embeds inhabiting a non-Euclidean space devoid of all landmarks. When camera crews encountered recognizable landmarks of any potential strategic importance, stock footage or tight shots of helmeted talking heads in a tank’s interior were substituted; viewers were advised that live exterior tracking shots would resume when there was nothing distinctive about the terrain.⁷ Jokes circulated during the siege of Baghdad acknowledging the simulational character of the war: “Why didn’t American troops get to Baghdad quicker? Because CNN kept having to re-shoot the scenes” (Agence France Presse).

Like the first Gulf War, the attack on Iraq functioned to rescue the idea of war, the status of war, its meaning, its future (the superiority of American might and its ability to identify and quash the terrorist enemy as opposed to negotiation with other countries within the U.N.). Like the first Gulf War, it does this in the hyperreal mode, proffering “the deontology of a pure electronic war without hitches” (Gulf War 34). Not only did the Iraqi regime collapse within a matter of days, but the U.S. won the nostalgia-evoking scenes of real war and real liberation it wanted. As one journalist put it, such scenes resembled “Paris after 1945 with an Arab cast. An old man beating a poster of Saddam Hussein with a shoe in deliberate insult. The statue of the Iraqi president with a noose around its neck and an American flag over its head like an executioner’s hood, the crowd below gathering to tug it from its pedestal” (Maddox). If this was not enough, Bush appeared in Top Gun-uniform aboard an aircraft carrier to declare victory. In its consistent and strategic embrace of the logic of simulation, Gulf War 2 was grounded in the “disappearance of alterity, of primitive hostility, and the enemy” (Gulf War 36).

Indeed, the recent war on Iraq seems the final phase of pulling back the symbolic challenge of 9/11 into a non-Euclidian, hyperreal media space, and into simulational, replicable scenarios. Like the first Gulf War, the U.S.-led coalition’s attack on Iraq has proved to be a “celibate machine” (Gulf War 36), generating a series of models, codes, and scenarios. Iraq is a testing ground, a kind of blank slate or model by which to generate scenarios that might be deployed to effect regime change in “rogue” states such as Syria, Iran, and North Korea, countries which form Bush’s “axis of evil.” Finally, in hyperreal mode, this “deontology of war,” death itself–and, by extension, its potential for singularity and sacrificial violence–becomes subject to the code. In a press briefing, U.S. war commander General Tommy Franks asserted that American forces had genetic material that could be used to identify Saddam and check whether attempts to kill him had succeeded. “He’s either dead or he’s running a lot,” Franks said. “He’ll simply be alive until I can confirm he’s dead” (Reuters). In this semiotic regime of the code, people “die the only death the system authorizes” (Symbolic 177); the code (controlled by the Americans) bestows the power to differentiate between life and death, to confer death, and to produce death.

Such examples suggest not only America’s (and the West’s) inability to grapple with symbolic obligation, but its concerted effort to absorb the threat of the Other by generating a seamless simulational and hyperreal world. Yet symbolic cultures such as Islam have a particularly potent weapon. As Victoria Grace notes, they have the power to “infect the west with that which it does not understand and cannot encompass: the symbolic power of culture that destabilizes any pretense to the universal and the coded instantiations of the real” (96). The West’s claim to a universal code is thus troubled and unsettled by the aftereffects of calamitous and seismic symbolic violence. Moreover, the destabilizing “infection” of symbolic power is integrally related to Baudrillard’s notion of the “transparency of evil” with its concept of the “accursed share” (Transparency 82)–the evil which Western society attempts to expel in order to maintain its operational positivity. There is a perverse paradox in America’s denial of the Other, including its denial of the evil and the alterity of death. If the West has barred the negative in the pursuit of the positive, the negative inevitably transpires, inexorably returns to haunt its comfortable positivity.⁸ As Baudrillard observes, “the price we pay for the ‘reality’ of this life, to live it as positive value, is the ever present phantasm of death” (Symbolic 133). In this dichotomous logic (death barred from life), death is constructed as irreversible, and therefore haunts life as an as ever-present and ever-threatening “ghostly presence.”⁹ In the death-denying contemporary West, it is precisely the ever-present specter of death that characterizes the “politics of everyday fear,” the general sense of disaster that is woven into the fabric of daily life, part of the haunting, nameless dread of terrorism, that which inevitably transpires as a result of a relentless devotion to positivity, “the triumph of Good all along the line” (Spirit 14).

The United States’s War on Terror–including the attack on Iraq and the threats against other “rogue states”–is an aspect of what Gary Genosko refers to as “simulated reciprocity” (xxi-xxii), a bogus, simulacral response to a unique and binding symbolic challenge. Yet 9/11 was itself an aspect of the “transpolitical mirror of evil” (Baudrillard, Transparency 81) in which the barred and excluded “negative” reappeared in a symbolic form so overwhelming that it continues to haunt the positivist order of America and the West. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 were a redounding consequence of the global injunction to positive value and the denial of the symbolic potential of death–an injunction that precisely left the West vulnerable to the fatal strategies of sacrificial violence and sacrificial death, strategies it cannot meet or answer on their own terms.¹⁰

Contrary to Bradley Butterfield’s argument, then, it is not a question of Americans being moderns or primitives, of Americans living in the denial of death, or even of Americans living in a never-ending flow of anesthetized simulation. For one of Baudrillard’s key points in The Spirit of Terrorism is that it is precisely the fundamental, constitutive antagonism of global capitalism that ultimately confounds America’s hegemony of the positive, as well as the mechanisms of simulation that produce and buttress it. For Baudrillard, this “fundamental antagonism […] points past the spectre of America […] and the spectre of Islam, to triumphant globalization battling against itself” (Spirit 11). What is excluded from this global system transpires in redoubled measure; that which the system finds intolerable, and that which is fatal to it–evil, death, reversibility–inexorably haunts the system in all its hyperextended perfection: “at the height of their coherence, the redoubled signs of the code are haunted by the abyss of reversal” (Jean Baudrillard 123). On 11 September 2001, this became dramatically apparent. In the “unforgettable incandescence of the images,” evil and death reasserted themselves, and the virtual consensus of globalism was suddenly engulfed by a void. Symbolic violence created a breakthrough, an effraction that shook the West’s self-certainty to the core, leaving it haunted with the specter of that which “dismantles the beautiful order of irreversibility, of the finality of things” (qtd. in Gane, Baudrillard Live 57).

Notes

1. For this formulation, I am indebted to Victoria Grace (25). I would like to thank her for providing me with galley proofs of Karen McMillan and Heather Worth’s article “In Dreams: Baudrillard, Derrida, and September 11.”

2. See Bennetts 82 and White.

3. See for example, Ann Coulter, “This is War” in which, responding to Barbara Olson’s death, she famously wrote about “those responsible” for the terrorist act: “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity.”

4. See Genosko (98).

5. Here I am indebted to Genosko’s discussion of the hostage (98). According to Genosko, Baudrillard’s reading of the hostage “has always been in the service of the symbolic […] ” (100).

6. Here I am indebted to McMillan and Worth (125-26).

7. I’d like to thank my colleague Kevin Glynn for pointing this out to me, and for lengthy discussions on the simulational aspects of the attack on Iraq.

8. I’d like to thank Victoria Grace for conversations and emails in which she pointed out to me the importance of Baudrillard’s notion of the “transparency of evil” and its relation to the Baudrillardian symbolic.

9. I am indebted to Victoria Grace’s discussion of the consequences of the West’s devotion to positive value (44).

10. Here I am indebted to Karen McMillan and Heather Worth (126).

Works Cited

• Agence France Press (AFP). “War Rising Above the Pain.” The Press [Christchurch, New Zealand] 8 Apr. 2003: B1.
• Baudrillard, Jean. “The Ecstasy of Communication.” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Port Townsend: Bay, 1983. 126-33.
• —. “Figures of the Transpolitical.” Revenge of the Crystal: Selected Writings on the Modern Object and its Destiny, 1968-1983. Ed. and trans. Paul Foss and Julian Pefanis. London: Pluto, 1990. 161-98.
• —. The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Trans. Paul Patton. Sydney: Power, 1995.
• —. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities. Trans. Paul Foss, John Johnston, and Paul Patton. New York: Semiotext, 1983.
• —. Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings. Ed. Mark Poster. Trans. Charles Levin. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988.
• —. “L’Esprit Du Terrorisme.” Trans. Donovan Hohn. Harper’s Magazine Feb. 2002: 13-18.
• —. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994.
• —. The Spirit of Terrorism and Requiem for the Twin Towers. Trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso, 2002.
• —. Symbolic Exchange and Death. 1976. Trans. Iain Hamilton Grant. London: Sage, 1993.
• —. The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomenon. London: Verso, 1993.
• Bennetts, Leslie. “One Nation, One Mind?” Vanity Fair Dec. 2001: 82-88.
• Butterfield, Bradley. “The Baudrillardian Symbolic, 9/11, and the War of Good and Evil.” Postmodern Culture 13.1 (2002): 27 pars. Sept. 2002 <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v013/13.1butterfield.html>.
• Coulter, Ann. “This is War.” National Review Online 13 Sept. 2001 <www.nationalreview.com/coulter/coulter091301.shtml>.
• DeLillo, Don. Mao II. New York: Viking, 1991.
• Der Derian, James. Antidiplomacy: Spies, Terror, Speed, and War. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.
• Derrida, Jacques. “No Apocalypse, Not Now (full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives).” Diacritics 14 (Summer 1984): 20-31.
• Dixon, Wheeler Winston. The Transparency of Spectacle: Meditations on the Moving Image. Albany, NY: State U of New York P, 1998.
• Fisk, Robert. “Lost in the Rhetorical Fog of War.” The Independent. 9 Oct. 2000: 3.
• Gane, Mike. Baudrillard: Critical and Fatal Theory. New York: Routledge, 1991.
• —, ed. Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews. New York: Routledge, 1993.
• Genosko, Gary. Baudrillard and Signs: Signification Ablaze. New York: Routledge, 1994.
• Grace, Victoria. Baudrillard’s Challenge: A Feminist Reading. New York: Routledge, 2000.
• Maddox, Bronwen. “Will the U.S. Stop at Iraq? Victory in Baghdad Offers Vision of Easy Regime Change.” The Times [London] 11 Apr. 2003: B1.
• “Media Watch.” Radio New Zealand. 25 Nov. 2001.
• McMillan, Karen, and Heather Worth. “In Dreams: Baudrillard, Derrida and September 11.” Eds. Victoria Grace, Heather Worth, and Simmons, Laurence. Baudrillard West of the Dateline. Palmerston North: Dunmore, 2003. 116-37.
• Reuters. “Where is Saddam”? The Press [Christchurch, New Zealand] 15 Apr. 2003: B1.
• White, Jerry. “White House Lied about Threat to Air Force One.” World Socialist Web Site 28 Sept. 2001 <http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/sep2001/bush-s28.shtml>
• Wolcott, James. “Over, Under, Sideways, Down.” Vanity Fair December 2001: 64-74.
• Zizek, Slavoj. “Welcome to the Desert of the Real.” Reconstructions: Reflections on Humanity and Media after Tragedy. 15 Sept. 2001. < web.mit.edu/cms/reconstructions/interpreations/desertreal/html/>.

Peter Yoonsuk Paik

Department of French, Italian, and Comparative Literature
University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee
pypaik@uwm.edu

One of the most well-publicized hypotheses regarding the terror of 9/11 is the notion that religious fantasies played a major role in inspiring the militants of al-Qaeda to launch their suicide attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Only irrational fanatics could have been capable of killing themselves for the sake of taking thousands of innocent lives and destroying three buildings that symbolize Western power and preeminence. Surely the hijackers must have been enticed and deluded by the rewards promised by Islam to martyrs–instant entry into paradise where they would be served by “seventy dark-eyed virgins.” The lurid and prurient nature of this fantasy has been invoked to account for the terrorist bombings committed by the Palestinians against the Israelis, as well. In the eyes of the liberal, capitalist West, such fantasies reveal the obscene underside of the puritanical worldview associated with radical Islam. The Muslim terrorist is capable of launching suicide attacks because he has embraced an immoderately concrete vision of the afterlife that has spawned in him a kind of psychosis. The belief that Islamist radicals are religious fanatics acting from a delusional hatred of the secular West or from contempt for the superseded religions of Judaism and Christianity has played no small role in stifling questions about the ideological factors behind these acts of terror, and about the legitimacy of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians in the occupied territories.

That the mystifications underlying the mass media discourse on Islamist terror and the American military response to it might possess significant theological content of their own comes as little surprise. One may recall the jarring “slips,” such as “crusade” and “infinite justice,” terms deeply disturbing to most Muslims, used by the Bush administration in the immediate aftermath of the attacks of 9/11. Even as these terms were hastily jettisoned under the criticism of American Islamic clerics, the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has done much to confirm the view that the actual policy of the United States has become that of a latter-day crusade against the Arab world, whether in the name of preventing the future use of weapons of mass destruction or establishing a model liberal democracy in the region. Indeed, one might argue that it is theological, absolutist notions of freedom and security that are driving the war on terror. This article makes the case that the destruction inflicted by the United States against Afghanistan and Iraq is no less religious in nature than the terrorist acts of Islamist radicals by examining the political fantasies behind much of the popular support for the neo-imperialist policies of the second Bush administration. I first discuss the legitimation for neo-imperialism among intellectuals supportive of the administration and the popular millenarianism that sanctions militaristic policies seen as fulfilling a divine plan. In section two, I provide a brief analysis of the best-selling novel series of the 1990s, Left Behind, which is based on a literalist understanding of biblical prophecy concerning the millennium. In the third section, I discuss the mode of spirituality that informs the apocalypticism which has become pervasive in American culture–a form of religiosity that has little to do with historical Christianity but is in fact far closer to the ancient heresy of Gnosticism. In the fourth section I address how the overarching themes and ideological orientation of this explicitly programmatic series of novels emerge in mainstream Hollywood cinema. I conclude with a discussion of how Christian doctrines, particularly that of sacrifice, become derailed in the demonology that takes root from a system of belief far more dualistic than that of traditional Christianity.

I. Suicide of the Last Men

In his article on the “fantasy ideology” of the militants of al-Qaeda, published in the Heritage Foundation’s journal Policy Review, Lee Harris proposes that it is wrongheaded to view the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon as having been driven by political objectives (21-22). Instead, Harris argues, we must come to grips with the fact that al-Qaeda is interested chiefly in enacting a collective fantasy on the world stage, a fateful and titanic drama in which they, self-cast as the forces of righteousness, carry on a struggle against the decadent, apostate legions of the Great Satan of the West. Yet, in spite of the unprecedented destruction wrought by al-Qaeda on 9/11, Harris assures us that such ideological fantasies–which in effect derail politics from the rational pursuit of strategic interests into the enterprise of transforming human nature and reality itself–are nothing new. The examples he provides, of groups for whom politics served as a form of self-aggrandizing theatre, include Nazis, Communists, Jacobins, and even Vietnam War protesters.

Fantasy ideologies, according to Harris, are a “plague” and should be dealt with accordingly, “in the same manner as you would deal with a fatal epidemic–you try to wipe it out” (35). I will leave aside for the moment the observation that the act of describing one’s political enemies in medical terms has served with disquieting regularity to legitimate massacres and genocide. Rather, the underlying assumption governing Harris’s distinction between politics as the rational and practical pursuit of concrete objectives and politics as the catastrophic enactment of a divine drama is that the secular West has outgrown the seductions of absolutist terror–so much so, in fact, that it is slow to recognize fully the true nature of the threat posed by radical Islam. Harris fears that the West has made itself more vulnerable to al-Qaeda in becoming bogged down in futile questioning over the ostensible political motives behind the attacks of 9/11, when, instead, it ought simply to devote its energies to annihilating a foe with whom it is senseless to reason. The conclusion that the liberal democratic West has effectively exorcised the demons of political totalitarianism and religious fanaticism also surfaces in the opposition between consumerism as a way of life in Western societies and the ethic of self-denial driving the Islamist militants, as pointed out by Slavoj Zizek in Welcome to the Desert of the Real, his recent book on 9/11 and the war on terror. In this particular ideological antagonism, the citizens of the West have become “Nietzschean Last Men,” whose primary concern is the satisfaction of fleshly and material appetites and who react with incomprehension at the suggestion that the only life worth living is one which is devoted to a transcendent cause. The Muslim radicals, by contrast, display the attributes ascribed to the Hegelian master–it is they “who are ready to risk everything, engaged in the struggle even up to their own self-destruction” (Welcome 40).

Yet the opposition between fundamentalist Islam and the liberal West often works to overshadow a significant rift within the West itself. This is the divide between the “post-historical” social democracies of Europe, which, according to Robert Kagan, have entered the Kantian realm of “perpetual peace,” and the still all-too historical United States, which remains stranded in a Hobbesian world of unending struggle (3). Kagan’s distinction stems from the Nietzschean principle (which he leaves unstated) that weak nations, such as those of Western Europe, embrace international law as the primary means of exerting their influence, whereas “brute force” is both the province and prerogative of the powerful (6). Robert Kaplan, in Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos, goes even further to argue that the United States effectively constitutes a “new imperium” and urges that it should embrace the role of global hegemon (148). What emerges is thus the contradictory image of the United States as the lone remaining superpower that is at the same time excessively reluctant to expend the lives of its own citizens as the cost of maintaining its geopolitical dominance–hence its reliance upon proxies, such as the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, for the hand-to-hand combat, and its dependence upon the overwhelming destructive force afforded by its advanced technology, as seen in the invasion and conquest of Iraq. Do not Kagan’s reflections on the American practice of power politics–as well as Kaplan’s advocacy of “stealth imperialism” by the U.S. as a corrective to “the self-delusive, ceremonial trappings of the United Nations” (148-49)–provide the murderous supplement to the monotonous consumerism of the Last Men within the liberal capitalist order?

It has been the province of thinkers who have achieved positions of governmental influence, from the liberal realist George Kennan to the Stalinist Eurocrat Alexandre Kojève, to explain in frank, “explicitly non-human” terms how the killing and impoverishment of millions is necessary for the prosperity of the West (Rosen 94). In the case of Kennan, the central matter is one of maintaining the imbalance of wealth and resources that grossly favors the United States; thus, the U.S. should abandon policies that champion “human rights, the raising of living standards and democratization” (Pilger 98). As Zizek notes, Kennan’s words have the salutary effect of tearing away the hypocritical mask of universal prosperity from late capitalism. But it is Kojève who articulates most forcefully the position that catastrophes always happen elsewhere and to other peoples. Kojève, a self-taught economist as well as a lecturer at the École des Hautes Études, where he taught an entire generation of French intellectuals, viewed his high-level position at the French ministry of foreign economic affairs as an unparalleled opportunity to unify theory and practice. For his idea of the “post-historical utopia,” which served as the philosophical underpinnings for his service to the French state and the emerging European Economic Community, is erected upon the “murders of millions of innocent persons in fulfillment of Hegel’s observation that history is a slaughter-bench […] upon which are prepared the feasts of the gods: the residents of the post-historical utopia” (Rosen 94).

Thus avowedly antihumanist ideas have been increasingly breaking the surface of public discourse after 9/11–whether as the open advocacy of imperialism by Robert Kaplan or the “new racism” that justifies itself not on the basis of the “cultural” or “natural” superiority of the West but according to “unabashed economic egotism” (Welcome 149). Yet such appeals to brute, naked force and amoral national interest run counter to the value system of Christian morality (underscored by the title of Kaplan’s book) that informs mainstream American society. It is instructive here to refer to Zizek’s account of ideology, the function of which is to “combine a series of ‘inconsistent’ attitudes” inclusive of sentiments of both assent and critique, so that the “obscene unwritten rules” which sustain power may prevail over the public Law (Plague 75, 73). Ideology is thus a way to “have one’s cake and eat it,” providing unity for heterogeneous and contradictory positions, such as believing in the existence of a Christian God and a moral universe while approving of tyrannies and massacres in developing countries as the necessary conditions for one’s own peace, security, and economic well-being. Such antagonistic contents become unified through a “quilting point” (point de capiton), an “effectively […] immanent, purely textual operation” that becomes comprehended as an “unfathomable, transcendent, stable point of reference concealed behind the flow of appearances and acting as its hidden cause” (For They Know 18).

The “quilting point” relieves the unbearable pressure wrought by irreducible ideological tensions by means of a reversal of perspective that magically changes turmoil and discord into harmony and resolve. Zizek’s examples of a “quilting point” include the function of the Jew as the bearer of contradiction in Nazi ideology as well as Saint Paul’s reversal of the view of Christ’s death on the Cross, which transformed it from a disastrous setback to the nascent Christian movement to its greatest triumph. It is my contention that the support of Christians–particularly the Christian Right–in the United States for decidedly un-Christian policies, such as a neo-imperialist foreign policy, a consumerist lifestyle, and the acceptance of a global system which condemns entire populations to destitution for the sake of U.S. prosperity, relies upon a “quilting point” that goes far beyond merely realistic concerns about the nation’s security. In fact, it is the very opposite of security; it is the mass destruction of the planet through the divine will of God that reconciles for these evangelicals the fact of having to live in the soulless, indolent world of the Last Men with a warlike imperialist foreign policy under the “third, properly symbolic moment” of an imminent apocalypse. Accordingly, wars are to be accepted not as the means for securing particular political ends, in terms of cold-hearted realpolitik, but rather to be read–and welcomed–as signs that the end-times have been set into motion. For the particular configuration of empire, Third World poverty, the dominance of sinful pleasures in the media, technological hubris, and the legal practice of abortion can only be tolerated by means of intense fantasies about their essentially temporary nature; such evils may reign at the present but will be swept away shortly by the punitive catastrophes of God’s judgment.

II. Fateful Dispensations

The view of the apocalypse that has become dominant at present among Christian evangelicals goes by the name of dispensational premillennialism. Promoted widely in the late nineteenth-century United States by John Nelson Darby, an Irish-born preacher who became the leader of a new sect, the Plymouth Brethren, after leaving the Protestant Church of Ireland, dispensational premillennialism emphasizes an account of the end-times based on a literalist reading of biblical prophecies (Boyer 87-88). Declaring that true Christians would be protected from the horrors predicted for the end-times, Darby popularized the doctrine of the Rapture, in which believers will vanish into thin air and be taken up into heaven. The Rapture has held a privileged position in the apocalyptic theology of Christian evangelicals, but evangelicals are divided about its timing vis-à-vis the Tribulation, the seven-year period when the earth will be overwhelmed by horrors and catastrophes of supernatural (and genocidal) magnitude. Post-tribulationism holds that the Rapture will occur at the Second Coming and that Christians will therefore have to suffer through the plagues, famines, and wars along with everybody else; this remains the viewpoint of a distinct minority that includes a number of survivalists. The view that looms largest in the public consciousness at present is the “pre-tribulationist” view, according to which believers will be evacuated into heaven before the onset of horrors. Of the two, the “pre-tribulationist” doctrine–the most widely held of the premillennialist viewpoints–offers the rosiest end-time scenario for believers and the ghastliest of sufferings for the faithless. Recent pre-tribulationists include Hal Lindsey, the best-selling author in the 1970s according to the New York Times, and Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, co-authors of the Left Behind series that features many of the best-selling novels of the last decade.

Left Behind, published in 1995 as the first novel in the series by LaHaye and Jenkins, opens with a world thrown into disarray by the mysterious disappearances of millions of people. As is common in the representations of the apocalypse among evangelicals, the world is paralyzed by an epidemic of plane crashes and car accidents after their pilots and drivers instantaneously vanish. Not only have all true Christians disappeared, as well as have all children under the age of ten, but also all fetuses have vanished from wombs. The narrative focuses on the ordeals of those “left behind,” that is, former skeptics and nominal Christians who, because of the mass disappearances, become converts to the faith. One of the protagonists in the series is an airline pilot named Rayford Steele, who had been growing apart from his devoutly religious wife. After her disappearance, he becomes plunged into guilt, and visits the church she had attended, where the senior minister had frequently preached about the Rapture. A repentant junior pastor whose merely cosmetic faith had failed to make him dematerialize hands Steele a video made by the senior minister specifically in preparation for this eventuality. “As you watch this tape,” it begins, “I can only imagine the fear and despair you face, for this is being recorded for viewing only after the disappearance of God’s people from the earth” (209).

The episode involving the video is intended as an injection of reality into the world of the novels, which have themselves been conceived as a kind of paratext to biblical prophecy (co-author Jenkins has said in a TV interview that he doesn’t think that these novels are fiction).¹ Real-life churches enamored of apocalyptic prophecy have gone to the lengths of making their own videos to explain the Rapture to non-believers after their members have disappeared. Websites dealing with the apocalypse have special sections containing information for those still on earth in the wake of the divine evacuation. Yet the intensely programmatic aims of Left Behind–as a fictionalized treatment of the fulfillment of Biblical prophecies–interpellate the evangelical reader by satisfying the contradictory demands of a split consciousness. On the one hand, the reader is treated to the spectacle of divine wrath being visited upon hapless non-believers during the time of the Tribulation–major American cities are reduced to rubble by nuclear strikes, a meteor storm destroys much of Iraq, 200 million ghostly horsemen kill a third of the earth’s population. The evangelical reader is thus invited to marvel at and enjoy grandiose scenes of carnage inflicted by a punishing God (in Lacanian terms, the act of perversely identifying with the enjoyment of the big Other); as billions of unbelievers suffer gruesome deaths and tortures, he or she can remain secure in the knowledge that the faithful will all have ascended into heaven before these harrowing events take place. On the other hand, the struggles of Left Behind‘s heroes, who are new converts to Christianity, mirror (however hyperbolically) the widespread feelings of marginalization and embattlement among evangelicals living in a society that appears to them hopelessly corrupt, dangerous, and decadent.

In the universe of Left Behind, the Antichrist is a charismatic Romanian politician with the unlikely name of Nicolae Carpathia. In the span of a few short months after the Rapture, he takes over the position of Secretary General of the UN, receives possession of Air Force One from an “emasculated” American president, purchases all the major media outlets around the globe, and wins the support of an overwhelming majority of the globe’s population in establishing a one-world government. Naming this universal regime the Global Community (GC), Nicolae takes on the title of “Global Potentate” and oversees the mass disarmament of the former nations’ arsenals from the GC’s capital, the newly rebuilt city of New Babylon, in Iraq. A scenario in which a pitifully small band of defiant Christians struggle against the might of a world empire may recall the “heroic period” of the early Church when it suffered persecution at the hands of the Roman emperors. Christian propaganda focusing on the courage and martyrdom of the saints greatly impressed Georges Sorel, whose myth of the general strike was influenced by the categorical refusal of the Church to accommodate the ostensibly reasonable demand of the Roman state to acknowledge the divinity of the emperor. As Sorel saw it, it was the Church’s uncompromising stance, which was judged by outsiders as irrational and foolish, that enabled it to take power once the empire had collapsed (211).² The crude theology of Left Behind, however, depicts miracles taking place with plodding regularity and world events fitting mechanically into proper sequence in fulfillment of biblical prophecies. The notion that born-again Christians will be exempt from having to endure terrible suffering extends to the post-Rapture converts who are the principal characters of the series. The two prophets at the Wailing Wall, both converts from Judaism, routinely incinerate their Jewish and Muslim assailants with fire from their mouths. A full-scale surprise air assault by Russia against Israel results in the destruction of every single Russian jet without a single Israeli casualty. When a plague of demonic locusts is unleashed, the creatures sting only non-Christians, causing such agony that they “want to die but [are] unable to” do so (Apollyon 205). There is a moment of unintended sadistic humor, in which the authors’ avowed philo-semitism reveals its underlying prejudice, when Buck Williams, a member of the “Tribulation Force” of Christians mobilized to combat the Antichrist, chides his friend, the skeptical Nobel-Prize winning Jewish chemical engineer Chaim Rosenzweig, for not being more scientifically curious about these supernatural insects, knowing full well that the locusts’ stings will cause him terrible pain. When the older man doubles over with convulsions after being stung, he begs Buck to bring him some water, to which Buck perfunctorily replies, “It won’t help” (Apollyon 265).

The supernatural turns of the narrative of Left Behind indulge the believer’s sense of Schadenfreude: evangelical Christians are depicted as the only people who understand why disaster is befalling the world; everyone else fruitlessly flails about for answers or, worse, is duped by the Antichrist’s explanations. Such smugness towards mass death and devastation is the result, I suggest, of the merger of American premillennialism and American consumer culture. For what is the Rapture but the “holiday from history” elevated to a cosmic principle? Moreover, this merger of millennialism and consumerism accounts for the increasingly wide appeal of apocalyptic scenarios and the recoding of apocalypse itself. The idea that the saved gain spiritual salvation but are spared physical suffering is a very different understanding of salvation than that of the early Church and its impassioned embrace of earthly ordeals and the risk of martyrdom. Indeed, the Rapture as a doctrine appears acutely symptomatic of a people for whom history is unreal and who have become convinced that disasters happen only to other people in foreign countries. The apocalyptic, as authors as different as Ernst Bloch and Norman Cohn remind us, has traditionally been linked to hopes for social transformation. The post-Augustinian revival of millenarianism by Joachim of Fiore was taken over by zealous Franciscans whose anger at the papacy and the wealthy would leave its mark upon the numerous anarchic sects and revolutionary uprisings that arose against the Church and nobility throughout medieval Europe. The apocalyptic of Left Behind, by contrast, is uncoupled from any concrete demand for social justice, and in fact advocates a political stance that opposes peace, especially in the Middle East, on principle, for the very reason that the Antichrist will dangle the vision of international harmony before a gullible globe as an irresistible lure for setting up his one-world government. Indeed, such humanistic ideas as religious tolerance, the rule of international law, and nuclear disarmament are all exposed in the novels as being ruses of the devil.

The categorical rejection of working for peace as playing into the hands of the Antichrist results less in the active embrace of war as a means of achieving concrete foreign policy objectives than in a viewpoint which greets the outbreak of wars as confirmation that the Millennium is near. The readiness to approve of wars as fitting into the workings of a divine plan would make this brand of twenty-first-century American millenarianism an ideological partner, albeit a volatile one, to the neo-imperialism of the second Bush administration. There are, to be sure, less widely known groups of evangelicals whose millenarian expectations have led them to support nuclear disarmament, human rights, environmentalism, and other causes promoting for social justice. Indeed, the sharpest critics of premillennialist literalism are to be found among evangelicals themselves. The eclipse of political and ethical dilemmas by the question of individual salvation among most prophecy writers, who repeatedly exhort those not yet born-again to accept Christ so that they may escape the horrors of the Tribulation, nevertheless betrays a fatalistic inertia that causes their doctrines to drift into antinomianism. Take, for example, the words of doomsday popularizer Hal Lindsey regarding the inevitability of World War III: “It’s clearly not going to get better before Jesus comes; it’s going to get worse. Christ’s reentry to this planet is to save it from self-destruction, not to ascend a throne that we have provided for Him” (281). Lindsey is merely one among numerous prophecy writers who since the Progressive Era have dismissed social reform as utterly futile in combating social, political, and moral evils, which they believe will only increase as the end-times draw near. Questions of morality thus become effectively cast aside when politics is reduced to matter of choosing between actions that hasten the end and those that delay or “distract” from it.

This rationale is explicitly at work in the activities of the so-called “Christian Zionists,” evangelicals who, believing in the decisive importance of Israel’s role in the apocalypse, have become fervent supporters for the hard-line, expansionist policies of the Israeli Right.³ Christian Zionists raised $14 million in 2001 alone to resettle diaspora Jews in Israel. They have also moved to cut off American financial support to Israel when it seemed that the Israelis and Palestinians were taking serious steps towards peace–when Ehud Barak, early in his ill-fated administration, attempted to move the peace process forward with the Wye River accord. In response, the conservative Christian Israel Public Affairs Committee, which was set up to garner Christian support for Israel, tried to block $1.6 billion in U.S. aid (Gorenberg 169). Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu have recognized the Christian Right as the most steadfast backers of their aggressive policies against the Palestinians, and the Sharon government frequently provides expenses-paid trips to the Holy Land for leaders of the Christian Right and holds meetings to discuss strategy with the Christian Coalition and other groups (Goldberg; Engel). But according to the apocalyptic narrative of the Christian Zionists, of which Left Behind presents an elaborately detailed illustration, all Jews will have either been killed or become converts to Christianity by the time of Christ’s return.

III. Onward Gnostic Soldiers

It is thus in their fixation on Israel as the place where the decisive end-time prophecies will be fulfilled that premillennialist eschatology effectively crosses over into antinomianism–the doctrine that the redeemed no longer need uphold the moral law. Although the term was first coined by Martin Luther to condemn the views of Johannes Agricola, who took the notion of justification by faith to the extreme of maintaining that a Christian’s salvation cannot be altered even by the intentional commission of sins, antinomian beliefs can be traced to the Gnostic repudiation of the Decalogue as an instrument of oppression devised by the tyrannical creator deity, Yahweh, to keep human beings in a state of spiritual bondage. Saint Paul, like Luther, was acutely aware of the attraction that an amoral interpretation of Christ’s sacrifice as the extirpation of the Law might exert upon new converts to the faith, and so devoted considerable energy in his Letters to affirming the holiness of the commandments. Early Christianity, to be sure, was an apocalyptic sect; although Paul and the Apostles believed that the Second Coming was at hand, they discouraged speculation about when it would actually occur. Instead, they stressed the responsibility of the Christian to lead a moral life after he or she had become converted, that is, had undergone the symbolic death that leads the believer to a new life free from the dominion of sin. The believer must now live in the awareness of having died to sin, “but the life he lives, he lives to God” (Rom. 6.10). Contemporary premillennialism, on the other hand, is almost entirely consumed by the specifics of end-time speculation, and its central fantasy of the Rapture amounts to a blithe denial of physical death: a fantasy that–if I may be permitted to reverse one of Luther’s most memorable metaphors–squeezes this second life granted by salvation into the bowels leading out of earthly existence, in effect dispensing with the deeply Christian idea of conversion as a traumatic encounter which slays and recreates the believer as a subject–in this world.

The question thus emerges as to whether premillennialism represents a deformation of Christian orthodoxy, or if it springs from an entirely different spiritual tradition. Let us recall here Harold Bloom’s thesis that Americans erroneously believe themselves to be Christian, but are in fact Gnostic without knowing it. In Bloom’s view, the exaltation of the self, the democratic–and anti-intellectual–mistrust of external authority, the vast spaces of the frontier, and the privileging of experience over doctrine in the churches have given rise to a kind of spirituality in the United States that has little in common with historical Christianity but is in fact a modern recurrence of ancient heresies. Such religiosity extends as well to the secular understanding of American nationhood, as the insistence upon the exceptionality of America’s destiny likewise commands the zeal of a religious devotion. For the ancient Gnostic as well as for the American Religion, the individual self is the irrevocable source of authenticity and truth, over and against any actual or imagined collectivity:

urging the need for community upon American religionists is a vain enterprise; the experiential encounter with Jesus or God is too overwhelming for memories of community to abide, and the believer returns from the abyss of ecstasy with the self enhanced and the otherness devalued (Bloom 27).

It is not repentance or brotherly love that is the defining attribute of Gnostic salvation but freedom–freedom from history, the cosmos, nature, as well as from morality itself. Gnosticism holds that the created world (and also the human body and soul) was designed by the Demiurge as a prison to hold the divine sparks, or pneuma, taken from the uncreated abyss of light. The politically explosive, even paranoiac character of Gnosticism in both its ancient and latter-day manifestations can be deduced from its account of the creation, which presents a cosmology in the form of a conspiracy theory. The minions of the tyrannical creator, the Archons, work to keep humanity in a state of ignorance regarding its own true, alien nature as well as the dark purpose of the created world. Gnostic salvation thus comes in the form of a liberating knowledge that awakens human beings to the presence of a divine spark hidden deep within the soul. The American Religion, Bloom argues, asserts this harsh dualism between spirit and matter in its “deepest knowledge,” which is the conviction of American Fundamentalists “that they were no part of the Creation, but existed as spirits before it, and so are as old as God himself” (57).

The Gnostic valorization of freedom at the same time articulates an exceedingly vindictive denunciation of the physical world, a condemnation far harsher than any perspective found in Christian orthodoxy. The radical dualism of Gnosticism means that its adherents assume a drastically different spiritual posture from that of the Christian believer; whereas the latter experiences saving knowledge as the increasing awareness of his or her sinful condition in a divinely created cosmos, the Gnostic sets out to regain his or her innocence in a world that is the misshapen and unregenerate product of a malign deity. Thus, Gnosticism, in order to sustain its belief in the innocence of the uncreated spark, must project all that is baleful and malevolent onto the cosmos itself. The assertion of this insuperable divide between one’s inviolable self and the woeful prison of matter generates an equally intractable sense of indifference to one’s actions in the world, since such indifference, which is actively assumed out of disdain and horror and thus not to be mistaken for detached quietude, demonstrates the powerlessness of the Demiurge to corrupt the divine spark within. According to Bloom, the American Religion is likewise defined by the conviction that the world and one’s actions in it are irrelevant to the purity of the self: “If your knowing ultimately tells you that you are beyond nature, having long preceded it, then your natural acts cannot sully you. No wonder then, that salvation, once attained, cannot fall away from the American Religionist, no matter what he or she does” (265). Furthermore, if the creation is truly identical to the Fall, and the physical world reveals the designs of an antagonistic deity, then the sacrosanct self becomes defined according to its hostility against the order of being. For the American Religion’s worship of freedom is at the same time a war against otherness, which it understands as “whatever denies the self’s status and function as the true standard of being and of value” (Bloom 16).

The premillennialist doctrine of the Rapture is thus distinctly Gnostic in character, as its image of mass ascent recalls not only the taking into heaven of Enoch and Elijah in the Hebrew Bible (both of whom are central figures in the Gnostic lore of the Kabbalah) but also the crucifixion of the Gnostic Christ, who, according to the heretical accounts, did not suffer a shameful and agonizing death but was instead transfigured by the bliss of illumination. The proximity of premillennialist eschatology to the heretical religiosity of the Gnostics and the enormous gulf separating it from Christian orthodoxy also becomes apparent in the fact that Left Behind emphatically breaks with the doctrine of original sin, as all children under the age of ten, as well as the unborn, are transported into heaven. What is astonishing is how this typically secular belief in the “natural innocence” of human beings, often derided by religious conservatives as a shallow, overly optimistic understanding of human nature, surfaces in a narrative in which the majority of the world’s population will be annihilated in horrifying catastrophes. There is, however, no contradiction that American Gnosticism, in its very creedlessness, has not yet been able to unify, least of all the perhaps altogether unprecedented phenomenon of an imperial eschatology–the convergence of millenarian fervor and imperialist domination that currently informs the foreign policy of the Gnostics of the American Right. The early, pre-Constantinian Church, Jürgen Moltmann notes, prayed “may thy kingdom come and this world pass away,” but once Christianity became the official religion of the empire, the imperial church came to pray instead “pro mora finis,” for the delay of the end (162). The know-nothing eschatologists of the Rapture, on the other hand, espouse an imperial politics while praying the prayers of the disinherited who yearned for divine intervention to destroy the empire!

The contradiction of an imperialist apocalypse is thus a coherent manifestation of a heretical spiritual tradition that has survived systematic persecution by taking on forms which mask its origins. The God who works miracles in mechanistically fulfilling the predictions of his prophets exhibits aspects, on the one hand, of the God of the Pentateuch who rains frogs on Egypt and leaves manna on the desert floor every morning, and on the other, of the Demiurge derided by Captain Ahab for his automaton’s lack of creative intelligence in slapping together a jerrybuilt cosmos. According to Bloom, the American Religion is defined by a startling reversal of traditional Gnosticism and worships the Demiurge as God. In the contemporary instance, a God whose works are both visible and historical becomes not the subject of ridicule (as was the case for the ancient Gnostics), but rather idolized as a radically anthropomorphized divinity. Such a reversed Gnosticism belongs nonetheless to a rich and vital tradition of American thought and culture, as Emersonian self-reliance and the flourishing of antinomian dissent in the New World reflect unmistakably Gnostic preoccupations. In this new millennium, Gnostic forms of thought have become commonplace in popular culture, thanks in no small part to the ubiquity of New Age thinking that buttresses everything from conspiracy theories about UFOs to the psychobabble of our therapeutic culture. Gnostic concepts also dominate treatments of religious themes in films and literary works not distinguished by any explicit programmatic intent. Two recent Hollywood films, ostensibly about the nature of faith–M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs (2002) and Bill Paxton’s Frailty (2001)–attest to the insidious power of Gnostic doctrines to deflect ethico-religious dilemmas into fantasies of national idolatry.

IV. Post-Ironic Affirmations

In Signs, Mel Gibson plays a former Episcopalian minister named Graham Hess who has recently lost his faith after the death of his wife in a tragic road accident. The film opens with a shot of large, mysterious patterns set into the cornfield near his farmhouse, where he lives with his two small children and younger brother, a former baseball player named Merrill Hess, played by Joaquin Phoenix. Shrugging off the crop circles as a prank, Graham remains defiantly skeptical in the face of mounting evidence that an alien invasion is imminent. When the evening news shows UFOs hovering over many of the major cities of the world, Merrill suggests to Graham that there might be a divine purpose at work behind their arrival. Graham curtly dismisses any such notion of providence, saying that the last words of his wife, “swing away,” were spoken under the haze of pain-killers which caused her to fixate on a memory of watching Merrill playing in a baseball game, and that this incident proved to him that the cosmos is ruled purely by chance. Once the aliens attack, however, Graham realizes that his refusal to believe in the aliens’ existence has endangered the lives of his family, and so renounces his skepticism. At the film’s close, when Merrill confronts an alien that has taken his nephew hostage, Graham suddenly recognizes the true import of his wife’s final words–he directs Merrill to the baseball bat mounted in the wall behind him and instructs him to “swing away” at the extraterrestrial, thereby saving the life of his son. Even his son’s asthma proves providential, as an attack closes his lungs and thus saves him from the toxic gases emitted by the alien.

Apart from the blatant consumerism of the film’s theology, in which the workings of God are made to fit the demands of a neat and tidy Hollywood resolution (God reduced tautologically to the mere function of deus ex machina), Signs is notable for its dimensionless literalism, its outright lack of metaphoric depth in its portrayal of the aliens. Science fiction, as a speculative genre, is rich in allegorical potential–one need only to call to mind the parable of Western imperialism in H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, in which Great Britain gets to suffer the fate it inflicted upon the peoples it colonized. In Signs, by constrast, the aliens do not “stand for” anything at all; still less do they incarnate “something outside the rational chain of events, a lawless impossible real,” to which, according to Zizek, the birds in Hitchcock’s film attest (Looking Awry 105). The aliens’ sole purpose, rather, is to serve as the pretext for the dubious conversion of the film’s protagonist.

In the “post-ironic” age we are now said to inhabit (especially after 9/11), in which one is called upon to renounce excessive skepticism and to embrace the responsibilities born of a new solemnity and earnestness, the very structure of the suspense narrative undergoes a dramatic shift. In earlier narratives about the supernatural, the genre of the “fantastic” as elucidated by Tzvetan Todorov in his classic study, the primary tension often emerges from and is defined by a protagonist’s–and the reader’s–activity of questioning whether or not ghosts or other paranormal beings really exist. The strategy of the post-ironic film about the supernatural hinges upon the surprise disclosure that the protagonist, with whom the audience has identified from the beginning of the narrative, is already dead. This narrative turn was made famous by Shyamalan’s earlier film, The Sixth Sense (1999), and also by Alejandro Aminabar’s The Others (2000), both of which interpellate the viewer as a ghost that has refused to acknowledge the fact of his or her own death. What these films seek to accomplish, whether by therapeutic ministrations or by the realization that death bridges two extensions of monotonous life, is the domestication of what Zizek, following Kierkegaard, calls the “ultimate horror,” which is not death but the inability to die (Ticklish Subject 292).

To get a better sense of the ideological shifts at work in the post-ironic age, let us imagine a version of Signs made according to an alternate set of symbolic coordinates. In a perhaps more traditionally “ironic” version, Graham, instead of being convinced of God’s nonexistence after the death of his wife, actively inveighs against God as being cruel and malicious. Indeed, he would look upon the alien invasion as another instance of a bored and sadistic deity making a plaything out of human fate, that God’s gratuitous reaping of human life is no different from the aliens’ “harvesting” of human victims, and even raising the blasphemous suggestion that God himself is an alien. Such a film, regardless of whether it would go on to refute or validate these hypotheses, would not only achieve the narrative coherence missing from the existing Signs but would also directly confront the influence of Gnostic cosmology and its valuations. For what is at stake in Gnosticism is the human will that–often unwittingly–turns God into the devil. Indeed, in this re-imagining of Signs, the aliens would indeed come to represent something–the repressed alien God who was once identified with the blissful, uncreated abyss but now returns in the guise of the exterminating deity of a wished-for Armageddon.

Signs, by contrast, presents the audience with a false wager, a dilemma about the existence of God that remains extrinsic to the strange events linked to an alien invasion, being instead programmatically foisted onto the eruption of the marvelous. As mentioned earlier, when Graham and Merrill first talk about the arrival of the alien ships, Gibson sternly rejects Merrill’s view that this fantastic event confirms the existence of a providential God governing the structure of the cosmos. The film therefore proceeds to muddle the distinction between faith and belief–that is, while faith is related to a binding symbolic pact, such as the covenant between God and Abraham or the Christian understanding of Christ’s death on the cross, one can “believe” in the existence of God (or in other deities or spirits for that matter) without necessarily having “faith” in Him, as in The Brothers Karamazov, where Ivan Karamazov condemns God for being unjust and unmerciful. Instead of developing Graham’s lack of faith as a refusal of the paradoxes of theodicy, Signs suppresses the question of faith by displacing it onto that of belief–Graham’s lack of faith in God translates seamlessly over the course of the film into his unwillingness to believe in the menace posed by the aliens, even as newscasts show armadas of flying saucers preparing to land and one of his neighbors is attacked by them. The narrative takes pains to emphasize the fact that his refusal to see the invasion as proof of God’s existence is what keeps from him taking reasonable steps to defend his family. In the film’s ideological universe, God can be counted on to demonstrate in astonishingly explicit terms that every tragedy or loss unequivocally serves higher and beneficial purposes, while skepticism is revealed as nothing less than a denial of reality itself. Signs thus shares with Left Behind a world in which the unbeliever commits the sin of stubbornly persisting in disbelief regarding the objective miracles of the alien invasion or of the Rapture that takes place before his or her eyes. The fact that belief is validated by miracles experienced on a collective and public scale turns any skepticism into a kind of psychosis in the face of cataclysms being meted out by divine power.

It is impossible to overlook the ideological revision of Christianity at work here, in which the believers are protected by a God dealing in miraculous contrivances. The very crudeness of a consumerist theology in which belief draws the reward of earthly well-being undermines the traditional Christian idea that faith exposes the believer to suffering and hardships, often with tragic consequences. If Signs were about the properly Christian dilemma of faith, Graham’s belief in God might in fact lead him to place his children at terrible risk, not the other way around. He would do this not because he doesn’t love his children, but rather because faith, as the suspension of the ethical and the universal, demands that no other relationship come before the relationship of the faithful with God. I am taking Kierkegaard’s reading of the story of Abraham’s call to sacrifice Isaac as paradigmatic for the Christian conception of faith. The recent Gnostic rewriting of this tale in Bill Paxton’s Frailty (2001) proves quite instructive in its distance from Kierkegaard’s interpretation, with divergences that lay bare in compelling ways the spiritual dimensions of the new imperial politics.

V. My So-Called Jihad

Set in a small town in Texas in the late 1970s, Frailty stars Bill Paxton (who also directs) in the role of Meiks, a working-class father of two young boys named Adam and Fenton. His wife having died giving birth to the younger son, Meiks is presented as an exemplary single parent, devoted and caring, warm-hearted yet firm. He is shown preparing meals for his sons, making jokes with them, helping them with their math problems, and so on. But one night, the father comes rushing into the bedroom shared by his sons to tell them that he has received a vision from God. An angel had come bearing the message that God had chosen him and his family to fight the demons that have been unleashed on earth in preparation for the final clash between God and the devil. The younger son Adam readily accepts his father’s account as truth, whereas Fenton shrinks in horror, believing that his father has gone insane and is having homicidal delusions. Subsequent visitations by the angel reveal to Meiks the weapons he is to use–a length of metal pipe, an axe, and a pair of gardening gloves–and he receives the first list of names of the demons he is to “destroy” (Meiks makes much of this distinction between “killing people” and “destroying demons.”) Then, late one night he returns home carrying a bound and gagged middle-aged woman whom he has kidnapped. When Fenton implores him to spare her life, Meiks responds by admitting he too doesn’t want to go through with slaughtering the woman, but God’s commands must nevertheless be obeyed.

The fundamentalist literalism behind the belief in the Rapture is echoed here in the father’s conviction that he can discern who, among those who look like ordinary persons, is actually a demon. When Meiks removes his white gloves and touches the flesh of his victims, he goes into convulsions while receiving visions of the evil acts they committed. Conversely, when Fenton brings the incredulous town sheriff to the house to show him the body of a recently executed victim, the father crumples over and begins to vomit after killing the officer, sickened at having been forced to take an innocent life to protect their sacred mission. Revealing that Fenton has been named by the angel as being one of the demons, thereby accounting for the boy’s reluctance to fight the forces of evil, Meiks declares that, in this one instance, he is determined to disprove the angel’s message. In a memorable scene portraying the manipulative, guilt-inducing power in a father’s admission of his own impotence, Meiks confides to his terrified elder son, just before locking him up in the dungeon built for their victims, “You’re my son, and I love you more than my own life. You know what’s funny about all this, Fenton? I’m afraid of you.”

The father’s words prove prophetic when, after being released from the basement, Fenton is commanded by his father to prove his newfound faith by executing their latest victim. Handed the axe, the son turns the weapon against his father, killing him instead. The guilt assumed by the elder son goes beyond this act of parricide–it is later revealed, in a characteristically post-ironic narrative twist, that the skeptical Fenton is really the “God’s Hands” serial killer sought by the FBI, not the believing younger brother Adam, who had willingly participated in the “destruction” of the demons. At the end of the film, the audience learns that it is in fact Adam who is telling the story in flashback while impersonating Fenton, in order to trap the FBI agent who is the latest “demon” to appear on his list. Thus, as in Shyamalan’s better-known Sixth Sense, the thrill experienced by the audience at the conclusion of the film consists of the overturning of its spectatorial position (“the protagonist has been dead all along!”). In Frailty, the two characters with whom the viewer identifies–the FBI agent trying to solve the killings, the rational and compassionate “good” son who was traumatized by his father’s gruesome actions–are revealed in the end to have committed, respectively, matricide and serial murder. Such a dispossession of the spectator’s points of identification must not be understood simply as an effect of the film’s creators resorting to the only narrative trick still capable of taking today’s audiences by surprise. Rather, the “real story” that emerges once the skeptical point of view is feigned and then discarded validates the bloody undertakings of the father and younger son. The film establishes that, far from being a deluded madman, Meiks, as well as his son Adam, does possess the supernatural ability to perceive the demons hiding in human form. Indeed, Frailty essentially indicts the audience for its very presumption of critical distance; in the film’s moral universe, skepticism and doubt are attributes belonging to demons who murder their own parents, whereas ruthless, exterminating violence defines the actions of the righteous.

Of course, religious (and political) faith does involve the overcoming of skepticism and doubt, and ruthless violence might even be the very action it enjoins. Indeed, Kierkegaard was drawn to Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac for precisely these reasons: to affirm the incommensurability between the moral law and the divine injunction. The Danish philosopher was well aware that virtue, common sense, and morality easily become obstacles to the unconditional commitment demanded by God. Frailty explicitly alludes to Abraham’s ordeal, when Adam, having thrown off the pretense of being Fenton, tells the FBI agent that his father had been commanded by God to kill his son: “You see, God asked Dad to destroy his son, much like he asked Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. But Dad couldn’t do it, and God didn’t take pity on Dad like he did Abraham.” Doesn’t the category of the religious necessarily involve in some fundamental sense the repudiation of the ethical and of any notion of the good, defined in human terms? And if faith is ultimately to be opposed to ethics, reason, and common sense, doesn’t Frailty merely present an updated illustration of Kierkegaard’s idea of the teleological suspension of the ethical? The answer is no, and we may proceed by looking at how the film significantly deviates from Kierkegaard’s understanding of Abraham’s sacrifice.

In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard defines the “paradox of faith” as the idea that the “single individual is higher than the universal” (70). Thus, insofar as the person of faith has “an absolute duty” to God, for Abraham the ethical/universal is the temptation which seeks to dissuade him from acting according to his faith. Kierkegaard contrasts the trial of the man of faith with that of the classical tragic heroes Agamemnon and Brutus. The mythical Achaean king and the defender of the Roman republic are forced to sacrifice their children for the sake of a greater social good–the necessity that compels them is thus the object of public approval and veneration and their actions are recognized as ethical. Abraham, on the other hand, is ready to commit an act of killing without any reference to the higher good of ethics. His sacrifice of Isaac is emphatically not for the sake of preventing a greater evil, and serves no purpose other than the fact that God has commanded it. One should stress here the wrong-headedness of attempts to critique the story of Abraham and Isaac as an oppressive myth that perpetuates the violence of patriarchal authority by referring to real-life instances where fathers have murdered their own children, such as the father who stabbed his daughter to death in California in 1990 or the 1996 case of Robert Blair in New Hampshire (in both instances, the father appealed to the biblical story of Abraham to justify and explain his act of killing), as detailed by anthropologist Carol Delaney in her book, Abraham on Trial: The Social Legacy of Biblical Myth (1998). According to Kierkegaard, God’s terrible commandment not only separates Abraham from the ethical, but also renders his dilemma incommunicable to others. The incommunicable nature of his ordeal thus makes Abraham either a man of faith or a murderer, but what his faith precisely excludes–the identity he is not ready to assume–is the “middle position” between the two, namely that of the murderer who makes the excuse that God commanded him to do it.

In Frailty, by contrast, the divine command given to Meiks lacks the mystifying and futile character of the injunction imposed upon Abraham. He is ordered to kill Fenton not because his faith is being tested through an ordeal, but rather for the very pragmatic reason that his elder son is a demon and thus places in jeopardy the family’s mission of fighting the forces of evil. If the film were faithful to Kierkegaard and had evoked the Abrahamic sacrifice in all of its appalling gratuitousness, Meiks would have been called to slay his innocent, obedient younger son. Similarly, whereas according to Kierkegaard, Abraham’s faith brings him into contradiction with the moral law, the divine command in Frailty never conflicts with the demands of the ethical universal. Meiks’s failure to slaughter Fenton is presented both as a breach of moral necessity and as a lapse in practical judgment, as it results in his own death at the hands of his son. Thus, the divine injunction is not experienced as radically and inexplicably horrifying; rather, Meiks maintains to the end the illusion that he is acting on behalf of the good when God imposes upon him the command to do what is terrible. Frailty thus domesticates the terrible command by keeping it on the side of the moral law and collective good (as opposed to the Kierkegaardian constellation of the divine injunction/transgression of the law/separation from the universal). As such, the film fails to achieve the status of what Zizek calls the “properly modern post- or meta-tragic situation,” which comes about when “high necessity compels me to betray the very ethical substance of my being” (Did Somebody 14).

VI. Collateral Sacrifices

Frailty also avoids the problematic of secrecy that is decisive in Kierkegaard’s account of faith, invoking instead a theology of visible redemption through its supernatural motif whereby Meiks and his younger son Adam are able to distinguish, simply by laying their hands on others, which persons are beings of unregenerate evil. A similar plot device is to be found in Left Behind, in which the saved can be distinguished from non-believers by the mark of God on their foreheads–a mark, furthermore, that can be perceived only by other believers. Of course, one can object that Frailty‘s basis in the Bible is tenuous at best anyway, since Jesus Christ and his disciples went around casting out demons, not slaying those possessed by them. But one may counter that such deviations from the Gospel are far too common in religious contexts across the American cultural and political landscape to be regarded as mere exceptions to orthodoxy, as a theology of visible salvation is not of Christian provenance but profoundly Gnostic in inspiration. The mystical ability to fathom the hidden guilt of others or instantly recognize their status as unbelievers may give rise in these two instances to an infantile view of good and evil which easily lends itself to the demonizing of one’s political enemies, but the vision of sanctified violence that emerges at the end of Frailty bears particular relevance for the way in which wars have been conducted in the post-Cold War order. For the violence in the film is sanctified precisely insofar as it is surgical–its victims, with the one regrettable instance of collateral damage in the town sheriff (for which the film implicitly faults Fenton’s skepticism), are without exception murderers and pedophiles who would otherwise get away with their crimes.

The idea of surgical killing, which is claimed to annihilate enemy combatants and matériel while minimizing civilian casualties, was of course a major legitimating factor for the recent war of conquest against Iraq as well as for the Persian Gulf War of 1991. Images of computer guidance systems directing bombs and missiles to Iraqi military targets dominated the television newscasts during the previous conflict, while the first Bush administration successfully kept pictures of dead and wounded bodies, the traditional imagery of war, off the air. The Air Force, however, announced on 15 March 1991 that 93.6% of the tonnage of the explosives that fell on Iraq were in fact conventional bombs, belying the surgical nature of the destruction inflicted upon Basra, the second largest city in Iraq before the war (Walker). Furthermore, even as the destroyed and damaged equipment of the Iraqi army was subjected to meticulous examination, the military suppressed any precise count of enemy casualties, giving a 50% margin of error to a total estimate of 100,000 Iraqi dead, a margin that, in the words of Margot Norris, “reduces the dead to phantoms of speculation” (242). Operation Desert Storm, celebrated as an overwhelming victory for the United States and its allies, concluded with the mass incineration of retreating Iraqi troops on what has become known as the Highway of Death. In a single month, a greater tonnage of bombs was dropped on Iraq than were used during all of World War II, while scarcely a photo of its human cost appeared in the U.S. media. The Western riposte to Islamist suicide attacks is to massacre from long range, using weaponry such as depleted uranium shells, which cause long-term environmental damage and physiological harm in the form of cancer, birth defects, and poisoned ground-water.

Frailty makes explicit the inherent fantasy in the derealization of mass Arab casualties in its depiction of victims who, in spite of their normal, everyday appearance, fully deserve to be slaughtered. Because it lacks the essentially programmatic nature of Left Behind, which cannot but provoke in the nonfundamentalist reader the grotesque and suffocating sensation of being directly confronted by another’s obscene fantasy, Frailty renders with greater degrees of concreteness the ideological equivalent of a theology of visible salvation in the realm of politics. It baldly takes at his word the fatuous, Manichean utterances of the current President Bush (America’s enemies “hate” freedom; Americans value “innocent life”) in portraying a pair of serial killers who insist that they do value “innocent life.” Yet the film’s over-identification with post-9/11 militaristic moralizing is constrained by certain ideological limitations. Aside from its Gnostic revision of the Abraham story, Frailty fails to unsettle the belief of the “God’s Hands” that the victims of their jihad are anything but irredeemably depraved. The film in this sense falls in line with a president who self-righteously condemns the nations he considers hostile to his administration’s interests as “evil.” The skeptical viewer will no doubt be tempted to look with irony upon the final revelation that the calling received by the “God’s Hands” is true and divinely inspired. But an ironic interpretation remains wholly external to the narrative–nothing within the storyline authorizes such a stance. Instead, Frailty anticipates a “fundamentalist” reading by evoking the genre of the “superhero,” a comparison drawn by the young Adam (“we’re a family of superheroes that are going to help save the world”) when his father first shares the revelation of his own personal “war against evil.”

One thing that has changed after 9/11, now recognized by the Left as a “missed opportunity” for the United States to confront and reevaluate its role in the world, is the acceptance of ideas formerly associated with the religious fringe by the mainstream media. Time magazine’s cover story of 23 June 2002 on the popularity of the Left Behind series commended the novels for exemplifying American optimism in the face of tragedy and took pains to mute the criticisms offered by various religious scholars and theologians. As mentioned earlier, Jerry Jenkins, the more avuncular of Left Behind‘s co-authors, declaimed in somber, almost melancholic tones on ABC’s UpClose that their work is not fiction, although he stated that he personally wishes that it were. As further evidence of how their exterminist eschatology is no longer regarded as a fringe phenomenon, his interviewer failed to pose any probing questions about a doctrine with a questionable basis in the Bible that bears more than passing resemblance to the cosmology of the Heaven’s Gate cult, which committed mass suicide near San Diego in March 1997. Yet, even as the Christian fundamentalist fantasy ideology of the apocalypse serves to endorse for many the blindly destructive policies of the United States in the Middle East, its suicidal nature reveals that it cannot entirely extinguish the critical force of the genre to which it belongs. For insofar as the apocalyptic evokes the sweeping and total transformation of things as they are, the millenarianism of the Christian Right comprises its own unconscious indictment. The prophecies of the Bible, with their rage against arrogant empires and unjust authorities, have served as a source of hope for the dispossessed and disenfranchised–that is, for those who are in a position to appreciate the metaphoric dimension of the imagery of the apocalyptic. In the hands of the fundamentalists for whom such symbols appear emptied of any metaphoric resonance, the prophecies, especially that of the Rapture, have become a kind of time bomb set against the providential history of the United States itself. “We live after the failure of peoples,” writes Giorgio Agamben, implying that the entry of a people or nation into post-history is marked by their taking up the task of reckoning with their crimes and complicity in terror (142). It might very well be that the apocalypticism of this new millennium is a kind of last obstacle–a final, almost but not quite nakedly nihilistic outburst seeking to give American manifest destiny a moral justification–before Americans, too, begin to realize their place alongside all the other peoples of the world. Until then, we are all subject to the risk that this apocalyptic will perpetrate further atrocities in the course of discrediting itself, so that we may have to live through yet more tragedies before we recognize how we were already bankrupt.

Notes

1. The interview took place on ABC News show UpClose on 5 August 2002.

2. Accounting for the scarcity of attention accorded to the persecution of Christians in pagan literature, Sorel notes that “no ideology was ever more remote from the facts than that of the early Christians” (211).

3. Nicholas Veliotes, former assistant secretary of state for the Near East and South Asia, relates that then-President Reagan himself explained to him the basis for conservative Christian support for Israel in biblical prophecy: “in order for Armageddon to occur, Israel had to exist so that it could be destroyed. Hence, any possible threat to the Jewish state has to be opposed. In this view, the peace process itself is a threat that must be opposed” (15). See Veliotes.

Works Cited

• Agamben, Giorgio. Means without End: Notes on Politics. Trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000.
• Bloom, Harold. The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation. New York: Simon, 1993.
• Boyer, Paul. When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.
• Cloud, John. “Meet the Prophet: How an Evangelist and Conservative Activist Turned Prophecy into a Fiction Juggernaut.” Time 23 Jun. 2002: 50+.
• Engel, Matthew. “Meet the New Zionists.” The Guardian 28 Oct. 2002 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,820528,00.html>.
• Frailty. Screenplay by Brent Hanley. Dir. Bill Paxton. Perf. Bill Paxton, Matthew McConaughey, and Powers Boothe. Lions Gate, 2001.
• Goldberg, Michelle. “Antichrist Politics.” Salon 24 May 2002 <http://archive.salon.com/politics/feature/2002/05/24/dispensational/index.html>.
• Gorenberg, Gershom. The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount. New York: Free, 2000.
• Harris, Lee. “Al Qaeda’s Fantasy Ideology: War without Clausewitz.” Policy Review 114 (2002): 19-36.
• “Interview with Jerry Jenkins,” ABC News UpClose. ABC, New York. 5 Aug. 2002.
• Kagan, Robert. “Power and Weakness: Why the United States and Europe See the World Differently.” Policy Review 113 (2002): 3-28.
• Kaplan, Robert. Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos. New York: Random, 2001.
• Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling/Repetition. Trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983.
• LaHaye, Tim, and Jerry Jenkins. Left Behind. Wheaton: Tyndale, 1995.
• —. Apollyon. Wheaton: Tyndale, 1999.
• Lindsey, Hal. The Final Battle. Palos Verdes: Western Front, 1995.
• Moltmann, Jürgen. The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology. Trans. Margaret Kohl. London: SCM, 1996.
• The New Oxford Annotated Bible. Ed. Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger. Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 1984.
• Norris, Margot. Writing War in the Twentieth Century. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2000.
• Pilger, John. The New Rulers of the World. London: Verso, 2002.
• Rosen, Stanley. Hermeneutics as Politics. Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 1987.
• Signs. Screenplay by M. Night Shyamalan. Dir. M. Night Shyamalan. Perf. Mel Gibson, Joaquin Phoenix, Rory Culkin, and Abigail Breslin. Buena Vista, 2002.
• Sorel, Georges. Reflections on Violence. Trans. T. E. Hulme. New York: Peter Smith, 1941.
• Walker, Paul. “U.S. Bombing: The Myth of Surgical Bombing in the Gulf War.” War Crimes: A Report on United States War Crimes Against Iraq to the Commission of Inquiry for the International War Crimes Tribunal. Ed. Ramsey Clark et al. 1992 <http://deoxy.org/wc/wc-index.htm>.
• Zizek, Slavoj. Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?: Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion. London: Verso, 2002.
• —. For They Know Not What They Do. London: Verso, 1991.
• —. Looking Awry. Cambridge: MIT P, 1991.
• —. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso, 1997.
• —. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso, 1999.
• —. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London: Verso, 2002.

Steven Helmling

Department of English
University of Delaware
helmling@udel.edu

Fredric Jameson years ago characterized Adorno’s chief critical device or method as the “historical trope” (Marxism and Form 3-59), so it shouldn’t strike anyone as a novel claim that Adorno’s “constellation” displays affinities with other now-familiar devices of modernist art and literature–Eisensteinian montage, cubist collage, the Joycean “epiphany,” the Poundian “ideogram.” The young Adorno presumably first encountered the word’s relevant usages when he read Benjamin’s Trauerspiel in the late 1920s; however that may be, the word recurs in his work throughout his career, from “The Actuality of Philosophy” (1931) to the late pieces collected in Critical Models. Its connotations are diverse and often conflicting, and one could make an interesting study of such tellingly divergent uses, as well as an interesting speculation of the rarity of Adorno’s own second-level reflections on the word.¹ The present study, however, attempts nothing so comprehensive.² I want in this paper to unpack some of the implications of constellation as a critical practice and elicit their tension or contradiction (a word not necessarily a vitiation in Adorno’s usage, and in many contexts a term of high praise) with the overall program, derived from Hegel, that Adorno regularly calls “immanent critique.” To that end, I will consider constellation in relation to Walter Benjamin’s “dialectical image,” with which it has obvious but also qualified affinities, to the Gestalt psychology of Wolfgang Köhler, from which Adorno would have been anxious to distinguish it, and to the epic device of “parataxis” as Adorno commends Hölderlin’s use of it. I will end by bringing the issues that emerge to bear on the 1944 Dialectic of Enlightenment, co-authored with Max Horkheimer, and the curiously agitated stasis “motivating” its thematic of Western Civilization’s “progress” and “regress.”

ADORNO AND BENJAMIN

It is in his “Portrait of Walter Benjamin” that Adorno speaks most suggestively and, for his own practice, most revealingly, about the theory, the practice, and the effect, of Benjamin’s dialectical image:

The [Benjaminian] essay as form consists in the ability to regard historical moments, manifestations of the objective spirit, "culture," as though they were natural. Benjamin could do this as no one else. The totality of this thought is characterized by what may be called "natural history." He was drawn to the petrified, frozen or obsolete elements of civilization, to everything in it devoid of domestic vitality [...]. The French word for still-life, nature morte, could be written above the portals of his philosophical dungeons. The Hegelian concept of "second nature," as the reification of estranged human relations, and also the Marxian category of "commodity fetishism" occupy key positions in Benjamin's work. He is driven not merely to awaken congealed life in petrified objects--as in allegory--but also to scrutinize living things so that they present themselves as ancient, "ur-historical" and abruptly release their significance. Philosophy appropriates the fetishism of commodities for itself: everything must metamorphose into a thing in order to break the catastrophic spell of things. Benjamin's thought is so saturated with culture as its natural object that it swears loyalty to reification instead of flatly rejecting it [...] the glance of his philosophy is Medusan. (Prisms 233)

For us, there is peril in this assimilation of culture to nature, which we regard as the classic ruse of ideology. Our antidote, from Lévi-Strauss and Barthes, is to dissolve the category of nature entirely into culture–to “flatly reject,” in effect, to deny our critical practice any resort to, the category of nature at all. But for Adorno, the ruse itself is the first thing critique must grapple with–and it must do so “immanently,” that is, from the inside: critique must suffer the ruse of ideology, and even in a sense reproduce it from within, in the very course of the attempt to unmask it and undo its power. Hence the use, for Adorno and for Benjamin, of a critical device that permits just what our usual practice forbids, namely, a patience of, or tolerance for, transaction between categories (for example, nature/culture) that other styles of “external” critique would disjoin. An “external” critical practice insistently seeks to separate culture and nature, to fortify or sharpen or harden the putative antithesis between them, to (as it were) dis-ambiguate the mystifying conflation by recourse to which ideology sanctifies cultural/historical contingencies as natural necessities. By contrast, the practice of Benjamin and Adorno might here be thought of as a “motivated” re-ambiguation that again allows culture and nature access to each other in ways that can be critical of the binary from “inside,” ways impossible for any “external” construction of them as mutually exclusive. As Adorno elsewhere puts it:

For [Benjamin] what is historically concrete becomes image--the archetypal image of nature as of what is beyond nature--and conversely nature becomes the figure of something historical. (Notes 2: 226)

Hence it is a good thing, an opening to critical insight rather than an ideological lapse, that “in Benjamin the historical itself looks as though it were nature” (Notes 2: 226), or, even more provocatively, that Benjamin’s work “swears loyalty to reification instead of flatly rejecting it” (Prisms 233).³

It is this subversive evocation of the ideology of nature from within, “immanently,” that makes Benjamin’s “Denkbild” or “thought image” (and, I am of course arguing, Adorno’s constellation as well) a dialectical image:

[Benjamin] was right to call the images of his philosophy dialectical [...] the plan of his book on the Paris Arcades envisaged a panorama of dialectical images as well as their theory. The concept of dialectical image was intended objectively, not psychologically: the representation of the modern as the new, the past, and the eternally invariant in one would have become both the central philosophical theme and the central dialectical image. (Notes 2: 226-7)

The language here leaves room for some unclarity. The “representation of the modern as the new, the past, and the eternally invariant in one” would, presumably, be ideological–the world’s own self-representation–and hence a fit “object” (“philosophical theme”) for ideological exposé by way of the dialectical image. But the unclarity allows also the suggestion that the representation is itself the theme and the (dialectical) image. Hold this ambiguity–cognate with our culture/nature problem–in mind; we will recur to it throughout. For now, the passage implicates in the “dialectic” that the dialectical image achieves or allows not only nature/culture, but also “theory” and “image”–another categorical binary often operative, and often less consciously, than culture/nature, in critical practice. In Hegel, “picture-thinking” is quite specifically a pre- or proto-philosophical kind of consciousness–although survivals of it persist into the age, the consciousness, the practices of philosophy itself. More conventionally, though–by something like a Hegelian methodological fiction–it belongs to earlier phases of the unfolding story of the World-Spirit, in which the advent of theory or philosophy is itself an important milestone. And this evocation of the World-story reminds us, too, that for Hegel, the dialectic was ineluctably a temporal process, which is to say conceptualizable only in or as narrative. Image, by contrast, is spatial and atemporal–and to that extent a dialectical image would seem to be a kind of paradox. Yet what makes the “representation of the modern as the new, the past, and the eternally invariant in one” ideological is that it has already collapsed the narrative implicit in the given terms (modern, new, the past) into the non-narrative stasis of an “eternally invariant” condition. Hence the interest, when Adorno insists,

there are good reasons why [Benjamin's] is a dialectic of images rather than a dialectic of progress and continuity, a "dialectics at a standstill"--a name, incidentally, he found without knowing that Kierkegaard's melancholy had long since conjured it up. (Notes 2: 228)

Thus can a Marxist critique recuperate, “immanently,” the arch-bourgeois Kierkegaard, as himself an immanent sufferer, exemplar, critic and diagnostician of all the superstitions and humors (“melancholy”) that compound the bourgeois ideology and Lebenswelt. But more to the present point is that the critical practice of Adorno generally presents what might seem the paradox or contradiction of an insistently historicizing program, realized in a critical practice that is virtually never motivated by historical argument in the form of historical narrative. Hence the relevance of the formula “dialectics at a standstill,” which has become almost a slogan for Western Marxists and others for whom the forward momentum of nineteenth-century progressive (liberal) and/or revolutionary (Marxist) narratives of eventual (of course, diversely) happy endings have stalled in the steady-state nightmare of the twentieth century, where, as Adorno and Horkheimer starkly put it, “mankind, instead of entering into a truly human condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism” (xi). For a world at such an impasse, “dialectics at a standstill”–a non-narrative dialectic–is the only kind of dialectic that answers to our condition.

“Dialectics at a standstill” is, then, not only the ideological condition to be contested, but also the contestation’s method. Indeed, the passage from Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk from which the phrase comes makes just this point: “dialectics at a standstill–this is the quintessence of the method” (Arcades 865); elsewhere, quite simply, “image is dialectics at a standstill”; and, “only dialectical images are genuinely historical” (Arcades 463). Here again we observe the commutativity of the ideological ethos and the critical method. To link all this–not only ethos and method, but program as well–with dialectical image suggests another, related, contradiction latent in Adorno’s practice that can tell us much about his motives and his meanings. Since Hegel, the project, or desire, of broaching the “new” in the domain of Spirit has regularly generated figurations of loosening or liquifying formations inherited from the past that have “hardened” or “frozen” and thus become rigid and imprisoning. Hegel himself spoke of philosophy’s task in such terms, of “freeing determinate thoughts from their fixity” (Hegel 20); compare this with Hegel’s frequent formula that thought “sets in motion” thought-objects, former “certainties,” that had been stalled. Adorno likewise typically figures reification as a process of freezing, hardening, or congealing, and the critical process, by contrast, as one of softening, reliquifying, and so on, as we have already seen in the quotation above praising Benjamin’s attempt to “awaken congealed life in petrified objects” (Prisms 233). The task of immanent critique, as Adorno puts it elsewhere, is that “congealed” ideological thought “must be reliquified, its validity traced, in repetition” (Negative 97). Above we saw what I called a motivated ambiguation of culture and nature; here we have a cognate move, in that to “reliquify” so as to release or engender the new must entail a “repetition” of that which had been “congealed.” Also, regarding “its validity traced”: immanent critique seeks as much to recover what is valid in ideological congealments as to undo what is false.

Thus conceived, immanent critique might seem, itself, an ambiguously narrative process putting the forward motion of renewal in tension with the cyclical or static entrapments of repetition. But the ambiguity above, whereby narrative devolves into standstill, into impasse, into image, has its analogous playing-out in the reversal whereby figurations of critical, anti-ideological reliquification are displaced by their very opposite: by imageries of petrification, hardening, freezing, rigidifying, even killing. In the following passage, for example, Adorno’s discussion of Benjamin’s dialectical image generates, not for the first time (we have already seen it above in the passage from Prisms) the balefully minatory image of Medusa.

Benjamin's medusa-like gaze [...] turns its object to stone [...]. [It] froze [its object] to a kind of ontology [sc. hypostatization, reification, fetish] from the start [...]. This [...] was the spirit in which [Benjamin] restructured every element of culture that he encountered, as if the form of his intellectual organization and the melancholy with which his nature conceived the idea of something beyond nature, of reconciliation, necessarily endowed everything he took up with a deathly shimmer. (Notes 2: 228)

Here, it would seem, the “gaze” of the critic does to its object just what immanent critique and other projects of “dereification” aim to un-do: hardens it, turns it to stone, turns it into a thing. (A resort to etymology here seems worthwhile: “thing” in Latin is res, the root of “re-ification; in Greek, “thing” is ontos, the root of “onto-logy,” another “thing,” so to speak, that Benjamin’s “medusa-gaze” turns its object into–both the thing, we might say, and its ideological theorization by Heidegger; hence “ontology” as figure here for what Adorno variously calls “reification,” “hypostatization,” “fetishization.”) Indeed, the critic’s gaze does something very suggestive of killing the object, depriving it of life–besides Medusa’s own lethal power of petrification, such is the suggestion of “endowing” it “with a deathly shimmer.” In context, it is following this passage that the “dialectics at a standstill” passage appears–so there is a pointed connection between, or constellation of, the theme above of non-narrative stasis and the point here about death. In Benjamin’s

micrological method [...] the historical movement halts and becomes sedimented in the image. One understands Benjamin correctly if one senses behind each of his sentences the conversion of extreme animation into something static, in fact the static conception of movement itself. (Notes 2: 228)

Here, again, the critic “immanently” repeats, even suffers, the stasis of our modern ideological condition in a way to perform (“repeat”) that very condition–the “moment” of the process captured in the Medusa-image being that in which the critic enacts the “repetition” of that congealed, petrified condition, not (yet) its reliquification.

In his 1959 lectures on Kant, Adorno calls for a hermeneutic that, by entering the (objective) “force field” of a writer’s or a text’s problematic, allows the interpreter to “go beyond the immediate meaning on the page” (Kant’s 80). The Medusa image, fraught as it is with what Freud would call “antithetical” motifs, emboldens me to give this a try. In the myth, the Medusa’s power to petrify anyone who looks at her is defeated by Perseus, who contrives to approach her without looking, and at the crucial face-to-face moment, holds up to her a highly polished mirror. Medusa, seeing her own image, is herself turned to stone, and Perseus then decapitates her. He keeps her severed head, however, and in further adventures, he uses it as a weapon–a fright object with which to petrify new enemies. Adorno licenses us, I suggest, to read “Benjamin’s medusa-gaze” as having the power to do to ideology something like what Perseus’s mirror does to Medusa herself, as well as to do what Perseus uses Medusa’s severed head to do to further adversaries. This image, of Medusa’s petrifying power turned against itself and then appropriated for further use against other threats, suggests something of the reflexiveness, the “antithetical” character, that is, the capacity for “dialectical” reversals, as well as something of the ordeal, “the labour and the suffering of the negative,” incumbent on the (hero-) critic, encoded in Adorno’s project of immanent critique.

I have been arguing, in effect, that the dialectical image de-narrativizes the implicitly temporal or narrative course, from “repeat” to “reliquify,” of immanent critique. We might say the Medusa gaze of the dialectical image freezes the temporality of immanent critique into a frozen, static, petrified image. But we can also play this construction the other way, reversing its direction, to reinsert the dialectical image back into the story by assigning it a particular “moment” in the narrative. If immanent critique is meant to reliquify an antecedent hardening, then the Medusa-gaze would seem to belong to the prequel of the story: the moment of its object’s petrification would seem to be the indispensable narrative precondition for the repetition and reliquification to follow. But Adorno evokes the Medusa myth in a context that suggests an even more surprising narrative for the Medusa moment to be assigned its place in. In the passage in question, Adorno resorts to the Medusa-image in the context of Benjamin’s treatment of some contemporary neo-Kantian efforts to make common cause with “ontology”; whether he is talking about Heidegger himself here I am uncertain, but the point would seem to be that Benjamin’s Medusa-gaze “froze” this nascent ideology in advance of its own hardening: that its action, in other words, projected or anticipated before the fact what still, at the time, lay in the future. The petrification it operates in such a case is prospective, not retrospective, which is to say it is petrification for the first time, not as repetition. To adapt Ernst Bloch, there is (of course) a “not yet” of ideology as well as of utopia–between which could be inserted, as a mediation, the “not yet” of (immanent) critique itself as Benjamin projects it in the very last sentence of his book on Baudelaire: “with the upheaval of the market economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled” (Charles Baudelaire 176).

ADORNO VERSUS BENJAMIN

I have so far expounded Adorno’s sense of constellation and critique by way of Adorno’s remarks on Benjamin’s dialectical image–a way of proceeding that has obscured their differences. Benjamin’s critical practice is strongly marked, as is Adorno’s, by the work of Freud, though a Freud mediated by the Surrealists rather than, as for Adorno, by Nietzsche. We may risk the generalization that the Surrealist program was to inhabit the madness of the culture, to re-enact it from within, less (directly) to critique it, than to exhibit it–to insert themselves into the Freudian drama, we might say, in the role not of ego, but of id, on the evident premise that the ego, whatever its for-or-against posture toward the world, cannot be as “naturally” or as “immediately” transgressive as the id. The practice of the Surrealists typically embraced what Adorno would have regarded as an irrationalist faith that the real madness was reason, and unreason its only antidote or purge, if not quite its salvation or its utopian alternative. Benjamin seems to regard such a resort to madness with some ambivalence–almost as something like a desire unhappily forbidden him by reason of that obdurately quotidian sanity from which all his brilliance and all his bile were powerless to deliver him. Some such longing, or nostalgia, seems to me symptomatized in Benjamin’s sense of the world as a pallid, petrified, undead, fundamentally irrational waking dream, and the resistless momentum by which this “phantasmagoria” passes into “allegory” in all the diffuse senses Benjamin lent that word. Benjamin plays with a morbid-seeming identification with the dead and with death itself; you might say that in his work critique is playing possum–one of his most famous quotations, indeed, avows that critique itself long since left the land of the living.

Adorno was moved by the pathos of all this in the life and death of his friend, and I would bet that he had Benjamin in mind in section V of the Anti-Semitism chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment, in which the modern subject’s protective “mimesis” of the reified surrounding world is imaged as a feigned death entailing all too literally the spiritual consequences of the real thing. Adorno’s animated, even febrile critical style could never be confused with Benjamin’s passive-aggressive, mock-compliant “melancholy.” As for Freud, Adorno took him very seriously indeed, as one who rationalized the irrational, but he never rose to what would seem to be the irresistible bait of assimilating the “repeat/reliquify” course of immanent critique altogether to the Freudian “compulsion to repeat” (best known from section III of Beyond the Pleasure Principle [1920]), and to Freud’s ingenious technique of appropriating that compulsion, in eliciting the patient’s own transferential resistances, to the healing labor of the analysis.⁴ Adorno was wary of any assimilation of his own project to psychoanalysis (the closest he comes, and it is not very close, is his late lecture “The Meaning of Working Through the Past” [Critical Models 89-103]); and his work holds itself much more aloof from Freud than that of such colleagues as Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, or Herbert Marcuse, let alone Benjamin, whose methexis in Freud brings him closer to the Joyce of the “Circe” episode than to the practice of any member of the Frankfurt School. Adorno has his own distinctively critical “unhappy consciousness,” an “after-Auschwitz” moral askesis that, to say it again, long pre-dated the news of Auschwitz itself–but this is a vibrant, highly cathected affect, quite different from that of the “saturnine” or “melancholy” Benjamin, which looks, indeed, rather like the resigned, “stoic” ataraxia that Adorno so frequently diagnoses as among the more desperate symptoms of the despair engendered by our supposedly empowered, post-Enlightenment, “administered world.”

GESTALT

These tensions between Adorno’s doubts concerning Benjamin’s practice of the dialectical image–and their implications for the sort of work Adorno wants performed, what problems he wants addressed, in his developing practice of constellation–may be illuminated here by a consideration of Adorno’s wariness of the Gestalt psychology of Wolfgang Köhler. As we will see, Adorno treats Gestalt theory as ideology–constellation, we might say, in reverse. Adorno sounds caveats about Gestalt theory in his 1931 inaugural lecture, “The Actuality of Philosophy” (Adorno Reader 31-32); a quarter century later, he makes almost a kind of satire of Husserlian “intentionality” fidgeting in the unwelcome embrace of Gestalt psychology (Against Epistemology 158-62). Pertinent here is Adorno’s discussion of Kant’s “unity of apperception,” the ground on which, Adorno forcefully argues, Kant’s “subjective” and “objective” sustain each other. For Adorno compares Kant’s conception–that is, he juxtaposes it heuristically, or one might even say, he “constellates” it–with Gestalt theory (Kant’s 100-01). Adorno is writing here in the late 1950s, at a time when artists and poets often seized on Gestalt theory as a validation of avant-garde practices of the quick cut, the elision of transitions, and so on; other kinds of inquirers, too–Marshall McLuhan comes to mind–made a sort of ideology, or shorthand, all-purpose explanation, of “pattern recognition” (as Gestalt was frequently anglicized) as a key to all manner of novel, putatively “modern,” styles of consciousness. In this passage, Adorno’s discussion projects Gestalt as the ideological problem rather than its critical solution: like Kant’s “unity of apperception,” the functioning of Gestalt is “unconsciously synthetic,” thus effecting (false, familiarized, familiarizing) reconciliations or integrations of experiential fragmentariness.⁵ By these lights, Gestalt is an instance or model, indeed an epitome, of ideology as such: reflex and reinforcer of the habitual familiarizations, the ideological conditionings, the false reconciliations or “imaginary solutions to real contradictions” of the historically and culturally given.

But I am eliciting these implications of Adorno’s reservations about Gestalt because what they imply is what Adorno leaves unsaid here, namely the contrast with his ambitions for the constellation. I should caution here that Adorno sometimes uses the word “constellation” to designate historically given, that is, already familiarized, ideological arrays or Gestalts [for example, Critical Models 138, 260]; my usage henceforth will connote “constellation” in the sense Adorno valorizes, as a device with the potential to be turned, in somewhat the manner of the Brechtian V-effect, against such familiarizations (though just this dissident potential, of course, is what mid-century avant-gardists were seizing on in Gestalt). And as we’ll see, the word’s “antithetical” reversals of meaning are themselves indices of the “dialectical”-ness of Adorno’s immanent critique. We might say that these “antithetical” meanings–“constellation” as unconscious ideological synthesis versus “constellation” as consciousness-raising estrangement; “constellation” as object of critique, or as subject of it–are themselves a kind of constellation implying or encoding, concealing or de-familiarizing a narrative, that of the classic Enlightenment project summarized by Freud in the formula, “making the unconscious conscious.” Adorno may “repeat” an over-familiar constellation and then reliquify (or, Medusa-like, petrify) its “congelations”; or he may present an unfamiliar and even shocking juxtaposition, whose estrangement is to provoke a new and heightened consciousness of the ideological condition in which we are entrapped. The historical image that results, ideological and critical all at once, appropriates the critical force we saw Adorno ascribing to the Benjaminian dialectical image, turning it, immanently, to estranging or defamiliarizing, sc. critical or (Hegel) “negative” purposes.

MEDIATION

Most ideologically consequential in Adorno’s critique of Gestalt–consequential, I mean, for our thinking about constellation–is the issue of mediation. According to Kant’s “unity of apperception,” Husserl’s “intentionality,” and Gestalt theory alike, it is the mind that synthesizes or integrates disjunct bits of sense-data into a coherent whole or pattern; and as we have seen, this synthesis, under whatever name or construct, looks to Adorno like a virtual model of the operations of ideology. Adorno urges that such ideological Gestalt-components, the “fragmentariness” that Gestalt synthesizes, or, indeed, the fragments themselves, “stand in need of mediation” (Kant’s 100)–a complexly ideological indictment, but suffice it for now to say that in Adorno, “mediation” connotes dialectical self-consciousness, awareness of the negative, of contradiction, of non-identity, and of the “labor of conceptualization.” Enthusiasts of Gestalt theory counted it in the theory’s favor that it seemed to propose or promote a view of experience as “immediate,” a specifically positivist or “nominalist” naïveté or ideological mystification–one might even say, “Gestalt“–that Adorno consistently meant to combat. Yet versions of this (to Adorno, naïve) quest for “immediate experience” are pervasive throughout the early twentieth-century “modernist” arts, from the scruffiest anarchists of Dada and Surrealism to that most stiffly proper of reactionaries, T. S. Eliot. It would seem to be implicit in Adorno’s own frequent motif of “shock” as a way to awaken numbed perception, and it is clearly the program enacted in such modernist devices as montage, collage, and ideogram, devices mobilized by their authors expressly to suppress and subvert received habits of synthesizing, modulating, contriving transitions–in short, mediating–between the typically incongruous or dissonant elements they contrived to bring together. Like these modernist devices, in short, the constellation at the very least looks as if it is dispensing with mediation–which in the context of the left-to-Stalinist intellectual culture of the 1930s and 1940s was tantamount to dispensing with “dialectic” itself.

Here we see just one among a complex of “overdetermining” factors that motivated Adorno’s modernism to stage itself as an affront to such “dialectical” political orthodoxy. His own practice was meant, in emulation of the great modernists he consistently advocated against the socialist realist alarums of Georg Lukács, to repudiate orthodox dialectical materialism (“diamat,” in the neologizing party-speak Adorno so loathed) as a reified dogmatic system. In the Lukácsean optic, Adorno’s practice of the constellation, assembling disjunct elements in (seemingly) unmediated array, would seem as decadent as cubist collage, Eisensteinian montage, Poundian ideogram, or Joycean stream-of-consciousness. It would seem “idealist,” “subjective,” “decadent”–“immediate” not only in the proscribed sense of un-mediated (philosophically impossible) but im- or de-mediating (politically and philosophically delusional, i.e., ideological). Most pertinently, and in terms deriving from the authority of Marx and Lenin both, it would have seemed “un-dialectical.” (See, for example, Lukács’s essays “Realism in the Balance” and “The Ideology of Modernism.”) Lukács’s prose retains the composure of the platform debater; Adorno more characteristically vents exasperation, rejoining that Lukács, “the certified dialectician,” himself argues “most undialectically” in, for example, dismissing Freud and Nietzsche as irrationalists and therefore “fascists pure and simple.”

[Lukács] even managed to speak of Nietzsche's "more than ordinary ability" in the tone of a provincial Wilhelminian schoolmaster. Under the guise of an ostensibly radical critique of society he smuggled back the most pitiful clichés of the conformism to which that critique had once been directed. (Notes 1: 217).

If Lukács denounced modernist “im-mediation” as “undialectical” and “sick,” Adorno here agitates (at age 55, and with Stalin five years in the grave) a vehemence that revives all the indignation of his avant-garde youth against the “provincial”moldy-fig-ismthat prefers a false unity, an “extorted reconciliation,” to an unflinching evocation of all the contradiction and falsehood of our condition.

In Lukács, tellingly, the adjective “dialectical” often modifies the word “unity”: dialectic thus sustains a procedure for unifying or integrating disjunct and/or incommensurable things. In other words, for Lukács the point of dialectic should be to produce unity in phenomena and in settings where, presumably, it needs producing. Adorno’s sense is virtually the opposite, that the aim of dialectic should be to expose the contradictions that ideological appearance has falsely reconciled: to produce or expose disunity, contradiction, non-identity. Constellation serves this end by bringing diverse phenomena together and forcing their consideration together. The disjunction between the constellated items is very much the point. To Lukács, the gaps and disjunctions would be evidence of a failure to have done the dialectical work that is the sine qua non of critical activity–to put it another way, a failure of “mediation.” To Adorno, mediation that fills in the gaps between the disjuncta would be ideological, homogenizing, causing the disjuncta to “lose their difference” (as Roland Barthes used to say [for example, S/Z 3]). For Adorno, the point of mediation would be to render, even “exaggerate,” the disjunctions, the contradictions that, for Lukács, they should unify. To Lukács, Adorno’s constellation would exemplify the same spurious and “sick” immediacy on offer in Beckett, Kafka, Freud and the other “decadent” modernists Lukács deplored: a mere “symptom” rather than a critical “negation” of the degenerate bourgeois cultural surround.

Adorno’s immanent critique, by contrast, stipulates that critique cannot hold itself above (or “outside”) the predicaments on which it aspires to offer critical comment. Since critique cannot help but participate in the culture’s “symptomatics,” it had best own this liability, and make of it, to the extent possible, a quickening instantiation of the challenge to be met, the problem to be addressed, thereby amplifying critique’s potential for dramatizing critical effort and ambition–“the labor and the suffering of the negative”–as such. Adorno agrees with Lukács in reprehending false or naïve “immediacy,” but his “constellational” view of mediation gives him a very different take on the evidence from Lukács’s. I don’t pretend always to understand why Adorno approves one work or artist–or indeed, theorist (for example, Freud, Nietzsche, Weber)–as dialectical and mediated, and damns another as deficient in these qualities; and to the objection that Adorno is “merely” making heavy philosophical weather of his personal tastes, I at least would not always be able to muster a very cogent reply. But worth mention here is the move that we might call, borrowing one of Adorno’s own most suggestive rubrics, “Dialectic In Spite of Itself” (Against Epistemology 49-50), by which Adorno often manages to recuperate (or “rescue”) his critical targets from his own critiques of them.⁶ But whereas Lukács casts these matters in terms of decadence and disease–his “Healthy or Sick Art?” only makes explicit a metaphorics pervasive in his work–Adorno stages the issue rather in terms of ideological appearance, “magic,” and “myth.” An especially pertinent instance for our purposes is Adorno’s exchange with Benjamin over an excerpt (on Baudelaire) of the Arcades Project that Benjamin submitted for publication in the Frankfurt School journal in 1938. Much to Benjamin’s surprise, Adorno reacted unfavorably: “motifs are assembled but they are not elaborated”; Benjamin’s materials, his trouvées, sit nakedly on the page, un-“mediated” by “theory”; the ideological result is that Benjamin’s “ascetic refusal of interpretation only serves to transport [the subject matter] into a realm quite opposed to asceticism: a realm where history and magic oscillate […].”

Unless I am very much mistaken [writes Adorno to Benjamin], your dialectic is lacking in one thing: mediation. You show a prevailing tendency to relate the pragmatic contents of Baudelaire's work directly and immediately to adjacent features in the social history and [...] economic features of the time. [...] you substitute metaphorical expressions for categorical ones [...] [so that] one of the most powerful ideas in your study seems to be presented as a mere as-if [...]. I regard it as methodologically inappropriate to give conspicuous individual features from the realm of the superstructure a "materialist" turn by relating them immediately, and perhaps even causally, to certain corresponding features of the substructure. The materialist determination of cultural traits is only possible if it is mediated through the total social process [...] [such] immediate--and I would almost say again "anthropological"--materialism harbours a profoundly romantic element [...]. The mediation which I miss, and find obscured by materialistic-historical evocation, is simply the theory which your study has omitted [...] the theological motif of calling things by their names tends to switch into the wide-eyed presentation of mere facts. [...] one could say that your study is located at the crossroads of magic and positivism. The spot is bewitched. Only theory could break this spell--your own resolute and salutarily speculative theory. It is simply the claim of this theory that I bring against you here. (Complete Correspondence 281-3)

Adorno’s objections here are not altogether dissimilar from the sorts of complaints Lukács vented about modernism, which at first may seem merely ironic, but it is more usefully taken as index of the fineness of the line Adorno means immanent critique to walk in its highwire ambition both to “repeat” the ideological “symptom” and to reliquify it in a critical negation. Hence the sting in the tail, the potential dialectical backfire, in Adorno’s homage, already quoted, to the effect that “Benjamin’s thought is so saturated with culture as its natural object that it swears loyalty to reification instead of flatly rejecting it. […] the glance of his philosophy is Medusan” (Prisms 233).

So I have risked the lengthy quotation above because its diffuse suggestiveness implies the scope of the tension between Benjamin’s critical practice of the dialectical image, especially in the Passagen-Werk, and Adorno’s of the constellation. Benjamin cites or quotes particular faits divers, one at a time, each standing distinct in its surround of white space on the page–even typographically, a dialectical image, one might say, of that “separation” or “chorismos,” the ideological entailment of “analytic” (bourgeois) philosophical method from Plato to Kant and beyond, that the Hegelian Adorno protests throughout his career. Constellation is of course the vehicle of Adorno’s protest, but it could also serve as a figure for it as well; his famously boundless paragraphs constellate diverse materials so diffusely as to ground or “theorize” or mediate them together–albeit, again, that the ground is contradiction rather than unity. Adorno tends, also, to “constellate” higher-brow materials than Benjamin–Hegel and Beethoven rather than, say, century-old department store brochures: in his 1931 inaugural lecture, “The Actuality of Philosophy,” Adorno sounds the “materialist” motif of the philosophical worthiness of “the refuse of the physical world”;⁷ but Adorno nowhere incorporates such materials in his writing as Benjamin did, let alone to programmatize, even to yearn, so overtly as Benjamin for their utopian “redemption.”⁸ This difference resonates with Adorno’s “mandarin” fastidiousness, as well as with his greater circumspection–almost, as he says himself, a Bilderverbot–regarding the utopian (see Buck-Morss, 90-95); it’s arguable that the dissent from Benjamin above helped confirm Adorno in these penchants.

But most consequential for our theme here (the contrast between Benjamin’s critical practice and Adorno’s) is the issue I characterized above in terms of kinesis versus stasis. Benjamin’s isolated atoms of social/historical fact, cited seriatim on the page, organized under generalizing rubrics into “Convolutes,” we may take as dialectical image of the pall under which the bourgeois world has, as if in the gaze of some Medusa more baleful than Benjamin, frozen into paralysis. By contrast, Adorno’s immanent critique, though it eschews narrative, can fairly be called kinetic: the sentences rush headlong, never faltering before difficulties more “responsible” critics would find daunting, and ready at every turn to embrace always heavier burdens of difficulty and challenge. Reading Adorno, you never cease to be surprised at, however you may grow accustomed to, the way a given sentence might lunge off in a new direction, extending (distending) itself to encompass further elements and all the problems they will bring in their train. And yet, as I have said, this kinesis of Adorno’s, however entoiled in the temporality of its own process of working through (Durcharbeit), the temporality of its own writing and being-read, is never itself narrative: whatever else he is, Adorno is never a storyteller.⁹ When Adorno advises Benjamin (above) that “the materialist determination of cultural traits is only possible if it is mediated through the total social process,” mediation itself sounds like an ineluctably kinetic activity or process, and the movement (my resort to the word is deliberate) between isolated particular and totality–as, at other moments in Adorno, between particular and universal, intuition and concept, matter and idea, content and form–suggests a universe in perpetual and turbulent flux, however stalled or arrested the dialectic that should be ceaselessly dislocating its apparently fixed and static ideological impasses. Adorno suggests something of this contradiction between kinesis and stasis in a much later formulation: “the concept of the mediated […] always presupposes something immediate running through these mediations and captured by them” (Introduction to Sociology 109). The immediate is both “running through” and “captured by” the mediations.

PARATAXIS

We are navigating, or “mediating,” between the stasis of image and the kinesis of narrative, and I want to adduce here a further motif in which these preoccupations find yet another way of overlapping: the “epic” device of parataxis, which lends its name to the title of Adorno’s late essay on Hölderlin. Parataxis is a rhetorical device in which narrative units–narratemes?–follow one another linked only by the conjunction “and,” thus evading or subverting more complex structures or grammars of narrative co- or subordination (cause and effect, antecedent and consequence, main event and subsidiary, and the like). Traditionally, parataxis was taken to be (and poets emulated it as) an artifice, a feature of the noble epic style; only in the twentieth century have classicists like Eric Havelock seen it as evidence of a kind of consciousness or mentalité preceding the advent of literacy. I am sure the latter view, as a way to link texts and consciousness in something like a “materialist” way, would have interested Adorno so much that his non-consideration of it in his essay is a sign that the suggestion hadn’t reached his ears.¹⁰ In any case, “Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry” (Notes 2: 109-49) praises parataxis, Hölderlin’s anyway, for evading the usual (sc. reified, familiarized, domesticated) ways of making sense. Hölderlin’s parataxes, Adorno writes, are “artificial disturbances that evade the logical hierarchy of a subordinating syntax,” and in particular, “the judgment” and “the propositional form” (Notes 2: 131-2). I don’t think it an impermissible stretch to suggest that Adorno values parataxis as doing with narrative monads something like what constellation is meant to do with the diverse fragments it constellates: presents them in an ensemble undomesticated by the familiar thought-syntax, the habituated grammars, the ideological presuppositions, that familiarize the new, converting it, in the very process of presenting it, into the same, the old, the already known–the, as it were, pre-reified. Hölderlin’s poetry “searches for a linguistic form that would escape the dictates of spirit’s own synthesizing principle” (Notes 2: 131)–that is, it strives to overcome the very liabilities of the mind’s own drive to grasp what it perceives.

Parataxis thus might seem a solvent, a way of de-composingwhat “spirit’s own synthesizing principle” too unthinkingly composes or synthesizes.¹¹ The evident motive is to mobilize the particular fragmentary contents against the larger synthesizing form(s). But Adorno insists that Hölderlin’s parataxis achieves not merely an abolition of form, an escape from it, but something like a kind of emancipation (not to say redemption) of form itself. And of course, to the extent that Hölderlin’s parataxis is itself a form, this is an emancipation not conferred on form from above or outside, but form’s own self-emancipation; hence what Adorno calls “the agency of form” (Notes 2: 114). Hölderlin’s parataxis “puts explication without deduction in the place of a so-called train of thought. This gives form its primacy over content, even the intellectual content” (Notes 2: 131-2). Set free from the “deductive” regimen of a “so-called train of thought,” the unfoldment (“explication”) of the matter can enact itself “immanently,” according to its own imperatives rather than to those of an external, syllogistic logic. So far from vanishing, form here rather achieves itself in allowing, being the vehicle for, new potentialities by which the particular contents find their expression. Thus does form become itself a content, content itself a kind of form, and all concretely, thus sublating the classic antinomies (form/content, idea/matter, abstract/concrete, universal/particular) that are the pitfalls common to philosophy and the aesthetic under the regime of “spirit’s own synthesizing principle.” Hence (and readers familiar with Adorno’s Beethoven-olatry will recognize the argument here):

It is not only the micrological forms of serial transition in a narrow sense [...] that we must think of as parataxis. As in music, the tendency takes over larger structures. In Hölderlin there are forms that could as a whole be called paratactical in the broader sense [...]. In a manner reminiscent of Hegel, mediation of the vulgar kind, a middle element standing outside the moments it is to connect, is eliminated as being external and inessential, something that occurs frequently in Beethoven's late style; this not least of all gives Hölderlin's late poetry its anticlassicistic quality, its rebellion against harmony. What is lined up in sequence, unconnected, is as harsh as it is flowing. The mediation is set within what is mediated instead of bridging it. (Notes 2: 132-33)

Note the recapitulation of our points above about mediation. But of larger consequence here is that Hölderlin, Beethoven, and Hegel are arrayed in constellation as practitioners of this immanent kind of composition (a “technique of seriation” Adorno calls it [Notes 2: 135]) in which the local, the particular “takes over larger structures,” producing forms that are “paratactical in the broader sense.”

This issue of “larger structures,” of parataxis on the large-scale level of form, returns us to the issue of temporality–Hölderlin, Beethoven, and Hegel (and, of course, Adorno) are all practitioners of forms a hearer or reader must experience in time–and thus of possibilities of kinesis within or by way of the structures their form achieves. “The transformation of language [in Hölderlin’s parataxis] into a serial order whose elements are linked differently than in the judgment is musiclike” (Notes 2: 131)–so that parataxis pushes referential language in the direction of non-referential meaning; moreover, terms like “serial” and “musiclike” restore “temporality” to the stasis of constellation. (“Serial” here doubtless connotes Schoenberg-and-after, rather than Sartre’s “seriality,” although the latter conjuncture, not to say “constellation,” is suggestive as well.) Adorno frequently implies that the temporality of music, and of written texts, whether “creative” or “critical,” amounts to a sort of quasi- or crypto-narrative trajectory in which the hearer/reader is challenged to participate.¹² In the “Parataxis” essay, although Adorno’s focus is on the lyric, narrative in Hölderlin appears (under the sign of the “epic”; see the discussion of Hölderlin’s relation to Pindar [Notes 2: 132-34]) as another impulse working against “the logical hierarchy of a subordinating syntax”:

The narrative tendency in the poem strives downward into the prelogical medium and wants to drift along with the flow of time. The Logos had worked against the slippery quality of narrative [...] the self-reflection of Hölderlin's late poetry, in contrast, evokes it. Here too it converges in a most amazing way with the texture of Hegel's prose, which, in paradoxical contradiction to his systematic intent, in its form increasingly evades the constraints of construction the more it surrenders without reservation to the program of "simply looking on" outlined in the introduction to the Phenomenology and the more logic becomes history for it. (Notes 2: 134)

Here the animus since Plato between poetry and philosophy is “sublated”; moreover, Adorno presents the sublation itself as event, that is to say, as narrative. The redemptive or utopian promise is made more explicit in a passage reprising all these themes:

The logic of tightly bounded periods [i.e., the opposite of "parataxis"], each moving rigorously on to the next, is characterized by precisely that compulsive and violent quality for which poetry is to provide healing and which Hölderlin's poetry unambiguously negates. Linguistic synthesis contradicts what Hölderlin wants to express in language [...]. [Hölderlin] began by attacking syntax syntactically, in the spirit of the dialectic [...] In the same way, Hegel used the power of logic to protest against logic. (Notes 2: 135-36)

THE “DIALECTIC” OF DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT

I want to end by sketching the ways that the themes we have been agitating are evoked or enacted to peculiar effect in Dialectic of Enlightenment. With Lutz Niethammer’s acerbic mot in mind, that moderns of Adorno’s sort exemplify a “will to powerlessness” (138-42), I will risk adapting Adorno’s formula above. If “Hegel used the power of logic to protest against logic” (Notes 2: 135-36), the Dialectic of Enlightenment uses a “mimesis” of the powerlessness of Enlightenment positivism vis-à-vis the crises of the mid-twentieth century to protest the non- or indeed anti-dialectical cast of Enlightenment thought, that dehumanizing, instrumentalized empiricism whose mastery of nature is gained only at the cost of nature-ifying, reifying, reducing to thing-like reflex, human being, human existence itself. Kinesis/stasis, narrative/non-narrative, mediated/un-mediated, parataxis/synthesis, dialectical/mythical–“our” particular subcultural penchant is to see these pairs as binaries. But we won’t get the hang of Adorno’s “dialectical” practice unless we cultivate the power of seeing these pairs rather as terms demarking the coordinates of particular conflicted problem-points, or (Adorno’s own frequent figure) force-fields within which the energies of certain contradictions pulse and clash. In our critical practice, oppositional binaries, the two terms separated by the crisp marker of the slash, suggest black/white distinctions. The polemical energy of Adorno’s practice can seem to drive or be driven by such stark contrasts, but my own experience learning to read Adorno has been that his black and his white are best taken as exaggerations of grey–the point being that what he advocates and what he reprehends can overlap in unexpected ways. For one instance, we may cite the “antithetical” tangle imposed on immanent critique (repeat/reliquify) by the Medusa-effect (repeat/petrify). Likewise, Adorno’s often surprising generosity to, even recuperations of, figures one had assumed would be bêtes noirs–Kierkegaard, say, or Spengler, or even Richard Wagner.¹³ And hence, in the exposition above, the contrast with Lukács (which highlights the liability of Adorno’s constellational critical “negation” to appear as mere ideological “symptom”); and even closer to the quick, Adorno’s own discomfort with the extreme of Benjamin’s apparently “unmediated” practice of “motifs assembled but not elaborated.” The cut between “image” and “dialectical image,” between (to use a more Adorno-identified term) “mimesis” and what we might, by analogy with Benjamin’s coinage, call “dialectical mimesis”–and in like manner the cut, indeed, between all the other binaries just cited–is sufficiently fine as not merely to allow, but actually to “motivate,” some confusion between the opposed, and supposedly clearly distinguishable, terms.

This, I take it, can appear, even to a mere amateur of philosophy like myself, as a major contradiction (of the bad sort) for Adorno as a philosopher. His assault on “identity”-thinking depends on practices of dialectic and mediation that can seem to undo the garden-variety kinds of non-identity or “difference” encoded in binaries like those above. If one of Adorno’s principle complaints with dialectic as usual–as practiced by historicizing heirs of the Hegelian legacy, whether left (Lukács) or right (Croce)–is that it can unwittingly accede to a logic of substitution that winds up affirming the “exchange/equivalence” habitus of Enlightenment, then it’s notable that Adorno’s negative dialectic can in certain lights appear to deliver itself to the same terminus. Perhaps the most troublesome instance is Adorno’s “deconstruction” (if the anachronism may be permitted) of nature/history in “The Idea of Natural History” (1931)–and I take it as some index of the trouble that Adorno never reprinted this essay in his lifetime. But however that may be philosophically, it is Adorno’s practice as writer that I want to illuminate here–and in that arena, the problem is one that Adorno’s immanent critique undertakes not to solve, or to make disappear, but precisely, to display, to expose, which must mean, to suffer, and in that special sense to “perform,” to make happen, to “repeat” and (to the extent possible) “reliquify,” in the writing itself. Critique must refuse the hubris of supposing it can escape, or has escaped, has risen above, its ideological condition. As knowingly as Milton’s Satan in hell (and compare Goethe’s Mephistopheles), critique must always avow, “Why this is ideology, nor am I out of it.” The point of Adorno’s immanent critique is not to exempt his own critical practice from the liabilities of the dominant ideology, but precisely to attest ideology’s ubiquity and power by enacting in the writing itself (his own) critique’s implication–even (his own) critique’s implication–in the very predicaments (his own) critique aims to address, protest, elucidate, redeem.

To bring the foregoing themes together will, I hope, be to suggest their use for a better reading of Adorno. The demonstration-text is Dialectic of Enlightenment, on the premise that in our academic subculture this is the most read and, because most read by novices, least understood of Adorno’s texts. But: “Adorno‘s text”? What of Max Horkheimer, whose name appears first on the title page, and to whom Adorno always ceded priority? Well, in practice, all commentary I know of treats Dialectic of Enlightenment “as if” Adorno were its author, and the few attempts I’ve seen to parse Adorno’s contributions from Horkheimer’s seem perfunctory (see Noerr 219-24) or (perhaps appropriately) shy of specifics (Wiggershaus 177-91, 314-50). Here I’ll take as a methodological fiction or premise the authors’ own professions that their equal collaboration moots any attempt to untangle their respective contributions. The 1969 “Preface” insists that the “vital principle of the Dialectic is the tension between the two intellectual temperaments conjoined in writing it” (ix); and I will offer the speculation that what was crucial in Horkheimer’s input was his penchant for arguing by way of historical narrative, which gives Dialectic of Enlightenment its narrative shape and its quasi-narrative energy. By contrast, Adorno’s critical practice eschews narrative; hence the “vital principle,” the “intellectual tension” I’ve just insinuated between the book’s overtly narrative organization (a smaller-scale rescript of Hegel’s Phenomenology, orchestrating a variant of Hegel’s trajectory from Greco-Roman antiquity to “Enlightenment” and the present day), and its “motivatedly” static (or “regressive”) “image” of Western history (or “progress”). It is precisely this tension, precisely this problematic or contradiction, it seems to me, that has made Dialectic of Enlightenment, for the past generation, the preeminent text in “critical theory” by either Adorno or Horkheimer–a claim, I think, that should valorize Horkheimer’s large (and too-much discounted) importance in the composition of Dialectic of Enlightenment.

But “authorship” issues aside, my point here is that the reflections above on constellation and mediation (and so on) shed light on what I recall, from my own “novice” first reading(s) of Dialectic of Enlightenment, as the most baffling of the problems and “difficulties” it presented for me. The book’s narrative organization was readily legible as an ironic reversal of the Hegelian narrative–the story of Geist not as triumphal progress to an Enlightened Absolute, but as ghastly “regression” to a nightmare of violence (“humanity, instead of entering into a truly human condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism” [xi]; “The curse of irresistible progress is irresistible regression” [36]). And the fate of narrative in modernist literature had prepared me for a story whose thematic burden of failure and waste was enacted formally in the failure of the narrative to achieve not only any putative thematic telos, but the telos of narrativity itself. The thornier problem for me was the book’s organization around binary pairs that defied my every presupposition concerning how an avowedly, and programmatically, historicizing and dialectical presentation would or should proceed. Odysseus/bourgeois, for example, or myth/Enlightenment: both of these oppositions seemed to collapse large and crucial historical differences, to homogenize them by, in effect, de-temporalizing or dehistoricizing them–as if “bourgeois,” or “myth,” or “Enlightenment” indeed, were names for “essentialized” or “essentializing,” trans-historical archetypes, permanent and immutable. And likewise for binaries whose aligned pairs were not from different historical periods, but contemporaneous, for example, Kant and de Sade, or Hitler and Hollywood. To expose as “bourgeois” classical philology’s idealization of Homer’s “universal” hero, as well as to root “modern” bourgeois values in the archaic (“heroic”) violences of self-preservation; to vandalize Enlightenment’s self-constituting difference from the (mythical, archaic) past; to elicit the unowned foundational commonalities between the categorical imperative and de Sade’s monstrous naturalism of the boudoir, or between anti-Semitism and the culture industry: I could read in all this a complex of protest and dissent and exposé–even, despite the extremity of the subject matter and the plangency of the affect, something at moments oddly like satire–but not, within the terms of what I took “critical theory” to be aiming at, a strategy of dialectical critique.

To such dilemmas, Benjamin’s (and Adorno’s) formula of “dialectic at a standstill” offers something of a key, as does the ambiguous response or antidote–mimesis, or critique? repetition, or reliquification? symptom, or negation?–of the “dialectical image.” Let me cite here a passage on “Mythical Content” from Adorno’s book on Kierkegaard that anticipates much of the elaboration–or homogenization–in Dialectic of Enlightenment, of the binary of “myth” versus “history” (or “dialectic”), as well as implying the grounds of Adorno’s lifelong dissent from that “fundamental ontology” in which Kierkegaard’s “blocked ontology” (Kierkegaard 57) was so implicated. “Blocked ontology,” we might suppose, borrows some of the charge implicated in a, so to speak, “ontology at a standstill”–and it is part of Adorno’s dissent from Kierkegaard that he would elaborate such a blocked or arrested ontology not as Adorno or Benjamin would a “dialectic at a standstill”: that is, as a defeat, a catastrophe, a reification, a congealment, a steady-state repetition or cycle of the old and the same. On the contrary, in Kierkegaard’s idealization such “standstill” appears as “sublime object,” a desideratum or Tantalus-fruit at once spiritual, philosophical, and polemical. Consider the following passage, whose crucial term for us is “image,” associated here with “myth,” i.e., with eternalizing, reifying, essentializing (mis)uses of thought–which is why special interest attaches to the appearance here of the important modifier, the dialectical image (emphasis added):

Dialectic comes to a stop in the image and cites the mythical; in the historically most recent as the distant past: nature as proto-history. For this reason the images, which [...] bring dialectic and myth to the point of indifferentiation, are truly "antediluvian fossils." They may be called dialectical images, to use Benjamin's expression, whose compelling definition of "allegory" also holds true for Kierkegaard's allegorical intention as a configuration [sc. "constellation"] of historical dialectic and mythical nature. According to this definition "in allegory the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica of history, a petrified primordial landscape" (Kierkegaard 54; the Benjamin is quoted from Origin 166).

“Dialectic comes to a stop”–as in “dialectic at a standstill” (compare the theme later in the book of “Intermittence” [Kierkegaard 100-02], a condition in which dialectic falters, becomes a stop-and-start affair)–“and cites the mythical,” the act of “citation” here apparently implying some self-consciously critical deployment of the given, ideological image, in quotation marks, as it were; or, on the analogy of the speech-act distinction, as (self-conscious) “mention” rather than (naïve) “use”–with the (Hegelian, and, many will complain, idealist) implication that the difference makes for some “critical” or “negative” consequence. Crucial here is that the “indifferentiation” of myth/dialectic seems, in the transit between the quoted passage’s second sentence and the third, to appear first as an ideological effect of the “image,” then as a critical effect of the “dialectical image.” And, as sign, vehicle, “motivation” of such “indifferentiation” is the implicit Medusa motif, here appearing in something like an inverted or (Freud) displaced form: the “facies hippocratica” is Benjamin’s image in the Trauerspiel of unhappy consciousness, an image drawn from Hippocrates’s physiognomics (see Hullot-Kentor’s note, Kierkegaard 151-2): a visage like the anguished mask of tragedy, or perhaps better, like the face of Medusa’s victim, struck by the horror of a “petrified primordial landscape.” Here the thing seen is stone, while the face of the viewer, seeing it, is animated to horror, whereas in the Medusa-motif, the vitality is all Medusa’s, upon seeing whom it is the viewer who turns to stone–but the tangle of “antithetical” motifs leaves in place the horror of petrifaction, and thus underscores the extremities of ambivalence in Adorno’s ascription of a “Medusa-gaze” to Benjamin as critic, or indeed to critique itself. Hence the analogously “antithetical” (or “dialectical”) wobble in Adorno’s own usage as regards “dialectics at a standstill,” which sometimes figures as an ideological condition critique and art protest, at other times as a “result” that critique and art are praised for achieving–the latter apparently as critical (or “dialectical”) “mimesis” of the former (see, for example, Beethoven 16; Philosophy of Modern Music 124).

“Dialectics at a standstill,” in both these senses (as ideological condition to be protested, and as critical “effect” to be achieved) is a formula especially apposite to Dialectic of Enlightenment.¹⁴ The narrative (or anti-narrative) of Dialectic of Enlightenment enacts the failure of the Enlightenment’s own “grand narrative” to achieve its announced, programmatic (narrative) telos of change and progress; and it indicts not only bourgeois Enlightenment positivism’s refusal of dialectic, but also (and much more daringly) the Soviet world’s official Marxist-Leninist fetishization of dialectic as an orthodoxy, as equally deluded miscarriers or unwitting betrayers of dialectic (conceived as “the engine of history”) itself. To that end the “appearance” (in the aesthetic sense [German Schein]) of non- or anti-“dialectical” pairs like Odysseus/bourgeois, or myth/Enlightenment, presents something like a dialectical image aiming, with critical force, to “bring dialectic and myth to the point of indifferentiation”–or an “allegory” presenting a “configuration [sc. “constellation”] of historical dialectic and mythical nature.” This “appearance” of “indifferentiation” (sc. “identity”) of dialectic and myth enacts what Horkheimer and Adorno regard as Enlightenment’s fatal ideological false consciousness, its sacrifice of qualitative to quantitative (“identity” or “equivalence/exchange”) thinking–and enacts it, in “appearance,” from “inside,” i.e., “immanently,” taking upon itself the full ideological burden of what it protests and would redeem. The case I’m making here could be thought of as a version of Adorno’s “dialectical despite itself,” which underlies his enthusiasm for thinkers avowedly critical of or indifferent to “dialectic”; I mean that Adorno’s seemingly static and essentialized binaries display an affinity with (say) Nietzsche’s tragedy/Socrates and Übermensch/priest, or Freud’s Eros/Thanatos, or the antinomies of instinct and “vicissitude” that in the late work on Moses and elsewhere seem to force on Freud a quasi-Lamarckian view of the heritability of acquired characteristics. Equally exemplary would be the great works of modernist music and literature with all their techniques of seeming “im-mediation” or “de-mediation”: works that attempt to escape outworn habits of mediation, to conjure an atmospherics or nostalgia of immediacy, and achieve thereby a kind of re-mediation (new mediations) that it is no mere word-play to hope might also be remedy.

The loosening of old mediations and the forging of new ones in modernism involved techniques of juxtaposition, of suppressing transitions (preeminently narrative ones), of foregoing explanatory motives for questioning ones–and it is among these modernist devices and motivations that Adorno’s constellation belongs. Michael Cahn, in what remains to my mind the richest and shrewdest essay on these matters, observes that Adorno’s aesthetic theory is not merely a theory of the aesthetic, but a theory that is aesthetic; he clinched the point by adducing the analogy of “critical theory” (42)–which is to suggest as well the senses in which Adorno’s aesthetic is critical, and (the premise of this essay) the extent to which Adorno’s critical practice involves issues usually referred to the aesthetic. It’s in something of that spirit that I have attempted here to explore Adorno’s constellation, not as a philosophic concept, nor even as an element or index of a critical method, but as part of a writing practice that I think Adorno’s readers should be readier than they have been to take as a kind of modernist poetics of critique–a poetics realizing itself as much in performance as in “theory.” In the critical practice of constellation, Adorno enacts a critique of the extant critical (dialectical, historicizing) practices of his own day, a critique analogous to that performed in modernist artistic practices. Adorno’s practice is as radical a departure from that of, say, Georg Lukács as Beckett (one of Adorno’s chief exemplars of the modern) is from Lukács’s standard-bearer for realism, Balzac. Indeed, Adorno’s defense of Beckett against Lukács may be thought especially suggestive, given Beckett’s gift for narratives whose point is the failure of anything to happen, whose meaning (as Adorno observes in “Trying to Understand Endgame“) is meaninglessness itself–a meaninglessness, Adorno would say, whose falsity Beckett enables us to reappropriate for truth. Some such result, event, or effect is the gesture of the dialectic of Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Notes

1. In perhaps the most suggestive of these, Adorno links it with Max Weber’s “ideal type,” a characterization stressing its heuristic potential (Negative Dialectics 164-66).

2. There are many treatments more systematic than mine. Still indispensable on this, as on so much else about Adorno, is Buck-Morss; on constellation see especially 90-110. (Buck-Morss notes Adorno’s reservations about “constellation” as a term connoting astrology [254n54]). More recently, see Jameson, Late Marxism 54-60; Jameson also assimilates constellation to “model” (68); and if I opened by evoking Eisenstein and Pound, Jameson observes that the affinity of constellation with Althusser’s conjuncture makes Adorno “Althusserian avant la lettre” (244). Nicholson treats constellation under the broader rubric of “configurational form” (passim, but especially 103-36)–a useful reminder that the thematics of constellation can often attach to such cognate terms as “configuration,” “complex,” even “ensemble” or “juxtaposition.” Also useful on Adorno’s aesthetics, though without specific reference to constellation, are Wolin 62-79; Bernstein 188-224, esp. 206; and Paddison 21-64, especially 35-7.

3. A full discussion of these issues would need to consider Adorno’s 1932 essay, “The Idea of Natural History”–and also, perhaps, his decision against republishing it.

4. On this last, see Freud’s 1914 paper on technique, “Recollection, Repetition, and Working Through.”

5. The motif of the fragment here touches on Adorno’s chronic theme of the false coherence of “system” and the necessity, in critique, of allowing the unintegrated, unintegratable loose ends of “the damaged life” to stand as reproach or “bad conscience” to all mystifying reconciliations.

6. For example, from Kierkegaard in Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic passim, from Kant in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (125), and from Freud and Weber in Introduction to Sociology (113, 123).

7. He is citing Freud’s Abhub der Erscheinungswelt (Adorno Reader 32).

8. Adorno most movingly sounds this motif in his 1930 essay on “Mahler Today”: see especially Essays on Music 605, where Mahler’s project sounds strikingly like Benjamin’s; and cf. 608, where Adorno contrasts Mahler and Schoenberg in ways that suggest an analogy with his sense of the differences between Benjamin and himself.

9. Here is another contention with Lukács–see the latter’s “Narrate or Describe?”–that resumes most of what is at stake in their conflicting positions on realism versus modernism.

10. Both “Parataxis” and Havelock’s Preface to Plato date from 1963, so Havelock’s argument cannot have affected Adorno’s essay, but I find no evidence that Adorno came across it later, either: too bad–I am sure it would have interested him keenly.

11. Compare the formula of “the logic of disintegration” by which Adorno at about this same time characterized what he acknowledged as a career-long concern (Negative 144-6; see also Buck-Morss 233n3).

12. For his most extended workout on these problems, see “Vers Une Musique Informelle,” in Quasi Una Fantasia, especially 294-301.

13. See the closing pages of In Search of Wagner (1952) or, an even more striking example, the 1963 essay on “Wagner’s Relevance for Today” (Essays on Music 584-602).

14. Let me own here that Adorno reprehends all rhetoric of “effect”; for him it connotes composition with an eye on the audience rather than on “the matter in hand.” I apologize for my resort to it here, but the shifts by which I might have attempted to do without it were more trouble than they were worth–and I am, after all, discussing the book from the position of a reader. I can hope that Adorno would at least countenance my usage as, again, attestation of the ideological predicaments of critique itself as composition, i.e., as “a kind of writing”–and also, of course, as a kind of reading.

Works Cited

• Adorno, Theodor W. The Adorno Reader. Ed. Brian O’Connor. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.
• —. Against Epistemology: A Metacritique. Trans. Willis Domingo. Oxford: Blackwell, 1982.
• —. Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998.
• —. Critical Models. Trans. Henry W. Pickford. New York: Columbia UP, 1998.
• —. Essays on Music. Ed. Richard Leppert. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002.
• —. “The Idea of Natural History.” Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Telos 60 (1984): 97-124.
• —. In Search of Wagner. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. London: NLB, 1981.
• —. Introduction to Sociology. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000.
• —. Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989.
• —. Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001.
• —. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E. B. Ashton. New York: Continuum, 1973.
• —. Notes on Literature. 2 vols. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson. New York: Columbia UP, 1992.
• —. Philosophy of Modern Music. Trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster. New York: Continuum, 1973.
• —. Prisms. Trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1981.
• —. Quasi Una Fantasia. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. New York: Verso, 1998.
• Adorno, Theodor, and Walter Benjamin. The Complete Correspondence, 1928-1940. Ed. Henri Lonitz. Trans. Nicholas Walker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999.
• Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. Farrar: New York, 1974.
• Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard UP, 1999.
• —. Charles Baudelaire: The Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Verso, 1983.
• —. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborne. New York: Verso, 1998.
• Bernstein, J. M. The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno. Oxford: Polity, 1992.
• Buck-Morss, Susan. The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute. Sussex: Harvester, 1977.
• Cahn, Michael. “Subversive Mimesis: Theodor W. Adorno and the Modern Impasse of Critique.” Mimesis in Contemporary Theory: Volume I: The Literary and Philosophical Debate. Ed. Spariosu, Mihai. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1984. 27-64.
• Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A. V. Miller. New York: Oxford UP, 1977.
• Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. New York: Continuum, 1988.
• Jameson, Fredric. Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic. New York: Verso, 1990.
• —. Marxism and Form. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971.
• Kahn, Arthur D. Writer and Critic And Other Essays. New York: Grosset, 1971. Lukács, Georg, “Healthy or Sick Art?” Kahn 103-09.
• —. “The Ideology of Modernism.” Marxism and Human Liberation. Ed. E. San Juan, Jr. New York: Delta, 1973. 277-307.
• —. “Narrate or Describe?” Kahn 110-48.
• —–. “Realism in the Balance.” Aesthetics and Politics. Ed. Ronald Taylor. New York: Verso, 1980. 28-59.
• Nicholson, Shierry Weber. Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adorno’s Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1997.
• Niethammer, Lutz. Posthistoire. Trans. Patrick Camiller. New York: Verso, 1992.
• Noerr, Gunzelin Schmid. “Editorial Afterword.” Dialectic of Enlightenment. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002. 217-47.
• Paddison, Max. Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.
• Wiggershaus, Rolf. The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories and Political Significance. Trans Michael Robertson. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1994.
• Wolin, Richard. The Terms of Cultural Criticism: The Frankfurt School, Existentialism, Poststructuralism. New York: Columbia UP, 1992.

Christy L. Burns

Department of English
College of William and Mary
clburn@wm.edu

In 1997, Thomas Pynchon published Mason & Dixon, his much anticipated history of America written from the perspectives of the astronomer and surveyor sent over from England to draw the famous boundary line. Their work was necessitated by a long-standing dispute between overlapping land grants of the Penns, of Pennsylvania, and the Baltimores, of Maryland¹; the job took nearly five years, from 1763 to 1768, and during that time the journals and letters of these two men record alternating shock and fascination with the functioning of society in the New World (see Mason). Pynchon draws on this historical material to create a fantastic, comedic, and at times seriously political novel. Pynchon’s work has always inclined toward the voices of cultural dissent–the counterculture of the 1960s being one of his more obvious inspirations, and the rebellion of the Luddites against mechanization a subtle revelation.² In Vineland, however, Pynchon’s critique of governmental authority takes on a more central role, and in Mason & Dixon–which was some twenty-four years in the making–he develops an important new method for postmodern political insight.³ Pynchon introduces a parallactic method that allows him a full and yet contentiously dialectical representation of “America” as it was in the mid- to late eighteenth century and as it is now, by various implications. In his use of parallax, Pynchon interweaves a critical representation of imperialism’s oppressive practices alongside a history of science and exploration. While other writers, like James Joyce, have invoked parallax as a perspectival method in order to challenge univocal narrative form, Pynchon works the concept more radically into his fictional treatment of historiography.⁴ Avoiding any semblance of an apolitical sketch of the past–or simple didactic critique–he uses the same method that Mason and Dixon employed to chart the transits of Venus and to draw their boundary line, applying parallax to a series of triangulated views, starting with Mason’s and Dixon’s attempts to assess the New World and eventually delivering a temporal form of parallax, a synchronization of the past with the present.

In her review of positions on postmodernism’s politics, Susan Rubin Suleiman identifies three general clusters among intellectuals and writers: those who pursue a “postmodernism of resistance” through experimental work that allows previously silenced groups to speak in contra-normative modes of representation; those who argue that postmodernism lacks a firmness of values and principles and so fails to have any political effect (that is, it disavows universals); and finally those whom Suleiman identifies as “cultural pessimists,” who believe neither in the efficacy of decentered experimentation nor in the claims of universals (the project of modernity, and so on), leaving to the postmodernist only the role of critic and never that of future visionary.⁵ Writers like Louise Erdrich and Ishmael Reed would qualify for the first category, Jürgen Habermas for the second, and Jean Baudrillard for the last. Pynchon’s work has straddled groups one and three; while his novels have implicitly supported a politics of resistance–and have employed experimental and decentering forms of representation–they have recently begun to engage not only in critique (the “pessimist” block) but also in future re-visioning.⁶ Vineland moved more directly into political critique, with its look back at the government’s means of breaking down the 1960s counterculture. But in Mason & Dixon Pynchon creates a parallactic intersection of perspectives and time frames, which allows him to engage in critique while also pointing toward a different possible future in which imperialist elements of American history are not comfortably edited out but are critically worked back in to national awareness.

I am suggesting that in Mason & Dixon Pynchon’s temporal or historical coordinates are the mappable difference, measurable via his synchronization of the 1760s charted alongside the 1990s. His readers thus will interpret history as a dialogue between the differences and the uncanny similarities of that time’s “angle” and their own. Pynchon initially establishes this method in his politicized readings of the Cape, where Mason and Dixon chart the first Venus transit, and he then follows the two as they return to England and are shipped off on another venture, to draw their famous line in America. Employing a homology between spatial and temporal assessments, parallax and synchronism, Pynchon recasts Mason and Dixon as implied historians, developing through the novel’s language an oddly contemporary perspective from within the eighteenth-century context. The novel is, for example, marked by an uncanny tone, which is an eccentric combination of both eighteenth- and late-twentieth-century colloquialisms. In one of the initial reviews of Pynchon’s novel, Louis Menand praises Pynchon for drawing each of his characters, even the least, with “the same deft touch [. . .] recognizable types in eighteenth-century dress. They come onto the page with an attitude, and Pynchon’s success in getting them to sound contemporary and colonial at the same time is quite remarkable” (24). At times Pynchon seems bent upon anachronism, injecting contemporaneity into this portrait of the past. These differences are not so radical, however, as many of Pynchon’s readers might think. Take for example one of the more striking transpositions of contemporary life into Enlightenment culture: when Dixon, hearing a rumor of “a Coffee-House frequented by those with an interest in the Magnetic,” locates his destination, he passes into what is clearly an eighteenth-century tobacco den, and is asked “what’ll it be?” He glibly responds, “Half and Half please, Mount Kenya Double-A, with Java Highland,–perhaps a slug o’boil’d Milk as well[…]?” (298). However postmodern and Starbuck-esque this scene might be, coffee houses are not an exclusive artifact of the twentieth century. They proliferated in seventeenth-century Europe, and when in the next century Boston Tea Party activists insisted that it was an American duty to forego tea, coffee’s popularity peaked (see Pendergrast 15 and passim). Pynchon’s seemingly anachronistic introduction of the contemporary attitude in his narrative of America’s past allows him to deliver a comical portrait of the nation’s early history, joking that in its nascent history Americans were even then as we are now.

Mason’s and Dixon’s potential agency as historical observers has long been overshadowed by their role as mapmakers, aligning them with science and relegating them to a “neutral” position in history. Yet Pynchon casts this neutrality in ironic relation to the position of knowledge assumed by Hegelian Enlightenment thought, drawing out the dialectics more than emphasizing the vantage point outside of history. Central to Pynchon’s consideration of what America is now (postmodernly) and what it was then (at the rise of modernity) are the combined traits of these two British astronomers, who constitute a pious Anglicanism (Mason) alongside Quaker sensibility (Dixon). While Mason paces around, haunted by the ghost of his wife Rebekah, who has been deceased already two years when the book begins, Dixon, a man of senses and desires, indulges merrily in drink and those fleshful desires that Mason’s mourning heart cannot allow. In terms of magic and social interpretation, Dixon is a pragmatist who sees abuse, while Mason is drawn most readily to the remarkable magic around them. Thus the forceful cohesion of future vision and social critique in the novel. Tending toward the metaphysical, Mason speculates upon their friend the talking dog, whom they first meet in London. He becomes agitated when Dixon wishes to shrug off the dog’s oddly magical skills: “mayn’t there be Oracles, for us, in our time?” he asks, “Gate-ways to Futurity? That can’t all have died with the ancient Peoples. Isn’t it worth looking ridiculous, at least to investigate this English Dog, for its obvious bearing upon Metempsychosis if nought else–” (19). Comically, the Learnèd Dog rebuffs Mason, “I may be praeternatural, but I am not supernatural. ‘Tis the Age of Reason, rrrf? There is ever an Explanation at hand” (22). Mason thus struggles to hold onto the magical, even as Enlightenment thought was calling for its extinction. Pynchon, in his inclusion of the Talking Dog and other miraculous forms, also mocks the drier form of reason with the pleasurable addition of high-flown imagination.

On the cusp of reason’s advent and magic’s eclipse, America arises. Mason’s and Dixon’s differences echo a divided perspective that is the constitutive tension within America’s identity; through it the Puritan and Quaker ethics and often contrary drives meet, much as Mason and Dixon eventually meet up with one another as they chart the line from different ends. Their personalities seem at times to be tethered extremes for Pynchon. Even late in their acquaintance, we find still that “the most metaphysickal thing Mason will ever remember Dixon saying is, ‘I owe my Existence to a pair of Shoes,’” as he describes how his parents met (238). Towards the book’s end, “Mason is Gothickally depressive, as Dixon is Westeringly manic” (680). They finish drawing a line through America, but as Pynchon’s narrator surmises, they “could not cross the perilous Boundaries between themselves” (689). They part ways, unable to figure out their friendship. Their odd and interesting relations suggest two opposite forces still present in U.S. culture–Dixon’s pleasurable pragmatism and his Quaker values (equality, acceptance) in tension with Mason’s Puritan posing, his starkness and formality, and his metaphysical inclination. Stargazer and surveyor, they effectively take the measure of America, both cartographically and morally, while they simultaneously reflect its constitutive differences.

If Mason and Dixon stand for the differences that make up America’s complex and at times contradictory consciousness, early in the novel they are alike in their dismay at the abuse that takes place in the colonies. In 1761, when Mason and Dixon travel to Cape Town to measure the first Venus transit, they find the Dutch in the early stages of exploiting African labor and resources, which they then export to the American colonies (Danson 7). Their host at the Cape of Good Hope is Cornellius Vroom, “an Admirer of the legendary Botha brothers, a pair of gin-drinking, pipe-smoking Nimrods of the generation previous whose great Joy and accomplishment lay in the hunting and slaughter of animals much larger than they” (60). The faux-Botha and his fellows see Mason and Dixon in distinct lights, admiring Mason’s potential contribution to the local gene pool and worrying about Dixon’s apparent sympathy for the oppressed in their society. They note “his unconceal’d attraction to the Malays and the Black slaves,–their Food, their Appearance, their Music, and so, it must be obvious, their desires to be deliver’d out of oppression” (61). While Dixon develops a great fondness for “ketjap” and things sensual in the novel (146), he also exhibits the Quakerly desire for equality, a politics that lends him a special sympathy for the slaves and a tendency to speak (and act) out of this sentiment, much as the Quaker community historically did in America (Danson 2, 8, 80-81). Mason, in the meantime, becomes the target of the Vroom family’s attempt to impregnate their slave, Austra, with valuable European sperm. Mason cannot let himself have sex with Austra, however, not because he sees clearly, as Dixon does, the machinations of the Vroom matron, Johanna, as she teases Mason’s desire and then propels him toward her slave. Rather, he finds himself repulsed by the thought of participating in any event that would add to the “Collective Ghost” that arises in his metaphysical eyes from the “Wrongs committed Daily against the Slaves” (68). Mason sees that

Men of Reason will define a Ghost as nothing more otherworldly than a wrong unrighted, which like an uneasy spirit cannot move on [. . .]. But here is a Collective Ghost of more than household Scale,--the Wrongs committed Daily against the Slaves, petty and grave ones alike, going unrecorded, charm'd invisible to history, invisible yet possessing Mass, and Velocity, able not only to rattle Chains but to break them as well. (68)

Mason observes the furious futility of religious and social codes, which still give rise not only to slaves committing suicide “at a frightening Rate,” but also to suicides among whites. If these wrongs remain “charm’d invisible to history,” he suspects that the future will bear the burden nonetheless.

In America, Mason and Dixon join in their shock at the treatment of American Indians, but diverge in their means of assessment. Mason, for example, is compelled by reports of a massacre of Indians in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and so visits the site. “‘What brought me here,’ Mason wrote in the Field-Record, ‘was my curiosity to see the place where was perpetrated last Winter the Horrid and inhuman murder of 26 Indians, Men, Women and Children, leaving none alive to tell’” (341). Dixon, it is gathered, tags along to keep Mason from venturing into such wilds alone, and they pick up a curious guide, who charms Mason but arouses suspicion in Dixon. As he talks on, “Mason soon enough on about how quaint, how American, Dixon rather suspecting him of being in the pay of the Paxton Boys, to keep an eye upon two Hirelings of their Landlord and Enemy, Mr. Penn” (341). Historically, Mason and Dixon had already witnessed bigotry in Philadelphia, where the worst fanatics pronounced Indians no better than animals and “Canaanites whom God had commanded Joshua to destroy” (Danson 83). While they were in Philadelphia, news arrived of the unprovoked massacre in Lancaster, some sixty miles west, where a band known later as “The Paxton Boys” attacked a small Conestoga village and killed and mangled the bodies of the inhabitants. Outraged, local officials gathered up the few survivors and promised them safe haven in a local jail in Lancaster, until they could be moved farther away. The Paxton Boys, however, broke in and murdered the refugees as well (Danson 88-89). Mason’s journal reflects his outrage, and Pynchon expands upon his fascinated horror and Dixon’s more cynical suspicions of their guide. What both discover, in his novel, is that excessive desire (whether for sex or for blood) motivates much of the nature of the New World.

Desire to chart the sky is not neutral, any more than the mapping of the colonies is without political interest. Indeed a young character, DePugh, at one point identifies the Venus transit as “A Vector of Desire” (96). Pynchon’s own text repeatedly swerves into long tangents about a range of desires; eventually the role of reading itself becomes a way to desire. In one of the novel’s subplots, the Rev’d Cherrycoke’s young niece, Tenebrae, is seduced by (or seduces) her older cousin Ethelmer when she convinces him to read an erotic novel to her (526-27). Ethelmer has earlier been chided by Aunt Euphrenia and Uncle Ives on the absurdity of recognizing more than one version of any tale, as well as on the dangers of reading literature. Ives announces that “I cannot, damme I cannot I say, energetically enough insist upon the danger of reading these storybooks,–in particular those known as ‘Novel.’” (350-51). Pynchon’s own novel proliferates tales of sexual seduction and romantic pining, ranging from Mason’s devoted mourning of Rebekah to the comical insistence of an automated duck to have a female, Frankensteinian equivalent invented for him to love and take as a mate (377). In 1739, Jacques de Vaucanson famously invented a duck complete with an automatic digestive system. Pynchon portrays the famous duck as the emblem of suppressed desires and overweening ambition gone awry. Mason and Dixon initially hear of the duck when they encounter Armand, a first-tier French chef who has had to flee his country because of the unwanted hostile, and then affectionate, attentions of the mechanical duck. According to Pynchon’s reconfiguration of Vaucanson’s experiment, the inventor encounters disaster when he endeavors “to repeat for Sex and Reproduction, the Miracles he’d already achiev’d for Digestion and Excretion” (373). Desire, however, produces life, so that the duck becomes independent, with desires and demands of its own. Flying around with such speed as to make it invisible, the duck haunts Armand, having discovered his infamy of cooking such delectables as Canard au Pamplemousse Flambé, Canard avec Aubergines en Casserole, and Fantaisie des Canettes (374). Developing a strange affection, following the chef over to America, the duck makes various verbal demands, requesting finally and especially that he convince Vaucanson to make him a mate, much like a Frankenstein bride (377). Vaucanson refuses, wanting (according to the duck) total control of his pet’s affections. “His undoing,” the duck surmises, “was in modifying my Design, hoping to produce Venus from a Machine” (668). Here the “Venus” of love is teasingly linked to the “transit of Venus” measure yet again. Pynchon is also citing his earlier wariness of the combination of humans and machines, in V. In that, Pynchon’s first novel, he negotiates between two modes of history, using entropy as a touchstone definition. As Marcel Cornis-Pope observes, Pynchon attempts to find a middle ground between “the drifting disorder of ‘posthistory’ and the deadening burden of history’s grand narratives” (104). What Pynchon develops, between determinism and pragmatism, is a kind of “postmodern gothic paradox” in which the truth of history always finds us too late (102). In Mason & Dixon, the grand narratives seem to swirl around sexual and cartographical possession, in tension with a plurality of cultures and ethical systems. This tension lies within European imperialism’s fierce attempt to control local inhabitants and its excesses of desire that spill over into decadent forms of capitalism.

Such desires circle around Mason and Dixon’s constitutive mapping of America; the country that emerges is marked by their contradictions, as it reaches for high ideals, energetically seeks investment of capital and power, and often seems to revel in its identity as a boundary-less place of unprohibited (secret) behaviors. Sexual desire is exploited and marketed, becoming a common by-product of the colonial drive. In Cape Town, their host, Vroom, attempts to “seduce” Dixon’s class-conscious politics by taking him to a place where a “menu of Erotic Scenarios” is offered, among them the “Black Hole.” In this scenario, a European may be taken and locked in a room, at very close quarters, with a mass of slaves dressed as Europeans. It is a “quarter-size replica of the cell at Fort Williams, Calcutta, in which 146 Europeans were oblig’d to spend the night of 20-21 June 1756” (152). In the replica of this “Night of the ‘Black Hole,’” all are naked and, pressed tightly together, and the sex tourist can find “that combination of Equatorial heat, sweat, and the flesh of strangers in enforc’d intimacy [which] might be Pleasurable […] with all squirming together in a serpent’s Nest of Limbs and Apertures and penises” (152-53). These “sex Entrepeneurs” thus use history as a means to an erotic imaginary, even as one might indignantly point out (just as Cherrycoke reflects) that “an hundred twenty lives were lost!” (153). Re-imagining, in Pynchon, may often be a way of progressive revisioning, but it can alternately be co-opted for exploitive forms of entrepreneurship.

Indeed, capitalism seems here to work off of an extreme oppositional dichotomy: that of moralism (Puritan) bound resistantly to an urge to transgress all morals. The chant of self-denial that, through repression, elicits a yearning for extremes of indulgence emerges repeatedly in Pynchon’s novel.⁷ And lust is only one aspect of limitless desire in this tale of national “origins.” In this prescient history, capitalism is a compulsive American trait, and episodes of eager consumerism and entrepreneurial manipulations of desires proliferate. Humorously, Pynchon “predicts” America’s collapse into opportunism; as a band enlightens Dixon,

this Age sees a corruption and disabling of the ancient Magick. Projectors, Brokers of Capital, Insurancers, Peddlers upon the global Scale, Enterprisers and Quacks,--these are the last poor fallen and feckless inheritors of a Knowledge they can never use, but in the service of Greed. The coming Rebellion is theirs,--Franklin, and that Lot,--and Heaven help the rest of us, if they prevail. (487-88)

Benjamin Franklin’s writings have arguably shaped early American entrepreneurial consciousness, in its best and worst lights.⁸ And in this America, lawyers also abound, as Mason is warned by his family, who jokingly tell him that “ev’ryone needs Representation, from time to time. If you go to America, you’ll be hearing all about that, I expect” (202). Pynchon’s poke at litigiousness seems to be an extension of his mockery of many Americans’ commercial opportunism and their monetarily motivated sense of rights. Pynchon’s point may simply be that a particularly intense form of desire lies at the root of American identity itself, with its tensions between pragmatism and metaphysics, its cynical commercialism combined with youthful vision. Moreover, Pynchon constitutes the historical desire (and its narrative effects) not merely as subjectivized or psychologized; he understands it as this parallactic construct, which is measured and split between two roots or objects, defying will and clarification of any singular agency.⁹ This parallax draws on a series of oppositions, not only between Mason and Dixon, but also between the future’s backward glance (its historical gaze) and the point at which it intersects with a historical moment or event. Each present perspective (of past events and narrated histories) is always in a tense dialogue with some distant or distinct point. In this way, parallax also suggests a particular configuration, wherein historical agency, compelled by the desire to narrate history and formulate identity, must mediate its willful and subjective vantage point with that of some other, radically distant point-of-view in order to produce a true “measure” of the past.

Pynchon’s parallactic method is appropriate to the eighteenth century not only because of Mason and Dixon’s use of it, but also because it was then “the rage”–a famous innovation being put to tremendously ambitious use. The method reached its most significant application in 1761, when scientists all over the world used it to measure Venus’s transit of the Sun. This transit was a major event for astronomers, and despite the Seven Years War in Europe, several scientists from a variety of European countries traveled to locations around the world to help compile data on Venus’s distance from the earth and, more importantly, the solar distance from Earth.¹⁰ Once astronomers had the solar distance, they could use it as an astronomical unit that would, according to Allan Chapman, operate as a “measuring rod to work out all the other dimensions of the solar system from proportions derived from Kepler’s Laws” (148). The parallactic method used to measure the Venus transits had been developed by Edmond Halley to observe Mercury’s transit of the sun in 1677. Mercury had moved too quickly to allow a measure, however, so Halley had to turn his attention to Venus’s transits of the sun, which, lasting eight hours, would enable more precise determinations. Although he published his findings through the Royal Society between 1691 and 1716, Halley did not live to measure a Venus transit. His parallactic method was therefore used for the first time by Mason and Dixon and their fellow astronomers in 1761.¹¹

To the Vroom girls, who teasingly inquire about their work at the Cape, Mason and Dixon explain their method:

Parallax. To an Observer up at the North Cape, the Track of the Planet, across the Sun, will appear much to the south of the same Track as observ'd from down here, at the Cape of Good Hope. The further apart the Obs [observations] North and South, that is, the better. It is the Angular Distance between, that we wish to know. One day, someone sitting in a room will succeed in reducing all the Observations, from all 'round the World, to a simple number of Seconds, and tenths of a Second, of Arc, --and that will be the Parallax. (93)

Drawing a triangle with its base on the earth and its apex in the sky, one can determine the distance of a heavenly body from the Earth. The first successful use of parallax was executed by the Greek astronomer Hipparchus, who observed the sun’s eclipse on March 14, 190 B.C. from what we now call Istanbul and also, with help, from Alexandria in northern Egypt. Measuring the angles to the moon from these points, Hipparchus could calculate that the moon’s distance from the Earth was approximately 71 times the Earth’s radius (Trefil 48). In 1761 and 1769, equipped with finer instruments of measurement, astronomers would set up a one-foot-radius quadrant, by which they could determine their local latitude. They also regulated a pendulum clock to establish local time. Precise coordinates enabled them to relate their various transit times to the home coordinates in Europe (Chapman 150).

While the mapping of the sky (and earth) may, in some ways, be yet another imperialist effort, the parallactic method subjectively frames the supposed objectivity of science in Pynchon’s work.¹² As Richard Powers, in his invocation of Joycean parallax, suggests, “the act of looking is powerful, if you can see the look. And for that you need some device that gives you parallax” (Birkerts 62). Powers explains it quite simply: if one holds a finger before one’s face, and then closes (and then opens) first the right eye and then the left, the finger appears to move slightly. One can thus “see the look” by virtue of the two different locations, different “points of view.” Pynchon is interested in more than the modernist emphasis on subjective narration and perspectival distortion, however. He examines the difference not merely between two “I”s but between two moments of national (self) perception: 1671 and 1997. Collective culture, at both points, seems to be spurred on by scientific curiosity and an intense capitalistic drive.

If Mason & Dixon initially separates science and capitalism, by the novel’s close the two surveyors begin to suspect their work’s collusion with some hidden political agenda. They fear that they have been so used by the British Royal Society as to perhaps be “slaves” themselves (692). Having gradually become acquainted with the American politics surrounding the line for which they are responsible, they feel merely “We are Fools” for being used by the Society in a matter that may have been more political than either had realized (478). Here science fears being controlled by the government; previously, Pynchon focused more on the individual’s fear of being controlled by science.

As readers of Gravity’s Rainbow will recall, that novel’s hero, Slothrop, is the hapless victim of a scientific conspiracy. Jamf, one of the inventors of Imipolex G, has paid off Slothrop’s impoverished father so that he might be allowed to experiment on the baby son’s tiny member. All this occurs under the umbrella of two commercial interests (a Swiss cartel and IG Farben) that have invested in Imipolex G. Himself unaware and unable to recall such early trauma, Slothrop now suffers the effects of having been conditioned to respond sexually (in the form of an erection) to the smell of the new plastic, which will eventually be used in rocket insulation (249-51). The result is that, during World War II whenever an A4 rocket approaches London, Slothrop as a full-grown man finds himself compelled toward a frantic search for sexual interludes. Sadly, he is the unwitting subject of the bawdy song “The Penis He Thought Was His Own” (216-17). Pynchon elaborates the ways in which postmodern society, through commercialism and science, has severed desire from its more intimate connections, taking away the supposed agency of sexual exchange. We become now merely the means of the drive, drawn on by false advertising and a world that conspiratorially manipulates our epistemologies (as in The Crying of Lot 49) and desires (as in Gravity’s Rainbow). We are, like Vaucanson’s mechanical duck, ever more machine-like in our impulses–yet always propelled by greater animating desire.

If in Gravity’s Rainbow Pynchon suggests that science might be cruelly manipulating–and even inventing–our desires so that they are not our own, in the swirl of science and culture presented in Mason & Dixon, he asks if our very scientific certainties are not politically predetermined. Pynchon prods science’s hesitation to see its own desires and the imbalance its supposed objectivity creates in postmodern culture.¹³ In Mason & Dixon, he reveals the political compromise even science itself can make, regardless of whether its practitioners believe themselves to be beyond societal and ethical measure.

In reviewing Mason & Dixon, Michael Wood poses one of the crucial questions raised by this novel; he asks, “why we should care about this amiably imagined old world, this motley and circumstantial eighteenth century smuggled into the twentieth?” Or, more broadly still, “what are we doing when we care about the (more or less remote) past?” (Wood 120). Differently put, one might ask: what is the historical impulse, that it should feed the desires of fiction? What is the historical desire, and is it linked to the scientific quest for knowledge? Pynchon’s novel would imply that it is, that the drive for an objective vantage point and insight–whether into the past behind us or the stars beyond–is an ambition far from alien to any of us. And yet those who serve as the conveyers of the drive–Mason and Dixon, for example–may neither be aware nor in control of its manifestation.

Finally, one might ask if there is some impetus for history to fictionalize, even in its root-like resistance to anything beyond the empirical. Or, conversely, should one engage in projects like Pynchon’s, which so broadly fictionalize histories? It may be recognizably postmodern and so of our time to insert fiction into history, as Edmund Morris does in Dutch, his controversial memoir of Ronald Reagan. But that practice, as well as the art of fictionalizing history, still troubles U.S. culture.¹⁴ Pynchon has always had an uncanny penchant for disguising history as fiction. In The Crying of Lot 49, he invokes the sixteenth-century postal service operated by the noble house of Thurn and Taxis, and in both V. and Gravity’s Rainbow he portrays the struggle of the Herero, an oppressed group of blacks in a southwest African group, who are still defined today in part by the German culture of their colonizers.¹⁵ In Mason & Dixon, Pynchon transposes current awareness over previous erasures to produce an odd sense of both the differences and yet also the complicity between eighteenth-century racism and our own erasures (or de-racing) of the past.

Rather than writing a counternarrative of history, Pynchon creates a form of history that stages an exchange between the past and present, so that the historian’s perspective, as Dominick LaCapra explains, “attempts to work out ‘dialogical’ connections between past and present through which historical understanding becomes linked to ethicopolitical concerns” (9-10). This makes no sense, of course, if one conceives of the past as static fact, rather than as a hybridized discourse composed of varying modes. However, in Jacques Lacan’s configuration of history, it is a form of rememoration that begins in material bits that have been left aside. Once these fragments are shaped by narrative, the nation may fold its history into identity with a sense that it is always what it now is (Lacan, Speech 17). When history is understood as destabilized and fragmentary from the start, Pynchon’s parallactic perspective is less a theft or distortion of some “honest” or “true” past. It is instead a conversation with its erasures, and a process of recovery. For psychoanalysis, the subject and the nation must be taught to grasp that this seemingly necessary history has been written around scars, “turning points,” and traumatic events (Lacan, Speech 22-23).¹⁶ Pynchon’s project offers a way of bringing lost fragments of history into a disruptive dialogue that could jolt his American audience out of assertive forgetting and the repeated aggressions that are propelled by the social-psychological work done as a whole culture endeavors to lock out memory of disturbing elements embedded within its national narrative.

Mason & Dixon represents an impulse to write history through the imaginary field, to crosshatch its narrative with a realization of culture’s desire to find its identity in the realm of the imagination. It thus argues, implicitly, for the importance of artistic imagination alongside scientific and historical work. Pynchon rejects the harsh realism and more cynical parodies employed by many contemporary authors, using humor and even magic as modes of transformation.¹⁷ Talking dogs, sexually aroused mechanical ducks, and nighttime apparitions and ghosts haunt Mason and Dixon in America; perhaps the country that combines technical invention with capitalistic enterprise might be equally mythologic in Pynchon’s ambivalent history. My suggestion is that this magical aspect of his narrative necessarily–and politically–interferes with the drive to fix and control knowledge and “truth,” which, coming out of the Enlightenment project, has nonetheless produced streaks of “darkness” that Pynchon uncovers and sets in dialogue with the more celebrated aspects of America’s historical guise. Ultimately, Pynchon’s novel produces a duality, between comic acceptance of American commercialism, with all its lovable foibles, and careful scrutiny of its political roots and past. Mason and Dixon may not be revolutionary agents, in terms of toting guns and instigating liberatory wars, but their perspectives raise questions about slavery, genocide, commercialism, and gender oppression. In this manner, the novel both critiques the past (and present) while also recasting history, reinterpreting it in a way that might influence future trajectories. In so doing, Pynchon continues to interrogate pragmatic American optimism about agency (one’s ability to effect change singularly at a historical juncture), while he implicitly invokes the power (and hence “agency”) of a larger cultural imaginary that influences the country’s self-image and the more minute actions of a community and nation.

Notes

1. Edwin Danson’s recent history of the drawing of the line describes the details of this project as well as those of the two Venus transits. Mason and Dixon were brought in after several failed surveys (on which the Penns and Baltimores could not agree) in 1763 and departed in 1768, after four years and ten months in America. See Danson 3-4, 18-26, 77-78, 183, 191.

2. Pynchon’s interest in politics is explicit in his essay “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?,” in which he recounts the vehement worker’s rebellion against the advance of machinery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in England. His paranoia also points alternately to the pervasive powers of capitalist ventures, in The Crying of Lot 49, and to the government’s extensive surveillance (potentially) in Vineland and (through science) in Gravity’s Rainbow. David Cowart discusses Pynchon’s essay on the Luddites and its importance to Mason & Dixon, demonstrating the relevance of this rebellion for Pynchon’s own project of rethinking the influence of science on American culture and politics.

3. According to Michael Dirda, in his review “Measure for Measure,” Pynchon signed contracts for two future books in 1973, the year Gravity’s Rainbow appeared. One book seems to have been Vineland and the second was provisionally titled “The Mason-Dixon Line.”

4. If Pynchon’s use of parallax is unique in its form, his is not the first literary appropriation of the concept. In Ulysses Leopold Bloom thinks of parallax while wandering near the Liffey in “Lestrygonians” (U8.110), recalling a book by Sir Robert Ball that discusses the concept. References to parallax surface briefly in other episodes, but it is more forcefully acted out in Stephen Dedalus’s and Bloom’s relative apprehensions of Shakespeare in the mirror in “Circe,” whereby we measure their different senses of the Bard (and so perhaps ideals) (U15.3820-24). It also appears in “Ithaca,” where the two men famously urinate beneath Molly’s window after silently “contemplating the other in both mirrors of the reciprocal flesh of theirhisnothis fellow faces” (U17.1184). Joyce uses two perspectives–at times a proliferation of them–to undermine monocular views and to register the difference between two (or more) interpretive angles. Pynchon’s use is more pervasive, as I argue here, and more explicitly political. (Ulysses citations refer to episode and line numbers from the Hans Walter Gabler edition.)

5. See Suleiman’s “Epilogue: The Politics of Postmodernism After the Wall; or, What do We do When the ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ Starts?”

6. Two exceptional reconstructions of Pynchon’s political project have appeared to date. Jeffrey S. Baker argues that in Gravity’s Rainbow the author both critiques and holds up the struggle for true democracy. Pynchon exposes the Puritans’ divisive roots in American ideology, where to be a member of the chosen few (the preterite) of Christianity is a dream opposed to our call for radical equality. Turning to John Dewey’s works, Baker argues for their importance to 1960s radicalism and in Pynchon’s own writing. Baker must, however, launch this argument through a reading of Vineland. Prior to that text, I am suggesting, Pynchon’s radicalism was less easily recognized. Jerry Varsava, as well, reads backwards from Vineland, finding a plea for rationalism and consensus politics in The Crying of Lot 49.

7. Lady Lepton’s party (which Mason and Dixon stumble upon in America when lost in the dark one night) has one servant who is startlingly familiar to the two, and Lord Lepton informs Dixon that he “purchas’d her my last time thro’ Quebec, of the Widows of Christ, a Convent quite well known in certain Circles, devoted altogether to the World,–helping its Novices descend, into ever more exact forms of carnal Mortality […] not ordinary Whores, though as Whores they must be quite gifted, but as eager practitioners of all Sins. Lust is but one of their Sacraments. So are Murder and Gluttony” (419).

8. Max Weber uses Franklin as an example of the American capitalist imperative to accumulate wealth. See Weber 48-51 and passim.

9. My understanding of agency here derives primarily from psychoanalysis and a deconstructive understanding of consciousness and action. That is, agency does not arise from an indivisible subject nor from one who (fantasmatically) claims full consciousness and wholly controlling intention. Instead, action arises from an ability to manage the tensions between unconscious pulls and conscious directives, an ability to encounter and embrace the ambivalence of fractured belief. Perhaps the most cogent defense of this notion of subjectivity comes in Jacques Lacan’s essay, “Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis,” and I have more extensively developed it in my book Gestural Politics: Stereotype and Parody in Joyce.

10. See Chapman 149. Mason and Dixon were initially on their way to Sumatra to observe the 1761 transit of Venus. The Seven Years War in Europe was still underway, however, and so their ship, the Seahorse, was set upon by the French. The attack left eleven men dead, and Mason and Dixon turned back to port. They traveled eventually to Cape Town instead and set up their equipment to view Venus’s transit of the sun.

11. Transits occur in pairs every 105 or 122 years. While Venus transits could never be seen without the help of a telescopic apparatus, Johannes Kepler predicted the transit of 1631, working from planetary observation data. Jeremiah Horrocks was the first to observe a Venus transit in 1639, having realized that a second transit would occur eight years after the first, despite Kepler’s prediction otherwise. Even before the parallactic method was developed, he was able to attain enough data on the transit to calculate the precise value for the node of the planet’s orbit, taken from the known position of the Sun’s center. He also calculated an accurate figure for the angular diameter of Venus, which proved to be smaller than previously believed. Most significantly, he extracted a solar parallax figure of 14 arc-seconds, which allowed him to calculate the mean distance of the Earth from the sun more accurately than any to date. Horrocks had informed other scientists, and his friend William Crabtree had also observed the transit. Both died before publishing their work, and the findings were eventually published by Johannet Hevelius in Poland in 1662 (Chapman 148).

12. Graham Huggan points out that a map can function as a tool of persuasion, demonstrating, at its most extreme, the fantasy that the world can be turned into a simple object. He argues that, the “new ‘scientific’ cartography” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while informed by more precise means of measurement and of attaining accuracy, still operated primarily as a tool of the colonialist imagination (5).

13. Michel Serres presents a fairly powerful analysis of the drive to “win” or conquer and control imbedded within various discourses on science and reason (Baconian and Cartesian, particularly) in “The Algebra of Literature: The Wolf’s Game.”

14. Morris apparently is inspired by Reagan’s own tendency to create fictions. What outraged some readers, however, was Morris’s decision to insert his own narrative persona into the biography as if he were a “real” historical presence in the past. The memoir stirred more than a little controversy. See Morris and Weisman.

15. The New York Times ran an article on the Herero on 31 May 1998, documenting its attachment to German dress and history, despite Germany’s abusive treatment of the Africans in 1904 (see McNeil). As for Thurn and Taxis, they operated both as an imperial and later private postal system throughout Europe. They were only nationalized in the late nineteenth century.

16. This analogy between the subject and nation is Lacan’s, and also seems to operate in some portion in Pynchon. If it is a simplistic and potentially ellisive move, belying the differences between intersubjective and national psychologies, my suggestion here is that it helps Pynchon describe, in his fictional form, a new postmodern mode that addresses politics explicitly.

17. In this, Pynchon is balancing between the parodic or hyperrealist branch of postmodernism and that of magical realism, which appears in postmodern novels by writers like Maxine Hong Kingston, Ishmael Reed, and Gloria Naylor. While these writers may link magical moments to cultural specificity and the possibility of cultural or personal transformations, for Pynchon magic is the mythological prehistory of science. As such, it is the necessary focus of postmodernism, if it is to have some futurity.

Works Cited

• Baker, Jeffrey S. “A Democratic Pynchon: Counterculture, Counterforce and Participatory Democracy.” Pynchon Notes 32-33: 99-131.
• Birkerts, Sven. “An Interview with Richard Powers.” Bomb (Summer 1998): 148-51.
• Burns, Christy L. Gestural Politics: Stereotype and Parody in Joyce. New York: State U of New York P, 2000.
• Chapman, Allan. “The Transit of Venus.” Endeavor 22.4: 148-51.
• Cornis-Pope, Marcel. Narrative Innovation and Cultural Rewriting in the Cold War and After. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
• Cowart, David. “The Luddite Vision: Mason & Dixon.” American Literature 71:2 (June 1999): 341-63.
• Danson, Edwin. Drawing the Line: How Mason and Dixon Surveyed the Most Famous Border in America. New York: Wiley, 2001.
• Dirda, Michael. “Measure for Measure.” Rev. of Mason & Dixon, by Thomas Pynchon. Washington Post 27 Apr. 1997: X01.
• Huggan, Graham. Territorial Disputes: Maps and Mapping Strategies in Contemporary Canadian and Australian Fiction. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1994.
• Joyce, James. Ulysses: The Corrected Text. New York: Vintage, 1986.
• Lacan, Jacques. “Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis.” Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977. 8-29.
• —. Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis. Trans. Anthony Wilden. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1968.
• LaCapra, Dominick. History, Politics, and the Novel. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1987.
• Mason, A. Hughlett. Journal of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon. Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society. Vol. 76. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1969.
• McNeil, Donald G. Jr. “Its Past on Its Sleeve.” New York Times 28 May 1998: 3.
• Menand, Louis. “Entropology.” Rev. of Mason & Dixon, by Thomas Pynchon. New York Review of Books 12 Jun. 1997: 22-25.
• Morris, Edmund. Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan. New York: Random, 1999.
• Pendergrast, Mark. Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World. New York: Basic, 1999.
• Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. New York: Harper, 1965.
• —. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Penguin, 1973.
• —. “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?” New York Times Book Review 28 Oct. 1984: 1, 40, 42.
• —. Mason & Dixon. New York: Holt, 1997.
• —. V. New York: Harper, 1961.
• —. Vineland. New York: Penguin, 1990.
• Serres, Michel. “The Algebra of Literature: The Wolf’s Game.” Textual Strategies. Ed. Josué V. Harari. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979. 260-76.
• Suleiman, Susan Rubin. Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994.
• Trefil, James. “Puzzling Out Parallax.” Astronomy 26:9 (September 1998): 46-50.
• Varsava, Jerry. “Thomas Pynchon and Postmodern Liberalism.” Canadian Review of American Studies 25:3 (1995): 63-100.
• Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. 1930. Trans. Talcott Parsons. London: Routledge, 1992.
• Weisman, Steve R. “The Hollow Man.” Rev. of Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, by Edmund Morris. New York Times Book Review 10 Oct. 1999: 7-8.
• Wood, Michael. “Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon.” Rev. of Mason & Dixon, by Thomas Pynchon. Raritan 17:4 (Spring 1998): 120-30.

Chris Bongie

Department of English
Queen’s University
bongiec@qsilver.queensu.ca

Put me in a room with a great writer, I grovel. Put me in with Roseanne, I throw up.

–Jamaica Kincaid¹

 
When Tina Brown asked Roseanne Barr to serve as guest consultant for a special women’s issue of The New Yorker in 1995, Antiguan-American novelist Jamaica Kincaid made her negative feelings crystal clear. She trashed Brown’s protégé in the most emphatic of terms–as my epigraph demonstrates–and eventually severed her decades-long ties with The New Yorker, accusing Brown of transforming that once venerable journal into “a version of People magazine.” In the following pages, I argue that Kincaid’s hostile reaction represents something more than an individual fit of pique on the part of a notoriously irascible and opinionated writer; rather, her nausea at the thought of being forced to occupy the same physical and textual space as Roseanne has much to tell us about the vexed, and very under-theorized, relations between postcolonial cultural producers (be they creative writers or academic theorists) and what is still often condescendingly referred to as mass culture. Kincaid’s testy comments direct us toward the surprisingly uncharted territory in which postcolonial and cultural studies (don’t yet) meet.

The one-sided confrontation between Kincaid and Roseanne can be read as emblematic of a failed dialogue between postcolonial and cultural studies. In Kincaid, we have a respected author of such postcolonial (or Afro-diasporic) “classics” as Annie John and In a Small Place, someone frequently lionized by critics as a writer who “speaks to and from the position of the other” (Ferguson 238). In Roseanne, we have a U.S. TV icon, someone who has also accumulated her fair share of academic plaudits from critics in disciplines such as women’s and cultural studies who have lauded “her subversive potential as a source of resistance and inspiration for feminist change” (Lee 96) or the way her show “potentially helps restore class visibility to the overwhelmingly middle-class world of television” (Bettie 142). While Roseanne may never have read Kincaid, the postcolonial author obviously feels that she has ingested enough of this media icon to pass definitive judgment on the degraded form of culture she represents: only those with “coarse and vulgar” taste, like Tina Brown, could possibly be drawn to such a nauseating figure as Roseanne.²

Revealingly, in voicing this negative evaluation of Roseanne, Kincaid seems compelled to preface it with the positive counterweight of groveling at the feet of a “great writer.” Kincaid has thus staked out a double position: one of power and contempt as regards the abject white woman she is condemning, but also one of deference to and emulation of an unnamed, unsexed, and unraced “great writer.” How are we to explain the hostility to an icon of mass culture on the postcolonial writer’s part, and the willingness to grovel before the idea of literary greatness? Both this hostility and this willingness must, at first blush, strike us as decidedly unexpected, given the strong tendency in postcolonial circles to question the legitimacy of the hierarchical thinking upon which Kincaid’s intertwined evaluations of Roseanne and great writers depends. As stated, a natural reaction to these comments would be to write them off as sports of Kincaid’s querulous nature that tell us nothing about postcolonial studies, its literatures, and its theories. I will, by contrast, be pursuing an “unnatural” counterargument based on the following intentionally provocative hypothesis: Kincaid’s double position, and the value judgments generating it, are in fact exemplary of the foundational bias of postcolonial literary studies, of its deep-rooted sense of distinction from the “coarse and vulgar” world of mass consumption.

The tension between popular culture and great writing evident in Kincaid’s evaluation of Roseanne by no means exhausts the nuances that can be read into her one-sided attack. The binary opposition Kincaid draws is complicated by the fact that she is herself a writer whose books have gained no small success in the literary marketplace. If Kincaid is not “popular” in the same sense that Roseanne is “popular,” she nonetheless has a proven track record as a bestselling author: she is a writer who not only generates “serious” articles by postcolonial critics but also frothy interviews in such places (ironically enough) as People magazine, and who has been deemed “worthy” of inclusion in a series like Critical Companions to Popular Contemporary Writers, where she takes her place beside the likes of Stephen King, Anne Rice, but also, intriguingly enough, Toni Morrison (see Paravisini-Gebert). Postcolonial and Afro-diasporic Kincaid may well be, but that has not stopped her from finding a place in the literary mainstream: or, to put it another way, she is (or, more exactly, can be read as) a middlebrow writer, one who takes some stylistic and ideological chances in her work but who also writes in such as a way as to be capable of pleasing a relatively broad audience. Kincaid’s distinction between the “great” writer and the “vulgar” mass media star cannot stand alone: it must be understood in conjunction with this second opposition between two different types of popularity, the middlebrow and the lowbrow.

Are these two types of popularity as easily separable from one another as one might wish (at least if one were a postcolonial defender of Kincaid), or is there a troubling complicity between them that needs to be thought through and perhaps even embraced? Might not the dramatic rejection of Roseanne on Kincaid’s part itself be nothing more than an anxious attempt–unconscious, calculated, or a mixture of both–to forestall any serious consideration of her own “popular” success, to fence off her own identity as a cultural producer from Roseanne’s, vaccinating herself against the latter by aggrandizing a sense of distinction that might ultimately be attributed to little more than the narcissism of small differences? Might not her middlebrow popularity be part of the very same media “buzz” as the lowbrow version she so disdainfully rejects?

This possible complicity, or (dis)connection, between two forms of popularity–what René Girard would refer to as their “double mediation”³–generates a second set of questions that needs to be addressed in tandem with those surrounding our initial opposition between “vulgar” popularity and “great” writing. How and where do the lowbrow and middlebrow modes of popularity intersect? Does it make any sense to speak of a writer like Kincaid as exemplifying the “middlebrow postcolonial,” given the apparent tension between the assimilative connotations of the first term and the resistant ones of the second? If there is such a thing as the middlebrow postcolonial, how is its popularity (or its potential for popularity) processed by postcolonial literary studies? What about the “lowbrow postcolonial”: is there such a thing (or such a process of reading), and if so, what is its relation not only to its middlebrow double but to the mass popularity of media icons like Roseanne or Jackie Collins?

Furthermore, to raise one last set of questions that has to be factored into the mix, what is the relation, or lack thereof, between all these forms of popularity (mass, lowbrow, middlebrow–or what I will be referring to collectively as the “inauthentically popular”) and that long-cherished ideological construct, a truly popular culture created and consumed by what Frantz Fanon was so fond of referring to as “the people”? Ideally neither degraded masses nor lowbrow or middlebrow consumers, the people–legitimate custodians of a traditional past or inspiriting lifeblood of a revolutionary future–might presumably be thought to have better and more “authentic” things to do with their time than watch Roseanne or read Annie John. In the failed dialogue between Roseanne and Kincaid, where are the people situated, presuming they even exist?

The three sets of questions I have just asked lay out a clear set of overlapping oppositions–the postcolonial versus the popular; the middlebrow versus the lowbrow, with specific reference to the postcolonial; and the inauthentically popular versus the “authentically popular”–that I will be addressing in the following very preliminary account of the foundational bias of postcolonial literary studies and its anxious and under-theorized relation to the empirical question of popularity. In the next section, I expand on the first of these questions, attempting to smoke out the bias toward great, or at least not bad, writing in postcolonial studies by briefly examining the case of a neglected Martiniquan novelist, Tony Delsham; in the section after that, I discuss the far-from-neglected Guadeloupean novelist Maryse Condé by way of expanding upon the distinction between the low-, the middle-, and the highbrow, and its unacknowledged importance to academic readers of postcolonial texts. After these two case studies, I conclude–aided by Graham Huggan’s groundbreaking The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (2001)–with some general considerations regarding what, if anything, cultural studies, with its concerted focus on the popular (in all its many forms), can contribute to our understanding of postcolonial studies, and indeed, to postcolonialism’s self-understanding. Will it help us imagine a room in which Roseanne and Jamaica Kincaid can meet with a new-found respect for one another, or at least without throwing up? And, to anticipate my unlikely point of arrival in this article, can we (re)imagine a place for the “great writer” in that very same room–if not at its center, then at least still within hearing of the less strained, more productive dialogue between cultural and postcolonial studies that I advocate in the following pages?

I. Pop Goes the Postcolonial: On (Not) Reading Tony Delsham

The idea for this article came to me in the summer of 1999, while doing research in Martinique. I found myself passing an idle hour in Fort-de-France’s most upscale bookstore, perusing the impressive amount of Caribbean literature and history for sale there. Two items on the bookshelves especially caught my attention. The first of these was a prominent display devoted to Dérives–a recently published novel by Tony Delsham, editor of the Martiniquan weekly Antilla. I have provided a brief account of Delsham’s novel elsewhere (“Street” 246-51), but the issue that I want to raise here revolves around Delsham himself, and his place–or lack thereof–in accounts of French Caribbean literature in particular, and francophone literature in general (to say nothing of that even broader and more nebulous discipline, postcolonial literary studies⁴). For many years now, Delsham has been among the most popular and visible writers in the French Antilles, if one judges popularity by the criterion of number of books sold.⁵ Given the fact of Delsham’s popularity, the question I found myself asking (and it is a question Delsham himself has repeatedly posed) is why no one pays any attention to him in francophone–much less postcolonial–studies, when so much critical ink has been spilled during the past decade over other prominent writers from the area like Edouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Maryse Condé.⁶ Surely, I asked myself, the popularity of Delsham’s many novels, which consistently deal with local issues close to the heart of his Antillean readers, tells us as much or more about the culture as do those other, sometimes more experimental but often very accessible narratives that have acquired an ever-growing reputation in France and North America? Surely a novel like Dérives is in many respects as, or even more, relevant an example of Martiniquan literature than, say, Chamoiseau’s Prix Goncourt-winning Texaco? I then found myself asking a question that is the obligatory rhetorical starting point of so much postcolonial literary criticism: why is a particular author ignored by the critical orthodoxy, and what nefarious circumstances are promoting the marginalization of this author and others like him?

One obvious factor in Delsham’s critical neglect doubtless involves the way his novels are marketed. A signal difference between Delsham and most of the luminous bodies in the firmament of Antillean literature is that the likes of Glissant and Condé benefit from their association with well-established Parisian publishing houses, whereas Delsham is self-published and the distribution of his books is largely a local affair, limited to the French Caribbean and certain parts of Paris; so, at a purely logistical level, it is hardly surprising he has been ignored.⁷ (To take this difference as a critical point of departure is, to be sure, to beg the question of how and why those other authors gained access to Parisian firms in the first place, and I will return to this question in my later discussion of the “certain quality” of Condé’s work.) The “indigenous” nature of the production and circulation of Delsham’s novels certainly helps explain his neglect, although one can easily imagine it becoming a major source of interest for some critics, who might want to take up Delsham’s cause and argue that this immersion in the local makes him more “authentic” than writers who have acquired an international audience. Complaints about the latter, cosmopolitan writers have, indeed, been repeatedly voiced in certain quarters in Martinique: the nationalist Guy Cabort-Masson has, for instance, lambasted Patrick Chamoiseau for complying with exoticizing Western notions about the Caribbean and “not writing for Martiniquans” (199). Such writers could well be regarded as appealing to “the ersatz nostalgia on which mass merchandising increasingly draws” (Appadurai 78). With his self-publishing and self-marketing approach, Delsham might conceivably be viewed as less subject to the collusions and compromises of this exoticizing nostalgia, and thus altogether more popular in the most positive (“authentic”) sense of the word since he has established a privileged relationship with a local readership–a readership that would not (at least according to this line of argument) be confused with the “assimilating” masses but that, rather, would be construed as forming part of the “oppositional” people, anchored in their “native” context and at a purifying distance from the global literary market and its ersatz commodities. For such critics, Delsham’s popularity in the French Caribbean might well be considered a vital source of distinction. The “writer as local hero” is, like the “writer as tragic exile,” the sort of script that postcolonial studies can live with–indeed, the sort of script it demands–and were a sociological consideration of production and consumption the only factor in deciding who is and is not worthy of being consecrated at the hands of postcolonial critics, it seems likely that Delsham would by now have been salvaged by a string of academics indignant at his marginalization.

Sociological considerations of this sort are not, however, the only factor in such decisions (indeed, it is part of my argument that such considerations are nowhere near as important as they should be to postcolonial studies). There are certainly any number of other reasons that might help explain why Delsham, despite his wide popularity in the French Caribbean, has not attracted any critical attention. To cite just one of these reasons, Delsham might well be viewed as falling short of postcolonialism’s decided “preference for perfect political credentials” (Donnell 102): notwithstanding his repeated stress on the need for class justice and his championing of a trendy cause like Créolité, the conciliatory position he consistently preaches in his novels and in his countless editorials for Antilla–where he styles himself an “advocate of love,” one stridently opposed to angry nationalists who argue their case at “the tribunal of history, which is the refuge of the castrated” (1 January 1999, 6)–does not offer the incendiary agenda that would be immediately attractive to francophone and postcolonial critics programmed to sing the praises of a “denunciatory tradition.”⁸

Delsham’s conciliatory “advocacy of love” may not be likely to win him a lot of fans amongst the advocates of denunciation, although one can certainly make the argument that his emphasis on cross-cultural understanding and “normalization” fits in with a recent turn toward “radically nonracial humanism” in postcolonial studies (Gilroy 15). However problematic his ideological positioning, though, it certainly cannot account in and of itself for the silence regarding his work: after all, a lot of ink has been spilled over V. S. Naipaul by critics who find his opinions on matters postcolonial utterly reprehensible. There must, in short, be a far stronger reason for Delsham’s exile from the mainstream of francophone criticism–a reason, I would argue, that extends well beyond the relatively narrow confines of French Caribbean literary studies and provides a conceptual base for the geographically wide-ranging but amorphous disciplines of francophone and, a fortiori, postcolonial studies. That reason, to put it bluntly, is this: Tony Delsham might be an energetic journalist, but he is a decidedly bad novelist.

Although it is a critical commonplace in postcolonial studies to lament the way in which marginalized writers have been misidentified as “bad” by uncomprehending elitist (neo-)colonialcritics, one would, to put it mildly, have to exercise a great amount of ingenuity in order to salvage Delsham’s novels on the basis of their literary value and exercise upon them in good faith any of the multitude of interpretive strategies through which a book’s “literariness” (or even its angry or sly resistance to Eurocentric ideas of “literariness”) can supposedly be confirmed. Delsham’s novels are so manifestly sub-literary that it is hardly surprising critics have ignored the rapidly proliferating mass of historical novels and romans à thèse he has produced and that they have, instead, devoted their critical energies to self-evidently “good” writers like Glissant, Chamoiseau, and Condé.⁹

Or, I should immediately add, these exclusionary practices are hardly surprising in a critical environment where any kind of premium is placed on literary value and where, indeed, the very fact of popularity (be it middlebrow or lowbrow) might be viewed with an Adorno-like suspicion. Hardly surprising, that is to say, if one has not abandoned oneself to the ostensibly “democratizing” insight–so prevalent in a lot of self-satisfied canon-bashing over the past several decades–that the very idea of literary value is nothing more than a cultural construction. Hardly surprising, if one has not fully absorbed what John Frow has isolated as “one of the fundamental themes of work in cultural studies”: namely, that to place the critical spotlight on popular culture is an excellent way of demonstrating the non-existence of its supposed antithesis, high culture, and of thereby showing us “that no object, no text, no cultural practice has an intrinsic or necessary meaning or value or function; and that meaning, value, and function are always the effect of specific social relations and mechanisms of signification” (61). Hardly surprising, in other words, if one remains committed to seemingly outmoded assumptions about the legitimacy of hierarchical distinctions between the good and the bad, the innovative and the conventional, masterworks and trash.

What is surprising, though, is that most of what we know as postcolonial studies actually takes place precisely in this value-affirming critical context–a context that some would call dated, Eurocentric, and (thus) morally reprehensible, but that I will simply refer to in more neutral terms as modernist. Postcolonial studies as one of the last redoubts of modernism? Postcolonial studies as fundamentally opposed to, rather than in accord with, a cultural studies ever intent on voiding texts of “intrinsic or necessary meaning or value or function” by privileging the “coarse and vulgar” likes of Roseanne or her pop-literary equivalents? Postcolonial critics as latter-day Adornos, turning their noses up at mass culture and groveling, à la Kincaid, in the presence of the highly serious and the complex, the unpredigested and non-standardized? This scenario might seem to fly in the face of “common sense” (which may well be another way of saying that it radically contests the dominant–at least in academic circles–“postcolonial ideology”¹⁰), but it seems to provide the only plausible explanation for how a popular writer like Delsham could be so dramatically shunted to the margins of an ostensibly margin-hugging discipline like postcolonial studies.

Two recent critiques of postcolonial theory can help us lay the foundation for an understanding of how this unlikely scenario might have come about: Emily Apter has disapprovingly commented on “postcolonial theory’s resistance to injecting itself with contemporaneity” (213), while Robert Young has pointed to the ways in which, largely due to Said’s textualist misappropriation in Orientalism of Foucault’s praxis-oriented idea of discourse, colonial discourse analysis has degenerated “into just a form of literary criticism that focuses on a certain category of texts” (394). Taken together, Apter’s critique of postcolonialism’s (and specifically Bhabha’s) insistence on the ways in which “‘time-lagged’ signification” continues to be “written out in postcolonial modernity” and Young’s critique of the bias toward texts (as opposed to everyday practices and material conditions) in colonial discourse analysis point the way toward an explanation for Delsham’s invisibility as an object of critical study. As a prerequisite for gaining institutional status in the 1980s, a geographically free-floating concept such as the “postcolonial”–even more open than its predecessor, Commonwealth studies, to the accusation of being little more than an empty abstraction–required something to unify it. While it might have seemed logical for this unifying force to have been supplied simply by “lived experience” and the geopolitical realities of colonial and postcolonial practice (as Young insists), the primary emphasis in fact came to be placed on the text, a text that could take any material form (postcolonial literature, painting, music, etc.) but that had to be read, and read in a certain “time-lagged” way, a modernist way. Lacking a “secure” grounding in any specific cultural territory,¹¹ postcolonial studies anxiously, and anachronistically, attempted to find a home for its “unhomely” self in (a modernist idea of) the text–an idea inseparable from evaluative criteria that were elsewhere being seriously questioned by the relativizing outlook of both postmodernism and cultural studies.

What does this modernist idea of the text entail? As I see it, when it comes to the identification and positive evaluation of cultural texts, the twin directives of modernism were as follows: aesthetic resistance (promoting stylistic difficulty) and political resistance (promoting social radical change). While the preference might well have been for an ideal fusion of the two (as in Brechtian theatre, for instance), style and politics could, needless to say, be seen as superficially at odds with one another, as the modernist extremes of art for art’s sake and agitprop demonstrate. Notwithstanding this potential for division, the two directives had in common an emphasis on the production, and productivity, of resistance which ensured they would be if not always open allies then at least secret sharers. Not surprisingly, given postcolonial theory’s explicit origins in the anti-colonial movements of the early- to mid-twentieth century, the two main strands of that theory replicate this double directive of modernist thinking: on the one hand (the “high seriousness” hand), we have “master thinkers” like Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, and on the other (the “resistance” hand), we have “engaged intellectuals” like Aijaz Ahmad and Benita Parry, with certain pioneering critics like Said occupying the vast middle ground between these two extremes.¹² A similar broad distinction might be made by way of accounting for many of the seminal figures in postcolonial literature: a Wilson Harris or a J. M. Coetzee on the one hand, an Ngugi wa Thiong’o or a Michelle Cliff on the other, with a foundational figure like Chinua Achebe vacillating somewhere between these two poles.

The question is not so much what separates these two sides, but what holds them together, presuming anything does, and it has been my contention that one of the primary factors enabling their coming together as part of the supposedly emancipatory field of postcolonial studies is an inability to come to terms with “compromised,” inauthentically popular texts, as well as the audiences who take pleasure in consuming them.¹³ Regardless of one’s gut-level reaction to this admittedly schematic claim regarding the modernist/textualist underpinnings of postcolonial studies, it is obvious that a general account of this sort overlooks a number of essential distinctions in its attempt at conveying a sense of the “whole” picture (to cite only a few: the distinction between postcolonial theory and postcolonial literary studies, between postcolonial literature and other forms of cultural production, between postcolonial cultural production and other material practices, etc.). There are obvious problems with any unified account of postcolonialism–even if the very idea of postcolonial studies necessitates a belief in some such unity. For that reason, at this point in the article, having made a general and pointedly polemical claim about the foundational bias of postcolonial studies, I should clarify that what I say in the following section about the “middlebrow postcolonial” is most specifically addressed to the biases of postcolonial literary studies. However, before turning to my discussion of Maryse Condé as a writer who in many respects exemplifies this under-theorized “problem,” I must add one last nuance to my account of how modernism and its biases continue to structure our reception of postcolonial literature: namely, an hypothesis regarding how these biases have adapted to the relativizing inroads of postmodernism.

If there is something startling about my basic argument in this article, it is in large part because the modernist biases upon which I have insisted have been not only occluded but also attenuated in the reception of postcolonial texts. As modernism segued into postmodernism and its absolute meta-narratives became ever more relativized, modernist boundaries between the “authentic” and the “inauthentic” could not, given the openly hierarchical nature of such distinctions, be simply asserted as of old. If, for instance, the dual directives of modernism legitimized two very different but related types of ideal audience–on the one hand, the estranged intellectual still capable of appreciating highbrow texts in the wasteland of degraded “mass” culture (Adorno listening to atonal music) and, on the other, the “people” capable of resisting the threat of massification and answering the call either of the ancestral past (Senghor’s Africans) or the revolutionary future (Fanon’s Algerians)–it is now virtually impossible to envision such audiences without being accused of elitism, on the one hand, or idealism, on the other. What happened as the modernist meta-narratives gave way was that the boundaries demanded by these narratives shifted down (in the case of the first, elite audience) and across (in the case of the second, popular audience): in the most extreme, hyper-populist instances of this shift, the very idea of any distinction between “brows” gets erased, everything becoming part of the postmodern mix (the downward shift), and the idea of the popular ceases to be riven in two, the mere fact of popularity becoming the central point of critical interrogation and, often, cause for celebration (the crosswards shift).

Up to a point, postcolonial literary studies has gone along with this relativizing tendency: first, by assimilating the middlebrow and the highbrow, while nonetheless continuing to exclude the lowbrow from its field of vision; second, by continuing to celebrate authentic popularity, while tacitly accepting, without interrogating, the inauthentic popularity that is defined by market forces rather than by the resistant desires of the “people.” Postcolonial literary studies ostensibly writes back against the hierarchical distinctions of the “Western” canon and renders audible the silenced voices of marginalized peoples; in fact, in its unstated reliance on a high/middlebrow vision of literature and its reluctance to take inauthentic popularity into serious account, it perpetuates a watered-down version of canonical thinking and only bothers to give a voice to the “people” when they say, do, and consume the “right” thing. In the following discussion of Maryse Condé, I attempt to flesh out this claim with specific reference to the “problem” that middlebrow popularity poses the postcolonial ideology.

II. (Ab)errant Revisionism: Maryse Condé and the Middlebrow Postcolonial

To introduce my account of Condé as a middlebrow popular writer, I must return to that same Fort-de-France bookstore where I first came across Delsham’s Dérives. The display for his novel was not the only item that got me thinking that day about the possible (dis)connections between popular writing and the ostensibly populist but surreptitiously elitist field of postcolonial studies and its unavowedly modernist vision of literature. On one of the shelves reserved for inexpensive paperbacks, I noticed Condé’s La migration des coeurs (1995), a Caribbean reworking of Wuthering Heights. Translated into English by her husband Richard Philcox as Windward Heights in 1998 (with an impressive array of blurbs on the back cover from a “wide” range of sources such as The New York Times Book Review, the Village Voice, Black Issues Book Review, and the Multicultural Review), this novel indulges in one of postcolonial literature’s most time-honored discursive moves: revising a European novel from the colonial era. As I flipped through its pages I thought to myself, with no doubt reprehensible cynicism: “Well, here’s a text that’s guaranteed to generate its fair share of essays by critics intent either on trumpeting the resistant virtues of postcolonial revisionism or on questioning the author’s decision to entangle herself in colonial narratives (a passionate but superficial difference of critical opinion that, as René Girard taught me, hides an underlying identity of outlook).”

As I mused over the article-generating text in my hand, my attention was drawn to a nearby novel that was, like Condé’s, published by Robert Laffont in the Pocket format, and that thus bore–superficially at least–a rather close resemblance to Condé’s. What I was looking at, it turned out, was Marie-Reine de Jaham’s Le sang du volcan (1997), second in a trilogy entitled L’or des îles that chronicles the entirety of Martiniquan history. Although it is a well-known critical assumption that one should not judge a book by its cover,¹⁴ I could not help being struck by the fact that, at least up to a point, Condé and de Jaham were being marketed in a surprisingly similar fashion (see Figure 1).

On the one hand, Condé: among the most respected francophone Caribbean writers, someone who long ago became a “consecrated” author, in Bourdieu’s sense of the word (75-78, 120-25). And on the other…de Jaham: a writer perhaps best described as the Jackie Collins of French Caribbean historical fiction, a decidedly second-rate but prolific Martiniquan writer of the béké (native white) caste who has lived most of her life in France, and whose first novel, La grande béké (1989), caused a good deal of scandal amongst her caste when it came out and proved popular enough that it was eventually made into a movie for French TV (1997; director, Alain Maline). What could these two writers possibly have in common aside from their French Antillean origins?

“Not much of anything!” would be the obvious response. In terms of identity/politics, the differences seem self-evident: in Condé, we have a “black” woman who, despite her migrant life, has solid “roots” in her “native” land, is on the right side of the political fence when it comes to the issue of Guadeloupe’s independence, and yet uses her novels not as an excuse for making blunt political statements but rather as a forum for posing complex and irresoluble problems¹⁵; in de Jaham, we have a “white” woman who has lived most of her life in Paris and whose novels, notwithstanding the scandal they initially caused in béké circles, astoundingly repeat many of the ideological assumptions of nineteenth-century “creolist discourse,”¹⁶ redeploying any number of long-established clichés (both positive and negative) about Martinique and the central role of the békés in shaping the island’s history, and offering narrative closure in the form of straightforward appeals (in a novel like Le maître-savane, the sequel to La grande béké) to the healing virtues of political autonomy for the islands, albeit always within the framework of the French nation. Very different writers, in short. Indeed, even the marketing similarities that initially struck me are, if one takes a closer look, only “skin-deep”: for instance, the exoticizing cover images that accompany both texts are supplemented, in de Jaham’s case, by the word “roman,” which–as a perusal of the novel’s back pages shows–marks the fact that it belongs to a series featuring writers such as Collins and Danielle Steel; there is no equivalent list at the back of Condé’s Laffont novels, presumably signaling the distinctive as opposed to generic nature of her romans (which would also appear to legitimize using a smaller print font for her novels than for de Jaham’s). To acknowledge “differences” such as these does not, however, absolve us from thinking through the evident similarities in the paratextual material out of which, alone, our awareness of those differences emerges¹⁷; these similarities locate the two texts, and their authors, in an uncomfortable relation made possible by their relative marketability and draw our attention to the under-theorized affinities and antagonisms of lowbrow and middlebrow popularity in a postcolonial context.

Given Condé’s preeminent status as a francophone writer, to think of her and de Jaham as occupying significantly overlapping spheres of production, circulation, and consumption seems almost heretical, and yet why should this appear such a strange coupling to us? One could certainly argue for specific points of intersection between these two prolific novelists–for instance, the way that de Jaham’s career trajectory seems almost parodically to mirror Condé’s, debuting with a scandalous first-person narrative and then moving on to recuperative historical sagas, just as Condé launched her career as a novelist with Hérémakhonon and went on to write the Segu cycle–but such arguments are of much less interest than the plain fact that both women are among the bestselling francophone writers with a Caribbean pedigree, each “worthy” of being marketed in Laffont’s Pocket collection, and each ubiquitous in Antillean bookstores.

After all, Condé is not simply a writer venerated by (primarily) North American francophone and postcolonial critics. She is also, like Kincaid, the author of accessible novels that have frequently (especially in France, and especially in the 1980s) found a broad, and in the case of the multi-volume Segu diptych, an indisputably bestseller audience. A novel like I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (1986; trans. 1992), has made a significant impact on everyday readers in the States, finding its way into the substantial and growing market for informative fictional texts about the Afro-diasporic experience. Condé’s novels get reviewed in all the right places in France, and translations of her work are discussed in such places as USA Today and the Washington Post.¹⁸ The structural finesse and linguistic experimentation of many of her novels notwithstanding, they are, if not page-turners à la de Jaham, nonetheless, to cite the blurb from the Multicultural Review on the back of Windward Heights, “engaging and well-written book[s] that [are] difficult to put down.” In sum, Condé is in many respects the very model of a middlebrow writer, with all the stylistic restrictions, political ambivalence, and capacity for success in the literary and academic market that this adjective entails. Such is the cultural capital attached to the name of a consecrated writer like Maryse Condé in North America, however, and such are the a priori assumptions about the “value” of francophone and postcolonial literature in general, that no discussion of her as a popular writer, a writer of marketable middlebrow fiction, can take place: the consensus must be that she is producing valuable literary work, and this value must at all costs be abstracted both from the market forces that are so obviously at play in the promotion and dissemination of her novels amongst the greater public and from the elitist dynamics of the creation and promotion of aesthetic distinction at work in the academic culture industry, which has a clear stake in securing and legitimating her identity as “postcolonial subject,” especially now that she has become such a powerful figure in the U.S. academy, the very embodiment of la Francophonie. One could hardly wish for the doyenne of francophone studies to be anything less than a “great writer,” after all!

And yet the (middlebrow) popularity of Condé’s novels (like that of any number of similar crossover writers such as Kincaid, Edwige Danticat, Arundhati Roy, etc.¹⁹) permits us to pose the unsettling question that has so often been asked by the practitioners of cultural studies: “What’s so great about great?” One answer to this question leads in a skeptical, relativizing direction that undermines the foundations upon which Condé’s distinction, and that of all writers, rests: “There’s nothing truly great about great, it’s all a conspiracy–or, more neutrally, the arbitrary product of institutional practices, contingent upon ideological imperatives and the like.” As someone who has never been wholly able to understand why my colleagues make such a fuss about Condé, I am sympathetic with this skeptical approach to answering the question. And yet, this question is a double-edged one: it allows not simply for the debunking response to which we have latterly become accustomed, but also for the same old response that people like F. R. Leavis used to haul out when talking about the “great tradition.” And this same old response, which undergirds Kincaid’s groveling comments about the “great writer,” is also–let me now strategically admit at the midway point of this article–of no small relevance to me! As someone who has read a lot of Condé and de Jaham, it seems self-evident to me that the former is a better writer than the latter, which makes it imperative to identify those features of her work that do make it, if not “great,” then at least greater than de Jaham’s. It is this double imperative, of skepticism and affirmation with regard to literary greatness, that I am ultimately arguing for in this article. This imperative becomes particularly visible when examining the interstitial terrain of the middlebrow, for to identify a text as middlebrow is, by virtue of its in-between condition, to acknowledge that its greatness is troubling; any stable conception of its actual worth is troubled by our sense that it is neither unequivocally “great” nor unequivocally the opposite of that, and for this reason we are forced to put into question and to (re)affirm its literary value.

As this article progresses, I will return to this double-edged imperative, but for now more needs to be said about the way Condé’s place in the francophone and postcolonial literary canon has been achieved without any serious consideration of her popularity. Critics have, obviously, not gone so far as to deny the fact of Condé’s popularity; they have simply ignored it. If her husband and translator Richard Philcox is, understandably, not shy about pointing out “the duality of Maryse Condé’s books–the way they attract both the ‘greater public’ and those in universities” (229), critics have consistently proven unwilling to interrogate the double-dealing nature of her work: they will mention the popular reception of her novels only in passing (more frequently, though, they will insinuate a case for the admirable unpopularity of her work by stressing the indifferent or hostile reception of her first effort, Hérémakhonon), and then quickly move on to consider the supposedly more subtle ways in which these novels attract them. And yet it is precisely the entanglement of these two forms of attraction that most needs addressing if the true distinctiveness of Condé’s work, the “duality” of which Philcox speaks, is to be understood amidst the welter of elitist claims for its distinction–claims based on the assumption of its “high serious” and/or “resistant” nature as francophone and, a fortiori, postcolonial text.

To flesh out this general scenario regarding Condé’s critical reception, it is worth pausing here to discuss in detail one random but highly influential example of a critic (mis)understanding Condé’s double identity by imposing modernist criteria of evaluation on her work: Françoise Lionnet’s exemplary 1993 account of La traversée de la mangrove (1989), the novel of Condé’s that–no doubt because of its quasi-Faulknerian array of relaying narrators and its “subversive” incorporation of Creole into a French text–has proven most popular with the critics, generating any number of articles praising its “polyphonic” or “mosaic” poetics, its “nomadic” and “relational” politics, its construction of an “authentically” creole or hybrid identity, and so on.

Lionnet’s reading of this novel identifies it as an example of a “new Antillean humanism,” and stresses the way it embodies in textual form Condé’s “return” to Guadeloupe in the mid-1980s after decades of self-imposed exile in Africa and France. According to Lionnet, this return involved a recovery on Condé’s part of her connection to authentically popular culture: she had, as Lionnet puts it, finally recognized “the value of the Creole language, of the indigenous dances and tales which […] require acceptance ‘on their own terms’” (71-72). After her wanderings abroad, Condé was now, with Traversée, in a position to ask “how a writer might derive sustenance from the sources of popular culture in order eventually to represent this milieu better and touch the readers who belong to it”; her new and more “humble” attitude toward her native land was generated by a “desire to come to a better understanding of the lived experience of culture, to return to the oral traditions of a once disparaged–because poorly understood–popular tradition” (72). In statements like this, we find the sort of appeal to the authentically popular with which postcolonial studies is at ease: a return to such things as “indigenous dances and tales” and “oral traditions” would appear to be just the thing to purify Condé of whatever contamination she might have incurred only a few years before in France as a result of the bestselling popularity of the Segu novels, to say nothing of remedying her regrettable lack of humility when it came to “the readers who belong” to Caribbean popular culture.²⁰

Indeed, Lionnet draws an emphatic line in the sand between those bestsellers and Traversée when she makes the claim–based largely on Condé’s liberal sprinkling of Creole throughout the text–that the latter novel has only one “true” audience, an audience presumably immersed in the “lived experience” of “popular tradition”:

Although published in Paris, like her previous books, Traversée is not written for a French public; for the first time, Condé seems to have a truly Caribbean audience in mind. Creole words and expressions are translated at the bottom of each page, but this was done after the fact, as a favor to the French reader and on the recommendation of Condé’s editor. (73-74)

This astounding statement perfectly exemplifies the anxieties produced among (though seldom articulated by) academic critics at the mainstream success of Segu–especially among those of a hybridizing bent such as Lionnet who are not likely to be attracted to the Roots-y dimensions that critics of another, essentialist stripe might be tempted to valorize in their own (mis)readings of Condé’s bestselling historical romance about Africa. In the most manichean of fashions, Condé’s “true” readership is reduced here to the happy few, and any paratextual gestures toward an other readership–such as providing French translations of “Creole words and expressions” (of the sort commonly found, for instance, at the bottom of the pages of de Jaham’s novels)–is written off as being simply a “favor” to the wrong sort of reader and, moreover, the responsibility not of Condé herself but of a misguided editor evidently not attuned to the virtues of “defamiliarization and estrangement on the level of language” that Lionnet argues, in explicitly modernist terminology, are this novel’s central feature (180). The postcolonial novelist is here attractively (and stereotypically) presented as both a powerful, beneficent figure, one who magnanimously bestows “favors” on an alien public for whom she is not writing, and a distressingly victimized individual, one who is subject to the inane “recommendations” of a foreign editor.

This clear distinction between a relevant and an irrelevant readership is supported in the rest of Lionnet’s account of the novel by a veritable battery of modernist assumptions and rhetorical moves. Her éloge of “oral traditions” is, for instance, doubled by an inflated emphasis on the (admittedly ambiguous) centrality of the writer in this novel.²¹ Her account of the ways in which Condé is inscribed within (good) traditions–not just “popular tradition” but also “the great tradition of European realism and humanism” as well as “that of nineteenth-century peasant literature” (76)–is supplemented by a repeated emphasis on the utter novelty of Condé’s enterprise, not only in terms of her own trajectory as a writer (the novel points us in an “entirely new narrative direction, the appropriation of a new locus of identity, the implementation of what might almost be called a new poetics” [75-76]) but also in terms of the history of literature itself (“she opens up the literary field to currently unexplored thematic and stylistic possibilities” [84]). Finally, her account of the novel’s undeniable emphasis on fragmentation is argumentatively linked to the idea that the text provides readers with a model for how to live: it demonstrates how Guadeloupeans’ “solutions to the problems of postcolonial life are sufficiently rich and nuanced to serve as a model for others” (77), and how fragmentation serves “as a basis for the construction of cultural models appropriate to the contexts of postcolonial creolization” (79).

Lionnet’s reading of Condé is modernist almost to the point of parody, and so it is not surprising that many of its key elements have been put into question by other critics: Mireille Rosello has, for instance, ably critiqued the “insular” model of a return to the native land that generates Lionnet’s “line in the sand” rhetoric about Condé’s readership (186); Lydie Moudileno has shown how the ambiguously central role of the writer in Condé’s Traversée is actually part of an ironical trajectory in which, by the early 1990s, writers come to have less and less of a role to play, exemplary or otherwise, in her novels (141-71); and Maryse Condé has herself so often claimed that she is not interested in providing rules or models of any sort in her novels that appealing to her as a writer of exemplary “solutions to the problems of postcolonial life” seems wildly beside the point. One can argue against many of the specifics of Lionnet’s analysis (or praise her for being honest enough to situate Condé in what, from a postcolonial perspective, must be the disreputable “great tradition” of European humanism, even if she is at pains to clarify that Condé’s novel is humanism “with a difference”). From our perspective, though, we need only point out the extent to which the exclusionary logic of Lionnet’s account of Traversée, and its convenient distinction between the right and wrong sort of readers (those, as it were, who impose or read the footnotes and those who do not), is generated by the anxiety about the relation between inauthentic popularity and literary value that I have been arguing haunts postcolonial literary studies. A text’s existence in the literary marketplace and its possibly complicitous relation to the desires of the buying public (regardless of where that public is located) are precisely what postcolonial literary critics have an extremely hard time envisaging and what they exile to the unspoken margins of their own self-styled “minoritarian” readings.

It is, to put it in more concrete terms, an easy thing for such critics to read the front cover blurb for Windward Heights (taken from a USA Today review) and feel overcome by a Kincaid-like nausea: “Exotic and eloquent […] Condé takes Emily Brontë’s cold-climate classic on obsessive love and makes it hot and lush.” The only “logical” reaction, from a postcolonial perspective, to such a fawningly effusive claim is to argue that it expresses an impoverished conception of the text, or even an act of deception promoted by insidious marketers and other such cultural mediators who have understood nothing about the work they are editing or reviewing. To speak of “co-optation,” “misappropriation,” “neo-exoticism” when faced with a blurb of this sort is postcolonial common sense, and for me to make the claim that this commonsense evaluation lacks any sense would simply be to replace one form of critical bad faith with another: nausea in the face of the USA Today review’s claims is, to a degree, a legitimate reaction, but there is also a degree of exactness to its “hot and lush” evaluation of Windward Heights, as there is to the Village Voice‘s by no means dismissive claim that the novel offers up a “monsoon of melodrama.”

Now, although my discussion of Condé up to this point might make it seem as if I am simply mounting a cranky attack on her abilities as a writer and using the fact of her relative popularity as part of an argument against the consecrated status she has achieved in francophone and postcolonial circles, what I am actually doing here is teasing out the preconditions for such a status and the exclusionary strategies of reading through which it is constructed. If the drift of my argument seems critical of Condé’s work, that has less to do with my own ambivalence toward her work than with the fact that the only way to tease out the implicit modernist hierarchies at work in postcolonial literary studies is explicitly to adopt such a perspective, openly to entertain the possibility that distinctions between the “great writer” and lesser writers, and between the various levels of “brow,” might actually provide a (doubtful) ground for evaluating texts. Postcolonial literary studies requires “greatness” of its writers, but cannot openly formulate this requirement because that would put into question its non-elitist self-presentation, its insistence that the postcolonial (to quote Lionnet’s totalizing claims about the Antillean subject’s imaginaire) “can be successfully articulated only through nonlinear, egalitarian, and nonhierarchical cultural relations” (79). By contrast, I think we have to begin seriously to question what is great (and perhaps also not so great) about a writer like Condé, what distinguishes her from other writers and allows us to say with relative certainty that she is better than de Jaham or Delsham.

What allows for this relative certainty? What is the “certain quality” that makes Condé more marketable (and teachable) than someone like Delsham, not quite as marketable (and very much more teachable) than de Jaham, and when all is said and done quite possibly more worthy of being taught and marketed than either of these writers? Viewed from a hostile perspective (of the sort that might, say, valorize Delsham for publishing his novels in the Caribbean rather than France), Condé’s marketability and teachability could simply be interpreted as the result of having fallen prey to the most dangerous of compromises, of having sacrificed her indigenous “opacity” to the nefariously cosmopolitan forces of Parisian publishing houses and the U.S. academic marketing circuit. Such a perspective would be a very limited one indeed, reducing not only Condé but virtually the entire roster of mainstream postcolonial writers to the status of literary Quislings. No, this “certain quality” of Condé’s does not (simply) have to do with betrayal and compromise; it has at least as much to do with how “good” her books are as with how “good” they are perceived as being by certain people (notably, publishers and academics). With my deliberately double-edged phrase “a certain quality,” I am referring both to something that is certain in the sense of indisputable (“established as a truth or fact to be absolutely received, depended, or relied upon; not to be doubted, disputed, or called in question; indubitable, sure” [OED]) and to something that is questionable in all sorts of ways (“of positive yet restricted (or of positive even if restricted) quantity, amount, or degree; of some extent at least” [OED]). The indisputable nature of this quality allows us to maintain that Condé is a better writer than de Jaham; its restricted nature renders her subject to an array of relative judgments that will be inflected by a complex set of cultural, ideological (etc.) assumptions. The two degrees of certainty–absolute and relative–cannot be disentangled from one another, which means that any critical discussion of a book’s worth will largely be a matter of expressing and analyzing (differing) perceptions of that worth (be those perceptions generated by individuals or what Frow refers to as “valuing communities”); however, this does not mean that to speak of a text’s real, as opposed to perceived, worth is simply nonsensical (as the relativizing insights of some extremist forms of cultural studies might suggest).

I will return in the final paragraphs of this article to the need for retrieving a necessarily contingent sense of a text’s real literary worth, but what needs to be pointed out here is simply that postcolonial literary studies has been reluctant to acknowledge its own investment in the “certain quality” it demands of its authors: lumping the highest of the highbrow in with the most middling of the middlebrow in a common ground that only seems all-inclusively horizontal rather than exclusively vertical until one starts thinking about popular texts such as Delsham and de Jaham’s that are excluded from its field of vision, it fails to address the (need for) distinctions upon which it is founded. Pointing out this commitment to a “certain quality” forces us to think about the (dis)connections between popularity and the resistant value ascribed to particular texts by postcolonial critics. To what extent are they compatible and where do popularity and (a modernist conception of) value part ways? What is at stake in tacitly privileging the latter over the former when they do part ways? And what would happen if we were to reverse this bias, and start taking the former as, or even more, seriously than the latter?

A crossover writer like Condé is all the more appropriate for thinking through questions about the (dis)connections between the popular and the postcolonial because she has herself, in both her critical pronouncements and novelistic practice, often made a (necessarily contradictory) case for both inauthentic popularity and literary value. On the one hand, unlike so many of her critical advocates, she has willingly acknowledged the ways in which her own work incorporates elements of the inauthentically popular,²² and somewhat less willingly interrogated her own status as a bestselling author.²³ On the other, she has time and again proved willing to deploy an evaluative language that openly distinguishes between “good” and “bad” writers in an old-fashioned way that can only be an embarrassment in the ostensibly plural world of “nonlinear, egalitarian, and nonhierarchical cultural relations” for which, a critic like Lionnet would argue, she is laying the foundations in her novels: nowhere, for instance, is a Kincaid-like willingness to distinguish between the good and the not-so-good more evident than when she unfavorably compares a popular (middlebrow) writer like Isabel Allende to Gabriel García Márquez: “I cannot say that I consider Isabel Allende a major writer. It seems to me that as a writer, she is less comprehensive, less accomplished than García Márquez” (Pfaff 128). Examples of this double emphasis abound in her work.

Condé thus occupies a double position with regard to the value of the popular, exhibiting a self-conscious acceptance and questioning of it. Indeed, such self-consciousness is one of the hallmark features of Condé’s novels and contributes in no small part, I would argue, to their “certain quality,” their ability to attract ostensibly very different readerships. Self-consciously occupying the middlebrow ground where different attitudes toward the value of literature troublingly meet, her work addresses, and takes its distance from, both inauthentically popular and academic audiences–a trend especially pronounced, I would suggest, since the late 1980s. Indeed, if I might venture a chronological thesis regarding the development of Condé’s oeuvre, it appears to me that her novels of the 1990s, following upon her bestseller successes of the previous decade and simultaneous with her belated immersion in and consecration by the U.S. academy, have increasingly become a meditation on what place, if any, the popular (in all its many forms, “authentic” and “inauthentic”) can have in what she herself once referred to as the “bourgeois and elitist” genre of the novel,²⁴ and how that place might disrupt the ideological expectations such novels generate among her various audiences, especially those of academic readers singlemindedly intent on treating her as a postcolonial writer who “speaks to and from the position of the other.” In writing self-consciously middlebrow novels, Condé plays with and disarms the expectations of her academic audience, producing visibly hybrid texts in which the inauthentically popular and the “highly serious” intersect in unexpected ways in terms of both content and form (unexpected, at least, within the framework of the postcolonial ideology).

Condé’s novels of the 1990s can be read as self-consciously invoking any number of time-honored ideological and narrative commonplaces of postcolonial literature, but in a page-turning format that troublingly evacuates them of their supposedly “resistant” value. From my perspective, this is where the real value of Condé’s novels resides–particularly those written over the past decade: in their ability to put into question, by packaging the postcolonial and the mainstream together in unmistakably middlebrow texts, the academic strategies of reading according to which they ostensibly demand to be read. To be sure, it is not just those strategies of reading that are troubled by these hybrid novels: a logical consequence of the double position Condé self-consciously occupies is that the postcolonial dimensions of her text will trouble other strategies of reading, “subverting” the expectations of her mainstream audiences by forcing them in a comprehensive and accomplished fashion to address normally marginalized cultural differences (race, class, gender, language, etc.). Such arguments can (and no doubt must) be made, although to be effective they require greater sensitivity than is usually found in postcolonial literary studies regarding the ways in which mainstream audiences–increasingly familiar with the basic ideological assumptions of postcolonial studies–may well expect a degree of subversion and estranging frissons of difference from the postcolonial novels they consume. However, familiar arguments about the postcolonial subverting the mainstream, valid as they might be, merely serve to confirm the foundational bias I have been critically examining here; more interestingly, the self-consciously middlebrow positioning of Condé’s novels forces us to think that familiar process of “subversion” in reverse, from the postcolonial to the mainstream, and in so doing, puts into question–without necessarily eliminating–that bias.

Nowhere, to return to the point of departure for my reflections on Condé, is this playing with the expectations of academic audiences, this middlebrow hybridization, more evident than in Condé’s decision to revise a classic nineteenth-century British novel like Wuthering Heights. As the controversy surrounding Alice Randall’s recasting of Gone with the Wind as The Wind Done Gone shows, revisionism is now a commonplace move: be it the Tara plantation, or going back to Manderley and telling Rebecca’s side of the story, revisionism has become the intellectual property of even the most nondescript and inconsequential writers, to say nothing of an efficient way to acquire instant media “buzz.” The revisionist move, such an attractive option for postcolonial writers in the past, has become so familiar, so obvious, so calculated, it might be argued, that little or no case can be made for its “innovative” or “resistant” possibilities. In the specific case of Wuthering Heights, the move is a doubly familiar one inasmuch as over the past decade critics have, predictably enough, shown an increasing penchant for reading Brontë’s novel through a postcolonial lens, asserting boldly that “Heathcliff’s racial otherness cannot be a matter of dispute,”²⁵ and scouring the text for references to faraway places. How are we to respond to such a familiar, and commercially canny, move on Condé’s part?

The first of two obvious responses to this question is this: blithely disregard the unoriginality of the revisionist move and unself-consciously pursue the “let us compare Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea” type of approach that has generated so many scholarly articles over the past few decades and that, even more vitally, guarantees the presence of texts like Windward Heights on any number of course syllabi (mine included); fixate on similarities with and differences from the originary text; chart the ways in which Condé is rewriting the Victorians; and take sides on the eternal question as to whether or not stressing the entanglement of the colonial and the postcolonial is ultimately a politically useful move. The second obvious response to this unoriginality is this: recognize it and simply refuse to play such a well-rehearsed game. How much eventually gets published on this novel will in large part depend on which of these two options wins the day: my own guess is that Migration will find its fair share of exegetes, but that misgivings about the unoriginality of its revisionist move will ensure that it appears less frequently than Hérémakhon and Traversée in Condé bibliographies.

A third response is possible, though. What if one were to acknowledge the unoriginality of this revisionist move and take it as one’s point of departure for an appraisal of the novel? What if one were to read, and valorize, it as strategically unoriginal? As will become clear in the concluding section of this article, such a recourse to the “strategic” is not without its problems (and its predictability), but it does seem to me a provisionally useful way of negotiating the impasse described in the previous paragraph. The blatant unoriginality of Condé’s move puts into question, without simply doing away with, the resistant and counterdiscursive energies conventionally associated with the revisionist subgenre of postcolonial literature. What work can this subgenre still perform if it has become so formulaic? That is the question, it seems to me, Condé is boldly forcing us to address with this novel, and the asking of that question is greatly facilitated by the sheer readability of Migration, which signals the text’s ready availability to middlebrow readers for whom its genealogical connection to Wuthering Heights will not necessarily form the primary point of interest or interrogation, but who might be drawn, rather, to such things as the presence of romance motifs (the pleasures of the “hot and lush”) or “universal” themes (the profundities that, to quote from the review of Windward Heights in the Chicago Tribune, make us “think about the kinds of emotions that have moved human beings throughout our existence”).

Condé takes the master narrative of postcolonial revisionism, which has caused so many critics over the past several decades to go into spasms of high seriousness every time a name like Caliban, Ariel, or Bertha Mason gets mentioned, and strategically redirects it toward the commodified double ground of the (middlebrow) popular, where the pleasures of the text mingle (un)easily with its profundities, the “low” appeals of romance with “high” insights into the human condition. The novel’s culturally specific (Caribbean, womanist, etc.) aspects, upon which any attempt at reading the text as “purely” postcolonial must in large part rely, prove inseparable from pleasures and profundities that are far less culturally specific: this doubling and displacement of the overtly postcolonial contents of the novel, similar to the way its revisionist form cannot be detached from an awareness of its formulaic nature, serves to relocate Migration in a commodified (middlebrow) popular context that substantially voids, without erasing, whatever resistant values one might originally have wished to associate with its revisionist gesture. If one were to give a specific name to this process of doubling and displacement that Condé’s strategic unoriginality renders visible, it might well be pastiche, in Fredric Jameson’s unflattering sense of the word as the monstrous postmodern double of the parody he continues, in modernist fashion, to valorize.²⁶ Following the lead of Condé herself, who once described Tituba as “a pastiche of the feminine heroic novel” (Pfaff 60), we might well read Migration as a pastiche of the postcolonial revisionist novel: a work that, by self-consciously exiling postcolonial revisionism to the mainstream, refuses to play along with the evaluative distinctions that undergird the postcolonial ideology, forcing us to confront the modernist limits of that ideology, while continuing to inscribe, weakly, the memories of resistance that it assumes.

From the very first words of Migration, Condé signals the aberrant nature of her revisionist gesture, refusing to meet the understandable (from a postcolonial perspective) expectation that her work will contest its colonial antecedent–as can be seen from the novel’s amiable dedication “À Emily Brontë qui, je l’espère, agréera cette lecture de son chef-d’oeuvre. Honneur et respect!” (Migration 7; translated by Philcox as, “To Emily Brontë, who I hope will approve of this interpretation of her masterpiece. Honour and respect!” [Windward n.p.]). This is hardly the sort of antagonistic relationship that one would expect from a revisionist novel, and any reading of Condé’s lecture of Brontë must take this unexpectedly “respectful” dedication as its point of departure. In interviews, Condé herself has stressed her lifelong “passion” for the novel (Anagnostopoulou-Hielscher 75), and while this passion could easily be read as the sign of an affinity between two women marginalized both by their gender and their provincial/colonial origins (Yorkshire/Guadeloupe), a reading of the epigraph that stressed only solidarity between marginalized women, while valid up to a point, would fail to account for the ways in which this solidarity gets mediated by Condé’s appeal to the “chef d’oeuvre”–an appeal to the elitist idea of the “masterpiece” that would certainly have struck a sympathetic chord with the Leavises, who were themselves great fans of Wuthering Heights.²⁷

From the outset, then, we are forced to confront a number of elective affinities that divert us from a conventionally postcolonial reading of the revisionist text: it is not subversion but passion that is highlighted here. This passion is generated both by aesthetic and affective evaluations–evaluations that, on the one hand, rely upon the category of the “masterpiece” and that, on the other, arise out of the sort of readerly engagement that has made Wuthering Heights such a widely consumed and loved novel. (It is this same engagement, to draw a relevant point of comparison, that has made so many an academic reader of Jane Austen anxious about the ways in which Janeites appropriate her work.²⁸) The amiable dedication to Migration, pointing us toward the literary value of Brontë’s “masterpiece” and signalling the author’s own affective ties to it as a reader, destabilizes the generic assumption that, as a postcolonial revisionist, Condé must have a bone to pick with Brontë’s colonial-era novel. As the inclusion of the Creole greeting “honneur et respect” in the epigraph suggests, the novel’s Caribbean content does not in any dramatic way contest the novel’s aberrant affiliation with its precursor but itself forms part of it. Condé has simply provided Wuthering Heights with new “migratory” contexts (Caribbean, womanist, etc.) that supplement but do not militate against her predecessor’s novel. Condé once remarked of Segu that it “is not a militant novel, and until people understand that I don’t write such novels, they will not comprehend my writings at all” (Pfaff 52); in pastiching the postcolonial revisionist novel, aberrantly channelling its militant energies in a mainstream direction, Condé forces this understanding upon her academic readers, while clearing a space for her other readers.

The all-too-familiar revisionist strategy pastiched in Migration, to be sure, hardly exhausts its postcolonial resonance: indeed, the novel very evidently lends itself to being read as exemplifying another narrative strategy that is decidedly more au courant in postcolonial circles. If Migration is an aberrant work of revisionism, as argued above, it is also an errant one, blatantly confirming Condé’s investment in the virtues of “errance,” a dominant theme in her novels of the 1990s (speaking of Desirada [1997], for instance, she noted that when reading it “one comes to the conclusion that wandering [errance] is an essential ground for creativity” [Anagnostopoulou-Hielscher 73]). This privileging of errancy is clearly relevant to the diasporic, anti-essentialist turn of so much recent work, literary and critical, in postcolonial studies, which has seized upon metaphors like nomadism and migrancy by way of insisting upon the virtues of tracking routes rather than exploring roots.

Indeed, it is precisely through a structural emphasis on errancy that Condé most visibly establishes the pastiche-like nature of her revisionist gesture in Migration: where the first third (Part I) of the novel sticks quite closely to a straightforward transposition of the Wuthering Heights story onto the Caribbean, with the requisite racial recoding (e.g., Condé’s light-skinned Catherine finds herself torn between a black Heathcliff, Razyé, and a béké Linton, Aymeric de Linsseuil²⁹), the last two-thirds (Parts II-V) of the novel rapidly loses touch with its Victorian predecessor, scrambling the latter’s second-generation plot and wandering into “new” territory that seems of little or no relevance to (a rewriting of) Wuthering Heights. Brontë’s novel ceases, at some point, to matter: it proves neither a destiny to be lamented (as in Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea) nor contested (as in Césaire’s A Tempest); quite simply, it becomes something that goes forgotten, and the reader waits in vain for a “return” to the obvious pattern of similarities and differences between colonial text and postcolonial counter-text that obtained in Part I of the novel and that held out the promise of some contestatory significance to the revisionist gesture–a promise the novel declines to keep, as it wanders away from its premises and becomes, as it were, just another Maryse Condé novel.

There will be no such “return” to the original, modernist assumptions of postcolonial revisionism, as Condé clarifies by her blandly obvious intertextual references to the idea of returning in various chapter headings, which are ironically undercut by what actually happens in these chapters. The closure sought by Heathcliff/Razyé in the final chapter of Part I, “Le temps retrouvé,” is not attained: Part II opens onto the second-generation story, initiating the novel’s errant drift away from its predecessor text. His son Razyé II’s “Retour au pays natal,” to cite the title of the novel’s penultimate chapter, proves equally unsatisfactory: his return to Guadeloupe fails to provide him with the catharsis and the anchor he was seeking. In Condé’s open-ended migratory world, there would thus appear to be none but the most highly ironized of places for standard modernist endings of the sort offered by Proust and Césaire, and her emphasis on errance and displacement is certainly in tune with the privileging of hybridity (Bhabha), relationality (Glissant), etc., in postcolonial theory of late. The way that Condé’s novel migrates away from its point of origin, away from both Wuthering Heights and the generic assumptions of postcolonial revisionism, might be read as an allegory for the process through which the colonial condition and the postcolonial response to it become slowly but surely erased, opening out onto a “new” world of errancy in which some of the old world’s key assumptions about the value of categories like “nation” and “race” have come to appear as errors. An errant world, then, but also a more human world–for it is assuredly the case that we only gain a sense of the humanity of Condé’s characters once we cease to read them as representative figures, as racialized embodiments of a text that has a revisionist point to make. The differences upon which colonial discourse and postcolonial counterdiscourse depend blind us to this common humanity, and as Condé’s novel errantly progresses, increasingly detaching itself from the revisionist script to which it initially seemed attached, it opens our eyes to what might be out there “beyond” the framework established by colonial discourse and perpetuated by postcolonial responses that, in directly contesting this discourse, cannot help remaining implicated in its inhuman vision of the world.

This possible opening beyond the all-too-familiar concerns of that complicitous entanglement of colonial and postcolonial that I have elsewhere dubbed the post/colonial seems akin to what Paul Gilroy, in Against Race: Identifying Political Culture Beyond the Color Line, has identified as the opportunity made visible by the current crisis in raciological thinking. For Gilroy, that crisis has created the grounds for envisioning a “planetary humanism” in which “out-moded principles of differentiation” will have lost their value–a humanism in which we might exercise a renewed sensitivity to “the overwhelming sameness that overdetermines social relationships between people and continually betrays the tragic predicaments of their common species life,” and in which we might learn how to value “the undervalued power of this crushingly obvious, almost banal human sameness, so close and basically invariant that it regularly passes unremarked upon” (29). As Gilroy knows full well, his insistence on “the possibility of leaving ‘race’ behind, of setting aside its disabling use as we move out of the time in which it could have been expected to make sense” (29) will be branded by many as utopian at best and irresponsible at worst by those who, in his words, capitulate “to the lazy essentialisms that postmodern sages inform us we cannot escape” (53). Without taking sides on that issue, or raising the question of what, if any, relation there might be between the “overwhelming sameness” valorized here and the nightmarish scenario of homogenization that haunted modernist critiques of mass culture and that continues to feed into our understanding of the possible effects of globalization, I would simply like to conclude my discussion of Condé’s novel by noting that if its errant narrative movement seems to point in the direction argued for by Gilroy, it nonetheless cannot help pointing back toward the very thing that it is putting into question by pastiching: namely, the resistant tenets of postcolonial revisionism.

The novel’s final chapter, after all, is entitled “Retour à L’Engoulvent,” and this final return takes us back, if only in translation and with the greatest ambivalence, to the revisionist return to Wuthering Heights that was Condé’s apparent point of departure in Migration and that the errancy of the last two-thirds of the novel seems to overturn. The two points–forward into the future and back into the past–meet here at novel’s end, cancelling each other out in the undecidability, the willed pointlessness, of the novel’s concluding sentence: it has finally become clear to Razyé II, who has moved back into L’Engoulvent (Wuthering Heights), that his dead wife Cathy, supposedly the daughter of Catherine and Aymeric, was almost certainly the daughter of Catherine and his own father Razyé. This unprovable if altogether likely scenario casts doubt on the future of his and Cathy’s daughter, Anthuria, fruit either of a legitimate cross-cultural interracial union or an unwitting act of incest.

Il [Razyé II] s’absorbait dans la pensée d’Anthuria. Une si belle enfant ne pouvait pas être maudit. (Migration 337)

[He was absorbed by the thought of Anthuria. Such a lovely child could not be cursed. (Windward 348)]

It is with this fragment of free indirect discourse–the narrator’s statement translating the character’s anxious question, which is masquerading as a statement–that Condé’s novel ends. This is no ending at all. It is only the beginning–an errant beginning that may or may not be “cursed” by the past and its erroneous legacies. Whom are we to believe? The narrator who seemingly asserts? The character whose nervous question is masked by a defiant assertion? The author who both asserts and questions? How we answer this unanswerable question will, unquestionably, depend upon how much belief we can place in a truly postcolonial future, one liberated from the accursed, inhuman entanglements of the post/colonial. But, if we as readers can only answer, provisionally, one way or the other, the strength of Condé’s strategic unoriginality, her (ab)errant revisionism, is that it forces us to acknowledge the weakness of our every response to that question of belief. If such a questioning of belief is, as I believe it to be, what constitutes the “greatness” of literature, then Condé is, when all’s said and done, the “great” writer she is unquestionably assumed to be. To emphasize the middlebrow dimension of her work is not, appearances to the contrary, to deny her greatness as a writer: it is simply to suggest that we have been looking for it in all the wrong places, not in the mainstream where her work is so clearly, if uneasily, situated, but in an other, less compromised place inhabited by our modernist precursors that can now be nothing more or less than an exotic memory which has yet, for better and for worse, to go forgotten.

III. A Spectre of Value: Living On the (Literary) Margins of Cultural and Postcolonial Studies

My reading of Condé’s Migration as a self-consciously (ab)errant “pastiche” of postcolonial revisionism has allowed me to do what, as a literary critic, I am most comfortable doing: namely, arguing for the value of certain literary texts on the grounds that they are somehow “different” from other, less intellectually provocative works. I have tried to factor the (middlebrow) popularity of Condé’s work into my argument, to show that her novel needs to be read less as a manifesto for some postcolonial imaginaire than as a “hot and lush” text that, as so much old-fashioned literature was once said to do, “makes us think about the kinds of emotions that have moved human beings throughout our existence”; I have tried to highlight the ways in which the novel’s popular appeal needs to be factored in by academic readers who are all too likely to overlook or dismiss it as not integral to an understanding of what she’s really doing. But in arguing for the strategic unoriginality of her revisionist gesture in Migration I have, clearly, caved in to the same logic generating, say, Lionnet’s fervent desire to read Condé as someone who provides “model” texts for the postcolonial critic to valorize. I have wandered (indeed, erred) quite a distance from the questions posed at the outset of this article regarding the problematic place of the popular in postcolonial studies. My take on Migration may or may not capture the duplicitous way that it engages with multiple–academic and inauthentically popular–audiences, but it most certainly does not resolve the question of what to do with the likes of “lesser,” and seemingly less self-conscious, writers such as Delsham and de Jaham. The argument outlined in the preceding paragraphs is a way of salvaging Migration for an academic audience (and for me!), rescuing it in a paradoxical sort of way from its “nauseating” exile in the mainstream. It is a way of saying, “Hey look, Condé is producing work of literary value after all, even if that value cannot be disentangled from other values that help generate its inauthentically popular, middlebrow appeal; she’s being serious precisely by putting into question the ‘high seriousness’ of postcolonial studies and its by-now predictable commitment to tired ‘old’ strategies of textual resistance such as revisionism, or its equally predictable appeals to ‘new’ strategies such as errancy that are still very much in vogue. All of which helps explain why she’s a self-evidently better writer than Delsham and de Jaham.”

But if my valorization of self-conscious textuality and the “certain quality” of Condé’s novels does not help us value Delsham and de Jaham, then does it really help us understand the (middlebrow) popularity of a writer like Condé? The fact that my account of Condé as pastiche artist par excellence would not work for these lowbrow writers puts into question, ultimately, the work I have just argued it might do for her; in the final analysis, I have continued to privilege Condé against cultural producers like Delsham and de Jaham, falling prey to the “creator orientation” that has informed so many critiques of mass culture (Gans 75), and placing a seemingly critical but ultimately narcissistic emphasis in my reading of her on the ways in which Condé plays (along) with the academic reader. In the preceding account of Migration, the text, the author, and a certain type of reader win out, and the concerted emphasis on issues of consumption, production, circulation, and regulation upon which cultural studies insists, and that my article initially seemed to promise, has gone by the wayside, as have many of the readers in Fort-de-France and Pointe-à-Pitre, to say nothing of those whose daily diet of prose includes USA Today.

To explore the (dis)connections of the popular and the postcolonial must surely take postcolonial studies in other, less author-/critic-oriented directions of the sort toward which cultural studies has been pointing for several decades now. We need, for instance, to take the insights of reception theory more fully into account and to place a new emphasis on the consumption of (what we label as) postcolonial texts in both their “place of origin” and the transnational literary marketplace: what sorts of pleasure, for instance, do these various audiences take from their readings of Delsham, de Jaham, or Condé? Such questions can only be answered by the type of empirical inquiry exemplified, say, by Janice Radway’s ethnographic approach to popular romances, albeit nuanced by the powerful objections lodged against her by the likes of Ien Ang, who rightly criticized Radway’s Reading the Romance for its failure to take account of “the pleasurableness of the pleasure of romance reading,” bogged down as it is in elitist feminist (in the context of this article, read elitist postcolonial) meta-narratives which assume that “the pleasure of romance reading is somehow not real, as though there were other forms of pleasure that could be considered ‘more real’ because they are more ‘authentic,’ more enduring, more veritable, or whatever” (527). The pleasurableness of this pleasure, or the absence thereof, will certainly differ depending on the location(s) in which a text is read, which in turn will inevitably affect evaluations of its quality, but the important point to register is that neither this pleasurableness nor these judgments can be understood without sociological research of the sort that is so markedly absent from postcolonial literary studies and its implied but rarely theorized reader, who is more often than not nothing more than the critic’s idealized self-portrait, or his/her phantasmagoric portrait of the Other.

This emphasis on consumption will need to be supplemented by an increased attention to the production and circulation of postcolonial texts (both literature and theory), which would begin to take into account such things as: the mutually implicated relations of aesthetic, philosophical, political (etc.) values and market values; the many ways in which postcolonial texts are commodified and distributed in an increasingly globalized market; which “marginal” books get adopted on course syllabi and what this has to tell us about the role of canon-formation in the ostensibly anti-canonical field of postcolonial studies; how the “postcolonial card” plays (or does not play) in current university hiring practices, and so on. In short, one would have to highlight the ways in which the postcolonial has become possible not simply as an object of textual interpretation, or of pleasurable (or not) consumption, but as an object of no small value to the literary and academic marketplace alike.

To be sure, if the dominant postcolonial ideology renders the asking of such unpopular questions about various types of popularity difficult, it has certainly not rendered them impossible. Over the past decade, there have been sporadic attempts at inserting such questions into the mainstream of postcolonial studies. For example, it is somewhat, if not entirely, in this spirit that Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, the oft-maligned Australian authors of The Empire Writes Back (1989), remark in the introduction to the final section of their Post-colonial Studies Reader (1995), entitled “Production and Consumption,” that they have included this section of mostly outdated articles “to stimulate the production of more current assessments of the material conditions of cultural production and consumption on post-colonial societies,” which is, they add, “one of the most important and so-far largely neglected areas of concern” in postcolonial studies (463-64). I suspect that the increasingly sullen reception of these pioneering Australian critics may well have something to do not only with their supposed privileging of “literary hybridity” at the expense of “histories of subjection,”³⁰ but with their receptivity to the idea of opening postcolonialism up to these empirical studies–studies that would inevitably put into question not only the individualist cult of the author/critic and the fetishization of textuality that is at the heart of so much work being done in postcolonial studies (their own included) but also the mechanical emphasis on subversion and resistance that so easily flows from the pens of those critics who can neither honor nor respect the dubious complicities that inauthentic popularity necessarily involves. Moreover, the admittedly limited emphasis of Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin on “the material conditions of cultural production and consumption,” as well as the hostility directed toward them in certain postcolonial circles, may well be related to their status as settler colony critics (like myself) who have grown up in nation-states where it is difficult, if not impossible, to think (or imagine one is thinking) outside the boundaries of “mass” society and the forms of popularity it engenders, and where the fact of widespread literacy, leisure time, and purchasing power ensures that, in the case of the literary field, prestige-invested forms of cultural production such as novel-writing cannot be simply cordoned off from the dynamics of inauthentically popular consumption.³¹

Be that as it may, it is out of this particular milieu that the most extended and energetic intervention dealing with the popularity of the postcolonial has recently emerged: Graham Huggan’s The Postcolonial Exotic, which comprehensively confronts many of the issues that crystallized for me around the figures of Delsham and Condé in that Fort-de-France bookstore. Huggan’s book constitutes a giant step toward breaking the relative silence surrounding the imbrication of postcolonial studies and the marketplace: taking as his starting point the question “How has the corporate publishing world co-opted postcolonial writing, and to what extent does the academy collaborate in similar processes of co-optation?” (viii), he offers “a speculative prolegomenon to the sociology of postcolonial cultural production” (xvi), very much along Bourdieuvian lines. The key move Huggan makes in order to raise the problem of the marketability of the postcolonial is to identify the postcolonial field of production as occupying “a site of struggle between contending ‘regimes of value’” which he denominates postcolonialism and postcoloniality (5). The latter, in Huggan’s usage, is a “value-regulating mechanism within the global late-capitalism system of commodity exchange,” an “implicitly assimilative and market-driven” regime, while the former is “an anti-colonial intellectualism that reads and valorizes the signs of social struggle in the faultlines of literary and cultural texts” and “implies a politics of value that stands in obvious opposition to global processes of commodification” (6). Rather than being simply at odds, these two regimes of value are “mutually entangled” and “bound up with” one another, which means that “in the overwhelmingly commercial context of late twentieth-century commodity culture, postcolonialism and its rhetoric of resistance have themselves become consumer products” (6). This does not mean that the one is simply reducible to the other, the “good” opposition to the “bad” assimilation, but that they cannot be told apart from one another, any more than the local can be kept separate from the global: as a result of this entanglement, “postcolonialism needs a greater understanding of the commodifying processes through which its critical discourses, like its literary products, are disseminated and consumed” (18).

Huggan subsumes these processes under the category of the “postcolonial exotic,” the exotic being “the perfect term to describe the domesticating process through which commodities are taken from the margins and reabsorbed into mainstream culture” (22). In a wide array of case-studies, he mercilessly analyzes the workings of this postcolonial exotic, and the inseparability of postcolonialism and global commodity culture to which it bears witness: examining such things as the Heinemann African Writers Series, Indo-chic, the Booker Prize, multiculturalism, ethnic autobiography, tourist novels, and the Margaret Atwood Society, he maps out the innumerable ways in which “the language of resistance is entangled, like it or not, in the language of commerce” (264). Faced with this entanglement, in which it becomes virtually impossible to distinguish between co-optation and complicity, the choice facing writers and critics “may be not so much whether to ‘succumb’ to market forces as how to use them judiciously to suit one’s own, and other people’s, ends” (11). As Huggan suggests throughout, following Appadurai’s lead, this “succumbing” to the market will not necessarily produce the negative, homogenizing scenario one might expect since “global processes of commodification may engender new social relations that operate in anti-imperialist interests, empowering the previously dispossessed” (12), and “anti-imperialist resistance is not necessarily diminished when ‘resistance’ itself is inserted into global-capitalist networks of cultural consumption” (262). This is the positive message that, doubtfully (“may engender,” “is not necessarily diminished”), emerges from Huggan’s consideration of postcolonialism’s complicity with the market-driven regime of postcoloniality: “lay[ing] bare the workings of commodification” through which the postcolonial makes itself heard (and is made to be heard) will, perhaps, not simply result in identifying a symptomatic “mode of consumption” but make possible “an analysis of consumption” that, somehow, will challenge us to respond differently to it in the future (264).

Huggan is understandably vague about what that future and its differences might look like, preferring to concentrate on the contemporary symptoms of the postcolonial exotic, that “pathology of cultural representation under late capitalism” (33). It is refreshingly clear that he is skeptical of those who, faced with “the spiralling commodification of cultural difference,” wish (like Aijaz Ahmad) “to disclaim or downplay their involvement in postcolonial theoretical production, or to posit alternative epistemologies and strategies of cultural representation,” or others who “might wish to ‘opt out’ of, or at least defy, the processes of commodification and institutionalisation that have arguably helped create a new canon of ‘representative’ postcolonial literary/cultural works” (32). If hero(in)es there are in his account of postcolonial writers responding to the dilemma posed by the postcolonial exotic, they are those who “have chosen to work within, while also seeking to challenge, institutional structures and dominant systems of representation […] [and] have recognised their own complicity with exoticist aesthetics while choosing to manipulate the conventions of the exotic to their own political ends” (32). These writers engage in what he calls “strategic exoticism,” “strategic marginalization,” and so on: for instance, someone like Vikram Seth–even if, or precisely because, his novels are not brooded over by the academic culture industry with the same intensity that Rushdie’s are, lacking as they do “the aura of self-conscious intellectual sophistication that might encourage, as it has certainly done for Rushdie’s work, the type of theoretically informed research that is a current requirement of the academic profession” (75)–is a novelist we can learn from because of the way that a work like A Suitable Boy “anticipates its own reception as a technically proficient blockbuster novel that seeks (and inevitably fails) to encapsulate a deliberately exoticised India,” and is aware of “the metropolitan formulae within which it is likely to be read and evaluated, and to some extent […] plays up to these, challenging its readers by pretending to humour them, to confirm their expectations” (76).

Time and again Huggan has recourse to this idea of “strategic exoticism” as a way of reconciling popularity and aesthetic value, and it is a version of this double game that I myself could not help playing in my own analysis of Condé, even if my invocation of her “strategic unoriginality” was put forward not in order to point out the ways in which she might be challenging her “blockbuster” reader (as Huggan argues Seth is doing) but, rather, the ways in which she plays up to the formula of postcolonial revisionism and the expectations it generates amongst an academic readership only to challenge those elite readers by implicating that formula in the “troubling greatness” of a middlebrow text. Notwithstanding this difference in focus, it is clear that my account of Condé fits in well with Huggan’s general portrait of “postcolonial writers/thinkers […] [as] both aware of and resistant to their interpellation as marginal spokespersons, institutionalised cultural commentators and representative (iconic) figures” (26). As to what the political value of the awareness and resistance exemplified by strategic exoticism is, Huggan has no easy answers (and nor, as should be apparent from my analysis of Condé, do I): as he points out, if strategic exoticism is “an option,” it is “not necessarily a way out of the dilemma” posed by postcolonialism’s always-already insertedness into “global-capitalist networks of cultural consumption” (32). Aside from confirming a sense of Condé’s or Seth’s “worth” as writers (a “worth” that their popularity does not preclude, even if the two may be inseparable from one another), one might well ask what such arguments as his or mine ultimately achieve.

This eternal question of the political value of literature, and its doubtful relation to the aesthetic value that both Huggan and I seem interested in preserving, is the familiar (no doubt, for some readers, all-too-familiar) territory to which my questions regarding the (dis)connections of the popular and the postcolonial have led me. Of what real help, or hindrance, is it to “know” that Condé is a better writer than Delsham? Can such “knowledge” benefit us in any way, or is it simply part of an obnoxiously hierarchical mode of thinking that prevents social justice from flowering on the face of this earth? What are the consequences of foregoing such “knowledge” and attempting to consider someone like Condé on “equal” terms with cultural producers like Delsham and de Jaham? It was precisely this leveling move–putting Roseanne and Jamaica Kincaid in (different parts of) the same room, as it were–that provided my point of departure in this article, and it is the sort of move without which cultural studies, with its concerted focus on the popular and the “ways of life” that give meaning to this popularity, would not exist. The cultural studies move, valorizing what might from an elitist perspective be regarded as inferior trash, is one–I started out by arguing–that postcolonial studies needs more effectively to incorporate into its repertoire if it is to go beyond the sort of sanctimonious vomiting and unseemly groveling to which Jamaica Kincaid seems prone. Identifying and breaking down the unspoken boundaries in postcolonial studies that separate the likes of Delsham and de Jaham from other more “accomplished” (but often glaringly middlebrow) writers would be a way of expanding the field in both a more democratic and a less homogenizing way, and thereby enhancing the field’s egalitarian and heterogenizing agenda. More democratic, because of its greater inclusivity. Less homogenizing, because issues of material production and consumption could now be foregrounded, supplementing the fetishization of certain authors/texts (who are inevitably found to have little more to say, politically speaking, than that “resistance to colonialism, capitalism, etc. is good, although not always easy”) with more of a sense of the diverse and overlapping cultural contexts (local, regional, global) in which these authors/texts operate. As Huggan’s study ably shows, the “postcolonial” as an institutionalized field of study has been constituted exotically, in complicitous relation to global markets and metropolitan audiences (a complicity that it has tried its best to ignore), and leveling the playing field of postcolonialism might enhance an awareness of other (e.g., regional) markets and other (non-metropolitan) audiences, offering if not a way out of the dilemma that his analysis of the postcolonial exotic and its conflicting regimes of value situates us in, then at least some refreshingly new perspectives on it.

All well and good. But what are we to make of these new perspectives that a cultural studies approach might offer postcolonial studies? What, for instance, will ethnographical accounts of actual reading communities and consumption patterns in the French Caribbean produce? What will a sociologically precise account of marketing strategies in the French Caribbean as compared to France result in? What will be the effect of treating writers like Delsham and de Jaham to the sort of extended analyses afforded writers like Glissant and Condé? What, in short, do we gain by making a place for the inauthentically popular in postcolonial studies? This, of course, is a question that cultural studies itself has had to ask repeatedly, after its foundational act of deconstructing the idea of the inauthentically popular and learning to take any and all forms of popularity seriously. One dominant response has been to (over)value what had previously been devalued, as in the work of John Fiske who, as Jim McGuigan points out, “merely produces a simple inversion of the mass culture critique at its worst, […] never countenancing the possibility that a popular reading could be anything other than ‘progressive’” (588). For many, however, this celebratory blanding out of the popular (or, more exactly, of the social relationships that are constituted by and mediated through the popular), in which it is treated as being in and of itself valuable and resistant, appears as “a deterrent to Cultural Studies’ overall political and ethical project”–a radical, or at least progressive, project which requires that the popular be, in Stuart Hall’s terms, “rearticulated” as part of a “hegemonic struggle” (Le Hir 125-26).³²

In 1981, at the end of his “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular,” Hall vividly summed up this “overall political and ethical project” of cultural studies and its relation to the popular when he explained that the latter is “one of the places where socialism might be constituted. That is why ‘popular culture’ matters. Otherwise, to tell you the truth, I don’t give a damn about it” (453). Thus, from Hall’s perspective, the popular has value, but only after it has been evaluated according to the criteria of the larger political project in which (his) cultural studies situates it. Hall’s was, and still is, a fine and honest response to the disturbing question that the popular poses cultural (and by extension postcolonial) studies, and yet of course it also lends itself, over twenty years later, to no small degree of historical irony by virtue of its desire to constitute “socialism”: not just because a modernist, future-oriented meta-narrative such as the constitution of socialism has become increasingly difficult to credit, but because it was precisely around this time that the initial, primarily class-based project of British cultural studies had begun to be challenged by other related projects with a different/differing primary focus on issues such as gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. The irony goes further, though, because if these other projects put into question and “interrupted” the foundational biases of cultural studies, they also appeared to have the potential to rescue it: their “progressive,” if not necessarily socialist, agendas brought a fresh energy to cultural studies and promised a way out of the impasse it had reached by the 1980s, what with the failure of neo-Gramscianism to stay the ongoing tide of Thatcherism on the one (practical) hand and of rampant relativism on the other (theoretical) hand, the endless and seemingly irresoluble arguments between symbolic and economic approaches to culture, the growing dominance of an uncritically “celebratory” approach to popular culture, the institutionalization of cultural studies in America (analogous to what Huggan has referred to as the recent “Americanisation of the postcolonial” [271]), and so on. All of these were signs of an impasse that cultural studies had reached, the flagging of its “overall ethical and political project,” which led, and continues to lead, many of its practitioners to look beyond the original class parameters of the project and take a feminist turn, a queer turn, or a postcolonial turn as a way around that impasse.

These signs are still with us, of course, and as my analysis of the postcolonial ideology has suggested, the postcolonial turn (which shaped a great deal of Hall’s own later work, be it added) in many respects leads not forward but back into the sorts of questions–notably, about the value of the popular–that cultural studies started out asking in the first place. Perhaps this circling (or more optimistically, spiraling) back is what has led Simon During–who, in his several accounts of the “global popular” over the past decade, has been one of the very few critics to have stressed the (dis)connectionsof the popular and the postcolonial–to state in the 1999 updated introduction to the second edition of his Cultural Studies Reader that “transnational cultural studies” is “eroding so-called ‘postcolonialism,’ first nurtured in literary studies, which was so important a feature of the late 1980s and early 1990s intellectual landscape,” but which (according to During) seems to be less able to deal, at least on its own terms, with the increasingly urgent issues surrounding globalization (“Introduction” 23). Will transnational cultural studies somehow synthesize the concerns of both cultural studies and postcolonialism, finally, and show us the way out of the failed dialogue that I have described in this article? One can, I suppose, always hope! But what needs to be kept in mind, as a new wave of transnational cultural studies hits the academic beaches, is that this hope for a “way out” is only thinkable, and hence only possible, within the terms of the original project that generated both cultural studies and postcolonial studies–a project committed to “hegemonic struggle” and, accordingly, committed to (that is, biased toward) certain values and not others. During exemplifies this commitment, for instance, when he argues at the end of his introduction that “engaged cultural studies” is a field “embracing clearly articulated, left-wing values” (27). It is only from a clearly articulated position such as this that the political value of the popular can be discerned and disengaged from other values that may or may not be compatible with it.

To be sure, finding a stable ground upon which to make such evaluations has become an increasingly hard thing to do in a postmodern era increasingly sensitive to the contingency of all values. One might well ask, and it would be an entirely legitimate question, why those “left-wing values” During holds so dear should be of any value to those who might be interested in, say, popular culture but not in the “political and ethical project” that legitimizes the study of it. From a radically skeptical perspective, there is no way around this relativizing question, but there are certainly solid enough responses to it, as Stanley Fish argued recently in the pages of The New York Times when he responded to a reporter who had asked him if the events of 9/11 meant the end of postmodern relativism, since such a position leaves us “with no firm basis for either condemning the terrorist attacks or fighting back.” Fish noted that so-called postmodern relativism simply argues against “the hope of justifying our response to the attacks in universal terms that would be persuasive to everyone, including our enemies,” but that it in no way precludes taking action based upon our own convictions. “We can and should,” he stated, “invoke the particular lived values that unite us and inform the institutions we cherish and wish to defend”; these values provide us with “grounds enough for action and justified condemnation in the democratic ideals we embrace, without grasping for the empty rhetoric of universal absolutes to which all subscribe but which all define differently.” With this argument Fish “resolves” the superficially irresoluble question of postmodern relativism, clearing a space for actions based upon value-judgments and effecting that “arbitrary closure” without which, as Hall has repeatedly argued, “politics is impossible” (see, e.g., “Cultural Studies” 264). Yet, in resolving this question, Fish rather spectacularly begs the question of who “we” are, and offers what could easily be construed as a justification of the U.S. invading impoverished nations such as Afghanistan and Iraq to which neither Hall nor During, I suspect, would subscribe, notwithstanding the fact that both men are equally sensitive to the difficulties of pursuing the hard road to (socialist) renewal in a world, as Hall is fond of putting it, “without final guarantees.”

It is precisely this lack of “final guarantees” to which, I argued at the end of my discussion of Condé, “great” literature so troublingly alerts us, displacing our certitudes and replacing us in other wor(l)ds, wor(l)ds where fictions become possibilities but never realities. That is, no doubt, a high-sounding albeit sincerely held belief about the value of literature; one can imagine any number of less ethereal counterarguments regarding what makes literature of value, but the important point to register is that valuations of some such sort are an inescapable feature of literary studies. To put oneself in the shoes of a practitioner of cultural studies, as I did at the beginning of this article, is to take one’s distance from such aesthetic and ethical evaluations, to relativize them and gain a sense of their limits (and also, of course, in the context of my own argument, to gain a sense of how those limits are, unavowedly, inscribed within a field such as postcolonialism, which shares an uneasy border with both literary and cultural studies). It is important to have a sense of the limits of what one values, no doubt, but as Fish suggests, it can also be worth defending those limits. When During states that postcolonialism was first nurtured in “literary studies” but is now being eroded by “transnational cultural studies,” he seems almost to imply that the tainted genealogy of postcolonialism might account for its supposed erosion. Literary studies, it would appear, cannot catch up to the incitements of globalization. Its seemingly residual status and elitist history (implicated, as it has been, not only in hierarchical assumptions about aesthetic value but in the material dynamics of colonization) explains very well why, as Huggan puts it, “some of the most recent work in the [postcolonial] field gives the impression of having bypassed literature altogether, offering a heady blend of philosophy, sociology, history and political science in which literary texts, when referred to at all, are read symptomatically within the context of larger social and cultural trends” (239). The foundational bias of literary studies toward “great” works could not be clearer, and it is not surprising that even the sub-field of postcolonial studies devoted to literature might wish to avoid any but the most condemnatory reckoning with this bias.

I have argued throughout this article that such a bias does inf(l)ect postcolonial studies in a variety of ways, regardless of its flatteringly egalitarian self-image; however, I have purposefully developed a supplementary argument that this bias is not something which, once unmasked, can or should be simply jettisoned. Rather, this bias must be explored more openly and, from my own perspective as a literary critic, with a measure of belief in the value of literature, not just as a model or a symptom but as the troubling other of contemporary (and self-evidently “progressive”) disciplines such as postcolonial and cultural studies–in short, with a measure of belief that literature and the greatness it troublingly promises is indeed something we might “cherish and wish to defend,” notwithstanding or precisely because of the cautionary distance it allows us to take from those other, more pressing beliefs that, however provisionally, must ground the “political and ethical projects,” socialist or otherwise, about which we give a damn. As we learn to listen in on the as-yet failed (but, we must hope, ultimately successful) dialogue between Roseanne and Jamaica Kincaid, the “great writer,” I would suggest, not only is but must remain present in our minds, exiled from the mainstream of cultural and postcolonial studies that beckons us, a spectre of value haunting the margins of a new center to which neither that writer, nor we literary critics, can ever return but toward which we can yet, perhaps, migrate.

Notes

I would like to thank Rey Chow and Katie Trumpener for some useful feedback in the early stages of this project, as well as Carine Mardorossian, Grace Moore, Susan Weiner, and Robert J. C. Young for reading and commenting on drafts of the article.

1. Quoted in Seabrook 33 (from Newsweek 18 Sept. 1995, 10). For the comment about People magazine, see Kincaid’s interview with Salon magazine (<http://www.salon.com/05/features/kincaid2.html>).

2. In the Salon interview, discussing Brown’s enthusiasm for Roseanne, Kincaid laments “the coarseness of it, the vulgarity,” and expresses a desire to “rescue [Brown] from her coarseness. She’s actually got some nice qualities. But she can’t help but be attracted to the coarse and vulgar. I wish there was a vaccine–I would sneak it up on her.”

3. Discussing how the “passionate divisions” of Restoration France (aristocracy versus bourgeoisie, political right versus political left, etc.) hide “the modern tendency to identity,” Girard notes that “double mediation is a melting-pot in which differences among classes and individuals gradually dissolve. It functions all the more efficiently because it does not even appear to affect diversity. In fact, the latter is even given a fresh though deceptive brilliance” (122).

4. In this article I use “francophone” and “postcolonial” as relatively interchangeable terms. While not wishing to deny significant differences between these two catch-all labels and the worlds to which they (supposedly) refer, I do not believe that these differences greatly affect the argument I am developing here: the same foundational bias is at work in both fields of study (by virtue of their geographically free-floating nature, as explained later in this section).

5. According to Gilles Alexandre, owner of the Librairie Alexandre in Fort-de-France and an important cultural mediator in the French Antillean literary scene, only Césaire sells more books than Delsham in Martinique (Césaire’s popularity being in large part attributable to school sales). Delsham’s status as Martinique’s bestselling novelist is common knowledge on the island, although any full account of his popularity would obviously need to be backed up by statistical research.

6. As just two randomly chosen examples of Delsham’s neglect, it can be noted that there is not a single index entry on him in the recent An Introduction to Caribbean Francophone Writing: Guadeloupe and Martinique (Haigh), and that at the 4th International Conference on Caribbean Literatures, held in his native Martinique (November 2001), not a single paper addressed Delsham’s work.

7. For Delsham’s own account of how he came to publish and distribute his own work, see the opening autobiographical chapters of his Gueule de journaliste (15-88).

8. This phrase provides a “cri de guerre” for Keith Walker’s Countermodernism and Francophone Literary Culture (1999). According to Walker, “colonialism entailed not only the power to annex and exploit other races, but also to textualize the racial Other […] . It is this textualization against which francophone narratives must always work” (13, emphasis added). In its totalizing and exclusionary claims about what francophone narratives “must always” do, this categorical assertion exemplifies–to the point of parody–the postcolonial ideology that I am analyzing here.

9. One could spend a lot of time analyzing the ways in which Delsham’s novels fail both to meet the standard criteria for positively evaluating literary texts or to contest those criteria in a knowingly postcolonial fashion. Necessary as such a discussion might be for “proving” my commonsense claims (widely echoed in Martiniquan literary circles) about Delsham’s dubious relation to what has come to be known as “literature,” such an account is beyond the purview of a general position paper like this.

10. Here, I am echoing Jerome McGann’s influential account of “the Romantic ideology,” and his argument about how “the scholarship and interpretation of Romantic works is dominated by an uncritical absorption in Romanticism’s own self-representations” (137).

11. The existence of identifiable nation-states and regions–the Caribbean, Latin America, West Africa, etc.–or longstanding cultural groupings within a nation-state or region–Afro-Americans, Aboriginals, etc.–greatly facilitates a coming-to-terms with the inauthentic popularity that forms such a sticking point for a “time-lagged” postcolonial studies, even if these readily identifiable territories or groupings are, under pressures of globalization, becoming ever more indissociable from geographically and culturally diffuse “ethnoscapes,” in Appadurai’s terms (that is, increasingly mobile landscapes of “persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers, and other moving groups and individuals” [33]). If a text can be located within a particular territory, then–no matter how lowbrow or how market-driven–it can be read, positively, as forming an integral part of a culture’s “way of life”; indeed, this is how cultural studies came about in the first place, as a way of (re)defining the parameters of the British nation-state. To be sure, though, the “problem” of popularity that I am identifying with postcolonial studies does not simply disappear when one finds a home for the inauthentically popular within the limits of a particular national or cultural grouping: one need only think, for instance, about the ways in which, in Afro-American studies, Terry McMillan and Toni Morrison both are and are not thinkable in one and the same space to get a sense of how this “problem” persists even in ostensibly less abstract contexts than that of the “postcolonial” or “francophone.” For an exemplary reading of this dilemma in the context of Asian-American literature, see Wong.

12. Graham Huggan, among others, confirms this account of the double directives generating postcolonial theory, which “might be seen as the provisional attempt to forge a working alliance between the–often Marxist-inspired–politics of anti-colonial resistance, exemplified in the liberationist tracts of Fanon, Césaire and Memmi, and the disparate, allegedly destabilising poststructuralisms of Derrida, Lacan, Althusser and Foucault” (260). In Huggan’s description, however, there is at work both an historical and geographical opposition (non-European writers from the 1940s and 1950s versus European writers from the 1960s and 1970s) that I would dissolve by referring both sides of the equation back to a modernism that took worldwide root amongst intellectuals and artists in the 1920s and 1930s.

13. As Simon During has noted, “‘postcolonialism,’ with its emancipatory conceptual overtones, only obscures analysis of the rhythm of globalization”: the emergence of what he has dubbed “the global popular” is a phenomenon with which “postcolonial thought” must be uncomfortable since it is difficult for such thought “to concede the colonized’s partial consent to colonialism” (“Postcolonialism” 343, 347; see also his “Popular Culture”).

14. The role of such paratextual material in (pre)determining a text’s meaning is, however, of vital importance; for a discussion of this role in a postcolonial context, see Huggan’s discussion of how cover design sets up “an initial horizon of readerly expectations that is subsequently confirmed or, more likely, modified in the narrative that follows” (168).

15. As Condé frequently notes in her interviews, “I have never in my life written a political tract. But there are always errors in interpreting my writings because people think I have done so. They always look for militant or positive heroes, and I never portray any” (Pfaff 88).

16. On “creolist discourse,” see my reading of the 1835 plantation novel Outre-mer by the béké Louis Maynard de Queilhe in Islands and Exiles (287-316). For a brief but effective comment on how de Jaham’s first two novels express the “ideological self-perception of the béké,” see Macey (45).

17. For a pioneering consideration of paratextual material in earlier Condé novels, see Massardier-Kenney (250-52).

18. As a glance at a bibliography of Condé shows (Pfaff 144-65), the review (along with the interview) is the preferred forum for discussion of her novels–another telling sign of the middlebrow nature (or at least reception) of her work.

19. On the way in which “critiques of middlebrow culture have been persistently gendered,” see Radway 872. The particular relevance of middlebrow writing to women as a way of subverting gendered hierarchies is not an issue that I can explore here, but it is worth thinking about Condé in the context of Deidre Lynch’s remark that “many women writers, conscious of the gendering of these categories [‘classics’ and ‘trash’], have been more interested in collapsing the boundaries that separate the literary and the popular than in policing them” (23,n13).

20. In a 1982 interview, for instance, Condé arrogantly commented, “In my opinion, no writer has ever spoken to the West Indian people, because our people do not read. Certain ideas may reach them through newspapers or television. But let’s not delude ourselves: West Indians have only vague idea of novels and poetry collections published in Paris by West Indian authors” (Pfaff 38). Condé voices a very limited understanding here of what it means to “read” in a highly literate location like the French Antilles, and I would certainly agree with Lionnet that she becomes more “humble” in this regard after the early 1980s.

21. “Condé appropriates the technique of the novel within the novel to reflect upon the role of the writer as outsider, and of the outsider as catalyst or pharmakon, both poison and antidote, dangerous supplement, chronicler, and aide-mémoire of the community” (Lionnet 75).

22. In one of her interviews with Françoise Pfaff, for instance, she happily described Segu as “a commissioned work” and noted the way in which it depends upon many of the formulas of lowbrow popular writing: “I followed the rules for that type of novel: coincidences, sensational developments, dramatic turns of events, and unexpected encounters. Like everyone else, I had read Alexander Dumas’s works, such as The Three Musketeers and Twenty Years After, as well as many other cloak-and-dagger novels. In French literature there is a whole tradition of adventure novels with surprise happenings” (49).

23. Given her own understandable investment in presenting herself as a “good” writer, it is hardly surprising that Condé’s relation to her own popularity is not straightforwardly positive. This ambivalence is evident, for instance, in her comments about the differences between her reception in France and the United States:

In France, writing a bestseller causes somewhat of a misfortune for the author. You have a hard time disengaging yourself from the image of an easy book that appealed to a large readership but was perhaps not very good as a literary work […]. [Whereas Americans don’t label one that way] because they think a best-seller is a good thing. It only means that the book appealed to a lot of people, and there is nothing wrong with that. Here, I don’t feel it is infamous to have written a bestseller like Segu. And besides I don’t know whether Segu is a bestseller in the United States. It is simply a book considered to be very important among certain African-American sectors. Segu hasn’t had the notoriety in the United States that it had in France. (Pfaff 106)

Condé’s claim that Americans “think a best-seller is a good thing,” like so many of her sweeping cultural assertions, may or may not be true; more to the point, in the context of my argument, is that serious consideration of this “good thing” is beyond the scope of the postcolonial ideology: the critical

scrutiny

that Condé associates with her reception in France is one that, given the occlusion of inauthentic popularity in discussions of postcolonial literature, she is unlikely to face in the United States.

24. Explaining her preference for novel writing in an interview, Condé once remarked, “the novel seemed simpler to me [than writing plays that could “reach illiterate people in Africa and the West Indies”] because it acknowledges that it is bourgeois and elitist. Literate people have access to novels. Books are sold in stores and you need money to acquire them. Authors have no illusion. They know that they will be read by a limited circle of people that they can almost anticipate” (Pfaff 37).

25. Maja-Lisa Von Sneidern, quoted in Stoneman (152). For an overview of this postcolonial turn in Wuthering Heights criticism, see Stoneman (150-55).

26.

Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists. Pastiche is thus blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs […]. (Jameson 17)

 

In my own critical work, I have repeatedly tried to rework this account of pastiche in more positive terms: see, for instance,

Islands and Exiles (374-75).

27. Q.D. Leavis’s comments about the Brontës, in her Fiction and the Reading Public (1932), are worth citing here as a prime example of the sort of modernist distinctions upon which postcolonial literary studies genealogically, if surreptitiously, depends: “The emotion exhibited in Wuthering Heights, unlike the emotion exhibited in Jane Eyre, has a frame round it […] [I]t is the Charlotte Brontës, not the Emilies, who have provided the popular fiction of the last hundred years” (quoted in Stoneman 131).

28. As Deidre Lynch points out, in a discussion of the anxieties produced by Austen’s “popularity and marketability,” Janeite is “the term that Austen’s audiences have learned to press into service whenever they need to designate the Other Reader in his or her multiple guises, or rather, and more precisely, whenever they need to personify and distance themselves from particular ways of reading, ones they might well indulge in themselves” (12).

29. Where Brontë’s Catherine asserts “it would degrade me to marry Heathcliff, now” (121), Condé’s elaborates: “Je ne pourrai jamais, jamais me marier avec Razyé. Ce serait trop dégradant. Ce serait recommencer à vivre comme nos ancêtres, les sauvages d’Afrique!” (Migration 20) [“I could never, never marry Razyé. It would be too degrading. It would be like starting to live all over again like our ancestors, the savages in Africa!” (Windward 13)].

30. For a typical critique, see Gandhi 167-70.

31. It is no coincidence that the case studies I have been considering in this article come from the French Antilles: relatively affluent islands with high literacy rates (over 90%). If the rare attempts to think postcolonialism and cultural studies together have generally originated from settler colonies such as Australia, it is also not by chance that recent efforts in this vein have been greatly facilitated by expanding “postcolonial” territory (traditionally identified with Africa, the Indian Subcontinent, the Caribbean) to include hitherto peripheral locations such as Hong Kong and China; see, for instance, the series of essays on Hong Kong “postcolonial cultural studies” collected in Cultural Studies 15.3-4 (2001).

32. Le Hir, I should note, is simply paraphrasing those (like Meaghan Morris) who make this critique of Fiske-style populism. For the quotation from Hall, see Le Hir (128).

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