Andrew Saldino

Department of Philosophy and Religion
Clemson University
asaldin@clemson.edu

 

Review of: Mark C. Taylor. Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004.

 

In Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption, Mark C. Taylor turns his attention to the topic of money and markets in order to shed light on what are undoubtedly among the most important and complex structures of the world in which we live. For, whatever else one understands, one is missing a crucial piece of the puzzle if one does not understand how money operates in the global economy. Taylor’s book represents an extraordinary attempt to do just that and, in the process, reminds its readers that no one book, no matter how smart, can put all the pieces of this puzzle together. For in its attempt to explain the profound theoretical complexities of financial marketplace, this book glosses over real issues of power that are fundamental to understanding the causes and effects of the ways that money get circulated in our world.

 

In his preface, Taylor suggests that this book has its origin in two events: the suspension of the gold standard by Nixon in 1971 and the stock market crash of 1987. The first event occurred without Taylor’s knowledge while he was abroad in Denmark and left him bewildered when he converted his small stipend into Danish kroner and received $200 less than he had the previous semester. “Where did the money go,” he wondered, trying to process this first experience of money’s “virtuality.” Regarding the second event, Taylor recounts a conversation with his son, Aaron, in October 1987:

 

"You know," I said, "the past few days have been pretty amazing."
Aaron, who was fourteen at the time, asked, "Why, what's going on?"
"The stock market has crashed and billions and billions of dollars have vanished."
"Really? Where's the money go?"
Once again, I had no answer. But by this time, I had come to suspect that the issue was not merely a matter of economics. (xv)

 

And a matter of mere economics it is not. Taylor spends the next 300 pages unpacking an entire history and philosophy of culture that is astounding in both its scope and depth. In taking account of this project, Taylor suggests that it “represents the culmination of an argument I have been developing for more than three decades” (xvi). And for those familiar with the richness of Taylor’s work during that period, that alone is reason enough to give this book some attention. While many elements of Taylor’s previous work are in evidence here, Confidence Games does mark a culmination in his attempt to develop a philosophy of culture consistent with the complexity of our world.

 

In summarizing the goals of this book in a subsequent interview, Taylor says:

 

I have three major objectives in this book. First, to explain how art displaces religion and then markets and finance displace art as the expression of spiritual striving during the past two centuries; second, to examine the interrelationship between postmodern philosophy and art on the one hand and finance capitalism on the other hand; third, to develop a model of global financial markets as complex adaptive systems. In the course of this analysis, the intricate interrelation of neo-liberal economics, neo-conservative politics and neo-fundamentalist religion becomes clear. (Taylor, Interview)

 

In seeking to explain the development of the global financial marketplace and its relationship to culture, Taylor has set an enormous task for himself. How well does he succeed in accomplishing these goals? Well, sometimes Taylor’s broad historical arguments are persuasive, and other times they seem strained. Consider, for instance, Talyor’s argument that the last two centuries have witnessed a broad transition from religion to art to the market as the preeminent locus of spiritual meaning in our culture. Certainly many other genealogies could be constructed to account for the rise to prominence of global capital, and I suspect that this history records the development of Taylor’s own thinking over the last thirty years, as it has moved from philosophy of religion to art and now into broader cultural issues, as much as it accurately describes the transitions in Western culture. However, while the exact genealogy that Taylor traces may not be convincing (is art necessarily the middle term between religion and money?), the more important point that there has been a transition from God to money as the foundational principle of Western society is almost beyond dispute. This crucial idea provides all of the historical support that Taylor needs for underscoring the importance of markets in the contemporary world.

 

Up until the Protestant Reformation, Taylor notes, the Church had a strong aversion to market activity (but not to money!), based on, among other things, the prohibitions of taking interest found in the Bible. Without interest the expansive power of a market economy is highly curtailed. Luther, while breaking from the Church, affirmed the prohibition of collecting interest as an element of his basic disdain for worldly activity. Indeed, as Taylor notes, “for Luther the greatest sin of the Catholic Church was the commodification of religion” (78). All this changes with Calvin’s view of economic success as a sign of an omnipotent God’s blessing and his subsequent acceptance of collecting interest as a vehicle of this success:

 

By emphasizing God's omnipotence so strongly, Calvin inadvertently collapses transcendence into immanence. If all acts and events are ultimately the result of God's providence, divine and human wills are finally indistinguishable even if they are not precisely identical. No longer imposed from without, divine purpose now emerges within the play of worldly events. With this aestheticization of creation and the immanentization of purpose, the way is prepared for Scottish moral philosophy and the birth of modern political economy. (84)

 

The fascinating point that Taylor makes in tracing this history is that the Smithian metaphor of the “invisible hand,” which comes to play so central a role in modern economic theory, was originally a theological metaphor derived from Calvin’s belief in God’s workings in the world: “God’s hand is not, of course, always visible; on the contrary, since God’s plan is ‘secret,’ ‘true causes of events are hidden to us,” Taylor writes, quoting Calvin (84). And given the prominence of Calvinism within eighteenth century Scotland, Taylor’s insinuation that the centrality of the “invisible hand” to Smith’s economic theory has its roots in Calvinism is both compelling and important.

 

In connection with this history, Taylor unfolds two related histories: that of money and representation. Taylor has proven himself an expert in the philosophical issues of representation, and if his treatment of these issues is a bit loose here, it is only because he has a bigger agenda in this work. Both money and representation, Taylor points out, have become increasingly abstract or “spectral,” and when these histories are combined with the theological history outlined above, one gets a real sense of the direction of the book’s argument:

 

As one moves from exchanging goods through exchange mediated by representational money (e.g., metal and paper) to spectral currencies, which are completely immaterial, there is a shift from immanence (actual things) through transcendence (referential signs) to relational signifiers traded on virtual networks, which are neither immanent nor transcendent. . . This trajectory initially seems to be characterized by progressive abstraction and dematerialization. Industrial and information technologies transform life by creating abstract economic processes and dematerializing financial instruments. Throughout much of the twentieth century, art follows a parallel course: as art becomes more abstract and progressively dematerializes, it becomes further and further removed from the everyday world. The aesthetic equivalent of religious transcendence is the autonomy of the work of art. This autonomy, we have seen, is expressed in the self-referentiality of l'oeuvre d'art, which mirrors the self-reflexivity of capital. At the moment when abstraction seems complete, however, everything changes. Just as the transcendence of God reaches a tipping point at which it inverts itself and becomes radical immanence, so artistic abstraction eventually reverses itself and reengages the world. (117-18)

 

When artistic abstraction reengages with the world, it does so in the form of an increasingly abstract money whose value has moved from the referential to the relational. This lack of referentiality, latent in the history of money itself, becomes full blown with two crucial policy shifts in the 1970’s: the aforementioned removal of the gold standard in 1971 and the Federal Reserve Board’s 1979 decision to let currencies “float” in relation to one another. With these two moves, the dollar became fundamentally freed from external control and was allowed to regulate itself through the working of the market’s invisible hand, in which absolute faith was required. These principles remain with us, regulating not only commodity markets (as in Smith) but financial markets as well, thus instantiating a faith commitment in the efficacy of this invisible hand at the core of society’s economic organization. The religious dimension of this transformation is not lost on Taylor. Stripping away of money’s ultimate referentiality signifies an economic “death of God,” although not an annihilation of God, if, like Nietzsche, one thinks of God in terms of the absolute foundation that insures social order. “In retrospect,” Taylor concludes, “it is clear that God did not simply disappear, but was reborn as the market” (6).

 

Increasingly unregulated financial markets in the 1980’s then gave rise to new ways of gambling on the market through stocks, options, futures, and swaps, all of which became highly leveraged and further and further removed from the material economy. “These markets,” Taylor writes in specific reference to derivative markets, index futures, and index options, “are bets on bets on bets, which seem to have little or nothing to do with the value of the underlying assets on which they are based” (180). As financial markets become increasingly spectral or virtual during this period, so our economy has become as postmodern as our philosophy and our art. Taylor here compares Wall Street to Las Vegas, insisting that “one cannot understand Wall Street in the 1970’s and 1980’s if one does not understand Las Vegas” (8). Wall Street’s postmodern economy, while increasingly distinct from the material economy it financially supports, and upon which it depends, is as real and surreal as the architecture, gambling, and culture on the Strip in Vegas.

 

If the crisis in financial referentiality mirrors the crisis of representation in philosophy, then Derrida and other postmodern theorists become crucial to understanding the postmodern economy, according to Taylor. What Derrida has to teach here is twofold: that the pure relationality of signs (and thus money and markets) in a world without final referents renders the desire for a completely stable financial system a chimera, and that this desire for foundation in economic theory is just another manifestation of a metaphysics of presence that has determined the tradition of Western thought. This presence is found in a wise, benevolent “invisible hand” that guides the flow of capital through the system. That the invisible hand is always pushing the market back towards equilibrium is a fundamental tenet of modern economic theory. This model claims to work without referentiality, that is, as a system of pure relationality in which entirely self-interested participants unconsciously produce the most efficient production and distribution of resources possible. That this system of supposedly pure relationality continually moves towards success, in terms of a stable equilibrium that promotes economic growth, is the final referent of the system itself. The efficiency of the market has, in effect, become the final referent, an invisible God making sense of a complex economic universe. The intelligence and goodness of the “invisible hand” is the guiding metaphysical presupposition of the system, the onto-theo-logical assumption that grounds modern economic theory.

 

The danger of this philosophical assumption is revealed in tracing the history of the “efficient market hypothesis.” This hypothesis treats the market as a complex but calculable entity that always tends towards equilibrium. Taylor traces the potentially disastrous results of this assumption by looking at the rise and fall of Long Term Capital Management (LTCM). Created in 1994 by financial analysts intent on minimizing investment risk, LTCM “put into practice the mathematical theories financial economists had developed. Their investment strategy rested on an unwavering faith in the efficient market hypothesis” (257). While these models enjoyed great success in the first few years, increasing competition forced the company to leverage itself more and more in order to continue to profit. LTCM, like many investors and institutions in the 80’s and 90’s, utilized the liberalization of stock and bond markets to make “bets on bets on bets.” And when the Russian ruble collapsed in August 1997, it set off a global financial crisis revealing both the interconnectedness of our economies and the lack of stability in a currency system that is purely relational. At the very time when the economists upon whose theories LTCM were built were receiving the Noble Prize in Economics for models that were used to minimize risk in calculating value, LTCM was on the verge of requiring a $3.625 billion bailout to avoid a global financial meltdown. This bailout effectively ended LTCM and, for many, the viability the efficient market hypothesis. Taylor quotes Lawrence Sumners (former Secretary of the Treasury under Clinton and current President of Harvard) in support of this position: “The efficient market hypothesis is the most remarkable error in the history of economic history” (276).

 

If these models were so bad, why did they gain such credence? Taylor offers this explanation:

 

The answer, it seems, is that people from universities and Wall Street to Main Street wanted to believe in the models. Paradoxically, these economic formulas and models were symptoms of the very desires and emotions they were designed to eliminate. Rationality, order, and predictability become all the more desirable in a world that appears to be increasingly irrational, chaotic, and unpredictable. The greater the uncertainty and irrationality of the real world, the greater the desire to believe in an ideal world where investors are rational and markets are efficient. (276)

 

Taylor synthesizes this analysis by highlighting its religious dimension, one that often remained unconscious to those in its grip.

 

In the final analysis, this dream is a religious vision in which the market is a reasonable God providentially guiding the world to the Promised Land where redemption finally becomes possible. (301)

 

The mantra here is that “models matter” (xvi), and in a world where relationality has come to replace referentiality, a model that privileges stability over complexity is bound for failure. And given the profound economic interdependence of our world, the consequences of these potential failures become more and more catastrophic. Taylor’s solution? First, a philosophical recognition of the reality that we inhabit:

 

reality is not an aggregate of separate entities, individuals, or monads that are externally and contingently related; it is an emerging web consisting of multiple networks in which everything and everyone come into being and develop through ongoing interrelations. Within these webs, subjects and objects are not separate from each other but coemerge and coevolve. (277)

 

Next, we need an awareness of how the economy is a manifestation of this complex adaptive reality:

 

In contrast to the efficient market hypothesis, which presupposes negative feedback and automatically corrects imbalances and restores equilibrium, complex adaptive systems also involve positive feedback, which can increase imbalances and can push markets far from equilibrium where unpredictable changes occur. Rather than occasional disruptions caused by exogenous forces, intermittent instability and discontinuity are inherent features of complex networks. Unlike isolated molecules, investors are interrelated agents whose interacting expectations make volatility unavoidable but not completely incomprehensible. When the economy is understood as a complex adaptive system, it appears to be a relational web in which order and disorder emerge within and are not imposed from without. (12)

 

Accepting the consequences of a deep relationality–in all dimensions of life–stands at the core of Taylor’s vision. “A complex time needs a complex vision” (320), Taylor deadpans on the next to last page of this work.

 

Concluding with religion, which he claims never really to have left, Taylor contextualizes the rise of global religious fundamentalism as both a reaction to the increasing insecurity of our shrinking world and a structural denial of that very insecurity. The simultaneous rise of the religious right in the United States and the emergence of the postmodern economy are not coincidental for Taylor. The rise of religious fundamentalism expresses the need for the certainty and stability that are being challenged by the growth of a destabilizing global economy. And yet, Taylor ironically notes,

 

outside the U.S, religious fundamentalism often provides a way to resist the expansion of global capitalism and American power, while within the United States, religious fundamentalism tends to legitimize market fundamentalism and sanctify American power. (306)

 

This is as close to an analysis of the political economy in terms of power that Taylor ever comes in this book. At another point he notes that the Federal Reserve Board’s 1979 decision to let currencies float, and the supply-side policies that followed with Reagan, “obviously favored the wealthy individuals and corporations and substantial financial assets” (134). But this line of analysis is not pursued.

 

In fact, Taylor explicitly distances himself from the Marxist theorists of global capital. In one of the most provocative passages of the book, Taylor suggests that

 

cultural critics like Fredric Jameson, Antonio Negri, and Michael Hardt have argued that postmodernism is a symptom of so-called late capitalism. . . .[They] share a Marxist perspective in which cultural processes can always be reduced to a supposedly material economic basis. . . [T]hese critics do not analyze the distinctive characteristics of the new network economy. . . Their theoretical perspective rests on industrial models that are as outdated as the neo-Marxist ideology they promote. . . [T]hese critics do not adequately explore the ways in which culture--art, philosophy, and especially religion--shapes economic realities. (29)

 

While there may some basis to the charge that these theorists read culture too much in terms of its “material economic basis,” the overwhelming political neutrality that of Taylor’s text seems to perpetrate a great injustice by failing to highlight the inequalities of the complex system that he describes. Power is not merely incidental to the system he describes, and yet relations of power are basically invisible in this text, causing this reviewer to wonder whether a description of the world that makes no reference to the complex ways in which power functions to produce profound material and spiritual suffering can be an adequate description of that world.

 

This book will not be all things to all people; that I feel compelled to make such a statement underscores the real value of the text. Read along with the very theorists that he dismisses, Taylor’s book presents an utterly remarkable description of the postmodern economy that “grounds” our postmodern culture. As such, it is a book worth reading.

 

Works Cited

 

• Taylor, Mark C. Interview with Roy Christopher. FrontWheelDrive.com. 31 March 2005 <http://frontwheeldrive.com/mark_c_taylor.html>.

 

David Caplan

Department of English
Ohio Wesleyan University
dmcaplan@owu.edu

 

A response to Lori Emerson, Demystifying the Digital, Re-animating the Book: A Digital Poetics

 

As I write this response on my office computer, three uneven stacks of books threaten to tumble across my desk. On top of the piles perch Jack Spicer’s The Collected Books (for a conference talk that needs expansion), an edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (which I just finished teaching), and my MLA ballot (due soon). My computer runs Windows 98 because I am too lazy to have the information systems staff update it and because the program fits my needs just fine. This morning I entered the changes I made on a hard copy, revising the opening in a neighborhood coffee shop. Outside the large front window, tourists admired the cobblestone streets and small brick homes built for German brewery workers and rehabbed by lawyers. Soon–I hope–I will email my response to the editors of Postmodern Culture so they can post it online.

 

Like our neighborhoods, our desks, and our lives, writing commingles the old and the new. I type, I email, and I write by hand. Alert to such daily facts, contemporary poetry quickly learned to embody familiar dislocations: the white noise of overheard chatter, the experience of listening to a CD while driving down streets organized for walking or walking through a suburban housing development.

 

Young poets coming of age now also face a particular literary-historical challenge. They follow the generation born around the mid-century, including Charles Bernstein (born 1950), Ron Silliman (1946) and Lyn Hejinian (1941), whose groundbreaking efforts replaced “tradition” with “innovation” as the poetic culture’s keyword. Ben Lerner speaks for his contemporaries when, in his debut collection, The Lichtenberg Figures, he wonders what comes next:

 

The poetic establishment has co-opted contradiction.
And the poetic establishment has not co-opted contradiction.
Are these poems just cumbersome
or are these poems a critique of cumbersomeness?

 

To which Lerner offers a qualified solution:

 

Perhaps what remains of innovation
is a conservatism at peace with contradiction. (22)

 

Like the fussy noun, “cumbersomeness,” Lerner’s poetry dramatizes an awkward moment. It wryly recalls the contentious debates that the previous generation’s work inspired. Partisans wrangled over the terms Lerner reproduces, debating what constitutes “the poetic establishment,” co-option, and “critique.” Lerner, though, less refuses to take sides than realize the sloganeering’s acute limitations. “Willful irresolution can stabilize into a manner just as easily as facile resolution, right?” he asks in an interview, responding to a question about the “prevailing post-avant penchant for hyper-cool and fragged surfaces.” “Honk,” another poem more wittily concludes, “if you wish all difficult poems were profound” (23).

 

Instead of an attachment to “willful irresolution” or “facile resolution,” poets need curiosity–curiosity about the state of language, poetry, culture, and the world in which we live. A lyric’s structure shows the importance of the seemingly trivial–the sound that a syllable makes, a pause’s hesitation, an easily ignored quirk of language. A successful poem, then, offers a model of curiosity. It demands and rewards inquisitiveness, demonstrating less a discovery, a paraphraseable insight, than the process of discovery. To account for this dynamic, we might consider “curious” and “incurious” poetry, depending on the degree to which it attends to the contemporary moment and the art form’s venerable history, the past’s complex, shifting relationship to the present.

 

Loss Pequeño Glazier’s Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm follows Glazier’s Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries, which argues for the aesthetic stance that underpins the poetry. The two books are intimately connected. Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm includes passages from Digital Poetics as epigraphs, suggesting that the poetry illustrates the principles that the critical book espouses. According to Glazier, “innovation” marks the most important poetry. In Digital Poetics, he clarifies this point:

 

In general, the term "poetry" is used in this volume to refer to practices of innovative poetry rather than to what might be called academic, formal, or traditional forms of poetry. (181)

 

Earlier Glazier responds to his own question, “What makes it innovative?”:

 

Innovative work avoids the personalized, ego-centered position of the romantic, realist, or modernist "I." Such a sentimentalized 'I," often concerned with its own mortality, can be considered as having passed away. Innovative practice is practice that overcomes the "I" to explore material dimensions of the text. (174)

 

Lerner prizes an inconsistency that fuses seemingly opposed qualities. He implicitly answers Glazier’s question, “What is innovative?” by presenting “conservatism” and “innovation” as inextricably connected. The most “innovative” work, Lerner suggests, leaves behind the techniques and gestures most often associated with “innovation.” In my terms, such poetry is curious about the complications that literature inspires. In contrast, a defensiveness guides Glazier’s assertions, as he establishes a series of three oppositions, each of which bears some scrutiny.

 

First, Glazier opposes “innovative poetry . . . to what might be called academic . . . forms of poetry.” Glazier wrote Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries as a dissertation for SUNY Buffalo; his acknowledgements page thanks his committee members Charles Bernstein, Robert Creeley, and Susan Howe. The University of Alabama Press Modern and Contemporary Poetics series published the book; Bernstein serves as the Series Co-Editor and Howe serves on the Series Advisory Board. Bernstein’s and Creeley’s praise adorns the back cover of Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm (the book’s two blurbs). Glazier has published two “academic” books: one a dissertation revised for a University Press series co-edited by his director, the other a poetry collection praised by two distinguished poets who served as his committee members.

 

Glazier, then, is an “academic” author, if we understand “academic” as a descriptive term, neither honorific nor derogatory. (To add an obvious example, I enjoy certain “academic” scholarship and poetry, including several titles published in the Modern and Contemporary Poetics series and by other university presses, and dislike others.) Glazier, though, defines “academic” and “innovative” poetry largely as period styles. “Innovative” poetry, he maintains, “overcomes the ‘I’ to explore material dimensions of the text.” Such elements, though, might be classified as “givens” rather than “discoveries,” as Lyn Hejinian writes of Jena Osman’s collection, The Character:

 

Ethical density, political ambiguity, shifting subjectivity, multifold social terrains, multicultural identities and interrelations--these are givens rather than discoveries in Jena Osman's work, and as a result the work doesn't stop there. (xi)

 

An “innovative” poem goes beyond the “givens.” It cannot remain content to reproduce established stylistic techniques and pre-existing accomplishments; it must not “stop there.” Glazier’s understanding of “innovative” poetry strikes me as insufficiently dynamic, inattentive to the terrain that such poetry traverses. In Hejinian’s terms, it confuses “givens” with “discoveries.”

 

Finally, this separation of “academic” and “innovative” poetry oddly echoes the assumption that so many “innovative” poets dispute (and Glazier himself would dispute in other contexts): the denial that “creative” and “scholarly” work inspire each other. “Various voices speak in my poems. I code-shift,” Rae Armantrout observes of her poetry. Setting it in a broader context, Armantrout observes, perhaps a little too bluntly, the affinity that “innovative” poetry shares with contemporary scholarship. “In the last decade or so,” she continues, “academics have been raising the question of who speaks in literary works and for whom. There is a contemporary poetry that enacts the same questions, a poetics of the crossroad” (24-25). Glazier’s poetry similarly explores the “poetics of the crossroad”; it is “academic” in the sense that it pursues questions about identity, culture, and language that academic scholarship raises.

 

Second, Glazier opposes “innovative poetry . . . to what might be called formal . . . forms of poetry.” All poetry is formal; otherwise it is not poetry. As the redundancy, the “formal . . . forms of poetry” suggests, no informal forms of poetry exist. There are only informal styles. Terza rima is no more “formal” than poetry written under aleatory or newly developed procedures. To call a sonnet “formal” and not poetry written under aleatory procedures is to deny the complexity of contemporary poetics.

 

Third, Glazier opposes “innovative poetry . . . to what might be called . . . traditional . . . forms of poetry.” When Jena Osman re-ordered language from press conferences conducted by Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, her “Dropping Leaflets” claims a tradition, as well as a method: Tristan Tzara’s cut-and-paste procedure. She sets the Dadaist technique in a specific political and literary-historical context. This manipulation of tradition might strike readers as more or less curious; partly its effect arises from the manner it extends the past into the present, using a nearly century old technique to address contemporary realities. Glazier’s simple opposition of “innovative” and “traditional” poetry does not account for this process of synthesis, development, and invention. Poets bear no responsibility to develop an adequate critical vocabulary for their work. While Glazier expands our understanding of poetry to include digital poetics, my concern is that his conception of print-based poetry limits his work in that medium.

 

An author’s note relates that many of the poems in Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm “have had digital versions, have grown, have been ‘sounded’, or have been co-developed within the digital medium” (97). In a conspicuous gesture, Glazier, the director of the Electronic Poetry Center, borrows from the vocabulary of computer software for his print-based poetry. “Windows 95” ends:

 

Artists tend to left-click while
Republicans tend to the right. If the period might've once
been called "Error & After" it will now be known as "Eudora &
after". Thorn and sing-shrub or Subject: I know I shall have
awful DOS pains in the morning as a result of this. (61)

 

Reviewing Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm for the online technology site Slashdot, Dylan Harris declared his dislike for “a lot of avant-garde poetry’s excess use of strange words.” Glazier, Harris charges, has

 

succumbed to the usual academic habit of filling his poems with obscure incomprehensibility, like http, chmod, EMACS . . . hang on a second, I know these words. They're not literary jargon, they're software babble, the words I work with.

 

Harris’s witty reversal demonstrates nicely his experience of reading Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm. Because Harris does not expect to see “the words I work with” in a poem, it takes a few moments to recognize them. Such moments of recognition possess a certain charm, as the poetry accommodates unexpected sources of language. Glazier organizes them with his favorite device, the pun. As in this passage, he introduces the puns gently, with an opening phrase suggesting the notion that the second phrase will complicate. The line breaks after “while” and “&” separate the two parts, building the reader’s expectation over how the poem will resolve the syntactical and rhetorical structure. The first pun grafts a spatial cliché (“Republicans tend to the right”). The second pun, “Eudora & / after” addresses the first word in the phrase it echoes, “Error & After.” Following the line break, the second half of the phrase “after” simply confirms the reader’s expectation.

 

This kind of “word play,” Lori Emerson observes, “becomes perhaps too typical, the puns bearing more amusement value than performing the kind of multi-leveled work that Glazier seeks to install as a centerpiece of his writing.” It is “typical” in another sense; it constitutes the favorite device of much contemporary poetry. Harryette Mullen’s most interesting examples develop intricate sound structures; as in a poetic version of a vaudeville routine, Bernstein’s juxtapose high and low. Glazier’s puns are earnest and well mannered, neither groaningly “bad” nor comically charged and inventive. In this respect, they recall the technically competent sonnets written by the mid-century generation.

 

Glazier’s favorite pun is his own name, a tendency that Emerson and I interpret differently. She sees such gestures as part the “disintegration of ‘Loss Glazier’ as a coherent and locatable author.” The puns, though, project the author relentlessly onto nearly everything he describes, witnesses, or imagines–places, languages, and creatures. This tendency strikes me as the expression more of poetic narcissism than of authorial disintegration.

 

Glazier’s interest in the exterior world is most vividly displayed in the sequence, “White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares (An Iteration).” The author’s note sets the scene:

 

As to the pumpkin seed in the title of this section, one time I was on a 14-hour journey in Costa Rica, crossing a mountain range in a dilapidated bus with bad shocks, enduring hour after hour of hairpin turns. A gaggle of North Americans on the bus complained vociferously about the inadequacy of the country and its transportation system. At one point, we stopped and boys came on the bus to sell home-baked pumpkin muffins. I began eating mine and found a pumpkin seed in the middle of it, another imperfection. I let the seed linger in my mouth thinking, this is the gift of language I have been given: to have this vocabulary on my tongue, to simply participate in other ways of being in the world. (99)

 

“A lack of comfort is the obvious burden the American poet carries,” Robert von Hallberg notes in his definitive account of the American “tourist poems of the 1950s,” “this is as much a test as a vacation.”(73). With the setting switched from Europe to Costa Rica, Glazier demonstrates his fittingness by the way he handles hardship. As in other tourist poems, fellow travelers from home–“A gaggle of North Americans”–offer contrasting examples; their complaints highlight the poet’s sophistication as he experiences a moment of pre-industrial imperfection coded as authenticity. When Elizabeth Bishop describes wooden clogs making a “sad, two-noted wooden tune,” she notes, “In another country the clogs would be tested. / Each pair would have identical pitch.” Bishop analyzes her experience shrewdly, realizing “the choice is never wide and never free” (18). Glazier similarly savors the pumpkin seed in the middle of “home-baked pumpkin muffin,” “another imperfection,” yet he succumbs to the illusion of unmediated experience. Forgetting the economic exchange involved, he accepts “the gift of language I have been given . . . to simply participate in other ways of being in the world.” (99)

 

The sequence embeds this narrative, with suggestive moments of lyric intensity and tourist discomfort: “Sleeping / hummingbird doesn’t wake–even to camera flash in volcanic night” (34) and “Narrow seats and coffee-can sides of rattling bus” (29). The fifth section returns to “the gift of language” embodied in the pumpkin seed: “as language forms / fills the mouths, tongues of tropical light, pura vida, compita” (31). This remarkably energetic conclusion builds to an ecstatic moment, where cultures, languages, and place commingle to sing an epiphany of “pure life.” An updated vocabulary and verse technique barely disguise what Glazier elsewhere calls the “sentimentalized ‘I’” that “can be considered as having passed away.” Rather, Glazier reproduces what he wishes to reject.

 

Works Cited

 

• Armantrout, Rae. “Cheshire Poetics.” American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language. Eds. Claudia Rankine and Juliana Spahr. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2002.
• Bishop, Elizabeth. Complete Poems. New York: Farrar, 1969.
• Glazier, Loss Pequeño. Digital Poetics: The Making of E-poetries. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2002.
• Harris, Dylan. “Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm.” Slashdot 18 Dec. 2003 <http://books.slashdot.org/books/03/12/18/1442246.shtml>.
• Hejinian, Lyn. “Introduction.” The Character. Boston: Beacon, 1999.
• Lerner, Ben. The Lichtenberg Figures. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon, 2004.
• —. Conversation with Kent Johnson. Jacket 26 (Oct. 2004) <http://jacketmagazine.com/26/john-lern.html>.
• Von Hallberg, Robert. American Poetry and Culture, 1945-1980. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985.

 

Lori Emerson

Department of English
State University of New York, Buffalo
lemerson@buffalo.edu

 

Review of: Loss Glazier. Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm. Cambridge, UK: Salt, 2003.

 

There is no single epigraph that can suitably frame this review of Loss Glazier’s Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm. Loss Glazier’s 2003 collection of poetry is simply too variable, straddling well-established print poetry practices (ranging from the work of the Objectivists to language poetry to so-called post-language poetry) and the still supple practice of digital poetry (ranging from generated, hypertext, kinetic, and codework poems). Even the book’s representation of “Loss Glazier” is malleable as the author repeatedly puns on “loss” to the point of effacing Loss altogether–“Loss Glazier” is anything from simply “glazier at ak-soo” (27) to a “loss” who “is mired in some kind of rhyme / game” (44) and who “picks / city for final drawn out stanzas” to call it “Leaving Loss Glazier” (64). Just as confounding is the “real” Loss Glazier whose poems move between English, Spanish, and computer languages and who founded and directs the Electronic Poetry Center–a poetry resource equally committed to digital poetry, print-based contemporary poetry, new media writing, and literary programming.

 

Likewise reflecting these hybridities and border-crossings, Glazier’s 2001 Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries is, as the title implies, a critical work as well as a statement of poetics that ought to be read alongside Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm. On the one hand Glazier’s critical work is an important attempt to forge a thoroughgoing theoretical framework to account adequately for digital poetry; on the other hand his critical work is also fundamentally inseparable from his creative work. Taking after Charles Bernstein’s A Poetics and Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson, his books comment on each other, quote from each other, expand on and digress from each other in ways that make it impossible to ignore the fact that Glazier’s whole work to-date represents a lucid, coherent, and clearly articulated project.

 

As Sandy Baldwin puts it in his review of Digital Poetics in Postmodern Culture, Glazier attempts to position digital poetry as a form of poiesis in order to broaden “the scope of poetic innovation and raise the question of ‘What are we making here?’” Baldwin also claims that the value of Digital Poetics lies in its attempt to “grasp the textuality of e-poetry in the antique textuality of the book.” Such an attempt means, first of all, de-mystifying the digital as either an ideal medium for those poets who still adhere to Pound’s dictum to “make it new” or as a far-from-ideal medium which threatens to ruin reading and writing as we know it. Effectively sidestepping either extreme, Glazier combines the aesthetics and politics made familiar by Bernstein and Howe with a critical approach to new media art articulated by critics such as Espen Aarseth, Johanna Drucker, and Lev Manovich–all of whom look retrospectively at print texts through the lens of the digital–to argue that the digital shares an emphases on method, visual dynamics, and materiality with twentieth-century print-based poetry. For Glazier, a digital poet like Simon Biggs, for instance, uses to similar effect the same text-generating methods based on combinatory mathematics that are also used by print-based poets Louis Zukofsky, John Cage, and Jackson MacLow.

 

However, what is new about digital writing, according to Glazier, is the materials and processes it offers–materials that make possible the ability to generate text from a vast and complex array of sources, to transform flip-books and concrete poems into kinetic poems, to create extensive hypertextual works and processes to make poetry that may now include computer languages, unix processes, and computer errors. As he puts it in an endnote to “The Parts,” the title poem in the first of three sections comprising Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm: “In these poems, I was motivated by the new possibilities of the medium, driven by the difficulties of casting words in the pre-web digital environment, excited by their transmissibility, and influenced by the vocabulary of early technology: mark-up conventions, network protocols, and computer code–themselves ways of working with words” (97).

 

Placing work at the heart of writing–and thus recalling the twentieth century’s history of procedural and processual poetries–Glazier also dissolves any easy distinctions we might make about working with print and working in the digital realm–distinctions usually used to claim either that the digital is the natural outgrowth of the printed book or that simply using a computer to write poetry constitutes a genre, poetics, or method of writing. As such, what’s particularly notable about Glazier’s account of the “new” in new media is that it affords us ways to reconceive print in the light of the digital; both the web and the way in which a computer stores information demonstrate not only that the computer “writes” in parts, storing information through the hard drive, but also that all writing is made up parts of other writings: “printing it out is only parts of / it, sections somewhere framed / and amenable to being scribbled on // so that perhaps it’s a matter / of clippings you assemble scrap book fashion strings // of form dispersed by light” (22).

 

It is worth pointing out that it is this move away from a hierarchy of media, where neither medium is superceded and where there is a necessary codependence between the new and the old, that makes his work remarkable. Not only does Glazier’s poetry enact and complicate precepts laid out in Digital Poetics, but he also includes digital accompaniments with both his critical and creative books such that a feedback loop is created between digital and print media–the print commenting and expanding on the digital commenting on the print and so on. This positions Glazier’s work as a self-reflexive rendering of David Jay Bolter’s and Richard Grusin’s groundbreaking concept of remediation. For Bolter and Grusin, every medium is divided between two equally compelling impulses: the desire for immediacy (or the desire to erase media) and the desire for hypermediacy (or the desire to proliferate media) (19). As they put it, the desire for immediacy is linked to proliferation of media because each tries to create a revolution of presence or “presentness” that the other media was not able to achieve; each media presents itself as a refashioned and improved version of other media and so “digital visual media can best be understood through the ways in which they honor, rival, and revise” (15). Undoubtedly the desire for immediacy underlies Glazier’s effort to use digital media to work with words from the inside, to animate, enliven and make language present; the online version of “White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares” is a clear example of this as images are used to accompany (and so to intensify our experience of) an ever-changing body of text that, in having over five hundred versions, is unique for each reader. As Tristan Tzara might say, “The poem will resemble you. / And there you are–an infinitely original author of charming sensibility” (39). There’s no experience more immediate than reading a poem written just for you.

 

It is the version of “White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares”–now with “(An Iteration)” added to the title–that appears in the second section (“Semilla de Calabaza (Pumpkin Seed)”) of Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm that best exemplifies the other aspect of remediation: hypermediacy. For Bolter and Grusin, immediacy inevitably leads to hypermediacy as the attempts at presence lead to an awareness of media as media. As such, “White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares (An Iteration)” is not a static poem with a unified point of view but rather a print version (one among many possible versions) that comes after and comments on the “original” digital version. Further, with phrases like “Do you mind if I slip into something more comfortable? Like what? your public underscore html” (27) or “One small cup on the (World) Wide Verb” (29), we are made aware not only of the extent to which computer-related vocabulary has become familiar to the point of being transparent but also of the printed book’s ability to comment simultaneously on itself and on the digital as media. For Glazier the book stages itself as the contemporary, not the predecessor, of the digital.

 

“White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares (An Iteration)” also initiates the aforementioned disintegration of “Loss Glazier” as a coherent self and locatable author–a theme that is taken up more thoroughly in the final section entitled “Leaving Loss Glazier.” While twentieth-century avant-garde poets have shown us that the author as a coherent entity is not inherent to print, this medium has long been used in the service of coherency and stability and we are most certainly made aware of how digital media bear the possibility of renewing and expanding the possibilities inherent in print. That is, with lines such as “I con, I can, I cheat icons. As a shortcut I speak through the ventriloquist” (28) and “I will now toss gloss of Los Angeles, Los Alamos.” (28), Glazier’s inter-media poetry works to unsettle easy assumptions about either medium: a unified author is no more inherent to print than a fragmented author is inherent to the digital.

 

The poems in “Leaving Loss Glazier” chronicle the rise of Microsoft as a monopoly and how the development of “panoptic software and manipulative word processing programs” (99)–paralleled, of course, by the ongoing colonizing efforts of Anglophone culture and language–works to reinstate coherency and stasis. As Glazier puts it in “Olé/Imbedded Object,” “Wherever you go, / there’s an icon waiting for you.” Moreover, like the language of capitalism that can turn a Greek goddess into a brand of running shoes in the span of a few years, these operating systems work at the level of language such that “the language you are breathing becomes the language you think” (57)–for example, “ever think how your life would have been different if in 1989 you’d stuck to WordStar instead of switching to WordPerfect?” (64). How better, then, to stage “a showdown” than by using the language of, say, Windows 95 against itself? Glazier writes:

 

Windows offer slivers of context as a frame for commercials as content. This might be the ideal path for the Web, according to many developers, a place you catch glimpses of information as you view windows plastered with ads . . . If you have the right attitude towards directories you will never flail. After making your choice, left-click the Next button or pass go . . . Artists tend to left-click while Republicans tend to the right. (60-61)

 

Likewise, there’s no better way to counteract the rapid shift toward a linguistically homogenous American than to commit “Tejanismo”–the deliberate hybridization of Spanish and English and, perhaps, even computer languages: “HTML as the world’s dominant language. As in, contact glazier at ak-soo. Well, I bet it has something to do with Nahuatl. Po cenotes. Act of Tejanismo” (27).

 

However, it must also be noted that by the end of the book the word-play exemplified by “Leaving Loss Glazier”– a section fraught with puns as is typical of both Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm and Digital Poetics–becomes perhaps too typical, the puns bearing more amusement value than performing the kind of multi-leveled work that Glazier seeks to install as a centerpiece of his writing.

 

Nonetheless, Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm stands alone in the yet-to-be established field of digital poetry and poetics; it is as unique in its seemingly effortless weaving together of competing philosophies, media theories, languages, and cultures as it is provocative in its refusal to position itself as the print-record of a digital revolution with “Loss Glazier” at the helm.

 

Works Cited

 

• Baldwin, Sandy. “A Poem is a Machine to Think With: Digital Poetry and the Paradox of Innovation.” Postmodern Culture 13:2. <http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.103/13.2baldwin.txt>
• Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT P, 1999.
• —. Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2002.

 

Derek Nystrom

Department of English
McGill University
derek.nystrom@mcgill.ca

 

Review of: Sideways. Dir. Alexander Payne. Perf. Paul Giamatti, Thomas Haden Church, Virginia Madsen, Sandra Oh. Fox Searchlight, 2004.

 

In a moment that we are meant to take as a sign that its protagonist has hit rock bottom, Sideways (2004) puts failed novelist and wine snob Miles (Paul Giamatti) on all fours outside a bedroom in a slovenly, bombed-out looking tract home; there, he watches with surprise and horror as an overweight, tattooed, working-class couple passionately fuck, the man taking intense pleasure in his wife’s recounting of how she had seduced another man. There is much to say about this primal scene of class abjection, but I will start by noting that it echoes the inaugural scene of Alexander Payne’s cinematic oeuvre. His 1996 debut film, Citizen Ruth (which, like all of Payne’s films, was co-written with Jim Taylor), opened by similarly positioning the spectator outside the filthy bedroom of a white-trash couple, their tattered mattress surrounded by empty 40-oz. malt liquor bottles, as the title character (Laura Dern), an aficionado of inhalants, endures joyless intercourse with her soon-to-be ex-boyfriend. One might trace the trajectory of Payne’s career by noting that where the scene from his latest film–which is also his best received–provides us with an on-screen delegate, whose discerning middle-class gaze we are meant to share, the opening sequence of Ruth does not align our perspective on its delinquent working-class protagonist with any reassuring spectatorial stand-in. One might also note that the abjected couple in Sideways seems to be having a much better time–and that it is now the middle-class voyeur who has the chemical addiction. All of these developments point to the complicated, ambivalent rhetoric of class that Payne has developed over the course of his films, a rhetoric that takes a new turn in his latest, Oscar-winning release.[1]

 

That Payne’s cinema is centrally about class is clear–or at least would be clear to any culture that did not struggle mightily to repress this fundamental condition of social life. The subversive frisson of Citizen Ruth comes as much from its protagonist’s unrepentant resistance to standards of middle-class dignity (indeed, even her choice of intoxicant makes trucker speed look chic) as from the film’s allegedly irreverent take on the abortion debate.[2] Meanwhile, the comically monstrous ambition of Election‘s (1999) Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon) is identified as the product of a shrill class ressentiment instilled in Tracy by her stewardess-turned-paralegal mother. The impending tragedy that retired insurance actuary Warren Schmidt (Jack Nicholson) attempts to avert in About Schmidt (2002) is the upcoming wedding of his daughter Jeannie (Hope Davis) to Randall (Dermot Mulroney), a handlebar mustachioed, mulleted doofus whose family resides in lower-middle-class squalor on a street where shirtless men blithely toss their garbage onto the lawn.

 

Yet the class condescension of these films is complicated by their portrayals of middle-class characters. Ruth finds a way to valorize its title character by critiquing the instrumentalist handling of her situation by anti- and pro-choice advocates–a process that discourages the audience from having a similarly reductive relationship to her. Similarly, in Election we see Tracy largely through the eyes of high school teacher Mr. McAllister (Matthew Broderick), whose annoyance at her relentless striving is mixed with a barely sublimated desire for her and resentment at his own station in life; any disdain for Tracy we might share with him is thus called into question. The audience is forced to adopt an equally dubious perspective in Schmidt, as we are privy only to the information available to its solipsistic and emotionally self-deluding title character. As a result, we are led to recognize that his dismay at his daughter’s choice of partner seems to be as much the product of his disconnection from Jeannie (and from virtually everyone else) as that of Randall’s apparent unsuitability. Our understanding of Randall and of his dissolute post-hippie family, we come to feel, may be constrained by Schmidt’s insistently blinkered viewpoint.

 

In its treatment of its middle-class protagonist, Sideways is of a piece with Payne’s other films. While we are asked to share Miles’s outlook on the events of the film–for example, we sneer along with him at Frass Canyon, a theme-park-like winery that aggressively markets itself to tour buses of senior citizens–Sideways also goes out of its way to problematize any easy identification with his position. Not only are we introduced to Miles as he awakens groggily at midday from a night of “wine tasting,” but we also watch him steal money from his mother in order to fund his weeklong bachelor vacation with his old college buddy Jack (Thomas Haden Church), a soon-to-be-married, has-been television actor. And, as is often the case in Payne’s films, both the characters’ middle-class self-regard and the film’s critique of it are signified through relations of taste. While Miles’s love of wine is never shown to be anything less than genuine, it also performs a compensatory function for a man who likes to think of himself as a Robbe-Grillet-style novelist and yet must teach eighth-grade English. Sideways also implies that Miles has a drinking problem, for which his oenophilia is a cover. Yet the film is also attuned to ways in which taste is only weakly correlated with class position and with monetary wealth. Although Jack is more successful than Miles, his palate and his appetites are exuberantly undiscriminating. Payne’s casting choices here serve as an allegory of this opposition in middle-class taste cultures: Giamatti is an independent film star, last seen as Harvey Pekar in the brilliant and critically heralded American Splendor (2003), while Church was last seen on cable reruns of Wings, a mediocre but successful sitcom.

 

Which brings us to the film’s positioning of itself in American film taste culture. While there was no way to know that Sideways would be as lauded as it has been, it is clear that Payne pursued a crowd-pleasing strategy here; he has crafted a film that is gentle and even uplifting in comparison to his previous outings, films marked by their ruthless and even misanthropic humor and by their refusal of happy endings. In contrast to the sharply drawn caricatures of Ruth‘s anti-abortion zealots or Election‘s Tracy Flick, with her cartoonishly clenched jaw, Sideways‘s characters are three-dimensional figures whose failings are softened–just as their features are softened by the cinematography’s frequent habit of bathing them in sun-dappled light. One might even argue that the piano-tinkling of the film’s score during travel-porn wine country montages and the glossily lit dinner where Miles, Jack, Maya (Virginia Madsen), and Stephanie (Sandra Oh) meet up threatens to turn Sideways into the cinematic equivalent of a trip to Frass Canyon. This tendency is confirmed by the film’s feel-good ending, in which the beautiful, blonde, and wine-loving Maya phones Miles to tell him that she loved his novel–a scene wherein Miles’s cultural capital and romantic appeal are simultaneously affirmed in a way that no Payne protagonist had hitherto experienced.[3]

 

Of course, Payne is too wary of unmitigated sentiment to show Maya welcoming Miles back into her arms; the film closes on a shot of Miles knocking on her door and cuts to the credits before she answers. In fact, one senses often in the film that Payne is aware of and playing with Sideways‘s aggressively middlebrow aesthetics. For example, consider those montages of the wine country outings: their use of split screens appears so superfluous as to be parodic (especially when the separate screens are showing precisely the same image). Furthermore, the beauty of those fields of grapes is frequently undercut by the ensuing shots of, say, Miles and Jack walking from their hotel to dinner, trodding down a highway access road prosaically lined with car dealerships. As many critics have noted, one of Payne’s strengths as a filmmaker is his eye for the banal, defiantly uncinematic detail: the slate-grey skies framing Omaha’s barren, non-descript landscapes in Ruth; the grim, fluorescently lit, low ceilinged interiors of Election‘s George Washington Carver High; the Hummel figurines adorning the brightly appointed yet mausoleum-like family home in Schmidt; to which we might now add the laminated menus of Sideways‘s mid-range eateries. So while Sideways may frequently give in to the canned lyricism of its romantic fantasies, its placement of these scenes alongside the more mundane trappings of the characters’ lives provides a salutary clarifying effect, one that also, it should be noted, supports Payne’s grander filmmaking ambitions. For Payne has often been described–and often describes himself–as a 1970s-style auteur, and Sideways‘s quotidian realism, its self-consciously deployed split screens, and its long, slow dissolves–straight out of Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail (1973)–all demonstrate his active engagement with this tradition. In interviews, Payne has emphasized this connection: “I want to live in a Hollywood where Hollywood is making auteurist cinema again, like they did in the 1970s,” he told the Miami Herald, “where we can have smaller, personal and more human films again” (Rodriguez). Film critics have largely assented to this affiliation: Esquire has called him “the next Scorsese” and “the Scorsese of Omaha,” and the Hollywood Reporter‘s review of Sideways is typical in its characterization of the film as having “subtle overtones of the great character movies of the 1970s” (Honeycutt). This association with 1970s auteurism has been consecrated by no less an icon of the period than Jack Nicholson, who said in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, “Alexander is a real throwback to the kinds of filmmakers I started with” (Hodgman 90).

 

It is worth comparing Payne’s films to those that Jack Nicholson started out in–or at least, those he started to become famous in: Easy Rider (1969) and Five Easy Pieces (1970). The former is the tale of two hippies driving across the U.S. “looking for America” that ends with the motiveless killing of its countercultural anti-heroes at the hands of ignorant, prejudiced, southern working-class men. Five Easy Pieces, in turn, is about the disaffected son of a family of classical musicians who “drops out” to work on an oilrig, only to abandon this blue-collar life when it threatens to restrict his liberty. Both films offer protagonists who challenge viewer identification as much as they court it, and feature what was then thought to be an unprecedented realism, portraying details of American life that had hitherto not been represented on screen. But in spite of their countercultural urge to undermine middle-class authority, both films also depict their working class characters as either unthinking traditionalists (Five Easy Pieces) or murderous thugs (Easy Rider), and thus ultimately work, as I have argued elsewhere (see Nystrom), to recover and reaffirm a certain brand of middle-class subjectivity. In the case of Five Easy Pieces, the protagonist is able to escape his adopted working class life only by drawing on his previously disavowed cultural capital; this development is echoed by the film’s own formal organization, which trades on the gritty realism of its blue-collar settings and story elements while representing them through art-cinema strategies that signify the filmmakers’ cultural distinction.

 

I want to argue that we can detect this bad faith–and a concomitant demonizing of the working class–in Sideways as well. Let us return to the scene with which this essay begins: the reason Miles is on his knees outside the couple’s bedroom is because he is trying to retrieve Jack’s wallet. Earlier that evening, Jack had picked up the woman, a waitress, who is now describing the affair for her husband while they make love. Miles must retrieve this wallet because it contains the wedding rings for Jack and his fiancée. At this late point in the film, Jack’s impending marriage has been exposed as a sham, entered into because his fiancée’s father will bring him into the lucrative family business. Yet rather than reject Jack’s nakedly disingenuous protestations that his fiancée is the most important thing in his life (Church does some excellent bad acting here), Miles agrees to retrieve the wallet and thus enable his friend’s mercenary bourgeois wedding. And just as Miles forgives his friend, so does the film: Jack’s wedding goes off without a hitch and serves mainly as an occasion for the exchange of knowing smiles between Miles and Jack. However critical Sideways is of its middle-class protagonists’ self-delusions and ethical lapses, both men get the reward that they had been seeking: Jack gets laid and his bride’s family business, while Miles gets a beautiful woman to read his novel and drink wine with him.

 

The working-class characters, on the other hand, are there to remind us of the sinkhole of tastelessness that both men are lucky to escape–literally in the bedroom scene, since the startled (and still naked) husband chases Miles into the street after he grabs Jack’s wallet. But perhaps the most telling moment of this scene is not Miles’s and Jack’s close call with blue-collar retribution, but what Miles sees as he looks over the disheveled bedroom of the copulating couple, searching for his friend’s wallet: his (and our) eyes pass over a television in the background tuned to an image of George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. The juxtaposition of this image with that of the couple’s spirited lovemaking generates an easy laugh, but it also makes one wonder if, as an email letter writer to Salon‘s Charles Taylor observed, the scene is thus meant to be “about the overweight, slovenly, working-class citizens of ‘Bush’s America’ (not the thoughtful, cultured expatriates-at-heart)” (qtd. in Taylor).

 

Here we should recall that the auteurist films of the early 1970s that Payne and his admirers ritually name-check needed to grapple with the critiques of the professional-managerial class leveled by the New Left and the counterculture, which thus explained their characters’ (and the films’ own) difficult negotiations of their middle-class heritage. At our current historical moment, however, the only sustained critique of middle-class power and privilege comes not from the left, but from the right. Unable to face up to the very real class contradictions of professional and managerial labor, the left has allowed the conservative movement to be the only political force articulating a coherent critique of this labor, one that seizes upon the genuine class antagonism generated by the prerogatives of expert knowledge and then reroutes and mobilizes this antagonism in support of a political program of anti-statist deregulation. In this context, one can read Miles’s depressive defeatism as a sign of blue-state intellectual self-loathing and this scene as one in which he looks on in dismay at a working class perversely won over to Bush’s vision of America.[4]

 

Except that this couple does not seem to be practicing traditional family values. And here we can perceive the antinomial impulse at work in Payne’s rhetoric of class. Part of the sequence’s comedy comes from the fact that the couple’s home–described by Kim Morgan as a “trashed-out abode . . . that looks like it was ransacked during a visit by TV’s Cops“–has prepared the audience for a scene of domestic violence; our laughter is informed by our surprise and relief that the husband’s response to his wife’s infidelity is not patriarchal rage but broadminded pleasure in non-monogamous relations.[5] In this light, it seems that any reductive connection between the couple and Bush’s cultural politics would be ill-advised.

 

Charles Taylor argues, however, that we cannot read this scene as Payne’s humanistic portrayal of “the sexual openness of [the couple’s] marriage,” because “for that reading to work you’d . . . have to get close to them, which is exactly what Payne, repelled by their fat, will not do.” But this is precisely what Payne does do: he gets close to them, his camera lingering on their gleefully writhing bodies. I’d like to compare this gaze, which I take to be both fascinated and repulsed, with that on another scene of intense pleasure from Payne’s work. I am referring to the moment in Citizen Ruth when we first watch Ruth Stoops huff some patio sealant. As she places the inhalant-filled paper bag over her mouth and takes in a big, deep breath, we cut to a long close-up of her eyes, which even as they redden and tear up are wide open in desperate and seemingly real exhilaration. Payne might be disgusted by experiences of pleasure that exceed all bounds of “good” taste, but he is also deeply compelled by them. For this reason, I am left wishing that Sideways had ended not with Miles’s return to Maya’s doorstep, but with the scene that comes just a few moments earlier. There, we see Miles eating a burger in a fast food restaurant and drinking out of a styrofoam cup. We learn that he is filling that cup from his long-hoarded bottle of 1961 Cheval Blanc, a rare and precious vintage. The film plays this moment as a bittersweet acceptance of failure: Miles has learned that his ex-wife has not only remarried but is pregnant, and his consumption of the wine can be construed as his acknowledgment that there are no significant achievements or pleasures left for him.

 

But what if we were to read this moment differently? What if we were to note that it is a moment where Miles enjoys his rarified pleasures, but without any outer significations of class distinction? After all, sneaking sips of an alcoholic beverage in a fast food joint erases the line between wine-lover and wino. Furthermore, his fellow pleasure-seekers are probably a few steps down the socioeconomic ladder even from those who like to take a day trip to Frass Canyon. And they are all, Miles included, guiltlessly eating food that tends to produce the kinds of bodies we recently saw being transported into erotic delight at the thought of non-normative marital arrangements. In short, we might read the scene as one where Miles’s specialized taste no longer separates him from those with less cultural capital, but instead offers him a sensual pleasure that is simply one among many in the room. Alexander Payne may have rooted us firmly in Miles’s middle-class subjectivity and offered us a film that ultimately gratifies his (and, as indie film spectators, our) longing for cultural distinction.[6] But his contradictory fascination with the class valences of various pleasures may unwittingly point to a logic of cultural distinction that does not travel up and down, but instead goes sideways.

 

Notes

 

I would like to thank Ned Schantz for his conversations with me about Sideways, and for looking over an earlier draft of this review.

 

1. Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor won the 2005 Oscar for Best Screenplay Adaptation.

 

2. With respect to the “abortion debate” narrative of Ruth, I agree with those who object to its suggestion of moral equivalency between anti- and pro-choice forces as dangerously wrongheaded (only one side of this conflict, after all, bombs the institutions and assassinates the practitioners of the other).

 

3. Scott persuasively argues that the nearly unanimous critical praise granted to the film is not unrelated to the fact that its hero is at heart a critic–one who not only gets the girl, but also has his discerning taste reaffirmed by that girl.

 

4. This reading of the film is also informed by Jacobson’s “Movie of the Moment” essay in Film Comment.

 

5. I am indebted to my colleague Ned Schantz for pointing out this audience expectation.

 

6. It should be noted that Sideways is not, strictly speaking, an independent film: it is a product of Fox Searchlight Studios, one of the “major indie” divisions of the traditional studios that sprung up in the wake of Miramax’s (brief) success as a division of Disney. Still, film critics discussed it almost invariably as an example of independent filmmaking. For example, Dargis closed her New York Times review by remarking that “since the late 1970s we have been under the spell of the blockbuster imperative, with its infallible heroes and comic-book morality, a spell that independent film has done little to break. In this light, the emergence of Mr. Payne into the front ranks of American filmmakers isn’t just cause for celebration; it’s cause for hope.”

 

Works Cited

 

• Carson, Tom. “The Next Scorsese: Alexander Payne.” Esquire Mar. 2000: 222.
• Dargis, Manohla. “Popping the Cork for a Twist on a So-Called Life.” Rev. of Sideways. Dir. Alexander Payne. New York Times 16 Oct. 2004: B7.
• Hochman, David. “The Scorsese of Omaha.” EsquireJan. 2003: 20.
• Hodgman, John. “The Bard of Omaha.” New York Times Sunday Magazine 8 Dec. 2002: 90.
• Honeycutt, Kirk. Rev. of Sideways. Dir. Alexander Payne. Hollywood Reporter 12 Sept. 2004 <http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/reviews/review_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000628380>.
• Jacobson, Harlan. “Movie of the Moment.” Film Comment 40:5 (Sept./ Oct. 2004): 24-27.
• Morgan, Kim. “Rare Vintage: Sideways is Good to the Last Gulp.” Rev. of Sideways. Dir. Alexander Payne. LA Weekly 22 Oct. 2004. <http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/48/film-morgan.php>.
• Nystrom, Derek. “Hard Hats and Movie Brats: Auteurism and the Class Politics of the New Hollywood.” Cinema Journal 43.3 (Spring 2004): 18-41.
• Rodriguez, Rene. “Just Like Fine Wine.” Miami Herald 12 Nov. 1994 <http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/entertainment/movies/10151926.htm>.
• Scott, A.O. “The Most Overrated Film of the Year.” New York Times 2 Jan. 2005: II:18.
• Taylor, Charles. “2004: The Year in Movies.” Slate 4 Jan. 2005 < http://slate.msn.com/id/2111473/entry/2111743/>.

 

David Herman

Department of English
Ohio State University
herman.145@osu.edu

 

Review of: Walter Jost, Rhetorical Investigations: Studies in Ordinary Language Criticism.Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2004.

 

Ambitious in scope, richly integrative, and extensively researched, this study demonstrates its author’s familiarity with ideas from multiple fields of inquiry, including classical as well as modern rhetoric, critical theory, philosophy, and literary modernism. The chief aim of the book is to work toward integration and synthesis; drawing on theorists ranging from Martin Heidegger and Kenneth Burke to Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell, and using the poetry of Robert Frost to work through the author’s focal concerns, the book seeks to develop a framework for interpretation in which “grammar and rhetoric, philosophy and literature, reason and desire, reference and semiotics, truth and antifoundationalism” might be brought into closer dialogue with one another (1). More precisely, Jost characterizes literature and philosophy as the termini of his discussion, suggesting that rhetoric can be used to negotiate between these discourses (7). Hence, although the four chapters in Part II develop extended readings of Frost’s “The Death of the Hired Man,” “West-Running Brook,” “Snow,” and “Home Burial,” respectively,

 

the present book is more about exemplifying a specific kind of critical inquiry, interpretation, argument, and community activity than it is about a particular poet, historical trajectory, literary period, or cultural moment. Frost’s poems present me with an occasion to rethink a nexus of questions about the everyday and the ordinary, language, experience, common sense, judgment, and exemplarity; to question assumptions about the grammatical and rhetorical possibilities of literary criticism; and to reexamine what I take to be underappreciated resources for criticism to be found in the traditions of rhetoric, hermeneutic phenomenology, pragmatism, and so-called ordinary language philosophy and criticism. (4)

 

The introduction further specifies what the author means by the “ordinary language criticism” mentioned at the end of the passage just quoted and also in the book’s subtitle. Ordinary language criticism, in Jost’s account, takes inspiration from the ordinary language philosophy pioneered by Wittgenstein, refined by J.L. Austin, and recontextualized by Cavell (Claim, In Quest, Must; see also Baillie and Cohen). For theorists in this tradition, people learn (and later use) concepts thanks to their place within a larger form of life and the modes of language use associated with that form of life. Although abstract logical definitions play a role in specialized discourses (e.g., certain forms of philosophical analysis), in other discourse contexts boundaries between concepts are fixed by “situated criteria, the features and functions of things, the behaviors and actions of people in certain circumstances in which we operate with our words” (8). For example, when I hear someone say plank in a conversation I do not try to match that person’s usage against an abstract mental checklist of necessary and sufficient conditions for “plankness” in order to make sense of the term.¹ Rather, I monitor whether the ongoing discourse is about the construction of ships, archaic practices of meting out justice at sea (as in walk the [gang]plank), or political campaigns, and I draw an inference, possibly incorrect, about which concept of “plank” is appropriate given the broader context in which the term plank is being used. “Plank” is irreducibly caught up in these contexts of usage; there is no single, decontextualized meaning of plank (cf. Herman 2002), but rather multiple, partly overlapping meanings, each determined by the use of the term in the situated, rule-governed modes of discourse production and interpretation that Wittgenstein called “language games” and Jean-François Lyotard “phrase regimens.” Further, these language games are not wholly autonomous practices but can impinge on one another, as when through a metaphorical extension plank migrates from the language game(s) of the shipwright to those of the politician and the pundit. The key insight here, though, is that plank does not denote “plank” prior to its being used in some language game or other, even if only the stripped-down “games” in which dictionary definitions or the rules of logic are used to map out semantic relationships among terms.²

 

But what would be the specific brief of an ordinary language criticism “consistent though not necessarily coextensive with ordinary language philosophy” (9)? How exactly would students of literature, say, draw on (post-)Wittgensteinian language theory to study “literary thinking across or askew to fields and theoretical specialisms, attending to the background complexity of everyday life and ordinary language as they shape the form and content of literary works” (10)? In one statement of method, Jost suggests that “ordinary language philosophy and criticism can be taken as nonstandard uses of ordinary language to investigate ordinary language ‘on display’ in literature” (43). But this formulation raises further questions: What is the difference between a nonstandard use of ordinary language and non- or extra-ordinary language? How do the sophisticated philosophical and rhetorical theories Jost uses to describe the nature and functions of ordinary language–and to analyze its deployment in Frost’s poetry–themselves relate to everyday communicative practices? Do ordinary language philosophy and criticism constitute “metalanguages” that can be brought to bear on the “object-language” that people use in contexts of everyday communication or in literary representations of those contexts? Or, rather, do the philosophical underpinnings of Jost’s approach militate against this view, given that ordinary language theorists posit not a binary division between “ordinary” and “specialized” languages, but rather scalar relations based on graded prototypicality–with everyday exchanges forming the central or prototypical case from which more or less technical, register- or purpose-specific uses deviate more or less markedly? In the domain of literary theory and poetics, how might ordinary language criticism (construed as an investigation of displays of ordinary language in literature) build on the prior research of scholars such as Mary Louise Pratt, who criticized the Russian Formalist idea of “literariness” by arguing that it is based on a conception of non-literary language as a “vacuous dummy category,” and who analyzed literary works as “display texts” in which norms for using ordinary language remain in play, though in modulated form?

 

I return to some of these questions below, in connection with Jost’s extended interpretations of Frost’s poems in Part II of the book. But it is important to note at the outset that, besides appealing to philosophical precedents set by Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell, Jost (who was himself trained as a rhetorician) seeks to ground the practice of ordinary language criticism in a rethinking of the ancient trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic/dialectic. In turn, this rethinking both enables and is enabled by the author’s close readings of Frost’s poetry. The introduction describes how Jost’s study draws on, while also recontextualizing, each component of the trivium. To synopsize:

 

• Grammar helps specify particular grounds of judgments underwriting human life and the means by which speakers organize conceptual parts into wholes (14).
• Rhetoric bears on the specific circumstances surrounding people’s acts and words and how they invent new words and actions in new circumstances (14). Here Jost seeks to reclaim elements of the rhetorical tradition from what he characterizes as Paul de Man’s reduction of “‘rhetoric’ to an unstable figurality in which binary topics and proofs (‘ideas’) are subordinated to and subsumed by tropes and figures (‘images’)” (16).
• Logic concerns sequences of actions and words and “the general gestalt patterns that connect actions to other actions, beliefs to further beliefs, judgments to further judgments” (14). Relatedly, dialectic concerns order and community, i.e., how members of a community achieve coherence (or not) by participating in an inherently collaborative attempt to “order the ordinary” (14).

 

In the new, post-postmodern dispensation, each member of the trivium becomes less a discrete analytical domain than a heuristic framework (or form of practice) in synergy with the other two.³

 

Part I of the book is titled “Rhetoric: An Advanced Primer” and, sketching out the general theoretical framework on which the author draws in later chapters, begins with a chapter called “Dialectic as Dialogue: The Order of the Ordinary.” Along with chapters 2-4, chapter 1 provides a foundation for Jost’s extended readings of individual Frost poems in the second part of the book–though Part I also draws on the poetry in developing those very foundations. (The book includes, as well, an Appendix that reprints seven of the Frost poems used as case studies; it also features extensive notes replete with bibliographic information about key rhetorical, philosophical, and critical sources.) Chapter 1 explores consequences of (and remedies for) an assumption that Jost argues to be pervasive throughout the history of Western philosophical discourse: namely, that “because everyday life presents endlessly diverse and shifting scenes of opinion and custom expressed in equally impermanent and equivocal words of ordinary language . . . , both the everyday and the ordinary are . . . illusory” (27). Radical forms of skepticism in contemporary thought leave untouched the grounding assumption that everyday scenes of behavior involve unsystematic action, opinion, or desire–or, for that matter, the related assumption that the non-systematicity of everyday action is threatened by co-opting ideologies which seek to systematize, and thus distort, the domain of the ordinary.

 

Controverting these assumptions, Wittgenstein, Cavell, and their fellow-travellers conceive of the ordinary and the everyday as “fundamental yet evolving cares and commitments of human beings in community with and against each other–hence of everyday language as a human habitat and even ‘home’ in which we dwell, the linguistic hub of activities constitutive of the human form of life” (32). Here, the metaphor of the hub stems from Jost’s refusal to draw a sharp line between everyday and non-everyday language use; instead, like Wittgenstein, he posits a continuum in which relatively more specialized uses radiate outward from less specialized linguistic practices (37). The chapter moves from a discussion of this general philosophical reorientation and its implications for skepticism, to a discussion of Frost’s “The Black Cottage,” a dramatic monologue whose narrator is “a homegrown skeptic about the home of the everyday and the ordinary” (54). Jost argues that the narrator’s skepticism is bound up with his tendency to speak as if all statements were tools that can be used in the same way–a tendency that eventually causes him to drop out of language games altogether.

 

Chapter 2, “Rhetorical Invention: Notes toward an American Low Modernism,” and Chapter 3, “Grammatical Judgment: It All Depends on What You Mean by ‘Home,’” continue to lay the general, philosophical groundwork for ordinary language criticism also provided by Chapter 4, “Logical Proof: Perspicuous Representations.” Chapter 2 characterizes Frost’s standard rhetorical posture as one in which “the language (style, structure, grammar, rhetoric) of practical problem solving, commonsense reasoning and beliefs, the rhetoric of the everyday and ordinary . . . often intermingled with philosophic meditations on their origins and ends” (64). Jost argues that whereas high modernism sometimes tries to escape from (in order to “purify”) everyday life, Frost practices a species of low modernism that focuses on overlooked possibilities in everyday life as well as everyday linguistic usage (69). Taking issue with Frank Lentricchia’s (Kantian) understanding of Frost’s poetry as private, affective, noncognitive, and “therapeutic” in character (78), Jost argues instead for a synthesis of the hermeneutic aesthetics of Gadamer with American pragmatism in the Emersonian-Jamesian tradition. This synthesis, he argues, reveals a strand of low modernism (in writers as diverse as Frost, Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, and Charles Olson) complementing the high modernism of Mallarmé, Joyce, Kafka, Musil, and Mondrian:

 

High and low both seek new integrations of our divided selves, but whereas high modernism makes language (reading and writing, communication) overtly difficult and strange in order to break its readers free from the grip of an everyday perceived to be suffocating and conventionalized, low modernism makes language deceptively easy and pleasurable in order to entice us into tripping over connections we had habitually overlooked. (85-86)

 

Frost in particular engages in topical invention, writing poems that catalog elements of the ordinary, not to defamiliarize the ordinary but rather to “recommunalize a precarious everyday” (93).

 

Chapters 3 and 4 shift from rhetoric to grammar and logic, respectively. In chapter 3, Jost builds on Wittgenstein’s philosophical recontextualization of the concept of grammar, i.e., his interest in what might be termed “metagrammar.” For the later Wittgenstein, the grammar of our language carries in its wake an entire metaphysics–as when (in English) the form of a statement such as “X is having a pain in his leg” causes speakers of the language to assume that pain is wholly private and internal, rather than being constituted at least in part by the verbal and other performances by which people display and communicate the experience of being in pain. More generally, a major task of philosophy is to disentangle the structure of sentences from the structure of the world. Chapter 3 suggests that Frost’s low-modernist poetry is marked by an analogous concern with(meta-)grammartaken in this sense; his work, too, explores broad, philosophical implications of ways of framing statements about the world. Thus, for Jost, both Wittgenstein and Frost resist the age-old codification of rationality in the form of the predicative proposition, whereby “subject-object predication defines a priori what counts as the statement of a definition, argument, or truth judgment” (102). Wittgenstein’s later philosophy suggests, rather, that we judge statements as true or false using criteria embedded in particular language practices that are in turn geared on to specific situations of use (cf. Addis). What counts as a true statement about, say, the length of a plank will depend on whether the statement is made in a shipyard, a backyard, or an institute for theoretical physics. Likewise, Frost’s low-modernist poems reveal a “preoccupation with the grammar of ‘proof’” (97), focusing on “the various claims of reason and its language games of ‘belief,’ ‘proof,’ ‘argument,’ ‘knowledge,’ ‘truth,’ and the like” (98). Jost uses the 1939 poem “There Are Roughly Zones” to argue that in Frost’s poetry “metaphysical categories of explanation” (“soul,” “mind,” “heart”) give way to “‘rough zones’ of explanation, meaning, and value”–the center of gravity shifting, as it does in Wittgenstein, from metaphysics to rhetorical talk, from substances and properties to “arguments and emotions . . . whose reality we experience in working our way through the poem” (121).

 

Chapter 4 opens with an account of Michel de Certeau’s distinction, in The Practice of Everyday Life, between hegemonic discursive “strategies” and subversive “tactics.” Suggesting that both strategies and tactics (cf. universals and particulars, rules and cases, generalizations and future instances, laws and their application) belong to rhetoric, Jost argues against “contemporary misconceptions that experience ‘must’ be–not only in everyday life but in art–politically or culturally shocking, ‘radical,’ ‘unheard-of.’” On the contrary, “‘to have an experience’ is indifferently both confrontative and, in Dewey’s language, ‘consummatory,’ a blended tension of difference and completion” (123-24). Far from having to be wholly aligned with tactics to be authentic, experiences must be anchored in discursive strategies to some extent if they are to be intelligible–“haveable”–at all.

 

Positing a scalar relationship rather than a binary division between strategies and tactics, the chapter then situates Aristotle’s distinction between enthymeme (or argument) and example along this continuum, locating argument at the strategic end of the scale and example at the tactical end. Arguments involve rule-governed deductions from determinate generalizations; examples, by contrast, enable rhetors “to structure relatively indeterminate situations from past particulars or cases” (124). Jost devotes the rest of the chapter to a discussion of relatively tactical dimensions of Frost’s poetry. Frost’s local tactics include jokes, riddles, and paradoxes, quasi-proverbial locutions, portraits of characters engaged in “drifting conversation,” and a variety of tropes. More globally, the poetry throws light on the issues of exemplarity and exemplification. Focusing on “Two Tramps in Mud Time” as a key tutor-text, Jost suggests that the poem exploits the relative indeterminacy of generic terms (“work,” “need,” “love,” etc.) to recall “past uses [of the words] as examples, as possibilities, . . . that may thus be used as resources for the future” (139). Further, invoking a number of disjunctive pairs (work/play, frost/water, practical tramps/poetic narrator), the poem thereby furnishes “many examples of unity-in-division, related to each other by analogy” and “rhetorically [moves the reader] to a new ‘place’ (topos), by virtue of our having experienced several plausible examples, whose terms then become, in Kenneth Burke’s formulation, ‘equipment for living’” (144). The final section of the chapter engages in an extended account of epiphany and epideixis, which for Jost constitute distinct language games. Whereas epiphany is the hallmark of high modernism, epideixis is the paradigmatic mode in Frost’s low-modernist poetry. Compared with epiphany, epideixis involves “a more gradual but also more overt evocation of the background patterns and premises of a position” (151); it has to do with speech more than psychology; and entails communal rather than personal realizations and changes (152-54).

 

Part II of the book is titled “Four Beginnings for a Book on Robert Frost.” Chapter 5, “Lessons in the Conversation that We Are: ‘The Death of the Hired Man’ (Invention),” draws on theorists as diverse as Alasdair MacIntyre and Carol Gilligan to explore how the conversation portrayed in that poem involves a dialectical interplay of ethical-rhetorical performances. Chapter 6, “Naming Being in ‘West-Running Brook,’” uses the poem to argue that Frost gives voice, in the idiom of the everyday, to the questions about being and time, language and interpretation, also asked by Heidegger but in a distinctly philosophical idiom. In Chapter 7, “Giving Evidence and Making Evident: Civility and Madness in ‘Snow’ (Proof),” Jost returns to issues of rhetoric in particular; in his account, the poem demonstrates that “knowing another is not a logical grasping of an object but a rhetorical seeing (acknowledging) of another, one who has a rhetorical claim on us to respond” (234).

 

Chapter 8, finally, is titled “Ordinary Language Brought to Grief: ‘Home Burial’ (Dialogue in Disorder and Doubt)” and is one of the richest, most probing chapters in the book. Here Jost builds on research stemming from Wittgenstein’s critique of the private-language argument–his criticism of the assumption that the experience of pain and other sensations involves a kind of “inner language” to which only the experiencer has access. In the author’s interpretation, Frost’s poem likewise works through philosophical issues bound up with skepticism about other minds and their “qualia” or ineliminably subjective states of awareness (see Freeman; Levine; Nagel). In a manner consonant both with Wittgenstein and with the broader “second cognitive revolution” to which his work has helped give rise (Harré, “Second”; Harré and Gillett), Jost argues that critics of the poem have made the mistake of trying to peer into “the ‘inner’ workings of the characters rather than the outer behavior and scene of their speaking, as though straining to penetrate the characters’ words to grasp the mental anguish within” (249). Instead (to shift for a moment to a vocabulary slightly different from Jost’s), the characters’ pain is enacted discursively; i.e., their words and behavioral displays give rise to inferences about emotional states located in and emerging from–rather than preceding–this multiperson episode of talk (cf. Harré, “Discursive”; Harré and Gillett).

 

Rather than presenting at this point a more detailed summary of the engaging, often line-by-line interpretations developed in Part II, I would like to highlight two broader issues raised by Jost’s readings of the poems–and more generally by the approach outlined in the book as a whole. The first issue concerns the metagrammar of Jost’s own project, i.e., the norms governing Jost’s argumentational moves and combinations of critical, philosophical, and rhetorical discourses as he articulates the project of ordinary language criticism. At issue, in other words, are the norms accounting for Jost’s own intuitions about what constitutes a “legal” or acceptable statement (or combination of statements) framed in the context of ordinary language criticism. The second broad issue involves rhetoric rather than grammar–specifically, the rhetoric of stability in terms of which Jost casts ordinary language criticism as an alternative to and defense against radical forms of skepticism. This issue concerns the relation between the rhetoric of stability and the conceptual underpinnings of ordinary language philosophy. It also concerns the specific rhetorical purpose served by the author’s emphasis on the stabilizing role of ordinary language in the approach that he advocates.⁴

 

First, then, what exactly is one doing when one engages in ordinary language criticism? More specifically, how does one formulate statements that would be deemed acceptable–grammatical–within this language game about language games? The question arises because of the language Jost himself uses; specifically, Jost’s readings of Frost sometimes suggest not just a parallelism but a more fundamental equivalence between philosophical and rhetorical discourses, on the one hand, and Frost’s poetry, on the other. For example, chapter 6 characterizes Frost as a “communicator and rhetorician–one who resists romantic expressivism and transcendentalizing in favor of a nonessentialist account of self and Being, and Heidegger’s postromantic elevation of Being over man in favor of man’s naming of being, and does so precisely by holding these (and other pairs) in tension” (214). Similarly, describing Frost as a “hermeneutically adept” poet (211), the author argues that “we can apply it [i.e., Heidegger’s notion of the “retrieval” of a human being’s past possibilities, traditions, heritage, such that they are not merely absorbed into the world] by proposing that the image of the backward ripple in the outgoing brook that so fascinates Fred signifies just this concept of ‘retrieval’ and its hermeneutic cousins ‘appropriations’ and ‘application’” (198). These statements suggest that Frost’s poetry allegorizes concepts of Heideggerian phenomenology; doing ordinary language criticism would be tantamount, in this instance, to showing how literary discourse is inter-translatable with specialized philosophical language–in this case, philosophical discourse concerned with temporal aspects of (the human experience of) the ordinary and the everyday.⁵ Yet the philosophical tradition on which ordinary language criticism draws does not assume that specialized languages are reducible to or wholly commensurate with less specialized usages; it merely assumes that every language emerges from and is intelligible because of a particular situation of use. Indeed, ordinary language philosophers insist on the non-equivalence of language games that might appear to be inter-translatable prima facie, but that on closer inspection prove to be anchored in incommensurate norms and conventions, different forms of life.

 

We return here to an issue broached earlier: namely, the relation between ordinary language criticism and the literary (and other) uses of language that it studies. True, Wittgenstein’s philosophical project was based, in part, on a rejection of the distinction between metalanguage and object-language formalized by Rudolf Carnap, among others. Rather than attempting to develop a logically purified metalanguage–an ideal language that, imposed from without, would purge ordinary language of its ambiguity and vagueness–Wittgenstein and those influenced by him sought to find a logic immanent to language itself.⁶ But to be self-consistent, ordinary language philosophy cannot equate grammar with metagrammar, the situated use of language with the (differently situated) philosophical study of such language use. One must assume that the same heuristic distinction continues to apply, mutatis mutandis, in ordinary language criticism. Arguably, however, when the author writes that “Frost’s own sense of judgment at the beginning of American modernism supersedes traditional epistemological accounts” (102; my emphasis), his verb-choice again flattens out the difference between Frost’s poetic project and the ordinary language critic’s way of characterizing that project. Likewise, when Jost notes that theorists of ordinary language and literary practitioners converge on the same themes and symbols, his account implies a similar convergence of grammar and metagrammar, i.e., of the use of everyday language and of theoretical descriptions of that use: “It is an abiding theme of Wittgenstein, and of Stanley Cavell in regard particularly to Emerson and Thoreau–Frost’s own models–that ‘home’ is the place, and symbol, of the everyday and ordinary, and not least the symbol for and the place of our use of ordinary language in, for example, talk and gossip” (168). Complex mapping relationships need to be spelled out more fully here. If it is to distinguish itself from thematics, ordinary language criticism cannot merely point to the discursive field from which concepts such as “home” and “the everyday” emanate and in which they are embedded. Beyond this, it must specify how a given text participates in this global field. At issue is the metagrammar that determines what a text can and cannot say without being shunted to a different zone within the field, thereby entering into different kinds of relationship with other texts in the domain as a whole.

 

The second broad issue mentioned before concerns the rhetoric rather than the (meta-)grammar of ordinary language criticism. More specifically, it concerns the rhetoric of stability used by Jost throughout his study. For example, in the introduction, the author sets up his analysis by suggesting that “rhetorical investigations . . . are stabilized in the sense of a community, and the question becomes what it means to use or trust that sense” (18). Meanwhile, in chapter 2, Jost seeks to use Frost’s poetry to steer a middle course between two positions regarding rhetoric: “that of earlier romantics and moderns for whom rhetoric is anachronistic, naïve, or pretentious for professional intellectual purposes, and that of a specific kind of postmodernist for whom it is rhetoric’s sole cunning to destabilize, by intellectually outwitting, all epistemological self-satisfactions across the disciplines” (72). The rhetoric of stability continues in the opening paragraph of chapter 5, where Jost writes: “For Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell, all understanding stabilizes itself in our ‘acknowledgments,’ ‘agreements in judgments,’ and ‘mutual attunements’ of so-called ordinary language and practice, perhaps the most important of which are our conversations with each other” (160). Similarly, in chapter 3 Jost argues that “resisting skepticism in literature or literary theorizing and criticism, by counting or recalling criteria of ordinary language . . . is stabilized in our acknowledgments, in what Frost alludes to as ‘glad recognition of the long lost’” (111). Later in the chapter, commenting on Frost’s concern with the “stable flexibility” of “the give-and-take that does in fact restrain our ordinary lives” (117), the author discusses how the “rhetorical action” of Frost’s poetry points to his interest in “stable and stabilizing” conceptions of taste and judgment, in contradistinction to “nonrational,” romantic conceptions of these faculties or aptitudes (116). And in his explication of “Snow” in chapter 7, Jost associates Frost’s poem with Wittgenstein’s turn from explanation to description, “to directing our attention to the deep conceptual patterns of linguistic surfaces in imagined actions and scenes, stabilizing causal propositionalism in what we know how to do and . . . already acknowledge” (221).

 

Jost is, to be sure, a highly effective rhetor, and passages like the ones just quoted–by appealing to the relative, provisional stability of interpretive criteria grounded in ordinary language use–serve to situate ordinary language criticism in the broader landscape of critical discourse. More specifically, by suggesting that everyday experience in general and ordinary language in particular exert a stabilizing influence in our ongoing efforts to make sense of the world, Jost positions ordinary language criticism between the Scylla of a relativistic, anything-goes anti-foundationalism and the Charybdis of anti-contextualism–i.e., variants of the (logocentric) view that utterances and texts lend themselves to fixed, determinate interpretations, irrespective of who’s doing the interpreting, when, and in what circumstances. The conventions and practices of everyday discourse anchor interpretation, but in limited–locally emergent–ways. With a shift in emphasis, however, ordinary language philosophy can remind us of the limits as well as the possibilities of everyday discourse in this respect. If discourse conventions and practices constitute a ground for interpretation, that ground is one capable of becoming, at a moment’s notice, a figure in its own right–i.e., a target of rather than a basis for interpretive activity.

 

From a Wittgensteinian view, utterances mean what they do both because of the form that they have and because of the way they are geared on to particular types of activity, such as games, formal debates, ritualized exchanges of insults, consultations among coworkers faced with a job-related task, and so on.⁷ In part, this grounding of words in activities channels and delimits how much interpretation I have to do when my interlocutor says something like I’m not going to do that. Rather than having to search exhaustively through all the semantic spaces potentially associated with that utterance to compute its meaning, I can rely on quick-and-dirty heuristics to figure out what’s being said, factoring in whether the utterance is part of a game of pickup basketball or a paraphrase of “Bartleby, the Scrivener.”

 

But conversely, I may lack knowledge about or aptitude for the activity in which the utterance plays a role; in this case, the ineliminable contextual grounding of utterance meaning will defeat my efforts at interpretation. Then, too, I may wish to create unusual, norm-breaking or -bending pairings of activities with utterances, hurling out oaths in the context of a formal academic debate or using specialized technical vocabulary in a note written on a greeting card.⁸ What is more, the link between utterance form and utterance meaning is not only one-many (one and the same locution can mean many different things, depending on context) but also many-one (utterances having different surface forms can mean the same thing in a given context: cf. I’m not going to do that, No way, Forget it, Never, and I prefer not to). Inextricably interlinked with successful or competent language use, therefore, is the possibility of being wrong about what someone means. The same activity-based criteria licensing interpretations of utterance meanings can also cause me to overgenerate inferences–as when I attribute different meanings to utterances intended as synonymous–or else undergenerate inferences–as when a mode of activity different from the default type (e.g., an interpretation of “Bartleby, the Scrivener” written under censorship) causes me to miss out on important nuances of someone’s words. Ordinary language does provide a ground for interpretation, but that ground is shifting, ever-changing, unstable. Just as the shifting of the earth both destroys and creates, the unstable topography of a language produces variable effects, from angry miscommunication to Frost’s poetry. This is Wittgenstein’s legacy: a non-necessary connection between saying and meaning–a probabilistic link between utterances and inferences–giving rise to interpretations that may be good or bad for some purposes, but not for others.

 

Notes

 

1. This is not to deny that, in particular sentences, the expression plank displays certain, more or less stable logical and linguistic properties that account for its syntactic behavior and semantic profile across diverse kinds of utterances. For example, the syntax of plank is such that it cannot function adverbially–except perhaps in very special (e.g., poetic) contexts. I can say The plank is slowly rotting, but not That board rots plank. Semantically speaking, planks and the sides of ships stand in a certain kind of part-whole relationship with one another–the relationship can be mapped as contained structure: containing structure–such that ceteris parabis (e.g., the plank is not fabricated from a special kind of particle board itself made out of tiny ship-shaped pieces of wood) some propositions about planks vis-à-vis ships will be true, others false, and still others nonsensical. Among the false propositions are Planks can be made of ships; among the nonsensical, I asked the shipwright to put that ship at a different point on the plank’s side; among the true, Ships’ sides can be made of planks. Note, however, that in describing the logico-semantic profile of propositions about planks, I have had to sketch part of the real-world context in which those propositions are used–disallowing the “nonstandard” contexts (poetry with strange adverbs, special particle board, etc.) mentioned above. The need for me to make such qualifications lends support to arguments formulated under the auspices of ordinary language philosophy.

 

2. As Jost puts it, “things, people, beings, always already ‘count’ for us not first as objects but as going concerns: to perceive them as isolated objects (as in a laboratory) takes effort and requires a determined diminution of what is present from the beginning, namely the full range of our interpretive understanding, including the linguistic structures for ‘seeing-something-as-something,’ what Wittgenstein means by ‘seeing-as’” (42).

 

3. The author sketches a particularly porous boundary between grammar and logic. Indeed, whereas Jost associates grammar with part-whole relationships and logic with forms of interconnection, one might argue the reverse: entailment relations, for example, involve concepts contained within other concepts (whereby “being red” entails “being colored” but not the inverse), and grammar involves combinatory principles governing connections among words, phrases, and clauses (I attached some planks is a grammatically legal combination whereas I planks attached some is not).

 

4. A related issue concerns the rhetorical effects of Jost’s tendency to elide “ordinary language” with “the ordinary” or “the everyday,” as in the following passage from chapter 7: “As argued throughout this book, Frost’s mind and method are the first to create an alternative low modernist lyric composed from everyday conversational materials taken for granted by everyone else. These materials and methods are steeped in the conventions of the ordinary, in our form of life and its emerging and disappearing common sense” (218). But ordinary language philosophers were not, arguably, theorists of the everyday–even though some of Wittgenstein’s arguments have broad implications for that theoretical enterprise. As discussed below (paragraph 15), ordinary language philosophy was initially a reaction against ideal language philosophy (Rorty). In this context, theorists of “ordinary language” disputed the view that a logically purified metalanguage was necessary for the purposes of logico-philosophical analysis–for example, to obviate ambiguous expressions, and attendant paradoxes and antinomies (e.g., Every sentence that I write is a lie), found in natural languages (Carnap). Hence, in future work in ordinary language criticism, Jost would do well to address more explicitly how theories of ordinary language à la Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell relate to theories of the ordinary/everyday à la de Certeau.

 

5. Granted, elsewhere in the chapter Jost suggests a non-equivalence between Frost’s poetry and Heideggerian phenomenology: “Frost himself in this poem is not, unlike Heidegger, laboriously splitting metaphysical atoms, though he does intuit profound issues in an insightful way. Although the technical language and rigor of Heideggerian hermeneutics could not be more alien to Frost, it may be that this hermeneutics offers a contrary medium in which, paradoxically, ‘West-Running Brook’ can best move” (195). The closing words of this statement, however, imply a strong affinity to which my current line of questioning still applies. By what criterion (in Wittgenstein’s sense of that term) does the ordinary language critic select a given discourse as the one best juxtaposed with the text whose grounding in the everyday he or she wishes to use the other discourse to examine?

 

6. Richard Rorty sketches the broader history of the dispute between practitioners of ideal language philosophy, such as Carnap, and practitioners of ordinary language philosophy, such as the later Wittgenstein.

 

7. See Stephen C. Levinson for a Wittgenstein-inspired account of how “activity types” of this sort provide heuristics for utterance interpretation.

 

8. In more complicated cases–for example, in a society living under censorship–issuing certain kinds of never-before-used utterances in the context of public activities can be ideologically as well as linguistically creative. See Fairclough and Wodak.

 

Works Cited

 

• Addis, Mark. Wittgenstein: Making Sense of Other Minds. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999.
• Austin, J.L. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1962.
• Baillie, James. Contemporary Analytic Philosophy. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 1997.
• Carnap, Rudolf. The Logical Syntax of Language. Trans. Amethe Smeaton. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1937.
• Cavell, Stanley. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979.
• —. In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994.
• —. Must We Mean What We Say? Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1969.
• Cohen, L. Jonathan. “Ordinary Language Philosophy.” Concise Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language. Ed. Peter V. Lamarque; consulting editor R. E. Asher. Oxford: Pergamon, 1977. 25-27.
• de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven F. Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002.
• de Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.
• Fairclough, Norman, and Ruth Wodak. “Critical Discourse Analysis.” Discourse as Social Interaction. Ed. Teun A. van Dijk. London: Sage, 1997. 258-84.
• Freeman, Anthony. Consciousness: A Guide to the Debates. Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2003.
• Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982.
• Harré, Rom. “The Discursive Turn in Social Psychology.” The Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Eds. Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen, and Heidi E. Hamilton. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. 688-706.
• —. “Introduction: The Second Cognitive Revolution.” American Behavioral Scientist 36.1 (1992): 5-7.
• Harré, Rom, and Grant Gillett. The Discursive Mind. London: Sage, 1994.
• Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State U of New York P, 1996.
• Herman, David. “A la recherche du sens perdu.” Poetics Today 23.2 (2002): 327-50.
• Lentricchia, Frank. Robert Frost: Modern Poetics and the Landscapes of Self. Durham: Duke UP, 1975.
• Levine, Joseph. “On Leaving Out What It’s Like.” The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates. Eds. Ned Block, Owen Flanagan, and Güven Güzeldere. Cambridge: MIT P, 1997. 543-55.
• Levinson, Stephen C. “Activity Types and Language.” Talk at Work. Eds. Paul Drew and John Heritage. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. 66-100.
• Lyotard, Jean-François. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.
• MacIntyre, Alisdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. London: Duckworth, 1981.
• Nagel, Thomas. “What Is It Like To Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review 83.4 (1974): 435-50.
• Pratt, Mary Louise. Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1977.
• Rorty, Richard. “Introduction: Metaphilosophical Difficulties of Linguistic Philosophy.” The Linguistic Turn. Ed. Richard Rorty. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1970.
• Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Eds. G.E.M. Anscombe and R. Rhees. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. 3rd edition. Oxford: Blackwell, 1958.

 

Jeffrey Williams

English Department

Carnegie Mellon University
jwill@andrew.cmu.edu

 

Review essay: Francis Mulhern, Culture/Metaculture (London: Routledge, 2000) and Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).

 

If you are building a house, the first thing you do is probably not to plant flowers. You dig the basement, pour the foundation, frame the building, raise and shingle the roof, put up the siding, and so forth. Then, if you have time and money left, you might put in a flower bed. The flowers might give you pleasure when you see them, but they are not usually considered essential to the house; they do not keep you dry in rain, warm in winter, or fill your stomach.

 

The traditional idea of culture as high art conceives of culture as something like the flower bed. While we might appreciate and value artifacts we deem beautiful, they are not essential to our primary physical needs. In a no-nonsense, colloquial view, culture is ornamental, secondary to if not a frivolous distraction from the real business of life. In classical aesthetics, culture is defined precisely by its uselessness and detachment from ordinary life. In psychology, Maslow’s model of a “pyramid of needs” places culture in the upper reaches of the pyramid, possible only after the broad base of material needs are taken care of, which are primary to psychological well-being. In the classical Marxist view, culture forms part of the superstructure, tertiary to the economic base, which determines human life.¹ Accordingly, studies of culture, like literary or art criticism, have traditionally been considered refined pursuits, like gardening or horticulture, but not of primary importance to society, like politics, economics, or business.

 

Culture of course has another familiar sense: rather than the flowers of human experience, it encompasses a broad range of human experiences and products. Though abnegating its special status, this sense likewise plays off the agricultural root of culture, expanding the bed from a narrow plot to the various fields of human manufacture. Over the past few decades, this latter sense seems to have taken precedence in colloquial usage, in politics, and in criticism. We speak of proclivities within a society, such as “sports culture,” “car culture,” “hiphop culture,” or “mall culture.” In political discourse, culture describes the tenor of society, such as “the culture of complaint,” “the culture of civility,” or “the culture of fear,” and societies are defined by their cultures, such as the “culture of Islam,” “the culture of democracy,” or “the culture of imperialism,” which generate their politics. In criticism and theory, culture, whether indicating race, class, nationality, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, abledness, locality, or taste, determines human identity, which in turn designates political interest. In short, “culture” has shifted from ornament to essence, from secondary effect to primary cause, and from a matter of disinterested taste to a matter of political interest. Consequently, pursuits that study culture, like literary or cultural criticism, have claimed greater political importance to society.

 

The reconception of culture does not dispel the idea of the house of society and the garden of culture, but reconfigures the process of construction. The question of a house presupposes the prior determination of culture, and a flower bed is not an afterthought but part and parcel of that culture; one’s culture determines whether one would own a plot of land and want a house rather than an apartment or a tent, and whether one would want a manicured lawn and attendant shrubbery. Culture draws the house plans before one pours any cement; it is the material that generates the world with such possible human activities and with businesses that produce cement, lumber, and potted plants.

 

Nearly fifty years ago, Raymond Williams charged criticism to understand the conjunction of “culture and society.” Now it seems that culture is society, interchangeable as a synonym for social interests, groups, and bases. Williams also charged us to examine culture in its ordinary as well as extraordinary forms, and it seems that the field of literary criticism has followed this mandate, undergoing what Anthony Easthope described as a paradigm shift, the objects of study expanding from high literature to all culture. However, if there is a paradigm of contemporary criticism, it designates not only an expansion of the object of study but a conceptual inversion of base and superstructure, culture shifting from a subsidiary (if special) role to primary ground. Even a social theorist like Pierre Bourdieu, who persistently foregrounded the essential significance of class, conceived of class less as a matter of material means than of taste, disposition, and other cultural cues. In the trademark phrase from his classic work Distinction, it is “cultural capital” that generates class position. Culture has become the base from which other realms of human activity–psychological, political, economic–follow.

 

The reign of culture has had its share of dissent. Marxists have attacked the rush toward identity politics as a fracturing of any unified political program as well as a fall away from the ground of class, and liberals like Richard Rorty have upbraided left intellectuals for their absorption in cultural politics at the expense of bread and butter economic issues like health care and labor rights.² In criticism, it appears that the field has absorbed Williams’s lesson and moved, as Easthope succinctly put it, from literary into cultural studies, but not everyone has been satisfied with getting what they might once have wished for.

 

Terry Eagleton and Francis Mulhern, probably the two most prominent inheritors of Williams’s mantle, have tried to correct the excesses of the reign of culture. Their books, Mulhern’s Culture/Metaculture (2000) and Eagleton’s The Idea of Culture (2000), take a middle road, acknowledging the significance of culture but quelling what they see as its present overinflation. I deal with them at length here because the books have been influential, published to considerable attention, including a long running debate in New Left Review; they continue the legacy of Williams, and before him of Leavis, as standard-bearers of British cultural criticism; they represent the residual bearing of the New Left; and they each hold positions as leading Marxist literary intellectuals in Britain (Mulhern has been a New Left Review mainstay and chief surveyor of modern British criticism, notably in The Moment of “Scrutiny” (1979), and Eagleton was Williams’s prize student and is the most prolific and prominent expositor of Marxist literary theory). The corrective stance of both books is their strength and their weakness: the strength that they disabuse some of the overwrought or misguided claims of current criticism, the weakness that they do not propose a major new vision of the study of culture. Both end, in fact, with calls for modesty.

 

Culture/Metaculture and The Idea of Culture overlap in broad outline. They are both short, concentrated books, Mulhern’s in Routledge’s revived “Critical Idiom” series and Eagleton’s in the new “Blackwell Manifestos,” rather than elaborate treatises or extended histories, reinforcing the sense of immediacy of calls for reform. They both sketch versions of cultural studies, take to task its current misdirection, particularly its absorption in questions of subjectivity and identity, and argue for a restoration of its political legacy. But they are very different in manner and style, characteristic of their authors. Mulhern, in a quickly drawn but assured survey, focuses on intellectual and institutional history, and his corrective is genealogical, attempting to supplant the British-centered genealogy with a broader, modern European one. Eagleton, in a ranging, topical examination, spins out a kind of history of ideas, and his corrective is definitional, more targeted against the errors of various forms of culturalism (like multiculturalism) as well as of contemporary theory overall (postmodernism, anti-foundationalism, and relativism), than a reconstruction.

 

Each book represents the distinctive roles Mulhern and Eagleton have fashioned as men of letters. Mulhern takes the role of serious don, earnestly laying out intellectual currents, as one would expect from the author of The Moment of “Scrutiny” or the editor of Contemporary Marxist Literary Criticism (1992). Eagleton takes a more puckish role, eschewing a dispassionate stance and disabusing contemporary criticism, often with dismissive barbs and witty turns of phrase. In his early incarnations, like Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976), Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), and The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), Eagleton marshalled lively (if opinionated) critical histories, but in his later incarnations, like The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996), he tends more toward the broadside. Consequently, Eagleton’s book is the more entertaining to read, but Mulhern’s leaves more of an argument to digest.

 

Mulhern’s argument turns on an unexpected but forceful reconstruction of the origins of cultural studies. He recasts its starting point from the Birmingham Centre to the longer and wider net of modernist Kulturkritik. The first half of the book surveys a group of modernist European writers who criticized modern society, including a range of writers such as Thomas Mann, Julian Benda, Karl Mannheim, Ortega y Gasset, Freud, Virginia Woolf, Orwell, T.S. Eliot, and Leavis, leading up to the inaugural moment of British cultural studies. What these writers have in common, and what Mulhern recoups, is their critical stance toward modern life under capitalism. What they also have in common, but what Mulhern discards, is their elitist remove from common culture and politics.

 

Mulhern fuses this tradition with British cultural studies. Why his account is unexpected is because cultural studies typically casts itself in opposition to Kulturkritik, whereas Mulhern argues that they both participate in the same “metacultural” discursive formation. Kulturkritik privileges an elitist minority culture, that draws upon a high tradition and sets itself against popular culture; cultural studies retains the same coordinates, but inverts Kulturkritik’s values, privileging the popular and abnegating tradition, arguing not for a minority culture but for the worth of minority cultures. Both also claim the political authority of the cultural; the mistake is that they overestimate that authority. In Mulhern’s narrative, Raymond Williams is a bridge figure, asserting the politics of culture but dispatching the paternalism of Kulturkritik (67).

 

The second half of Culture/Metaculture reprises the standard genealogy of British cultural studies, from Hoggart and Williams through Stuart Hall up to contemporary identity critics (mostly unnamed). Though Williams is cast as the legendary founder, Hall is the hero of the book (“The possibilities of Cultural Studies are nowhere so richly illustrated as in the work of Stuart Hall” [131]), praised in particular for turning attention to Empire and for proposing a “non-reductionist theory of culture and social formations” (101). Mulhern inventories Hall’s achievements: his struggles in and against sociology; his assimilating structuralism to a revised Marxism; and his directing attention toward media in the 1970s, the politics of the welfare state in the 80s, and ethnicity in the 90s.

 

Despite these achievements, cultural studies has experienced a fall, drifting to banality, unreflective populism, and relativism (137ff.). Mulhern’s most vehement castigation is that “politics is everywhere in Cultural Studies. The word appears on nearly every page,” but without teeth, “predominantly phatic in accent” (150). Cultural studies finally “subsumes the political under the cultural” (151), where it again joins Kulturkritik, which likewise “reasoned politics out of moral existence, as a false pretender of authority” (151). Thus it only offers a “‘magical solution’ to the poverty of politics in bourgeois society” (168). This is a severe diagnosis, but Mulhern’s prescription is relatively mild. He argues that cultural studies suffers from immodesty in placing excessive value on the political efficacy of cultural fields such as identity, an immodesty it “learnt willy-nilly from its authoritarian forebear, Kulturkritik” (174), and so recommends a dose of “modesty.”

 

The strength of Mulhern’s genealogical revision is to deepen the understanding of British cultural studies to modern European intellectual history and to discern its normally unnoticed ties to the terms of Kulturkritik. This is where Mulhern is most original and persuasive, demonstrating that cultural studies inherited rather than invented the problematic of culture, an insight usually forgotten in most histories of cultural studies, which start with Hoggart or Birmingham. The weakness of Mulhern’s genealogy, however, is its partiality. It foregrounds only one family tree, of the European high modernist tradition, and that tree includes some distant relations while excluding some more expected branches. The spectrum from Mann to Orwell is a disparate amalgam, and it underplays, for instance, Adorno and others from the Frankfurt School. Lastly, it gives an exemption to Hall, who could precisely be seen as the pivotal figure for the turn away from Marxism to poststructuralism and the preoccupation with identity.³

 

In a review in New Left Review, Stefan Collini elaborates the first two limitations, and in a rebuttal Mulhern answers that he was not claiming a unity but doing a “historical morphology of discourse” (87) which might be extended back to Romanticism, and that Adorno and Marcuse represent a competing Marxist Kulturkritik (92-93).⁴ The problem, however, is that Mulhern does claim to represent a “discursive formation,” which implies a comprehensive frame, even if not entirely unified. It seems odd to leave out the Frankfurt branch, who obviously participate in the same tradition of Kulturkritik, sharing the same disdain for popular culture and privileging of high culture. That they represent the Marxist line of Kulturkritik is in fact usually taken as their legacy for cultural studies, and many accounts induct them into the discursive formation of cultural studies. But Mulhern’s narrative of the fall of contemporary cultural studies mandates their exclusion; Mulhern sidesteps Frankfurt Kulturkritik because of the unity of the narrative he wants to tell that culminates in the political hubris of contemporary cultural studies.⁵

 

Perhaps this shows the stakes of any such genealogy. Genealogies purport a historical validity, but their primary function is polemical, to legitimate or delegitimate the heirs. Genealogies are not for the sake of the ancestors, who cannot benefit from them, but for the heirs; they are not veridic but pragmatic. Mulhern’s polemic is to avoid the errors of the hubristic uncles (and one aunt) of Kulturkritik and to emulate the better uncles, like Hoggart and Williams, of the Marxist lineage of British cultural studies. However, one way that Mulhern himself carries out the inheritance of Kulturkritik is in his resort to modesty. Modesty, after all, is a moral imperative, not a political one, nor to my knowledge a Marxist one. Mulhern thus claims a moral authority over cultural criticism–in his term “metaculture”–and becomes an heir of Kulturkritik, or for that matter, of Leavis.

 

Mulhern’s own project does not escape the metacultural problematic, especially in its focus on a “discursive formation.” Though rhetorically buttressed with the materialist-sounding “formation,” his history is almost entirely set within the realm of cultural discourse, and its political intervention occurs there. The field of reference of Culture/Metaculture is not the material base of society but literary and critical history. Such a history has some explanatory value and might hold a certain autonomy from larger social formations, but it is not the kind of history that traces the material institutions of criticism, such as the changes in publishing, the position of men and women of letters, the massive growth of the university, and the migration of those from the non-European world during decolonization, that formed contemporary cultural studies during the post-World War II epoch. It is not the kind of institutional history that he marshals in The Moment of “Scrutiny” for the interregnum between the great wars. In dwelling on a “morphology” of cultural criticism, Mulhern can only make a further metacultural claim, the check of modesty; he intervenes in the culture of criticism moreso than discerning the social history that conjoins with the culture of criticism.

 

Mulhern does advert to institutional history, but only as a dark spectre. While the primary plot of Culture/Metaculture is the familiar one of the dissolution of the class politics of Marxism to the localized politics of identity, there is a subplot, and its villain, impeding the proper marriage of culture and society, is institutionalization. Mulhern declares that institutionalization “is among the darker themes of the collective autobiography” (133). Its henchman is academic professionalism; while “Kulturkritik was . . . amateur . . . Cultural Studies, likewise but oppositely committed, has evolved into a profession” (133) and “an organized academic pursuit, from the later 1960s onwards” (92). This I find the most nettlesome argument of Culture/Metaculture. It undermines the case Mulhern has built for the continuous plot between Kulturkritik and contemporary criticism, supplanting it with a plot that privileges Kulturkritik and that relies on a kind of spiritual fall from a pure, disinterested state to a corrupt, interested state. It contradicts the account of the heroic origin of cultural studies in Raymond Williams and others, who were academics, the account of the initial formation of the Birmingham Centre, which was after all a moment of institutionalization, and the account of Hall as a model figure through the 70s to the 90s. Overall, it is historically fuzzy in yoking institutionalization, which is by no means a distinctively contemporary phenomenon, with the post-60s rise of identity politics.

 

Why does Mulhern, otherwise so careful, do this? He is drawn to two myths, that of the amateur man of letters or intellectual and that of a pre-institutional eden. The myth of the amateur is a commonplace, regularly wheeled out in TLS and other conservative venues that bemoan “the death of the intellectual,” but the amateur was neither free nor independent; rather, it was a category enabled by the surplus of capitalist accumulation, which granted privileged training and leisure to pursue activities like criticism. The elitism of Kulturkritik was consonant precisely with the class position of the “amateurs” who propounded it, and their elitism was not only cultural but a disdain for democratic institutions. Surely this is nothing to be nostalgic about; rather than apologizing for being academic-professionals, I think it better to be gainfully employed in public institutions, without the disadvantages of a ruling class background.⁶

 

Moreoever, the era of the putative amateur does not represent a pre-institutional Eden, as any reader of George Gissing’s New Grub Street will realize, but exhibits a different mode of institutionalization, in the modern period centered on journalism, publishing, and other literary institutions. The institution of the university, particularly under the welfare state, might easily be seen as a more rather than less democratic channel–perhaps of liberal rather than radical redistribution, but a redistribution nonetheless. It is doubtful that Raymond Williams or Terry Eagleton would have become prominent critics had they not been scholarship boys in the post-World War II university, and the opening of the profession of criticism to such critics could easily be seen as enjoining rather than impeding Left criticism. Rather than a draconian fall, one could instead view cultural studies’ academic purchase as a victory in what was called during the 60s a struggle for institutions, which created the conditions to pursue the kind of work done by Hall and those at Birmingham, and presumably by Mulhern himself. This is not to hold up the largely academic location of contemporary criticism as an unalloyed good, but neither is it a dark theme.

 

Eagleton’s The Idea of Culture is less concerned with the genealogy or institutional history of cultural studies and more concerned with its present practices. Though he does touch on Kulturkritik (in fact citing Mulhern) and particularly on Eliot’s and Leavis’ notions of culture, his focus is on its extant use, and his revision is not to reconstruct a better history but to redeem a better concept. His basic argument is fairly simple–that we should hold the idea of “culture as radical protest” over competing ideas, such as “culture as civility, culture as identity, and culture as commercialism” (129)–and his recuperation relatively modest, returning to Raymond Williams’s “notion of a common culture,” based on socialist politics (119).

 

Eagleton’s more complicated move is to recuperate what “common” means. While it represented a radical democratic impetus against high culture in Williams’s formulation, in contemporary cultural theory the notion of a “common culture” has taken retrograde associations: it speaks for hegemonic culture, eclipsing other ethnicities, sexualities, and so on; it assumes an essential core; and it projects a universal human condition, which elides particularities of various social groups. Eagleton, with some nuance, negotiates a middle position between the extremities of dominant and minority, essential and different, and universal and particular. His synthesis is the commonality of our bodies (“A common culture can be fashioned only because our bodies are of broadly the same kind,” 111) and our “natural needs,” which “are critical of political well-being” (99). Lest this seem a blatant essentialism, he allows that “of course human bodies differ, in their history, gender, ethnicity” (111). But, adapting current theories of the body which undergird identity studies, he asserts that “they do not differ in those capacities–language, labour, sexuality–which enable them to enter into potentially universal relationship with one another” (111).

 

In a sense, one could call this a pragmatic essentialism, similar to what the feminist critic Diana Fuss calls “essentially speaking,” whereby one uses such concepts provisionally, acknowledging their limits, to achieve social goals. Eagleton spells this out in a 1990 interview: “I think that back in the seventies we used to suffer from a certain fetishism of method . . . . I would now want to say that, at the level of method, pluralism should reign, because what truly defeats eclecticism is not a consistency of method but a consistency of political goal” (76). Correspondingly, in The Idea of Culture Eagleton argues that the pluralism of identities does not achieve radical political change, but “To establish genuine cultural pluralism [first] requires concerted socialist action” (122). In other words, identity studies have it backwards, and socialist politics are prior to identity politics. Eagleton still resolutely avows the priority of the base.

 

While this argument for recuperating a common culture frames The Idea of Culture, the bulk of the book turns its energy toward disabusing various forms of contemporary criticism. That is, it is not a survey of cultural studies in the manner of Literary Theory or The Ideology of the Aesthetic, nor a reconstructive analysis like Mulhern’s, but in large part an invective. Like Mulhern, Eagleton takes to task the over-emphasis on culture, particularly on categories like identity and its diluted sense of politics; pulling no punches, he claims that “Identity politics is one of the most uselessly amorphous of all political categories” (86). Thus he proposes, again like Mulhern, a check on culture’s “assum[ing] a new political importance,” and calls for more modesty: “it has grown at the same time immodest and overweening. It is time, while acknowledging its significance, to put it back in its place” (131). Unlike Mulhern, there is barely any consideration of the Birmingham project (in a hundred pages, there is only one mention–a favorable quote–of Stuart Hall). Also unlike Mulhern, Eagleton names a number of villains, and his real target often seems a wide-ranging band of those who espouse postmodernism (a number of sentences begin with phrases like “for the postmodernist”), cosmopolitanism, relativism, and anti-foundationalism rather than what ordinarily would be considered cultural studies. What most motivates him, it seems, is taking other critics down a peg.

 

While he claimed at one time that “deconstruction is the death drive at the level of theory” (Walter Benjamin 136), now he seems to have reached a truce and absorbed some of its tenor (for instance, “cultures . . . are porous, fuzzy-edged, indeterminate” [96]). He instead turns his turrets toward pragmatists and postmodernists like Stanley Fish and Richard Rorty. Eagleton’s strength has always been his unabashed, if sometimes unnuanced, polemical flair. The weakness is not only that such polemics cut with a broad sword, but that many of the critics he takes aim at have little to do with the study of culture. Fish, for instance, has only addressed cultural studies to dismiss it. In Professional Correctness Fish argues, like Mulhern and Eagleton, that contemporary critics wrongly conflate culture and politics, but unlike them, he finds the error to stem from Raymond Williams’s original joining of literature and society in The Country and the City (45-46). Pace Williams, Fish wants to restore literature as a specialized field; he does not deny history or politics, but argues that they belong to a different realm and literary critics should stick to literature. While Fish held considerable influence during the heyday of theory, he has become a sort of literary reactionary (he remarks that many will consider his a retrograde view), and he has little influence on contemporary critics, at least in the U.S. Fish has been a favorite target of Eagleton’s–elsewhere he calls him “a brash, noisy entrepeneur of intellect” (2003, 171)–but he has become an anachronistic enemy, like the Germans in movies, whom Eagleton reflexively invokes, almost with nostalgia for the battles of high theory and the time when the generation of theorists, like Fish and Eagleton, ruled the field.

 

Rorty presents a different case. While Fish adverts to a version of the pragmatist argument that theory, like principle, does not govern practice and has “no consequences,” a substantial part of Rorty’s work has been historical. Against the ahistoricism of analytic philosophy, Rorty has recuperated the history of pragmatism, from William James and John Dewey to Cornel West. Part of his criticism of philosophy has been its focus on arid, technical issues, making itself irrelevant to political life. Indeed, much of Rorty’s recent writing has dwelt on social issues, deliberately following the example of Dewey, who was prominent in early twentieth century educational reforms and democratic politics in the U.S. Rorty himself has castigated the American “cultural left,” as I mentioned earlier, for its narrowly academic address and its failing to take up basic social issues, like the minimum wage and universal healthcare.⁷ This might represent a unionist or liberal position, on the model of the New Deal welfare state in the U.S., but Eagleton collapses it to a difference between Right conservatism and Left radicalism. It is actually one between social democracy and Marxism. Also, as I have suggested, Eagleton broaches a pragmatist position in his eschewal of method for the sake of political goals. He is closer to Rorty than he acknowledges, or, more to the point, productively sorts through.

 

In the midst of villains, the one unalloyed hero of The Idea of Culture is Raymond Williams, and Eagleton obviously follows Williams’s keyword model. There is in fact a certain poignancy to Eagleton’s updating the project of his teacher. But it also reveals something of the way that Eagleton has fashioned himself as a critic and the particular bias of his work. He has followed the Williams of Marxism and Literature in his theoretical surveys, of The Country and the City in his literary criticism, and even of The Border Country in a novel and a few plays, but not of Communication, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, or Resources of Hope. While he has never departed from a Marxist credo (as some in his generation have), he has remained largely in the domain of literature, with forays to the history of ideas, but avoided cultural studies, despite its carrying out a significant line of contemporary Marxist criticism. This is especially striking in comparison to Williams’s other prize student, Stuart Hall, or for that matter Arnold or Eliot. It indicates an odd blindness in Eagleton’s work, all the more striking given that he is probably the most deft (if polemical) and popular surveyor of criticism. There is a way in which Eagleton has always resided in the moment of literary theory–first coming to prominence with Criticism and Ideology (1976), stamping the field with his bestselling Literary Theory, and for the past decade targeting postmodernism in The Idea of Culture as well as The Illusions of Postmodernism and After Theory (2004). His terrain of struggle has not been our common, ordinary culture, but the texts and concepts of the history of criticism and their latter-day permutations.

 

There is finally a certain intractability to the debate over culture. One dimension of its intractability stems from the term itself. “Culture” has become an impossibly capacious term that refers to a panoply of practices, products, and people. Like the air, culture is ubiquitous. The term “culture” has also become ubiquitous in critical practice, and no longer holds any precise meaning or force, or rather it suffers from an oversaturation of meaning that makes it amorphous. While the word, as Williams noted in Keywords, has one of the more complicated histories of usage in English, when Williams resucitated it, it had a distinctive polemical force against its elite usage, militating against the classed designation of “culture.” In turn, Williams’s revision enabled the study of objects normally excluded from literary criticism, disrupting the accepted paradigm of Cambridge English. Now, though it is sometimes used to invoke the rhetoric of disruption, it has become normal practice.

 

Eagleton and Mulhern respond to this dilemma to a degree, taking to task the expansion of the term and calling for the restoration of a more measured, former sense. But this tack represents a minor modification, tweaking rather than shifting the paradigm. As is the case with most restorations, it changes the name of the king rather than the conceptual model. And, like most restorations, it is unlikely to change the minds of those who have allegiance to the houses of identity. At best, it represents a weak solution to the dilemma, leaving the debate much the same.

 

Another dimension of its intractability is that “culture” is residually embedded in the framework of base and superstructure. The debate thus tends to fall out along the lines of an either/or choice, between the traditional Marxist account of the priority of the economic and the view of culture as having priority in determining human experience. Part of the problem is that this framework suggests a two-dimensional, spatial model, like a drawing of an iceberg, whereby the Marxist holds that the economic constitutes 90% of the iceberg supporting the 10% cap of culture floating above, and the culturalist holds that culture comprises most of the ice. The relation of the two tends to be configured as a zero-sum equation (base + superstructure = society), as a measurement of relative displacement in physics (society – base = superstructure). To put it another way, the framework tends toward subsumption, one conceived as encompassing the other, rather than each being contiguous and not able to be subsumed, so a full description would necessitate “both/and.”

 

Eagleton and Mulhern try to restore a more austere notion of politics and economic determinacy. Although they show nuance in acknowledging culture as more important than merely superstructural, their condemnation of its paucity of political force rests on the residual construal of base and superstructure or of politics and culture. In his afterthoughts in New Left Review, Mulhern emphasizes that he is not dismissing the politics of culture but claiming that there is a “discrepancy” between culture and politics, and they are not reducible to each other (“Beyond” 100-4). Of course, but he still finds culture coming up short, and does not explain the discrepant value of culture.

 

The third dimension of the intractability of the debate about culture is that most arguments about its politics remain in the cultural field, as Bourdieu would call it, of literary criticism. They are arguments primarily over critical history. In other words, most arguments declaiming the paucity or mistaken politics of culture are culturalist arguments. Despite pronouncements of interdisciplinarity, most culture critics do not turn to political theory, political economy, or economics. Those in the literary field might draw on cousin humanistic fields of history or cultural anthropology, but not on harder social sciences. This might not be from bad faith but from professional standards, since one risks a naive amateurism tilling in fields without training. Or it might be from habit, that we tend to gravitate toward the discourses we are familiar with.

 

Eagleton and Mulhern, despite disclaimers, reflect the paradox of criticizing culturalism culturally–Mulhern reconstructing and revising the history of literary criticism, and Eagleton directing his polemic against the usual critical suspects. There of course might be better and worse ways to do this, but it is finally an internecine battle or an internal correction of the field rather than one that draws the field in a new direction or looks outside that field. Despite their taking to task the paucity of politics in cultural studies, neither Eagleton nor Mulhern themselves bring the disciplines of politics–political philosophy, political economy–into the debate.

 

To my mind, the best solution to these dilemmas is Nancy Fraser’s work on redistribution and recognition, first proposed in her influential 1995 New Left Review article, “From Redistribution to Recognition?” and expanded in her 2003 book (with Axel Honneth), Redistribution or Recognition?. The virtue of Fraser’s explanation is that it shifts the debate from the tired one of cultural studies, recasting the frame to a dualist approach, and working through political philosophy. Though Fraser’s article appeared in New Left Review and drew considerable attention (including a 1999 volume of responses by Rorty, Judith Butler, Seyla Benhabib, and others, Adding Insult to Injury), neither Eagleton nor Mulhern cite it. This is a glaring omission, but symptommatic of the gravitational pull of the literary field that they inhabit.

 

Fraser shifts the debate from the terrain of literary-cultural studies and the question of the correct ratio of culture to the terrain of political philosophy and the question of social justice. This is fundamentally a pragmatist move: the debate about culture turns on whether a particular view of the economic and culture is a correct representation of the world.⁸ For Fraser, the interest is not to draw a true picture of reality but what best serves the goal of social justice. The enemy is subordination, and one might experience subordination both culturally, in the form of status, and economically, in the form of class.

 

Fraser distinguishes two lines of political philosophy, one aligning with Marxism that centers on class and economic distribution, the other from Weber and a certain line of Hegelian thinking about consciousness that centers on status and cultural recognition. Fraser starts from the belief that inequality derives from injuries of status as well as of resources. Identity politics thus are not irrelevant in the struggle to redress inequality; culture is not just “an antidote to politics” (17), as Eagleton asserts, but crucial to what Fraser elsewhere calls a “politics of needs.”⁹ Another way to put this is that needs are not just bodily, as researchers on childhood development tell us, but of consciousness. The goal is not to adduce the equation of economy and culture, but to adduce whether social needs are served justly and the consequences people suffer from both maldistribution and misrecognition.

 

Fraser foregoes entrenched either/or dichotomies. As she reasons,

 

Most such theorists assume a reductive economistic-cum-legalistic view of status, supposing that a just distribution of resources and rights is sufficient to preclude misrecognition. In fact, however, as we saw, not all misrecognition is a by-product of maldistribution, nor of maldistribution plus legal discrimination. Witness the case of the African-American Wall Street banker who cannot get a taxi to pick him up. To handle such cases, a theory of justice must reach beyond the distribution of rights and goods to examine institutionalized patterns of cultural value; it must ask whether such patterns impede parity of participation in social life. (Redistribution 34)

 

Conversely, against a “culturalist view of distribution” that

 

suppos[es] that all economic inequalities are rooted in a cultural order that privileges some kinds of labor over others, [so] changing that cultural order is sufficient to preclude maldistribution. In fact, however, as we saw, not all maldistribution is a by-product of misrecognition. Witness the case of the skilled white male industrial worker who becomes unemployed due to a factory closing resulting from a speculative corporate merger. In that case, the injustice of maldistribution has little to do with misrecognition. It is rather a consequence of imperatives intrinsic to an order of specialized economic relations whose raison d'être is the accumulation of profits. To handle such cases, a theory of justice must reach beyond cultural value patterns to examine the structure of capitalism. It must ask whether economic mechanisms that are relatively decoupled from structures of prestige and that operate in a relatively autonomous way impede parity of participation in social life. (34-35)

 

The strength of Fraser’s approach is that she tries to account for both without devaluing one or the other. She opts for a dual rather than singular solution. A well-known nettle in physics is how to explain the behavior of light: sometimes it behaves like particles that caroom and ricochet, sometimes it behaves like waves that oscillate in a more uniform motion. Fraser presents a kind of wave-particle theory of society, whereby social interaction behaves like the wave motion of culture, sometimes like the material particle of class. If one takes this dualist perspective, then one need not make a choice, and in fact the choice is a false one. Again, such a dualism is not a description of reality, but, pragmatically, a perspective:

 

Here redistribution and recognition do not correspond to two substantive societal domains, economy and culture. Rather, they constitute two analytical perspectives that can be assumed with respect to any domain" . . . Unlike poststructuralist anti-dualism, perspectival dualism permits us to distinguish distribution from recognition--and thus to analyze the relations between them. Unlike economism and culturalism, however, it avoids reducing either one of those categories to the other and . . . allows us to theorize the complex connections between two orders of subordination, grasping at once their conceptual irreducibility, empirical divergence, and practical entwinement. (63-64)

 

With Fraser, we should dispense with the debate over the correct ratio of culture, or the true picture of politics and culture. Rather, we should focus on what best serves the goal of justice and acting against injustice, whether it goes by the name of culture or class.

 

Notes

 

1. To be sure, even Marx, in the introduction to the Grundrisse, notes the asymmetry of culture and society (110), or what Louis Althusser came to call the “semi-autonomy of art.”

 

2. Through the 1990s a good many Marxists, like Ellen Meiksins Wood, have excoriated the dissolution of identity politics, while others, like Ernesto Laclau, have tried to forge a “neo-Marxism.” In different registers, Aijaz Ahmad, notably in After Theory (1993), and Arif Dirlik have diagnosed the mistaken turn of postcolonial criticism away from class.

 

3. Hall’s “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies” provides a telling counterpoint to Mulhern’s genealogy, as Hall inducts a capacious range of structural and poststructural sources into the lineage of cultural studies.

 

4. See Collini, “Culture Talk” and Mulhern, “Beyond Metaculture,” which are lucid clarifications of the arguments. New Left Review has run several sequels to the initial review, exceeding even the replication of Hollywood sequels.

 

5. One other elision, especially apparent to American eyes, is that Mulhern’s account never deals with the U.S. lineage of cultural criticism, which has a varied but lively history, from early twentieth-century figures like Thorstein Veblen, whose classic Theory of the Leisure Class provides a still-trenchant exposition of the cultural manifestations of class in “conspicuous consumption,” to mid-twentieth century figures like Lionel Trilling, for whom culture was central (one of his books was called Beyond Culture), to contemporary figures like Michael Denning, Hazel Carby, Andrew Ross, and Lawrence Grossberg, who were trained in Britain but have promoted versions of cultural studies, often mixed with American Studies. It is a peculiarity of most accounts of cultural studies that they do not trace the interplay of European and U.S. versions, especially after World War II, when they share the same historical formation. Most accounts of British cultural studies are provincial in this regard, focusing entirely on the British tradition; this has led some recent American critics to declare, “it no longer makes sense to treat our work as a footnote to the Birmingham tradition” (Jenkins, McPherson, and Shattuc 5).

 

6. For fuller elaboration of the “romance of the intellectual,” see my essay “The Romance of the Intellectual and the Question of Profession.” The tension between professionalism and anti-professionalism is a familiar tension in modern literary studies. As Eagleton notes of “the contradictory nature of the Scrutiny project,” “for if it was concerned on the one hand to sustain an ‘amateur’ liberal humanism, claiming an authoritative title to judge all sectors of social life, it was on the other hand engaged in an internecine struggle to ‘professionalize’ a disreputably amateur literary academy, establishing criticism as a rigorously analytical discourse beyond the reach of both common reader and common-room wit” (Function of Criticism 74).

 

7. This is not to defend Rorty–indeed, he has also made strange calls for patriotism–but I do not think one can simply dismiss his politics.

 

8. This is a philosophical move most familiar in Rorty, who diagnosed philosophy’s metaphysical tendency to construct “a mirror to nature.” Fraser has been a key feminist interlocutor of Rorty’s, as well as of Habermas, alongside her largely Left affiliations.

 

9. See especially her analysis of U.S. welfare and women in the closing chapters of Unruly Practices.

 

Works Cited

 

• Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. 1984. Trans. Richard Nice. London: Routledge, 1979.
• Collini, Stefan. “Culture Talk.” New Left Review 7 (2001): 43-53.
• —. “Defending Cultural Criticism.” New Left Review 18 (2002): 73-97.
• —. “On Variousness; and on Persuasion.” New Left Review 27 (2004): 65-97.
• Eagleton, Terry. After Theory. New York: Basic, 2004.
• —. Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory. London: NLB, 1976.
• —. “Criticism, Ideology, and Fiction: An Interview with Terry Eagleton.” The Significance of Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. 71-89.
• —. “Discourse and Discos: Theory in the Space between Culture and Capitalism.” TLS 15 July 1994: 3-4.
• —. Figures of Dissent: Critical Essays on Fish, Spivak, Zizek and Others. London: Verso, 2003.
• —. The Function of Criticism: From The Spectator to Post-Structuralism. London: Verso, 1984.
• —. The Idea of Culture. Oxford and Malden: Blackwell, 2000.
• —. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.
• —. The Illusions of Postmodernism. London: Blackwell, 1996.
• —. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983.
• —. Marxism and Literary Criticism. Berkeley: U of California P, 1976.
• —. Walter Benjamin, or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism. London: Verso, 1981.
• Easthope, Anthony. Literary into Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 1991.
• Fish, Stanley. Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999.
• Fraser, Nancy. Adding Insult to Injury: Social Justice and the Politics of Recognition. Ed. Kevin Olson. London: Verso, 1999.
• —. “From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Postsocialist’ Age,” New Left Review 212 (1995): 68-93.
• —. Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the ‘Postsocialist’ Condition. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997.
• —. Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989.
• Fraser, Nancy, and Axel Honneth. Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange. London: Verso, 2003.
• Fuss, Diana. Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference. New York: Routledge, 1989.
• Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies.” Cultural Studies. Eds. Larry Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler. New York: Routledge, 1992. 277-94.
• Jenkins, Henry, Tara McPherson, and Jane Shattuc, eds. “The Culture that Sticks to Your Skin: A Manifesto for a New Cultural Studies.” Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasure of Popular Culture. Durham: Duke UP, 2002. 3-26.
• Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. New York: Vintage, 1973.
• Mulhern, Francis. “Beyond Metaculture.” New Left Review 16 (2002): 86-104.
• —, ed. Contemporary Marxist Literary Criticism. London: Longman, 1992.
• —. Culture/Metaculture London: Routledge, 2000.
• —. The Moment of “Scrutiny.” London: NLB, 1979.
• —. The Present Lasts a Long Time: Essays in Cultural Politics. Cork: Cork UP, 1998.
• —. “What Is Cultural Criticism?” New Left Review 23 (2003): 35-49.
• Rorty, Richard. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998.
• Williams, Jeffrey. “The Romance of the Intellectual and the Question of Profession.” Education and Cultural Studies: Toward a Performative Practice. Eds. Henry A. Giroux and Patrick Shannon. New York: Routledge, 1997. 49-64.
• Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.
• —. Keywords. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1983.

 

 

 

Laura Hinton

Department of English
City College of New York
laurahinton@earthlink.net

 

One of the most innovative and sometimes overlooked founding writers of the West Coast Language Poetry school is Carla Harryman, author of twelve books of poetry and cross-genre writing that includes poet’s-prose, plays, and experimental essays. Her short classic pieces in collections like Percentage (1979), Animal Instincts (1989), and There Never Was a Rose without a Thorn (1995) reveal a commitment to cross-fertilizing literary genres, interweaving theory and fiction, prose and lyric, satire and dialogue, in a way paralleled perhaps only by Kathy Acker. Harryman’s more recent works like Gardener of Stars (2001) and Baby (2005) continue to build an aesthetic based on the blurring of conventional genres and literary boundaries, creating a non-categorizable mode of writing Ron Silliman has called the “inter-genre”: a radical prose-poetry disengagement from Romantic lyric or bourgeois “realism” in favor of a fantastical utopian language of desire.¹ But perhaps Harryman’s most unusual contribution to the Language movement and to postmodern literature at large is her work in Poet’s Theater. A leading figure of the San Francisco Poet’s Theater in the 1970s and ’80s, Harryman has continued poetry-performance work past the new millennium, staging a series of avant-garde poetry plays that include the ambitious multi-media piece Performing Objects Stationed in the Subworld (2001/2003), and a new piece, Mirror Play, recently performed in Michigan and to be performed again this fall in Wels, Austria.

 

It is not a single genre or piece for which Harryman is known, however, but for her refusal to be typecast, for her writing’s generic flexibility and poetic inventiveness as it “restages”–either upon a literal stage or through the medium of a literary text–hybrid writings that challenge and cross over formal representational modes, sometimes engaging collaboratively with other artists and media in the process. (The 2003 San Francisco performance of Performing Objects, for example, brought together an artist and a musician, as well as a co-director and actors, through Amy Trachenberg’s art-installation-like costumes and sets and Erling Wold’s songs.) Like most Langpo and experimental writings, Harryman’s writings have been confined to the world of small presses and their distribution. Her inventiveness and challenge to the structural foundations of mainstream commercial literature have made her an icon among her Langpo colleagues for over three decades. She is beginning to draw a wider audience with several urban-performance incarnations of Performing Objects and by appearing internationally (this fall Harryman is delivering a series of lectures in Germany). The upcoming issue of How2, which plans to devote a special section to Harryman’s work, attests to her increasing recognition.

 

One insufficiently discussed and–I would argue, essential–component of Harryman’s writing is its relationship to feminist politics. Through her feminist and Leftist political roots, Harryman has striven to create a wide and liberal range of experimental venues, expressing and exploiting the potentiality of ideological freedom. But Harryman has also created, in the process, what I would like to call “an aesthetics of contradiction.” In this introduction to Harryman’s writing, I explore the ways in which Harryman’s radical, non-genre-based writing practice is anchored to the feminist insight that literature itself must be unmade/re-made for it to begin to express women’s symbolic experience in a patriarchal social-textual order, and to begin to express women’s particular relation to cultural-artistic power. Harryman’s aesthetics of contradiction, I argue, play upon tension, conflict, female “exclusion” from mainstream and masculine-coded discourses, and the artifice of aesthetic surfaces and “games,” ultimately to reject the artifice of gender altogether.

 

In other words, Harryman’s poetic writings function not so much to render literary objects beautiful (although sometimes they do so in the process), but to question radically the function of literature–poetics used against poetics, as a form of conceptual art. Like conceptual art, a multi-disciplinary movement conceived primarily in the visual-arts realm that has influenced Harryman greatly, these poetics do not just mold shapely lyrics or lines or phrases to be scanned or otherwise formally determined, but also insist that the audience reflect upon the nature of “poetry” and, in fact, make of poetry that which questions its own existence. In conceptually based literature like Harryman’s, poetry acts as a conflictual, challenging medium, a discourse of “communication” that “fails” more than it communicates–that repeatedly replicates these failures as lack of linguistic or narrative resolution. In this conceptual aesthetics of contradiction, Harryman clearly draws upon postmodern theories that seek a conflictual as opposed to a unifying model of “meaning” or “narrative truth,” theories like Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1979), whose challenge to le grand récit is appropriated for feminist purposes in Craig Owens’s classic “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism” (1988) in a discussion of women artists’ necessary relation to the avant-garde through their “exclusion” from male-based history and aesthetics, and exemplified by Acker’s novels or by Cindy Sherman’s fake photographic Hollywood stills. Poet Rae Armantrout also writes of the power of “exclusion” on behalf of women’s experimental writing in her essay “Feminist Poetics and the Meaning of Clarity” (1992), articulating the role of conflict and contradiction as women artists face the symbolic order. Interdisciplinary volumes like Feminism/Postmodernism (1990) further open a dialogue in sociology, philosophy, literary studies, and science about this feminist engagement in conflictual models of epistemological engagement, making synthesis no longer a preferred mode of inquiry, as did Conflicts in Feminism (1990). More recently Judith Lorber argues in Breaking the Bowls (2005) that “gender cannot be a unitary theoretical concept, and the oppression of women cannot be a homogeneous political rallying cry”; she calls for “countermeasures to the effects of gender” that are “undoing gender” itself (xii-xiii). Megan Simpson has expressed this belief with regard to women’s Langpo writings explicitly, in Poetic Epistemologies: Gender and Knowing in Women’s Language-Oriented Writing (2000).

 

An aesthetics of contradiction is at work in Harryman’s text as a sign of political, personal, discursive struggle, a struggle that has marked her own path as an adventurous woman writer from the beginning of her career, who helped formulate the Langpo movement after leaving college in the late 1970s. In the interview that follows, Harryman admits that “the critique of gender when it comes to ‘language poetry’” has yet to be written.” While she applauds a feminist epistemology “that also critiques identity politics,” Harryman looks back on her experience of living in the West Coast literary climate of three decades ago as creating “different registers of experience and knowledge unreconcilable at this time,” and admits, “writing within situations of contradiction was and remains an aspect of my work.” In her experimental essay on motherhood, “Parallel Play,” Harryman comments on “contradiction” as it inflects her aesthetic philosophy in general: “The goals of the writing are built on sometimes contradictory or competing claims, which manifest themselves in shifts of style and genre within individual texts” (122). She furthermore reveals here that “I want the claims to work themselves out transformatively” (122). She means, perhaps, that her aesthetics of contradiction is not meant to create opacity forever and remain oblique, but rather to shift the structural possibilities dialectically, and to offer, through creativity and art, previously unimaginable modes of language and thought.

 

Harryman’s aesthetics of contradiction takes many forms, yet always emphasizes the artifice and also the conceptual underpinnings of art. One such form is “the game,” that activity both artistic and sociological, which Harryman imitates, probes, and transforms in order to explore systematic and arbitrary constraints. The “game” is regulated by a series of tightly controlled rules that provide constraints to regulate the flow or trajectory of various literary devices, ranging from plot expectations to theatrical moves to imagery and symbols–or what might be said in a given social situation.² The role of competing contradictory languages that resonate–however arbitrarily–through the meta-language of the “game” becomes noticeably part of an aesthetics of contradiction in The Words after Carla Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories and Jean-Paul Sartre (1999), a series of cross-genre writings in which Harryman toys with implicit and explicit logical scenarios based on language games, board games, relationship games–all the “games” by which a pre-established ideological set of codes sets the direction of social discourse. Contradiction is the effect of the collision course that emerges when one set of rules vies for power over another. Harryman’s play with the “game” of rules concludes, albeit circularly (and that’s part of the “game”), that rules are arbitrary formations of structures of belief, never separated from “coherence” as imagined through language. Although another function of the “game” is to behave as if there are no other rules, it’s only a game: the “game” is only binding–seemingly natural–within its own set of obligations and restraints.

 

Related to this concept of the “game” that permeates many of Harryman’s writings is her textual relation to surface and performance, as opposed to narrative depth. An aesthetics of contradiction emerges within her writings as they prefer multiple postures and voices–seemingly both serious and parodic at once–and refute a subjectivity or psychological insight into any one “character” or “persona,” coded as “singular subject,” as is the tradition in realism or Romantic lyric. As a result of this multiple use of potentialities for subjectivity, Harryman’s writings appear to value the surface of the text. They don’t try for “Meaning” with a capital “M”; and it’s not that “meanings” don’t exist but that one set of meanings or an interpretative construct overlaps with another, offering contradictory possibilities. In works like Percentage, for example, as Chris Stroffolino notes, “the traditional expectations that poets have a locatable ‘speaker’ and ‘situation’ are discarded. Instead the acts of writing, thinking, and selecting are foregrounded,” and a “stylistic disjunction” creates a surface that is not to be penetrated beyond the language/discourse itself (172). What Harryman achieves in this early chapbook will become a style that, to use her phrase, is always “in the mode of,” never with a referential or outside “look” toward a universal realism. Her short piece entitled “Animal Instincts” in the collection begins with the announcement: “Out my window the view blocks what’s behind it.” This anti-Balzacian narrative is anti-photographic, anti-realistic, with no reference to objects delineated within space through a visual language. As a result of this loss, Harryman asks how one might advance through a narrative lacking visual desire:

 

In any case, I know that the village is neither square nor long, that science has specific status in private life, and that no one is aware of anyone's standards. Here the road forks and the mind cannot advance. ("Animal Instincts" 33)

 

Yet “desire” is concocted through another approach to narrative. It is literally re-made, not through the falsity of a smooth progressive description of objects in space within the linearity of story but through the humorously disjunctive, troubled, self-reflexive critique of a text about its own status as text. The problem, of course, with reading a Harryman text–and the kind of complex pleasure it provides–is that there is little platform to remain upon while “the road forks” and the narrative–like the mind–“cannot advance.” Harryman, like many postmodern artists, takes a contradictory attitude. Yet, unlike the tradition of feminist avant-garde filmmakers, whose spokeswoman, Laura Mulvey, famously articulated in 1975 narrative’s “sadism” through its linear “male gaze,” Harryman prefers to use narrative–against itself. She declares in her short piece “Toy Boats,” originally published in Animal Instincts and republished in There Never Was a Rose Without a Thorn: “I prefer to distribute narrative rather than deny it,” thus contradicting the conventional binarism Mulvey identified between narrative and non-narrative writing. Harryman writes that narrative is not a mode of writing that should be dismissed, but used as its own witness: “Narrative holds within its boundaries both its advantages and defects. It can demonstrate its own development as it mutates throughout history” (There Never Was A Rose 2). Its mutating effect gives narrative what she declares to be its great advantage: ” in accomplishing its mutability, it [narrative] achieves an ongoing existence” (2). As we use but also stand outside of narrative, we see that its framing structures include ourselves. Rather than reject narrative because of its tendency to employ the patriarchal “gaze,” Harryman offers this insight: “Those who object to this artifice are narratives enemies,” she writes, “but they, too, are part of the story” (2).

 

In contradictory motion, Harryman asks that we be both inside the “interior” of narrative and “outside,” observing the artifice of narrative’s potentially mutable and shifting surfaces at the same time. “Toy Boats” is one of the short inter-genre pieces in which Harryman refuses to resolve her aesthetic contradictions. In taking the form of a dialogue through multiple voices that challenge one another, she challenges both the idea that any one viewpoint prevails (Lyotard’s “le grand récit” and the false and contradictory division between subjects, all too often masculinized and feminized in narrative as subjects and objects. Harryman takes an interest in the “object.” She views it through the Hegelian dialectic, by which the object becomes a projection of the subject’s need for ego-identification. She explores the object’s status in great depth in Performing Objects Stationed in the Subworld, where “characters” take on and become part of an interaction not only with others (as objects), but also with various objects of play arranged around the stage–objects that are also remnants of a lost urban inner-city world: pipes, tires, tools, clothes lines and hanging laundry. The re-placement of the object into the subject’s dialectic is central to Harryman’s writing. She resists conventional narrative or lyric poetry’s focalization on a single persona, character, or subject, in the interest of exploring the margins of subjectlessness and the value of “the other.” And she focuses more on relational effects between “others” than on subjectivity as a monological effect. Of great interest to her is one’s status as object, in works like Baby, as well: in families, communities, in art and in literature.

 

Harryman’s interest in objects, and one’s object-relation to gendered others, is comically rendered in a short piece entitled “The Male.” This non-generic prose piece–is it a short story? is it an essay?–caricatures not any one person but cultural masculinity, while a presumably female “other” (as “writer”) sits making pancakes and chatting with “the male” across the breakfast table. In this piece we witness a version of masculinity as inarticulate, prosaic, disembodied, and wittily sentimentalized. (The “male” asks a question “that reminds me of masturbating while reading Wordsworth,” we read. ) The piece does not only study but literally enacts “the male’s” gendered language: “The Male by nature prosaic, moving from one place to the next in an unrhapsodic way, thinking hard perhaps but communicating little, allowing his motions to speak for him, so that he was followed by a trail of his own making?” (There Never Was a Rose 143). This is a loaded sentence. “The Male” is “by nature prosaic” because “he” is not one to consider the ironies of the coded language, the “game” of gender communication, into which he is fit. The discomfort caused by reading such statements is replicated in “the male” when “he” lacks communication and defines himself in terms of silence. He “communicates little,” because there is no exchange in this textual dialogue. There is “thought,” but it is “naturalized” and made seemingly concrete to the “male” body–“allowing his motions to speak for him”–which creates a symbolic “reality” that he may interpret as the “real,” but it is “a trail of his own making,” a chain of signifiers. The reader’s frustration is articulated by an equally frustrated female figure-as-author: “I am just a person, I said to the Male, but you are not just a male” (146). She adds: “I don’t know why I chose to present myself in this way to the creature” (146). While dismantling cultural masculinity in the same way as it was formed (like cultural femininity), “the male” is studied, eulogized, and, ultimately, denigrated, like “woman” as cultural sign. Here Harryman’s feminist engagement is detached and comical in a way reminiscent of Jane Austen. Ultimately, however, unlike the psychological novels of Austen, a piece like “The Male” represents not a person but a cultural identity, a faulty emblem of an ideal–embodied perhaps, in social-textual life by actual men in domestic settings in middle-class households, but not a “true” flesh and blood person. “His” presence is a non-presence, a fetishistic signifier of a larger cultural value in which subjects and objects act too readily in ideological concert.

 

Harryman’s aesthetics of contradiction often offer this kind of scathing social critique–one that is often much more difficult to trace or locate politically. Much of her writing, in fact, operates like social-political satire–but without the tragic “butt,” without the missing ideal that gives satire its edge. Her brand of satire operates in the manner Fredric Jameson describes in “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” through “pastiche.” Jameson discusses postmodernism as a function of the “newly emergent social order of late capitalism,” as a resistance to the high modernism, say, of a Joyce or Eliot, a Stravinsky or Frank Lloyd Wright, itself once a reactionary art that is now institutionalized by “the university, the museum, the art gallery network, and the foundations” (111). According to Jameson, two “significant features” of postmodern art exist, embracing rather than repudiating “consumer society” and the post-industrial electronic era dominated by the media and multinational corporations: both “pastiche” and “schizophrenia” (113). These features govern “the postmodernist experience of space and time respectively” (113).

 

While I may disagree with some of Jameson’s assumptions about postmodern art and literature in general, I find that his definition of pastiche describes the kind of contradictory structure that inhabits much of Harryman’s inter-genre work. Jameson distinguishes pastiche from parody, which he describes as “the mimicry of other styles . . . of the mannerisms and stylistic twitches of other styles” (113). Parody, a popular phenomenon in modern art and literature, is that which accentuates the “idiosyncrasies and eccentricities” of other styles, producing “an imitation which mocks the original” (113, emphasis added). Parody relies on the presence of an original, an acknowledged presence which audiences may hear, read, or see. It also structures an ideal for which readers may be nostalgic (in realism or satire), when the ideal end itself is seen as impossible or deflated. The effect of parody is “to cast ridicule on the private nature of these stylistic mannerisms and their excessiveness,” suggesting, however, in the process, that there might be a “way people normally speak or write” (113). Yet pastiche does not rely on the presence of an original or a normative expression–“the imitation of a peculiar or unique style,” Jameson writes. Pastiche, instead, is “a neutral practice of such mimicry . . . without the satirical impulse, without laughter” (114).

 

Harryman’s writing creates the satirical effect “without laughter.” It is like parody, but a parody that “has lost its sense of humor” (Jameson 114). Or has it? Rather, Harryman’s writing has lost its original referent. It may not be technically satiric. But it is pastiche-parody quite full of what is funny and absurd in gendered social life and texts. To understand Harryman’s writings, one must embrace a unique sense of feminist humor. And one must revel in a sense of human incapacity and language’s absurdity and take joy in contradiction. I believe that at the comic root of Harryman’s writing is a deep pleasure in feminist-inspired contradiction, not only because contradiction un-does the gendered terms that structure language and world, but because it offers an alternative space for creativity and productivity, one based on openings rather than on closings. Harryman’s productivity appears to be opening again and again.

 

An Interview with Carla Harryman

 

I. “The Formation of this Scene”

 

LH: Can you go back in time and recall the origins of your aesthetic practice in the 1970s and early ’80s West Coast experimental literary scene–your association with writers we now call “Language Poets”?

 

CH: I was part of the formation of this scene. I had met Steve Benson in college in Southern California in 1971, and he had introduced me to Kit Robinson–who introduced Steve and me to Barrett Watten in 1973. Barry and Kit would visit Steve and me in Santa Barbara and L.A., where we moved in 1974, and we would visit them in San Francisco. Some of the time we passed doing collaborations on a typewriter while socializing: one person would sit down and type, and when he or she was done, the next would have a turn. The others sat around with beers and talked.
In addition to the poets and artists who informed my aesthetic practice, there was the post-Vietnam War climate, the grittiness, the revelation of histories of San Francisco culture, sub-cultural social fluidity, queer culture, an edgy political climate, an open public culture, low Bay Area rents and little money–all were very influential on the development of my writing.

 

LH: Was there a particular individual who stimulated you to start writing in this particularly innovative way, in which creating semantic “sense”–traditionally speaking–is not the primary artistic goal?

 

CH: Ron Sukenick, my instructor in college, would tell his students that W.H. Auden’s best poems were written for sound or liveliness, not sense. Did I agree with that assertion? Perhaps not–but the assertion itself interested me. With this statement, I became immediately taken with the idea of writing for something other than sense. I felt that sense was too limiting in regards to what writing could do. So I tried to find out how to produce writing in which the writing itself was foregrounded. The associative, memory-based logic of Victor Shklovsky’s A Sentimental Journey, which I read at this time, suggested to me that prose structures are actual thought. What fascinated me about the temporality of Shklovsky’s book was the fact that “free” association was not free. The “freedom” of the writing is bound to the problematic of degrees of freedom and un-freedom within human experience. I wanted to write something that had a kind of structural efficacy.

 

LH: Were you drawn to this kind of logic of association and “structural efficacy” within literature prior to this period–even as a child?

 

CH: When I was a little girl, I thought of writing as this kind of magical or sublime thing. I was interested in telling stories, but not stories about anything that was actually happening. I think I had the idea from a very young age that there was no reason to tell a story about an event already happening, that was already a “story.” I had a few friends who wanted to write or wrote novels, and I was fascinated by their ambition; but I wasn’t at all interested in the content of their books. I wanted to write what wasn’t there in front of me.

 
My mother used to recite Blake and Shakespeare over the ironing board. “Tyger, Tyger” was amazing and ironing was boring. When she wanted us to exit the car more quickly, she would say, “Out, out brief candle.” I liked the idea of being a brief candle, which translated into being swift. The associative concept always fascinated me.

 

LH: When you began studying literature seriously in high-school and college, what authors most appealed to you intellectually and artistically?

 

CH: John Ashbery and his work, The Skaters, showed me the wonder of surface. Later, a friend introduced me to Robert Creeley’s For Love. This book opened up another path of thought, that of digression. This was the year of odd encounters: Creeley, Wittig, Eluard, left French politics, depressive romances, and important friendships.

 

LH: Speak in more detail about these important friendships.

 

CH: My friendship with Steve [Benson] encouraged my latent interest in performance. Writing itself became, through Steve’s intervention, a kind of performance, especially in collaboration with other writers. The experience of on-the-spot invention, companionship, and edgy play at this time became important.

 
Barrett [Watten] was the “medium” through which I was introduced to the writing of Lyn [Hejinian], Bernadette Mayer, and Clark Coolidge. I can still see the manuscript pages of their works, as well as Lyn’s early letter-press production of A Bride Is the Thought of What Thinking, passed around in Barrett’s Potrero Hill apartment in San Francisco, where Erica Hunt and he were roommates for awhile. Erica, too, was an inspiring conversationalist. That was part of the culture of the times: poets talking.

 

LH: Describe the gender politics that affected you as an emerging writer during the late ’70s and early ’80s on the West Coast.

 

CH: There was certainly an open space for women writers, which I believe distinguishes our generation from earlier generations. But I think the critique of gender when it comes to “Language Poetry” has yet to be written. Megan Simpson’s Poetic Epistemologies was helpful to me in understanding the larger framework of the gender issue, because she works with a feminist perspective that also critiques identity politics. I found different registers of experience and knowledge unreconcilable at this time. Socially, I experienced an engagement with left politics and a kind of unity. But the kind of aesthetic practice I was involved with did not gel into a unity. I would say that writing within situations of contradiction was and remains an aspect of my work.

 

II. “A World of Subjects Who Think of Themselves as Historical in New Ways”

 

LH: Let’s turn the conversation to more theoretical-aesthetic concerns–beginning with the very terminology one might use for writing based in “situations of contradiction,” or a “difficult” writing. Such writing is often associated with the movements of “modernism” or “postmodernism.” Do you make a distinction between these movements and/or the terms, as do many critics of twentieth-century culture? These terms themselves seem to me a site of contradiction and contestation.

 

CH: Olsen’s relationship to modernity is vexed. Williams’s is progressively engaged. That’s an example of a difference. Recently, I was reading Brian McHale’s Postmodern Fiction. He claims that the “postmodern” in fiction is predominantly concerned with ontology, whereas “modernism” is predominantly concerned with epistemology. Lyn’s [Hejinian’s] writing on Stein, I think, would support this view.

 
However, in art-theory discourse, the two terms would be reversed. In the visual-theory world, I would say that most people think about “modernism” as ontologically situated and “postmodernism” as about epistemology. Yet, always upon closer scrutiny, one yields to the other–these terms are not easy to stabilize.
“Modernism,” as associated with modernity, gives of a world of subjects who think of themselves as historical in new ways. The modernist subject can make history. Also, history is not something that happened, that is happening, that is future oriented. The postmodern subject would have a more skeptical relationship to history, yes? What does that do for art?

 
I don’t really buy discussions that attempt to simplify these terms or to claim that postmodernism is really just late modernism. The artist’s intervention into periodization is very complex, because the present is always entailed. And the present also changes. And one must write in a present. We are living in a horrific new century under circumstances that perhaps one might have imagined but can only now experience. We now live in a time where citizens’ voices are not heard, where the truth is stonewalled at every turn, and lies and criminality in government prevail.

 

 

LH: I’m still interested in how you might use these terms, and how they would apply to your own writing. Some critics are using these terms “modern” and “postmodern” as a way of marking two distinct literary historical periods to the century; others are using them to mark aesthetic distinctions. For example, Stein, although she worked early in the twentieth-century and is historically associated with many “moderns,” was, in fact, textually a “postmodern”–based on her aesthetic breakthroughs, her experimentation with time, with the sentence.

 
Some critics have written about “modernism” as a period when there was this nostalgia for beauty, or the romantic sublime (but as nostalgia, not timely “presence”). I am fascinated by the way in which your own work takes on a kind of postmodern version of the sublime, as it confronts utopia. Since “utopia” actually means “nowhere” or “no place,” going back to Thomas More’s book title, utopia is always an ironic place, a place that can’t exist–a perfect (which is imperfect) postmodern world. Is there any form of modernist nostalgia in the utopias you work with? Take, for example, Gardener of Stars–there are you registering a desire for something lost, something better, connected to the sublime, in “nowhere,” as word and concept?

 

CH: Well, utopia means many things. It means “nowhere,” an impossibly remote place, an impossibly better world, an ideal world and so on. In modern art, the “nowhere” presented asks for completion, and this entails irony: completion is the end of utopia. I am interested in Ernst Bloch’s construction of the utopian emotion of hope, as he offers us a rich psychological and aesthetic reading of utopian desire. There are certainly utopian projects within modernism. I would include Stein and Breton in this.
For me, “nowhere” is a place to write into. It can be pretty bleak. Gardener of Stars conflates utopia and dystopia. I have been very interested in desire as a future-oriented feeling generated by negative situations. Its positive value is in the capacity to revise the future, not through closure or finitude. Gardener of Stars ends with a comment about the wrecked city becoming a promise: “rose thorns, slack wicker, and collapsing fences arranged the city into a promise.”

 

LH: On the issue of the terminology we use to define this new mode of writing in which you and other Language Poets are engaged, I read an interview a couple of years ago of Charles Bernstein, in which he called into question the term “experimental” in reference to avant-garde writing practices. Others, as well, have questioned the use of that term. Why is that word so problematic? Would you, too, like to see a better word for this new practice or building tradition? Kathleen Fraser, of course, has proposed the word “innovative,” and applied it specifically to many women’s avant-garde practices. I guess the real question is: how does one categorize writing that works against traditional forms or categories? How do you personally explain to people what you do?

 

CH: The word “experimental” has been disparaged by many people for many years. I understand why the term is disparaged. I also understand that in a world that has real literary divisions, the problem of how to cite what is non-mainstream–how to call that–is really problematic. People also complain about the term “avant-garde,” and suggest that this word, too, is bad, that it associates “experimentalism” with militarism. But didn’t Ghandi propose a peaceful army? I have been involved in an on-going project at Wayne State University in which we often use the word “new genre.” This term also has its limitations.
I was on faculty panels at the Naropa Institute a couple of times, and there were three or four boring statements by really wonderful poets about why they did not like the word “experimental.” I’m not sure the term is useful all the time, but it also sometimes seems rather like a straw horse. People get worked up about the relationship of language experiment to science experiment. The term “innovative,” I think, comes with less baggage–it doesn’t get people all nervous about “those experimentals.” But there’s also this other term used by writers like Kathy Acker: “the other tradition.” When Barrett was doing a reading of Acker’s work as it comes down through Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders [presented at New York University in the fall of 2002], he was writing a potential narrative for “the other tradition.” That’s an interesting construct which encompasses history–which isn’t simply about a current practice.

 

LH: Such a concept suggests that the kind of writing you do emerges from a solid if sometimes overlooked historical tradition. Is it possible that what some people call “postmodernism” is perhaps not historically isolated or unique–even if some contemporary readers feel “postmodern” experimentation is too difficult or opaque for them?

 

CH: Yes, absolutely. Going back to your first set of questions on origins: some of my literary sources are in Rabelais–or Jane Austen.

 

LH: Jane Austen?

 

CH: Yes, Jane Austen. Really important. She’s so funny.

 

LH: I agree that she’s unbelievably funny and very dry–the quintessential ironist. So many people don’t experience that reading of Jane Austen, the way the irony and wit are so embedded in the narrative that there’s actually no place to stand, although she manages to give this illusion of a realism in writing that became the nineteenth-century domestic novel or novel of psychological realism. In my opinion, Austen’s “realism” in an ontological universe doesn’t actually exist.

 

CH: No it doesn’t.

 

III. “Games are Interrogations of Restraint”

 

LH: I’m thinking of Austen as a figure of ironic surface and yet disciplined restraint. You have written about the aesthetic of “restraint” in the essay you wrote for the anthology Cynthia Hogue and I co-edited, We Who Love to Be Astonished; the essay took up “restraint” in work by Hejinian, Acker, as well as one of your performance pieces. Could you re-articulate here your concern with this aesthetic practice? How does “restraint” bear a relation to your own work, in particular?

 

CH: In the article, I try to explain that “constraint” would be any formal device that structures the writing of the work. A sonnet has rules, constraints. OuLiPo uses mathematical constraints. Hejinian uses constraints: in Writing as an Aid to Memory, the constraint was related to the alphabet. Restraint has to do with what holds the writing back from taking some other direction than the one it does take. So a restraint might have to do with what a device or constraint allows and disallows, with ideological limitations, with conceptual limitations, with choices.

 
In my writing for performance, I work with an open text, a text that is available to multiple interpretations and that, in fact, intensifies the capacity for performative work to be multiply interpreted. It requires both explication of the text and interpretive invention on the part of any ensemble. The work would not be similar production to production–ever. The limit, then, is that it can’t be reproduced: each production becomes a unique object.

 
In general, much of my work questions the given, the posited, not only from the outside but also in regard to the writing itself. There are a number of works that I would place in the category of games. Some of them have that formal designation, and some of these are part of a collaboration with a visual artist. I came up with the concept “games” when I was writing The Words: After Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories and Jean-Paul Sartre. Writing games have to do with references to conventional games, like board games and card games–but I’m also interested in conceptual games, political games, the games of hierarchy, other power games, language games, philosophical games, games of interpretations, and the game of the writing itself, which is a kind of performance game. Within any possible written game, a number of these kinds of games come into play. When they do, it’s as if the hand has been given. Then one sees how the hand is to be played. A relationship made to composition becomes then an important aspect of the game.

 
Perhaps the games are interrogation of restraints. The first restraint is the given in language. The next restraint is what results from breakaway moves. There are lots of breakaway moves, trying to resist restraint.

 

LH: I heard you read recently at St. Marks Poetry Project in New York, from your new work Baby. Going back again to this concept of “restraint,” explain to me how this form of textual resistance affects the “game,” so to speak, of this new work.

 

CH: You could apply the notion of restraint to any open text, to see what the bounded ideological conflict is in the work. What would I say about Baby? The world of Baby blends realistic representation and irreality. But I guess the family is the most overt restraint. Baby is determined by the family as an ideological construct. There is no Baby without the family.

 

LH: You mean the family body as social or figural?

 

CH: Both. They are played with and against each other. Baby may imply critique but it does not dismantle the family.

 

LH: In other words, the “Baby” you “play with,” so to speak, is a figure upon which we are to sit in judgment against the bourgeois or “nuclear” family?

 

CH: The family in Baby more closely resembles the biologically intertwined extended family. The tiger performs as a caregiver, a kind of metonymic object of caregiving that could be mother, grandmother, aunt–even “baby-sitter.” But all of these roles are predicated on family/biological relations. It’s the primary attachment that’s important within the baby/tiger world, as this attachment is projected imaginatively and discursively.

 

IV. “Narrative Itself is not One Thing”

 

LH: I’m fascinated with the way you bring together nature and culture in a non-dualistic way in Baby. Another kind of dualism that’s become fashionable in our critical language is narrative versus non-narrative, and the critique of narrative in general. Your own interest in narrative comes up again and again in your work.

 
I think you are doing something very interesting with narrative. In the tradition of meta-fiction, you are writing about representation itself. As you suggested earlier in your use of the “game,” you write “narrative fiction” that is not about plot and characterization at all, but about the making of something game-like in its narrative sequences. I’m thinking of your short prose piece, “Toy Boats.” There you raise the issue of narrative and the reality it attempts to create through representational objects. Quoting from “Toy Boats,” you write: “I prefer to distribute narrative rather than deny it.” Then the piece goes on to suggest that narrative is not a mode of writing that experimental writers should rid themselves of at all, but should use it accordingly.

 
I would say that this approach to narrative is very different from the “non-narrative,” or “anti-narrative,” stance taken on by many experimental poets, or, as so well articulated by the cinematic avant-garde, in the tradition of art-house films. But in Toy Boats, you seem to overcome this dualism about narrative. You suggest that we should use narrative as its own critic, as its own witness. As you write: “Narrative holds within its boundaries both its advantages and defects. It can demonstrate its own development as it mutates throughout history . . . in accomplishing its mutability, it achieves an ongoing existence.”

 
That all said, can you describe to me further what you meant by “mutability” in this statement? How do you imagine a subject’s relation to narrative?

 

CH: I don’t imagine a subject’s ideal relation to narrative. I also don’t feel at all prescriptive about narrative, and I don’t judge narrative or non-narrative negatively. I am very much engaged with non-narrative as well as with narrative: and that’s why I say, “I prefer to distribute narrative rather than deny it.”

 
Narrative as a hegemonic construct is overpowering. The concept that narrative is the basis for all communication is quite faulty, and the interventions of non-narrative in all artistic mediums are of paramount importance to me. And the construction of social power and narrative themselves are, of course, related. I wrote “Toy Boats” for the “Non/narrative” issue of Poetics Journal. Because I have always read in all of the genres without a sense of hierarchy, or exclusive identification with poetry, I have a response that is different from that of poets who have rejected narrative on ideological grounds. “Toy Boats” is engaged with critique related to the construct of narrative/non-narrative as binary. What continues to be an important engagement for me is the topic of narrative in the context of debates that polemically reject narrative.

 

And, conversely, I am concerned with questions of non-narrative within the pervasive contexts that reject or recoil from non-narrative.
Yet, narrative itself is not one thing, exactly. I like to think about how narrative structures work. I don’t collapse narrative into a single phenomenon at all. The critique of narrative in film may be related to but is not identical with this discussion.

 

LH: Laura Mulvey, in her seminal film essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” from the mid-’70s, made an argument for the importance of avant-garde rejections of narrative when she wrote that, in the classic narrative-film, “narrative demands a sadism.” She was studying Hollywood filmmakers like Hitchcock when she suggested that, in the traditional narrative film plot, someone has to get hurt, that there is a subject directing linear control over its object (often feminized in her account). Do you agree with any of these assumptions about classical narrative in film or literature?

 

CH: I met Mulvey briefly at a conference at Wayne State in 1990. When her essay came out, I was–as were many people–already involved with feminist-related questions concerning art making and the positioning of the feminine within various art contexts. The undoing of narrative, for me, is politically charged and it is a political project. But this process works in various registers, not necessarily consistent with one another, and not necessarily entirely under my control.

 
On this topic of narrative and sadism, which you also mention in your book, The Perverse Gaze of Sympathy, there is this possibility that the forced change narrative linearity demands is sadistic. I am not sure that the word “sadistic,” however, would satisfy all transformative events within the linearity of narrative. “The forced change” can be seen from multiple perspectives.

 
For example, in my piece “Fairy Tale,” which is a fantasy about Bush No. 1’s Iraq War and one of my more straightforward narrative works, the story is about the ideology of apocalypse. A child considers–is she “forced” to consider?–the meaning of “the end of the world.” What causes her to consider the meaning of the phrase is, on the one hand, the destruction she’s experiencing, and, on the other, the lying and duplicity she experiences from the outside. She is subordinated by the splitting narratives, “right and wrong,” “good and bad,” of American warmonger discourse. Since morality is not moral, but simply an aspect of war implementation, she has to come to terms with the hideousness of apocalyptic ideology, its ability to control people through fear and to permit violence. The utterance “the end of the world” produces “the end of the world” within her mentality, and the story shows us something about how this phrase helps produce the denial of the violence of the present, which, for some people, is “the end of the world.”

 
I would say, if we were to use the word “sadism” in regards to this story, that the sadism is what the story represents as the real world. It is the violence of capital that has visited itself on the girl. But the girl is represented not simply as a victim. She is represented as a thinking and perceiving person who has been given a set of problems to solve. The solutions or mandates of the problems, however, do not lead anywhere except to the fact of existence. This fact of existence is inscribed within the fairy tale that doesn’t end (all the terms of the tale have to be understood to end), and is directed toward that in the world which denies the fact of existence of real people whose existence is denied and wrongly interpolated for propaganda purposes to justify government-mandated violence.

 

V. “I Was Examining the Language as Material, for its Plastic Values”

 

LH: I have been struck by these issues of narrative in your work as best articulated, for me, by film rather than literary theory. I feel there is something about your work–perhaps the performance quality, and also the awareness of the visual–that is potentially cinematic. What do you feel is your own work’s relation to cinema, or the theories behind perhaps some of the art-house or experimental cinema?

 

CH: Let me digress and offer again a bit of literary biography. Throughout the ’70s, I was working very actively with the sentence and the paragraph. But I also worked a bit with the line, and that work with the line actually was, in several instances, quite influenced by my viewing of experimental film. The poem “Obstacle,” published in my first book Percentage, for example, was dedicated to the filmmaker Warren Sonbert, because it was written in the dark of a movie house in the Mission District of San Francisco while I was watching his film, Divided Loyalties.

 
My poem was concerned with this work I was doing on sentences and paragraphs. I was examining the language as material, for its plastic values, and I was interrogating meaning making within literary, performance, conceptual, and visual-arts contexts. “Heavy Curtains,” also included in Percentage, is a collaboration I wrote with Barrett as we watched a television show. Around the time that I began working with narrative and non-narrative trajectories–and in addition to my engagement with visual art of the ’60s and ’70s–I became acquainted with the works of Brakhage and also numerous early twentieth-century films.

 
LH: You seem to value theory, both about language and about the visual arts. You even write theory yourself. What do you value most about theory, and how might you be using theory in your “fictive” work?

 

CH: I guess I am interested in the problem of the artist conversing with the theorist, as well as the problem of art being positioned in relationship to theoretical constructs. This does not mean that I am “anti-theory.” But there is generally, in my work, a tension between the artist and the theorist.
Butler’s Gender Trouble is of great value to me theoretically; her theorizing of gender with respect to performativity is very important. But what she sees and represents as performative is very restrictive in regards to what is made in art.

 

LH: How might performativity be particularly central to many contemporary women writers like yourself?

 

CH: I find performativity as an important generative for women writers–excuse this peculiar map–from Gertrude Stein to Toni Morrison to Gloria Anzaldúa, to emerging writers like Laura Elrick and Redell Olsen. The performative isn’t some kind of exclusive domain of a particular gender. But within the context of gender, and with an emphasis on the woman writer, through the performative, one can find generative interpretation as well as an analytic system.
I suppose that I am very anti-prescriptive with respect to approaches to the aesthetic. And I am so engaged with the problems of difference that I truly resist theoretical projects that try to mandate the aesthetic.

 

VI. “Writing Can Be a Conversation with Oneself, with Another, with Many”

 

LH: Do you imagine for yourself a specific or ideal audience? Do you gender that audience? What kind of reader–from what strategic social positioning–do you see when you write? Do you imagine multiple readers, or someone specific?

 

CH: I don’t imagine an ideal audience. I may have an audience–but take away the word “ideal.” Writing can be a conversation with oneself, with another, with many. And those in the conversation can come and go. Another can invite oneself into their place, language, mentality. Writing can be drawn to or attracted by another. In addition to this contingency of the audience–whom the work appears for–art is an aspect of appearance itself.

 
On one hand, the audience for the artwork is a function of the art work–even an aspect of it. On the other hand, the art work is constituted by the audience. The audience can thus be “Nobody.” Let us consider “Nobody” to be an idea which can gravitate toward non-existence or toward colloquialism: i.e., I’m just a nobody. The writing is constructed through the identification with the “non-” in a certain way. Activity of composition may require the negation of identity. I do not write for you because I can anticipate that or how you will respond to something, but because you might respond but in a manner that I cannot fully anticipate. Writing is the appearance of thinking, but of course thinking doesn’t exist in a free form. Nor does the audience. This is what I know, what writing knows, what the audience knows of writing.

 
I could be a writer who knows what I write for, for what purpose. That purpose might be to instruct and to entertain. That purpose might be to encourage a question. That purpose might be to interject a proposition into the intellectual sphere that places key assumptions about the nature of literature or society. Does the audience identify with the imagined purpose, and then the writer writes for the audience’s identification with such an imagined purpose?

 
One might say that Baby is motivated by a proposition such as: there is a baby in each of us. But this baby in each of us may also be a maguffin. If the word “baby,” in each of us, is really an appearance of a non-existent something (word and not word), a nothing, or a nobody, then there is an idea of a baby in each of us that is not a baby. There is an x in each of us that might arouse an aspiration to be or to know or to respond to “baby.” There is also the proposition that to “know” baby is not to know baby as a narrative about babies. We are looking to understand that baby who interacts with environments, who is constituted by and intervenes in the environments–because we want to understand the volatility of human nature, its libidinous aspects and its social meanings, and its ability to address problems positively as well as to reflect problems negatively.

 
So consider this and then the question of the audience. The audience is a baby, or one who would like to engage with the “baby” proposition, or who is interested in the way in which the word baby elicits responses that position baby differently. Yet one also assumes a positive identification with the grammar and logics of baby: I pee, you pee, baby pees. I think, you think, baby thinks. If baby thinks what I think ,then a baby might think . . . what you think. What do you think?

 
I do imagine that somebody will not want to read Baby; in its own baroque fashion, it might produce some kind of anxiety about maturity or masculinity or gender identity, for “baby” proposes, perhaps, another gender, even as baby goes by “she.”

 

VII. “The Ensemble Inhabits Something Already Given”

 

LH: Let’s turn to your work in poet’s theater. Much of your most important work over the years has been accomplished in direct engagement with actual present audiences, through the performance-poet’s experience with the stage. A few years ago, you debuted your piece Performing Objects Stationed in the Sub World, first in Detroit and then in San Francisco. I was very fortunate to have been able to attend the San Francisco premiere. I found it very exciting, original, engaging–and also professionally produced and performed. Would you talk about when you first developed this particular theatrical work, and how it might connect to the last decade of your life spent living in Detroit?

 

CH: The work was originally written for a poetry colloquium organized by Romana Huk at Oxford-Brookes University in the spring of 2001. In a two-three day period, I directed a staged reading with Cris Cheek, Miles Champion, Cole Heinowicz, Redell Olsen, and myself, all performing the roles of the performing objects. The reading was really what Jim Cave, the director I worked with on the later San Francisco performance, calls a “demonstration.” We were demonstrating performance approaches to and performative functions of the text.

 
The work was performed in an abbreviated form as a demonstration, again, in San Francisco in the winter of 2002, under the direction of Jim Cave at the first annual Poet’s Theater jubilee co-sponsored by New Langton Arts and Small Press Traffic. At this point, a number of the principal collaborators for the 2003 San Francisco performance were assembled.

 
In the meantime, Zeitgeist Theater in Detroit produced the play, directed by John Jakary. Zeitgeist is a small avant-garde theater space that produces some plays by local playwrights while it focuses on the European avant-garde: Jarry, Becket, Ionesco. In many respects the Zeitgeist Theater was an exceptional venue for the play, especially as the text was inspired by living in Detroit.

 
Many people have fantasies about Detroit: the weeds growing in the abandoned parking lots signify a return to nature. Or it is the most violent and horrible city in the United Sates. Or it is the most segregated city in the country.

 
Detroit is a majority black-populated city. This does not make it the most segregated city in the country. This is a concept difficult for Media America to grasp. It does mean that, in fairly specific ways, Detroit is undercapitalized: the people of the city have significantly less economic power than they require to develop the political base that would be most advantageous to them.

 
What interested me about Detroit, as it developed in Performing Objects, was the life of what I call the sub world. The sub world does not correspond to any rigid or fixed notions of this part of the world. At the same time, the sub world is predicated on fantasies about and ideological projections of Detroit, while working within the elided social spaces between city and suburb that Detroit techno has so brilliantly conceptualized. In order to live in Detroit, one must live in a sub world; but one also must live in the above/the dominant world. The sub world in Detroit refuses fixed definitions and social rigidity: and everybody knows this world. It’s where you have fun, it’s where things get made, it’s where rigid narratives about race relations and social uplift have no hold, it’s where things get sexy, it’s where life happens: it is not, however, the same thing as a subculture, because the mainstream culture and activity of the sub world variously interpenetrate.

 
The text references various genres–from the lyric poem, to lyrics, to fairy tales and documentary, and other inter-genre stuff. It is a fragmentary work that, in performances, is meant to be seamed together through the discovered rhythm of the performance: the ensemble inhabits something already given (the text and the referential spaces determined by the text) and it constructs its own relationship to what’s already given; it makes its own space.

 
In Detroit, the play was directed in a more traditional fashion than it was in San Francisco. John Jakary made a plan and rehearsed the performers based on his plan. But the performers were also performing something that they recognized as being about where they were, and the performance reflected this sense of familiarity.

 

LH: Speak more about this space you call a “sub world.”

 

CH: In a way, the sub world is a kind of refuge. People in Detroit have their refuge–in some sense, you can’t live without it. It is also a critique of the way in which “refuge” might reproduce hegemonic structures and narratives. Detroit is antagonistic, for often very good reasons, toward outsiders’ views of it. It is also xenophobic: it doesn’t like geographic outsiders, and expects to be misunderstood and betrayed by them. The play in its construction of the sub world undercuts the xenophobic aspects of Detroit culture.

 
In addition to this interest in the sub world as I learned it by living and working around and in Detroit, I became interested in the phenomenon of the suburbs and the way in which my current experience of suburbs intersected with my childhood life. There is something quite compatible between my rural/suburban childhood and the family and sub world cultures of contemporary Detroit. This was recognized–quite sensitively, I feel–by the Detroit ensemble. And the play took on a very particular kind of familiar working-class backyard feeling under Jakary’s direction.

 
LH: So how did the Detroit production evolve into the production I saw at the LAB in San Francisco? How did city/geography change the performance values?

 

CH: During the Detroit performance, both Jim Cave and Amy Trachtenberg–the visual artist who eventually collaborated on the San Francisco production–came out to see the play. Even though the San Francisco production was radically different from the Detroit production, the Detroit production and the future collaborators’ visit to Detroit had a significant impact on the 2003 production at the LAB, including that I was able to invite a Detroit actress, Walonda Lewis, out to San Francisco for that production of the piece.

 
The dynamics of cross cultural relations within the Bay Area and Detroit are quite different, and this is something I wanted the Bay Area people to recognize. I wanted to widen the discursive, narrative, ideological space in which intercultural relations were experienced by the performers. Or, another way of saying this is: I didn’t want them to feel locked into pre-given assumptions that could limit what they might do with the work.

 
This inter-city conferencing was so exciting to me that I am now embarking on a quite ambitious, six-day project that involves bringing people from the Bay Area and Detroit together at the Susanne Hilberry Gallery in Ferndale, Michigan, in August to work on another performance piece, Mirror Play.³

 

LH: I was impressed with the way in which Performing Objects not only was a work of poetry as performed in a theater space, but also hybridically invaded, so to speak, by so many other forms of art. The script itself had this feel or mood of a great Shakespeare comedy, without the same kind of scene-making. It also brought together music and visual art: you composed some lovely pieces that were brilliantly sung by Ken Berry, and you worked in collaboration with Trachtenberg, a wonderful visual artist, on the costumes and sets–the latter of which looked like a conceptual-art installation project in the semi-round of the theatrical space. You also collaborated as director with Cave. Can you speak a bit more of the collaborative experience of this project, and its infusion of poetry, theater, music, and visual art?

 

CH: Lots of theater uses the elements you identify, but my work is not purely theater in the conventional sense. As in the writing, there is an inter-generic property: here I would say it is marked by the crossover of experimental theater and performance, and conceptual art. Performance here is not genre-directed, so much as it is a signal of promise within conditions of what might be called a certain postmodern distress.

 
Unlike the work of Joan Jonas of the conceptual installation art movement, or early Meredith Monk in the world of dance, or Laurie Anderson, who works with electronic media and recorded narrative–all of whom have worked with multiple media in performance in non-traditional/theatrical modes–my work takes a complex text, based in multiple genres that is linguistically self-reflexive, as the initial site of the work: so language/writing is the point of departure and what must be actively sustained to realize the performance itself. If the value of the work is first language, then it is important for me that the language of the visual is intensified as such, that the visual is not an illustration of language but a language in its own terms. This would, in most cases, be true with music as well–although in this particular piece, the music was cast in a more supporting role than it was in the 1989 production of my performance work, There Is Nothing Better Than a Theory, or in my current piece, Mirror Play, which will involve layers of sound, music, noise.

 

VIII. “What Makes the Work Good has Everything to do with Who is Involved in It”

 

LH: Can you discuss the value of process versus final product as you write–and also say more on the issue of collaboration so essential to your process as an artist?

 

CH: Process for me is extremely important. I have an open relationship to process. I set no value on regulating the duration of the development of a work. Something might take one week or three years to realize. Something that takes three years might turn out to have been most interesting to me at some earlier phase. This is the way an artist or poet thinks, not the way someone in repertory theater thinks. My works are well made because their realization requires that they be well made and I do not have a fixed value for what that means. What makes the work “good” has everything to do with who is involved in it as well as with the conceptual approaches to the text and the collaboration process.

 

LH: Indeed, you have worked steadily over the years with a number of fine poets and artists. How has the process of collaboration itself been most recently important to the multi-media nature of Performing Objects?

 

CH: I have been collaborating in various modes with Amy [Trachtenberg] since 1991. There are other visual artists I have worked with and am currently working with in performance and in interdisciplinary collaboration. But Amy has been my closest visual arts collaborator over time. Jim [Cave] is also someone I have worked with as a director–and continue to work with–as well as Erling Wold, who wrote the music for the song lyrics, and who was the composer for the 1995-2005 chamber opera project that brought all of us together as a team for the first time.

 
The “demonstration” of Performing Objects presented at the Poet’s Theater Jubilee at California College of the Arts in 2002 was a sketch. It brought together a number of people who remained in the piece, and it provided a basis for further discussion about the realization of the work. The style of the sketch was somewhat slapstick, which was interesting as a way to bring out the contrast between those aspects of the work that could conceivably lend themselves to that kind of humor, and the more lyric and melancholic aspects of the work.

 
In the summer of 2002, when I was an artist-in-residence at the San Francisco LAB preparing the performance, I began looking at the piece from a completely different angle. I invited both trained performers and Bay Area poets to come in and work on the piece, and, in effect, to take it apart. Both Amy and Jim participated in some of the rehearsals: Amy came into the space and took notes; Jim observed my approaches to cacophony and then came back with shaping responses. My job was to explore collective vocalic and spatial approaches to the work, which would open up the work and ways of working for Jim, as director. I also wanted to hear the piece and find out how performers responded to it–and each other–in an open and improvisatory situation. Outside the practice space of the LAB, Jim and Amy and I had on-going discussions about the relationship of language to performance and to mise-en-scène. In working collaboratively in this way, the visual ideas of the artist influenced the directing of the play.

 
In the summer of 2003, I returned to San Francisco. Actually, I commuted back and forth while living part-time in Detroit, and there were occasions as the rehearsals got underway when I wasn’t there. This is another aspect of collaboration: I didn’t want to have too much control over the piece, and I wanted to give Jim plenty of space to play around with it on his own. I find this detachment on my end works very well, because changing the process and focus from time to time leaves room for new things to happen.

 
Amy really knew how to work with the total space of the raw gallery as the sub world itself. Now Amy and I are considering putting together a lecture on collaboration. Jim responded brilliantly to the givens of the space so that there weren’t any dead spots. This is something we discussed a lot in collaboration on the piece: keeping the space alive.

 

LH: In conclusion, how might collaboration continue to be the basis for your writing–and its performative structure? Can you comment on process and collaboration in your latest performance work, Mirror Play?

 

CH: My latest performance work is written as a “mirror” of Performing Objects. The space of what was the sub world is now a foyer, so architectural concept has replaced the social structure concept of the sub world. But each of these concepts “mirrors” the other. In Mirror Play, the one room is also a site within “one world.” Any “body” in the world can enter or not the space of the one room. The question is: what’s happened to the house?

 
As I have conceived its relationship to media now, Mirror Play stresses language, sound, and music–at least, that’s where I’m beginning with it. Initially, I had conceived of Mirror Play as a poly-vocal piece for one performer: I liked the idea of one performer working with multiple voices within the conceptual anti-chamber space. However, that one immediately turned into two as I felt that an instrumental voice needed to be an aspect of the speaking voice. I started working with Jon Raskin, developing the piece for spoken voice (mine) and jaw harps. Now the poly-vocality is being extended to many voices and more instruments. I am about to embark on a six day experiment in developing the work at the Susanne Hilberry Gallery near Detroit, and I have gathered people from San Francisco and Detroit to work on the piece then. We’ll see what happens and go from there.

 

Notes

 

1. Silliman was the first writer, to my knowledge, to use the term “inter-genre” to describe this new style of poet’s prose that forms a conceptual-poetry critique of bourgeois realism. See his “Introduction” to In the American Tree.

 

2. These constraints are different from but related to the technique of “restraint” about which Harryman has written and about which she comments in the Interview.

 

3. Mirror Play was performed at the Susanne Hilberry Gallery in August 2005–Ed.

 

Works Cited

 

• Armantrout, Rae. “Feminist Poetics and the Meaning of Clarity.” Sagetrieb 11.3 (1992). Rpt. in Artifice of Indeterminacy.Ed. Christopher Beach. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1998: 287-96.
• Harryman, Carla. Animal Instincts: Prose, Plays, Essays. Berkeley: This Press, 1989.
• —. Baby. Brookline: Adventures in Poetry 2005.
• —. Gardener of Stars. Berkeley: Atelos, 2001.
• —. “Parallel Play.” The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood. Eds. Patricia Dienstfrey and Brenda Hillman. Welseyan UP, 2003.
• —. Percentage. Berkeley: Tuumba Press, 1979.
• —. Performing Objects Stationed in the Subworld. Workshop performances at the Zeitgeist Theater, Detroit, MI, and at Oxford Brooks University, Oxford, England (2001); full-length interdisciplinary performance at the LAB, San Francisco (2003).
• —. “Rules and Restraints in Women’s Experimental Writing.” We Who Love to Be Astonished: Experimental Women’s Writing and Performance Art. Eds. Laura Hinton and Cynthia Hogue. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2002: 116-24.
• —. There Never Was a Rose without a Thorn. San Francisco: City Lights, 1995.
• —. The Words after Carla Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories and Jean-Paul Sartre. Oakland: O Press, 1999.
• Hirsch, Marianne, and Evelyn Fox Keller, eds. Conflicts in Feminism. New York: Routledge, 1990.
• Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Post Townsend: Bay, 1988: 111-125.
• Lorber, Judith. Breaking the Bowls: Degendering and Feminist Change. New York: Norton, 2005.
• Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1984.
• Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16.3 (1975): 6-18.
• Nicolson, Linda J., ed. Feminism/Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1990.
• Owens, Craig. “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism.” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Post Townsend: Bay, 1988: 57-77.
• Silliman, Ron, ed. In the American Tree. Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 1986.
• Simpson, Megan. Poetic Epistemologies: Gender and Knowing in Women’s Language-Oriented Writing. Albany: SUNY 2000.
• Stroffolino, Chris. “Carla Harryman.” Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol 193. Ed. Joseph Conte. 171-79.

 

Ben Roberts

Media Studies
University of Bradford
b.l.roberts@bradford.ac.uk

Between Derrida and Stiegler

 

In his massive multi-volume work, Technics and Time, Bernard Stiegler explores a history of technics as epiphylogenesis–the preservation in technical objects of epigenetic experience. Epiphylogenesis marks for Stiegler a break with genetic evolution (which cannot preserve the lessons of experience), a break which also constitutes the “invention” of the human. As Stiegler puts it in the general introduction to Technics and Time, “as a ‘process of exteriorization,’ technics is the pursuit of life by means other than life” (17).

 

Since the “human” is constituted through its exteriorization in tools, its origin is neither biological (a particular arrangement of cells) nor transcendental (to be found in something like consciousness). The origin of the human as the prosthesis of the living is therefore fundamentally aporetic: one should speak, for Stiegler, of a non-origin or default of origin.¹ Stiegler develops these arguments through a reading of Rousseau and Leroi-Gourhan, showing on the one hand how the empirical approach of the paleo-anthropologist cannot avoid the transcendental question of origin and, on the other, how Rousseau’s transcendental account of the question of origin inscribes inside its account, despite itself, the thought of the human as contingent or accidental (Technics 82-133).

 

I will not expand on Stiegler’s reading of Leroi-Gourhan and Rousseau here. What I intend to discuss is rather the relationship between Stiegler’s work and that of Jacques Derrida. In particular I will examine Stiegler’s discussion of Derrida in the latter half of the first volume of Technics and Time and then move on to discuss the interviews between the two men gathered in the Echographies collection. I will demonstrate significant differences in their respective theoretical approaches and show how these arise in part from problems in Stiegler’s reading of Derrida.

 

The context of Stiegler’s disagreement with Derrida in the first volume of Technics and Time is the discussion in chapter 3 of the paleo-anthropologist Leroi-Gourhan and the “invention of the human.” At the opening of the chapter Stiegler argues:

 

We are considering a passage: a passage to what is called the human. Its "birth," if there is one . . . . To ask the question of the birth of the human is to pose the question of the "birth of death" or of the relation to death. But at stake here will be the attempt to think, instead of the birth of the human qua entity relating to its end, rather its invention or even its embryonic fabrication or conception, and to attempt this independently of all anthropologism. (135)

 

Here then is the place of Leroi-Gourhan in Stiegler: the chance to understand the emergence of the human in a non-“anthropologistic” manner. The key to this approach is the role Leroi-Gourhan assigns to technics in the evolution of the human. For Leroi-Gourhan, the evolution of the human–unlike that of animals–is not only a question of the evolution of a biological entity but also, crucially for Stiegler, the evolution of technical objects (or “organized inorganic matter” as Stiegler has it). Thus Leroi-Gourhan opens up the possibility of an understanding of the human as no longer simply either a biological entity or a biological entity with some transcendental quality (consciousness, free will, etc.) added to it. Unfortunately, for Stiegler, Leroi-Gourhan cannot quite deliver on the promise of a non-anthropologistic or non-anthropocentric account of the human. For although Leroi-Gourhan has an account of the process of hominization as the exteriorization of the human in its tools, he still requires what Stiegler calls the “artifice of a second origin” in order to account for the passage from “technical” to “creative” consciousness.

 

What lies behind this failure is an inability to understand the origin of the human not merely as obscure but as fundamentally aporetic. For the exteriorization of the human into technics–writing, tools and so on–raises a fundamental aporia of origin: “The paradox is to have to speak of an exteriorization without a preceding interior: the interior is constituted in exteriorization” (Technics 141). It is at this point, in order to elucidate this aporetic structure, that Stiegler calls on Derridean différance:

 

The ambiguity of the invention of the human, that which holds together the who and the what, binding them while keeping them apart, is différance . . . Différance is neither the who nor the what, but their co-possibility, the movement of their mutual coming-to-be, of their coming into convention. The who is nothing without the what and conversely. Différance is below and beyond the who and the what; it poses them together, a composition engendering the illusion of an opposition. The passage is a mirage: the passage of the cortex into flint, like a mirror proto-stage. (141)

 

For Stiegler only différance as a structure of differing and deferral without origin can describe this aporetic relationship between interior and exterior that is the “human.” Différance, here the co-possibility of the who and the what, is what makes possible the who and the what, “below and beyond” them as Stiegler puts it, and as such is what make possible the non-origin or what he calls here the “proto-mirage” of the human. However, the status of this passage is problematic, and it is what is at stake in Stiegler’s dispute with Derrida. On the one hand, this emergence or passage is a “mirage,” “aporetic” or “paradoxical.” The tool, the “work in flint,” is no more an effect or product of the human being than the human is an effect or product of the appearance of flint tools. On the other hand, something, however “aporetic” it may be, happens, “is accomplished” or commences, and is this “beginning of ‘exteriorization.’” Put otherwise: what happens, what is suspended inside these quotation marks may remain paradoxical or aporetic, but that it happens, that there is a “passage” is not in question. For Stiegler this passage is crucial because it marks the emergence of what he calls from the beginning of Technics and Time “organized inorganic matter,” “the prosthesis of the human” or what he will later call, in relation to the discussion of Husserl, “tertiary memory.” It is precisely this passage that, for Stiegler, is “remaining to be thought” in Derrida’s work.

 

This point seems to be demonstrated most clearly for Stiegler in Derrida’s own reading of Leroi-Gourhan in the chapter of Of Grammatology entitled “Of Grammatology as a Positive Science,” and in particular in the following passage, which, since it seems to mark such a crucial point of distinction between Stiegler and Derrida, I quote at length:

 

Leroi-Gourhan no longer describes the unity of man and the human adventure thus by the simple possibility of the graphie in general; rather as a stage or an articulation in the history of life--of what I have called différance--as the history of the grammè. Instead of having recourse to the concepts that habitually serve to distinguish man from other living beings (instinct and intelligence, absence or presence of speech, of society, of economy, etc. etc.), the notion of program is invoked. It must of course be understood in the cybernetic sense, but cybernetics is itself intelligible only in terms of a history of the possibilities of the trace as the unity of a double movement of protention and retention. This movement goes far beyond the possibilities of the "intentional consciousness." It is an emergence that makes the grammè appear as such (that is to say according to a new structure of nonpresence) and undoubtably makes possible the emergence of systems of writing in the narrow sense. Since "genetic inscription" and the "short programmatic chains" regulating the behaviour of the amoeba or the annelid up to the passage beyond alphabetic writing to the orders of the logos and of a certain homo sapiens, the possibility of the grammè structures the movement of its history according to rigorously original levels, types and rhythms. But one cannot think them without the most general concept of the grammè. That is irreducible and impregnable. If the expression ventured by Leroi-Gourhan is accepted, one could speak of a "liberation of memory," of an exteriorization always already begun but always larger than the trace which, beginning from the elementary programs of so-called "instinctive" behaviour up to the constitution of electronic card-indexes and reading machines, enlarges différance and the possibility of putting in reserve: it at once and in the same movement constitutes and effaces so-called conscious subjectivity, its logos, and its theoretical attributes. (84)

 

Now, from Stiegler’s point of view, the important point here in Derrida’s reading of Leroi-Gourhan is that the exteriorization of the human into tools or graphical marks is only a stage in différance as the “history of life” in general. Thus Derrida emphasizes the continuity of the “notion of program” from “genetic inscription” up to and beyond alphabetic writing. The possibility of the gramme as program is prior to any particular type of program, be it genetic or nongenetic, and even if one must pay attention in the history of the gramme to “rigorously original levels, types and rhythms,” Derrida insists that “one cannot think them without the most general concept of the gramme. That is irreducible and impregnable.”

 

Stiegler’s response seems to be as follows:

 

Différance is the history of life in general, in which an articulation is produced, a stage of différance out of which emerges the possibility of making the gramme as such, that is, "consciousness," appear. The task here will be to specify that stage . . . . The passage from the genetic to the nongenetic is the appearance of a new type of gramme and/or program. If the issue is no longer that of founding anthropos in the pure origin of itself, the origin of its type must still be found. (Technics 137-38)

 

Thus even if Derrida is right in thinking that the notion of program in Leroi-Gourhan challenges all the traditional distinctions that mark the difference and origin of the human, of anthropos, it is nonetheless the case that with the human we see the emergence of a new type of program, and that new type of program is exactly what Technics and Time, in its understanding of technics as the prosthesis of the human, is concerned with. For Stiegler it is crucial therefore to distinguish genetic evolution from the non-genetic evolution which he calls epiphylogenesis and which involves the evolution not of the biological entity which is the human being, but of the technical supports in which the human’s epigenetic experience is preserved and accumulated.

 

For Stiegler it is the significance of epiphylogenesis, or the fact that Dasein “becomes singular in the history of the living,” that Derrida fails to think. This is not simply because différance, which Stiegler establishes, on the basis of the quote from Of Grammatology, as the “history of life in general” is not developed far enough to have an account of the specificity of epiphylogensis which Stiegler is outlining, but also, curiously, because Derrida’s arguments about différance are for Steigler in some sense inconsistent with themselves. After quoting at length the passage from the essay “Différance” on the temporal and spatial dimensions of the French verb différer, Stiegler comments as follows:

 

All of this points primarily to life in general: there is time from the moment there is life, whereas Derrida also writes, just before the Leroi-Gourhan quotation [i.e., the passage from Of Grammatology cited above], that "the trace is the différance that opens appearing and the signification (which articulates) the living onto the non-living in general, (which is) the origin of all repetition." To articulate the living onto the nonliving, is that not already a gesture from after the rupture when you are already no longer in pure phusis? There is something of an indecision about différance: it is the history of life in general, but this history is (only) given (as) (dating from) after the rupture, whereas the rupture is, if not nothing, then at least much less than what the classic divide between humanity and animality signifies. The whole problem is that of the economy of life in general, and the sense of death as the economy of life once the rupture has taken place: life is, after the rupture, the economy of death. The question of différance is death. (139, translation slightly modified)

 

In other words, it is incoherent for différance to constitute both “the history of life in general” and the specific stage in the history of life–which Stiegler associates with the invention of the human and technics as epiphylogenesis–when the living is articulated upon “the non-living in general,” i.e., upon inorganic organized matter.

 

However, one might wonder if it is not because Stiegler is himself operating from within such a rigorous distinction between phusis and tekhne that he is able to convince himself that it is only after the “rupture” of the technical that death is the economy of life. For Stiegler it is only after such a rupture, i.e., “the invention of the human,” that the trace articulates the living on the non-living in general. It is only at this point that the evolution of a particular living being (the human) becomes bound up with the evolution of something that is not living, that is, what Stiegler calls “inorganic organized matter,” in the form of tools, writing and so on. But there is no reason to suppose that Derrida is working with the same set of assumptions when he talks of the possibility of the gramme embracing not only alphabetic writing but also “genetic inscription.” Indeed it seems to be clearly the case that Derrida is precisely challenging such a classical set of distinctions (which is what they are, for the opposition between epigenesis and epiphylogenesis only reproduces in a different form the more traditional opposition between nature and culture). It would seem perfectly reasonable for Derrida to argue that genetic inscription is a species of the gramme precisely because genetics does indeed articulate the living upon the non-living in general: the DNA of a biological entity binds it to its non-living ancestors just as much as their written or technical legacy; genetic codes preserve the legacy of the nonliving in the living in a way that is analogous to (though obviously not the same as) alphabetic writing. Moreover it is not immediately obvious why genetic evolution should be regarded simply as an “economy of life,” when death and genetic non-survival are in part the criteria of selection: genetics, it might be argued, is equiprimordially an economy of life and an economy of death. It is only if one thinks, like Stiegler, that there is first an economy of life, then a rupture that coincides with the arrival of the human, and that then, as he argues above, “life is, after the rupture, the economy of death,” that one is forced to regard genetic inscription as in some way rigorously distinct from all later forms of–no doubt, “epiphylogenetic”–inscription.

 

In part the problem here is Stiegler’s attachment to the category of “organized inorganic matter” and to the assumption that the organic/inorganic distinction maps in a straightforward, unproblematic manner onto the distinction between living and nonliving that Derrida invokes with respect to the trace. In fact, Stiegler often takes inorganic (inorganique) and non-living (non-vivant) to be simply synonymous.² In other words, he reads the “non-living in general” of the passage from Of Grammatology as solely consisting of a very specific form of non-living he associates with inorganic matter. Having construed Derrida’s thinking of the trace in this manner, Stiegler is then puzzled why Derrida isn’t more interested in the relationship between organic and inorganic matter (living and non-living), and more specifically why he isn’t more interested in the “rupture” of the human which Stiegler understands, as we have seen, as the point at which the evolution of the living becomes bound up with a relation to the non-living in the form of tools. Stiegler therefore makes the mistake of assuming that the trace requires one to think of this new category of organized inorganic matter when in fact the trace challenges (without erasing) the very categorical distinctions on which Stiegler is relying. Indeed precisely what makes the trace, or the idea of the gramme as program, radical is that it exists on either side of Stiegler’s imagined rupture and therefore challenges both the opposition between nature and culture and “the name of man.” As Beardsworth comments:

 

The risk Stiegler runs in differentiating the historical epochs of arche-writing, and in thinking them in terms of technical supplementarity, is precisely that of considering technicity in the exclusively exteriorized terms of technics which befit the process of hominization . . . The major theses in Technics and Time according to which the technical object represents a third kind of being . . . that hominization emerges through the technical suspension of genetic, and that, therefore, the human lives through means other than life . . . all such theses, while brilliantly articulated by Stiegler in their own terms, end up having the following somewhat ironic consequence: biological life prior to, or in its difference from anthropogenesis is removed from the structure of originary technicity; as a result biology is naturalized and the differentiation of technicity qua technics is only considered in its exteriorized form in relation to processes of hominization. ("Thinking Technicity" 81)

 

It might seem that it is not so much Derrida’s account of différance that is confused as Stiegler’s reading of it. This point can be illustrated by Stiegler’s reading of a different passage about différance, a passage this time drawn from the essay “Différance”:

 

Thus one could consider all the pairs of opposites on which philosophy is constructed and on which our discourse lives, not in order to see opposition erase itself but to see what indicates that each of the terms must appear as the différance of the other, as the other different and deferred in the economy of the same (the intelligible as differing-deferring the sensible, as the sensible different and deferred; the concept as different and deferred, differing-deferring intuition; culture as nature different and deferred, differing-deferring; all the others of physis-tekhne, nomos, thesis, society, freedom, history, mind etc.--as physis different and deferred, or as physis differing and deferring. Physis in différance . . . ). (Margins 17)

 

Having cited a section of this passage, Stiegler comments: “Now phusis as life was already différance. There is an indecision, a passage remaining to be thought” (Technics 139). What he seems to mean is that différance cannot be simultaneously “the history of life in general” (the definition from Of Grammatology which Stiegler is taking here to be synonymous with “the history of phusis in general”)³ and the differing-deferring of phusis and tekhne which Stiegler assumes can only be the case after the “rupture” of the technical. But it is clear from this passage that Derrida sees the thought of différance as that which first of all challenges the philosophical opposition between phusis and tekhne, establishing them as “different and deferred in the economy of the same.” It is not surprising therefore that Derrida does not have an account of the invention of the human as a “rupture” in différance, because this rupture would seem to risk affirming on a different level the very philosophical oppositions that such a différance disrupts. For, to reiterate, it is difficult not to see in Stiegler’s opposition of phylogenesis and epiphylogenesis a reproduction of a most classical opposition between nature and culture, where the “nature” of phylogenetic evolution, which can never preserve the experience of the individual entity, is opposed to the “culture” of epiphylogenetic evolution which would preserve such epigenetic experience in its exteriorized prostheses (tools, writing and so on).⁴ On this reading, Stiegler would add to this traditional division the twist that such a culture would no longer be understood as the product of the human but as that which invents the human in an exteriorization of the organic living being into inorganic technical objects.

 

Of course, Stiegler would not agree with the suggestion that the phylogenesis/epiphylogenesis divide or “rupture” simply reproduces the opposition between nature and culture; such a resistance would probably center around his linking the idea of epiphylogenesis to différance. The role that différance plays in Stiegler’s theoretical setup–especially in the first volume of Technics and Time–is to show that as soon as there is anything like epiphylogenesis–i.e., culture–there is a différance, that is, a differing deferral without origin. It is exactly on this point, after all, that Stiegler sees himself as deviating from Rousseau and Leroi-Gourhan, who must both ultimately rely on the artifice of a second origin or coup in order to explain the deviation from nature (Rousseau) or the arrival of “symbolic consciousness” (Leroi-Gourhan). Epiphylogenesis as différance, on the other hand, allows for a new non-anthropocentric concept of the human and of “culture.” Such a concept would displace the question of the origin of the human and of culture, whether that question is framed in transcendental or biological terms. Indeed this seems to be exactly how Stiegler understands Derrida’s own reading of Leroi-Gourhan, as is evident from this (as we shall see, rather imprecise) précis of the passage from Of Grammatology previously cited:

 

In other words, Leroi-Gourhan's anthropology can be thought from within an essentially non-anthropocentric concept that does not take for granted the usual divides between animality and humanity. Derrida bases his own thought of différance as a general history of life, that is, as a general history of the gramme, on the concept of program insofar as it can be found on both sides of such divides. Since the gramme is older than the specifically human written forms, and because the letter is nothing without it, the conceptual unity that différance is contests the opposition animal/human and, in the same move, the opposition nature/culture. "Intentional consciousness" finds the origin of its possibility before the human; it is nothing but "the emergence that has the gramme appearing as such." We are left with the question of determining what the conditions of such an emergence of the "gramme as such" are, and the consequences as to the general history of life and/or of the gramme. This will be our question. (137, emphasis original)

 

For many readers of Derrida, this must seem like a rather strange way of understanding différance. For it is not easy to understand how a Derridean understanding of différance would allow one to oppose a “non-anthropocentric concept of the human” to an anthropocentric one, or to contest the opposition of concepts such as nature and culture by referring them to the “conceptual unity” of différance. Derrida says, both in the essay “différance” and elsewhere, that différance is not a concept, “neither a word nor a concept,” a point that is repeated several times in the essay “Différance.”⁵ Moreover, such remarks are not mere qualifications, caveats, or platitudes which Derrida attaches to an otherwise orthodox semantic exposition of what différance is: they are rather at the heart of his argument. Différance is not a concept because it is “the possibility of conceptuality, of a conceptual process and system in general,” and “as what makes possible the presentation of the being-present, it is never presented as such” (Margins 6,11). Deconstruction can therefore never proceed by opposing différance as a new concept to a series of old metaphysical concepts, for example, by opposing a “non-anthropocentric” concept of the human to an anthropocentric one. It is also for this reason, as Derrida also makes abundantly clear, that one can never simply think différance as naming some kind of conceptual unity which would be prior to all conceptual oppositions. Since that which makes conceptuality possible can never in itself be made present as a concept, it is in principle “unnameable” (and this is the sense of “différance” being “neither a word nor a concept): indeed the choice of the term différance is, as Derrida points out, only a strategic or provisional one, which, as he also points out, does not mean that a better term (for example, “technics,” or “epiphylogenesis”),⁶ or a real name, is waiting in the wings.⁷ Far from a conceptual or nominal unity, Derrida’s choice of the neographism “différance” is motivated not by a desire to unite the two meanings of the verb différer but by that of maintaining it as being “immediately and irreducibly polesemic” (8).

 

The problem then with Stiegler’s argument is, as Geoff Bennington has argued, Stiegler’s desire to think technics in both quasi-transcendental and positivistic terms.⁸ There is a question about the relationship between historical or theoretical understanding of technics and the argument that Stiegler also wants to advance about technics as a quasi-transcendental structure (what Bennington calls “originary technicity”). This problem concerning the relationship between positive knowledge about technology and the quasi-transcendental understanding of technics also arises in the series of interviews between Stiegler and Derrida presented in Echographies:

 

The origin of sense makes no sense. This is not a negative or nihilistic statement. That which bears intelligibility, that which increases intelligibility, is not intelligible--by definition, by virtue of its topological structure. From this standpoint, technics is not intelligible. This does not mean that it is a source of irrationality, that it is irrational or that it is obscure. It means that it does not belong, by definition, by virtue of its situation, to the field of that which it makes possible. Hence a machine is, in essence, not intelligible. (108)

 

It is difficult not to read this as a direct challenge to the logic of Technics and Time. For what is Stiegler’s project if it is not to make technics visible and intelligible?

Stiegler responds to Derrida at this point: “It [technics] constitutes sense if it participates in its construction” (109), to which Derrida responds, reiterating:

 

Yes, but that which constitutes sense is senseless. This is a general structure. The origin of reason and of the history of reason is not rational. (109)

 

In his own reading of this interview–an interview which he admits he finds “disappointing” since “Derrida’s responses to [Stiegler’s] questions and interventions remain too much within the ambit and terms of his own philosophy”–Richard Beardsworth formulates the following reading of this exchange between Stiegler and Derrida:

 

Derrida's comments are, to say the least, odd in response to Stiegler's concerns, both at a juncture of the interview when the two men are acquainted with each other's preoccupations and, more importantly, at a moment in cultural history when the terms of philosophical reflection upon the real are shifting. As we have seen, Stiegler's interest lies, precisely, in the historical differentiation of this "other" of reason and meaning together with the political implications of the articulation of this "other." To respond by reiterating a series of propositions that are well-known from within and around the thought of deconstruction and post-structuralism, but that do not engage as such with the explicit wish on Stiegler's part to genealogize, after the last twenty years thinking, what lies prior to the opposition between reason and unreason, meaning and unmeaning is intellectually and culturally dissatisfying. ("Towards" 138)

 

But it is surely not Derrida who fails to engage with Stiegler but vice versa: as we have seen above, Stiegler fails to respond to the basic problem being outlined here, however many ways Derrida formulates it, which one might formulate again and put as follows: “How is theoretical and historical knowledge of “technics” possible, given that, as you yourself argue, technics is first of all what makes theory and history possible?” Stiegler never really responds to this question, neither in Echographies nor in the two first volumes of La technique et le temps. In his general introduction to the multi-volume work, he doesn’t even offer the genealogical explanation that Richard Beardsworth provides for him in his reading of Echographies. Moreover this response, i.e. to assert the possibility of a genealogy of technics, couldn’t be more problematic. One can provide a genealogy of a concept, showing how that concept is inherited through a determinate history. But we are concerned here with the genealogy of that which makes conceptualization possible. Moreover–and here, in a sense, is the very strangest aspect of the deployment of the term “genealogy” here–as Stiegler has already shown us, technics as epiphylogenesis or tertiary memory is the condition of inheritance itself. A genealogy of technics would be a genealogy of genealogy itself, an exercise that would seem rendered impossible by the “topological” structure that Derrida mentions in relation to intelligibility.

 

Following the “topological” logic that Derrida outlines, if technics is the condition of memory it can’t possibly be made present, rendered intelligible, dissected, theorized, historicized and, in general, remembered or made present to consciousness. Stiegler assumes that technics is not only the condition of knowledge, but is in itself knowable. However, as soon as prosthesis or technicity in general is the condition of knowledge, of what is sayable or thinkable, what can be positively known or said about the prosthesis qua prosthesis is necessarily limited. To not recognize this limit is to risk confusing insights into the empirical history of technology as prosthesis with arguments concerning technics as a transcendental condition of knowledge. At a later point in the interview Derrida reformulates this idea in the terms of Specters of Marx on inheritance. Derrida comments on the necessary dissymmetry which inhabits this relation to the spectral quality of the technical object:

 

One has a tendency to treat what we've been talking about here under the names of image, teletechnology, television screen, archive, as if all these things were on display: a collection of objects, things we see, spectacles in front of us, devices we might use, much as we might use a "teleprompter" we had ourselves written or prescribed. But wherever there are these specters, we are being watched, we sense or think we are being watched. This dissymmetry complicates everything. The law, the injunction, the order, the performative wins out over the theoretical, the constative, knowledge, calculation and the programmable. (Derrida and Steigler 122)

 

For both Stiegler and Derrida the question of technics is closely linked to the question of inheritance: for Stiegler, as we have seen, it is because the technical object is the condition of my access to the “past I have not lived” that technics is constitutive of temporality; for Derrida, “to be is to inherit,” that is, to be is to be inhabited by a certain spectral inheritance. However, for Derrida what is crucial about the structure of inheritance is what he calls in Specters of Marx the “visor effect”⁹–the reference being to the suit of armour worn by Hamlet’s ghost–which means that we cannot see the specter, even as “we sense or think we are being watched.” As Derrida reaffirms in Echographies: “The specter is not simply the visible invisible that I can see, it is someone who watches or concerns me without any possible reciprocity, and who therefore makes the law when I am blind, blind by situation” (121). Thus even if “to be is to inherit,” there is a certain impossibility about knowing the terms of that inheritance. What this means in the context of Derrida’s discussion with Stiegler, and this is the sense of the passage we have just cited, is that if technicity is the condition of inheritance, such a technicity can’t in itself become the object of theoretical knowledge. The dissymmetry which Derrida remarks here is clearly linked to the topological structure we have seen him bring out in relation to intelligibility: that which bears the inheritance can’t in itself become visible within that inheritance. Thus whereas in Technics and Time Stiegler could be seen constructing a (highly cogent) theory of inheritance as epiphylogenesis, for Derrida the structure of inheritance exceeds and makes possible theoretical knowledge, without itself becoming the object of a theoretical knowledge. It is in this sense that “the law, the injunction, the order, the performative wins out over the theoretical, the constative, knowledge, calculation and the programmable.”

 

The question of the dissymmetry of this topological structure differentiates Stiegler’s theoretical account of technics from the thought of arche-writing in Of Grammatology. Technics and Time never explicitly asks how the theory of technics or a history of the supplement is possible, or, put differently, how, given a general structure in which everyone has forgotten Epimetheus, it is possible for Stiegler to remember him. Stiegler inclines toward a simpler and more traditional type of theoretical work in which one imagines that what can supersede philosophy in its repression of technics (or even Heideggerian thinking) is just a “better” theory,¹⁰ one that in this case makes possible a new thinking about the political or what Stiegler calls a “politics of memory,” as he outlines toward the end of the first volume of Technics and Time:

 

The irreducible relation of the who to the what is nothing but the expression of retentional finitude (that of its memory. Today memory is the object of an industrial exploitation that is also a war of speed: from the computer to program industries in general, via the cognitive sciences, the technics of virtual reality and telepresence together with the biotechnologies . . . There is therefore a pressing need for a politics of memory. This politics would be nothing but a thinking of technics . . . ) (Technics 276)

 

It might well seem therefore that Stiegler’s desire in the first volume of Technics and Time to think technics on the basis of différance (and therefore to resist the various pitfalls which he finds in Leroi-Gourhan and in Simondon) is at odds both with the specifics of Derrida’s own account of différance–this much is clear from the reading in The Fault of Epimetheus–and with deconstruction in general to the extent that Stiegler in Technics and Time is concerned with the construction of a new theoretical account of technics that is capable of displacing philosophical and, to a certain extent, traditional scientific accounts. At the stage of the “Fault of Epimetheus” Stiegler tends toward a theory of what one might call, using Richard Beardsworth’s terminology, “technics as time.”¹¹ This theory would draw on deconstruction in a straightforward way as a continuation of the arguments that Derrida opens up in the chapter entitled “Of Grammatology as a Positive Science” in Of Grammatology–while correcting, for example, Derrida’s failure to understand the significance of the emergence of the human (which we addressed above).

 

In later work,¹² Stiegler seems to advance a subtle distinction between his work and that of Derrida. Whereas Derrida is primarily concerned (in Of Grammatology) with a “logic” of the supplement, Stiegler is concerned with the “history” of the supplement. This distinction can be observed in the paper “Discrétiser le temps,” where Stiegler argues for a history of the supplement “of which . . . Derrida has unfortunately never really explored the conditions.”¹³ Even if Stiegler believes, as he states in the introduction to volume two of La technique et le temps (“La désorientation”), that the logic of the supplement is “always already” the history of the supplement, it is clear that he believes that Derrida has in some sense neglected this history of the supplement or failed to recognize its importance. This question is explicitly raised in La technique et le temps in the discussion of phonetic writing in the chapter in volume 2 entitled “L’époque orthographique”:

 

The stakes here concern the specificity of linear writing in the history of arche-writing, ortho-graphic writing which is also phono-logic, always understood from the beginning as such, and of which Derrida often seems to blur, if not deny the specificity of in the history of the trace.¹⁴

 

Here Stiegler insists on the term “orthographic” writing in preference to “phonetic” or “phonologic” writing. Stiegler argues, via a reading of Jean Bottero, that what is distinctively different about such writing is not that it is closer to the sounds of speech, but rather that it is capable of breaking with the context of its inscription in a way that “pictographic” signs are not:

 

"Proper writing" (l'écriture proprement dite) is what is readable as a result of us having at our disposal the recording "code." It is orthothetic recording. Pictographic tables remain unreadable for us even when we have the code at our disposal: one must also have knowledge of the context. Without this, the signification escapes. In order to accede fully to the signification of a pictographic inscription, one must have lived the event of which it holds the record.¹⁵

 

Therefore for Stiegler the specificity of orthographic writing is not that it is closer to speech but that it represents a different type of “recording” (enregistrement). Derrida’s own account of “phonologocentrism” seeks to show that (i) the philosophical account of language always prefers speech to writing ; (ii) it therefore prefers phonetic writing to any other kind since, being closest to speech, it is something like the “least worse” form of writing. The deconstruction of such phonologocentrism involves showing, on the one hand, how the characteristics that philosophy ascribes to writing are always already at work in language in general (including speech). To this extent Stiegler is quite happy to go along with Derrida’s account. He finds a problem when, on the other hand, Derrida argues that as soon as one removes the phonetic privilege, an axiomatic distinction between phonetic or orthographic writing and non-phonetic writing becomes impossible to sustain. Stiegler finds it problematic that Derrida can on the one hand argue in the opening Exergue of Of Grammatology that the phoneticization of writing is “the historical origin and structural possibility of philosophy as of science” and yet on the other hand write in a later chapter, “Of Grammatology as a Positive Science” that “phoneticization . . . has always already begun” and that “[the] cuneiform, for example, is at the same time ideogrammatic and phonetic” (4, 89). Stiegler comments:

 

Grammatology elaborates a logic of the supplement where the accidentality of the supplementary is originary. It is concerned with taking the history of the supplement as accidental history from which would result a becoming essential of the accident--but one must therefore also talk of a becoming accidental of the essence. By most often blurring the specificity of phonologic writing, by suggesting for the most part that nearly all that develops therein was already there before, by therefore not making this specificity a central question (and doesn't all grammatology come in a certain manner necessarily to relegate such a question?) doesn't one weaken in advance the grammatological project?¹⁶

 

One has to understand this move in the context of Stiegler’s overall project in Technics and Time. The deconstruction of speech and writing is crucial to Stiegler’s argument because it appears to show that the technical supplement (writing), far from being an exterior accident that befalls an originally full speech, is actually at the heart of language proper. It therefore deconstructs the opposition between the contingent, “accidental” exteriority of the technical supplement and language as essence or necessity. But for Stiegler this move is, as it were, only a first step. One must go beyond what he sees as a mere logic of the supplement–the deconstructive move that locates the contingent accidentality of the supplement within and not outside the essence of language–to what he wants to think of as the “history of the supplement.” The point is that Derrida’s deconstructive move here ought to lead him not only to the deconstruction of the relationship between the accidental and the essential but also to be more interested in the “accidental” in itself, in the history of the technical supplement, i.e. technics. It ought to lead him to thinking, as Stiegler puts it here, the “becoming accidental of the essence,” which involves rethinking the essence of the human as technical accidentality–essentially Stiegler’s project in Technics and Time. One ought to be less interested in the written supplement in general as an avenue for the deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence and more interested in the “specificity” of given written supplements.

 

Beardsworth’s Two “Derrideanisms”

 

In the conclusion to his influential book, Derrida and the Political, Richard Beardsworth develops a “loose speculation” about “two possible futures of Derrida’s philosophy”:

 

The first would be what one may call within classical concepts of the political a "left-wing Derrideanism." It would foreground Derrida's analysis of originary technicity, "avoiding" the risk of freezing quasi-transcendental logic by developing the trace in terms of the mediations between human and the technical (the very process of hominization). In order to think future "spectralization" and establish a dialogue between philosophy, the human sciences, the arts and the technosciences, this future of Derrida's philosophy would return to the earlier texts of Derrida which read metaphysical logic in terms of the disavowal of techne. The second could be called, similarly, a "right-wing Derrideanism." It would pursue Derrida's untying of the aporia of time from both logic and technics, maintaining that even if there is only access to time through technics, what must be thought, articulated and witnessed is the passage of time. To do so, this Derrideanism would mobilize religious discourse and prioritize, for example, the radically "passive" nature of the arts, following up on more recent work of Derrida on the absolute originarity of the promise and of his reorganization of religious discourse to think and describe it. (156)

 

Even if immediately after this passage Beardsworth makes clear that there is in fact “no answer and no choice” between these opposed “futures” of what he calls here “Derrideanism,”¹⁷ it is clear from the rest of this concluding chapter to Derrida and the Political that the speculative choice he presents here responds to or formulates what seems to be for Beardsworth a real duality in Derrida’s thought. Even if Beardsworth retreats rather quickly from the reality of this choice, the terms in which he formulates it already demand at least two questions, or sets of questions: firstly about the possibility of making a distinction between, on the one hand, a thinking of deconstruction in terms of technics (which Beardsworth associates here, as elsewhere, with the work of Stiegler) and, on the other, a sort of literary or “religious” deconstruction; secondly, about the legitimacy of ascribing to these two “schools” a right- or a left-wing political orientation. Moreover, while Beardsworth seems to retreat from the “choice” at the end of Derrida and the Political, his later article “Thinking Technicity” offers a similar analysis of “good” and “bad” deconstruction. In this essay the first (good) form of deconstruction is to be tied to Derrida’s early work and is again concerned with thinking, via the analysis of arche-writing, an originary technicity as the “radical exteriority of any interiority” (“Thinking Technicity” 77). The second form of deconstruction is to be found, for Beardsworth, in Derrida’s work around “Levinasian ethics, negative theology and the Platonic conception of the khôra and is formulated here as thinking ‘an excess’ that precedes and conditions all determinations” (77). Beardsworth comments as follows:

 

For Derrida, arche-writing and this excess of determination are necessarily the same, even though each reveals a series of singular traits particular to the context from which they are thought. I would nevertheless argue at this juncture that, despite their sameness they necessarily have different effects. These effects reveal that there is a tension between them, one which concerns the kind of work that they bring about on metaphysical thinking, and its limits. The one (that of excess) has arrested within the culture of contemporary philosophy further articulation of what lies behind the institution of metaphysical thought, while the other, if situated beyond the immediate question of language and writing, can be considered to invite further differentiations. The one has given rise to the "theological" turn to deconstruction in the 1980s (together with the sense of its apolitical nature) while the other, if articulated through its differentiations, allows us to continue thinking the past and future of metaphysics in terms of technical supplementarity, one that allows us to advance all the more interestingly the political dimension of contemporary thought. ("Thinking Technicity" 78)

 

These two forms of deconstruction don’t seem in principle very different from the “left-wing” and “right-wing” Derrideanisms that Beardsworth has talked of earlier, and here the “choice” between them is not immediately withdrawn but rather confidently affirmed. Indeed the opposition between thinking technical supplementarity and thinking the “excess” beyond all determination therefore refigures here the two forms of alterity that Beardsworth outlines in the conclusion of Derrida and the Political–the two forms of radical alterity:

 

There are . . . "two" instances of "radical alterity" here which need articulation and whose relation demands to be developed: the radical alterity of the promise and the radical alterity of the other prior to the ego of which one modality (and increasingly so in the coming years) is the technical other. (155)

 

Beardsworth goes on to argue that Derrida has hitherto failed to “articulate” these two forms of alterity; his failure to do so is explicitly tied to his avoidance of the question of technicity in Derrida’s reading of Heidegger in Of Spirit. Derrida’s failure to articulate these two forms of alterity leads Beardsworth to imagine the two future forms of Derrideanism we have just mentioned.

 

At this point it is worth explicating further these two forms of alterity. The first form of alterity–what I will call “technical alterity”–is formulated by Beardsworth in terms of a relation to the “nonhumanity” of matter. Beardsworth ties this alterity to Derrida’s early thinking about arche-writing and the question of originary technicity. This technical alterity or originary technicity is then developed, as we have seen, by Stiegler into a theory of technics. Technics understands originary technicity as an “Epimethean” prosthesis of the human, where the human is figured through the “default of origin,” constituted only in its prosthesis. It is not clear that Stiegler’s thinking of technics as the prosthesis of the human is entirely consistent with a thought of technical alterity or originary technicity. Indeed although in Derrida and the Political and in “From a Genealogy of Matter to a Politics of Memory” Beardsworth seems fairly clear that Stiegler’s technics is consistent with the idea of articulating the relation of matter to the “nonhuman” (or technical alterity), in his later article Beardsworth distances himself from Stiegler:

 

The risk Stiegler runs in differentiating the historical epochs of arche-writing, and in thinking them in terms of technical supplementarity, is precisely that of considering technicity in the exclusively exteriorized terms of technics which befit the process of hominization. In other words, the wish to differentiate further what lies behind metaphysics in terms of technics, if the model of technics remains that of the "technical object," always runs the risk of re-anthropologizing the very thing that one wishes to dehumanise. The major theses in Technics and Time . . . while brilliantly articulated by Stiegler in their own terms, end up having the following somewhat ironic consequence: biological life prior to, or in its difference from anthropogenesis is removed from the structure of originary technicity; as a result biology is naturalized and the differentiation of technicity qua technics is only considered in its exteriorized form in relation to the process of hominization. ("Thinking Technicity" 81)

 

This argument underlines the problematic nature of Stiegler’s reading of Derrida. For Stiegler, as we have seen, it is only with the human that life is pursued by means other than life. Hence the human marks a break in the history of différance as the history of life. The origin of technics as organized inorganic matter therefore constitutes the aporetic non-origin of the human. But as Beardsworth points out here, this leaves the relationship between organic life and inorganic life undisturbed and ends up reaffirming the singularity of the human (as that which is invented through the emergence of technics). Stiegler’s thinking of technics therefore risks undermining an originary technicity that is not tied to the specific emergence of the human, which is what Derrida seems to be thinking under the rubric of the trace and of différance as the “history of life in general.”¹⁸ Stiegler’s “technical alterity,” on this reading, ends up losing the alterity of the nonhuman which we have seen espoused in Derrida and the Political.

 

The second form of “radical alterity” that Beardsworth outlines in Derrida and the Political is the “alterity of the promise.” In the conclusion to Derrida and the Political, Beardsworth shows this Derridean thought of the promise at work in Specters of Marx. Beardsworth quotes the following passage:

 

Even beyond the regulating idea in its classic form,¹⁹ the idea, if that is still what it is, of democracy to come, its "idea" as event of a pledged injunction that orders one to summon the very thing that will never present itself in the form of full presence, is the opening of this gap between an infinite promise . . . and the determined, necessary, but also necessarily inadequate forms of what has to be measured against this promise. To this extent, the effectivity or actuality of the democratic promise, like that of the communist promise, will always keep within it, and it must do so, this absolutely undetermined messianic hope at its heart, this eschatological relation to the to-come of an event and of a singularity, of an alterity that cannot be anticipated. Awaiting without horizon of the wait, awaiting what one does not expect yet or any longer, hospitality without reserve, welcoming salutation accorded in advance to the absolute surprise of the arrivant from whom or from which one will not ask anything in return . . . just opening which renounces any right to property, any right in general, messianic opening to what is coming, that is, to the event that cannot be awaited as such, or recognized in advance. (Specters of Marx 65)

 

As is made clear here, Derrida is situating the political, in the form of the democratic or communist promise, in terms of a “messianic” structure of the event which Beardsworth calls the “absolute future that informs all political organizations” (Derrida and the Political 146). The thought of the political requires that one hold on to the idea of an indeterminate future, or an unanticipatable event. If the future were either in principle or practice entirely knowable, then the political would become superfluous. The political must therefore welcome the event in its absolute alterity, awaiting it without horizon of anticipation (attente sans attente)–for to anticipate the event would already be in some sense to determine it, to know something about it, to anticipate the unanticipatable.

 

This messianic structure around the event is to be distinguished by Derrida from any determinate messianism of a biblical kind:

 

Ascesis strips the messianic hope of all biblical forms, and even all determinable figures of the wait or expectation . . . . One may always take the quasi-atheistic dryness of the messianic to be the condition of the religions of the Book, a desert that was not even theirs (but the earth is always borrowed, on loan from God, it is never possessed by the occupier, says precisely [justement] the Old Testament whose injunction one would also have to hear); one may always recognize there the arid soil in which grew, and passed away, the living figures of all the messiahs, whether they were announced, recognized, or still awaited. (Specters of Marx 168)

 

However, this “dry” messianic structure of the event is not simply a structure that would underpin any determinate messianism as it would underpin any determinate politics. Nor is it a limit that, as Derrida puts it in “Force of Law,” “defines either an infinite progress or a waiting and awaiting” (Acts of Religion255), because the political relationship to the “absolute future” also requires that one act, that one make political decisions. Derrida formulates this argument in relation to justice in “Force of Law”:

 

justice, however unpresentable it remains, does not wait. It is that which must not wait. To be direct, simple and brief, let us say this: a just decision is always required immediately, right away, as quickly as possible. It cannot provide itself with the infinite information and the unlimited knowledge of conditions, rules or hypothetical imperatives that could justify it. And even if it did have all that at its disposal, even if it did give itself the time, all the time and all the necessary knowledge about the matter, well then, the moment of decision as such, what must be just, must [il faut] always remain a finite moment of urgency and precipitation; it must [doit] not be the consequence or the effect of this theoretical or historical knowledge, of this reflection or this deliberation, since the decision always marks the interruption of the juridico-, ethico-, or politico-cognitive deliberation that precedes it, that must [doit] precede it. (Acts of Religion 255)

 

This messianic structure which Beardsworth associates with the promise and thinks of as Derrida’s second form of alterity is therefore marked by what Derrida calls later in Specters of Marx an “irreducible paradox” (168). For it is both a “waiting without horizon of expectation” and also “urgency, imminence” (168). One can never therefore be entirely happy with the division that Beardsworth makes at the end of Derrida and the Political when he associates this second form of alterity straightforwardly as “a reorganization of religious discourse” (156). It is never simply the case, for Derrida, that “what must be thought, articulated and witnessed is the passage of time” (156). That is only one step, one side, or one hand and, as Beardsworth reminds us elsewhere, with Derrida “it is always a question of hands” (“Deconstruction and Tradition” 287). For this reorganization of religious discourse is always also–via the thinking of urgency, imminence or the necessity of decision–a rethinking of political or juridical discourse. Nowhere could this point be clearer than in Specters of Marx, where Derrida very precisely associates the urgency or imminence of this messianic structure with Marxism. As Derrida puts it there: “No differance without alterity, no alterity without singularity, no singularity without here-now” (31). The linking of differance to the singularity of the here-now is an indication that what is being thought around the political injunction is not completely new in Derrida’s thinking. Indeed in an earlier interview about Marx, Derrida explicitly links the singularity of the political injunction to the theme of iterability developed in “Signature Event Context” (“Politics of Friendship” 228). This argument around iterability will help us to show that Derrida in fact from his earliest writing thinks Beardsworth’s two forms of alterity together.

 

As Derrida reminds us in “Signature Event Context”:

 

My "written communication" must, if you will, remain legible despite the absolute disappearance of every determined addressee in general for it to function as writing, that is, for it to be legible. It must be repeatable--iterable--in the absolute absence of the addressee or the empirically determinable set of addresses. This iterability (iter, once again, comes from itara, other in Sanskrit, and everything that follows may be read as the exploitation of the logic which links repetition to alterity), structures the mark of writing itself, and does so moreover for no matter what type of writing (pictographic, hieroglyphic, ideographic, phonetic, alphabetic, to use the old categories). (Margins of Philosophy 315)

 

So the iterability of the written mark constitutes a “logic which links repetition to alterity.” In On Being With Others, Simon Glendinning gives a particularly clear account of this moment in Derrida:

 

Paradoxical as it may seem, what has to be acknowledged here is that Derrida's appeal here to the concept of iterability is made not only because of its connection with the idea of sameness and identity but also because of its (improbable, etymological) connection with alterity, otherness and difference. Roughly, what Derrida aims to show is that alterity and difference--i.e., what is traditionally conceived as bearing on features which are essentially "accidental" or "external" to "ideal identities"--are, in fact and in principle, a necessary and universal feature of all idealisation as such. Thus, Derrida will argue that the recognisability of the "same word" is, in fact and in principle, possible only "in, through, and even in view of its alteration." (112, citing Derrida, Limited Inc 53)

 

In other words, what guarantees the sign in its identity, that is, its iterability, is already constituted through a relationship with alterity. Here this alterity is not simply that of original technicity, relation to exteriority, or the alterity of the “nonhuman.” It is always already also a relation to temporal alterity and alterity in general. Now this is clearly a very significant point in relation to Stiegler’s attempt to develop the thought of originary technicity in Derrida’s early work on arche-writing into a general theory of technics. For Stiegler’s argument is, as we have seen, that the technical object in general constitutes the relationship to time, the condition of access to the undetermined future (and the privileged example of this is what he calls orthographic writing, what Derrida calls “phonetic” writing). Yet the argument around iterability makes it clear that for Derrida the “orthographic” mark is already itself constituted by a relation to alterity–the repeatable identity of the mark is only constituted through a relation to its temporal alteration and to alterity in general. There are in effect two sides to the argument around the trace. On the one hand, “articulating the living on the non-living in general,” the trace is a moment of exteriorization, binding idealization indissolubly to the mark (Of Grammatology 65). On the other hand (“it is always a question of hands“), the mark is never simply material: it is only constituted as the mark that it is through a relation with alterity. Iterability can never mean simply “possibility of repetition” because in that case what guaranteed the identity of the mark would have to be constituted as a possibility prior to the actual repetitions it made possible–this structure of an ideal form and its real copies would then reconstitute a logocentric and idealist understanding of language. The trace therefore can never simply constitute the technical possibility of a relationship to alterity, which it is already constituted itself through a relationship with alterity. The technical organization of time is always already the temporal organization of technics.

 

The necessary relationship between technicity and alterity in relation to the sign is underlined in Derrida’s later work on the commodity. For Derrida, the spectral quality that Marx locates in exchange-value–that is, that an exterior thing be the bearer of an idealized value–is already at work in use-value. For the use-value of the ordinary useful thing is never simply a material property, or constituted simply through an imminent relation of a human subject to the thing, but is always constituted through “the possibility of being used by the other or being used another time . . . . in its originary iterability, a use-value is in advance promised, promised to exchange and beyond exchange” (Specters of Marx 162). What this makes clear once again is that for Derrida iterability, the identity of the technical object, or what Stiegler wants to think of as the organization of “organised inorganic matter” can’t simply be thought of as constitutive of temporalization because it is first of all constituted by and through a relation to an alterity that is both spatial and temporal (here figured precisely in terms of the promise that Beardsworth would like to oppose to it). On the one hand this problematises the whole project of Technics and Time in as much at it wants to relate the history of the supplement–thought of as the history of organized inorganic matter or technics–as the prosthesis that invents the human in its relationship to time. For the relationship to time cannot be simply derived from the technical object if, as Derrida’s argument around iterability makes clear; the technical object is already constituted in part by that relationship with time. On the other hand it also renders extremely problematic the division Beardsworth is trying to demonstrate in his conclusion to Derrida and the Political between two forms of alterity. To recall the terms of Beardsworth’s argument:

 

in the context of the theme of originary technicity of man . . . there is indeed a shift which Derrida has not expounded. In Of Grammatology the trace was said to "connect with the same possibility . . . the structure of relationship to the other, the movement of temporalization, and language as writing" . . . In "The violence of the letter: from Lévi-Strauss to Rousseau" Derrida maintained that "arche-writing" was the origin of morality as of immorality. The non-ethical opening of ethics. A violent opening." This opening is rewritten as the promise in Specters of Marx. And yet, if time is from the first technically organized, if access to the experience of time is only possible through technics, then the "promise" must be more originary than "originary technicity." Even if they are inseparable--and what else is the law of contamination but this inextricability?--they are not on the same "ontological" level. There are, consequently, "two" instances of "radical alterity" here which need articulation and whose relation demands to be developed: the radical alterity of the promise and the radical alterity of the other prior to the ego of which one modality (and increasingly so in the coming years) is the technical other. (Derrida and the Political 155)

 

In our context it becomes clear what Beardsworth’s problem here is. He wants to regard Derrida’s early work as concerned with an originary technicity in the form of the trace that would be constitutive of both temporalization and the relationship to the other, and therefore constitute the “nonethical opening of ethics.” The priority would be not to think alterity but rather to think that which is constitutive of alterity, i.e., the “technical other,” exteriority, and the relation to the nonhuman–in short, “technics.” But with the thinking of the “promise” in Specters of Marx the alterity that appeared to be constituted by technics in the early work is seen to be more originary than technics. The relation to temporal alterity in the form of the event would have to be thought prior to the technical “organization” of time. This leads Beardsworth to conclude that there must indeed be two forms of alterity at work in Derrida, “which need articulation and whose relation demands to be developed.”

 

But the analysis we have just made makes it clear that for Derrida the “technicity” of the sign, i.e. iterability, is already constituted through a relation to the other. It is not a question of simply constituting or making possible a relation to temporal alterity. The problem here is Beardsworth’s assumption in the phrase “And yet, if time is from the first technically organized . . . .” For that implies that technical organization is to be thought prior to the temporalization to which it gives access. (Indeed this sounds much more like Stiegler than like Derrida.) As Derrida puts it in Of Grammatology, the very text from which Beardsworth is quoting:

 

The "unmotivatedness" of the sign requires a synthesis in which the absolutely other is announced as such--without any simplicity, any identity, any resemblance or continuity--within what is not it . . . . The trace, where the relationship with the other is marked, articulates its possibility in the entire field of the entity [étant]. (47; translation modified, emphasis added)

 

The relation to the other is not constituted by some, technical, for example, “synthesis” that precedes it: alterity is rather already inscribed within the synthesis that constitutes the trace. Originary technicity in the form of the trace is here quite clearly the opening to alterity, to the “event,” to the “promise” which Beardsworth thinks must come along later and therefore constitute “a shift which Derrida has not expounded.” But there is no shift in Derridahere that has not been expounded. If there is a shift to be “expounded” it is between Derrida’s understanding of originary technicity in the trace and Stiegler’s thinking of technics as the technical organization or determination of time. 

 

Notes

 

1. On the aporia of the origin of the human in relation to the work of Leroi-Gourhan, see particularly Technics and Time 141-12. Stiegler develops the argument around the “default of origin” (défaut d’origine) through a reading of the “fault” of Epimetheus in Plato’s Protagoras, concluding that “[humans] only occur through their being forgotten; they only appear in disappearing” (Technics and Time 188). See also Bennington and Beardsworth’s exposition of this argument in Stiegler, “Emergencies” 180-81; “From a Genealogy of Matter to a Politics of Memory” 95n16.

 

2. This can be seen in the following definition of the organized inorganic from Stiegler’s article “Leroi-Gourhan: l’inorganique organisé“: “Leroi-Gourhan fournit les concepts fondamentaux, et à partir desquels il est possible de faire apparaître un troisième Règne, à côté des deux règnes reconnus depuis longtemps des êtres inertes et des êtres organiques. Ce nouveau règne, qui a été ignoré aussi bien par la philosophie que par les sciences, c’est le règne de ce que j’appelle les êtres inorganiques (non-vivants) organisés (instrumentaux)” (188-89).

 

3. See Bennington’s comments on the problematic nature of this equation of phusis and “life” (189).

 

4. This clean separation between phylogenetic and epiphylogenetic evolution is challenged for Stiegler by modern technology in the form of genetic manipulation: “Dès lors que la biologie molèculaire rend possible une manipulation du germen par l’intervention de la main, le programme reçoit une leçon de l’expérience. La loi même de la vie s’en trouve purement et simplement suspendue.” (“Quand faire c’est dire” 272). See also La technique et le temps II 173-87.

 

5.”Différance is literally neither a word nor a concept”; “différance is neither a word nor a concept“; “différance, which is not a concept” (Margins 3, 7, 11).

 

6. Bennington criticizes Stiegler for his “confident identification of ‘technics’ as the name for a problem which he also recognizes goes far beyond any traditional determination of that concept” (190).

 

7.”‘Older’ than Being itself, such a différance has no name in our language. But we ‘already know’ that if it is unnameable, it is not provisionally so, not because our language has not yet found or received this name, or because we would have to seek it in another language, outside the finite system of our own. It is rather because there is no name for it at all, not even the name of essence or of Being, not even that of “différance,” which is not a name, which is not a pure nominal unity, and unceasingly dislocates itself in a chain of differing and deferring substitutions” (Derrida, Margins 26).

 

8.”[Stiegler’s] compelling, and at times brilliant account of originary technicity is presented in tandem with a set of claims about technics and even techno-science as though all these claims happened at the same level. This mechanism makes of Stiegler’s book perhaps the most refined example to date of the confusion of the quasi-transcendental (originary technicity) and transcendental contraband (technics)” (“Emergencies” 190).

 

9.”To feel ourselves seen by a look that it will always be impossible to cross, that is the visor effect on the basis of which we inherit from the law” (Derrida, Specters 7).

 

10. This is essentially the argument Bennington makes in his reading of Stiegler: “‘Technics’ is a philosophical concept, and to that extent can never provide the means to criticise philosophy. Failing to register this point (which is now very familiar as the principle of all of Derrida’s analyses of the human sciences in Writing and Difference and Margins) condemns one to a certain positivism, itself grounded in the mechanism of transcendental contraband whereby the term supposed to do the critical work on philosophy (here tekhn) is simply elevated into a transcendental explanatory position whence it is supposed to criticise philosophy, while all the time exploiting without knowing it a philosophical structure par excellence” (184).

 

11. I am drawing here on Richard Beardsworth’s account of Stiegler’s work: “La technique et le temps therefore thinks technics firstly within time (in terms of its own historical dynamic), secondly with time (in terms of the impossibility of the origin), and thirdly as time (as the impure, retrospective constitution of the apophantic ‘as such,’ or consciousness)” (“From a Genealogy” 96).

 

12. For example in Stiegler, “Derrida and Technology.”

 

13. “Histoire [du supplément] dont je pense que Derrida n’a malheureusement jamais réellement exploré les conditions” (“Discrétiser le temps” 117n6).

 

14. “L’enjeu porte sur la spécificité de l’écriture linéaire dans l’histoire de l’archi-écriture, écriture ortho-graphique qui est aussi phono-logique, toujours comprise d’abord comme telle, et dont Derrida parâit souvent éstomper, sinon dénier, la spécificité dans l’histoire de la trace” (La technique II 41).

 

15. “L’écriture proprement dite est ce qui nous est lisible pourvu que nous disposions du code d’enregistrement. C’est l’enregistrement orthothétique. Les tablettes pictographiques nous restent illisibles même lorsque nous disposons du code: il faut avoir aussi conaissance du contexte. Sans lui, la signification échappe. Pour accéder pleinement à la signification d’une inscripiton pictographique, il faut avoir vécu l’évenement dont elle tient registre” (La technique II 68-9).

 

16. “La grammatologie élabore une logique du supplément où l’accidentalité supplémentaire est originaire. Il s’agit de prendre l’histoire du supplément en considération commehistoire accidentelle gauche dont résulterait un devenir-essential de l’accident–mais il faudrait alors parler aussi d’un devenir accidentelle de l’essence. En estompant le plus souvent la spécificité de l’écriture phonologique, en suggérant que la plupart du temps presque tout ce qui s’y développe était déjà là avant, en ne faisant donc pas de cette spécificité une question centrale (et toute la grammatologie n’en vient-elle pas d’une certaine manière nécessairement à reléguer une telle question?), n’affaiblit-on pas par avance le projet grammatologique?” (La technique II 43).

 

17. Bennington cites this passage from Beardsworth and then comments: “Beardsworth’s gesture in proposing this scenario only immediately to refuse it really might be described by the operator of disavowal” (“Emergencies” 214n47). Bennington is alluding here to Beardsworth’s frequent usage of the term disavowal to describe gestures of philosophical exclusion. (To take a few examples from an extremely rich field: in Chapter 2, “[in] Hegelian logic, the very logic of contradiction ends up also disavowing time” (Derrida and the Political 91); in Chapter 3, “Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle with respect to an opposition between vulgar and primordial time is Iitself a disavowal of time” (109); in the conclusion, “does Derrida’s thinking of the ‘there’ in terms of the promise disavow in turn the originary relation between the human and the nonhuman?” (152). In general in Beardsworth one either “articulates” or “negotiates,” on the one hand, or “disavows” on the other.) Bennington comments on this “operator of disavowal” in Beardsworth’s book: “Beardsworth’s understanding is that Derrida takes ‘metaphysics’ to do with a ‘disavowal’ of time . . . he uses the term within mild scare-quotes at first, but soon stops and never thinks through the difficult implications there may be in relying on a psychoanalytically determined concept to describe this situation” (“Emergencies” 197). It should be pointed out, however, that Beardsworth does offer the following (albeit short) justification in a footnote to his introduction: “[I use] ‘Disavows’ in the Freudian sense, that is in the sense of a refusal to perceive a fact which impinges from the outside. Freud’s example in his use of the term is the denial of a woman’s absence of penis . . . The term is, however, appropriate for the way in which the tradition of philosophy has ‘denied’ finitude. The concept will be used frequently in my argument” (Derrida and the Political 158n2).

 

18. The argument that Beardsworth makes here is similar to the one made by Bennington in his earlier essay “Emergencies,” which may well have influenced Beardsworth’s thinking. Bennington argues: “Stiegler wants to force the whole philosophical argumentation of Derrida through the ‘passage’ of the emergence of mankind: the fact that he then goes on to characterise that ‘passage’ in terms of an originary technicity which is very close to Derrida’s own thinking does not alter the fact that his first gesture commits him to a certain positivism about difference, and this leads to his confident identification of ‘technics’ as the name for a problem which he also recognises goes far beyond any traditional determination of that concept” (190).

 

19. In a remarkable conversation between Beardsworth and Derrida entitled “Nietzsche and the Machine,” Derrida provides the following extended analysis of why the “idea” of “democracy to come” is different from the Kantian Idea: “Where the Idea in the Kantian sense leaves me dissatisfied is precisely around its principle of infinity: firstly, it refers to an infinite in the very place what I call différance implies the here and now, implies urgency and imminence . . . secondly, the Kantian Idea refers to an infinity which constitutes a horizon. The horizon is, as the Greek word says, a limit forming a backdrop against which one can know, against which one can see what’s coming. The Idea has already anticipated the future before it arrives. So the idea is both too futural, in the sense that it is unable to think the deferral of difference in terms of ‘now’, and it is not ‘futural’ enough, in the sense that it already knows what tomorrow should be” (49-50).

Works Cited

 

• Beardsworth, Richard. “From a Genealogy of Matter to a Politics of Memory: Stiegler’s Thinking of Technics.” Tekhnema: Journal of Philosophy and Technology 2 (1995): 85-115.
• —. “Thinking Technicity.” Cultural Values 2 (1998): 70-86.
• —. “Towards a Critical Culture of the Image.” Tekhnema: Journal of Philosophy and Technology 4 (1998): 114-41.
• Bennington, Geoffrey. “Emergencies.” The Oxford Literary Review 18 (1996): 175-216.
• Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Religion. Ed. Gil Anidjar. New York: Routledge, 2002.
• —. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982.
• —. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri C. Spivak. New York: John Hopkins UP, 1976.
• —. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994.
• Derrida, Jacques, and Bernard Stiegler. Echographies of Television. Trans. Jennifer Bajorek. Cambridge: Polity, 2002.
• Glendinning, Simon. On Being With Others. London: Routledge, 1998.
• Stiegler, Bernard. “Derrida and Technology: Fidelity at the Limits of Deconstruction and the Prosthesis of Faith.” Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: a Critical Reader. Ed. Tom Cohen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. 238-70.
• —. “Discrétiser le temps.” Les Cahiers de médiologie (2000): 115-21.
• —. “Leroi-Gourhan: l’inorganique organisé.” Les Cahiers de médiologie (1998): 187-94.
• —. “Quand faire c’est dire: de la technique comme différance de toute frontière.” Le passage des frontières: autour du travail de Jacques Derrida. Paris: Galilée, 1994. 271-83.
• —. Technics and Time. Trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998.
• —. “Technics of Decision: An Interview.” Interview with Peter Hallward. Trans. Sean Gaston. Angelaki 8 (2003): 151-68.
• —. La technique et le temps. Vol. 2. La désorientation. Paris: Galilée, 1996.

 

Dalia Judovitz

Department of French and Italian
Emory University
djudovi@emory.edu

 

Besides, you know, all my work, literally and figuratively, fits into a
valise . . .

–Marcel Duchamp, 16 Dec. 1954

 

“Well, it had to come. How long will it last?” wondered Marcel Duchamp in a letter to Katherine Dreier about the onset of World War II following the invasion of Poland. “How will we come out of it, if we come out of it?” At fifty-two, and thus too old for military service, Duchamp envisaged doing “some civilian work to help. What?? Everything is still a mess,” he exclaimed. In Paris, half deserted and in darkness, he was “waiting for the first bomb, to leave for somewhere in the country.”¹ The eruption of the war had Duchamp packing his bags again, just as he did during World War I when he first came to America. In this period he was producing materials for a box packed in a valise, a folding exhibition space that would assemble reproductions of his artistic corpus. Resembling a portable museum, The Box in a Valise (1935-41) collected 69 miniature reproductions and replicas that he intended to assemble in America.² Traveling between the unoccupied and occupied zones with a cheese dealer’s pass in the spring of 1941, Duchamp anxiously transported across the German lines a large suitcase filled not with cheese, but with materials for his boxes.³ The materials for assembly and reproductions for fifty boxes were shipped off to New York in 1941 in two cases, along with Peggy Guggenheim’s recently acquired art collection, under the label “household goods.” By 14 May 1942, when Duchamp got his papers and headed from Marseilles to New York, most artists and intellectuals had already left France; this escape route would soon be cut off.⁴ Fleeing the ravages of war in the nick of time, Duchamp would once again assume the migrant condition inaugurated by his arrival to the U.S. during World War I.

 

Duchamp’s repeated attempts to take refuge from war reflected his enduring aversion to militarism and patriotism. Speaking of the reasons for his first migration to the U.S. during WWI, he stated: “I had left France basically for lack of militarism. For lack of patriotism, if you wish” (Cabanne 59). He held this conviction throughout his life, although after WWII it was colored by ambivalence and regret.⁵ Even as early as 1905, “being neither militaristic nor soldierly,” he availed himself of the exemption of “art worker” by becoming a printer of engravings (the other option was to be a typographer) in order to reduce his military service (Cabanne 19-20). Duchamp’s aversion to war largely overlapped his discontent with art and his sense that he was incompatible with its endeavors. In a letter to Walter Pach (27 Apr. 1915), he notes the combined impact of war and art on his decision to leave France:

 

For a long time and even before the war, I have disliked this "artistic life" in which I was involved.--It is the exact opposite of what I want. So I tried to somewhat escape from the artists through the library. Then during the war, I felt increasingly more incompatible with this milieu. I absolutely wanted to leave. (Duchamp, Amicalement 40)

 

His disenchantment with art is based on its exclusive cultivation of visual aspects (what he called the “retinal”) to the detriment of intellectual expression. Trapped by professional and market pressures that left artists to merely repeat themselves by copying and multiplying a few ideas, he actively sought to escape. War appears to have exacerbated this rising disaffection with art and with the artistic milieu by bringing it to a crisis. However, the challenge of implementing his decision to leave both war and art behind and the questions this decision raises gained renewed urgency upon the eruption of WWII.

 

Does the production of The Box in a Valise during World War II attest to an attempt to take refuge in art by stepping out of history? Walter Arensberg, Duchamp’s sometime patron and friend, commented in 1943 that the retrospective history that the Box constructs through the monograph-like compilation of Duchamp’s works suggests that he became the “puppeteer” of his past by inventing a “new kind of autobiography.”⁶ Arensberg’s contention that Duchamp would resort to the creation of personal myth by artistically manipulating his past, however, is hard to reconcile with Duchamp’s denunciation of autobiography: “I flatly refuse to write an autobiography. It has always been a hobby of mine to object to the written, I, I, I’s on the part of the artist” (Hulten 28 June 1965). Duchamp objected to autobiography’s excessive reliance on the “I” as supreme referent because it consolidates and aggrandizes authorial identity, instead of putting it into question as he had done in his works. His refusal to write an autobiography suggests that his endeavor in the The Box in a Valise may not be simply an effort to manipulate and reclaim past history in artistic terms. Marked by traumatic dislocation, this work is symptomatic of Duchamp’s attempt to respond to historical events whose magnitude can no longer find refuge in art. In this essay, I argue that The Box in a Valise affirms the vulnerability of art in the face of catastrophic change. Rather than representing a step out of history, The Box in a Valise reflects the realization that the production of art and the position of the artist would have to change in response to traumatic historical events. In the face of global war, neither art nor the artist can offer salvation, that is, the pretense to reclaim, in the guise of art, historical events that have shattered the frames of reference for human experience.

 

War Refugee and/or Art Refugee?

 

Drafted, but found to be “too sick to be a soldier” (he had a heart murmur), Duchamp was “condemned to remain a civilian for the entire duration of the war,” a decision he was not too unhappy about (Duchamp, Amicalement 37). Unable to tolerate the rising patriotic fever of the war along with the rising pitch of the artistic dogmas of the day, notably Cubism, Duchamp arrived in New York on 15 June 1915. In the “Special Feature” section of The New York Tribune (12 September 1915), he reflects on the unique nature of the trauma and grief engendered by the First World War in order to comment on its irremediable impact on the production of art. Referring to Cubism as a “prophet of the war,” he concludes: “for the war will produce a severe, direct art.” He claims that there would be a major shift in sensibility due to the immensity of the scale of suffering brought on by war, and ascribes the emergence of this “severe, direct art” to the hardness of feeling in Europe, due to the experience of a new kind of grief whose magnitude no longer seemed to concern any one individual. He explains:

 

One readily understands this when one realizes the growing hardness of feeling in Europe, one might almost say the utter callousness with which people are learning to receive the news of the death of those nearest and dearest to them. Before the war the death of a son in a family was received with utter, abject woe, but today it is merely part of a huge universal grief, which hardly seems to concern any one individual. (Hulten 12 Sept. 1915)

 

Duchamp’s remarks elucidate the nature of the trauma of the First World War by pointing out the extent to which the personal sense of loss was supplanted by a universal grief beyond representation. The problem is not that people became more callous, but that they were no longer able to claim their personal grief and suffering in the face of events whose magnitude shattered the very framework of human experience. Thus his comments suggest that the nature and fate of art in the wake of the traumatic experience of World War I would have to change. But in what sense and how would these developments impact his work?

 

Duchamp’s personal observations regarding his first migration to America provide some interesting clues. In an article, “French Artists Spur on American Art” (24 Oct. 1915), Duchamp notes the impact of the war: “Art has gone dusty . . . Paris is like a deserted mansion. Her lights are out. One’s friends are all away at the front. Or else they have been already killed.” The foment of artistic activities and exchanges was exhausted, weighed down by talk about the war: “Nothing but war was talked about from morning until night. In such an atmosphere, especially for one who holds war to be an abomination, it may readily be conceived that existence was heavy and dull.” As far as painting is concerned, he writes, “it is a matter of indifference to me where I am.” He concludes that he is so happy to be in New York, “for I have not painted a single picture since coming over” (Hulten 24 Oct. 1915). Duchamp’s expressed indifference to his location reflects the indifference he appears to have developed to painting as a whole, since he stopped painting upon his arrival in the United States. Thus it would seem that for Duchamp art had gone dusty not just in the ateliers of Paris affected by the war, but more generally, as a pursuit that he would suspend and subsequently leave behind.

 

Does the refuge that Duchamp sought from the war coincide with the freedom that he had been seeking not just from painting but also from art as a whole? A closer look at his activities since 1913 onwards reveals his emergent interest in the readymades on the one hand, and the development of his ideas for The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even or The Large Glass (1915-1923) on the other. These projects reflect his efforts to move away from a purely visual idea of painting toward an understanding of art as intellectual expression.⁷ Playfully fudging the distinction between ordinary and art objects through mechanical reproduction, the readymades expose through this redundancy the conceptual and institutional premises that encase the designation of objects as art. The Large Glass reassembles and reproduces earlier pictorial studies on glass, stripping painting bare of its visual vestments by rendering it transparent. Using various techniques of reproduction to “dry” up its pictorial content, Duchamp postpones the intent of its pictorial and artistic becoming. By laying bare its conditions of possibility, he challenges the idea of painting and by extension art. Thus, while Duchamp’s refuge from World War I resulted in the suspension of his activities as a painter, it also seems to have provided the freedom to rethink the nature and destiny of art. Consistent with his claim that there is “nothing static about his manner of working,” his departure inaugurated a new beginning: “I have never deceived myself into thinking that I have at length hit upon the ultimate expression. In the midst of each epoch I fully realize that a new epoch will dawn” (Hulten 24 Oct. 1915).

 

Voyage Sculptures: The Physics of Baggage

 

Among Duchamp’s readymades produced after his arrival in New York in 1915 was his first portable work entitled Traveler’s Folding Item (1916, New York) (see Figure 1).

 

Figure 1: Traveler’s Folding Item, 1916 (1964 edition) Gift of Mary Sisler Foundation, Collection of John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, The State Art Museum of Florida © 2005 Succession Marcel Duchamp ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris

 

This Underwood typewriter cover was lost, with no photo left of the original, and was recreated in miniature in 1940 for inclusion in The Box in a Valise. What is notable about this little-discussed work is the centrality of its assigned position in the Box. Displayed between Paris Air and Fountain, it is aligned with the bar that separates the upper and lower portions of The Large Glass.[8] Does the portable and folding nature of this work imply a reflection on The Box in a Valise as folding exhibition case? Its portability, like that of the valise, implies freedom of display outside the confines of the museum, while its flexibility and hence capacity for folding opens up new ways of thinking about the nature of art objects. This work stands out among Duchamp’s readymades because it interrogates the pretensions to solidity associated with sculpture by introducing the “idea of softness”: “I thought it would be a good idea to introduce softness in the Ready-made–in other words not altogether hardness–porcelain, iron, or things like that–why not use something flexible as a new shape–changing shape, so that’s why the typewriter cover came into existence.”[9] But Duchamp does more than just introduce softness into the readymade, since the cover’s flexibility undermines in effect its ability to stand up as an object in its own right. The changing nature of the cover’s shape (whether folded or unfolded) is determined by its use and activation by an agent.

 

Traveler’s Folding Item points to the typewriter it hides from view, a reference reinforced by the verbal cue of the brand name “Underwood” on the cover. When Walter Hopps asked him about this work, Duchamp responded: “Oh, it is removed from its machine” (Camfield 110). Hidden under the “skirts” of the cover is not just any ordinary object, but a writing machine (machine à écrier).[10] While not particularly worthy of being looked at, the absent typewriter alludes to the mental and verbal processes involved in the production of readymades. These include the choice and determination of the object’s modes of display, along with the use of poetic or punning titles that add “intellectual color.” But as Duchamp specifies, this “cerebral colour” “adds not in the way of intellectualism, but in the way you make another frame to a painting” (Hulten 19 Oct. 1949). Its function is to reframe the work, opening up a new way for seeing and understanding it. Portable by nature and not quite an object in its own right, this flexible case adapts itself to circumstance, thus relinquishing claims to stability both of form and of meaning. This work is doubly interactive, not only because it derives its meaning by association with another object, but also because it requires the intervention of the spectator/producer for its activation in its various conditions. If the readymades were a way of demonstrating the “cover-up” involved in the framing and thus packaging of objects as works of art, Traveler’s Folding Item lifts that cover to revel in the absence of the object, the implied institutional gestures that underwrite its artistic existence and display. Unfolding and suspending the conventions that encase the traditional definition of art objects in the confines of the museum, this portable work anticipates Duchamp’s folding exhibition project, The Box in a Valise.

 

Following America’s entry into World War I in 1917 and his classification for military duty as a foreigner, Duchamp set off in 1918 for the neutrality of Argentina. Having left France in 1915 for his lack of militarism and patriotism, he had now “fallen into American patriotism, which certainly was worse” (Cabanne 59). He packed in his bags Sculpture for Traveling (New York; object disintegrated; dimensions variable) (see Figure 2), a portable piece made from colored rubber bathing caps cut into irregular strips and glued together into a flexible lattice.

 

Figure 2: Sculpture for Traveling, 1918 Philadelphia Museum of Art: Marcel Duchamp Archive, Gift of Jacqueline, Peter and Paul Matisse in memory of their Mother Alexina Duchamp. © 2005 Succession Marcel Duchamp ARS, N. Y./ADAGP Paris

 

Attached with variable lengths of string to the four corners of his studio, this “multi-colored spider’s web” (Hulten 8 July 1918) lacks the solidity of statuary since the “form was ad libitum” (Cabanne 59). Its variable shape and dimensions can adapt to its conditions of display. Duchamp may have chosen to use strips of bathing caps not just because of their elasticity, but also because they allude playfully to the head. The inscription of a mental dimension in the work is particularly important to Duchamp, given his efforts to challenge a purely visual understanding of painting and art. The analogy of this work to a “spider’s web” hides a reference to painting, since the French word for a spider’s web (toile d’arraignée) also refers to the pictorial canvas (toile). Dispensing with the idea of painting, the suspension of this web of strings only retained the protocols of its display. Suspended like a spider’s web, Sculpture for Traveling lay in wait ready to entrap unwitting spectators by impeding their ability to walk around the room (Cabanne 59). The unfolding of this work in space obstructs the “habitual movement of the individual around the contemplated object” (Hulten 26 June 1955), thus disrupting notions of exhibition display. Providing an “antidote” to painting and sculpture, the economy of means and portability of Sculpture for Traveling exposes and challenges the defining conventions for both the production and consumption of works of art. While alluding to his efforts to take refuge from war once again, this work marks his refusal to take refuge in art by rethinking and redefining its nature.

 

In 1942 Duchamp produced a modified version of this work in an installation format, using the idea of entangled strings minus the bathing caps. Sixteen Miles of String (see Figure 3) was presented in the First Papers of Surrealism Exhibition organized by André Breton and Marcel Duchamp (referred to as his “twine”) for the Coordinating Council for French Relief Societies in New York, 14 Oct.-7 Nov. 1942.

 

Figure 3: Sixteen Miles of String, 1942. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Marcel Duchamp Archive, Gift of Jacqueline, Peter and Paul Matisse in memory of their Mother Alexina Duchamp. © 2005 Succession Marcel Duchamp ARS, N. Y./ADAGP Paris.

 

For now, this analysis will focus on the installation before proceeding to discuss the exhibition’s circumstances, catalog, and opening in more detail. The most notable consideration framing this work is that it was set up to benefit the war relief efforts. The setting for this exhibition was the ornate Whitelaw Reid mansion (ca. 1880s), with its gilded decorations and painted ceilings. This ostentatious and dated setting was out of line not only with the “modernity” of the works displayed but also with the events surrounding the display. Transposing his intervention in Sculpture for Traveling to the public sphere, Duchamp constructed an elaborate web of entangled strings that crisscrossed the exhibition space, obscuring individual works as well as impeding the spectator. By posing a physical impediment, the entangled strings hindered the spectators’ efforts to see the paintings. Reflecting his earlier attempts to keep painting and its retinal seduction at bay, this work reframed the conditions for the display and consumption of art. Given the context of WWII, these attempts at obstructing art took on added resonance.

 

Not surprisingly, the artists exhibiting their works were less than sanguine about this disruption of the conditions for viewing their works.[11] As Duchamp recalled, his gesture attracted their concern and ire: “Some painters were actually disgusted with the idea of having their paintings back of lines like that, thought nobody would see their paintings.”[12] Did Duchamp’s “harassment of the spectators” disguise the harassment of his fellow artists’ works, as Brian O’Doherty (a.k.a. Patrick Ireland) contends (72)? It is important to keep in mind that his intervention took on not other artists’ works, but rather the conditions of their display. This disruption of aesthetic contemplation reframed the spectators’ experience of the exhibition as an event which was no longer about the business of art as usual. Moreover, on the exhibition’s opening night, children solicited and instructed by Duchamp played in the galleries, throwing balls and creating havoc. Countermanding the anachronism of the setting and challenging the conventions of art, this installation staged the possibility of its own annulment. By barring access and obscuring visibility, the crisscrossing strings marked a de facto cancellation of the show as a purely visual event. Resembling a giant cobweb, this installation commented on the obsoleteness of art gone dusty in the midst of war, along with its modes of display.[13] Sixteen Miles of String exposed the institutional premises (or “strings”) attached to the display and consumption of art that secured the myth of its immutability. It is precisely this entanglement or trap that The Box in a Valise avoids since its tangibility, mutability, and portability challenge both the idea of art and the immobilizing foreclosure of the museum.

 

Canned Goods

 

Referring to The Box in a Valise, Duchamp inquired where he should send his “canned goods” (Hulten 23 Feb. 1941). It would seem that in addition to his earlier efforts to “can chance,” he had now “canned” reproductions of his works in a box. This idea of gathering reproductions of his works in a box is new, although Duchamp had already began producing compilations of his notes as early as 1914. As he noted however, at the time “I didn’t have the idea of a box as much as just notes” (Cabanne 42). The Box of 1914 (see Figure 4) is a Kodak photographic box containing sixteen photos of manuscript pages of notes and a drawing.[14]

 

Figure 4: The Box of 1914, Closed View. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Mme. Marcel Duchamp. © 2005 Succession Marcel Duchamp ARS, N.Y./ ADAGP, Paris

 

These allusions to photography as a medium for mass reproduction parallel Duchamp’s emergent interest in questions of reproducibility and the multiple, which became the explicit content of his readymades. Reproducing disparate fragments of Duchamp’s mental musings, these notes “can” his thought processes as counterparts to the physical production of art.[15] His comments on The Green Box (1934) (see Figure 5) reiterate the notion of compilation (the equivalent of a Sears, Roebuck catalog) with the caveat that this catalogue was to be consulted when seeing the Glass“because . . . it must not be ‘looked at’ in the aesthetic sense of the word” (Cabanne 42-43).

 

Figure 5: The Green Box, 1934. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection. © 2005 Succession Marcel Duchamp ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris.

 

This conjunction removed the “retinal aspect” by disrupting the aesthetics of the “look,” that is to say a purely visual consumption of art (Hulten 16 Oct. 1934). In his discussion of The Box in a Valise, Duchamp explained that he found a “new form of expression”: “Instead of painting something the idea was to reproduce the paintings that I loved so much in miniature. I didn’t know how to do it. I thought of a book, but I didn’t like the idea” (Duchamp, Writings 136).[16] His remarks indicate that the Valise represents not just an alternative to painting, but a new form of expression that relies on miniature reproduction but is not assimilable to a book. Unfettered by the logic of the book that freezes representation into a regulated succession of static images, Duchamp’s box encased in a valise provides a dynamic and interactive space for the assemblage of his works. Does Duchamp merely repeat himself through a strategy of self-quotation? Or does he discover through The Box in a Valise a new way of thinking about art by redefining notions of artistic making?

 

The process of reproducing and assembling his portable boxes proved to be painstaking and time consuming. Duchamp had to travel in order to retrieve information regarding the color tones of the originals. Lost objects were reproduced with the aid of photographs, and he even had to repurchase a work in order to reproduce it. In the case of the typewriter cover, where both the original and the photo were lost, he had a miniature replica made that now became an original. The Valise also made available through reproduction works unavailable for viewing because they were in private collections. Shying away from readily available reproduction techniques, he resorted to older, more time-consuming methods using collotype printing and hand colored stencils. Since he delegated the actual handwork involved in the production of the replicas to various artisanal workshops, his intervention consisted of preparing the materials for reproduction by spelling out and then supervising the successive steps to be followed. According to Ecke Bonk, “he broke down his originals into separate graphic steps and had them reassembled as reproduction” (20).[17] His analytic breakdown of “original” works in order to generate directives for their re-assemblage as replicas redefined the issues raised by mechanical reproduction in the case of the readymades. In The Box in a Valise Duchamp takes to task the conventional understanding of mechanical reproduction through the laborious hand reproduction of works which undermine and blur the distinction between an original and its replica, the unique and the multiple. Alluding to his discovery of the readymades, he playfully reappropriates and restages his earlier gestures, thereby relying on a notion of making whose unartistic character postpones its possibility of becoming art.

 

Unpacking the Museum?

 

One of the most noteworthy aspects of The Box in a Valise (see Figure 6) is that it appears to function as a miniaturized collection and museum-like retrospective of Duchamp’s works.

 

Figure 6: The Box in a Valise, 1941. Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection. © 2005 Succession Marcel Duchamp ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris

 

He first described the idea for this project to Katherine Dreier in March of 1935: “I want to make, sometime an album of approximately all the things I have produced” (Affectionately 197). Initially he thought of assembling them in a book, but then “I thought of the idea of a box in which all my works would be mounted like in a small museum, a portable museum, so to speak, and here it is in this valise” (Duchamp, Writings 136). The monographic and retrospective character of the box playfully alludes to the institution of the museum in the guise of a portable collection presented as a collectible item. But does this collection of reproductions of his works merely reinforce, or rather, mimic the museum in order to expose its institutional logic? In response to Katherine Dreier’s idea of turning her house into a museum, he remarked that keeping together the paintings and sculptures she has collected is to him “more important than thinking of a Monument or any grandiose form of doing it” (Hulten 24 Aug. 1937). Duchamp’s comment indicates that his idea of collection as a context that frames the totality of a body of work is independent of notions of institutional aggrandizement. In a letter to Walter Pach (28 Sept. 1937), Duchamp explains that he would like to see his painting join its “brothers and sisters in California,” rather than be subject to speculation by being scattered about. He added that he is certain that Arensberg, like himself, “intends making it a coherent whole” (Affectionately 216). His idea of amassing his works in a collection involves an appeal to their contextual coherence suggests the iterative and interrelated character of these works. The collection of miniature reproductions in The Box in a Valise functions as an antidote to the institutional logic of the museum by creating an alternative exhibition context where visual consumption is undermined through interactivity and play.[18] Rather than merely presenting a retrospective record of his works, the Valise will subvert the idea of art through strategies of reproduction and mimicry that will challenge notions of authenticity and display associated with the museum.

 

Upon opening the leather case of the valise, the viewer discovers a box whose lid lifts up to reveal the assembled miniature reproductions. Across the celluloid transparency of The Large Glass one can see other works, which are only brought into view once the sliding partitions on both sides are pulled out. The exhibition space requires the intervention of the spectator for its activation; its unfolding delays the immediacy of visual consumption. This work’s tangibility challenges the museum’s interdiction of touch, mediating visual access through an interactive process analogous to play. Undermining the institutional premises of exhibition display based on distance and passive viewing, this work does not invite the spectator but indeed requires him or her to give a hand in its “making.” Postulating appropriation as the only mode of access to this work, Duchamp redefines the position of the viewer by actively engaging him or her in the production of meaning. The prominent display of The Large Glass, flanked on the left by three readymades, Paris Air, Traveler’s Folding Item, and Fountain, underlines their shared significance in challenging retinal art through unartistic forms of expression.[19] The left sliding panel unfolds to reveal two reproductions of paintings that mark the passage or transition to the Glass, thereby hiding from view Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 which had been instrumental in establishing Duchamp’s artistic reputation. By foregrounding these preparatory studies leading to the Glass along with the readymades, and by obstructing the view of his celebrated Nude, he redirects the viewer’s gaze away from painting. This effort to downplay painting can also be seen in his choice of stacking the reproductions of his paintings on top of each other in the bottom part of the box, thereby impeding visual access.

 

The sliding panel on the right displays on the bottom 9 Malic Moulds, another preparatory study for the Glass, and on the top, Tu’m, an assemblage or compendium of shadows of readymades, in conjunction with the transparent Glider, and Comb, a readymade. By presenting an assemblage of his preparatory studies for the Glass, along with the compilation of readymades in Tu’m, this section draws our attention to the notion of compilation as a guiding principle not just for the Glass, but for the Valise as a whole. It suggests that the meaning of represented objects can only be addressed as a context of embedded gestures. The privilege accorded to the display of Comb may be explained by its French title “peigne,” which is the subjunctive form of the verb to paint, “I ought to or should paint.” Thierry de Duve observes that Comb refers both to the impossibility and to the possibility of painting, since while doomed by industrialization it retains a conceptual potential whose affirmation entails the postponement of its pictorial “happening” (115). Comb thus alludes to Duchamp’s dilemma as an artist who sought to move beyond a retinal understanding of art, the obligatory “I ought or should paint,” toward its conceptual redefinition through unartistic modes of production capitalizing on notions of reproduction and mimicry. As Duchamp pointedly notes: “I am not a painter in perpetuity and since generals no longer die in the saddle, painters are no longer obliged to die at their easel” (Hulten 29 Oct. 1958).

 

On bottom left of the case there is a foldout photograph of Three Standard Stoppages (1913-14), which Duchamp designates as an instance of “canned chance.” Recording the accidental shapes produced by three meter long strings (dropped from the height of one meter on three canvases painted in blue), he fixed them in glue, cut them into strips and affixed the resulting impressions on glass plates which served as molds for the preparation of three wooden templates. By resorting to these various strategies of reproduction he conceptually drew upon the plastic potential of chance as generator of variable shapes. Thus his efforts to “can” chance by recording and reproducing its contingencies ends up not just preserving the past, but strategically redeploying its manifestations. This work illuminates his particular claims for reproduction in the Valise, understood not just as mere replication of his past works, but as a new strategy for making that can no longer be assimilated to art. Commenting on the readymade, Duchamp noted that its significance lies precisely in its “lack of uniqueness,” a message that is also delivered by the “replica of a readymade” (Duchamp, Writings 142). While his original readymades were products of mechanical reproduction, the replicas in the Valise were hand-made using traditional techniques: The Box in a Valise thus questions the notion of uniqueness attached to a work of art through reproduction, be it a mechanical or artisanal process. By exploring the logic of the multiple as a new horizon, Duchamp uncovers the conceptual potential of reproduction using replication and mimicry to undermine notions of artistic production. Challenging the idea of art and the institution of the museum, the Valise stands as an affirmation of freedom. While drawing on Duchamp’s prior interventions, this nomadic work does not recover the past as an object of nostalgia or autobiographical self-reference. Rather than reclaiming past history, The Box in a Valise opens up a transition toward new forms of making no longer reducible to art.

 

Luggage Tags

 

The leather-bound copies of The Box in a Valise bear the intriguing hand-lettered signature “of or by Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Sélavy.” Rrose Sélavy was Duchamp’s female alter ego who began to sign or co-sign his ready-mades starting in 1920. She made her physical appearance in a photograph by Man Ray (1921) of Duchamp in female masquerade (see Figure 7).

 

Figure 7: Rrose Sélavy, 1921. Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Samuel S. White, 3rd, and Vera White Collection. © 2005 Succession Marcel Duchamp ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris

 

This doubling of the artist as himself and/or his female other challenges the myth of the artist as unique creator and recasts the gesture of artistic making as an appropriative, rather than originary act. For Duchamp the aesthetic result is a phenomenon that involves two poles, since the picture is made as much by the onlooker as by the artist (Hulten 13 Jan. 1961). By redefining artistic making as an active interchange, he opens up the appropriation of the Valise not just to Rrose Sélavy, but to the spectator as well.[20] This attempt to activate and reauthorize the position of spectatorship can be seen in his birthday gift to Ettie Stettheimer of a set of luggage tags complete with string. Bearing Rrose’s alias and Duchamp’s address, this tag bears in lieu of its destination the phrase: “Ettie who are: YOU FOR ME?” (Hulten 30 July 1922). The query regarding identity, and its redeployment through the interchange of “YOU” and “ME,” extend a playful invitation that the Valise enacts insofar as it requires activation by the spectator. But in The Box in a Valise, Duchamp did not just question the institution of authorship, since in addition to assuming the role of producer of reproductions executed by others he also emerged as collector, curator, and archivist of his works. Undermining the position of the artist as originating agency, he subsumed under the guise of producer a plurality of forms of agency, which conventionally are associated with different professional entities and activities.[21] By blurring the institutional and professional distinctions that sustain the autonomy of these roles as underwritten by the institution of the museum, he successfully challenges in the Valise the cultural presuppositions that underlie the definition both of the artist and of the production of art.

 

Baggage Claims?

 

Trapped by the increased violence and widening scope of WWII, while attempting to supervise the production of and retrieve the materials for The Box in a Valise, Duchamp made his last-minute escape from war-ravaged France on 14 May 1942. Shortly after his arrival in New York in June, he was asked to help organize a Surrealist group show for the benefit of the war relief efforts sponsored by the Coordinating Council for French Relief Societies. The money raised was to be used for supplies for French prisoners and for the adoption of French children orphaned by the war. In addition to participating with André Breton in organizing the exhibition, he presented the installation Sixteen Miles of String discussed earlier. He also worked with Breton on the conception of the exhibition catalog First Papers of Surrealism (see Figure 8) and designed its covers.[22]

 

Figure 8: Covers of First Papers of Surrealism, 1942. Front cover on the right, back cover on the left. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Louise and Walter Arensberg Archives. © 2005 Succession Marcel Duchamp ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris

 

The front cover depicted a photographic close-up of the crumbling wall of his fellow artist Kurt Seligman’s barn bearing the bullet traces of Duchamp’s rifle shots reproduced as perforations (Hulten 14 Oct. 1942). This “shooting” event took place in the context of an outdoor party attended by friends and other Surrealist artists.[23] While alluding to the violence of war, this photograph records the impact of a simulated event akin to an “art performance.” In the midst of the war, when images of destruction were readily available, why did Duchamp resort to this strategy of simulation? Instead of appropriating ready-made images, he relied on a photographic “shot” of the damage inflicted by his shooting. Punning on the violence implied in “shooting” (since “shooting” refers both to bullet and to photographic “shots”), Duchamp introduces a cautionary note in regard to photography’s and art’s potential for violence in attempting to represent the impact of the war.

 

The back cover shows a close-up photo of a slab of Gruyère cheese pockmarked with holes and stamped over with the title and details of the exhibition. The absurdity of the juxtaposition of the bullet-ridden wall with a slab of cheese is at first shocking. Is it simply a bad joke on the absurdity of war? Keeping in mind the circumstances of Duchamp’s recent escape from the war, this back cover may well allude to the cheese dealer’s pass Duchamp used to transport the materials and reproductions for the The Box in a Valise across enemy lines. If so, this allusion would underline the absurdity of his efforts to retrieve his “valises,” which marked his refuge and renunciation of making art. The juxtaposition of bullet shots and cheese may be a visual pun, suggesting that the holes in the cheese may have resulted from its being shot.[24] If so, this may be yet another way to figure the potential damage of photography in attempting to “shoot” the effects of war. The only mention of war in the catalogue, to Düsseldorf having been repeatedly bombed, is not accompanied by a photograph. Thus while alluding to the violence of war, the front and back covers also point to the dangers implied in the attempt to take refuge in its photographic and/or artistic representation.

 

The exhibition catalog includes Duchamp’s “Compensation Portrait” (1942) (see Figure 9), a reproduction of Ben Shahn’s photograph (ca. 1935-41) of a haggard and care-worn woman in rural America during the Great Depression with the caption “Marcel Duchamp” below.[25]

 

Figure 9: Marcel Duchamp’s “Compensation Portrait” First Papers of Surrealism Catalogue, 1942 Philadelphia Museum of Art: Collection Mme. Duchamp. © 2005 Succession Marcel Duchamp ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris

 

Suggested by Duchamp and Breton, the idea of “compensation portraits” mandated that participating artists choose the photograph of an unknown person to represent them. The rationale presented was as follows: “not being able to offer an entirely adequate photographic image of each of the principal exhibitors, we have thought it best here to resort to the general scheme of ‘compensation portraits.’” Why did the exhibition’s organizers resort to this unusual compensation scheme? Was their inability to represent the exhibitors adequately also a reflection on the inadequacy of photography’s claims to representation? Referring to the ongoing war, the catalog dryly states: “Circumstances made it impossible for us to represent properly or by their most recent works a number of artists.” The list of artists that follows (grouped by country, not always of origin but sometimes of refuge) documents the absence, inaccessibility, or displacement of artists and/or their works from the sphere of artistic activity. Deprived of their national identity and expropriated of their worldly goods including their art, many of these artists were on the run. Thus Duchamp’s and Breton’s failure to represent certain artists or recent works served to mark both art’s vulnerability in the face of war and its inability to compensate for damages incurred. While set up as a “benefit” in order to generate funds for the “relief” of French prisoners and orphans, this exhibition could neither relieve the damages incurred nor compensate for the losses suffered.

 

A closer look at Duchamp’s “Compensation Portrait” reveals Duchamp’s playful reflection on the potential dangers implied in artistic attempts to lay claim to traumatic events. In letting Shahn’s photograph stand in lieu of his own semblance, Duchamp does not so much appropriate the “portrait” of another person as Shahn’s claim to “portray” the ravages of the Great Depression. In so doing, he demonstrates that Shahn’s photographic “claim” to represent this painful epoch (in the guise of an anonymous woman’s ravaged complexion) cannot be secured. His photograph is open to appropriation, and hence to the possibility of betrayal of its author and of its intended meaning. Drawing on the purpose of this art exhibition as a benefit to raise funds for the “adoption” of French children orphaned by war, Duchamp strategically redeploys this notion of adoption to rethink the nature of art in the face of war. Adoption means taking as one’s own what is not “naturally” so; in the case of a child orphaned by war, adoption secures the legal recognition of the child’s history through the assignment of a new surname and hence a new identity. The child’s assumption of a different name marks the traumatic loss of the parents, designating a damage that cannot be claimed but only passed on as an event beyond compensation. Thus by “adopting” Shahn’s photograph as if it were an “orphan,” and reissuing it under his own name, Duchamp acknowledges its traumatic history without claiming to represent it. In so doing, he demonstrates that his strategies of appropriation do not lead to the consolidation but rather to the dissemination of the self and to the postponement of identity.

 

Overlapping with the dates that frame the idea and execution of The Box in a Valise (1935-41), Marcel Duchamp’s “Compensation Portrait” substitutes an American, aged, impoverished, and worn-down feminine semblance for the seductively French, feminine, and gay co-signatory of The Box in a Valise, Rrose Sélavy. Sporting an American identity authorized by another artist, this new persona in the guise of a “compensation portrait” attests to a traumatic history that can no longer be claimed in the name of art and of the artist. As Duchamp later explained: “You see art never saved the world. It cannot” (Hulten 8 Sept. 1966). Challenging aestheticism, particularly the idea of the cultivation of art for its own sake, he underlines the inability of art to save the world. However, while art cannot offer redemption by transcending the brutality of war, this fundamental limitation does not mean that all attempts at making must cease at once and forever. Recalling Duchamp’s choice in 1905 to avail himself of the option of becoming an “art worker,” instead of fulfilling his regular military service, and his subsequent concerted efforts to produce works that draw upon but are no longer reducible to art, we can begin to understand that he could go on working without falling into the trap of making art. Declaring his affinity to craft rather than to art, his strategic use and deployment of handcrafted reproductions aligns him with modes of production associated with craftsmen rather than with artists. Decrying the relatively recent “invention” and individuation of the “artist,” he privileges a notion of “making” whose meaning cannot be exhausted by art: “We’re all craftsmen, in civilian or military or artistic life” (Cabanne 16).

 

Attesting to the vulnerability of art in the face of catastrophic events, The Box in a Valise commemorates the idea of transition as a refuge from war that no longer retreats into art. Turning away from the monumentalization of art and the self-aggrandizement of the artist, this nomadic work will mark, through its appeal to transience, the impossibility of finding refuge in art. Liberated from the confines of the museum by its portability, this work relies on strategies of reproduction and miniaturization whose conceptual import privileges reiterated gestures rather than fetishized objects. Instead of falling prey to self-referentiality by upholding the personal myth of the artist, this work scrambles and redistributes authorial agency. Requiring the intervention of multiple agents, its production no longer relies on nor privileges a unique maker. Affirming its affinity with child’s play rather than with the seriousness of making art, this work postpones the artistic becoming of art in response to the catastrophic events of modern history. Claiming the only “baggage” it can, that of art and the institution of the museum, The Box in a Valise opens up new possibilities for engagement and making in the wake of modernism. Foregrounding the assumptions implicit in modern art, this work postpones its becoming by setting its determinations into play. In so doing, it delineates a new postmodern horizon for activities that draw upon but are no longer classifiable as art.[26] Even as the forces of the art market and art institutions conspire to reclaim and enshrine this work as art within the walls of the museum, they cannot undermine the primacy of its appeal: an open invitation to the spectator and by extension to posterity to lend a hand in the creative act.

 

Notes

 

1. Excerpts from this letter of 24 September 1939 are reprinted in Hulten, henceforth cited as Hulten, followed by date of entry.

 

2. First issued in 1941 as a deluxe edition of twenty copies accompanied by “colorized” originals, it was subsequently produced in seven series (A-G) until 1968; see Schwarz 762-64.

 

3. Duchamp obtained his travel permit as a cheese buyer from his friend Gustave Candel, the owner of a chain of Paris dairies; see Marquis 262.

 

4. For a detailed account of Duchamp’s activities during this period, see Tompkins.

 

5. In his 1967 interview with Cabanne (a year and a half before his death), Duchamp remarked: “I left France during the war in 1942, when I would have had to have been part of the Resistance. I don’t have what is called a strong patriotic sense; I’d rather not even talk about it” (85).

 

6. Letter from Walter Arensberg to Duchamp, 21 May 1943, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Walter and Louise Arensberg Archives, Philadelphia, PA; also quoted in Tompkins 316.

 

7. For a detailed analysis of these two projects, see Judovitz 52-73 and 74-119.

 

8. Duchamp’s comment on this particular alignment of readymades was that they were like “ready-made talk of what goes on in the Glass.” This remark was reported by Walter Hopps to William Camfield, based on an exchange with Duchamp on the occasion of his first solo retrospective (at the age of 76), organized by Hopps at the Pasadena Museum of Art (Fall 1963). See Camfield 109.

 

9. Duchamp’s observation is from an unpublished interview with Harriet, Sidney, and Carroll Janis in 1953 in the Philadelphia Museum of Art Archives, quoted in d’Harnoncourt and McShine 281.

 

10. For the gender implications of this cover as a kind of skirt and its potential reference to the Bride and the Large Glass, see Schwarz 196.

 

11. The critics and the public, however, appeared to have taken to this idea in a stride, recognizing this installation as a work in its own right. See Kachur’s helpful discussion of the circumstances and reception of this work (171-188 and 1899-91).

 

12. Harriet, Sidney, and Carroll Janis’s unpublished interview with Duchamp 7-16; also quoted in Kachur 189-90.

 

13. Buchloh examines Duchamp’s appeal to obsoleteness as a reflection on problems of cultural institutionalization and reception (46).

 

14. For a description of the various versions of the Box of 1914, see Schwarz 598-603.

 

15. Joselit suggests that Duchamp’s use of photography as a means of gaining access to his personal notes ends up equating mental and industrial processes; see pp. 84-6.

 

16. From “A Conversation with Marcel Duchamp,” television interview for NBC, Jan. 1956.

 

17. Along with Bonk’s comprehensive account of Duchamp’s activities and techniques for reproduction, also see Buskirk’s helpful summary (194-97).

 

18. Stewart comments on the collection as a “form of art as play, a form involving the reframing of objects within a world of attention and manipulation of context” (151).

 

19. Buskirk has persuasively argued that the Valise retrospectively reinforced and solidified the impact and reception of the readymades; see 194-203.

 

20. Duchamp’s play with the reversibility of gender represents both a critique of the essentialism of gender and of notions of fixed artistic identity; see Judovitz, “‘A Certain Inopticity’” 312-15.

 

21. Buskirk suggests that Duchamp’s assumption of these various professional functions anticipated postmodern developments; see 201.

 

22. Tompkins observed that the title of the exhibition “First Papers of Surrealism” referred to an immigrant’s application for U.S. citizenship, alluding to the refugee status and the loss of national identity of many of the participating artists; see 332.

 

23. See Hauser’s comments on this event (2).

 

24. In his notes on the “Infrathin” (which also refers to the infinitesimal interval separating a shape from its mold), Duchamp uses the example, “Gruyère with fillings for defective dentitions.” Playfully suggesting that the cheese holes are in need of dental fillings, he uses the French word for making a filling (plombé) as a pun on a lead bullet (plomb); see Matisse, n26 (no pagination).

 

25. This image was reproduced in First Papers on Surrealism. Ben Shahn’s photograph was taken under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration and was published in Steichen; see Schwarz 766.

 

26. For a more relevant account of the relation of modernism and postmodernism in the arts, see Lyotard 79-82.

 

Works Cited

 

• Bonk, Ecke. Marcel Duchamp: The Box in a Valise. Trans. David Britt. New York: Rizzoli, 1989.
• Breton, André, and Marcel Duchamp. First Papers of Surrealism. New York: Coordinating Council of French Relief Societies, 1942.
• Buchloch, Benjamin. “The Museum Fictions of Marcel Broodthaers.” Museums by Artists. Eds. A.A. Bronson and Peggy Gale. Toronto: Art Metropole, 1983. 115-27.
• Buskirk, Martha. “Thorougly Modern Marcel.” October 70 (Fall 1994). Rpt. in The Duchamp Effect: Essays, Interviews, Round Table. Eds. Martha Buskirk and Mignon Nixon. Cambridge: MIT P, 1996.
• Cabanne, Pierre. Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp. Trans. Ron Padgett. New York: Da Capo, 1971.
• Camfield, William. Marcel Duchamp: Fountain. “Introduction.” Walter Hopps. Houston: Menil Collection and Houston Fine Arts, 1989.
• Cooper-Gough, Jennifer, and Jacques Caumont, eds. Ephemerides on or about Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Sélavy 1887-1968. Marcel Duchamp: Work and Life. Ed. Pontus Hulten. Milan: Bompiani, 1993. N. pag.
• D’Harnoncourt, Anne, and Kynaston McShine, eds. Marcel Duchamp. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973.
• Duchamp, Marcel. Letter of March 3, 1935. Affectionately, Marcel: The Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp. Eds. Francis M. Naumann and Hector Obalk. Ghent: Ludion, 2000.
• —. “Amicalement Marcel: Fourteen Letters from Marcel Duchamp to Walter Pach.” Ed. Francis M. Naumann and Hector Obalk. Archives of American Art Journal 29:3-4. 36-50.
• —. Marcel Duchamp: Notes. Ed. Paul Matisse. Boston: Hall, 1983.
• —. The Writings of Marcel Duchamp. Eds. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson. New York: Da Capo, 1973.
• Duve, Thierry de. “The Readymade and the Tube of Paint.” Artforum International 24 (May 1986): 110-21.
• Hauser, Stephan E. “Marcel Duchamp Chose Emmentaler Cheese (1942).” Tout-Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Online Journal 1.3 (Dec. 2000): <http://www.toutfait.com/issues/issue_3/Contents/contents.html>.
• Joselit, David. Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910-1941. Cambridge: MIT P, 1998.
• Judovitz, Dalia. “‘A Certain Inopticity’: Duchamp and Paris Dada.” Paris Dada: The Barbarians Storm the Gates. Ed. Elmer Peterson. Boston: Hall, 2001.
• —. Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995.
• Kachur, Lewis. Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dali and Surrealist Exhibition Installations. Cambridge: MIT P, 2001.
• Lyotard, Jean-François. “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?” The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997.
• Marquis, Alice Goldfarb. Marcel Duchamp: Eros, C’est la Vie: a Biography. Troy: Whitston, 1981.
• O’Doherty, Brian. Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986.
• Schwarz, Arturo. The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp. New York: Delano Greenridge, 1997.
• Steichen, Edward. The Bitter Years, 1935-1941. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1962.
• Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.
• Tompkins, Calvin. Duchamp: A Biography. New York: Holt, 1996.

 

Ashley Dawson

Department of English
College of Staten Island,

City University of New York
adawson@gc.cuny.edu

 

In his classic study of post-1945 youth subcultures, Dick Hebdige suggests that Black British popular culture served as a template for defiant white working class subcultural practices and styles (29). The kind of affiliatory cultural politics that Hebdige describes is best exemplified in the little-studied Rock Against Racism (RAR) campaign of the late 1970s. As Paul Gilroy stresses in There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, his seminal analysis of British culture and nationalism, unlike much of the Left at the time, RAR took the politics of youth cultural style and identity seriously.¹Surprisingly, neither Gilroy himself nor subsequent cultural historians have extended his brief discussion of RAR; as a result, our understanding of this movement, its cultural moment and its contradictions remains relatively undeveloped. This is particularly unfortunate since, unlike previous initiatives by members of Britain’s radical community, RAR played an important role in developing the often-latent political content of British youth culture into one of the most potent social movements of the period. In 1978 alone, for instance, RAR organized 300 local gigs and five carnivals in Britain, including two enormous London events that each drew audiences of nearly 100,000. Supporters of RAR claim that the movement played a pivotal role in defeating the neo-fascist threat in Britain during the late 1970s by quashing the electoral and political appeal of the National Front. Although there has been debate about the ethics and efficacy of the campaign, there can be little doubt that RAR provoked a rich and unprecedented fusion of aesthetics and politics.

 

The anti-racist festivals organized by RAR responded to an exclusionary ethnic nationalism evident among supporters of the neo-fascist National Front, official discourses emanating from the Labour and Tory mainstream, and British culture more broadly. Drawing on cultural forms of the Black diaspora such as reggae and carnival and juxtaposing them with the renegade punk subculture, RAR sought to catalyze anti-racist cultural and political solidarity among Black, Asian, and white youths. RAR thus offers a particularly powerful example of what Vijay Prashad calls polyculturalism, a term which challenges hegemonic multiculturalism, with its model of neatly bounded, discrete cultures (xi). In contrast to prevailing notions of multiculturalism, the term “polyculturalism” underlines the permeability and dynamism of contemporary cultural formations. As a result of RAR’s work, proponents of RAR argue, a generation of white youths have been exposed to and came to admire Black culture, to hate racism, and to view Britain as a mongrel rather than an ethnically pure nation.

 

Polycultural transformation does not, however, just happen. Rather, the forms of quotidian identification and exchange experienced by white, Asian, and Black communities need to be forged consciously into traditions of political solidarity. Unlike in the multicultural model, which is predicated on the ahistorical interaction of supposedly isolated cultures, the polycultural carnivals organized by RAR stressed the interwoven character of British popular cultures in order to build a grass-roots anti-racist movement.² By taking the quotidian bonds and identifications shared by urban youth cultures of the period seriously, RAR opened up a new terrain of politics predicated on engaging with the spontaneous energies of subcultural creativity rather than trying to ram preconceived politically correct cultural forms down young people’s throats. While an incendiary fusion of culture and politics was integral to European avant-garde groups for most of the century, RAR brought this combustible combination to a mass audience for the first time in Britain, blazing a trail for contemporary direct action movements.

 

The anti-racist tradition developed by RAR was also predicated on evoking links with anti-racist struggles outside the sclerotic confines of the British body politic, in sites such as South Africa and the United States. Such transnational affiliations suggest liberatory possibilities that break the boundaries of the nation-state.³ This politics of spatial transgression becomes particularly clear once we begin recuperating the legacy of punk and of Two-Tone aesthetics. The genealogy of groups like the Slits, the Clash, and the Specials, for example, runs not only to the European avant-garde, but also to non-metropolitan traditions such as Jamaican dancehall and South Asian anti-colonialism.⁴ In turn, the dialogic performances that characterize popular cultures of the Black diaspora need to be connected to the assault on the culture of the spectacle embodied in the punk movement.⁵ If, as Hebdige argues, Black popular music provided the generative matrix of post-war youth subcultures in Britain, at crucial moments Black, white, and Asian subcultures have converged and exchanged musical beliefs in electric circuits with significant political outcomes. The Rock Against Racism campaigns of the mid- to late-1970s were a particularly important effort to draw on the energies of polycultural youth subcultures, one whose relevancy has grown more apparent as xenophobic rhetoric has reemerged as a regular feature of the British public sphere.

 

In mid-May, 1977 the Clash took the stage at the decrepit Gaumont-Egyptian Rainbow theatre in London’s Finsbury Park, backed by a billboard-sized banner of the police under attack by brick-throwing Black youths at the carnival of the previous August in Notting Hill. The group launched straight into “White Riot,” their anthem of identification with Black rebellion:

 

White riot - I wanna riot
White riot - a riot of my own
White riot - I wanna riot
White riot - a riot of my own
Black people gotta lot a problems
But they don’t mind throwing a brick
White people go to school
Where they teach you how to be thick

 

An’ everybody’s doing
Just what they’re told to
An’ nobody wants
To go to jail!

 

All the power’s in the hands
Of people rich enough to buy it
While we walk the street
Too chicken to even try it

 

Everybody’s doing
Just what they’re told to
Nobody wants
To go to jail!

 

Are you taking over
or are you taking orders?
Are you going backwards
Or are you going forwards?

 

For the Clash, the Notting Hill carnival uprising was a symbol of Black youth resistance to an exploitative and oppressive system, a form of rejection that the punk generation needed to emulate. “White Riot” suggests that Black kids had not just seen through the lies and hypocrisies of the decaying British welfare state, but had the courage to do something about it. By contrast, not only were white youths brainwashed by the state apparatus of education, but, according to the Clash, they also lacked the courage to rebel and change the system when they were able to penetrate the veil of ideology.

 

The Clash were touring in 1977 with punk bands the Jam and the Buzzcocks, as well as with a roots-reggae sound system featuring I-Roy and dub from the Revolutionaries. This line-up was an expression of the polycultural character of certain segments of punk subculture in the mid-1970s.⁶ Dub reggae was the soundtrack for punk in those early days, with Rastafarian DJ Don Letts spinning records at seminal punk club the Roxy. In addition, many punk bands practiced in run-down areas of London such as Ladbroke Grove, home to one of Britain’s largest Caribbean communities.⁷ But hybridity was not the only game in town; neo-fascist skinheads also turned up at punk gigs regularly, trolling for disaffected youths who might be turned on to racial supremacist doctrine. Indeed, in case anyone in their fishnet stocking-clad, mohawk-wearing audience didn’t get the anti-racist message, Joe Strummer announced from the stage before the band barreled into their wailing version of Junior Murvin’s lyrical reggae classic “Police and Thieves,” “Last week 119,000 people voted National Front in London. Well, this next one’s by a wog. And if you don’t like wogs, you know where the bog [toilet] is” (Widgery 70).⁸ Strummer’s terse statement attests to the deeply racialized character of British popular culture in general and to the menacing presence of neo-fascists at gigs in particular, as well as to the determination of certain segments of the punk movement to confront such racism head on.

 

The Clash’s anti-racist stance was catalyzed by the evolution of new models for political practice within Black British and Asian communities during the 1970s. Such practices were based on an explicit rejection of the vanguardist philosophy that underpinned many previous Black power organizations. In an editorial published in 1976, for example, the Race Today collective articulates the new philosophy of self-organized activity:

 

Our view of the self-activity of the black working class, both Caribbean and Asian, has caused us to break from the idea of "organizing" them. We are not for setting up, in the fashion of the 60's, a vanguard party or vehicle with a welfare programme to attract people . . . . In the name of "service to the community," there has been the growth of state-nurtured cadres of black workers, who are devoted to dealing with the particularities of black rebellion.

 

In turning against the tradition of the vanguard party, groups such as the Race Today collective were not simply rebelling against their immediate predecessors in the Black power tradition. They were, rather, recuperating a tradition of autonomist theory and practice that extends back to the work of C.L.R. James in Britain during the 1930s.

 

By the mid-1970s, James had returned to Britain and his brilliant writings on the tradition of radical Black self-organization had begun to influence younger generations of activists in the Black community there.⁹ For James and for other radicals of his generation such as George Padmore, the impatience with vanguardist philosophies stemmed from the failure of the Comintern and the Soviet Union to support anti-colonial struggles during the 1930s adequately.¹⁰ In James’s case, however, this disillusionment with particular Communist institutions developed through his historiographic and theoretical work into a full-blown embrace of popular spontaneity and self-organization. From his account of Toussaint L’Ouverture’s tragic failure to communicate with his followers during the Haitian revolution in The Black Jacobins to his attack on the stranglehold of Stalinist bureaucracy on the revolutionary proletariat in Notes on Dialectics, James consistently champions the free creative activity of the people.¹¹ His theories gave activists a way of talking about the complex conjunction of race and class that characterized anti-imperialist struggle in the periphery and anti-racist politics in the metropolis.¹² Taking the revolutionary activity of the slaves in Haiti as his paradigm, James articulates a model of autonomous popular insurrectionary energy that offers a perfect theoretical analysis of spontaneous uprisings such as those that took place at the Notting Hill carnivals of 1976-78 in London. He was, indeed, one of the few major radicals to proclaim the inevitability and justice of the urban uprisings throughout Britain in 1981 (Buhle 161). The impact of James’s ideas concerning the autonomy of the revolutionary masses can be seen in the polycultural politics of coalition that mushroomed in response to the violence of the British state during the late 1970s.

 

Yet despite the increasing militancy of the Black community, the grip of popular authoritarianism continued to tighten in Britain. If people of African descent were particularly subject to harassment and violence by the police, the Asian community in Britain suffered especially heavily from both organized and impromptu racist violence. In June 1976, 18-year-old Gurdip Singh Chaggar was attacked and stabbed to death by a group of white youths opposite the Indian Workers’ Association’s Dominion Cinema in Southall (Sivanandan 142). Horrified by the lack of official action in response to this violence committed in the symbolic heart of one of Britain’s largest Asian communities, the elders of the community gathered to give speeches and pass resolutions against the tide of racist violence.¹³ Asian youth in Southall, however, were fed up with this kind of pallid response, and with the quietist approach of their so-called leaders. They marched to the local police station demanding action. When the police arrested some of them for stoning a police van along the way, the crowd of youths sat down in front of the police station and refused to budge until their friends were freed. The following day, the Southall Youth Movement was born.¹⁴ Other Asian youth groups followed in its wake around London and in other British cities. These groups were primarily defensive and local in character.¹⁵ Unlike the class-based organizations that traditionally dominated the Left wing in British politics, in other words, these groups stressed the language of community over that of class. Their struggle tended to turn on immediate goals related to political self-management, cultural identity, and collective consumption rather than on the more ambitious but distant goals of the revolutionary tradition.¹⁶

 

Like the spontaneous uprisings that took place during the Notting Hill carnival, the Asian Youth Movement also led to the development of new political formations that helped forge what Stuart Hall afterwards termed “new ethnicities.” Youth organizations and defense committees that sprang up in one community tended to receive help from groups in other communities, and, in turn, to go to the aid of similar organizations when the occasion arose. In the process, boundaries between Britain’s different ethnic communities were overcome in the name of mutual aid. Asian groups like the Southall Youth Movement joined with Black groups such as Peoples Unite, and, in some instances, new pan-ethnic, polycultural groups such as Hackney Black People’s Defence Organization coalesced.¹⁷ In addition, Blacks and Asians formed political groups that addressed the oppressive conditions experienced not only by racialized subjects in Britain but throughout the Third World at this time. Such organizations regarded racism in the metropolis and imperialism in the periphery, in the tradition of C.L.R. James, as related aspects of the global capitalist system. Many of these groups hearkened back explicitly to the Bandung conference of 1955 between African and Asian heads of state by developing a politics of solidarity in the face of state and popular racism in Britain. The polycultural character and ambitions of these groups is reflected in the titles of journals such as Samaj in’a Babylon (produced in Urdu and English) and Black Struggle. While such coalitions always had their internal tensions, they were sustained by their participants’ conscious reaction to the divide-and-conquer politics that had characterized historical British imperialism and that continued to manifest itself in the metropolis.

 

The emotional resonance of this politics of polycultural solidarity is suggested by dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson’s “It Dread Inna Inglan.” Composed as part of a campaign to free an unjustly imprisoned community activist, LKJ’s dub poem celebrates the potent affiliations that racialized groups in Britain strove to foster during this period:

 

mi se dem frame-up George Lindo
up in Bradford Toun
but di Bradford Blacks
dem a rally roun . . .
Maggi Thatcher on di go
wid a racist show,
but a she haffi go
kaw,
rite now,
African
Asian
West Indian
An’ Black British
stan firm inna Inglan
inna disya time yah

 

for noh mattah wat dey say,
come wat may,
we are here to stay
inna Inglan,
inna disya time yah . . . (Johnson 14).

 

LKJ’s catalogue of different ethnic groups closes with the unifying label “Black British,” which unites the groups in common resistance to the racism of politicians such as Margaret Thatcher. LKJ’s dub verse creates a linguistic equivalent of this imagined community by hybridizing standard English and Jamaican patois (Hitchcock). This was a community forged by dint of anti-racist struggle in the metropolis. Indeed, for prominent radical theorists of the time such as A. Sivanandan, Blackness was a political rather than a phenotypical label.¹⁸ Skin color, in other words, only became an important signifier of social difference when it was embedded in power relations predicated on the systematic exploitation and oppression of certain groups of people by others.¹⁹ If this understanding of the social construction of “race” derives from the bitter experiences of colonial divide-and-conquer policies, the politics of solidarity found within local anti-racist groups emerge from a tradition of struggle against the racializing impact of state immigration legislation and policing in post-war Britain. As the popular authoritarian ideology gained greater purchase on the British public in the economic and social crisis conditions of the late 1970s, such forms of solidarity became increasingly important.

 

When LKJ published “It Dread Inna Inglan,” Margaret Thatcher had just won the general election. Her agenda was, however, already quite clear to Britain’s Black and Asian communities. In 1978, she had given an interview on Granada TV in which she linked the fears of post-imperial Britain to prejudice against Black people:

 

I think people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture and, you know, the British character has done so much for democracy and law, and has done so much throughout the world, that if there is any fear that it might be swamped, people are going to be really rather hostile to those coming in. (Qtd. in Widgery 14)

 

The assumptions behind Thatcher’s infamous “swamping” rhetoric are, of course, precisely the insular ones that legitimate the increasingly exclusionary immigration legislation of the post-1945 period.²⁰ Indeed, Thatcher’s painfully sanctimonious voice articulated views held by mainstream Labour and Conservative politicians throughout the post-war period. What had changed was the frankness with which such openly racist views could circulate in the public sphere. Thatcher’s speech delivered almost immediately bloody results for Britain’s Black and Asian communities. The media began running reports about everyday instances of “swamping,” and notorious racist agitator Enoch Powell was offered time on the BBC to discuss “induced repatriation” of Black and Asian Britons (Sivanandan, “From Resistance” 144).

 

The rising tide of racism had become inescapably evident to anyone paying attention to mainstream British popular culture well before Thatcher’s campaign. For example, in August 1976, Eric Clapton, the British guitarist who had made a career by appropriating music of the Black diaspora, interrupted a concert in Birmingham to deliver a drunken stump speech in support of Enoch Powell. Other British musicians such as David Bowie were openly flirting with fascist iconography and ideology at the time.²¹ Red Saunders, a photographer and ex-Mod, responded to the endorsement of racism by Clapton, whom he called “rock music’s biggest colonist,” with a letter calling for a grassroots movement against racism in rock music that was published in the main British pop-music weeklies (qtd. in Widgery 40). His call provoked a response of over 600 letters, and Rock Against Racism, a group dedicated to amplifying the polycultural character of urban youth culture using contemporary popular music and performance, was formed soon after. David Widgery’s editorial in the inaugural issue of RAR’s paper, Temporary Hoarding, was the group’s first manifesto: “We want Rebel music, street music. Music that breaks down people’s fear of one another. Crisis music. Now music. Music that knows who the real enemy is. Rock against Racism. Love Music Hate Racism” (qtd. in Renton).

 

RAR made its public debut at London’s Royal College of Art in December 1976. Headlining the bill was Dennis Bovell’s dub band of the time, Matumbi, who filled the hall with heavy bass frequencies and caused joyous confusion among the pogo-ing punks. The show brought together the radical Left and youth culture for the first time. This was not an easy proposition. As Widgery states in his memoir Beating Time, “the Left thought us too punky and the punks thought they would be eaten alive by Communist cannibals” (59). The traditional Left, of course, tended to see the cultural realm as superficial, something that didn’t really count in the final analysis. Underlying the traditional Left’s tactical failure was a broader theoretical shortcoming: blinkered by an orthodox Marxist reading of social relations, they tended to view “race” as a kind of epiphenomenon of the class struggle. Once the basic economic inequalities endemic to capitalist society were ameliorated through either parliamentary reform or revolution (depending on particular sectarian tendency), then the “race problem” itself, it was believed, would disappear. This attitude was confirmed for many Black radicals when the Anti-Nazi League (ANL) was formed in 1977. The very name of this organization, an outgrowth of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) that drew broad support from the Labour Party and many major trade unions, suggested the insularity of the white members of the British Left. The National Front was regarded as a recrudescence of the Nazi party, an attitude that ignored the emergence of the racist state in imperialist high-Victorian Britain rather than in Weimar Germany. In addition, the ANL seemed to assume that the NF was reanimating the putrid corpse of a racism that was laid to rest during World War Two. This attitude blithely ignored the discrimination and hostility Black and Asian people had been exposed to since their arrival in the metropolis after 1945, not to mention the enduring experiences of imperialism and neo-colonialism of people throughout the Third World during the post-war period. In order for the forms of affiliation and solidarity imagined in the Clash’s “White Riot” to become anything more than rhetoric, the white Left would have to tackle and overcome not simply the deep-seated racism that characterized British nationalism, but also that which was embedded in their own theoretical models.

 

Such an anti-racist project would therefore require a thorough critique of British cultural and political traditions. Although many of the core organizers of RAR were members of the SWP, they were also products of the subversive countercultures of the 1960s. Their experience working with underground newspapers and theater groups, as well as the SWP’s relatively unorthodox Luxemborgian emphasis on rank-and-file initiative, led these organizers to engage with the politics of everyday life and popular culture. As a result, organizers such as Widgery, Syd Shelton, Andy Dark, and Ruth Gregory realized that they had to appeal to both white and black youths using cultural forms that spoke to the sense of alienation and despair that was corroding Britain’s hidebound society, and, in the process, offer them alternatives grounded in the polycultural affiliations emerging in contemporary British cities (Goodyer 56). If they didn’t, the fascist appeal to nationalist notions of ethnic purity would win out, as the experiences of Asian and Afro-Caribbean communities at the hands of the State and neo-fascists were demonstrating all too clearly. As Widgery puts it in his memoir: “If socialism is transmitted in a deliberately doleful, pre-electronic idiom, if its emotional appeal is to working class sacrifice and middle class guilt, and if its dominant medium is the ill-printed word and the drab public procession, it will simply bounce off people who have grown up on this side of the sixties watershed” (84).

 

In seeking to mobilize subcultural movements such as punk and reggae, the activists involved with RAR were treading on ground prepared for them by C.L.R. James and by cultural studies scholars like Raymond Williams, who emphasized the importance of the “structure of feeling” that knitted people in a particular culture together.²¹ Despite Williams’s inattention to issues of race and imperialism, his populist focus was leading at roughly the same time as RAR’s campaigns to groundbreaking work on youth subcultures by members of the Birmingham Center for Cultural Studies.²² For scholars such as Dick Hebdige, subcultures engaged in forms of semiotic guerrilla warfare, ripping signifiers of commodity culture from their original context and refashioning them into signs of cultural and political dissent. A simple safety pin could, according to Hebdige, become an emblem of class warfare that placed the entire post-war settlement in question (104). Although Hebdige’s poststructuralist take on subcultural behavior had the great merit of finding politics where the Left had tended to see simply commodity fetishism, it lacked an ethnographic component and hence could be regarded as a form of projection rather than an accurate account of youths’ own perceptions of their behavior (Thornton 6). Unlike cultural studies scholars such as Hebdige who pronounced on youth culture from their theoretical armchairs, the organizers and participants in RAR sought to harness the iconoclastic energy of the punk and reggae subcultures in order to effect concrete political change.

 

In their public events, RAR consciously drew on the subversive shock tactics that fueled not simply the punk movement but modernist avant-garde movements like Revolutionary Russian Constructivism, the French Surrealist movement of the interwar period, and the Situationalist International (SI), which helped catalyze the uprisings of May 1968 in Paris. Purposely setting out to denaturalize the dominant institutions of bourgeois society, these avant-garde groups used jarring juxtapositions to disrupt the society of the spectacle created by the capitalist media and to stimulate utopian hopes of alternative social arrangements. The debt of punk groups like the Sex Pistols to such movements was clear to the activists of RAR, many of whom had been active in or influenced by the Parisian uprisings in May of 1968 that were partially inspired by the SI.²³ RAR appropriated many of the avant-garde’s techniques, using them to speak to youth in a fresh and direct way. Particularly important for RAR was the technique of pastiche so prominent in punk fanzines of the day. Appropriating this anti-elitist cut’n’paste aesthetic, RAR activists sought to create images that appealed to iconoclastic youth sensibilities while drawing out the sedimented political meanings of contemporary culture. In Temporary Hoarding, the broadsheet RAR distributed at their concerts, for example, images of Hitler, Enoch Powell, and David Bowie were juxtaposed to make clear the implications of the latter’s dalliance with fascist style. Similarly, Temporary Hoarding contrasted scenes from the riots that took place during the middle of the decade at the Notting Hill carnival with photographs of the Soweto uprising in apartheid South Africa in order to make clear the implications and historical background of British racism.

 

In addition to drawing on the European artistic avant-garde, RAR also harnessed the celebratory blend of aesthetics and politics that characterizes the Caribbean carnival tradition to enliven their outdoor concerts. Savagely suppressed by colonial British authorities during the late nineteenth century, carnival had become a symbol of insurgent subaltern occupation of public space in Anglophone Caribbean nations such as Trinidad and Jamaica. The tradition was revived by Caribbean communities in Britain following the white riots of 1958 in Notting Hill. When in the mid-1970s British authorities attempted heavy-handedly to close down the festivities, Black youths rioted, producing the images used by the Clash during their performance at the Gaumont in 1977. Thus, in calling the events they organized carnivals, RAR was self-consciously drawing on a tradition of resistance to racist control of metropolitan and colonial space. Perhaps the most important such event was the massive carnival of 30 April 1978. After gathering in Trafalgar Square, the RAR carnival wound its way through the streets of London towards the East End. With 100,000 participants, it was the biggest anti-fascist rally in Britain since the 1930s. Labor-union activists, anti-racist stilt-walkers, aging stalwarts of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, dreadlocked rastas, young punks in pink boiler suits, feminists, militant queers, and every other possible permutation of Britain’s Left united in a celebration of solidarity that decisively rejected the dour thuggery of the NF’s bully boys.

 

The concert in Victoria Park that concluded this RAR carnival was designed, like the other events the group organized, to create an anti-racist consciousness using the twin musical subcultures of roots reggae and punk rock. The radical historian Raphael Samuel describes the carnival as “one of the very few [events] of my adult lifetime to have sensibly changed the climate of public opinion” (qtd. in Renton). RAR also organized concerts in British Asian neighborhoods such as Southall, although Asian performers were not on the bill. Critics of RAR have seized on this omission as a sign of the blindness of the group’s organizers towards ethnic minority groups who lacked the cultural cachet of Britain’s Afro-Caribbean population (Sabin 203-206). Such a charge ignores RAR’s interest in connecting with organizations such as the Asian Youth Movement, as well as the group’s attention to anti-racist organizing in Asian communities. In addition, Bhangra, a popular music form that evolved in the British Asian community, did not start to cross over until the mid-1980s, meaning that there was no organic popular cultural bridge between Asian and white youths until after RAR’s dissolution. RAR’s concentration on reggae and punk subcultures was, in other words, a product of the cultural conditions the organization confronted on the ground as well as a reflection of the group’s tactical decision to amplify organic subcultural affiliations (Goodyer 51).

 

In order to spread the anti-racist message, RAR assiduously programmed concerts in which British reggae bands like Aswad, Steel Pulse, and the Cimarrons performed alongside punk bands like The Clash, The Slits, and Generation X. Simply putting such diverse bands together on stage was a triumph. Skinhead NF members frequently tried to disrupt early concerts put on by the organization by menacing Black performers backstage. In addition, punk bands such as Sham 69 that had substantial skinhead support had to make the same difficult decision concerning neo-fascist followers that mainstream politicians had faced and botched. The political solidarity demonstrated on stage by groups such as Misty and Adam & the Ants in the face of escalating racist violence was deepened by the musical cross-pollination that took place when the bands climbed on stage together. The Clash’s debt to reggae dub music and to the insurrectionary Rastafarian ideology is the clearest instance of such hybridization. Other examples abound. When pioneering all-women punk band the Slits eventually got their first album, Cut, released by Island records in 1978, it too demonstrated the heavy influence of dub music. Similarly, reggae bands such as Birmingham’s Steel Pulse had come up through the punk underground, playing in punk strongholds such as the Hope and Anchor and the 100 Club during 1976’s Summer of Punk in London. Their militant Rasta style (fatigues, dark glasses, and wool tams) made them kings of the gobbing, fighting, pogoing punk crowds. Performing next to punk bands like the Stranglers, their voices got angrier, guitars choppier, bass heavier, and drums rockier, but Steel Pulse nevertheless retained a roots reggae style.

 

After just over a year of organizing, however, RAR was also helping to fuel a second wave of punk that produced the indigenous British fusion of rock and reggae known as Two-Tone music. Early proponents of Two-Tone such as Jerry Dammers of the Specials turned to ska, which Jamaican bands developed during the late 1950s in reaction to American R&B. Ska offered British Two-Tone bands a perfect vehicle for the polycultural musical styles and highly politicized messages that appealed to their racially diverse audiences. Their lyrics were often overtly didactic. For example, “A Message to You, Rudy,” The Specials’ second single, addressed the young thugs of the National Front directly:

 

Stop your messing around
Better think of your future
Time you straightened right out
Creating problems in town
Rudy, a message to you
Rudy, a message to you

 

Stop your fooling around
Time you straightened right out
Better think of your future
Else you’ll wind up in jail

 

Rudy, a message to you
Rudy, a message to you

 

Admittedly, the hortatory character of such songs was too crude for later post-punk groups. As Simon Reynolds puts it in his recent history of the period, post-punk groups “saw the plain-speaking demagoguery of overtly politicized groups like The Tom Robinson Band and Crass as far too literal and non-aesthetic, and regarded their soapbox sermonizing as either condescending to the listener or a pointless exercise in preaching to the converted” (xxiii). Yet the Specials’ work during the era of RAR needs to be carefully contextualized; there was a literal battle going on to win the sympathies of young white working class Britons to overtly racist or anti-racist politics. Iconoclastic intentions had initially led some punks, including members of the Sex Pistols and their entourage, to wear swastikas. One of the band’s last singles concluded that “Belsen was a gas” (qtd. in Renton). In addition, copies of Bulldog, the Young National Front paper published during this period, demonstrate that punk and New Wave gigs were seen by the neo-fascists as channels through which British Nazism could proselytize and recruit (Goodyer 53). Music, including that being produced by mixed race ska bands like the Specials and Madness, was subject to fierce contention during this period. What perhaps looks like crude agitprop in retrospect, therefore, must have had an immediate existential appeal at the time. As the Specials note on their website, during their “Two Tone Tour” of 1979, for example, “it was a fact that racists from the NF and the BNP [British National Party] were recruiting at the shows, but the bands openly distanced themselves from these people, and made it clear to all that they weren’t welcome. It goes to show how stupid these people were, canvassing music fans who were dancing to multi-racial bands and singing along with songs preaching racial unity, and yet some impressionables took the bait” (“History”). The anti-racist exhortations and Two-Tone aesthetic of groups such as the Specials were thus not simply a pose, but rather offered potent examples of lived anti-racist politics. By combining cutting edge subcultural style and radical anti-racist messages, RAR helped transform what it meant to be British for a significant number of urban youths.

 

A crucial aspect of this transformation of British culture was an analysis of the historical roots of racism. As Paul Gilroy has argued, RAR saw racism as a symbol of a far broader crisis in Britain’s economy and society (129). In order to understand the relevance of race in British life during the 1970s, young people had to develop a sense of the way in which Britain’s imperial history helped form their subjectivity. To hammer this point home, Temporary Hoarding dug up the roots of British racism with withering clarity:

 

Racism is as British as Biggles and baked beans. You grow up with it: the golliwogs in the jam, The Black and White Minstrel Show on TV and CSE History at school. It's about Jubilee mugs and Rule Britannia and how we single-handedly saved the ungrateful world in the Second War. Gravestones, bayonets, forced starvation and the destruction of the culture of India and Africa were regrettable of course, but without our Empire the world's inhabitants would still be rolling naked in the mud, wouldn't they? However lousy our football teams or run-down our Health Service, we have the private compensation that we are white, British and used to rule the waves. It would be pathetic if it hadn't killed and injured and brutalised so many lives. Most of the time, British racialism is veiled behind forced smiles, charming policemen and considerate charities. But when times get hard, the newest arrival is the first to be blamed . . . From the wire cages of Heathrow Airport's immigrant compounds to the gleaming Alien Registration computer in Holborn, a new colour bar stretches. Every retreat by officialdom inflames the appetite of the Right. Once again racialism is back. It is growing where it is not challenged. And challenged it must be. For when racialists rule, millions die. (Qtd. in Widgery 75-78)

 

For RAR, the marches of the NF and police brutality in places like Southall were the colonial chickens coming home to roost. In arguing that the police riot in Southall was the return of colonial violence to the metropolis, Temporary Hoarding makes a point developed at length in Hannah Arendt’s brilliant study of the imperial roots of Nazism. The genocidal techniques employed by the Nazis were developed, Arendt argues, during the mass extermination of the Herero people in German South West Africa (192). Temporary Hoarding makes a similar point about the British racist state. Without the slave trade and the plantation system, RAR argues, no industrial revolution in Britain. Without lousy housing and unemployment after 1945, no racism. Without the deeply inculcated notions of racial superiority and imperial destiny with which the average white Briton had grown up, the spurious connection between the so-called “ethnic minority” populations and the nation’s post-imperial decline could not have been made. Unpacking the scapegoating mechanism behind coded racist talk of “swamping” indulged in by politicians such as Margaret Thatcher, RAR aimed to de-construct state authoritarianism and lay the foundation for genuinely popular anti-racist alternatives.

 

In the process, RAR went some way towards meeting the objections of Black Britons, who sometimes expressed distrust of white radicals. LKJ was among this group of skeptics during the mid-1970s. In his poem “Independent Intavenshun,” LKJ challenges the commitment of the white Left to anti-racist struggle. In doing so, he offers a powerful argument for Black and Asian autonomy:

 

Mek dem gwaan
Now it calm
But a wi who haffi really ride di staam
Wat a cheek
Dem t’ink wi weak
An’ wi can’t stan up pan wi feet

 

Di SWP can’t set wi free
Di IMG can’t dhu it fi wi
Di Communist Pawty, cho, dem too awty-fawty
An’ di laybahrites dem naw goh fite fi wi rites

 

Soh mek dem gwaan
Now it calm
But a wi who haffi really ride di staam (18)

 

LKJ’s poem bristles at the tendency of certain Leftist groups to arrive in Black and Asian neighborhoods in order to fight National Party members in the streets, only to depart as soon as the brawling concludes. All too often, these battles raised the ire of members of the broader white community with whom Black and Asian residents would have to deal following the departure of radical activists. Indeed, this polarizing effect was a conscious tactic on the part of the NF (Widgery 28). Since most racial attacks were not committed by fascist cadres but by “ordinary” people, the street-fighting policies of some of the white Left could backfire on members of the Black and Asian community. In addition, as LKJ’s poem suggests, the interventions of white members of the British Left too often assumed that Black and Asian communities were helpless victims who had to be “saved” by the white vanguard. Faced with this condescending attitude, Black radicals such as LKJ insisted on the necessity for self-organization and autonomy within their communities.

 

Like LKJ, critics of RAR argue that the campaigns of the late 1970s were not simply driven by the sectarian motives of some far Left groups, but exploited anti-racist musicians and fans for their own ends (Home, Kalra). Such criticism is an important challenge to facile representations of anti-racist solidarity. While RAR’s core leadership was white and was affiliated with the SWP, these facts do not necessarily vitiate the group’s project of proposing new modes of being British grounded in the evolving polycultural solidarities of urban youth culture. First of all, RAR did not demand ideological conformity from the bands it sponsored. In fact, it did not even demand a political attitude at all, but was content to draw on the dynamic energies generated by putting Black and white musicians on stage together (Goodyer 56). In addition, the often-stated intention of organizers was to draw on existing subcultural energies rather than to shoehorn performers and audiences into an ironclad political orthodoxy. As a result, RAR largely avoided the drab didacticism of competing organization such as Musicians For Socialism (Goodyer). Finally, as Paul Gilroy has observed, RAR’s project was essentially about decolonizing white culture in Britain (115). Thus, for an RAR organizer such as Syd Shelton, “the problem was not a Black problem or an Asian problem, it was a white problem. They were the people whose minds we had to change–white youth, not black youth” (qtd. in Goodyer 55). RAR sought to make the kind of flirtation with fascism engaged in by some punks unacceptable. In this they were largely successful; groups like Siouxsie and the Banshees went from sporting swastikas in 1976 to writing “Metal Postcard,” a song based on the collages of German anti-fascist John Heartfield (Renton).

 

Crucial to this project of decolonizing white youth culture was the recognition of new cultural affiliations. If Britain’s imperial heritage introduced a virulent strain of racism into the body politic, it also helped produce the polycultural formations on which RAR drew in order to forge an anti-racist popular culture. As David Widgery puts it in his memoir:

 

Black is a metaphor for everything that white society cannot face in itself, its past, its passivity, its savagery . . . . We whites must realize, before it's too late, that the reverse is true. That they are here because we were there. That there is no Britain without blacks and that we could not keep our slaves out of sight forever. That there is no such thing as pure English nationality or pure Scots or Welsh but a mongrel mix of invaders and predators and settlers and émigrés and exiles and migrants. That there is no us without them. (Qtd. in Widgery 122)

 

Temporary Hoarding‘s emphasis on the mongrel character of British identity was a slap at the discourse of national purity employed not simply by neo-fascists but by mainstream politicians such as Margaret Thatcher. By reminding kids attending gigs of the UK’s imperial history, RAR offered an internationalist perspective that goes beyond street fighting to illuminate the broader inequalities on which the global capitalist system is founded.

 

Conclusions

 

In tandem with the fierce resistance of Black and Asian communities to the violent attacks of the police, organized neo-fascists, and racist Britons in general, RAR offered a potent challenge to the neo-fascist threat in the streets and at the ballot box during the mid- to late 1970s. As the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 suggests, however, their attacks on explicit racism were ill designed to combat the more subtle, coded forms of discrimination deployed by mainstream politicians. In addition, the forms of militancy that catalyzed polycultural forms of unity such as those organized by RAR were frequently based on models of masculinity and street fighting bravado that rendered many women’s identities and struggles invisible. As the formation of the Organization of Women of Asian and African Descent (OWAAD) by Black feminists during these years indicates, the male chauvinist elements of the Black Power tradition were actively challenged from within the Black community. All too often, however, white activists and artists such as the Clash identified precisely these traditions as the core of Black British culture.²⁴

 

RAR folded after Margaret Thatcher’s election. The organization’s dissolution no doubt reflects the severity of the blow dealt to the Left by the electoral consolidation of Thatcher’s aggressive popular authoritarian neo-liberal ideology in Britain. Given the repressive climate that characterized the 1980s, the dissolution of RAR was a significant loss. For, although organized groups of neo-fascist thugs largely disappeared from the streets following Thatcher’s victory, British racism did not recede. The 1980s saw a series of violent conflagrations in Britain’s cities that were directly related to the forms of authoritarian policing and structural economic neglect meted out to the nation’s so-called ethnic minorities. But RAR’s demise was also, to a certain extent at least, a product of its own success. As Widgery puts it in his memoir, “Our aim was to become unnecessary by establishing an anti-racist, multi-cultural and polysexual feeling in pop music which would be self-generating, and to make politics as legitimate a subject as love . . . . Whatever the follies of eighties pop, there has been no sign of overt racism from white musicians” (115). Despite the limitations that characterize RAR, the traditions of polycultural solidarity that emerged from the group’s public events, from autonomous anti-racist defense groups like the Southall Youth Movement, and from the popular resistance at the Notting Hill carnival transformed British popular culture for a whole generation.

 

The creativity with which such groups tackled Britain’s post-imperial legacy helped stimulate a renaissance in the popular arts that would put Britain on the cutting edge of artistic and theoretical innovation during the 1980s and 1990s, notwithstanding Thatcherite political hegemony. Explicit racism largely disappeared from British popular culture and an international consciousness developed in the music scene that led to events such as Band Aid and Live Aid. Black filmmakers such as Isaac Julien and Sankofa produced pioneering work whose creolizing aesthetic helped recode narratives of race and nation in Britain (Mercer). In addition, the radical cultural tactics generated by RAR remain a touchstone for efforts to overcome the toxic contradictions of popular authoritarianism in contemporary Britain. Although the lineage of direct action groups such as Reclaim the Streets, which organized a massive anti-neo-liberal street festival that disrupted commerce in the London in 1999, clearly calls back to the Situationist International, the countercultural politics of the DiY groups of the 1990s also owe a lot to RAR’s innovative use of style.²⁵ The recent revival of RAR’s strategy in the “Love Music, Hate Racism” campaign suggests that, for some Britons at least, the campaigns of the late 1970s offer important resources of hope. Most importantly, RAR and affiliated Black and Asian community groups helped give marginalized youths a sense of their collective agency at a particularly bleak moment in British history. As LKJ was to write in the title track of an album he released in the late 1970s: “it is noh mistri/ wi mekin histri/ it is noh mistri/ wi winnin victri” (24).

 

Notes

 

1. For a discussion of RAR’s emphasis on the autonomous value of youth culture and a critique of other anti-racist traditions that failed to take this approach, see Gilroy 121-129.

 

2. For a critique of multiculturalism, see Kundnani 67.

 

3. Paul Gilroy has consistently challenged the implicit but habitual xenophobic nationalism of the British Left. For a particularly strong critique, see Gilroy 26-27.

 

4. Much has been made of the debt owed by punk to the Situationalist International. However, discussions of punk’s genealogy rarely mention specific interactions between punk bands such as the Clash and reggae musicians. For a particularly interesting discussion of the links between punk and the European avant-garde, see Marcus.

 

5. Paul Gilroy writes suggestively in There Ain’t No Black of the call-and-response aesthetic of black diasporic musical forms (164), but does not relate this aesthetic to underground musical traditions within the white community.

 

6. For an excellent ethnographic account of the cross-racial affiliations of British urban youth of the era, see Jones.

 

7. I am indebted to a very knowledgeable anonymous reviewer for this point.

 

8. David Widgery’s memoir is the only detailed history of Rock Against Racism to date. As a result, his perspective on the organization necessarily looms large in retrospective analysis, although he was not necessarily the most prominent or involved organizer at the time. In-depth interviews conducted by Goodyer suggest, however, that there is substantial agreement among core organizers over Widgery’s account of the movement. See Goodyer 60.

 

9. James’s influence is, for instance, very much evident in Paul Gilroy’s analysis of the riots of the 1980s in Britain’s cities. See Gilroy 245.

 

10. For a detailed discussion of this period in James’s life, see Buhle.

 

11. One of the earliest and most succinct discussions of James’s autonomist theory can be found in Robinson.

 

12. See, for instance, Stuart Hall and associates’ subtle characterization of race as a modality of class (394).

 

13. The lack of police reaction to such killings is partially explained by the fact that racial hate crimes were not recognized as a specific category of criminal behavior during the mid- to late 1970s in Britain. This fact is, of course, a symptom of broader forms of institutional racism in Britain at the time.

 

14. The radical experiences of youths in self-defense groups such as the Southall Youth Movement (SYM) often led them to question not just the older generation’s leadership but also “established” community values such as sexism. See Widgery 32.

 

15. As Paul Gilroy notes, these groups reflect the changing mode of production in the post-Fordist economies of developed nations such as Britain. See Gilroy 225.

 

16. Gilroy attributes these goals, derived from the work of Manuel Castells on urban social movements, to British self-defense groups such as the Southall Youth Movement. See Gilroy 230.

 

17. Additional details concerning these organizations can be found in Sivanandan 142-143.

 

18. Sivanandan has been and remains one of the most powerful advocates of this political mobilization of the category “black.” For his critique of the decline of “black” as a political color, see Communities of Resistance. For an analysis of challenges to this unificatory terminology over the last decade, see Alibhai-Brown xi-xiii.

 

19. The social construction of “race” has, of course, been one of the central concerns of post-colonial theory. For an early example of this line of thought that draws heavily on the British context, see Gates.

 

20. Gilroy offers a withering critique of this strategy of “ethnic absolutism.” See Gilroy 43.

 

21. Bowie made the following comments to Playboy journalist Cameron Crowe:

 

PLAYBOY: You've often said that you believe very strongly in fascism. Yet you also claim you'll one day run for Prime Minister of England. More media manipulation?BOWIE: Christ, everything is a media manipulation. I’d love to enter politics. I will one day. I’d adore to be Prime Minister. And, yes, I believe very strongly in fascism. The only way we can speed up the sort of liberalism that’s hanging foul in the air at the moment is to speed up the progress of a right-wing, totally dictatorial tyranny and get it over as fast as possible. People have always responded with greater efficiency under a regimental leadership. A liberal wastes time saying, “Well, now, what ideas have you got?” Show them what to do, for God’s sake. If you don’t, nothing will get done. I can’t stand people just hanging about. Television is the most successful fascist, needless to say. Rock stars are fascists, too. Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars.

 

 

Bowie was also photographed arriving back in the UK around this time in an open topped Mercedes, giving a fascist “sieg heil” salute. This was shortly before he went off to live in Berlin and record albums like “Low.”

 

22. Williams first articulates the concept of “structure of feeling” in Culture and Society. He develops this concept in relation to Gramsci’s theory of hegemony in later work. For a discussion of the debates that circulated around this concept among members of Britain’s New Left, see Dworkin.

 

23. The most germane example in this context is Hall, Resistance through Rituals.

 

24. For a discussion of these avant-garde/punk links, see Marcus.

 

25. This was true both for white and for Asian activists. For a discussion of the masculinism of the Asian Youth Movement, see Westwood. A more extended critique of the masculinism of black nationalist political formations can be found in Samantrai.

 

26. For a discussion of DiY groups in the 1990s, see McKay.

 

Works Cited

 

• Alibhai-Brown, Yasmin. Imagining the New Britain. New York: Routledge, 2001.
• Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951.
• Buhle, Paul. C.L.R. James: The Artist As Revolutionary. New York: Verso, 1988.
• Crowe, Cameron. “David Bowie: A Candid Conversation with the Actor, Rock Singer and Sexual Switch-hitter.” <http://www.cameroncrowe.com/eyes_ears/articles/crowe_jrl_bowie.html>.
• Dworkin, Dennis. Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left and the Origins of Cultural Studies. Durham: Duke UP, 1997.
• Gates, Henry Louis, ed. “Race,” Writing, and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
• Gilroy, Paul. “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack:” The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. 121-129.
• Goodyer, Ian. “Rock Against Racism: Multiculturalism and Political Mobilization, 1976-1981.” Immigrants and Minorities 22.1 (Mar 2003): 44-62.
• Hall, Stuart et al. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. London: Macmillan, 1978.
• —. Resistance through Rituals: Post-War Youth Culture. New York: Routledge, 1976.
• Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. New York: Routledge, 1979.
• Hitchcock, Peter. “‘It Dread Inna Inglan:’ Linton Kwesi Johnson, Dread, and Dub Identity.” Postmodern Culture 4.1 (Sept. 1993) <http://80-muse.jhu.edu.proxy.library.csi.cuny.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v004/4.1hitchcock.html>
• Home, Stewart. We Mean It Man: Punk Rock and Anti-Racism–or, Death in June Not Mysterious. 30 Sept. 2005. <http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/man>
• Johnson, Linton Kwesi. Mi Revalueshanary Fren. London: Penguin, 2002.
• Jones, Simon. Black Culture, White Youth: The Reggae Tradition from JA to UK. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Education, 1988.
• Kalra, Vininder, John Hutnyk, and Sanya Sharma. “Re-Sounding (Anti)Racism, or Concordant Politics?” Dis-Orienting Rhythms: The Politics of the New Asian Dance Music. Eds. Kalra, Vininder, John Hutnyk, and Sanya Sharma. London: Zed, 1996.
• Kundnani, Arun. “The Death of Multiculturalism.” Race and Class 43.4 (Apr-Jun 2002): 67-72.
• Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989.
• McKay, George. DiY Culture: Party and Protest in Nineties Britain. New York: Verso, 1998.
• Mercer, Kobena. “Recoding Narratives of Race and Nation.” Black Film/British Cinema. Ed. Kobena Mercer. London: ICA, 1992.
• Prashad, Vijay. Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity. Boston: Beacon, 2001.
• Race Today Collective. “Self Organization vs. Self Help.” Race Today Mar. 1976.
• Renton, Dave. “David Widgery.” 30 Sept 2005. <http://www.dkrenton.co.uk/anl/widgery.html>.
• Reynolds, Simon. Rip It Up and Start Again: Post-Punk 1978-1982. London: Faber and Faber, 2005.
• Robinson, Cedric. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. New York: Zed, 1983.
• Sabin, Roger. “I Won’t Let That Dago By: Rethinking Punk and Racism.” Punk Rock: So What? The Cultural Legacy of Punk. Ed. Roger Sabin. London: X, 1999.
• Samantrai, Ranu. AlterNatives: Black Feminism in the Postimperial Nation. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002.
• Sivanandan, Ambalavaner. Communities of Resistance: Writings on Black Struggles for Socialism. New York: Verso, 1990.
• —. “From Resistance to Rebellion: Asian and Afro-Caribbean Struggles in Britain.” Race and Class 23.2/3 (Autumn 1981/Winter 1982): 111-52.
• The Specials. “A Message to You, Rudy.” The Official Specials website. 22 Sept. 2005. <http://www.thespecials.com/lyricview.php?sid=1>.
• —. “History.” The Official Specials website. 22 Sept. 2005. <http://www.thespecials.com/history3.php>.
• Thornton, Sarah. “General Introduction.” The Subcultures Reader. Eds. Ken Gelder and Sarah Thornton. New York: Routledge, 1997.
• Westwood, Sallie. “South Asian Masculinities In Britain.” Nation and Migration: The Politics of Space in the South Asian Diaspora. Ed. Peter Van der Veer. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1995.
• Widgery, David. Beating Time: Riot’n’Race’n’Rock’n’Roll. London: Chatto and Windus, 1986.

 

 

Timothy Donovan 

English Department
University of North Florida
tdonovan@unf.edu
skimball@unf.edu
jlsmith@unf.edu

 

On 8 October 2004, Jacques Derrida died. We are now left with these remains. We write as mediums, like cane-tappers trying to record under the influence of a Derrida that remains within us and outside us.

 

As we write, we face the unknowable singularity of death, yet we still feel its strange temporal force. Even as we are tempted to mark its significance with its finality, we are more forcefully haunted by our responsibility to mark its memory with its futures. With difficulty, we ask what would it be to receive the gift of Derrida’s death? How do we sustain the generosity of the gift we have received? And how does our mourning recognize such generosity? In part, we respond to such questions by extending Derrida’s thought toward pressing political problems that demand deconstruction.

 

Documentarian Errol Morris was perhaps presented with a similar task, trying to record Robert McNamara, who sat in front of his camera and who remained out of reach, a memory and a documentary yet to come. Since his resignation as Secretary of Defense (to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson during the years 1961-1968), McNamara has found himself haunted by past memories and by possible futures. We watch him in Morris’s award-winning documentary film, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons in the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003) tapping into his past, urgently tapping out his tale, hoping to exhort those who most need to hear and see, those who may influence a future so that it avoids catastrophe. He talks, he converses, he writes, he contributes feverishly to a material archive that he hopes will prevent complete destruction, including a destruction that he can only intuit, and that his structures of reason are necessarily inadequate to address: the destruction of the archive itself.

 

Morris records the lessons that have emerged from McNamara’s years of wandering, to Cuba, to Vietnam, and back to Vietnam. McNamara remains a witness to more than eighty years of unprecedented worldwide political and military violence. Some of this violence McNamara assisted, planned, and directed. What remains for him as his life nears conclusion is an “honest” accounting of the motivations and rationales that directed him, and so many other powerful American policy-makers, toward an unknown number of misjudgments during their time. Surely McNamara has remorse for what he so starkly terms his responsibility for having “kill[ed] people unnecessarily.” Yet more than absolution and exoneration for past action, The Fog of War offers eleven well-reasoned lessons that aim to produce greater resolution for the future. Ultimately, McNamara wants to make very clear that the stakes of warfare have changed immeasurably with the emergence of nuclear weapons.

 

Our efforts here as writers are to outline how, in attempting to give the gift of his life’s insight before his own death, McNamara is precipitated into an impossible but necessary work of mourning what remains of the dead. This work turns on a crisis of decision, the crisis of the nuclear referent, the crisis of a radical and radically haunting facelessness that shadows–better, that cuts across–all decision.

 

From the tapping of our fingers to the clicking of the cameras we are all engaged in the commemoration of mourning. To these remains we are all drawn, where at once the possibilities of the past, present, and the future await us.

 

We write as mediums, like cane-tappers trying to record under the influence of a Derrida that remains within us and outside us.

 

What Remains to be Seen? The Rhetoric of Witnessing    Morris’s Fog documents further written recollections published by McNamara over the last fifteen years that try to account for the unprecedented violence that has occurred since the First World War. Titles such as Wilson’s Ghost: Reducing the Risk of Killing and Catastrophe; In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons Of Vietnam; and Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedycertainly indicate a keen historical focus, but also McNamara’s personal commitment to persuading others about the perils of the future threatened by the remains of the past.  Initially, McNamara’s writing provides a corrective for the political misjudgments influenced by the predominance of a Cold War perspective. This motivation for critique, however, is haunted by a more looming threat than just cautionary advice about the limits of perspective.  The Cold War grounded in nuclear build-up is the advent of conflict haunted by a decisive possibility that would end politics, the polis, and perhaps the world. The optimism evident in post-World War hope for a “war that would end all wars” has ironically been resignified. McNamara’s writing is haunted by the possibility of a “war that would end all wars,” because he witnessed this possibility. If war indeed fogs and confuses judgment, his purpose is to show that the competitive logic of war always points toward an imperative guided by a nuclear logic.A rhetoric of responsibility that thematizes McNamara’s written work also orients the lessons in Morris’s film. Responsibility as an evaluative duty is evident near the film’s end, when McNamara turns to the poetry of T.S. Eliot to grasp the force of his need to recollect, to witness his past.“We shall not cease from exploring And at the end of our exploration We will return to where we started And know this place for the first time“[1]McNamara’s citation from the Four Quartets–which does not conceive of and so defends against the prospect of a radical end, such as nuclear annihilation–indicates the conventional sense of responsibility as the duty to explore ceaselessly, but the responsibility of exploration has a reactive energy of recollection that is divided.  McNamara’s recollections have a retrogressive, circular movement projected backward that returns in memory, gathering the remains to return to a momentary place anew.  In “knowing this place for the first time,” he must return, recollect, and clear the fog that has confused him and so many others of his generation. Yet the desire to step out of the fog and gain the proximity that would provide clarity to some beginning is threatened by the same opacity that he wants to lighten. To begin again at a place with full knowing may be nothing more than naïve nostalgia for a purified point of origin.And yet, in nearly every way, Morris’s McNamara is a confident evaluator, assured of his interpretive decision to “return to where we started” historically.  The documentary begins with a montage of post-World War/Cold War images that ends with a shot of McNamara during his service as Secretary of Defense preparing for a television press conference and questioning the television crews, “are you ready? All set?”  Morris draws attention to the equivocal nature of origin as well as to the equivocal authority McNamara has over the archive with an opening interchange that seems to build a clever transition from the press conference decades ago to the present filming. At the beginning of Fog, McNamara prepares himself for the interview by asking the filmmaker to speak in a practiced tone so he could clearly hear the questions.  After practicing voice levels, McNamara states authoritatively and efficiently that he does not need to “go back”:”Now I remember exactly the sentence I left off on.  I remember how it started, and I was cut off in the middle.  But you can fix it up someway.  I don’t want to go back, introduce the sentence, because I know exactly what I wanted to say.”   Just as we know that this film is constructed by editing, we see and hear McNamara directing some of the editing.  The decision to begin the film with a seemingly incidental matter is more than just clever. McNamara’s comments introduced us to a very precise and efficient man who knows exactly what he “want[s] to say.” Such certainty is not just momentary; McNamara has to some extent a very clear evaluation of the fog that has clouded the twentieth century. His desire to convey a precise viewpoint is clear in Morris’s documentary, and is also evident in his written work, which is as clear, efficient, and logical as fine technical writing.   This desire for efficiency is exemplified in recollections that produce what Kenneth Burke calls an “analysis of analysis” (Burke 9).  On topics ranging from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the Vietnam war, McNamara is insistent that the fog of the Cold War concealed, for good or for ill, underlying cultural, political, and moral principles that could have resulted in political negotiation that may have minimized the needless killing and massive destruction suffered over the second half of the twentieth century.  In many ways his judgment that historical myopia guided U.S. foreign policy seems generally correct, and his support of this evaluation is compelling. The lessons Morris culls from McNamara’s testimony are most forceful when the filmmaker highlights the United States’ sense of its worldwide destiny and, thus, of global responsibility, a state that was often motivated by political imperialism.   McNamara’s keen analysis of an ideological paradigm that underwrote all decisions for many decades is understood more subtly as a “terminal incapacity” (7). Kenneth Burke argues that terminal incapacity occurs when one’s very abilities function as blindness (7). The resolution to fight the threat of the Triple Axis in World War II reinforces the resolve to battle a new enemy–worldwide communism. Thereafter, the U.S. response to the threat of the spread of communism becomes programmatic, and the U.S. cannot envision subtle social, cultural, and political problems that might open a different perspective on its dreaded responsibility. The U.S. ability to fight communism produced a resolve to do so that finally blinded or incapacitated the U.S.’s ability to evaluate its anti-communist goals and the means with which it secured them.  In the end, McNamara provides the viewer with a cautionary critique, lessons that clarify the past and help envision the future.   And yet, he still mourns.   We don’t want to dismiss entirely the use of personal evaluation, the wisdom of an elder statesman recollecting his political life as a testimony for the future. The future is customarily presumed to be a reconstitution of the past. Yet, there remains a sense of responsibility that binds McNamara.  In one sense, he cites an evaluative efficiency that binds his responsibility, and yet he remains bound by another responsibility that provokes him beyond reason.  McNamara’s ongoing lessons about responsibility are haunted by a summons to which he often responds with trembling. What he has seen is threatened further by what he has not seen–indeed, by what he has seen he has not seen, what he would give us to see. McNamara never saw the faces of the hundred thousand Japanese civilians killed by a firestorm during the World War II bombings in Japan. What he did see–the singular spectacle of Quaker Norman Morrison, his body ablaze in protest–brings him to interiorize in mourning the faceless thousands incinerated in Japan, Vietnam, and many _____ elsewhere yet to come. Franklin is the spectacle that actualizes “the truth of the mourning of the other…who always speaks in me before me” (Derrida, Mémoires 29). McNamara’s recollections in the film are another attempt to bring clarity to a call that haunts him, to evoke the unseen faces that might authorize the summons. Further, his persistence in re-facing his former enemies–Castro’s face, the faces of Vietnamese leaders, and the faces of others–shows McNamara’s need to personify and endow with a sense of presence, clarity, and authority a summons that resists location. In the end, we believe that McNamara’s exhortations summon these specters for the viewer, so that we might also see and feel–in the absence of the face of the other, of the other others whose ashes cover the face of the world–the grave responsibility that remains.   Faced with McNamara’s lessons of hope for empathy and renewed rationality, the viewer is also challenged by a kind of physical pressure. We are not offering detail in place of argument when we point out that the viewer cannot overlook Robert McNamara’s presence in the film: his face, his voice, and his eyes. His direct, pervasive presence is not solely a matter of Morris’s Interrotron.[2] In Fog, McNamara seems almost to enter our space. His urgent tone and direct gestures seem to project forward, penetrating the film’s virtual space to assure us of his counsel. This guidance is expressed in a proud voice that wavers somewhere between warning and remorse.  Quite starkly, Morris’s most pressing close-ups encounter McNamara’s eyes fogged with a watery kind of melancholy filled by the confusion of responsibility.  We cannot look past his eyes tinged with remorse, betrayed by his most powerful personal talent: the force of analytical reason.  Foremost, we cannot look past his eyes because his mourning of reason strains to perceive another form that can account for experiences that exceed his understanding. He, or Morris, wants us to see him seeing (at) those limits.   In mourning, we turn to the profound writing of Jacques Derrida because no other thinker has shown us with so much insight and patience the importance of mourning what is to come: the crisis of the future. Derrida remains the great thinker of the future, a future that is an absolute threat.   Ceaseless Mourning: What Remains to Be Thought   War, ultimately from the Indo-European wers-, to confuse, mix up.   –Adapted from The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots (77)     Haunted by the spectralizing effects of the remains, McNamara’s answers to the questions Morris poses offer themselves to be read in a certain way[3]–that is, as scenes, acts, and gestures in an incomplete, indeed an incompletable, work of mourning.   No doubt McNamara entertains no such intent. From the beginning to the end of the interview, McNamara directs his discussions and arguments toward the absolute urgency of certain “lessons.” These are not the eleven often deeply ironic lessons Morris uses to punctuate his film, but ten nation-guiding principles McNamara has formulated in the explicit hope of refocusing present and future American military and foreign policy. Although Morris does not include them in his film (he appends them in a “special feature” to The Fog of War‘s DVD release), they inform all McNamara’s discussions. Indeed, the imperative to which McNamara’s principles attempt to answer constitutes the horizon of his sense of the nation’s collective responsibility to itself and to the world. Over and over, then, McNamara’s responses to Morris underscore the central–the nuclear–imperative to which he testifies: America in particular, the world more generally, must reduce the threat of nuclear war and the frequency and virulence of conventional war in the twenty-first century.   This imperative–with its psychological urgency on the one hand, its force of moral necessity on the other–imposes a ceaseless work of mourning that provokes the subject to yet further mourning rather than aiding the subject to bring grief to an end. The reason is that a certain irremediable loss, a loss itself lost to understanding, permeates McNamara’s pedagogical aims and opens his discourse to what might be called the lesson of his lessons. This lesson of the lessons, a lesson, therefore, without lesson, is that there is something utterly unlearnable about war from war, something unlearnable about human fallibility. This unlearnability poses deep problems for individual and collective responsibility in the realm of political decisions, and it is a something that cannot be broached except by way of a mourning that does not end.   1.1 The Lesson of the Lessons, the Lessons without Lesson   “My rule is, try to learn, try to understand . . . develop the lessons and try to pass them on.”   –McNamara, The Fog of War.   “One has to think and never be sure of thinking.”   –Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster (145).   Morris organizes The Fog of War around a series of eleven aphoristic “lessons” which he draws from McNamara’s own words, often quoting him directly. A close inspection of these lessons indicates the dramatic irony of their central contradiction: a heightened consciousness is necessary and yet insufficient for learning what must be learned from war–from thinking about war and from thinking about thinking about war.[4] A similar inspection of McNamara’s own lessons–which are much less gnomically conceived principles than Morris’s, and which arise out of McNamara’s experiences in the Pentagon, out of his deep apprehensions about nuclear armaments, and out of his judgment that it is absolutely necessary to reduce “the brutality of war,” “the level of killing,” and the threat of terrorism–shows that they, too, are essentially contradictory. One of their greatest ironies derives from the way they specify incompatible goals–above all the contradictory goal of maintaining the sovereignty of the United States on the one hand and an imaginary sovereignty of a universal political entity to come–“the human race” or “society as a whole”–on the other.[5]   If both sets of lessons are similar in being contradictory, even if they are contradictory in dissimilar ways, they are also both offered as “lessons,” a term Morris and McNamara alike employ uncritically. Morris and McNamara each thematizes his pedagogical aims but not the value of the presumptive value of those aims–in other words, not the possible lessons that might be drawn from attempting to draw lessons from war. What, then, does the word lesson disclose about the meaning and force of McNamara’s and Morris’s lessons? More importantly, what does the word lesson disclose about the points of view and assumptions this term conceals?   According to The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, the word lesson derives from a stem, leg-, to collect “with derivates meaning to speak’” (35). According to Shipley, it means to “gather, set in order; consider, choose; then read, speak” (209). This root has given rise to the Greek stems legein, to gather, speak, and logos, speech, word, reason. The two are the source of, among their English derivatives, lexicon, dialect, logic, and logistics as well as of apology. In its descent through the Latin, legere, to gather, choose, pluck, read, leg– has generated such terms as legend, legible, legion, collect, and intelligent, as well as sortilege, neglect, and sacrilege. Possibly through the Latin lex, law, it has eventuated in legal, legitimate, loyal, legislator, and privilege; and possibly through legare, to dispute, commission, charge, it has produced allege and legacy.   More directly than many words, “lesson” inherits an overdetermined range of connotation and denotation. Bearing above all the metaphysical legacy of the logos, the word “lesson” capitalizes on those intellectual traditions in which knowledge is conceived as a potentially transcendental force, a life-protecting force, which provides humans a means of surviving their violence. The word “lesson,” then, functions symptomatically as a wish-fulfillment and thus as an expression of the anxiety the wish-fulfillment would relieve. Would that there were or could be lessons from war. If such lessons are possible, then such knowledge might enable humans to reduce their dependence on war. If such lessons are not possible, then advances in techno-scientific knowledge–and the annihilative military and terrorist purposes to which such knowledge is predicted to be put–are likely to be apocalyptic.   McNamara is explicit about his fear. It is the theme of all of his remarks. In the section of the documentary that proceeds under the title “Rationality Will Not Save Us,” McNamara attributes the avoidance, to date, of nuclear holocaust to sheer “luck!” He warns: “That danger exists today, the danger of total destruction of one’s society.” He attempts to formalize this warning in his second and deeply paradoxical lesson concerning the unpredictable consequences of the “human fallibility”: “The indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will lead to the destruction of nations.” Morris reduces this observation to a caution about the limits of rationality. Thus, whereas Morris stipulates the limits of a rationality that, by itself, “will not save us,” and holds open the possibility that something other than or in addition to rationality might, McNamara declares that a destruction beyond all remediation “will” happen for reasons of a “fallibility” that is inherent in if not constitutive of humanness in general, not just of particular (rational) modes or forms of human thought. In his tenth lesson, then, McNamara invokes not only the specter of the nuclear terrorism that threatens “nations”–nations in general, all nations, the identifying names of which become irrelevant in relation to the nuclear annihilation that would destroy the archive of names along with nations–but also the fact of American responsibility for contributing to this peril: “One of the greatest dangers we face today is the risk that terrorists will obtain access to weapons of mass destruction as a result of the breakdown of the Non-Proliferation Regime. We in the U.S. are contributing to that breakdown.” In these two lessons, then, McNamara specifies the apotropaic meaning of his use of the word “lesson,” which marks the apocalyptic tone of his entire discourse, of his entire testimony.   McNamara twice identifies the uncanny source of his fear, and thus of what will have been his future testimony before Morris’s camera. The first revelation occurs in his dispassionate observation that “there will be no learning period with nuclear weapons.” The second occurs when he reports on his visit to Cuba in 1992 and his highly emotional confrontation with Castro over the missile crisis thirty years earlier. He recalls that he learned for the first time that “162 nuclear warheads, including 90 tactical warheads, were on the island at the time of this critical moment of the crisis.” He is flabbergasted: “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, and Castro got very angry with me because I said, ‘Mr. President, let’s stop this meeting. This is totally new to me. I’m not sure I got the translation right.’” But the meeting proceeded, and McNamara recalls having asked Castro three questions the answers to which instantly excite in him a simultaneous disbelief in and yet utterly appalled acceptance of what he is hearing:   Mr. President, I have three questions to you. Number one: did you know the nuclear weapons were there? Number two: if you did, would you have recommended to Khrushchev in the face of a U.S. attack that he use them? Number three: if he had used them, what would have happened to Cuba?   Castro answers yes to the first question. To the second, Castro answers no, not would have but did: “I would not have recommended to Khrushchev, I did recommend to Khrushchev that they be used.” And to McNamara’s third question, Castro evidently replies that Cuba “would have been totally destroyed” and then adds: “Mr. McNamara, if you and President Kennedy had been in a similar situation, that’s what you would have done.” Although McNamara repudiates Castro’s assertion, his emotion in remembering the exchange as well as during the encounter itself suggest that he now knows Castro could be right. In the moment he hears Castro’s third answer, McNamara is beside himself–literally so, for he is borne away by a dread that makes him tremble in the knowledge not only that he is learning something he had not known during the missile crisis, but something he had not known he had not known about the mindset of his opponent and of himself. He now knows that his double ignorance could have led to a nuclear confrontation.   In other words, in the moment of gaining access to his abyssal self-ignorance, McNamara is forced to see his past blindness. At that moment he envisions the unimaginable–an apocalyptic future that was avoided not by insight or foresight but by blind luck. More generally, he is on the verge of glimpsing the possibility of a present and future blindness that could not be revealed as such until afterward. If he knows that “it’s almost impossible for our people today to put themselves back into that period,” then he must suspect the terrible consequence: it will be “almost impossible” for “our people today” to learn from “that period.” Therefore, when, near the beginning of the film, McNamara says that “at 85, I can look back,” he is not necessarily claiming a specular privilege but confessing, rather, the spectacular structural sightlessness that attaches to every experience of oneself in the present. “We all make mistakes,” McNamara says near the end of the film. What prevents this assertion from being a pious cliché is that McNamara not only knows that “our understanding, our judgment, is inadequate,” but suspects that such knowledge about the fragility and incompleteness of knowledge comes only in hindsight, only belatedly, which is to say always too late.   However, whether or not he grasps it, the lesson of his lessons is that he could not deduce, invent, or otherwise recognize the specific lessons during the experiences which only in retrospect produce them. The lesson of the lessons is not in their content. The essential feature of each of the lessons is not the lesson itself. Rather, the lesson of the lessons is that they are without lesson: they do not summarize a formalizable knowledge that can be taught, learned, transmitted. The lessons are untimely, and the lesson of these lessons is that they can never present themselves as such precisely when they are most needed. Or, rather, the lesson of McNamara’s lessons is that he has intuited something about the nature of knowing, especially in times of crisis when unprecedented events unfold in unprecedented ways such that one must reckon with what exceeds present categories of comprehension, decision, action, and anticipatable consequence, putting one in the position of having to invent on the spot new means of responding to the danger at hand.   McNamara’s earlier understanding of this intractable double bind demonstrates how difficult it is to escape the effects of this bind at the very moment of recognizing it. A third of the way through the film, a younger McNamara, then Secretary of Defense, admits: “There’s much I don’t know I don’t know.” Affirming the logical necessity of this proposition, he laughs awkwardly, unable to confront its emotional force, its affective power, which will overtake him years later as one signal of what yet remains to haunt him. Years before he will have been haunted, the Secretary of Defense does not grasp the import of his insight as an index of the inescapable possibility that every present self-declaration can be caught up in a dramatic irony to which the speaker is blind. Not simply blindness, then, and not even blindness to one’s blindness, but the possibility of being blind and the unavailability of a means for determining whether or not one really is–it is this condition of possibly inevitable self-ignorance that constitutes the nuclear core of the terrible fallibility to which McNamara bears witness. In testifying to the need to learn something from the history of war in the twentieth-century and from the prospective nuclear eventuality he fears is inevitable, he testifies to the failure of his testimony and acts out the second-order cognitive fallibility that is an inescapable feature of this very testimony.   In other words, McNamara’s lessons are literally irresponsible–that is, non-responsive to the realities they would negotiate–for a reason that is structural to human consciousness and is not merely the consequence of a faulty or self-protecting memory. McNamara does not quite deduce this consequence. At the end of the film, however, he acts it out in a performative declaration that gives the lie not to the specific substance of his lessons but to their meta-level efficacy, to their ability to be sent and received as lessons. In the film’s epilogue, he balks at talking further about his responsibilities concerning the Vietnam War: “You don’t know what I know,” he says. He is talking specifically “about how inflammatory my words can be.” And yet his statement has an immeasurably greater pertinence, for the problem of the kinds of lessons to which McNamara would testify is that any such lesson requires knowing what one does not know one does not know, and a willingness to open oneself to the prospect of having to engage in an impossible act of self-recognition, a self-remarking that gives and withdraws the very possibility of witnessing.   1.2 The Necessity and Impossibility of Witnessing “As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”   –Donald Rumsfeld, DOD news briefing, 12 February 2002. 1.21 Epistemological Asymmetry   There is a fundamental difference between the consciousness of self and the consciousness of other. It appears that each person has a direct, immediate, and privileged access to part of his or her own mind that is denied to others, who for their part have only an indirect and mediated access to anyone else’s “first-person” mental state. A person seems to be able to know his or her own mind by an act of self-reflection. “The certitude of inner existence, Husserl thinks, has no need to be signified. It is immediately present to itself. It is living consciousness” (Derrida, Speech and Phenomena 43). But no such act of self-reflection will enable an individual to know the mind of the other in the same way. The result is an epistemological asymmetry between what an I can know of itself and what the same I can know of another. This asymmetry is built into the very structure of consciousness, and it blocks each and every I from knowing others or being known by them in the way that this I knows–or thinks it knows–itself.   People tend to experience the asymmetry narcissistically–that is, as the richness of their own consciousness of themselves as opposed to the much poorer knowledge others seem to have of them. Who would trade the consciousness they have of themselves for the consciousness others have of them?   However, the certainty attaching to the experience of one’s own self-consciousness, a certainty in which Descartes sought a foundation for knowledge, may always be less accurate, less reliable, less truthful than the knowledge others have of oneself. One reason for this derives from the tautological nature of knowing or believing something to be the case. If a person holds a belief, he or she cannot simultaneously believe that this belief is in error. If an I knows or thinks it knows something to be the case, this I cannot simultaneously know in the present moment that it is mistaken, if it is. The grammatical (present) tense of this tautology is not accidental: anyone can, in principle, come to recognize that a belief they had previously affirmed is false, that they can have held a mistaken belief. However, at the moment, the person cannot simultaneously believe that the belief is true. A person can believe (or think he or she believes) or not; but this person cannot both believe and not believe what he or she believes.   And yet others might very well recognize that I am in error, if I am, in believing what I (think I) believe. What is more, others might also be in a position to recognize not only that, because I believe what I believe, I do not and cannot presently experience the falsity of my belief (under the circumstances, once again, that I am, in fact, harboring a false belief). This means that others are able, in principle, to occupy an epistemological position that remains out of reach for me: others can know that I am wrong; they can know that I do not know that I am wrong; they can know that I do not know that they (or someone else) might know what I do not; and they can know that I am not merely wrong, and not merely unaware of my ignorance, but unaware of my unawareness of my ignorance, and so on, at the very moment that I am convinced that I know what I (think I) know.   Under these circumstances, it would behoove me to bracket my (false) consciousness of myself, my mistaken belief, and to become as open as possible to the other’s consciousness of my error–indeed, for the other’s awareness of my unawareness of my unawareness.   And yet such an attitude remains difficult to achieve, especially when my emotional state reinforces my sense of knowing what I know. The experience of being impassioned–angry, for example–very often heightens the (potentially illusory) sense of certitude attaching to my experience of my own beliefs, my own knowledge, especially when the object of that knowledge is someone with whom I am angry. To be sure, it is possible to recognize the possibility that my emotional state is affecting my perceptions; it is even possible to count to ten before responding. Both possibilities, however, affirm the commonplace experience that the feeling of anger often intensifies the certitude with which one (thinks one) knows something to be the case.   The experience of knowing or seeming to know what one knows inscribes human consciousness within an untranscendable horizon; at the same time, however, it programs human consciousness–at least that form of consciousness that has developed from the tradition of western metaphysics–to experience its inscription not as a confinement within an unsurpassable limit but as a freedom that offers precisely the promise of transcendence in the form of access to truth itself.   Derrida generalizes this irony in Of Grammatology when he summarizes the phenomenological experience of “hearing oneself think.” Consciousness, especially in its form as conscience, he notes, seems to occur as an unmediated self-voicing in which one’s thought is available to oneself as a signified that is seemingly independent of any signifier, and that therefore has a completely non-material being, a non-material presence to the subject that hears itself thinking. “This experience of the effacement of the signifier in the voice is not merely one illusion among many–since it is the condition of the very idea of truth. . . . This illusion is the history of truth” (20). The history of truth is the history of the attempt to recuperate the knowledge of self as superior to the other’s (potential) knowledge of the self’s (potentially abyssal) self-ignorance. For this reason the truth of the truth–the truth that the experience of truth derives from an illusory experience of seeming self-presence–cannot be introjected, cannot become the non-illusory basis of the experience of one’s self-consciousness.   The reason is evident in the paradox, notoriously remarked by Donald Rumsfeld, that one can know that there are “unknown unknowns” but, by definition, not know what they are. Here, Rumsfeld can represent the world, including his enemies. He can represent his representations of himself. What is more, he can represent his self-representations as limited, partial, possibly erroneous or self-deluding. He can even represent the possibility that he might not know something, not know that he does not know it, and thus not be able to represent the limit that cuts, divides, or separates him from the very knowledge he thinks he has. What Rumsfeld intuits, in short, is that insofar as the object of knowing is subject to an indeterminate future falsifiability, self-consciousness is a source of radical epistemological provisionality. Indeed, it is a source of epistemological self-impoverishment. The catastrophe of self-consciousness is not its capacity for an infinitely regressive series of self-inclusive self-representations but its irreparable incapacity for representing the error of its representations (if and when they can be determined to be in error), except belatedly.   What turns the screw of catastrophe ever tighter is the further paradox that each of us can have, in principle, more accurate beliefs about the beliefs of others than those around us, who can also have more accurate beliefs about our beliefs than we can. These two asymmetries do not balance or cancel each other out but double and redouble each other ad infinitum. They mark and remark a rationally determinable structural boundary to rationality, a limit condition that can be specified from one side, as it were, but not from the other–the one side emerging only when the I foregoes its presumptive privilege of attesting to itself, to its knowledge of itself.   1.22 Declining to Witness   At the same time, in specifying its knowledge of the other, the I can never entirely separate itself from a minimal assertion about what it (thinks it) knows of itself. The I that knows that the other does not know its error is an I that is always in the position of knowing (or thinking that it knows) that it knows. In other words, the predication “I know” means “(I think) I know that I know,” and for this reason the I cannot assume the position of the other; that is, the I cannot become the other who knows what it (some I) does not know it does not know of itself. Only another other, an other that does not say “I,” an other that cannot say “I,” an other that is therefore not simply another human subject able to speak in the first person–only this other other could know what any human subject, appearing to speak to or for or from itself, cannot know and cannot know it cannot know. If bearing witness presupposes a first-person predication, then this other other can never bear witness to my false beliefs. Its meta-level knowledge would not be recuperable as a form of self-consciousness. This other other is not a you that says “I.” In not being able to say “I”–and thus in not being able to say “I see,” “I know that you do not know,” “I recognize that you do not recognize that you do not know,” and so on–this other other could witness what no I can witness of itself or any other I, what, in fact, no one who ever says “I” can witness.   Consciousness is a disaster, then, precisely insofar as it precipitates each I into a position of thinking it knows, precisely insofar as it cuts each I off from the possibility of speaking without saying “I,” without embedding its knowledge and its representations of its knowledge in a self-referential, hence self-interested, frame.   This is a secret that consciousness keeps from itself within itself, even when it reveals this secret to itself: I can never know, until some future moment, whether or not my present beliefs are in the name of a value other than self-interest–for example, the value of a truth that would not participate in the illusory experience of self-certainty. I can never make that future moment come to pass. I can never make it arrive. I can never say: “Now, at last, I know. Now I finally know that I know.”[6]   1.23 Deciding–For and Against   On this count, how should McNamara be judged? As Alexander Cockburn shows, throughout the interviews McNamara misremembers and occludes the historical record, construes his behavior in self-serving ways, and otherwise inauthenticates himself. If one were to bracket McNamara’s personal fallibility, however, there would remain the problem of an impersonal fallibility within the very structure of knowing and acting. This fallibility takes the form of unforeseen or unintended consequences, of unwanted outcomes, of results that those who initiate a course of events might be the first to repudiate on moral or ethical grounds–in other words, of developments for which no one r can take responsibility. “Do you feel in any way responsible for the [Vietnam] war? Do you feel guilty?” Morris asks. McNamara answers: “I don’t want to say any more.”[7] One might wish to condemn McNamara for his evasions–indeed, for his evasion of his evasions–especially on the matter of America’s invasion in Southeast Asia. And yet it is also possible that McNamara cuts off the exchange precisely because responsibility can never be a matter of a sorrowful, rueful, or otherwise mournful subject coming to accept a determinable responsibility that originates in this person’s decisions and actions. It is possible, then, that McNamara does not want to answer Morris because he has caught a glimpse of a responsibilit–yan impossible, unforgivable responsibility–to which he does not know how to respond, and for which he does not know whether or not it would be possible to know what his responsibilities would be.   Responsibility requires decision, and decision entails not just lost opportunities but infinite opportunity costs. Every decision cuts off all other possible futures in order to deliver what will have been a particular future. To decide, then, is to impose a –cidal fate upon what might have been. It is to beckon toward what cannot come to pass, hence cannot die either. It is to cut off and so lose what, in not coming into being, cannot be lost as such, and thus would be a loss before and beyond loss, a death before and beyond death, a loss or a death without loss or death.   McNamara might be understood as struggling to articulate a version of this insight. “Historians don’t really like to deal with counter-factuals, with what might have been,” he declares in the film. When he then adds that, “Well, I know a few things,” he is not asserting a positive or empirical knowledge based on experience but anticipating what he shortly thereafter calls the “fog of war.” This metaphorical fog itself does not cloud judgment but rather foregrounds what does–namely, the beclouded and beclouding nature of all judgment with respect to the futures that are decided against, consciously or not, in coming to any decision. That is why he ruminates on his guilt not so much for a decision he made as for a corporate decision which blocks any simple attribution or acceptance of blame: “in order to win a war, should you kill 100,000 people in one night by firebombing or any other way?” he asks, having recalled his part in the military “mechanism that in a sense recommended” just such a decision–namely, “killing 50% to 90% of the people of 67 Japanese cities and then bombing them with two nuclear bombs.” When McNamara invokes the “mechanism” of decision-making, he admits that the decision in question must–absolutely must–be faulted, but he em also recognizes it is an empty gesture to take the burden of fault on himself no matter how much others might want him to or even how much he might want to: “LeMay said, If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.’ And I think he’s right. He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals.” McNamara knows that the “fog” of war–the “fog” that renders responsibility impossibly irresponsible–is not limited to war but is a feature of all decision: “Our understanding, our judgment, is inadequate.” If his pronouncement is bathetic, it nevertheless speaks to the terrible knowledge of what cuts him off from the we (the 100,000 dead among so many others) at the very moment he invokes a community of like minds, of the we whose understanding and judgment are in adequate.   Vis-à-vis the lost futures entailed in any decision, the inadequacy is radical. It is no wonder that McNamara would seek, in the words he loves from Eliot, to “know the place for the first time”–as if it were s possible to abide in a moment of time before the onset not only of loss but of all the losses that have been and will continue to be lost. These lost losses proceed from out of the very act of deciding, from out of the instant of decision,[8] for one never decides in the name of life alone without deciding also in the name of a nameless and incalculable deathliness. Having to decide means having to decide against life in deciding for life.  War invariably makes such implication explicit. The memory of those decisions produces a ceaseless work of mourning.   1.3 Memory and Mourning   “Let me just ask the TV–are you ready?”   –Robert McNamara, The Fog of War   The therapeutic disciplines typically distinguish between normal and pathological grief in mourning. Freud, for example, contrasts melancholia with a more typical course of grieving. In melancholia, Freud says, the individual “knows whom he has lost but not what it is he has lost in them” (“Mourning and Melancholia” 166). In normal mourning, even at its most severe, however, the individual does not suffer this unknowing: “there is nothing unconscious about the loss,” and thus nothing unknowable about the source of the individual’s suffering or its psychodynamic course. The result is that “the testing of reality, having shown that the loved object no longer exists, requires forthwith that all the libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to this object” 165-66). This withdrawal is often t exceedingly difficult. The individual must convert the representation of the loved object as living into a representation of the loved object as dead or permanently gone, as thereafter irrecoverable, as irreparably mute before the desire of the one who remains. “Each single one of the memories and hopes” by which the survivor had been libidinally invested in or “bound . . . to the object” must be “brought up and hyper-cathected” so as to “detach” this person’s libido and enable it to be redirected toward the world of the living. The grieving individual, Freud suggests, knows this quite well. And yet Freud finds himself unable to explain either “why this process of carrying out the behest of reality bit by bit . . . should be so extraordinarily painful” or why the pain should “seem natural to us” (166). Normal grief proceeds from something unknowable, a pain that, because it “seems natural,” conceals its essential mystery, its essential unknowability, its essential non-essentiality.   As has been suggested, this double, indeed abyssal unknowability permeates the very structure of consciousness, which is incapable of representing and introjecting the lost losses that are a consequence of every decision. For this reason, then, consciousness is implicated in a work of mourning that can never, in principle, bring the process of withdrawing its “cathexes” from the lost object to an end. The reason is simple: the very basis of any decision is a simultaneous psychic investment and disinvestment. Cathexis to a loved object is always a refusal to cathect to all the other possible objects. It is a non-cathexis in them, a blocking off or even blotting out of them. Cathexis itself entails a form of the very withdrawal of cathexis that Freud considers to be the mystery of grief and its pain. Cathexis to is simultaneously decathexis from: cathectic attachment to a loved object is from its onset a version of the decathexis from by which the subject is formed or constituted in a mourning without end, in the ceaseless work of mourning that attends all identifications and object choices and thereafter all decision. In Mémoires, “Dialanguages,” and elsewhere, Derrida has explained that one can never completely assimilate the dead other, who remains before and after the interiorizing movement of mourning. All the more so would the other others remain beyond cathectic or decathectic appropriation. For this reason, then, all object choice, all cathexis and its decathectic self-preservation upon the death of the object, inscribes psychic life within a structure of cutting, of -cision, the fatality of which McNamara attempts to witness.   The shared etymology of memory and mourning points to the identity of attachment and loss, love and grief. Both memory and mourning descend from a common Indo-European stem, (s)mer-, to remember. This root has given rise to the Germanic murnan, to remember sorrowfully, the origin of mourn, and to the Latin memor, mindful, the source of memory, remember, commemorate, and other cognate terms (American Heritage Dictionary 62). These etymologies suggest that memory–the “very essence of the psyche” in Freud’s model, as Derrida explains in “Freud and the Scene of Writing” 199–is inseparable from the work of mourning. If the heart of mourning is an experience of loss, then so too would be the condition of the possibility of a subject’s self-relation, of its auto-affection. Psychic life would begin with a movement of ontological subtraction. However, if the heart of mourning is not a loss that can be experienced but an incalculable loss of what will never have been–of losses that were never present to be subsequently lost, of losses that can never be recalled, of losses that are lost as losses–then the condition of the possibility of psychic life would be absolutely mournful.   Anticipating his listeners’ unbelief, the first-person subject of Errol Morris’s documentary–the person who is still moved to tears by his memory of John F. Kennedy and this President’s determination to prevent nuclear war–this person, Robert Strange McNamara, insists that he can remember the celebration in San Francisco at the end of World War I. His first memory, then, would be from as early as the age of two, and it is this: “My earliest memory is of a city exploding with joy”   Exploding in Sorrow: The Remains of the Dead   The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger.   –Jacques Derrida Of Grammatology   ‘If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.’ And I think he’s right. He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?”   –Robert McNamara, The Fog of War   McNamara tries to access some reason that will stop the world from ceaseless mourning, but in sorrow he is haunted by the vague sense that such reason itself might be the threat he fears.Any ethical principle remains threatened by the velocity and efficiency of competition that is the essence of warfare. The lessons of war seem to arrive too late. In McNamara’s economy of decision, war demands that “one must do evil in order to produce good.” However, as Derrida reminds us, the advent of the nuclear age may introduce a new rate of speed and temporality so effective that it erases all competence in a feverish drive to dominate (“No Apocalypse, Not Now” 20). It is this unprecedented rate of speed and competition that McNamara tentatively begins to intuit as a kind of evil because implosion is its telos. As an efficiency expert, McNamara is guided by reason. He understands very clearly that nuclear weapons are efficient while his work is a plea for political and military initiatives that are essentially slow and inefficient: reasoned judgment, deliberation, negotiation, and internationalism. Few within international politics would argue with such sound judgment. And yet this sound, reasonable advice does not seem to face the threat that intuits. Perhaps the , conflict that McNamara faces is a “reason that must let itself be reasoned with” (Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason 159).   In General Curtis Lemay, McNamara faces his threatening intuitions because Lemay, like Castro, exemplifies the frightful, extremist will to accelerate the stakes of warfare to the utmost. If McNamara is troubled by the stakes of moral behavior, by criminality in war, Lemay embodies the perspective that aggression has no limit when warranted by the necessity for national self-defense. Taken to these limits, McNamara reasons, Lemay’s military strategy presents a glimpse of the evil of competitive aggression that may dominate the future. When evil takes the form of a face so ordinary and so respected, one must recognize in this face a glimpse of oneself.   Lemay personifies the logic of the nuclear age, a strategic logic that accelerates the goal driven by the desire to “prevail” over all others. The etymology of “prevail” expresses an absolutism that predominates before and beyond all else. The will to absolutism manifested when Lemay besieged Japan in a torrid firestorm, and when he argued for using nuclear weapons against Cuba in the Cuban Missile Crisis and, again, against the North Vietnamese in the Vietnam War. He justified those absolute decisions on practical grounds: if you have a powerful advantage over your enemy, you should exercise this force before it is visited on you. Thus the definition of a war criminal is a general who loses. The problem of needless killing remains a moral distinction arbitrated by the victor. Both sides must sacrifice the utmost to prevail. And the sacrifices made for victory are archived by a victor who is authorized by a morality and a spirituality underwritten by an absolute, transcendental ideal. Freedom, liberation, progress, destiny, God are some of the many proper names used to efface the confusion of needless sacrifice in warfare.   For McNamara, Lemay’s strategies of brutal, competitive force realize the apocalyptic finality of warfare once nuclear armaments proliferate throughout the world. His repeated response to the force of such hard-line military and political strategy has been a dedicated effort to persuade his witnesses to interrupt the sense of entitled “omnipotence” that disguises a dangerous sense of “vulnerability” that remains the legacy of the Cold War (Lifton 128). For him, the stakes of this legacy remain despite historical differences. In fact, his rhetorical tone has become more urgent. In the May/June 2005 issue of Foreign Policy, he argues that the Bush Administration’s policy on nuclear weapons continues and contributes to policies that have been in place for over forty years and that have “grown more dangerous and diplomatically destructive in the intervening years” (“Apocalypse Soon” 1). Further, entitled by a sense of omnipotence, the Bush Administration has contributed to the nuclear arms conflict by failing to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), suggesting that American interests remain independent of the interests of the international community. What entitles such authority? McNamara would suggest that such a perspective of a self-interested power is the effect of hard-line politics of force. As the strongest nation in the world, the US can dominate the political sphere and control world history. But we believe that McNamara increasingly senses that this reason is only part of the reason, meaning that certain reasons are not reasonable enough.   McNamara cannot quite access the forces of authority that extend Lemay’s, the Bush Administration’s, or the U.S.’s historical sense of messianic dominance. McNamara’s thinking encounters a prior, more formidable violent force that he can barely sense and that he cannot fully know. Yet in the face of Lemay and others, he is offered a glimpse of the holocaustal possibility of the messianism of American foreign policy–a future that in its drive toward finality effaces any trace of the future.   At this impasse, we believe that Derrida’s writing provides profound insight into the violent absolutism that confounds McNamara’s perspective. At this impasse, Jacques Derrida’s writing is most memorable because he has made a compelling claim about the singular force of deconstruction. Deconstruction has a singular competency in the nuclear age, for the logic of this era–total remainderless destruction–“watches over deconstruction, guiding its footsteps” (“No Apocalypse” 27). If deconstruction is anything at all, it intervenes in those decisive “events which would end any affirmative opening toward the arrival of the other” (Derrida, “The Deconstruction of Actuality” 32).   From a Derridean perspective, the nuclear age is a metonymy inscribed within the structure of ontotheological historicity that Derrida names metaphysics, the movement of an “absolute epoche” that struggles toward the revelation of finality (“No Apocalypse” 27). Derrida summarizes the movement of this particular historicity succinctly when he notes that “the very concept of history has lived only upon the possibility of meaning, upon the past, present, or promised presence of meaning and of truth (Derrida, Dissemination 184). The nuclear age is the troubling potential of the internal logics of transcendence and finality within metaphysical structures that provide complete revelation in a parousia of truth.   The holocaustal apocalypse of nuclear war would finally make present the unwitnessable truth of metaphysics: an explosion of negative transcendence that results from the political efficiency of technocratic reason, as this decision making economy ultimately prevails in an attempted capitalization of the absolute. In Derridean terms, such an unveiling would mean the event of an absolute wholly other revealed within a telos of deathward closure, which would end all mourning in a “remainderless destruction . . . completed by a nuclear catastrophe that would irreversibly destroy the entire archive and all symbolic capacity” (Derrida, “No Apocalypse” 27-28).   What is at issue here . . .is the violence of the archive itself, as archive, as archival violence. (Derrida, Archive Fever 7)   Nuclear catastrophe would certainly risk annihilating all that is named humanity. One would not need to read Jacques Derrida’s writing to reach this stunningly obvious conclusion. Catastrophic death is surely not a horror to be passed over as an obvious simplicity. Nevertheless, Derrida’s point about annihilation directs us to a far more complicated and rewarding explanation about the metaphysical economy of the absolute–an economy infected with a trace of evil. What is this trace of evil as such?   When Derrida refers to the destruction of the archive, he writes of the violent emergence of utter evil. Such a force of evil violently opposes and destroys all others in its drive to prevail as an absolute: the “one” (78). Derrida’s writing relentlessly traces the violence of the archive he names western metaphysics, an archive that sends forth a deathliness in its efforts to enclose or transcend any trace of its constitutive other. The essence of the nuclear referent figured by the center, the core, or the basis is the effect of a burning drive to authorize, elect, dominate, and conclude. Nuclear war is the legacy of this burning fever.   As the ultimate sacrifice, nuclear war would be the event that finally reaches to award a name to the unnamable. It would be the war that would end all confusion.In confusion, McNamara is constrained by the limit of thinking: he knows but he does not quite know; and he sees but he cannot see clearly. He is haunted by the faint image of things burning, and he hears the murmur of their cries. From where do these images arrive? Are these things of the past? Are these things now? Are these things yet to come? At these threatening limits, he trembles in sorrow.   Of the specters that remain with us haunting our writing, of those that we faintly acknowledge one commands our attention: Its voice echoes: “no apocalypse, not now.”

WHAT YET REMAINS    Every decision is a cut. Every decision is a cut that marks the incalculable decisions that could have been made, the infinite decisions that didn’t make the cut. And all of these remaindered decisions haunt the decisions that, having been made, remain. We can see, for instance, when we look back upon decisions we have made in our lives, that they are fractured by their possibilities, that they have always been fractured by the other possibilities, not only the un-chosen possibilities, but even those contingent on the un-chosen, those to which we are blind in principle. The past, we see, is actually always fractured by the future it cannot calculate.For this reason, the Derridean archive would be the repository not only of the future that will come to pass but of those futures that will not. It would include the trace of what, by virtue of the structure of decision, is without trace.                           Born of their cuts. Decisions are born from cutting, by necessity.                     “A witness, as such, is always blind. Witnessing substitutes narrative for perception.”   –Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind 104.                   BLIND TO THE CUT   A film is born of cuts, and bears its cuts, any film, a home movie, a flashy Hollywood production, a documentary film of an historic decision maker. For a celluloid strip is first cut to pieces before a film can take form: razors, scissors, cisions, and decisions enjoin in their shredding. Virtually all films are edited in a process of cutting that enables the assembling or the splicing of the cuts. The reassembly, however, does not restore but continues the violence to temporal and spatial continuity. Sergei Eisenstein–Soviet socialist filmmaker and innovator of montage–saw political possibilities in the dialectical conflict in the splice and decided to emphasize it, marking his aesthetic in the cut. At the same time, Hollywood film, prioritizing narrative structure, perfected “continuity editing,” also called “invisible editing,” editing that distracts the viewer from its constitutive cuts to render their necessary visibility “invisible.”                                               EVERY DECISION IS A CUT   Decisions are sometimes marked by their fatal effects, and they are always marked by their fatal origins, their need to have cut off future possibilities. “We burned to death a hundred thousand Japanese civilians in one night.” We see Robert McNamara say this three times in The Fog of War. On the third time he asks: “Was there a rule then that said you shouldn’t bomb, shouldn’t kill, shouldn’t burn to death 100,000 civilians in one night?” Mass killing is obviously traumatic, but it is in the syntactical stutter that McNamara marks the painful structure of decision itself.         “Blindness does not prohibit tears, it does not deprive one of them.”   –Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind 127.       McNamara is a man who can cry, but, while citing this event three times, he never cries for the 100,000 Japanese civilians. Yet while we don’t quite see a mourning for those dead, we do catch a glimpse of a mourning of the decisions not made–the U.S. military could have decided, even, to “kill” the citizens of Tokyo, but it didn’t; it decided to “burn to death” the citizens of Tokyo. And McNamara marks this decision over and over. The decision to kill 50-90% of the urban population of Japan before dropping two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was always haunted by the other possible decisions, and it remains haunted by the other possible decisions. For a decision is in ruins as soon as it is made, for it sits amidst the ashes of all the unmade decisions, all the futures sacrificed.                           Shouldn’t bomb, shouldn’t kill, shouldn’t burn to death.         “In the beginning, at the origin, there was ruin. At the origin comes ruin; ruin comes to the origin; it is what first comes and happens to the origin, in the beginning. With no promise of restoration.”   –Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind 65.                         “That’s what’s happening right now.”                   “It’s too late.”                                       “It leaves. It leaves.”   –Derrida, Derrida               (Shouldn’t bomb, shouldn’t kill, shouldn’t burn to death.)   CRITICAL FLICKER FUSION   In film, the stutter becomes a flicker. Consider for a moment that the movement on a roll of film is created by interrupting a still image 24 times a second, 24 still photographs, each cut with a black bar, a non-image, images and non-images both spooled through the projector. Yet, we see a continuous, uninterrupted moving image. Humans continue to see an image for a fraction of a second after it is removed from eyesight, and this is called an “afterimage,” a trace of a trace. While we are watching our afterimage, a black bar, a lapse, a not-seen, crosses the screen. Flick, flick. Forty-eight times a second a projector’s light pulses whose luminosity we perceive as unwavering (Critical Flicker Fusion) . In the flicker is the seen and not seen, what allows for, but is not itself, seeing. This technical point exemplifies an ethical difficulty. Sight is not just partial; one’s vision is essentially irresponsible to the traces that allow for the presence of vision. There is a constitutive blindness to seeing because sight has no insight into its own blindness.                       HAUNTING POSSIBILITIES   We are necessarily blind. The physiologically blind, we should notice, often reach out to ask other eyes to see in their blindness.   During his 98 bombing missions in Vietnam, former Captain Randy Floyd never once saw the Vietnamese people who died and suffered from the bombs dropped from his plane. His job was “very clean,” as he says, simply pulling the “commit switch” with the pre-programmed bomb pattern when it was time. Military performance depends upon decisiveness, upon an unwavering beam of light. More than anything the “commit switch” cleans up the messy job of decision, blinding one to the incalculable decisions that could have been made, the incalculable futures sacrificed. The job of the bombardier is the job of a blind man who thinks he can see. “During the missions, after the missions, the result of what I was doing, the result of this, this game, this, uh, exercise of my technical expertise never really dawned on me, that reality of the screams, or of the people being blown away, or of their homeland being destroyed, uh, just was not a part of what I thought about.” If he knew he were blind at the time, he would need to reach out for guidance from another, another whom he himself could not see. Someone looking up and watching a bomb fall from the sky perhaps. “When I was there, I never saw a child that got burned by napalm.”   To see a future clearly requires a blindness, a staving off of possibility. Those sacrificed possibilities can return to haunt, and they can return to haunt such that we not only are in a position to mourn the sacrifices of the past, but begin to recognize in the notion of possibility, the necessary sacrifices of the future. “But I look at my children now, and, um, I don’t know what would happen, if, uh, uh, what I would think about if someone napalmed ’em.   Randy Floyd’s children haven’t been napalmed. But they could be. In opening to his blindness, the Other he can’t see, in recognizing that there will always be Others he can’t see, Randy Floyd accesses the Other of infinite possibility. He isn’t recognizing the probability that his children could be burned to death; he is recognizing the possibility. We witness Randy Floyd’s non-witnessing. He knew what he didn’t see, a knowledge which opened the possibility of not knowing what he didn’t see. Once one begins to recognize those unseen possibilities, one is experiencing the difference that necessitates mourning. When Randy Floyd accesses this structure he doesn’t mourn the future death of his children as much as he folds that incalculable future upon a past whose structural difference he then painfully experiences. The past is always fractured by the future it cannot calculate or see.   Randy Floyd appears in the 1974 documentary Hearts and Minds. We watch his eyes as he speaks, his words forcing unthinkable images into his mind, seeing what he can’t see: Vietnamese children napalmed; his own children napalmed. We watch him cover his eyes with his hands to wipe the blurring tears. And then, on the screen, we see, cut in, what he didn’t: Vietnamese children, skin peeling off in sheets.   The documentary gives sight to a blindness, what we neglected to mourn, what we never knew to mourn, showing us that there are endless blindnesses. There is a blindness of the other in all sight. And there is a blindness within mourning that is a recognition of the other, whose death and whose presence is never fully incorporable, whose death and whose presence we are always available to, without closure. One can only mourn without promise of restoration.                                                 “They would like to follow the gaze of the other whom they do not see,” perhaps even the Other other, the other who does not return us to ourselves” (Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind6).                     WITH NO PROMISE OF RESTORATION   Documentary film has a history of bringing the unseen into view: it preserves what has passed; it travels to foreign lands; it serves as exposé; it focuses on the mundane; it represents the marginalized. But before it can serve any of those functions for viewers, it must be organized by the filmmaker(s). The film must be shredded to pieces before it is assembled into a viewing experience whose unfolding in time and space we feel to be coherent.   Many films achieve coherence by relying on overarching narrative logic that allows us to experience a series of discontinuous shots as continuous. In fact, the practice of continuity editing is one of the great hallmarks of Classic Hollywood film. Continuity editing establishes a number of editing devices that habituate the viewer to experiencing continuity where they see discontinuity. Something as simple as the shot-reverse shot technique so frequently used when filming a conversation illustrates this well: we begin with an establishing two-shot of two interlocutors; then we alternate back and forth, usually in close-up, between the two as they converse–shot-reverse shot. Our sense of narrative continuity–that two people exchange words in a conversation whose meaning and significance become increasingly clear–overrides the visual discontinuity–that the perspective hops from one spot to the next without spatial transition and that “dead time” is cut out.             “A witness, as such, is always blind. Witnessing substitutes narrative for perception.”   –Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind104.               While basic continuity style has dominated Hollywood since the early twentieth century, the Hollywood Renaissance cut into this dominance in the late 1960s, a time of worldwide revolution that included the Vietnam War. A number of American filmmakers began making experimental and culturally conscious films, many of them violent to narrative expectation. Easy Rider (Hopper 1969) and Bonnie and Clyde (Penn 1967) both famously and abruptly kill their protagonists without resolution or perhaps even significance; Catch-22 (Nichols 1970), a World War II satire produced during the Vietnam War, often denies the viewer establishing shots, splicing the viewer instead into disorienting close-ups in medias res; and M*A*S*H(Altman 1970), a Korean War satire produced during Vietnam, keeps the viewer so far from the central action that we remain unsure of its centrality. As Warren Beatty astutely observed, “Bob [Altman] had a talent for making the background come into the foreground and the foreground go into the background, which made the story a lot less linear than it actually was” (Biskind 103). In other words, American fictional film during the Vietnam War takes up a similar challenge as documentary film generally: it aims to break our habits of seeing in order to bring to sight forces already at work: discontinuity, disorientation, non-resolution, uncertainty. These films break from the logic of classical cinematic language. They are marked by their insistence that we see film in ruins, a representation that in its medium and in its structure always testifies to the violence and division of its origin.Derrida’s generalization of the ruin in Memoirs of the Blind allows us to see how a film in ruins could speak to an American culture increasingly threatened by dissent and diversity: “The ruin . . . is experience itself. . . . There is nothing of the totality that is not immediately opened, pierced, or bored through” (69). The ruin offers “no promise of restoration” (65).                                           BLIND SPOTS   Randy Floyd mourns “with no promise of restoration.” His own sense of totality has been opened, pierced, bored through.   Robert McNamara’s horizon, however, doesn’t reveal that choice. His life of war put him in the position of making decisions so fatal that his understandable response is to hope to provide a structure to relieve the future of seeing this repetition; he hopes to restore the future with the past.   “At my age, 85, I’m at age where I can look back and derive some conclusions about my actions. My rule has been try to learn, try to understand what happened. Develop the lessons and pass them on” (Morris).   He quite reasonably suggests a goal:   “Should not the nations of the world–the United States in particular–establish as their overarching foreign policy goal the reduction of fatalities from conflict within and among nations?” (McNamara, Argument 5)   To help determine the future, McNamara begins digging in the ruins to locate the “missed opportunities” of leaders and decision makers in conflict.   “I want to be absolutely clear that my primary concern is with raising the probabilities of preventing conflict in the future. The missed opportunities we examine are, we argue, due primarily to mutual misperception, misunderstanding, and misjudgment by leaders in Washington and Hanoi. We therefore ask: If each side had known the truth about the other’s reality, might the outcome have been less tragic?” (6).                           “As a general rule–a most singular rule, appropriate for dissociating the eye from vision–we are all the more blind to the eye of the other the more the other shows themselves capable of sight, the more we can exchange a look or a gaze with them.”   –Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind 106.       While McNamara recognizes the presence of blind spots in the past, he cannot see their structural necessity. He hopes they can be illuminated. Within his reasonable world, he has no choice but to work through probabilities. Yet statistical analysis calculates outcome while it cannot see the incalculable within all outcome, the threateningly incalculable that must be, impossibly, confronted.The future haunts: those nagging blind spots.                       “The point is right away to go beyond, in one fell swoop, the first glance and thus to see there where this glance is blind, to open one’s eyes wide there where one does not see what one sees. One must see, at first sight, what does not let itself be seen. And this is invisibility itself. For what first sight misses is the invisible. The flaw, the error of first sight is to see, and not to notice the invisible. –Derrida, Specters of Marx141.           McNamara’s image is already captured, divided by its future.                                 “Absolute hospitality requires that I open up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner . . . but to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other, and that I give place to them, that I let them come, that I let them arrive, and take place in the place I offer them, without asking of them either reciprocity (entering into a pact) or even their names.”   –Derrida, Of Hospitality25.                 As captured by Morris’s documentary, McNamara’s struggle with reason and its inadequacy to address futurity is a strikingly beautiful and painful impasse. Morris takes McNamara’s image and renders it through the hesitating fragility of a blink, that physiological reminder of the weakness of sight, that it shares itself with blindness. The de-centered composition, dropped frames, freeze frames, and oblique angles all work cinematically to take unwavering self-possession from a man still looking for the ghosts that will possess him.               “But we are never ourselves, and between us, identical to us, a ‘self’ is never in itself or identical to itself.”   –Derrida, Mémoires28.                                                         EYES AND TEARS   We are necessarily blind, and we reach out to ask other eyes to see in our blindness. Derrida illustrates this idea simply with the many portraits of blind men reaching forward with their hands.   In the “Deleted Scenes” from The Fog of War, McNamara cites Dylan Thomas’s poem “The Hand that Signed the Paper,” which ends:   The five kings count the dead but do not softenThe crusted wound nor pat the brow;   A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven;   Hands have no tears to flow.   The counting hand doesn’t reach forward; it stays close to the chest. Hands, here, enlist the dead in their self-enclosing and instrumental reason. They “see” the dead as a reflection of their own empire and cannot acknowledge the near-dead. But the blindness of this hand does not cause it to reach out to implore another for assistance. Blind eyes do. Or rather the hands of those with blind eyes do, for the eyes of the blind no longer service self-navigation, the seeing of oneself in place. The desire to picture oneself no longer performs through the eyes that are blind.                               “The desire for self-presentation is never met, it never meets up with itself, and that is why the simulacrum takes place. Never does the eye of the Other recall this desire more sovereignly to the outside and to difference, to the law of disproportion, dissymmetry, and expropriation. And this is memory itself.”   –Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind121.   Even the non-blind find their eyes have deceived them in providing the hope of a glimpse of totality in self. Self-representational desires, especially at their strongest–for instance, in an act of self-portraiture–reveal the inadequacy of one’s own eyes to actually see oneself seeing. As Derrida write in Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, the truth of the eyes is unveiled when seeing is veiled, as through tears. For in welling up and delivering forth tears the eyes are doing something:   “It makes something happen or come, makes something come to the eyes, makes something well up in them, by producing an event. It is performative, something vision alone would be incapable of if it gave rise only to representational reporting” (122).                           At the end of the book, Derrida explains of the Andrew Marvell poem “Eyes and Tears,” “between seeing and weeping, he sees between and catches a glimpse of the difference, he keeps it, looks after it in memory–and this is the veil of tears–until finally, and from or with the ‘same eyes,’ the tears see” (128-9):   Thus let your streams o'erflow your springs,Till eyes and tears be the same things:   And each the other’s difference bears;   These weeping eyes, those seeing tears.   The weeping eyes seeing are no longer a repository of (self) representations, but instead the performative locus of (self) expropriation, no longer an instrument servicing the desire for (self) enclosure. Catching a glimpse of the difference they weep, and mourn, and cry with joy.                                                               “No justice . . . seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims of wars.”   –Derrida, Specters of Marxxix.                               “Is the most distressing, or even the most deadly infidelity that of a possible mourning which would interiorize within us the image, idol, or ideal of the other who is dead and only lives in us? Or is it that of the impossible mourning which . . . refuses to take or is incapable of taking the other within oneself, as in the tomb or the vault of some narcissism?”   –Derrida, Mémoires 6.                                                                                 No apocalypse. Not now.                                   “It’s too late.”   –Derrida, Derrida.                                                       EVERY MOMENT IS MARKED BY THE POSSIBILITY   What is threatening to us is what we cannot–in advance–know, name, or foresee. What is necessary is our opening to alterity, within us and outside us. Jacques Derrida taught us this forcefully in his lifelong project of recognizing the future as the “arrival of the totally unexpected,” a sentiment introduced early in the documentary bearing his name, Derrida. Later–or was it earlier?–in the “deleted interviews” of the film, he recognizes a “death effect” that occurs when one has one’s picture taken. Since the presence of the pro-filmic subject is not required, but recalled, as the photograph passes through time, photographing always marks an absence: “This film will survive me . . . every moment is marked by the possibility.” One gives oneself over to the monstrous future that includes one’s death.           “The desire for self-presentation is never met. . . . Never does the eye of the Other recall this desire more sovereignly to the outside and to difference, to the law of disproportion, dissymmetry, and expropriation. And this is memory itself.”   –Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind 121.   Even Derrida shows reluctance. Yet he finally says, in Derrida, “at the end there was something good in allowing oneself to be surprised, in allowing other people to take what they want. It’s too late. It leaves; it leaves. That’s what’s happening right now.”                                                                                                                 It leaves. It leaves.

Notes

 

1. McNamara nearly gets the stanza right, but his memory slips on a couple of words.  The correct citation is from Section V of Eliot’s Four Quartets: “We shall not cease from exploration/ And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time.”

 

2. Errol Morris invented what he calls the “Interrotron” to help control the gaze of the interviewed subject.  The camera works so that the interviewer’s image is directly over the lens, which structures a conversation between interviewer and interviewee that has the interviewee looking directly into the camera.

 

3.In “Four Protocols: Derrida, His Deconstruction,” John P. Leavey explains how, “in its most general sense, Derrida’s deconstruction can be reduced to a simple phrase: d’une certaine manière, in a certain way,” a phrase Derrida himself uses, in both Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology, to describe his project (43).

 

4. Thus, for example, “Rationality will not save us” (lesson 2), and yet one must “maximize efficiency,” seek “proportionality,” “get the data,” and “be prepared to reexamine your reasoning” (lessons 4, 5, 6, and 8). Thus, too, “Belief and seeing are both often wrong” (Morris, lesson 7); however, not only is it that “There’s something beyond one’s self” (lesson 3) but that it is knowable that there is something beyond oneself. On the one hand, “To do good, you may have to do evil” (lesson 9) because, after all, “you can’t change human nature” (Morris, lesson 11); on the other hand, we must “empathize with the enemy” (lesson 1) and yet must not answer the questions the enemy asks “but the question you wish had been asked of you” (lesson 10)–which is to say that we must not yield to the enemy’s perspective but insist on our own.

 

5.The first two lessons involve divergent frames of reference. On the one hand, the future appears to be apocalyptic, for “the indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will lead to the destructions of nations” (lesson 2). On the other hand, we can mitigate this indefiniteness “by adhering to the principle of a ‘Just War,’ in particular to the principle of proportionality (lesson 1). According to the first lesson, the destruction of nations is unavoidable. According to the second, the destruction can be reduced and in any event rendered more rational and justified. That is, the second posits in a “Just War” a force of justice that is a matter of a certain calculability. In its justice, the “Just War” releases a force capable of blocking the incalculable forces associated with human error in making decisions about using nuclear weapons, the outcomes of which can be predicted to be unpredictable.

 

Another tension obtains in the way McNamara presents as a solution to the problem of war what might in fact be part of the problem of war. On the one hand, “surely we can agree that we should establish as a major goal of U.S. foreign policy and, indeed, of foreign policies across the globe: the avoidance in this century of the carnage–160 million dead–caused by conflict in the 20th century” (lesson 4). On the other hand, however, “one of the greatest dangers we face today is the risk that terrorists will obtain access to weapons of mass destruction as a result of the breakdown of the Non-Proliferation Regime” which “we in the U.S. are contributing to.” (lesson 10). The call to change “our” policy, however, presupposes not only that “we” can agree that “our” policy is flawed but that the flaw can be repaired by more rigorously pursuing the “major goal” of avoiding our or the enemy’s reliance on war. If we can agree, we will not be tempted to engage in the violence that threatens to erupt from our disagreements.

 

Lesson 3 requires that the United States try to convince other nations that its economic, political, and military superiority is to their advantage. On the one hand, “We are the most powerful nation in the world–economically, politically, militarily–and we are likely to remain so for decades.” On the other hand, the U.S. should try to “persuade other nations with similar interests and similar values of our proposed use of that power.” The relation of lesson 3 to lesson 8 restates this tension in terms of the call to curtail the nation’s sovereignty. On the one hand “we should build a system of jurisprudence based on the International Court . . . which would hold individuals responsible for crimes against humanity” (lesson 8). On the other hand “We are the most powerful nation in the world” (lesson 3) and the U.S. is not likely to relinquish our claim to define, defend, or otherwise pursue its national self-interests, let alone the sovereignty on which they are predicated.

 

Finally, nine of the ten lessons pit the sovereignty of the nation-state against the non-existent sovereignty of “the human race”–that is, of “society as a whole.” Thus, on the one hand we must act out of our individual self-sovereignty (lessons 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10); on the other hand, we must act out of our regard for “society as a whole” (lesson 6), for “the human race” (lesson 1), for “our own poor and . . . the disadvantaged across the world” (lesson 5).

 

6. Writing of disaster in general, of a revelation without revelation, Maurice Blanchot declares that “The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact. It does not touch anyone in particular; ‘I’ am not threatened by it, but spared, left aside.” In other words, “There is no reaching the disaster.” For this reason, “When the disaster comes upon us, it does not come” (The Writing of the Disaster, 1). All disasters are disasters of consciousness, of the epistemological asymmetry between, on the one hand, one consciousness and another (an I and a you, an I and a he or a she) and, on the other hand, between the self-conscious, self-reflexive I and an altogether other other, n another knowing–unknown, unknowable, unattached to self-reflexive subjectivity that says “I,” hence to an unknowing knowing.

 

7. Is it that he does not want to say “any more” (that is, anything additional on the matter) or that he does not want to say “anymore” (that is, he no longer wants to say what he may have said in the past)?

 

8. In explicating Kierkegaard’s reading of Abraham and Isaac, Derrida underscores Kierkegaard’s recognition that “the instant of decision is madness’” (cited in The Gift of Death 65). In his analysis of Blanchot’s recit, “The Instant of My Death,” Derrida endeavors to answer “How is it that the instant makes testimony both possible and impossible at the same time?” (Demeure 33).

 

Filmography

 

• Bonnie and Clyde. Dir. Arthur Penn. Warner Brothers, 1967.
• Catch-22. Dir. Mike Nichols. Paramount, 1970.
• Derrida. Dir. Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman. DVD. Zeitgeist Films, 2002.
• Easy Rider. Dir. Dennis Hopper. Columbia Pictures, 1969.
• The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. Dir. Errol Morris. Sony Pictures Classics, 2003. DVD. Columbia TriStar Home Video, 2004.
• Hearts and Minds. Dir. Peter Davis. Warner Brothers, 1974. DVD. The Criterion Collection, 2002.
• M*A*S*H. Dir. Robert Altman. 20th Century Fox, 1970.
• McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Dir. Robert Altman. Warner Brothers, 1971.

 

Works Cited

 

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• Blanchot, Maurice. The Instant of My Death/Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony. Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000.
• —. The Writing of the Disaster. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1986.
• Burke, Kenneth. Permanence and Change. 3rd ed. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.
• Cockburn, Alexander. “The Fog of Cop-Out: Robert McNamara 10, Errol Morris 0.” Counterpunch Weekend Ed. (24/25 January 2004). < http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn01242004.html>.
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• —. “Deconstruction of Actuality.” Radical Philosophy 68 (1994): 28-41.
• —. “Dialanguages.” Points . . . Interviews, 1974-1994. Ed. Elisabeth Weber. Trans. Peggy Kamuf and others. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995. 132-55.
• —. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.
• —. “Freud and the Scene of Writing.” Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978.
• —. The Gift of Death. Trans. David Wills. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.
• —. Mémoires: for Paul de Man. Rev. ed. Trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, Eduardo Cadava, and Peggy Kamuf. New York: Columbia UP, 1989.
• —. Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003.
• —. “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives).” Trans. Catherine Porter and Philip Lewis. Diacritics 14.2 (1984): 20-31.
• —. Of Grammatology. 2nd ed. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998.
• —. Of Hospitality. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000.
• —. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford UP, 2000.
• —. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005.
• —. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994.
• —. Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Trans. David B. Allison. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973.
• Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology. Ed. Philip Rieff. New York: Collier/Macmillan, 1963. 164-79.
• Leavey, John P. “Four Protocols: Derrida, His Deconstruction. Semeia 23 (1992): 42-57.
• Lifton, Robert Jay. Superpower Syndrome: America’s Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World. New York: Thunder Mouth P/ Nation, 2003.
• McNamara, Robert S. “Apocalypse Soon.” Foreign Policy (May/June 2005). <http://www.foreignpolicy.com> 22 May 2005.
• McNamara, Robert S., James G. Blight, and Robert Brigham with Thomas J. Biersteker and Col. Herbert V. Schandler. Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy. New York: Public Affairs, 1999.
• Shipley, Joseph T. The Origins of English Words: A Discursive Dictionary of Indo-European Roots. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1984.