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Terror, Representation, and Postmodern Lessons in Hitler Studies

Alan Nadel (bio)
University of Kentucky
amnade2@email.uky.edu

Review of: Karen Engle, Seeing Ghosts: 9/11 and the Visual Imagination. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queens UP, 2009. Print.

Jeffrey Melnick, 9/11 Culture. West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Print.

Marc Redfield, The Rhetoric of Terror: Reflections on 9/11 and the War on Terror. New York: Fordham UP, 2009. Print.

Phillip E. Wegner, Life between Two Deaths, 1989-2001: U.S. Culture in the Long Nineties. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2009. Print.

Hapless Jack Gladney seems to have wandered into the postmodern world of Don DeLillo’s White Noise directly out a David Lodge novel. The chair of a Department of Hitler Studies in a small Midwestern college, Gladney feels an obligation to remain neutral about Hitler (a position in part facilitated by Gladney’s inability to read German). What makes Gladney a man ahead of his time is DeLillo’s reliance on the fact that “Hitler Studies” is painfully anachronistic, a point illustrated by the way the term “Nazi” seems to have lost its intellectual content. “Nazism: Hitler Studies:: Poststructuralism: Postmodernism” might be the answer to a hypothetical SAT question, but in what year? In 1934, before SAT questions or postmodernism existed? In a non-existent future, after the moment when Hitler Studies will have had emerged as an institutionalized option of the liberal education? Is Nazism the nexus of a potentially renewable intellectual engine, we are forced to ask, or simply a leveling pejorative, the relic of a bygone moment (except in the Vatican) when the word signified—as does today the word Republican (or Democrat, Tory, Liberal, or Socialist)—a viable political movement with issues and agendas? The problem of Hitler Studies, both for Gladney and for DeLillo’s readers, is to construct an imaginary space wherein Hitler Studies attributes to an academic field a vitality and a legitimacy that it denies to Hitler himself. Constructing this space fissures the seam where imagining is cemented to conceiving, for we can certainly imagine Hitler Studies by applying paradigms from other “interdisciplinary” academic programs: conferences and journals clustered around loci of mystery and controversy, requirements of the major, curricula that partition and redistribute privileged topics along temporal, geographic or disciplinary axes (e.g., “Hitler’s Art and Nazi Aesthetics,” “Hitler’s Rhetoric,” “Hitler and Globalization,” “The Semiotics of the Hitlerian,” “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” etc.).

What is so discomforting—in both the best and worst sense of that word—about the plethora of writing on “9/11” is that it evokes the same contradictions as does the (fictive) world containing a place for Hitler Studies. Can we study the event of 9/11 with Jack Gladney’s intellectual and ethical distance, and if not, can we be said to be “studying” it—as opposed to invoking, or denouncing, or mourning, or memorializing it—at all? All four of the books at hand evoke this question, and even more so in conjunction. Jeffrey Melnick (9/11 Culture), treating the destruction of the twin towers and the panoply of its cultural fallout as a series of questions, comes closest to Jack Gladney’s objectivity. Philip E. Wegner (Life between Two Deaths, 1989-2001) resembles Gladney as cultural historian, and Marc Redfield (The Rhetoric of Terror) manifests Gladney’s philosophical doubt. Karen Engle (Seeing Ghosts) resembles Gladney’s haunted aspect in his uncertainty about how to interpret signs and meanings, how to distinguish in his own perceptions between the visionary and the hallucinatory, and in his own conclusions between insight and paranoia. Melnick raises better questions, to be sure, than Gladney, and Wegner is a much better cultural historian. Redfield and Engle, similarly, are more genuinely philosophical than Gladney, and both are a hell of a lot smarter. All four authors, moreover—like those who try to ward off misfortunes by imagining that they are about to occur—express awareness of their awkward positionality in relation to their topic. But it is still hard to shake off the disquieting concern that all these books exist in, or at least are haunted by, the hypothetical space of Hitler Studies, since the very act of imagining Hitler Studies makes its actuality inconceivable.

Herein, we enter an ontological loop where the inconceivability of Hitler Studies is as absolute as is the reality of Hitler’s actions. How is this possible? Or to put it another way, if imagining a Department of Hitler Studies in some way makes the question of Hitler academic and so distances Hitler from reality somehow, is there an ethical dilemma in reducing Hitler to pure simulacrum, or an epistemological dilemma in knowing him only as a representation? At the same time, given that the past does not exist, all we ever know of it are representations: records, photographs, memories, written accounts, relics. In that regard, the emergence of Hitler Studies claims a futurity from the perspective of which our current absurdities merge with our past horrors, and we become the captives of the events we are trying to capture.

Thus history is always captivating, regardless of the terms of that captivity. This insight implicitly connects Redfield, Melnick, Engle, and Wegner, all captives in one way or another of the phenomena clustered around the term “9/11,” for, as Redfield explains, “very quickly the name-date became a slogan, a blank little scar around which nationalist energies could be marshaled” (1). The authors, linked by the illusiveness of that ambiguous name-date, often invoke Derrida to help explain its slippery logistics. “Derrida tells us that mourning and memory are inextricably tied to the proper name” (39), Engle explains in an attempt to analyze the photo image named Falling Man, a figure that in its namelessness she sees as a metonym for the whole 9/11 event: “The work of mourning—for this man, for this day—is permanently disrupted by the impossibility of recognition, the failed identification of the victim. This failure cannot be overemphasized, for it is through this failure that the profundity of Falling Man‘s iconicity begins to emerge” (39).

The failure of the visual, furthermore, complements a failure of the verbal, as Melnick shows in his chapter on the rumors that simultaneously infuse and bracket the event. These rumors interweave, creating a vast non-fabric of threads tugged in every direction: Arabs in a Detroit (or was it Bakersfield?) restaurant cheered when the towers went down, BUT the Jews working at those towers were mysteriously warned not to show up for work that day, BUT a Middle-eastern-looking man in New Jersey purchased inordinately large amounts of candy just before Halloween in order to poison trick-or-treating children, BUT the towers were actually taken down by explosives planted in their base by the Bush administration, AND the Pentagon was actually hit by a missile, BUT the real point of the attack was to control African-American minorities. Significantly, the circulation of what Melnick calls these “wedge-driving” rumors employs the same avenues of public discourse as do the channels of news and music and expressions of community action, memorialization, and patriotism. Therefore, if 9/11 culture is “constituted by the labors of historians, fictions writers, journalists, musical artists, and so on trying to make the tragedy available to the widest possible public as their own story” (35), Melnick notes that it also allows “the illusion of care and community-building to satisfy much more self-absorbed goals” (35).

The snapshot also figures cogently in the tension between official representation and cultural counter-statement. Melnick champions photography, especially the impromptu sort, as “the most valuable form of democratic cultural expression in the months after the attacks” (65). Thus, he implicitly marks the snapshot as a kind of counter-terrorism, one undertaken by an array of agents. Even though he feels that the New York Times‘s “Portraits of Grief” feature efficiently “cornered the market on remembrance” (76), Melnick praises the Times as the “first cultural actor to take note of the ‘snapshot culture’ . . . [and] to reproduce it in a representational economy of scale” (77). He qualifies his praise, however, by reminding us that the Times’s “standardization of the snapshots . . . made it clear that a corporate 9/11 culture was born almost simultaneously with the collapse of the towers” (77). Melnick’s book is full of these ups and downs, with a whole chapter devoted explicitly to the imagery of rising and falling that proliferates in fiction, film, and visual art after 9/11. Notably, Melnick uses the chapter’s title, “Rising,” to foreground the culture’s impetus toward uplift, most powerfully represented by Bruce Springsteen’s blockbuster record, The Rising, a conscious 9/11 memorial, especially to the kind of working people that Springsteen’s earliest music celebrated. As with the Times “Portraits,” it is impossible to separate commercial and corporate interests from the production of public commemoration.

Nonetheless, Melnick highlights the value of rising as a counter-imagery to what he calls “the central visual reality of 9/11: falling” (78). Claiming simultaneously that it is the central image and also the taboo image in the wake of 9/11, Melnick makes falling both center and margin in 9/11 culture. From 2001 to 2005, the taboo against falling is generally observed; Clear Channel’s list of banned songs included “a number of ‘falling’ songs” (80). In its place, Melnick contends, “rising” imagery prevailed. (The film Chicken Little and the novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, he feels, typify this trend.) By 2006 we find images of paper falling and in Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center the sound of bodies hitting the ground, which created cultural permission for the representation of falling bodies. Except that, Melnick points out, the 2004 novel Windows on the World ends with “a man jumping out of the titular restaurant with his two kids” (89); except that a significant Esquire article discussed falling imagery as early as 2003 and addressed Richard Drew’s earlier well-circulated photo of the anonymous falling man; except that Eric Fischl’s Tumbling Woman sculpture was mounted in Rockefeller Center in 2002, on the first anniversary of 9/11. Even though the sculpture was renounced as tasteless and quickly covered up, its subsequent removal as much disproves the falling taboo as demonstrates it, as does Melnick’s decision to hold these earliest details to the end of his chapter, such that we read backwards, from the absence of an image to its appearance, to its presence and disappearance during the period of its absence.

To the extent that Melnick is correct about his details, then, the rising imagery that celebrates the nation’s (and its corporate interests’) response to the collapse of the towers (and the falling bodies that preceded the collapse and the fallout that proceeded from it) continuously marks the falling that it excludes. Melnick’s analysis thus turns The Rising into a sign of falling. What, after all would be the point of Springsteen’s relentless insistence on rising—the words “rise” or “rising,” Melnick points out, appear in more than half the songs on the record—if nothing had fallen, if this music did not come after the fall? And how are we to interpret Melnick’s linking of the public’s revulsion at Tumbling Woman with his claim that the jumpers, like the snapshot phenomenon, were “a tragic expression of American democracy: a racially and economically diverse mix of bond traders, restaurant workers, and administrative assistants waited at those windows” (emphasis added, 92)? Melnick thus provides many examples of the way that 9/11’s up/down dichotomy is a version of the symbiosis, in Derridean fashion, of inside and outside. This loop of symbiotic inversion pervasively structures our representation of the event, which—like the site called Ground Zero—comprises an open space that is too full.

By contrast, consider how Engle, whose debt to Derrida is explicit, deals with some of the same details: “As Derrida writes, the desired demarcation of insides and outsides has never been fully realized” (14). Engle points this out in order to explain how the covering up of Tumbling Woman, prior to her removal, manifests the obscenity it tries to obscure: in exactly the way, I have suggested, the imagery of rising and Melnick’s celebration of it marks the taboo, and then the not-taboo, and actually the always-already of a taboo-being-violated.

Seeing Ghosts, Engle’s provocative examination of 9/11’s engagement by what she calls “the visual imagination,” starts with a series of contemplations on Tumbling Woman to illustrate how, as “Derrida so eloquently argues, that which is associated with the graphic is fundamentally associated with the improper—that condition or state of exteriority and distance from the truth, self-presence, and Being” (13). And yet in Tumbling Woman‘s incompletion—her removal from the narrative of her fall, her removal from the history of events that inform that fall, her removal from the completion of her fall, her removal from visual display, her removal from Rockefeller Center—the sculpture restages the displacement of 9/11 in the visual imagination. This may not point us to a narrative of democracy, as Melnick would have it (either directly or metonymically), but rather to the horror of our own historicity: “She has not yet finished dying and the future between her impact and her death remains open. This is the history,” Engle writes, “we cannot yet begin to imagine” (18).

Similarly, Engle implicitly interrogates Melnick’s praise of snapshots when she looks at the array of photographs surrounding 9/11 in juxtaposition with Richard Drew’s photograph, Falling Man, an eerily singular shot of a man in mid-drop, head pointed directly down, almost in an acrobatic pose. The man has never been definitively identified, and the photo was decried and subsequently pulled from circulation while at the same time circulating as an image of public discourse, the ultimate example of the falling taboo in violation. Some felt that the image was “pornographic,” presumably in that invited a prurient engagement with the intimacy of this man’s death. At the same time, Engle points out, the remains from Ground Zero were transported to Fresh Kills, Staten Island, where they were meticulously sorted and classified, then photographed and exhibited:

An exhibition, Recovery: The World Trade Center Recovery Exhibition at Fresh Kills, emerged out of the documentation of the Fresh Kills operation. Whereas Drew’s photograph was decried and condemned, images of a recovered tooth in a test tube, frozen tissue samples, and workers sifting through remains were framed and hung on museum walls.

(44)

Postcards and faces too haunt 9/11. Not just as ghosts but as composites with proscriptive messages, the postcards provide templates for imagining and historicizing the event. And yet, along with their imagery and iconography, they also circulate news of instability and uncertainty. “From technical reproductions of images on postcards,” Engle explains,

to the mass production of cards featuring the same images, to the millions of cards with their infinity of messages and images circulating around the globe, postcards operate simultaneously according to logics of reduction, replication, and multiplication. Bearing an uncanny resemblance to the movements of viral transmission, postcards expose a fundamental instability within the system of language and the tradition of linear history.

(62)

One constructed postcard image features Uncle Sam standing Paul Bunyan-like above the New York skyline, his fist clenched, his forearm bulging, his arm reared back as though he were about to land a powerhouse punch on the nose of the next incoming plane. Many postcards present a collage of shots of the towers aflame superimposed on the broader skyline of lower Manhattan full of vast black smoke. In one example, the words “Attack on Manhattan” appear across the upper right quadrant of the picture, just above smaller words, in a more uneven typeface: “The Unthinkable.” Another shows a waving American flag superimposed on a close-up of the rubble at Ground Zero, and some cards inscribe bits of texts such as the Pledge of Allegiance or the song “You’ll Never Walk Alone” against an array of 9/11 backdrops. While intending to create a sense of national unity, a message from an “I” to a “you” comprising an “Us,” these cards communicate ambiguous messages, perhaps the most troubling being that they gesture “toward a myth of national community that obscures the everyday violations of individual rights enacted against the apparently self-evident and protected group: the American people” (Engle, 76).

Extensively detailing the sense of national unity that crossed racial divides to create a post-9/11 “Us,” particularly in popular music, Melnick too shows how fragile that unity was, evoking as much critique as assertion, which only accelerated with the assault on Iraq. Both Engle and Melnick explain convincingly how the culture reflects the contradictions in the claims that 9/11 united the nation against a common enemy, and Engle is particularly astute in her analysis of the imagery representing that “enemy,” especially the use of homoerotic images to demean bin Laden. If Engle is insightful about the way this imagery questions American masculinity in the process of asserting it, both she and Melnick make clear that the gender politics of 9/11 re-masculinize the national imaginary by assigning women to a subordinate role, a trait that the film World Trade Center shares with the stories spun around rescued soldier Jessica Lynch and Abu Ghraib prison guard Lynndie England. Engle and Melnick also explain that what Melnick calls “shout outs” merge and muddle the acts of mourning and the attempts at memorializing.

“Virtual trauma,” the first of two concepts produced by the events of 9/11 that Marc Redfield insightfully contemplates, bears directly on the points made by Melnick, and even more so by Engle. If one might describe Melnick’s book as surveying the spectrum of media that represent 9/11 and the array of mediations they produce, Redfield examines how those mediations structurally connect to the commemorative and the traumatic, to our ability to name and to mourn. In every aspect of its meaning, the name-date 9/11 depends on a time mediated by the futurity that makes commemoration possible as well as by a present that makes repetition immanent. This tension between temporalities in effect drains the name-date and empties it out, as Redfield shows: “Imperatively and imperialistically, the empty date suggests itself as a zero point, the ground of a quasi-theological turn or conversion: everything changed that day, as the U.S. mainstream media so often tells itself” (17). As it mediates time, 9/11 produces mediated space: “Just as there is now only one ‘September 11,’ there is now only one ‘Ground Zero,’ capitalized. But the latter term has been torn not out of the calendar but out of the lexicon of atomic warfare” (23). As such, the term “both calls up and wards off the ghost of Hiroshima” (23) at the same time that it effaces the future by suggesting a site of survival rather than of nuclear annihilation, connoted by the non-capitalized uses of “ground zero.” Steeped in the rhetoric of targeting, the name “stokes a fantasy of omnipotence that is inseparable from vulnerability and exposure” (25).

Drawing on the recent work of Donald Pease, Redfield elaborates the relationship between this fantastic space and many confused claims of innocence: “The zero is a ground, American ground, the virgin space of a new beginning (‘everything changed’), the guarantee of a wounded innocence and a good conscience” (24). The site Ground Zero both evokes and deploys competing narratives of innocence. To the extent that “zero” becomes the baseline for culpability, the litmus test of innocence, its appropriation as a national site produces the troubling question that nearly got Professor Ward Churchill expelled from the University of Colorado, in effect: how innocent were the people whose occupations centered on world trade and who worked in the lap of Wall Street? Similarly, some African Americans expressed discomfort over being identified as part of the power system which bin Laden held accountable for what he saw as U.S. imperialism, while others saw the event as transcending racial divides (at the same time, of course, that it was erecting new ones).

Like racial and national identities, like the significations attached to “ground zero,” the notion of innocence does not so much describe a fact as initiate its contestation. If all of these books demonstrate anything, it is that nothing about 9/11 is innocent. At the heart of the conflicts over innocence, these books suggest to me, is the unacknowledged fact that the term can refer to radically different realms of reference. Innocence can entail issues of law, evidence, procedure, and (potential) punishment. The word can also refer to the disposition of the soul. Yet a third type of innocence denotes lack of experience, often but not necessarily sexual. Slippage among these meanings, however, seems almost inevitable, as they circulate in a slippery chain of cultural substitution. The loss of sexual innocence can entail an illegal act and/or can affect the disposition of the soul, depending on the legal, social, or spiritual referents one invokes. Innocence thus activates some entrenched confusion connected to, if not partially caused by, the infusion of secular life with theological myths, meanings, attributes, or wants. In what ways was 9/11 an attack on the innocent? In a purely criminal context, the victims were innocent and the perpetrators guilty, but as these books show, 9/11 is transcendent in issues of law because it put U.S. retaliation above the rule of law. The U.S., holding itself innocent in the eyes of God as well as the eyes of the law, set out to seek God’s revenge–a point President George Bush II made in his famous post-9/11 speech, and which he and numerous of his supporters have reiterated frequently. God is on the side of the United States because it was innocent, as innocent as the innocent people in the World Trade Center whom God chose not to protect. This argument uses evidence—9/11, Ground Zero—to transcend the need for evidence: doing God’s work makes evidence irrelevant, because it is hubris to try to prove anything to God, something that would of course be clear to someone such as George Bush II, who believes God had chosen him to run for President.

But when innocence is debated on spiritual grounds rather than forensic, it is glossed—or outed—by the actions of the terrorists whose claims to spiritual innocence warranted their actions; that innocence was epitomized by the virgins promised them in heaven. The terrorists’ innocence gave them access to innocent young women, who, under heavenly auspices, would lose their innocence by surrendering it to the oxymoronically innocent terrorists. The forensic guilt for their attack on the secular nation and on secular institutions was thus the reciprocal purchase of innocent victims. Evaluated in such a spiritual economy, they could neither feel guilt for what they were about to do, nor be guilty for what they had done. In the end, it was all very innocent: innocent victims, innocent victors. In this context, post-9/11 stages a struggle for the rhetorical position from which to ascribe the guilt.

Although Redfield does not address the concept of innocence in these terms, its specific dualities are consistent with those he ascribes to “September 11” and to “Ground Zero”:

Both terms move beyond themselves, as it were, and in a double sense: on the one hand, by emphasizing survival and encouraging all the phantasms of power—of picturing, targeting, annihilating, and consuming—that drive the “war on terror”; on the other hand, by surreptitiously exploiting an iterability and finitude conditioning of all life, technology, and mourning . . . . The more the world superpower dials the 9-1-1 emergency number, gives a name and a face to evil and goes to war, the more haunting September 11 becomes. Overwritten by atrocity after atrocity committed in its name, its afterimage persists.

(47)

The geographical and temporal dislocations involved with name-date and site-name also help explain why the event of 9/11 was often compared to a movie, illustrating once again the way visual paradigms, in their failure, continue to haunt representation. If most people who saw 9/11 or saw news of it did so via television, what they saw was already a movie, an event viewed through the contrivance of cinematic conventions that inform traumatic spectatorship. In this way, the event was a form of reverse engineering in that the movie conventions that mediated its reception also informed its production:

On the one hand, the phrase “it was like a movie” conjures up not just an excess of event over believability but a sense that this event is to be mediated, would have no sense, perhaps would not even have occurred if it were not being recorded and transmitted. . . . On the other hand, the cameras and transmitters repeat the terroristic violation of human dignity itself, reducing someone’s pain and death to an image, stripping away the soul in capturing a representation of the body.

(30-31)

Here Redfield usefully evokes the Burkean idea that the sublime enables the spectator to imagine surviving his or her own death, to suggest that “in being ‘like a movie’, in soliciting the spectator to identify with the inhuman camera, the spectacle-transmission renders the spectator part of a process of mediation in which time and space suffer dislocation” (35). Thus, the rhetorical import of the name-date and the site-name, the language of targeting and of televisualizing simultaneously demand and obstruct mourning, a conclusion that Redfield shares with Melnick and Engle, although he demonstrates it with arguments of a different register (except when he discusses the films World Trade Center and United 93).

In turning to his second scrutinized term, “war on terror,” Redfield draws heavily on Agamben to argue that “at the heart of modernity’s rudimentarily secularized idea of sovereignty lies terror: a terror proper to sovereignty itself” (54). Explaining how the “terrorist” is essential to the constitution of the modern state, Redfield demonstrates forcefully and effectively that “the declaration of war on terror is at once the most obvious, overdetermined, and obscure speech act of our era” (91). Just as Redfield ends the first half of the book with a sentimental gesture toward the possibility of “true mourning, if we achieve it” (47), the deconstructive energies of the second half evoke the utopian possibility of moving from the paradigm of perpetual war to that of perpetual peace: “as ‘peace’ becomes the site of a certain excess within language and thought, a nonapocalyptic openness to the future may be said to emerge” (94).

Redfield’s move connects the examinations of cultural representation produced by Melnick and by Engle to Phillip E. Wegner’s reading of cultural allegories between 1989 and 2001—what Wegner calls “the long nineties”—so as to periodize the cultural history that culminates with 9/11. Quoting the final lines of Don DeLillo’s Underworld, a meditation on the possibility of a word becoming a thing in the world, a word identified at the end of the novel as “peace,” Wegner shares with Redfield a desire to summon the possibility of peace as the utopian impetus of 9/11’s apocalyptic narratives. To this end, Wegner pursues a historical analysis based on identifying and tracing cultural allegories. In other words, telos rather than scope of content connects Wegner to the other 9/11 books in this group, in that they all are attempting to ask what comes after 9/11. The details of the haunted space that Engle sees there and the contradictions implicit in its cultural artifacts, delineated by Melnick, are consistent with the logic traced by Redfield. When that logic yields authority to utopian desire, Redfield is in effect willing an after-9/11-ness that fills the implicit void articulated by Melnick and Engle. Using a logic of historical dialectics—grounded in what led up to 9/11—Wegner attempts, similarly, to replace the haunted void with a utopian vision.

For him, 9/11 marks the end of a period initiated by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet Communism. In that period, as Wegner describes it, neoliberal energies consolidate around the triumphalism associated with Francis Fukuyama’s declaration that history had come to an end. In the context of this pseudo-utopian vision of a world order in which American power, influence, and values flourish uncontested, Wegner identifies the dystopian strains to which, at the end of this period, 9/11 gives visibility. To put it another way, if 9/11 marks the end of the end of history, the nightmare of history that was always there announces itself—as all nightmares do—at the moment of awakening. For Wegner, 9/11 is a wake-up call that makes visible the fact that historical possibility is open-ended.

Underworld thematized this historical possibility as a retrospective allegory of the long Cold War period that preceded Wegner’s “long nineties.” In those long nineties, Wegner demonstrates, the three films of The Terminator series “form a dialectical sequence . . . as each film reworks the ideological and political raw materials of its predecessor” (62), sequentially reflecting the world-views of the three previous Republican Presidents. About the two versions of the film Cape Fear and the novel on which it was based, Wegner fruitfully asks, “what are the fears, the ‘real life’ to which the figure of [the villain] Cady has given form?” (87). With finely nuanced readings, Wegner shows that each version of the Cape Fear narrative reflects the anxieties of its historical moment: the novel reflecting Cold War gender anxieties, the first version of the film reflecting late 1950s racial conflict, and the Scorsese 1991 remake manifesting “the explosive reemergence . . . of anxieties about new forms of class conflict” (88).

These chapters, which constitute the first half of the book, historicize the cultural possibilities that provide Wegner’s raison d’être. They illustrate, as well, how he develops his allegorical readings and the historical purposes to which he puts them. His larger goal, as he makes clear from the beginning, is not just to historicize but to construct the conditions of utopian possibility. Thus he examines the films Ghost Dog and Fight Club to demonstrate the relationship between the naturalist tradition and dystopian narrative, and to explore “the way they adapt the formal strategies of the dystopia, as well as its precursors in naturalist fiction, to the new situation of what has been variously described as an emergent global postindustrial, post-Fordist, or service economy” (124). The final third of the book looks at works that provide what Wegner identifies as a way out of the dystopian: the film Independence Day (read alongside Derrida’s Specters of Marx in order to tease out an allegorical conception of the messianic), the Forever novel trilogy, Octavia Butler’s Parable novels, and the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

For Wegner, 9/11 thus creates the occasion for the shift into a new cultural stage, a way out of life caught between death’s rehearsal and its restaging. The first sentence of the book’s final paragraph tells us that we have arrived “at the most significant lessons that we can take away from these extended narratives” (216-17). In articulating the tension of the two deaths that impel his periodizing, Wegner thus constructs an argument caught between an informing moral teleology and specific cultural anxieties. These works teach Wegner more than something about the conditions of their production, the complexity of those conditions, and the layers of displacement that those complexities produce; they also teach him how we should envision the future, how we should live in historical time. In Wegner’s reach for the utopian, one is reminded of the end of The Political Unconscious, where Jameson argues that religion, as a utopian discourse, is a form of Marxism. This move may be glib or optimistic or admirable, and from my perspective, at least, only a curmudgeon—or worse, a libertarian—would be completely unsympathetic to Jameson’s (and hence Wegner’s) objective, which is progressive, reconciliatory, and social-minded. It is similarly hard to object to a methodology that is detailed and clever.¹

To what extent, however, does Wegner’s utopian tale wag the postmodern dog? If the idea that everything is narrative is a postmodern concept amenable to the allegorizing methodology used here to contextualize the postmodern condition within a progressive teleology, perhaps the allegorical method succeeds not because of the trajectory it reflects but simply because everything is narrative. From my perspective, the meaning of the term culture and the value of cultural criticism derive from the fact that at any historical moment, specific narratives acquire cogency. That value lies, however, not in subsuming narrativity to the interests of metanarrative, but in demonstrating that cogent narratives do not constitute a coherent whole, because at the moments of conflict and contradiction, at the sites where competing or self-contradictory narratives are sutured, ideology becomes most visible. The allegorical aspect of culture follows from the idea that culture is the product of narratives.

But what follows from all of this? Although Wegner appropriately uses the name-date to mark an end to historical opacity, if one is to build on his work, it is necessary to go beyond the position contra Fukuyama. If 9/11 creates the rupture through which the signs of history must be acknowledged, by what process do those signs enter the flow of historical representation, the flow upon which 9/11 has returned our focus? The dilemma of inside/outside, the power of enfoliation that torments the capacity to represent 9/11 (as Engle and Redfield so convincingly demonstrate), makes us ponder not only what 9/11 was and what it means, but what follows, in the light of which allegorical thinking—as the juxtaposition of these other books with Wegner’s makes a little more clear—is a form of wishful thinking. This troubling issue confronts the stasis implicit in 9/11 souvenirs, those mementoes that replace the flow of history with the reification (and, Melnick emphasizes, the commodification) of memorials.

The next step, these books taken together remind us, is as uncertain as it is necessary. Dare we not consider what comes after bin Laden? While American military forces and intelligence operatives are going after him, so long as he escapes their capture, we remain his unwilling captives. Whether we consume with alacrity the souvenirs of his greatest triumph or critique with a vengeance the way that triumph is represented, whether we grouse at the humiliation of full body scanners at airports or support whole-heartedly the PATRIOT Act, we remain bin Laden’s captives. Until he is captured, he is free from facing any consequences or acknowledging any restrictions. This makes him the veritable leader of the free world, with everyone else his follower, in lockstep or in pursuit, however deceptive his trail, however hard it is to follow. No one can deny that crashing a plane into a tower of the World Trade Center is a hard act to follow, except by some of bin Laden’s followers, who crashed a second plane into the World Trade Center twenty minutes later. What followed is history. If that was the same history to which Fukuyama proclaimed an end, the reason may be that Fukuyama’s argument is harder to follow than bin Laden’s, which is simple almost to the point of being innocent: bin Laden represents the victims of Western imperialism. The U.S., he believes, has designs on the Muslim world that entail following cultural infiltration and economic coercion with military invasion. Because U.S. coercive power is directly connected to its wealth, the only way to combat its designs is to destroy its economy by luring it into a multi-trillion-dollar revenge fest.

The validation of his argument was marked in the U.S. by a return to displaced historical narratives that followed a logic of associating 9/11 and Ground Zero with Iraq, hinging particularly on the idea that Saddam Hussein was the next Hitler. As each of these books demonstrates, in the wake of 9/11, the impossibility of representing 9/11 within historical time is a course-offering from the postmodern Department of Hitler Studies.

Alan Nadel, William T. Bryan Chair of American Literature and Culture at the University of Kentucky, is the author of four books, including Containment Culture (Duke University Press, 1995), Flatlining on the Field of Dreams: Cultural Narratives in the Films of President Reagan’s America (Rutgers University Press, 1997), and Television in Black-and-White America: Race and National Identity (University Press of Kansas, 2005). He is the editor of two books on August Wilson and the co-editor, with Susan Griffin, of Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock, the Men Who Knew Too Much (forthcoming from Oxford University Press). His poetry has appeared in several journals, among them: Georgia Review, New England Review, Paris Review, Partisan Review, and Shenandoah, and he has won prizes for the best essays in Modern Fiction Studies and PMLA.

Footnotes

1. The specter of Jameson looms extremely large in this book. The Index notes references to Jameson 67 times in Wegner’s text and an additional 42 times in his footnotes. Nor are the text citations brief; many contain quotes several lines long, and 22 of the Index items cite references that exceed one page. Jameson–cited, quoted, or discussed, on the average, once every two to three pages–provides the trajectory of the book’s argument, the methodology that supports it, and the objectives that inform it.

September 3, 2013

Modes of Luxurious Walking

Apple Zefelius Igrek (bio)
Seattle University
igreka@seattleu.edu

Review of: Allan Stoekl, Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007.

If there is a single, obsessive object of thought in Georges Bataille – from Guilty (1944/1988) and Blue of Noon (1957/1978) to his magnum opus The Accursed Share (1949/1988) – it is the expenditure of wealth and energy. The very object of study, despite the rigid and calculated necessity of knowledge, transcends everything productive. Expenditure is at the core of human acquisition (in terms of knowledge, economy, and moral restraint), which implies that there is an irresistible violent force at work in all of our attempts to furnish subjectivity with some measure of concrete stability. This is precisely why Allan Stoekl writes in his introduction to Bataille’s Peak that the meaning and survival of the community is nothing else than an aftereffect of what is sacred, i.e., “the drive to spend without counting, without attempting to anticipate return” (xvii). The ethical, in a similar vein, cannot be separated from an incessant flash of energy that is itself only ever partially reducible to human needs and projects. In just this way, it is a radically heterogeneous form of religious experience which, for Bataille, provides us with an unknowable basis for thinking through our social and ethical relationships. This kind of experience is provocatively self-contradictory: it returns us, through ritualistic forms of sacrifice, to a kind of intimacy with the world which destroys its own conditions of knowledge.

Keeping to this paradox of atheistic mysticism, Stoekl ably crafts a unique position in current environmental debates. These debates almost always privilege human subjectivity.1 A Bataillean model of energy and religion, by contrast, affirms no such humanistic principle. Stoekl’s position, then, is one which will emphasize expenditure both within and against the closed economies of utility and personal satisfaction (191). This in turn will expose a blind spot in contemporary theories of Empire which posit the “end of nature,” as such an end requires the very energy which it repudiates. Doubtless, this is a provocative undertaking; and Stoekl, who is highly regarded for his 1985 publication of Visions of Excess, brings it into focus with passionate writing and methodical expertise.

Privileging excess and expenditure rather than conservation and self-interest, Bataille reverses the usual order of economic thinking. Such a reversal, as Stoekl reminds us, can be traced back – in certain respects – to Bruno and Sade. In the first, matter is equated with a kind of energy which is concomitantly active and passive. The formless, infinite nature of God, according to Bruno, cannot be separated from that which passively receives its concrete shape and reality. In this heterodoxical Christian position (for which Bruno was burned at the stake), matter is movement and movement is corruption and corruption, in turn, is regeneration. Physical barriers are thus broken down by the very action of nature through which God is immanently identified with both creativity and destruction. In a similar way, albeit from a violently atheistic perspective, Sade affirms an underlying principle of nature associated with sheer transformation. Contributing to this process is the manifestation of movement and the stimulation of senses via sovereign crime. The Sadean hero is indifferent to morality, and overthrows it by way of an extreme form of selfishness. Bataille, however, retains the paradox of a limit to be perpetually crossed: the death of God must be lived, otherwise we have returned to an apathetic transgression which destroys itself in its own egotistical assertion. For this reason, Stoekl rightly observes that Sade needs the human, and needs God, without which there is no criminal defiance (16). Bataille’s theory of expenditure begins with such a paradoxical formulation: moral awareness mustn’t be eradicated or toppled, but affirmed through its very destruction. The excess of God and human morality is to be discovered in a revision of Sadean crime which opens up the self to an immeasurable experience: “[A]n extreme devotion to crime—to, as the prewar Bataille would put it, the production of heterogeneous objects—leads, surprisingly, to a self-sacrificing generosity. The self is not simply destroyed in a whirlwind of energy; the self is destroyed through an excess of energy entailing a mortal gift of oneself in love, in crime, to the other” (28).

Any discussion of Bataillean waste, excess, and profligacy invites the question as to whether this general economy should be distinguished from modern capitalist societies in which blind, ruinous extravagance seems to be the predominant moral imperative. If anything, modern industrial economies are built on extraordinary waste and extreme ecological devastation; thus one could plausibly argue, as Jean-Joseph Goux has, that the risk-taking ethos of transnational capitalism is the quintessential post-bourgeois embodiment of Bataillean expenditure (Stoekl 137). There is, of course, an all too obvious blind spot to this eternal perpetuation of cultural and economic excess: it cannot be sustained. As demand for energy dramatically increases over the next few decades, we will surely witness, as predicted by the petroleum geologist M. King Hubbert (in what is called, alluding to a bell-curve graph, “Hubbert’s Peak”), a vast and imminent depletion of our fossil fuel resources. Stoekl draws the discomfiting but probable conclusion that “the more or less constant growth in productivity, production, and profits the world experienced over the last century, tracked with a commensurate population increase, based as both were on increases in energy production, is nearing its end” (119). If we will soon reach a point where we can no longer rely upon large quantities of highly concentrated sources of energy, without which the very essence of modern consumerist subjectivity will be thrown into disarray, then a call to personal sacrifice must not be far behind. Thus, Lisa H. Newton, in direct response to the problem of scarcity, argues for a simpler and more authentic life in contrast to the currently unsustainable levels of status-driven consumption (Stoekl 120). Sustaining our globalized economy at a more appropriate, more rational level will necessarily require a fundamental change in our approach to natural resources. This implies the conservation of energy, to be sure, but Newton also links this approach to a moral and religiously inspired perspective, one which renounces easy pleasure and artificial consumerism. The new self – simple, austere, rational – seems to be absolutely crucial to the survival of the planet. In this context, Bataille’s theory of excess life and wild expenditure would appear to be deeply problematic.

Without falling back on eco-religion, evangelical environmentalism, or various strands of consumerist humanism, Stoekl makes the radically innovative argument that Bataille’s theory of expenditure, when properly modified and updated, helps us to carve out a post-sustainable ecological perspective. The critics Stoekl draws on, by contrast, all rely upon some version (hidden or otherwise) of anthropocentric ethics. They are based upon human instrumentality, and thus they cannot be severed from a project-oriented subject. If we think back to Newton, we are reminded of the need to cultivate an “authentic self,” one sustained by its rational interdependence with nature. It follows that the simple, honest self is the self that survives. Likewise, Gary Gardner invokes religion as a means of fostering ecological awareness through ritual, tradition, and community bonding (Stoekl 153) — not an inherently bad message. Nevertheless, Stoekl questions whether this is simply a religious pretense: “If we reconfigure religion only to ‘foster and sustain’, then to what extent can we continue even to believe in the independent power and validity of religion? Doesn’t it simply become one more tool, suited to the accomplishment of a task?” (155). Even the irrationally self-destructive individualism of David Brooks falls into this camp: the future of the happy, anti-conventional American subject is predicated upon an elusive but ideal wholeness which is the highest aim and accomplishment. In Bataille, the highest point justifies nothing. The summit – or peak – is always already equated with a sacrificial leap. Stoekl refers to this as the “good duality” in Bataille: there is a presupposition of limits, language and self-consciousness, as well as the infinite movement of loss and death which can never be contained by those evanescent boundaries. In consequence, there arises a sovereign form of life, self-consciousness, and history: “A self-consciousness . . . that grasps ‘humanity’ not as a stable or even dynamic presence, but as a principle of loss and destruction. A history not of peak moments of empire, democracy, or class struggle, but as exemplary instances of expenditure” (53).

Stoekl’s appropriation of Bataille, in light of the above quote, will strike many readers as counter-productive—to put it very politely. The only feasible solution to an ever-growing energy crisis, it will be said again, includes an ethics of self-restraint and a politics of ecological sustainability. Stoekl, however, reminds us that if Hubbert’s model is indeed correct, as it appears to be, then the very idea of sustainability is itself unsustainable. A permanently sustainable economy defies the same material and historical conditions that would otherwise make it seem so urgently necessary. Furthermore, to the extent that we are moved by irrational, excessive desires, it may be nearly impossible to convince the masses to follow a simple, austere, and authentic life (122). A more reasonable adaptation, Stoekl argues, taps into the same expenditure which most of us already pursue in a minor, attenuated form. Consumer spending, in fact, may itself be a response to this desire which is more primordial than our moral constructs. But now it would seem that we have come full circle: how is this desire for excess experiences to be distinguished from the same economic activity which apparently brought us to our present catastrophic situation?

The multi-layered, complex, book-length answer elaborated in Bataille’s Peak cannot be given here. The shorter answer, however, can be stated in two parts. First, Bataillean expenditure should be modified by taking into consideration qualitative differences between docile and insubordinate forms of energy. The fact that the former is a finite, quickly disappearing resource implies that we can no longer afford to ignore, as Bataille could, the issues of energy depletion and cultural decline (Stoekl 42). Drawing from two Heidegger essays, “The Question concerning Technology” and “The Age of the World Picture” (1977), Stoekl contextualizes weak, mechanized forms of expenditure by reference to fossil fuel consumption. Because we assume the world exists for us in a quantifiable way – to be conquered, stockpiled, and used up – we ourselves become a disposable thing or object: “Man the subject for whom the objective world exists as a resource is quickly reversed and becomes man the object who, under the right conditions, is examined, marshaled, and then releases a specific amount of energy before he himself is definitively depleted” (131). Docile energy, Stoekl surmises, makes for docile subjects. Only after we have acknowledged this contemporary fact are we able to complement the first part with a second: insubordinate forms of energy are essential to insubordinate forms of action. In the general movement of social ecstasy and expenditure, by way of which we transgress ourselves in moments of physical intimacy, we open the isolated self to an immensity which can be neither measured nor stockpiled. Nor can it be experienced through the timeless efficiency of the car: “As the ultimate common denominator, the car brings together, in the isolation of vapid subjectivity, social classes and identities. All are one on the freeway, mixing while not mixing, moving around the empty circuit of gutted urban space” (184). The simulacrum of freedom is achieved through speed, empty signifiers, and the indifferent reproduction of subjectivity. Excess is thus transformed into pure stream of consciousness, and our “cursed flesh” disappears as an abstract, useless obstacle to absolute technological freedom. By contrast, the inefficient movement, the clumsy and death-bound use of time, holds out the best promise for a post-sustainable future: walking, dancing, cycling, and spending oneself in a wounded but effervescent fusion of the self with the other (190). Passion and ecstatic movement in the post-fossil fuel era will therefore “be one of local incidents, ruptures, physical feints, evasions and expulsions (of matter, of energy, of enthusiasm of desire)” (190). As opposed to a closed economy of the useful, practical self, in which every moment of loss is immediately sublimated as a higher purpose and function, Bataille’s affirmation of an intimate relationship with the world and others necessarily subordinates the higher truth – and every mode of instant communication – to a formless substratum or base matter that will forever escape human domination.

This twofold response helps Stoekl to resituate contemporary arguments on both Empire and the totalized city. Drawing from Michel de Certeau’s “Walking in the City” (1980), Stoekl traces the historical loss of the body through the creation of a universal, albeit anonymous, modern subjectivity. The automobile, as already put forth, reframes reality so that everything is construed according to an “always but never changing image on the (wind)screen” (184). The car thus becomes a grand historical symbol of speed, freedom, transcendence, and the conquest of nature. But at the same time, none of this is possible without fuel. The same subject that manifests itself as pure movement and pure sovereignty is also a function of certain finite resources. Insofar as de Certeau fails to consider the role of cheap fossil fuel inputs in connection with the utopian and totalized city, he is unable to rethink the expenditure of energy as a mode of resistance to modern networks of conformity and surveillance. Stoekl, however, sees in de Certeau’s walker an intimation of another kind of energy subversion. What is crucial at this historical juncture isn’t only the unusual and peculiar connotations of the walker in contrast with the commodified autonomy of the driver, but furthermore the “spectacular waste of body energy” (188). This movement of intimate corporeal existence, wasting itself on a “grossly inefficient” effort (192), gestures toward something beyond the virtual reality of today’s Empire. As the universal city is no longer restricted by space or time, even the speeding car is being outpaced and outdistanced by the ubiquitous circulation of signs, images, and capital. And as the global scale shrinks to the size of instantaneous communication, the old dualities of private and public, society and nature, real and artificial, are quickly vanishing. Yet this very dialectic, which seemingly overcomes itself in a new, bland form of media domination, cannot possibly exist without a specific relationship to labor. Stoekl observes that in this respect Hardt and Negri, who would reduce all natural phenomena to moments of history (196), remain firmly tethered to Marx and Kojève—at least inasmuch as the historical returns us to a concrete function of labor. But even human labor has its limits. It is no more autonomous than the myth of Man which it intermittently supports, for it produces nothing in the absence of fuel (x). And fossil fuels are a natural fact: “Labor power discovered these fuels, put them to work, ‘harnessed’ them, transformed their energy into something useful. But labor power did not put the fuels into the earth” (197). There are, consequently, limits to Empire. And one of the most crucial limits, for us, is the imminent depletion of highly concentrated forms of energy. If the global spectacle is slowing down and a sustainable response is hardly sustainable (as Stoekl previously argued), it seems that we will have to rethink excess expenditure. Bataille’s Peak performs this task on every page, and does so in the most formidable, difficult terms—by reminding us of the general finitude, exertion, madness, and jouissance of bodily economies.

Apple Igrek teaches in the Philosophy Department at Seattle University. He has published essays on fiction, cultural theory, Georges Bataille and Michel Foucault. His work appears in such journals as Colloquy, the International Studies of Philosophy, and Comparative and Continental Philosophy (forthcoming, 2010). His current project is entitled “Thinking Through Walls and the Internalized Image in H.P. Lovecraft.”

Footnotes

1. Celebrants of car culture and suburbia, such as Loren E. Lomasky, do so most blatantly when they defend autonomous freedom without seriously taking up questions of waste and resource use (Stoekl 124). Proponents of eco-religion, however, are no less anthropocentric: Gary Gardner and Mary Evelyn Tucker continue to place man and soul atop the same matter/spirit hierarchy which Lynn White Jr., in his seminal 1967 essay “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” already critiqued as the religious underpinning of environmental degradation (Stoekl 155).

September 3, 2013

Living Antagonistically: Lorenzo Fabbri’s Domesticating Derrida

Timothy Campbell (bio)
Cornell University
campbell@cornell.edu

Review of: Lorenzo Fabbri, The Domestication of Derrida: Rorty, Pragmatism and Deconstruction. Trans. Daniele Manni, London: Continuum, 2008. Print.

To choose security is to choose death. That such a lesson comes at the expense of Richard Rorty in a book on the relation of French deconstruction to American pragmatism is only one of the more compelling paradoxes in Lorenzo Fabbri’s impressive The Domestication of Derrida: Rorty, Pragmatism and Deconstruction. At first glance Fabbri, a young Italian academic, appears to be working within the tradition of continental critiques of American pragmatism and in particular the work of Richard Rorty, a critique begun almost three decades ago first by Michel Foucault and then by Derrida himself.¹ The title of Fabbri’s book is drawn from Wlad Godzich’s important reading of de Man, “The Domestication of Derrida,” which appeared in the 1983 volume The Yale Critics. There Godzich describes (and circumscribes) the intellectual encounter between Derrida and de Man in ways that inform Fabbri’s own take on Rorty. Building on and diverging from Godzich’s essay, Fabbri recounts his own coming to terms with Rorty’s reading of deconstruction as an anti-philosophy in an itinerary that moves from contingency, to irony, to—and in my view most decisively—a final engagement with Foucault and the implicit question of biopolitics. Fabbri’s concluding chapter on modernity, politics, and monstrosity registers the fundamental break between deconstruction and pragmatism, one centered on the features of a truly political form of life. On Fabbri’s read, deconstruction brings in its wake radical possibilities for “favouring new possibilities of existence and of being-together” (4).

To get at those radical possibilities, Fabbri naturally begins where one would expect him to: with a cogent summary of Rorty’s reading of deconstruction across well-known texts like Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. In a series of marvelous close readings, Fabbri brings his own profound knowledge of Derrida’s works to bear on Rorty, laying out in convincing fashion the real strengths of Rorty’s interpretation of deconstruction, and examining point by point the areas of contact and contamination between contemporary American pragmatism and deconstruction. Fabbri is always attentive in these comparisons to the role writing plays for both Derrida and Rorty, a writing that skirts in and out of the ironic. The place of writing becomes decisive in the second chapter, when Fabbri puts to the test his earlier readings of Rorty’s supposed alliance with deconstruction by taking up the question of the doubly “private” in Rorty’s understanding of the political. Of particular interest for Fabbri is the function of autobiography in Derrida’s thought and more generally the relation between theory and the “person” espousing it. In the final chapter Fabbri pivots from the private and the philosophical to the question of forms of life and their relation to political solidarity. Fabbri’s damning if familiar conclusion is that Rorty remains, alas, a stubborn liberal who cannot see how easily pragmatism allies itself with normalizing strategies meant to contain radical political possibilities for life. When Rorty, in Fabbri’s gloss, chides Derrida for not having been decent enough to keep philosophy within the boundaries of private life, it is precisely with a view to denying philosophy’s vocation as a practice of civil disobedience, a possibility Derrida himself puts forward in a series of essays from the 1980s and 1990s.²

There is much of interest in Fabbri’s account of the limits of linking pragmatism and deconstruction too closely, but I’d like to focus especially on two areas. The first becomes visible in the margins of the introduction and the opening chapters but really comes into view in the book’s final pages. Drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben and Jean-Luc Nancy in particular, Fabbri speaks of an underlying anxiety on Rorty’s part when the topic moves to thinking community. He writes that Rorty “is locked within the boundaries of a given theoretical and political community, confiding in narratives and philosophy to prevent the coming of monsters. Deconstruction, instead, plays in blindfolds. It bids on possibilities for an existence to come” (127). In this insistence on political and theoretical communities, Fabbri is able to track, in a way others before him have not, how the dispositifs of Rorty’s pragmatism—principally tolerance and the private—align Rorty again and again with a liberal form of community. Fabbri is nothing short of devastating here. Making great use of Foucault’s essay “What is Critique?” to buttress his claims against Rorty, as well as of Derrida’s seminal readings on the university in “Eyes of the University,” Fabbri offers a ringing defense of an ontology of actuality, making the case for “doing theory” as a way of de-anchoring the “presence of the present” (114). His reading of “the presence of the present” as that which undergirds the liberal form of community becomes the privileged site for deconstruction (4). It is by adopting deconstruction that unexpected futures become visible, ones sacrificed by Rorty’s incessant policing of the private and public. Indeed, Fabbri speaks of Rorty as proffering a sort of “reductive vitalism” (74). This seems exactly right: a vitalism addressed to fencing off private lives from community is one not only reductive but also destined to wither. In other words, what Rorty fails to see in Derrida’s work is how deconstruction raises truly important questions for a future radical politics. On that note, I couldn’t help thinking when reading The Domestication of Derrida that what Fabbri has done essentially is to have Rorty play Sterling Hayden’s brigadier general Jack D. Ripper to Derrida’s Group Captain Mandrake (as played by Peter Sellers) in a theoretical remake of Dr. Strangelove. The difference would be that in the new version vital communities are substituted for vital bodily fluids.

The second point follows closely on the question of community and concerns how Rorty responds to the vulnerability of public space. In Fabbri’s view, his response really comes down to security measures. Why the recourse to the police? Fabbri writes that Rorty “needs to have assurance that at the end of the day he will return to the exact same form of life from where he moved in the morning. And when such a happy ending cannot be guaranteed, the fear of the unpredictable makes him create protective barriers that ensure the security of his home” (126). On this score, Fabbri deploys to great effect a Nietzschean reading of security, which resonates especially with those pages from Daybreak in which Nietzsche recognizes how easily security comes to dominate society, creating those who can do nothing else except worship security “as the supreme divinity,” who can judge their actions according to one criterion alone: whether these actions tend “towards the common security and society’s sense of security” (105-106). Fabbri is relentless in the final chapter in keeping a ledger of the high price Rorty pays to have his home protected and his security maintained, measured in a missing politics and an absent philosophy to come, in a normalized and normalizing form of political life that Foucault critiqued so deeply in The Birth of Biopolitics. In this, Rorty’s perspective on deconstruction becomes a window on how extensively he nullifies the political generally, neutralizing the capacity of critique—deconstruction is the privileged critique though implicitly others are included in Fabbri’s analysis—to uncover the history of normalization, and what in turn links normalizing strategies to citizenship and to the state. Worse still, Rorty’s hopes for securing public space from unexpected (and therefore dangerous) forms of life produce, through Derridean auto-immunity, monsters that pop up repeatedly in Rorty’s work. In a series of strange doublings, it is a monstrous Derrida who comes to stand in metonymically for other monstrous forms of collective life when security has failed and vulnerability comes to characterize all human groupings. Fabbri suggests something else here too: that in the coming together of security and community—community as the subject and object of security—Rorty’s pragmatism is disclosed as a biopolitical machine whose function is to produce nothing short of a liberal form of life as a political form of being-together that wants (and ultimately fails) to secure its citizens. Fabbri instead insists repeatedly on the possibility of liberating all forms excluded from such a secured space by emphasizing “those struggles which aspire to favour antagonistic ways of living the now” (124). In this combination of antagonism and life, Fabbri echoes in important ways the recent work of the Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection.³

In refusing Rorty’s reading of Derrida, which transforms “philosophical reflection into a private matter,” Fabbri sees possibilities for future antagonistic forms of life (50). Deploying a reading of Derrida’s other writings—not only Specters of Marx, as one might expect, but The Post Card as well—Fabbri shows how deeply Derrida was aware of the impropriety of the private and of the possibilities the private offered for future antagonisms. Although others, especially Geoffrey Bennington, have repeatedly focused on the centrality of contamination in Derrida’s work, Fabbri’s reading of Rorty reminds us again of its importance and of Rorty’s continued failure to come to grips with the concept.⁴ Not surprisingly, given his deconstruction of the political malfeasance of Rorty’s private/public divide, Fabbri doesn’t shy away either from including his own private moments of reading Rorty. Say what you want about this choice, it’s undeniable that Fabbri takes Rorty seriously. In fact Fabbri essentially offers a model for how to take thought seriously by weaving narratives of a private nature with his literal “coming to terms” with Rorty. This fearless attempt to bring deconstruction and pragmatism together through the inclusion of the private is one of the best things about the book, as it progressively dawns on the reader that the bridging between the private and the political happens thanks precisely to the critique offered by deconstruction. There’s also something compelling about Fabbri’s insistence on the shared vulnerability of the private and the public; it is as if the ruins of public space are created precisely by bracketing the private from contact and potential contamination. Fabbri’s is an urgent call to return deconstruction to its rightful place in public debates.

There are many other eloquent pages here: Fabbri’s deconstruction of metaphor in the first chapter as reinforcing the rule of the transcendental; the implicit third person perspective in Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other; the taking up and elaborating of Caputo’s perspective on Derrida for his own political reading; and Fabbri’s wonderful discussion of the potentiality that inheres in any deconstruction of actuality as “suspending” the way in which we are directed towards an object. With that said, Fabbri does move quickly and sometimes misses opportunities. For instance, I would have loved to read more on the differences between Derrida and Rorty over the function of the intellectual. Certainly Fabbri’s discussion recalls Gramsci’s famous notion of the organic intellectual and might have made for another point of contact between Derrida and Rorty (as well as their divergence). One might also wish that Fabbri had discussed at greater length the relation of political indocility and critique in that other figure who today so dominates discussions and critiques of governmentalization, namely Giorgio Agamben. But these are quibbles. What Fabbri has done is to offer the reader a map of the long-standing differences not simply between Rorty and Derrida, but between a kind of liberal politics that only knows how to secure itself and its “we” from threats to its position of dominance, and another more anarchic possibility in which one attempts to imagine an “alternative we.” In short, Fabbri’s important book demands serious attention not only from those interested in the relation between Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty, but from those interested in thinking together a future radical politics.

Timothy Campbell teaches in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University. He is the author of Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi (Minnesota, 2006) and Improper Life: Thanatopolitics and Technology from Heidegger to Agamben (Minnesota, 2011). In addition to his translations of Roberto Esposito’s Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community (Stanford, 2009) and Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy (Minnesota, 2008), he is the co-editor along with Adam Sitze of The Biopolitical Reader (Duke, 2011).

Footnotes

1. See the interview with Foucault, “Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations,” as well as Derrida’s far-reaching “critique” of pragmatism in his “Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism.” For Rorty’s perspective on Foucault, see “Foucault and Epistemology.”

2. See Derrida’s “Mochlos, or the Conflict of the Faculties” and “The University without Condition.”

3. “He [the good citizen] can’t help envying these so-called ‘problem’ neighborhoods where there still persists a bit of communal life, a few links between beings, some solidarities not controlled by the state, an informal economy, an organization that is not yet detached from those who organize themselves” (Invisible Committee 36-37).

4. See the recent special issue of diacritics titled “Derrida and Democracy,” in particular David Wills’s essay on the secret.

Works Cited

Bennington, Geoffrey. “Derridabase.” Jacques Derrida. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. Print.
———. Interrupting Derrida. New York: Routledge, 2000. Print.
Caputo, John D. “Beyond Aestheticism: Derrida’s Responsible Anarchy.” Research in Phenomenology 18 (1988): 59-73. Print.
Derrida, Jacques. Eyes of the University. Right to Philosophy 2. Trans. Edward Morri et al. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004. Print.
———. “Mochlos, or the Conflict of the Faculties.” Logomachia: The Conflict of the Faculties. Edited by Richard Rand. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1992. 3-34. Print.
———. Monolingualism of the Other: Or, The Prosthesis of Origin. Trans. Patrick Mensah. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988. Print.
———. The Post Card: From Socrates and Freud to Beyond. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. Print.
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———. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.
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September 3, 2013

The Poet’s Theater of Fiona Templeton: An Environmental View

James Sherry (bio)
jamestsherry@verizon.net

Abstract

Fiona Templeton’s play YOU-The City was originally produced for an audience of one in the Times Square neighborhood of New York City. The theatrical event presents an ecosystem where connections and logistics predominate over character and plot. It establishes a peer relationship between actors, audience, and their interactions that finds expression throughout the work in its theatrical components such as character, staging, and text. This environmental social structure links the play to a broader epistemology that reconstitutes the concept of identity in the arts. To support an alternative way of looking at ourselves, this essay brings in several concepts from other disciplines, notably extended cognition and q-analysis, a hierarchic model that functions by inclusion rather than like a system of separate castes. These tools are helpful in showing how cross disciplinary thinking supports an environmental model and are also useful because canonical culture remains fixated on the individual.

I was sat with a malevolent question… but now I am more or less riotous and bounded, because, well duh, the encounter between spectator-subject and image-object is a process of frivolous interference or mutual indignant mutation! I hope this doesn’t sound too confrontational.

–Nada Gordon, Scented Rushes

1. Environmental Theater

Fiona Templeton’s YOU—The City is an intimate play for an audience of one initially staged in 1988 in the mid-town neighborhood of New York and later published by Roof Books as a script along with photographs of the performance event.¹ In its original performance, on keeping an appointment at an office in Times Square, a “client” (the sole member of the audience) is passed through a series of mainly scripted encounters at both indoor and outdoor locations, including a church, an apartment, and a gypsy cab ride. The action reaches a climax when the client realizes that she has become the object of one of the transitions or hand-offs in a Hell’s Kitchen playground. The narrative of YOU—The City is therefore not a story but a sequence of separate scenes, linked by one or more of the actors guiding the client from one event to the next. Each of these encounters takes place in a separate, typical city niche: an office with a secretary and an executive, a church with a defrocked priest, a sidewalk worked by a prostitute, a gypsy cab, a tenement apartment in which two lovers argue. Throughout the play’s 15 different scenes—each in its own local ecosystem—Templeton established, in a guided tour of over two hours, a work of environmental theater. The client’s encounters are environmentally linked by their location in the same neighborhood and as part of the continuous experience of any city dweller. The play focuses on environmental issues also in the way that the sequence of encounters changes the client’s idea of the self from that of an isolated individual in an unfamiliar and unsettling situation to someone who has become acutely aware of how he or she shares identity as well as space with the actors. The client realizes she is a component of a larger environment.

This use of real-life surroundings, the loosely coupled relationships of one scene to another, and the way performers, both actor and client, identify with each other are the means by which Templeton realizes an environmental theater. By using theatrical strategies that extend the stage and the play into a living, diverse surrounding, Templeton has created interactive associations among actors, audience, settings, and text. I call this environmentally aware theater where the audience’s consciousness of its participation in the play overrides the artifice of the theatrical experience in some important ways. Environmentally aware theater presents an alternative to an absorptive theatrical experience that usually presents its artificiality intra-textually. YOU—The City transforms dramatic theater’s emphasis on the individual (going back to Aeschylus) into an awareness of one’s collaborative engagement in a network of beings. By extension, environmentalism (individual and network in dual agency) reinforces culture, in this case a poetics, in helping society to understand the interrelated conditions of the planet threatened by climate change. In this essay, I suggest that YOU—The City shows how Templeton’s poet’s theater contributes to an environmental poetics that proposes a significant modification of our engagement with the world. Understanding poet’s theater environmentally also allows us to link effectively with other disciplines to reveal an environmentally informed epistemology.

2. Environmental Perspectives

There is a growing literature around the practice and definition of ecopoetics that debates and enacts writing in relation to ecology, broadly conceived. One of the goals of ecopoetics is to engage with other disciplines. The relative weight granted language, and what is meant by ecosystem, varies greatly depending on the point of view of the writer. No single definition of ecosystem has emerged from ecopoetics. Further, Jonathan Skinner asks in his editor’s notes to the latest issue of ecopoetics “that the term [ecopoetics] continue to be used with uncertainty and circumspection. That it ask and be asked the hard questions about language, representation, efficacy, ethics, community and identity . . . .That it entail some real effort at interdisciplinary thinking” (ecopoetics 06/07 9).² For these reasons and for the purposes of this essay, I apply the McGraw Hill life sciences glossary definition of ecosystem to Templeton’s work: “A unit of interaction among organisms and their surroundings, including all life in a defined area.” I use this definition because it comes from outside literature and extends the connections from poetics beyond the discipline of poetry. Such extension to multiple disciplines is consistent with most of the diverse perspectives around ecopoetics, environmentalism, and systems theory. Further, using the McGraw Hill definition supports my aim to connect poet’s theater to other disciplines. Finally and most importantly, this definition helps to clarify Templeton’s environmental work and encourages us to think of the play as a series of linking mechanisms both between actor and audience (self and other) as well as linkages among scenes.

In YOU—The City the environmental perspectives among these 15 urban “unit[s] of interaction among organisms and their surroundings” are shaped on many levels of the theatrical experience. From the characters played by the actors or the audience to subject positions within the system, the audience member experiences an oddly disjointed and re-hinged experience of the self. For example, the Manhattan neighborhood becomes an objectified space (ecosystem) in which actors appear and reappear, sometimes changing character between appearances. Many of the actors are seen only once. This continuous variation among actors’ appearances and reappearances in the environmental setting, and on a smaller scale within the various scenes, allows Templeton to treat the individual—actor or performer or accidental neighborhood onlooker—as a metaphor for how the individual organism operates in any ecosystem. The play’s focus on connections helps one understand how an environmentally aware culture that objectifies our interdependence with other organisms and processes might differ from the human-centered perspective that dominates intellectual life. In order to establish a culture for environmentalism, to view our world environmentally, such a poetics can establish a framework in which humanity and nature are understood as a single complex system, a social model of environment. The individuals in Templeton’s play are engaged not just in their own dramatic action; they also “perform” their status as organisms situated as part of complex sets of relationships (human and non-human, subject and object). While this social model of environment may be said to be part of a systems approach to our condition, I only tangentially engage systems theory here in order to prevent a systems view from overdetermining poet’s theater’s environmentalism. YOU—The City reveals and focuses us on the qualitative events that emerge from these complex quantitative interactions within urban ecosystems. Templeton uses these quantities to build a framework supporting multiple cultural practices rather than any one monolithic culture. Her metaphor of the city and the city as content thrive in the structure of the play, engaging diverse relationships among audience and actors, and allowing us to understand, repeat, and adjust our relationships with the ecosystems that the play presents. Templeton avoids the doctrinaire by treating rhetorical positions as aspects of a larger continuity rather than as ideals to be guarded. Inclusiveness is paramount, attending to what is, if the environmental metaphor is to be successful in representing the similarities of organisms, places, and things at different scales.

In this essay I look at how YOU—The City and some of Templeton’s other works of poet’s theater address issues of environmental inclusiveness and ideological balancing. These issues include the integrity of the individual organism, subject/object relations, the definition of cognition as taking place only within the mind, and the status-oriented hierarchies of literary judgments. Instead of a binary kind of hierarchy, subject over object, Templeton traces subject/object relations through the non-status-oriented matrix of set theory. Templeton builds perspectives through a diverse set of issues rather than striving for a singular objective. Her scenes are structured as sets of encounters and modeled so that the themes mentioned above can be understood as they occur. Finally, I turn to set theory to demonstrate the interdisciplinary poetics sought by both ecopoetics and environmentalism. Set theory links disciplines and helps differentiate poet’s theater from other theaters by showing how to model communication between genres, depicting where connections are facilitated and where communication becomes more difficult.

3. Poet’s Theater

Templeton is not alone in her attempt to rework the shape of theater. Many works of modern theater have addressed non-environmentally aware theater’s over-simplification of relationships and have sought a structurally more realistic stage. Jean Genet’s The Maids plays with the hierarchy of the domestic relationships between a madam and her two maids as they vie for control of the roost. The Living Theater and other theatrical troupes poured off the stage into the audience and then invited the audience onto the stage in order to undercut an unproductive separation of actors and audience. Alan Kaprow’s “Happenings” proposed an integrated environment that was inclusive of subject and object in an event-driven model that helped renew relationships between the actors and audience. Jerzy Grotowski’s “Poor Theater” used actors as props in The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, exposed culture as a disguise for genocidal architecture in Akropolis, and created an integrated “total act” of components in his final work Apocalypsis cum Figuris. These and many other efforts have attempted to reformulate subject/object relations in theater, but mostly in the context of an experience related to the stage and encapsulated in a building. Centralizing the action on the proscenium stage requires suspension of disbelief that takes us away from daily experience. YOU—The City addresses this subject/object problem by taking the theater to multiple locations, disturbing the action to create quotidian stresses and make us question our surroundings. Rather than showing expected relationships between characters ensconced in different locations as happens in the movies, Templeton multiplies the idea of subject in the way the characters relate to each other and to the audience depending on location—that is, relations are ecosystem dependent.

Poet’s theater explicitly calls attention to this relationship between the audience and the performers as a structure of its own (a common poetic device, which will be seen below in the discussions of actors and audience). While much innovative theater uses some poetic practices, Templeton’s effort tightly binds theater and language-oriented poetics. I use the term poet’s theater to link Templeton’s theatrical and poetic work in YOU—The City. I also treat Templeton’s work as a special case of an environmentally oriented poet’s theater because environmentalism can contain many other ideas of what poet’s theater can be; its taxonomy is dynamic. Further, I use the term environmental with respect to poet’s theater to emphasize the mechanisms by which components of the theater are linked rather than the stories of each scene. Concepts and practices like staging, characterization, and plot are not supplanted by environmental horizontality. Their connections map the ecosystems of poet’s theater and open a window onto how the larger culture can begin to take an environmental perspective into account. Poet’s theater’s inclusiveness retrieves the larger context of theater as a ritual connected with actual social structures (as in Greek theatre), not simply an artifact of culture commenting on society. The context of Templeton’s poet’s theater is structured with a comprehensive set of social concerns and constituencies: the workplace, the family, and the way individuals and roles outside the mainstream are understood and addressed. Like other theatrical experiences, it includes the stage, actors, text, props, but it also includes a range of technical components and ideas about environment in a way that throws into contrast our own propensity for understanding our lives environmentally. While this environmental propensity is constantly undermined by specialist claims of individual uniqueness, adaptive solutions must be recognized as the driving force behind our construction of social life and society itself.

4. The Environmental Construction of Poet’s Theater

In YOU—The City, Templeton puts the audience in direct one-on-one contact with the actors in their surroundings. Each audience member either travels alone or is escorted from location to location, meeting each actor in a series of mainly scripted encounters in and around Times Square, New York. The audience-of-one participates in the play according to a general set of rules and logistics established for the performance as a whole. Appendices to the play specify the instructions given to the actors prior to performance on such topics as client flow through the scenes, shuttling performers back and forth between the scenes, a gender alternation chart when performers must stand in for other performers, the role of monitor performers who track the flow, and how to handle fake clients, standby appointments, and blanks if a client fails to show up for an appointments. The addenda read like a battle plan: everything accounted for including chance. A more detailed map can be drawn over Templeton’s work by listing and describing some of the components of the ecosystem of YOU—The City, beginning with the role of cognition through to the play’s text, its stage, its performers, its audience, and its criticism. This map will represent its construction and performance in a way that highlights the work itself as an ecosystem participating in an environmental poetics. Once we have a clearer idea of what is inside each of these components, I will show how to rebuild them into a loosely coupled whole with set theory.

One of the primary problems for the environmental movement in general to solve is how we overcome the way that ideologies isolate and separate people who actually may have many related interests and intentions. Theater’s traditional distance between stage and audience reifies this alienation as well. Identifying all participants and relationships in a performance event except oneself as the other in the structure of theater (audience to actor and by extension actor to actor) accents difference in a way that does not reflect the essential symbiosis and cooperation required to create and produce theater and to manage its resources. It also fails to reflect the social cohesion that frequently results from these experiences. Artists of all persuasions have often supported such ideological thinking by focusing on the differences between individuals, between schools of art or poetry, and by treating the work as the production of an individual. The problem is rooted in Descartes’ cogito where comprehension takes place all at once in the mind as if on a mental stage.

In the environmental model of poet’s theater, mind participates in a more integrated manner with bodily activities. Environmental cognition shows thought extending, in certain instances, beyond the organism. Mark Rowlands, professor of philosophy at the University of Miami, suggests that cognition can be said to take place inside the body and also the “manipulation and transformation of information bearing structures” (16).Several functions, especially the function of memory, take place externally, like an external disk array on your computer. “In certain circumstances,” Rowlands writes, “acting upon external structures is a form of information processing” (19). For example, in non-environmental cognition when we want to find something, what we call thinking takes place. Then with the idea constituted in the mind and our thought completed, we look for the thing, i.e. we act, while presumably thinking about something else or repeating the initiating thought, “I want thyme,” obsessively as a litany or mantra to confirm our belief in the thought. Our actions are detached from the thought process. Moreover, the very distinction in question is that between thought and action. In the environmental model, thinking extends to the process of looking as well as creating the image (signified) of what we want to look for. Thinking and acting are symbiotes. Let’s say you want to find the thyme. You think of the thyme and open the spice rack. To paraphrase Rowlands’ description of the process: You run your finger along the bottles until you find the label that matches the image that you have in mind: thyme. The matching process is as much a part of environmental cognition as conceptualizing thyme in the first place or, in a more complex situation, as reading the word thyme in the recipe. The thinking process extends throughout the event, beyond the mind and into action. We can also cite language as a relevant cultural example of external cognition that we are using together now as I write and you read these words asynchronously. Thus thinking also takes place over extended time, establishing a four-dimensional topology for thought. Extending thought to language, to its uses, and to the external world, we can think about our environment in the process of acting on it. Defining cognition environmentally, we can value the external world in a way that’s consistent with how we value ourselves.

Setting appropriate initial conditions, such as environmental cognition, for a self in relation to another component of the environment moves us toward establishing the sustainable interactions idealized by environmentalism. Extended cognition also helps avoid the trap of subject/object relations that separates the self from its surroundings in a way that allows us to detach ourselves from where we are, a detachment that can lead to such counterproductive behaviors as throwing a candy wrapper on the street or failing to secure a deep water drilling rig to improve profitability. The assumption that we can select a single perspective, either our own or that of the things we’re talking about (our discipline), from which to view the world and then apply that perspective to all events exemplifies the inflation of the subject, driven by the ego, from which humanity is environmentally suffering. Without extended cognition, we are conflicted every time we see a situation that presents more than one perspective. The mind-centered approach colors our entire world view even in its consideration of the body. Non-environmentally aware theaters model the theatrical experience as a set of unidirectional and sometimes bidirectional connections between actor and audience, between actor and actor on the stage, between author and audience, between director and actor. We often talk about these connections separately and analyze them within our specialized disciplines, because our assumptions about thinking inhibit a more inclusive approach. These point-to-point connections become confused as the assignment of a central perspective shifts between author, actors, and audience. The simplification that seems so effective in its first instance builds unnecessarily complex models as we proceed from one use case to another.

As an alternative to these point-to-point communications, we might construct sets of perspectives. In the case of YOU—The City, the scenes represent multiple perspectives for the audience. Individual processes such as character and thematics can be traced through the sets showing the accessibility of paths with greater or lesser difficulty of communication. These paths become narratives of relations that are dynamically inter-subjective and so model our world more effectively (an approach I will revisit at the end of the essay in a consideration of q-analysis). Templeton questions traditional ideas, conventions, and standards of theater in ways that model environmental cognition and sustainable interactions, as when she writes:

Well, who goes to the theater to sit and have catharsis any more, but this very experimental form provided you with the kind of rush the conventional theater no longer does. The only difference between that and catharsis is the distance issue. But whilst problematizing the relationship between performer and performee, and between theater and reality, YOU does this by indulging you. It’s like Genet’s Balcony; it’s a place of your own enactment. What if somebody doesn’t get it that there’s a distance and takes it for real? Well, some people almost did. And the performers had to see that and play.

(YOU 133)

The distance between actor and client in YOU—The City becomes proportional to the distance between performers, sometimes nearer, sometimes farther, but always interactive. Catharsis is no longer a characteristic of the audience; it is a performance in itself, another interaction on the stage. In another example, Templeton attenuates the distance between the actor and client. “If the client picks up the telephone, the monitor performer should be aware of the name of the client who is in that scene at that point and should ask: Are you [client’s name]? Sorry to bother you” (134). By now the client has clearly joined the cast. This process expands the idea of intention to a matrix and introduces extended cognition, a key concept of a culture that supports environmental change.

The Text / Documentation as Ecosystem

In the published book, the text of YOU—The City is divided into three columns, a collaborative design between Templeton and myself (in my role as press editor for Roof Books) that treats the writing as an ecosystem. The left-hand page is divided into two columns, one offering documentation of the event including photographs, and the second listing the instructions to actors (see Fig. 1 below). On the right-hand page, the play’s “dialogue” stands more or less alone. This architecture differs from the organic compound that most published plays use, for example, in the French’s editions where all text is printed in a linear format that accumulates over time.

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Fig. 1.

Page layout from YOU—The City (New York: Roof, 1990). 32-33.

By separating the components, this publication attempts to make the reader aware of separate species of text, to treat them both independently and together, and at the same time to make it really easy to read the spoken words without interruption, as a kind of poetry. Templeton was forceful in her insistence that the performers speak poetry, a subset of the textual materials in the book. In some sense, then, I have begun to think of the other material and the connections among them as its poetics. By highlighting this textual taxonomy we can see both the independence of the components and the necessity of their interaction to complete the performance. In theatrical texts that are not environmentally aware, this interaction is assumed, thus glossing over the interactions of the various species of text—spoken word, directions to the actor, and documentation of the performance, including pictures and comments. In contrast, the divided text of YOU—The City highlights how our thinking extends beyond the spoken word to location to comment to a wide variety of components of the ecosystem.

Environmental poetics is inherent in Templeton’s text as “you” is repositioned through constant repetition and continuous presence in the same way that nature appears to dissolve through our manipulation of it. The self dissolves, and second person and first person comingle. Integrating the ego into the world helps us treat humanity and nature together as a single complex unit. The notion of externalized cognition, where thinking takes place not only in the mind but extending beyond it as a connection between the world and the mind, reveals, Templeton asserts, the fundamental social condition of the person:

Because the text on the page is not actually being addressed to you, it may be read as though something were missing, which it is, because you have to add your subjectivity, in a more active sense than the page usually demands … the you disappears from the text. Because you is passed on. The word you changed from being egoistic to being social. You had learned the second person.

(YOU 135)

Environmentalism implies that we model events as relationships between entities (actors, client, props) rather than as isolated nodes operating via communication to each other. Templeton moves back and forth between the performers, sometimes equating them, sometimes separating them until that path is well defined, the relationship materialized. Templeton takes the notion a step further by pointing out that the primary objects of an ecosystem (as in the McGraw Hill definition) may be those interfaces between two organisms as much as the organisms themselves. And YOU attempts to show precisely that, for as Templeton writes:

The experience of art is in relationship, meaning being born where intention and interpretation meet. Theater is the art of relationship. A performance is the product of as many points of view as there are creators; a realized moment of performance is the meeting of as many as are present, performers and audience … ‘you’ assumes and creates relationship.

(YOU 139)

But lest the inveterate traditionalist slip into a state of terror at having her identity stolen by forces akin to the Soviet threat or Invasion of the Body Snatchers, YOU reassures the reader that

since YOU deals with relationship, it also evokes privacy. But not the privacy of reaction of the individual in one of a thousand theater seats, protected in anonymity and in numbers . . . the gaze is returned, client and performer sustain between them the performance of the performance, because there is only them—a deflection of the attention of either and reality is redefined . . . The performance is a relationship, “you” is a relationship, meaning is made between speaker and hearer. You‘s privacy is that of the individuality of any relationship.

(YOU 139)

YOU takes exception to theater’s separation of performer and audience by creating a renewed relationship between them. Furthermore, Templeton argues that “[t]he relationship [between performer and audience] was located in the same place where the meaning of the text was made” (140). The question of difference, of uniqueness in the arts, does not disappear. Differentiating features remain within the larger context of relationship. But the contours of the self blur, and environment, instead of being defined as the place where the subject resides, becomes ecosystem inclusive of the self.

The energy created by the edges of selves in contact replaces the reality of the self in situ with an environmental set of relationships. Templeton notes that this change can present difficulty for performers: “The performance defined itself close to the edge of the real, but in order to use and to make visible the chosen side of it. For one performer, the edge was not clear enough in that his performance spilled into his life, and so the clients’ lives, our lives, mine” (YOU 140). Here is a clear representation of an environmentally defined world where the edges of the different selves in contact with each other become the bodies of the ecosystem. The performers did not find it quite so easy to return to the imaginary world that humanism creates of bodies moving through space. Seen in this light of fricative edges, the edges of the text run off the page, “the Aristotelian unities became logistic rather than narrative concerns” (YOU 141). And this textual logistic is represented by staging as well as by a schedule of performers and performees interacting. YOU—The City documents the text, the action of the events, and commentary about both. Providing a more complete document of the work than the usual publication, the book published by Roof attempted to prevent the reader from becoming lost in the text, hypnotized by artistic technique. The text itself is one stage of meaning among others, not the whole meaning. For example, Templeton comments that “the cab ride not only separates the play’s two geographical sets of locations, but also separates the introductory linear series of scenes from the loop of the rest of the piece” (YOU 149). Meaning in poet’s theater is located repeatedly at every level of scale and in each facet of the text.

The Stage

The staging of YOU—The City has received more attention than most of the other parts of the performance because it is the distinguishing feature of the work. Yet viewed in parallel with the other components of the theater, its unique values also contribute to a comprehensive environment. YOU—The City moves from the usual closed space of theater to the streets. Templeton made the city like a movie set, sans cameras, in order to “switch from close up to long shot to a level of reality—because it was so completely site specific. And not just site specific, but without the feeling of other people watching—it was just your experience” (“Presence Project”). These sites are a distraction from the work’s themes and disarming at the same time, because the client is constantly trying to understand what to do, how to behave. If it were located in a theater, with its familiar conventions of audience behavior, the presence of other audience members would likely encourage you to sit quietly. If you were alone in the city and contacted some strangers, you would also likely follow behavioral conventions, interacting according to the needs of the exchange, whether someone is asking directions or stealing your purse. But in this case, where audience and performers are constantly negotiating the space between them, audience-performer interaction both unsettles familiar behaviors and suppresses normal protective instincts because the safety of the performance remains operational, even on the mean streets. Standing in a scene, if you are only in the role of watching performers, you might be able to separate yourself from the action. But if the performers are constantly telling things to “you” while you are watching the scene, saying “you” over and over, inviting your engagement, but not indicating in any clear way how to react or even whether to react, your sense of self begins to break down. In that chaotic moment, more and more information is exchanged between audience and performers, which increases your understanding of what is going on–not just in your mind but around you, through the transmission of language and bodily cues taking place between you and the performers. However, most clients become confused because of this chaotic plethora of data (although I spoke to one woman who found it perfectly natural).

The staging of Templeton’s poet’s theater also poses questions about the impact of structure, because “framing the artificial makes it seem real,” as Nick Kaye says in one interview (“Presence Project”). Templeton thinks “it’s a question of whether you can take it that far,” which I take to mean that whether framing the artificial actually goes so far as to change the perception of reality, or whether it simply highlights the fact of artificiality, is a matter still open to debate. Templeton’s incredulity about the easy identification of framing with transformation extends to human interaction by making it difficult for the performers to find a consistent frame:

I talk about framing to the performers a lot. And often you think about framing as something you do when you observe, but I talked to them about framing as something that they had to do to themselves. For example, when they were, in fact, saying a script, they had to present it in such a way that it seemed natural—yes, as acting, which was to do with the way in which they set up their relationship with the other person [client].

(“Presence Project”)

In this sense the performers use the confusion of location to confuse the idea of role. Enacting the frame is actually breaking the frame as it makes us aware of the frame and drags us into it. External cognition re-establishes a larger frame, making the relationship both less confusing and more comprehensive. Like the performers and audience, the stage is mutable and not entirely under control. People from the street intrude into the set and participate in the performance. As Kaye points out in his interview with Templeton, “There seems to be a very close link between this attention to site and an overlaying of these roles and positions. I wonder if you think of those things as being indelibly intertwined” (“Presence Project”). The stage becomes an unpredictable environment, or nearly so, because Templeton continues the distinction between real and artificial even while questioning it.

The environmental aspects of the piece are revealed in its symmetry and complexity, as opposed to the dramatized asymmetry of modernist and postmodern productions. Actors enter at alternating symmetrical points and leave in the same alternative symmetry, but the entries and exits do not coincide. Thus there is a perceivable order but it is not predictable for the audience; the performers are only kept on track by a series of complex instructions and schedules documented in the book, but not readily apparent to the client. As Templeton has already pointed out, here logistics replaces the narrative and hence informs the theatrical structure. Whereas narrative is often associated with the story of an individual or the collective story of multiple individuals, by using logistics to replace a story line that runs from the beginning of the play to its end, Templeton again points out that relationships rather than individuals lie at the core of any understanding of our environment. How we feel about a specific interaction with the environment is not as important as understanding the results of that relationship. Of course ignoring human behavior would be impractical, but its psychological aspects must be balanced with the effects of our relationship to the environment. Logistics points out one way of dealing with the incredible complexity of environmental changes or problems, be they climatic or social; within YOU—The City, it also reduces the effects of individual psychology and emphasizes the interactions between multiple performers and the audience of one. These interactions are visible in the diagram below (see Fig. 2), which shows the logistics of the shuttles that performers have to follow in staging the work. Out of this schedule a temporal aspect of the work emerges, besides its duration or the duration of its scenes; here again the performer becomes a metaphor as well as the carrier of the text to the audience. The systematic and external sense of timing in logistics is not arbitrary but is, instead, required to move people to the right place at the right time. Essentialism in narrative–the plot, if you will–is replaced by the necessity of logistics.

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Fig. 2.

Diagram of Performer Shuttles for YOU—The City (New York: Roof, 1990). 164.

The Performers

The relationship between the performers and the other components of the theater displays an environmental bias to Templeton’s work. As Templeton writes about the process of realizing the play again and again in situ:

While re-creating YOU—The City in various versions, I became interested in further layers of participants besides official audience and performers—the inhabitants of the various neighborhoods, who gradually knew what was happening as pairs of audience and performer passed many times daily. These layers became both audience and performers themselves, either choosing to watch, simply to appear, to offer comments, or to intervene. This inspired how L’Ile (The Island [2003]) works, using multiple layers of audience and performers as its base and structure.

(“A Poetics” 7)

This evolving approach to structure contrasts with a structure where complex frameworks are stripped of components until they can be modeled in a linear fashion. Care is usually taken in scientific and artistic endeavors to assure that the components eliminated do not significantly alter the net value of the materials or calculation.³ Nevertheless, complex layering produces emergent properties that can change the results and certainly change the tone and atmosphere of those results. In Templeton’s case those interactions resulting from complexity tend to be the content of the work as much as its presumed theme. I would hazard that even the term “poet’s theater” titles the genre as a complex layering of roles, and in fact, the very title YOU—The City implies a dual agency that rapidly develops beyond the usual subject-object relations in theater.

This technique of dual agency is modeled most famously perhaps in The Living Theater’s late 1960s productions. Presenting inter-subjectivity as an action highlights the set of relationships between audience and performer so that the self is extended into the surroundings. This extended performer is tough to define and behaves more like a performer in an ecosystem, taking on different attitudes depending on what role she takes with respect to others in the niche: performer, guide, client, or monitor. A tree, for example, can provide shade for a ruminant, a home for a sparrow, flowers for a bee, block nutrients from smaller plants, and act as a landmark for a human. The performer, too, is mutable and defined by his/her role within each context. In one case, an actor changes roles from one scene to the next. In another example, an actor in one scene becomes a client in a subsequent scene. In YOU—The City, the larger ecosystem, the city, becomes an actor as well, causing many difficulties for the performers and the audience. The character designated in the text as the “46^th Street Person” says

I have to be polite to you, when what I really want to do is rip you apart. No, of course not, because then you wouldn’t be you anymore, and anyway, no, I don’t want to see your insides. . . . So you can’t be what? Be you? Let me be you. Let me be you to you? Or see yourself for him?

(YOU 29)

This speech suggests that humans are not all of one sort. Some operate independently while some are capable of only acting within a well-defined context. Changing roles change people’s values. In another case, the Excommunicado Confessor chastises the audience: “Fearless invention before a crowd of madmen and scared to say it. Your own forged bills pour in. Forge a presence an absence can quench. . . . You’re spun to face yourself. Don’t say yes” (35). Here is a man who has intentionally stepped out of his role, reinvented himself in opposition to his prior role and in opposition to the vagrant in the prior scene. The priest points to the forgery/forging of the self in a reflexive mode. Ultimately, the anti-deistic diatribe focuses on resistance (“Don’t say yes”) to being one person, but being many, a truer relationship with the world.

In her “Notes to the Directions (On Performance)” Templeton describes the actor’s method as changing from pretending to be a different person than you actually are to an unspecified something else which I assume is accessing multiple roles together. Templeton’s process structures Puckishness. The linking of the actor and audience makes the distinction even more difficult to deal with when Templeton says to the actor, “Where does you live? This guy lives somewhere between the speaker and the hearer” in the connector (YOU 145). And this thought takes us from the topic of the performer to that of the audience.

The Audience/Client

Poet’s theater questions the self as it rewrites the relationship between performer and audience. This characteristic mechanism of modern poetry becomes a cause célèbre in postmodernism. Arthur Rimbaud used the second person to mean the first person. In John Ashbery’s “Pyrography,” the postmodern speaker shifts from I to they to we to you and all are conflated to describe the present tense where our existences are structured together in an ecosystem of selves (8-11). YOU—The City keeps the social being, the person, in flux as a client moves through the locations confronting different performers, taking a different role with each while trying all the while to retain a consistent picture of the self to align with her overall impression of the event. In some cases the client is an observer with the scene going on around her, as in the apartment. But suddenly the client is called to the phone, injected into the action. The client also revisits the apartment, taking on a different role. In other locations, the client is addressed but not told what to do. She is left to her own devices, freed to act according to her interest. In some scenes, like the playground handoff, the client becomes part of the scene and cannot avoid participation. These different roles do not create a conflict so much as they identify the person as a conglomerate of intentions and relations with the other participants of the action. It took me many days to realize that what I had experienced as a client myself was not conflict but transformation from one to many.

In this way YOU materializes the person as a sequence of roles and the self as one’s collective awareness of those roles. Brevity in poetry (its ecology)–or condensation, as Pound would have it–is insufficient at this point. Environmental culture cannot be reduced to conservation, although that role is relevant. The poet aligns her role with the others that she takes on in writing, directing, and producing the work. In this way environmental poetics is expansive as well as conserving of resources. The role or the job of the poet does not scale out as in mass media, but upward in sets at every level from poetry writing, to poetry reading, to poetry publishing, to poetry community… Each set of activities includes the prior one so that the hierarchy implied is inclusive rather than oriented to the status of the set or person. The boundaries of a work of poetry are extended in the way the self has been shown to be mutable. The common artistic assumption of uniqueness does not scale up and so needs to be augmented by these common elements. Together these elements create the network context that we have described as an ecosystem, the plane of our poetic geometry. That plane is then juxtaposed to the person for the purpose of establishing value in the space between them. In her essay “A Poetics of Performance Relevant to a Particular Definition of the Word,” Templeton says,

executing something, doing what the thing is supposed to do, but specifically in relation to a standard of measurement, efficiency. . . . Performance is doing something, but there is still a standard involved. Not simply how well someone plays the flute, or acts in a character, in terms of efficiency (how would that be measured anyway), but in terms of its effect. Performance in the arts is not simply knowing all the notes, but the context in which it happens. Performance necessarily has a context.

(1)

Templeton is well aware of the western tradition of “the individual as the unit of thought” (“A Poetics” 5), and intentionally extends the self beyond the individual through the context of performance. Thinking in poet’s theater is externalized in an environmental way and extends between the performer and the audience, not simply as communication of messages, but as a transformation that modifies both the original work and the people who attend the presentation. “You” become part of the larger whole. The spiritual notion of uncontaminated purity, theatrically represented in a monologue, disappears. Communication exchanges text and presence with the audience rather than speaking at the audience. But dialogue with the audience is continuous to the point of exhaustion in YOU—The City.

In the apartment scene of YOU—The City, Templeton exhibits this complexity of self and relationship. She calls this scene “the most distancing Act” (YOU 142), while for me the space is more easily seen as an ecosystem of relations.

Suddenly there is more than one performer, and costumes, and dialogue, and distance within enclosure, and more than one client, them and us now as well as you and me, these objectifying signs are undermined in their very theatricality. The performers are not speaking to each other, though the dialogue replies to itself, but they are looking at each other’s clients in a schema of deferred otherness.

(1)

The niche defined by the apartment enclosure exposes an environmental way of thinking. Templeton’s version of environment is oddly resonant: “Meaning is not an answer but an apprehension of successive forms, their retention, protention and compatibility for coexistence in the mind” (YOU 143). The mind space is getting rather crowded in her formulation and it might be easier to open outward to include those external elements. Poet’s theater participates in externalized cognition by the interaction between the performer and the audience. By breaking down the separation between audience and performer, by changing the ratio from many-to-many to one-on-one, YOU enables cognition to take place between the audience of one and a performer in the first part of the event. In the second part, interactions of one to many are explored. Looking at these multiple ratios emphasizes a dynamic structure for the performance that addresses the matrix of environmental poetics. In both cases, the thought process takes place via interaction between audience and performer as well as by comparison between scenes. Templeton uses these philosophies of relationship in her work as well as in her personal experience: “a moment of hesitation I experienced as a child on realizing that the bus driver could be called by the same name as my mother, ‘you’. It is the pronoun of recognition, of exchange . . .” (“A Poetics” 3).

YOU—The City frequently addresses the dissolving ego of environmental poetics to make citizens less apt to despoil the nest. The Meterless Charioteer (gypsy cab driver) looks over his shoulder at the audience, “I can look back at you. Of course you can see through me. I have to be an impostor, though you don’t know of what. But you do. And where do you fit in?” (39). The gypsy cab driver is a three-in-one imposter: one person posing as another and then acting in that role. The client is then asked directly by this poseur how she fits into the role-playing, highlighting the client’s desire to retain a singular identity (“you”) throughout this stretching and fragmenting process of self. The stage instructions in this scene add to the dissolution; “Your ‘you,’” Templeton writes, “is often ‘one’, so sometimes ‘I’, meaning you” (YOU 40). These instructions not only reinforce the shifting roles by using the pronouns, but they also point to how pronouns shift in grammar. This cascading of similar shapes at different scales, the person in the cab and the play with grammar, reinforces the play of dynamic systems so important in understanding the complexity of environment. With such self-shifting, Templeton turns locations inside out. The cab driver looks over his shoulder at you and says, “Watch where you’re going. I don’t want to be stuck with you forever. Aren’t you hungry to move on? If I look away are you free? Now you can see more than two sides of life, like leaning into the mirror after your night on the tiles. What’s in it when you’re not? Out there is your way in” (41). Now at the nth case the driver suggests a view of the action beyond the usual polarity of self and other. “Out there,” outside the cab, outside the self you find a method of understanding the world as a series of relations. The organism, you, exists. It doesn’t dissolve but exists in its relations rather than in the fixed role where our culture tends to place it. As the Coca Cola commercials opine, “You’re the one.” Templeton provides an alternative.

In some ways the metaphor of Templeton’s work and the metaphor of poet’s theater get carried too far and aren’t successfully restructured. In/out, you/me, the shifting dissolves and you’re lost: “I know you’re not me. Who am I, you want to know? I’m who’s talking to you. Oh, of course, I always change, I change toward you. . . . From who you are or seem to be to me… You’re not discussed” (YOU 41). But even these confusing identities are entertaining if they are not too threatening. The replacement of plot by logistics isn’t carried through to a more complete definition of self, although we realize it as we negotiate our passage through the event. Simply reading the text it is somewhat difficult to imagine.

Click for larger view

Fig. 3.

Act II.ii from YOU—The City (New York: Roof, 1990). 55.

As the expected notion of self transforms Templeton emphasizes presence as much as person. As she explains, “I am actually very happy to watch shows that are nothing but attention to the moment—whatever that is—but . . . attention for me is what creates presence—and that’s what’s evoked in audience transaction” (“Presence Project” 5). Such a commitment to presence approaches Robert Wilson’s austere presentations of a person and a vegetable on stage and may be said to be about negotiating the moment. And beyond that, we must include memory in poetry.

And Criticism (post-event activities of writing and publishing)

Establishing an environmental poetics would be incomplete without positioning the work you are reading now in the ecosystem of the play. While this may be a separate topic in its own right, our ecosystem of poet’s theater includes talking about it. In the published performance of YOU—The City, a wider context is already established by including photographs and comments, as discussed above. While each of the sets we have discussed is incomplete, the focus remains on the relationships between them. And what establishes that relationship more than critical writing about the play? Environmental poetics focuses attention at every point in the process, from intention through critical interpretation. Additional meaning is imparted in the formats of publication and venues where the work is distributed. As already cited, Templeton points out that “Meaning is not an answer but an apprehension of successive forms . . . The movement of the mind through meaning after meaning, the series of their landscapes, is meaningful. For example, here the meaning is clear, here obscure, here conclusive . . .” (YOU 143). One of the forms included in the performance is writing about it; the published performance includes columns of comments and contextualizing remarks. Interestingly, this environmental approach of including its own commentary has a precursor in Dante’s Vita Nuova, where each poem about Beatrice is followed by a commentary on the poem in its context with prosodic notes and biographical information. In this sense Templeton’s poet’s theater and environmental poetics present themselves as species of criticism, a horizontal force across the silos of epistemology.

5. Set Theory and Environment: What’s Different About Poet’s Theater

By changing the relationship between actors and audience, Templeton increases our awareness of each of them. By increasing the amount of detail through heightened awareness she helps us see how the components can be modeled both independently and together. By arranging the text in several columns, our collaborative publication defines another set of components that can be modeled together rather than seen as an indissoluble organic unit. We need an interdisciplinary tool to allow us to look at both the similarities and differences in a relatively value-free structure. Set theory provides such a modeling process; as a tool, it is specifically suited to depict both what distinguishes poet’s theater from other theaters and their common elements. Through the use of set theory we can compare poet’s theater to non-environmentally aware theater. We approach the problem of differentiation by defining the sets of components of YOU—The City so that they may be compared to other forms of theater–Shakespeare, for example–or even to non-art events, like social structure. Whereas most art writing thrives on differences reinforced by self-interest and contemporary culture, set theory models both common and unique elements. If we apply this tool to poet’s theater, I think we may also establish a method that can be carried forward to other disciplines. My aspirations for this theory exceed somewhat the scope of poet’s theater, but the ethos of using poetry to create an environmental culture is equally unreasonable.⁴

Set theory is that branch of mathematics that treats collections of things. The physicist Ron Atkin, through what he calls q-analysis, uses set theory to create non-evaluative hierarchies that show how components of a system like theater can be linked and how they communicate.⁵ If we structure poet’s theater using the approach that we took in the prior sections–that is, as text, performers, audience, etc.–we can represent it as a hierarchy of levels. Hierarchy here does not mean superior and inferior like castes, but rather higher levels that include lower levels like a garden includes flowers, shrubs, trees, and lawn: a hierarchy of scale. This kind of precision may seem obsessive to the poet and fuzzy to the mathematician, but taking a line of reasoning from the political realm, the fact that both disciplines find difficulties with it makes it a potentially useful tool. Q-analysis helps us to look at different disciplines in relation to each other, and set theory fits well with many modes of discourse. Q-analysis engages methods from algebraic topology to help understand metaphoric structures such as theater and poetry and as a cross disciplinary tool readily aligns with environmental poetics. Using q-analysis we have organized Templeton’s work to show how poet’s theater is both like and unlike its non-environmentally aware counterparts. Q-analysis also helps us understand how communication is achieved. In poet’s theater the stage, the actors, the audience, the text are all in place; only their positions are somewhat shifted from where they would be on, for example, the Shakespearean stage.

To apply set theory to YOU—The City, start with the level of the play or work of poet’s theater as the most inclusive level of our hierarchy. (We might also conceptualize more inclusive levels such as Templeton’s entire oeuvre or the even more inclusive category of poet’s theater. It is immediately obvious that q-analysis is a flexible analytic tool.) At this level we also include the neighborhood of Times Square or a neighborhood of London, or of any other city where the event has been performed, since the play itself does not encompass the physical location. We include these at the same level because together they cover all aspects of the physical and conceptual work. Call this level N+2. In the ways they connect, the play and the neighborhood together comprise the ecosystem of the work.

At the level included in level N+2, call it N+1, and including all levels beneath, is the sequencing of scenes and characters. We find at the same level a single member of the audience, the client, who moves through all scenes from first to last. Also at the N+1 level are the transits between scenes, the logistics, where the audience/client is conducted or moves alone from scene to scene. This N+1 level also includes general instructions to the performers and other textual components described above. (See Fig. 2‘s diagram of transits above.)

At level N are the individual scenes and their narratives. For YOU—The City the scene is the primary niche in its ecosystem. (We can easily recall many pieces of poet’s theater where actors and locations extend beyond the scene, but that is not the case here.) The play as described earlier was actually generated from a set of relationships between a client and a performer. These relationships were later constituted as scenes. Here we can see how the matrix of intention (described earlier in this essay) more accurately describes the net result of the completed event even though it differs from the initial intention. These relationships construct the scenes. At this level we also have the specific locations where each scene is being performed—the apartment, the office, the cab.

At the N-1 level are individual locations, actors/characters, and text within each scene. Actors in this play are usually only in one scene and only present in a scene one at a time. The first five scenes establish this standard. After the taxi ride a more complex mixture of ingredients is applied. After the cab rides actors extend across two scenes, and including one case where an actor appears in scenes that are not sequential. At one point in the apartment scene, several actors appear together and in that scene two audience members are together and may relate to each other. At this level several important differences between poet’s theater and non-environmentally aware theater are evident. First the plots and subplots all take place within a scene; they rarely cross even as themes, except the theme of identity, of course. In fact YOU—The City isolates themes within a scene; they don’t survive outside the borders of the niche of the scene, another biomorphic metaphor. The characters too, with the exceptions listed above, do not survive the limits of the niche of the scene. This is not true in the apartment which is visited twice.

At the N-2 level we can place the details of the text for each scene, how the performers speak their lines, how they relate to the client. These performative aspects of the piece are isolated as well within the scene. Intention for the author, as pointed out, began here, but is not readily visible in the performance where the structure of the scenes commands our attention.

Here is a summary of the levels for YOU—The City. The play offers three groups of sets, somewhat simplified:

Group A represents the theater: the play, the scenes, the transits, the neighborhood and specific locations.

Group B represents the participants: the characters/actors, the audience/client, neighborhood people who intrude into the scenes.

Group C represents the text: the commentary in the play, the spoken text, the narratives in each scene, the speeches.

Leaving out the commentary for the time being, although we have seen above how it participates, we can fit the groups into a hierarchical schema where each level contains the level below it:

N+2 The play as in groups A and C, the neighborhood as in group A

N+1 The audience/client as in group B, transits and logistics as in group A

N The scenes as in group A, the narratives as in group C, the characters in more than one scene, the specific locations of the scenes

N-1 Locations, text, and participants of each scene (characters and client).

We could go on from here to show textual and performance details, but for the purposes of this analysis, we have probably gone far enough to clarify how q-analysis might organize the theater. Ron Atkin uses a similar approach to Midsummer Night’s Dream (131-141). Here, for comparison, is Atkin’s q-analysis of Midsummer Night’s Dream. The groups have a similar structure with different and similar contents:

Group A: the play, the acts, the scenes, the subscenes

Group B: the characters

Group C: the commentary, the play, the plots, the subplots, the speeches…

And here is the schema:

N+2 The play (as in group A), and also the play (as in group C)

N+1 The acts (A), the plots (C) [plots refer to the different strands of the story the lovers, the faeries, and the workingman’s theater troupe]

N The scenes (A), the characters (B), and the subplots (C)

N-1 The sub-scenes (A), the speeches (C)

(Atkin 131)

The differences and similarities are immediately apparent. Templeton simplifies the narrative structure but adds location-specific information that Atkin with his more traditional aesthetics assumes. Rather than multiple scenes within the narrative, and plots and subplots, Templeton’s poet’s theater focuses on how the stories are played out within each scene or niche. Templeton separates narrative, the sequence of scenes, from the stories within each scene. If we identify story with the self, then poet’s theater becomes a critique of the identification of narrative (structure) with story (self) in prior theaters. Narrative becomes logistical. Although not all poet’s theater has this specific structure, poet’s theater as a general case revises the structure of prior theater. Poet’s theater changes the idea of self; the subject/object problem is also dealt with differently as discussed above. Now it is easier to see the power of the structure assumed in prior theater and what results by changing that structure in poet’s theater. The top level contains the play in both cases, but in YOU—The City the location becomes an active participant whereas in the prior theater the locations are assumed as the stage. The transits exist as blocking in Shakespeare but are not considered in Atkin’s hierarchy, because they are assumed by humanist culture as Atkin sees it. Shakespeare’s is a human-centered approach in that it avoids a narrative of logistics, preferring to focus on character. If we look closely at Shakespeare we see that relationships are often established by logistics–who is where when–and happenstance is a key player in the narrative. But Shakespeare primarily sequences the narrative using stories or plots. Also different between environmentally focused poet’s theater and prior theater is the active presence of the audience or client as a dynamic contributor to the action. While scenes and plots are present in both, their locations are somewhat different. The details of each scene show a similar structure between Templeton and Shakespeare but in Templeton’s poet’s theater there are no sub-scenes, and plots are encapsulated within scenes. From another viewpoint the plays are similar. We still have the play, the text, the actors, and the audience. They have different roles in each type of theater, but the components are quite the same. Consider the biological analogies. What separates environmentalism from humanism in part is how environmental poetics treats both similarities and differences in identifying the two theatrical structures. Environmental poetics allows interactive positioning rather than taking an ideological stance that isolates different perspectives. Humanism’s fixed hierarchy is still defined in Genesis.

When looking at these similarities and differences together, notice the balance between them. While we continue to distinguish one part of the modeling tool from another as in any hierarchy, we are also confronted with large-scale similarities between the plays. Looking at this contextualized set of factors forces a comparative view of these plays. Again, as in Templeton’s blurring of the borders of the individuals, the reader is driven to value a larger sphere than the self, and we begin to identify with the structure of the environment as well as the self as part of it. Q-analysis would allow us to go further, too, in mapping the topology of the play, as Atkin does in his book-length treatment. Doing so would show the specific communications that are facilitated by being in the same dimension of the ecosystem. It would also show those that are made more difficult by being in another level or dimension, such as the difficulty of understanding the entire play at level N+2 from the point of view of the client moving consecutively through the scenes at level N+1. The client has to go through all the scenes and debriefing by the director in a café at the end before having enough information to grasp the concept even though the client is constantly trying to understand her situation. In Templeton’s poet’s theater the location varies from scene to scene and locations recur only once with the client in a different role, whereas in proscenium theater almost all action takes place on the same stage with some action understood to have taken place offstage. Props and actors are treated as resources to be moved on and off the stage as the action directs. The distributed architecture of poet’s theater is used even where there is only one location as poet’s theater frequently re-orients the coordinates of the audience and the staging.

But what does this analysis do for us that justifies extending the creative impulse to the structure of set theory? What do we learn from applying topology to art? In the environmental model, human biological and mechanical systems as well as systems of ideas can be considered ecosystems, i.e., as we have said, a set of relationships and as such can be treated together. Q-analysis organizes any of these complex structures in an unambiguous way that is expected in science and politics, but remains unusual, even difficult, for art. In fact, this method can be said to restrict one of the primary values of poetry–ambiguity–replacing it instead with several well-delineated logistical processes. But there’s plenty of ambiguity left to go around; it occurs at different points in the artistic process. We learn to accommodate change and dynamism in our actions and thoughts. Q-analysis supplies a structural description of the linkages among these components, allowing us to see that our environment is not simply an extension of our will. It separates the semantic relationships from the syntactic (ordering, logistic) relationships but treats them at the same level so that they communicate. And I mean to use it and external cognition as levers to change our view of environment from a bucket into which we can throw objects and ideas with predictable results to a set of relationships with edges defining events. We learn how components of our lives communicate or distance themselves, both human and non-human entities.

How can we establish an environmentally oriented methodology by mixing mathematical and literary tools as Templeton implies and I have made explicit here? One goal is to establish that independent modes of discourse separated by great intellectual distances can live side by side, even thrive symbiotically and consequently encourage environmental thinking in the arts. Q-analysis shows that difficulty in communication across dimensional boundaries appears even among related ideas such as understanding the whole play while in it. In its method of construction, q-analysis works environmentally. Its complex structures are focused on linkages, as in Templeton’s work, where a system has “considered parts standing in interaction because the state of each part is dependent on the state of other parts via a directed influence/dependence linkage” (Legrand). The topological process of connectivity in q-analysis allows the data to be inspected with less distortion than with a narrative. Again, I point to the need for artists to consider how non-evaluative hierarchy can exist alongside narrative and tone in a normally ambiguous text or even in a polysemic innovative text. Q-analysis is useful in diagnosing the failure of large-scale systems like works of art or social structures. We can see where communication works, where it breaks down, and where it is duplicated (Ishida). For example, communication works easily where the levels are connected downward. It’s easy to understand grass and flowers in the garden. Going upward levels of greater inclusiveness are more difficult to communicate in that it’s harder to understand the garden from the point of view of one flower. It’s difficult to understand the relationship of the individual in society if relationships are not emphasized. The individual doing the thinking becomes easily confused and marginalized. Q-analysis’ value as a social science tool makes it an appropriate linking agent between arts and sciences.

Atkin’s q-analysis is known for showing the limits of communication. By applying it to poet’s theater, an art often concerned with the indefinable and personal analogy, we are able to show that things we expect to combine in a specified way might combine differently, and that they don’t successfully combine in yet other ways. Q-analysis emphasizes the experimental aspect of poet’s theater; things don’t always work as planned, and events in the performance are highlighted as tentative and provisional. Atkin shows this through a geometrical analysis of a hierarchical environment, inclusive of subject and object and capable of becoming a lens through which to view across disciplinary lines. Templeton’s work enables us to view ecosystems similarly by establishing a concrete structure where all the parts are defined in the poet’s theater semantically, and are then structured syntactically in such a way that the hierarchy works to direct the audience’s path through the ecosystem. In this process, Templeton’s work is both exploratory as a kind of trial and error process, and produces artistic and ambiguous results (although this process is not unique to art). Social structure can now be read as an ecosystem of relationships.

James Sherry is the author of more than 10 books of poetry and prose. His new manuscript, Sorry: Environmental Poetics, is forthcoming. He is the editor of Roof Books (www.roofbooks.com) and founder of the Segue Foundation (seguefoundation.com) that has produced more than 10,000 literary and other art events in the New York metropolitan area during the past 30 years.

Footnotes

1. YOU—The City was first produced in New York City (USA), 1988; London (England), 1989; Ljubljana (Slovenia), 1990; Den Haag, (Netherlands), 1990; Zurich (Switzerland), 1990; Munich (Germany), 1991; Hamburg (Germany), 1999; Rotterdam (Netherlands), 2001.

As editor and publisher of Roof Books I consider this essay a conflict of interest. It may also be that few people besides the actors themselves have gotten as close to the work as I did as editor. As a result I have taken on the risk of conflict of interest in order to pursue the environmental perspectives of material I know quite well. The conflict has prevented me from writing about it for 20 years. It has also impelled me to take a non-evaluative view of the piece, since I clearly like it, having put a lot of energy into it and being shy of praising it too highly. Finally, my conflict of interest is exacerbated by the fact that I have emphasized certain aspects of Templeton’s work to support my own interests.

While an environmentalist as I have been describing, Templeton’s intention from the author’s point of view was not focused on creating the environmental person I have described in this essay, but rather on a socially constructed person, an alternative to that monadic organism often critiqued by postmodernism. That alternative derived from the thrust of critical thought turns out to have been environmentally oriented. And in the intervening years environment and planetary considerations have overwhelmed the issue of personal identity. The critic’s intention merges with the proto-environmental alternative Templeton created as I have described in paragraphs about intention above. As publisher and critic I am at once spectator and creator in this essay and by extension publisher and actor in YOU—The City. The extended environmental person appears everywhere.

2. Jonathan Skinner, founder and editor of the journal ecopoetics, refers to ecosystem in similar terms to the McGraw Hill definition in a recent email to me. “You use the term ‘ecosystem’ in the essay in a way that certainly fits in with a lot of what ecopoetics has proposed (and in a way that is neither more nor less defined than ‘ecopoetics’).” But Skinner thinks we need to be careful in the metaphorical use of the term ecosystem. He suggests putting “energy into a critique of the metaphorical use of . . . “ecosystem” which is a core work of ecopoetics.” While this subject is a bit outside the scope of this essay on poet’s theater, ecopoetics is consistent with the thrust of this essay. Each effort to transform a metaphor for poet’s theater across disciplines has to be carefully undertaken. Images arise in the mind from a breakdown in linguistic logic and hence are a biological outcome of uncertainty and problematic conditions. Poetry has long established this link to biology. And in some ways the obviousness of our effort increases its difficulty. A discussion of the differences between ecopoetics and my view of environmental poetics would focus on how ecopoetics presents a new nature poetry while environmental poetics focuses more on using natural methods to create innovative writing that may not have nature as the subject.

3. Of course, many recent writers (such as language poets) and scientists (such as those seeking to solve real world problems of turbulence) also address complex systems directly without simplifying to linear problems.

4. As an aside, considering how these imbalances work through the theory of complexity, we can see how nature uses similar structures at all scales of the environment, from a thought to a planet.

5. The impulse behind using set theory to talk about different disciplines comes from Atkin’s Multidimensional Man.

Works Cited

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Rowlands, Mark, “Environmental Epistemology.” Ethics & the Environment 10.2 (2005): 5-27. Print.
Skinner, Jonathan. “EcoPoetics Question Mark.” Message to the author. 1 Dec. 2009. Email.
Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Duke UP, 2003. Print.
Templeton, Fiona. “The Presence Project Interviews Fiona Templeton.” Interview by Gabriella Giannachi and Nick Kaye. The Presence Project. 24 May 2006. Web. 24 Oct. 2010.
———. “A Poetics of Performance Relevant to a Particular Definition of the Word.” Birkbeck College at Royal Holloway University, University of London. Apr. 2007. Talk and TS.
———. YOU—The City. New York: Roof, 1990. Print.

September 3, 2013

Performing Ketjak: The Theater of the Observed

Nasser S. Hussain (bio)
Leeds Metropolitan University
nassershussain@gmail.com

Abstract

This essay takes as its focus Ron Silliman’s 1978 marathon street-side reading of his long poem Ketjak in San Francisco, and examines the “special effects” of a poet’s theatre when it is extended beyond the physical and ideological boundaries of the traditional, contemporary poetry reading.

When in the spring of 2005 the moderators of the Buffalo Poetics listserv banned posting poetry to the board, poet Mairead Byrne asked, “How will you know it’s a poem and is there an honor code?”–an inquiry that points out the elusiveness of the poetic itself. In order to appreciate fully the thrust of her argument, it is necessary to reproduce her entire letter:

Dear Editors,

With regard to your recent decision that poems will no longer be allowed on the Poetics List, I realize you do not intend to address this matter further but I have a question. How will you know it’s a poem and is there an honor code?

For years I have been trying to free myself of conversation in favor of conversing only in poetry. I have made major strides towards this goal. I feel success is within my grasp. The answer is not to import found language into poetry but to send poetry out into everyday discourse like so many platelets or Frisbees or oases of calm government. To that end I have produced thousands of poems. I am close to having at least one for every eventuality. They can be quite subtle. Almost indistinguishable from real conversation (to me of course they are much realer than conversation, hence my endeavors to begin with).

How will you know if my messages are poems? How will you know they are not poems? Do you want me to self-declare? Do you want me to throw away years of work and start ham-fistedly attempting to communicate “normally” again?

What is the power of *about*? Why is it alright to talk *about* poetry but not alright to talk poetry? How will you know? What will you do?

Are there grey areas? Will you notice if too much attention is paid to spacing or a bit of alliteration creeps in? Even avoiding the obvious, what if a piece has all the devil-may-care casualness of prose but the bold gestalt heart of pure poetry? Even impure. Is your rule enforceable?

Why would you want it to be?

I will sign this so you know it’s not a poem. Next time I may be trickier. Or maybe I’m being really tricky now.

Mairead

(“How will you know”)

According to Byrne, her experiments have led her to a point where she can converse in poetry, rendering her poems “indistinguishable” from everyday conversation. Far from the hushed and sacred space of the poet’s reading, poems circulate, for Byrne, like vital “platelets” in the bloodstream. They are playful “frisbees” flung outward from the poet in the game of life. Considered as such, Byrne’s work in language (suddenly “poetry” seems too narrow a word) is an unrepeatable and continuous performance, a Heraclitean flow of utterance that is constantly dancing with and determined by the particularities of its context. For Byrne, poetry is a sustained and sustainable mode of being in the world, and not an occasional irruption of aesthetic language into an otherwise dull and alienated existence in which words exist as mere instruments, tools we use to chisel out our desires.

If we take Byrne at her word (and there is no reason not to), then the boundary between the poetic and the non- is not merely blurred, but dismissed utterly. There is no difference between the vernacular and the poetic: Wordsworth, Whitman, Eliot and O’Hara have all found their apotheosis here. We needn’t even look to Byrne’s published work, nor subject it to close reading or analysis in one of a hundred theoretical frameworks; rather, all we need to do is have a chat with the poet about any subject we wish, and in so doing, we will be bathed in a poem crafted for just the occasion, customized to work in that particular context. Such an attitude towards artistic production and reception resonates with much of the thought expressed in Continental European modernisms, inaugurated by the Futurists, and culminating in Marcel Duchamp’s readymade sculpture. This dynamic interplay between the average and the aesthetic came to the fore in North America in the 1950s with the Black Mountain experiments in performance, where events like the carnivalesque productions orchestrated by John Cage (like the “untitled event” that took place in 1952) formed the crucible from which sprang Allan Kaprow’s Happenings, Guerrilla theater, and the catalogue of Fluxus and Conceptual art in the last three decades of the twentieth century.

This is a brief sketch of a renegade band of practitioners in the history of sculpture, art and theater. Their exploits and repercussions have already been well documented.¹ Rather than retread these avenues, it is my concern in this essay to examine the point at which the theatrical avant-garde intersects with the poetic, specifically in the case of Ron Silliman’s public reading of his long poem Ketjak in 1978. Given Language poetry’s insistence on the material status of the word–those “language particles” that, when manipulated, result in “new aggregates of meaning,” which in turn allow for the perception of “(as yet unseen?) physical states of matter” (Coolidge 502)–it becomes possible to inquire into the activities that those language particles manifest in the world. Under the special circumstances of Language poetry, reading a poem is not simply a recitation or re-hearse-ing of the words on the page, but a loosing of matter into the plane of experience: it is a rare opportunity to watch language perform independently on the stage of everyday life.

One of the dominant critical tropes of Language poetry lies in the dialogic character of the work. Of Steve Benson’s early work in the 1970s, Geoff Ward writes that the poem (“As is”) “may be on permanent vacation from literature’s traditional functions,” and that the resultant hash of language–which mixes images of pubic hair, a freeway accident, unidentified shards of metal, dictionary definitions of “adjudicate,” and “treetop birds swing[ing] out from/ nylon hose flung out the window in mild abandon”–is Benson’s call to the reader to “sort it out – if you want to” (Ward 9-10). Language poetry teases the reader out of a passive readerly stance, and demands a more active approach to the invisible and assumed processes of interpreting words on a page. This is not to say that reading work other than Language poetry does not require such an “athletic” approach, but in the specific case of Language poetry, soliciting the reader’s participation is an explicit part of the work. The text is designed to achieve this effect as an end in itself. Silliman’s street rendition of Ketjak carries on this participatory dynamic, but transmutes it into a performance. In print, the Language poem challenges the aesthetic codes of reading; gone from the poem are the familiar markers of sustained narrative, meter, rhyme, and often (especially in the early Language experiments) words themselves, as the text explores the limits of “diminished” or blatantly “non-referential” language. When language’s obligation to represent an exterior reality transparently is thus abdicated, the reader becomes a co-conspirator in the production of meaning, and must improvise a series of responses to the text as it continually undercuts and complicates its status as a “representation.” In short, Language poems tend to foreground the experiential nature of reading, above and beyond any nominal content that may (or may not) appear in the work itself.

This much is clear: we are to read as though we are writers. But how, then, should we listen? Instinctively, we might hew to the traditional format for public performances of poetry:

A person stands alone in front of an audience, holding a text and speaking in an odd voice, too regular to be conversation, too intimate and too lacking in orotundity to be a speech or a lecture, too rough and personal to be theater. The speaker is making no attempt to conceal the text. Signs of auditory effort in the audience are momentarily lost in occasional laughter, tense silences, and even cries of encouragement. Sometimes the reader uses a different, more public voice and refers to what it is being read, or to some other information of apparent interest. No one talks to the reader. No one proposes a second take. No one reflexively discusses the ritual itself.

(Middleton, Distant 25)

This ritual is also the form preferred by the print poet, as a kind of advertisement for poetry disseminated via the “book tour.” (Margaret Atwood has even gone so far as to develop the LongPen, a device that allows her to avoid the tedium and effort of physically travelling to book readings, and instead allows her to autograph her fans’ copies from the comfort of her home.²) Anyone who has attended even a single such contemporary poetry reading will be immediately familiar with the milieu of silent reverence and repressed coughing that Middleton describes in the passage above. It is my sense that Middleton has isolated a kind of metanarrative built into the poetry reading itself. The subject of this metanarrative is not so much the structure of the poetry reading as it is the model it provides for the consumption of poetry: a blueprint for the audience members when they leave the event and “perform” the poem for themselves, silently, internally, and alone. The poetry reading is a metanarrative that provides the reader with an “insider’s” perspective on the poem; it points up the gravity of a specific line break, it gives the silent reader cues to the varieties of tone and voicing implicit in the words, and most importantly, it highlights an awareness that the poem on the page is being directed (always and already) at an audience, that is, the reader. In this sense, the poetry reading trains the audience to bifurcate itself, to be both the performer and the listener at the same time, to mime the “original” author’s initial performance of the poem for her own entertainment/edification/education later. The event of the poem performed by the author hovers over any subsequent interaction with the poem, informing its interpretation and reception.

This is not an unbreakable cycle, however. Current practitioners have reacted against the structural metanarrative of the poetry reading and its disabling corollary of trained consumerism, as we saw above in Mairead Byrne’s effort to actually talk poetry rather than talk about it. David Antin’s work since 1972 is one historical precedent for Byrne’s model. Essentially, Antin’s chosen form (the “talk-poem”) leverages the sacred space of the poetry reading and declares that, if the contemporary poetry reading is the space-for-poetry, then whatever is said on this platform must, by extension, be poetry.³ The collected body of Antin’s work, both in print and in performance, can be read as a sustained effort to answer the question that stands as the epigram to his first book, Talking: “If someone were to come up to you and start talking a poem at you, how would you know?” Like Byrne’s poetry for every situation, the act of talking (at least in the protected sphere of the “event” of an Antin performance) is co-extensive with poetry.

Somewhere between Middleton’s model and Byrne and Antin’s avant-garde interventions lies Ron Silliman’s performance of Ketjak in San Francisco in 1978. In a written reflection on his performance, Silliman succinctly summarizes “the act”: “On Saturday, September 16, 1978, between noon and 4:30 pm, I read, without amplification or intermission, the entirety of Ketjak, at the corner of Powell and Market streets in San Francisco” (“Reading” 195). A four and a half hour long performance might exhaust even the most avid connoisseur, but the simple reason for the amount of time required is the length of the text. Ketjak proceeds from its initial line whose duration is a single two word sentence–“Revolving door”–and roughly doubles the number of sentences per line until the twelfth line, which in its original printing appeared as a line “45 pages long, containing more than 10,000 words” (“Reading” 194). Not only does the poem double in length from one line to the next, but it maintains the order of sentences from line to line. The best way to describe this technique is to watch it happen in the poem directly. For instance, lines three and four of Ketjak read as follows:

Revolving door. Fountains of the financial district. Houseboats beached at the point of low tide, only to float again when the sunset is reflected in the water. A sequence of objects which to him appears to be a caravan of fellaheen, a circus, camels pulling wagons of bear cages, tamed ostriches in toy hats, begins a slow migration to the right vanishing point on the horizon line.

Revolving door. First flies of the summer. Fountains of the financial district spout. She was a unit in bum space, she was a damaged child. Dark brown houseboats beached at the point of low tide – men atop their cabin roofs, idle, play a Dobro, a jaw’s harp, a 12-string guitar – only to float again when the sunset is reflected in the water. I want the grey-blue grain of western summer. A cardboard box of wool sweaters on top of the bookcase to indicate Home. A sequence of objects, silhouettes, which to him appears to be a caravan of fellaheen, a circus, dromedaries pulling wagons bearing tiger cages, tamed ostriches in toy hats, begins a slow migration to the right vanishing point on the horizon line.

(Silliman, Age 3; my emphasis)

I have italicized the four “new” sentences in the fourth line to make clear the additions that Silliman has made, and to show that he maintains the order of the sentences that previously made up the third line. The sentences of the third line are (with minor adjustments) recognizably and sequentially preserved in the fourth line. This new line, now eight sentences long, is created by inserting sentences into the spaces between the sentences of the line previous. The fifth line will repeat this technique, and so on until the gargantuan twelfth line (which in the 2007 edition of the poem runs almost fifty pages in length).

One effect of this form on the reader is a constant renegotiation of the syllogistic connections among sentences. For instance, the sixth line of the poem ends with these two sentences: “Look at that room filled with fleshy babies. We ate them.” This “couplet” (so to speak) coerces the reader into imagining a horrifying tableau of cannibalism. But by the eighth line, now 108 sentences long, these same elements recombine into a different and disjunctive narrative and reads as follows:

Look at that room filled with fleshy babies, incubating. Points of transfer. A tall glass of tawny port. The shadows between the houses leave the earth cool and damp. A slick gaggle of ambassadors. We ate them.

(Silliman, Age 9)

Where earlier we ate the babies, now they incubate peacefully, removed by a distance of four sentences from our threatening teeth. In fact, several new “points of transfer” have been placed in our way, shuttling us between appreciating a glass of port, the space between two houses, and leading to the prospect of eating a “slick gaggle of ambassadors” (perhaps a bit more palatable menu than a room full of innocent cherubs, but disturbing nonetheless). As Barrett Watten observes, the text “makes for an evaluative mode of thinking – values of the sentences are revealed in how they interact with those around them” (271). But these subtleties are best available to the reader of the poem, and are accessible through a sustained act of scanning the text, all the while flipping back and forth in the book in order to register the shifts and consistencies between lines. They are also partially present to the listener, as the text echoes itself from line to line–however, as the lines grow and the interstitial additions from one line to the next grow in number, the real time that passes between the echoes might diminish the effect. Yet the “listener” that I have invoked is a very special person–she is a dedicated, knowledgeable and motivated audience member who has chosen to attend the “event” of Ketjak, and most likely brings with her a set of expectations (of varying levels of accuracy: she may find that this reading is entirely not what she expected at all, feel disappointed, and leave).

These are precisely the special category of listeners that Silliman attracted to his outdoor reading of Ketjak. In his report on the reading he writes:

A lesson I’d learned from a year’s work at the Tenderloin, which served well during the reading, is that psychotics & most street alcoholics respect an aggressive assertion of presence. Only one person tried to jam a toothbrush down my throat as I read.

I did want the presence of some support, not only for such contingencies as that & to combat the general alienation of any streetcorner speaker (I after all was hardly to see anything beyond the borders of my page), but because I intended the event as a communication to other poets, concerning their work as well as mine. I sent out a flyer & listed the reading in Poetry Flash.

(“Reading” 198)

In the cloistered space of the contemporary poetry reading, the poetic is readily and easily distinguished from the chatter and white noise that bookends the “event” itself. The presence of an emcee who “introduces” the speaker, a publicized starting time, dimming the lights–all of these are rituals designed to focus our attention on the specialized use of language that is, after all, the reason for gathering in the first place. Middleton writes elsewhere that the poetry reading is “awash” with precisely those “distracting noises” that are forbidden from, say, the cinema. This may appear contradictory, especially given the “ritualized” atmosphere of the contemporary reading that I described earlier. A gathering of film-goers for even the worst Hollywood dreck is ostensibly spared the conditions of the poetry reading, a scene endlessly compromised by “[p]oor acoustics, outdoor noise . . . comings and goings of drinkers, coughs due to poor ventilation, encouraging remarks and heckling, lack of sight-lines”–in short, a relatively poor forum for the appreciation of the spoken word (“How” 14). Middleton argues that there is a miniature drama being staged in the contemporary poetry reading, as poets in smoky loud bars all over the world raise their voices to be heard over the collective clinks of bartenders mixing drinks and the clatter of coins as they make change for a clientele immune to the charms of art. He calls it “a drama of poetry’s struggle against the conditions of a modernity that does not value poetry much alongside many other arts, especially those of advertising or with enormous commercial potential” (14). Up to a point, Middleton is accurate, and his interpretation of the poetry reading as a beleaguered art-form should be welcomed by those artists and audiences who labor for “poetry’s promotion to a position of importance” (14). But I am tempted to ask: why should poetry be so visibly and surgically separated from the rest of language? Would a model for poetry reading that resembles the kind of silent attention we give to productions “with enormous commercial potential” actually be a salutary state of affairs compared to Silliman’s street corner?

Silliman’s motivation for performing Ketjak on the street becomes quite clear. He writes that he intended

to give a typical poetry reading, a normal presentation of a text of unusual length. This required enabling (empowering) the audience to move freely, even to come & go, without disrupting the event. The architectural tradition of such readings tends toward enclosed sites of intimate dimension. While this might be ideal for most readings, it nevertheless imposes limitations which have nothing to do with the text itself. Like the so-called little magazine, most reading spaces militate for the short poem, the eminently discrete (& disposable) affective experience.

(“Reading” 195)

Just as the “little magazine” (and its attendant market) prohibits the production of long poems, so too does the typical (or “contemporary”) poetry reading impose a problem for the poet interested in the kinds of experience that only a longer form can provide. It is certainly possible for a short poem to relate (or represent) an experience that might take four hours of time, but it is an entirely different matter to live through four hours directly. In this manner, again, the poetry reading provides a blueprint with which we might (mistakenly) determine the poetic from the non-poetic; poems appear (both in print and in performance) as short, three minute bursts of specialized language, quick epiphanies that we can consume and just as quickly dispose of before moving on to the next. By pushing the poem out of the private theater of a silent reader, and beyond the relatively more public space of the poetry reading, and instead injecting it wholesale into the experience of everyday life, Silliman’s performance strikes at the heart of these issues. What is poetry meant to accomplish? Is the oral transmission of a poem finally degraded into nothing more than an advertisement for the author, or an instruction manual on how to read the poem without the aid of the author’s voice? Is a three-minute poem (or any “eminently disposable” chunk of time) long enough to say anything significant? And finally, what might poetry look like if loosed from the arbitrary physical and temporal limits of the contemporary poetry reading? Silliman proposes that the fragmented, disjunctive world-view produced by just such consumer-friendly snippets of poetry is actually subject to a much larger unity, one that takes into account the co-extensivity of language with the world that it names, but does not imagine that it can ever reach a point when the two comfortably and finally overlap. When Silliman writes that this particular performance was a “test of his own belief in [his own] work,” he is not only addressing contemporary critics, but he is also committing to a unification of the act of poetry to the life of the poet (“Reading” 198). Reading the entirety of Ketjak is a demonstration of the inseparability of the two, in a manner that Byrne and Antin might appreciate.

In the photo that accompanies Silliman’s report on the event, the poet is framed in a manner that makes the task of picking him out of the tableau, if not particularly difficult, at least inconvenient (see Fig. 1 below). At the left edge of the photo is a man shielding his eyes in a manner that might seem dramatic and “pronounced.”⁴ The Mickey Mouse balloon, clearly visible in the foreground, highlights the tourist and transient nature of the capitalist setting Silliman has chosen, a context inflected by a monolithic, highly commodified and easily consumable representation of “play.” The central figure of the photograph, the man with the flowers and rolled-up paper, striding through Silliman’s sphere, is a perfect encapsulation of what Silliman intended to accomplish with his performance: to expose the illusion of aesthetic experience as somehow transcendent by placing it in a context of everyday experience. The man with the flowers, unaware that he is being recorded in the moment of Silliman’s poem, functions exactly like any one of the sentences that make up Ketjak; he is physically “present” and thus connected to the entire mise en scène that is the event, but his trajectory and his relationship to the moment is at the same time separate and disconnected.

Click for larger view

Fig. 1.

Photograph by Alan Bernheimer. Used by permission.

If, as David Antin suggests in one of his talk-poems, we are always “standing somewhere […] in this semantic space,” then one corollary of his proposal would cast our bodies as linguistic units within the semantic landscape (tuning 119). The disjunctive relationship between Silliman’s sentence units is then a trope for how our bodies interact with one another in the world–rubbing shoulders, jostling in crowds, sidestepping one moment and impeding a fellow citizen the next, always with varying degrees of orientation as we navigate the ever-changing flux of human traffic. Silliman deploys his lines in a manner that cites reality rather than mimes it.

The tool Silliman uses to cut through representation and engage with “reality” more directly is the “New Sentence.” The New Sentence is the basic unit of Ketjak (and characteristic of Silliman’s poetry in general), and is his particular contribution to Language poetry. The need for a New Sentence in the first place is born from the shortcomings of writing under capitalism. In his essay “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World,” Silliman argues that

[w]hat happens when a language moves toward and passes into a capitalist stage of development is an anaesthetic transformation of the perceived tangibility of the word, with corresponding increases in its expository, descriptive and narrative capacities, preconditions for the invention of “realism,” the illusion of reality in capitalist thought.

(New Sentence 10; my emphasis)

Realism, “realistic,” “realist”–all such modes of representation in art (visual or verbal) are participating in a capitalist pattern. Capitalism effaces the human labor and materials that go into creating a “good” for the marketplace, and instead assigns value according to a process of fetishization. Commodity fetishes then operate to stratify society: for instance, by marking the people who can afford highly valued goods (regardless of the product’s functionality) as “upper” class, the fetishized consumer good somehow “represents” and references something authentic about its bearer in a highly codified but tacit discursive web that presents the illusion of an ordered world. Silliman posits that the same process applies in language. I do not wish to rehearse Silliman’s entire argument, but the following passage is worth consideration:

“Correct grammar,” which has never existed in spoken daily life save as a template, is itself thus predicated upon a model of “high” discourse . . . “Educated” speech imitates writing: the more “refined” the individual, the more likely their utterances will possess the characteristics of expository prose. The sentence, hypotactic and complete, was and still is an index of class in society.

(New Sentence 79)

In this sense a subject can possess language in the same manner that she can possess a consumer item, and the same illusory economy of reference will apply. Being able to speak “like a book” implies that the speaker belongs to a higher strata or order of society than does someone who cannot. The strategy for the avant-garde writer is now clear: she must write a book that doesn’t operate in an economy of reference, and cannot possibly operate as an index of class–a tactic that will liberate both parties (reader and writer) from the pitfalls of commodity fetishism.

Silliman claims that “[u]nder the sway of the commodity fetish, language itself appears to become transparent, a mere vessel for the transfer of ostensibly autonymous referents” (New Sentence 11). The model for his antidote comes from pre-literate cultures. He writes that

within tribal societies the individual has not been reduced to wage labor, nor does material life require the consumption of a vast number of commodities, objects created through the work of others. Language likewise has not yet been transformed into a system of commodities, nor subjected to a division of labor in its functions through which the signified overwhelms the signifier.

(New Sentence 11)

The main culprit in the fetishization and commodification of language, the form most responsible for diminishing the opacity and tangibility of language, is the realist novel, which delivers a “hypotactic and complete” worldview between its printed covers. Its arrangement of words

derives from the narrative epics of poetry, but moves toward a very different sense of form and organization. Exterior formal devices, such as rhyme and linebreak, diminish, and the structural units become the sentence and paragraph. In the place of external devices, which function to keep the reader’s or listener’s experience at least partly in the present, consuming the text, most fiction foregrounds the syllogistic leap, or integration above the level of the sentence, to create a fully referential tale.

(New Sentence 79)

In other words, the prose novel dissociates the reader from her presence in the act of reading by turning what was previously an external and tangible formal device into a system of internalized assumptions about the author’s intent: specifically, the assumption that the sentences being read, formed into paragraphs that integrate into the larger structures of the novel, are cohesive, coherent, and universally directed toward the overall monolithic (and highly ordered) “meaning” of the work. It is through the reader’s internalized faith in the hypotactic structure of the prose novel that “capitalism passes on its preferred reality through language itself to individual speakers” and readers as well (New Sentence 8).

In contrast, the New Sentence provides an antidote to the alienated reader, lulled into a false picture of reality-in-print. It makes the sentence itself an “exterior formal device” by limiting the syllogistic play between sentences to its immediate context. In his list of the eight qualities of the New Sentence, four are directly concerned with the dynamics of syllogism in print. The list is as follows:

1. The paragraph organizes the sentences;

2. The paragraph is a unit of quantity, not logic or argument;

3. Sentence length is a unit of measure;

4. Sentence structure is altered for torque, or increased polysemy/ambiguity;

5. Syllogistic movement is: (a) limited; (b) controlled;

6. Primary syllogistic movement is between the preceding and following sentences;

7. Secondary syllogistic movement is toward the paragraph as a whole, or the total work;

8. The limiting of syllogistic movement keeps the reader’s attention at or very close to the level of language, that is, most often at the sentence level or below.

(New Sentence 91)

Or, as fellow Language poet and theorist Bob Perelman writes, “[a] new sentence is more or less ordinary itself but gains its effect by being placed next to another sentence to which it bears tangential relevance” (61).

I have already discussed some of the formal properties of Ketjak, but the significance of Silliman’s New Sentence form requires elaboration. It is my argument here that the ordered (though modulated) repetition of sentences from one line to the next suggests a parallel relationship between sentences and subjects. The clue that has led me to this conclusion is coded in the title of the poem itself; Ketjak is not only the name for the poem that marked Silliman’s “adulthood as a writer” (Interview 255), but is also the umbrella term he has given to the very large output of poetry that he has produced and continues to write. In this sense, then, Ketjak includes The Age of Huts (compleat), the twenty-six books of The Alphabet, the book length poem Tjanting and his current work in progress, Universe. This entire stack of radical text is Ketjak, and as he admits in the preface to the 2007 edition, Silliman does have a penchant for “Russian-doll structure[s],” so it should come as no surprise (as well) that at the center/beginning of the project, we find a poem with the same name as the entire collection (Age ix). Now that Silliman has openly declared his super-title for the project, the time has come to explore the term Ketjak more closely.

A Ketjak (or ‘tjak, or Kechak) is a Balinese version of the Ramayana myth in the form of a ritualized dance, performed by troupes that can reach hundreds of members who replay part of an epic battle between the story’s hero, Rama, and the villain, Ravanna. R.K. Narayan’s prose translation of the Ramayana provides us with an interestingly “ordered” portrait of the evil Ravanna. In his court, where the “reigning gods…perform menial tasks,” each is left to employments that suit their particular skills. Vayu, the wind god, sweeps the floors clean with his breath; the god of fire is in charge of domestic illumination, and Death itself is enlisted to toll the passing hours of the day (Narayan 79). Ravanna’s court appears as a nearly perfect image of order. This might seem slightly at odds with Western invocations of the seat of evil (a tradition stretching from Milton’s portrait of Pandemonium in Paradise Lost to Hawthorne’s menacing and tangled forest in “Young Goodman Brown”), where disorder and chaos are the hallmarks of the demonic. The Ramayana neatly flips this dynamic on its head: to defeat the overly ordered Ravanna, Rama and the monkey horde invite and wield confusion as a weapon for justice. The ‘tjak performs this moment in the conflict when the monkey-god Hanuman enlists the help of a horde of monkeys to ward off Rama’s enemy (see this image of a ‘tjak). While the dance and chant retain many of the formal features of the original narrative, it has been decontextualized somewhat to serve now as a generalized rite of exorcism. As Walter Spies and Beryl de Zoete note, the aggressive and discordant sonic value of the chant is paralyzing to the rather straightforward demons against whom it is directed (“Indonesian”). The possessed subject, encircled by hundreds of chanters, all repeating the syllable “‘tjak!” eventually has the demon within driven out by the sheer noise of the chant.⁵ This is the source–combined with Steve Reich’s experiments with percussion and taped voices as well as an interest in the possibilities of “choral” arrangements in poetry–that led Silliman to write (and continue writing) Ketjak.⁶

The sentences in Ketjak are deployed in the same manner as dancers in a ‘tjak: each member of the crowd is “more or less ordinary” (a circumstance highlighted by their uniform dress), and they only achieve the goal of exorcism by sheer numbers (the bigger the horde of “monkeys” the more confusion they generate for the linear demon). The sentences of Ketjak hover between fixity and flow; the repeated sentences appear to move apart from one another, but their sequential relationship remains, by and large, intact.⁷ In the same fashion, adding more chanters to the ‘tjak would simply be a process of shouldering one’s way into the group, severing any previous contiguity between chanters while simultaneously establishing two new ones (that is, between the new chanter and the two people on either side of him) and all the while increasing the volume and confusion for the malevolent spirit. This much is clear in the mystical economy of the Balinese dance, but if we follow Silliman’s translation of dancers into sentences, what is being exorcised by Ketjak? The demon that is symbolically being driven out by Silliman’s sentences is the commodity fetish in language. Bruce Andrews and Charles Berstein’s comment is pertinent here: the “bothersome and confusing” insistence on a monolithic linguistic economy of one-to-one (word to thing) reference presents a world not unlike Ravanna’s court, where the gods perform their speciality over and over again, mere domestic instruments (ix). To the Language poet, forcing words into such narrow confines is tantamount to the same thing, leaving us in a world ruled by consumption rather than by creativity. Again, Ravanna’s court is best understood through Silliman’s notion of commodity fetishism in language: the moment when “the word – words – cease to be valued for what they are themselves but only for their properties as instrumentalities…so that words…disappear, become transparent, leaving the picture of a physical world the reader can consume as if it were a commodity” (Andrews and Bernstein x). When we replace “word” with “god” and “the reader” with “Ravanna” in the passage above, Silliman’s motivation for Ketjak comes into focus: if commodity fetishism is the malevolent spirit, then the possessed subject in need of purification by ‘tjak is language itself.

What is the nature of this purified subject, this restored language? If we assume that the demoniacally possessed subject is initially diagnosed by his penchant for linearity, then the healthy subject must, by extension, be comfortable in a crowd. Where the possessed reader would insist on a one-to-one exchange value in his linguistic economy, the exorcised reader is looser, less rigidly defined. He would be anonymous, multi-pronged, capable of coupling successfully with a variety of people, assemblages. He would be a nomad within himself, continuously in flux, “fitting in” only provisionally, as he goes. His personality, his fixity, his distinguishable singularity in the tribe would only ever be an effect (temporarily and repeatedly) produced by the context in which he finds himself. The successfully exorcised subject, then, is less about returning him to some essential, singular identity, and more about making him better able to deal with the polymorphousness of everyday life. So too with language. In the hands of the Langpoet, language becomes less referential (read: linear) and more experiential; the rebarbative effects of the poetry are meant to remind the reader of the essentially dis-organized nature of organic life. The possibility for confusions, multiple readings, and a lack of closure are not mere poetic innovations, but are fundamental features of existence as we directly experience it. Language poetry, in this sense, is realist. A contingent, environmental language.

This is the moment of the poet’s theater. We might cast Silliman’s reading in the terms of guerrilla theater, or draw parallels with Allan Kaprow’s Happenings, Fluxus, or any variety of site-specific works of performance art, but Ketjak carries a special valence. It dramatizes the presence of the poet and the poem in the world. Reading Ketjak is more than an advertisement for the poem and the author: it is a staging of the difficulties and successes of poetry-in-action. Steve Benson remarked in a review of Silliman’s performance that he was “reading the reading of his poem” (272), but if we take for granted the Langposition that casts the reader as a collaborator in the work, it is just as reasonable to see this event as a performance of the act of writing. Where the poem manages to grip some aspect of reality, those moments when the poem and the world overlap, when it fails or is ignored as the poem and the poet and the event itself all recede into the white noise of the marketplace in San Francisco–these are the special effects of a poet’s theater.⁸ In these poems and performances, we awaken, like Byrne, to the fact that poetry cannot and should not be bracketed away from the rest of life, relegated to an economy of representations and epiphanies, but is instead a form of art indistinguishable from life. The twelfth line of Ketjak, all fifty pages and ten thousand words of it, is an arbitrary stopping point. It is not the ending of a poem; it is a prolegomenon, an opening flourish that encodes a much larger gesture toward a literature that seeks to encompass a street corner, a city, a world. A theater of the observed.

Nasser Hussain is a lecturer in English Literature in the Department of Cultural Studies at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK. He has published articles on performance poetry and contemporary poetics and is currently working on a book project about American travel literature and narratives of passing.

Notes

1. The best survey on the topic of performance art and its history remains Rose Lee Goldberg’s Performance Art:From Futurism to the Present.

2. For a sense of the corporate face of this invention, see www.longpen.com, where the main argument in favour of this technology seems to be about reducing the carbon footprint of people who, rather ironically, depend on the forestry industry for the raw materials to produce their books in the first place.

3. One such moment is observable in Antin’s piece “how long is the present.” Here, the occasion is a performance at a book fair, and Antin indulges the audience expectation for a “reading” by opening one of his books and reading from it aloud. Of course, Antin closes the book after a few lines and says that what he’s done isn’t “reading” but “reciting” a pre-written text.

4. In a subsection of “Reading Ketjak” entitled “Lessons, If Any,” Silliman writes that in the process of reading the poem, his “physical movements became more pronounced” (199). While this may be true, it is interesting to note that in the shot, he appears to be in a traditional “reading” stance—holding the book open with both hands, head and eyes bent toward the open page (and it is also impossible to determine whether he is performing aloud or engaged in a silent, internalized act of reading)—while the man on the left edge looks more the part of the thespian.

5. Ironically, this is a tactic that even the US military have employed; to flush the dictator Manuel Noriega from the Vatican Embassy they played heavy metal and rock music incessantly until he surrendered. See Westcott’s “Is Noriega too hot to handle?”

6. For a dramatic staging of the Ketjak, see Ron Fricke’s 1992 film Baraka. Choreographically speaking, the dance is very organized, but sonically, apart from a rough call-and-response structure, the chant is certainly discordant to the point of frightening. These days, however, it seems that in the wake of Fricke’s film (although it is difficult to pin the blame solely on the director) the dance has become a popular tourist attraction, performed now in hotels as a kind of degraded indigenous dinner theater. In his interview with Sinda Gregory and Larry McCaffery, Silliman details Steve Reich’s influence and the possibilities of choral arrangements in writing (252).

7. The sole exception to the sequential arrangement that I have detected is the sentence “first flies of the summer,” which appears only in the fourth line of the poem, never to be repeated again—and I believe that by doing so, Silliman is enacting the brief life span of those flies, rather than, say, referring to it (AH 3).

8. Of course, the infinite particularities of the performance are lost to us, but Steve Benson observed at least one possible moment when a passerby might have thought that a particular line was addressed directly to her (272).

Works Cited

Andrews, Bruce and Charles Bernstein, eds. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1984. Print.
Antin, David. Talking. Champaign, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 2001. Print.
———. tuning. New York: New Directions, 1984. Print.
Baraka. Dir. Ron Fricke. MPI Home Video, 1992. Film.
Benson, Steve. “Ketjak in San Francisco.” Andrews and Bernstein. 270-71. 272-73.
Byrne, Mairead. “How will you know it’s a poem and is there an honor code?” Buffalo Poetics List. University of Buffalo, SUNY, 2 May 2005. Web. 3 May 2005.
Coolidge, Clark. “from A LETTER TO PAUL METCALF (jan 7 1972).” In the American Tree. Ed. Ron Silliman. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1986. 501-02. Print.
Goldberg, Rose Lee. Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present. London: Thames and Hudson, 1995. Print.
“Indonesian Ketjak.” Ubuweb Ethnopoetics: Soundings. UbuWeb, n. d. Web. 14 Sept. 2010.
Middleton, Peter. Distant Reading: Performance, Readership and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2005. Print.
———. “How to Read a Reading of a Written Poem.” Oral Tradition 20.1 (2005), 7-34. Print.
Narayan, R. K. The Ramayana. New York: Viking, 1972. Print.
Perelman, Bob. “Parataxis and Narrative: The New Sentence in Theory and Practice.” The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History. Princeton: Princeton UP 1996. 59-78. Print.
Silliman, Ron. The Age of Huts (compleat). Berkeley: U of California P, 2007. Print.
———. Interview. Alive and Writing: Interviews with American Authors of the 1980s. Eds. Sinda Gregory and Larry McCaffery. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1987. 240-56. Print.
———. The New Sentence. New York: Roof Books, 2003. Print.
———. “Reading Ketjak.” Eds. Ellen Zweig and Stephen Vincent. The Poetry Reading: a Contemporary Compendium on Language and Performance. San Francisco: Momo’s Press, 1981. 194-199. Print.
Ward, Geoff. Language Poetry and the American Avant-Garde. Keele: British Association for American Studies, 1993. Print.
Watten, Barrett. “Mohawk and Ketjak.” Andrews and Bernstein. 270-71.
Westcott, Kathryn. “Is Noriega too hot to handle?” BBC News. BBC, 6 Sept 2007. Web. 13 Sept 2010.

September 3, 2013

Carla Harryman’s Non/Representation and the Ethics of Dispersive Performance

Heidi R. Bean (bio)
Bridgewater State University
heidi.bean@bridgew.edu

Contemporary poet’s theater audiences might best be characterized by community rupture: each member experiences an individual identification in the collective space of the theater. This essay takes a closer look at this audience formation through the work of Carla Harryman, a poet-playwright associated with the San Francisco branch of what has become known as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing. Harryman’s 2008 work Mirror Play weaves together poetic experimentalism with references to the U.S.’s role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to the Gulf War, and to the 1968 campy intergalactic anti-war movie Barbarella. She employs poet’s theater conceptually as a means of rethinking our engagement with political narratives. The result is an interpretive “community” marked, paradoxically, by discontinuity and dispersion. Portraying an America defined not by physical borders but by complex military, economic, cultural, and political relationships, Harryman’s work plays through the ways in which these relationships are constructed and maintained. What emerges is not an interpretive free-for-all but rather an embodiment of the ethical dilemma in the postmodern era–the contradiction, as Geoffrey Galt Harpham puts it, between “How ought one to live?” and “What ought I to do?”, between generalizable norms and individual acts in actual (and unique) situations.

I live in a fabrication near something I have never said before.

–Carla Harryman, “Property”

In “The Ear of the Poet in the Mouth of the Performer,” an essay-play that works through the politics of poetry-performance in the post-9/11 U.S., Carla Harryman recalls a performance in which she participated in the early 1990s: the wearing of a pin designed by artist Daniel Davidson that bore the deceptively simple message “Iraqi.” Responses to Harryman’s wearing the pin oscillated between “largely friendly looks and pleasantly unanticipated conversations from mostly Arab immigrant and Arab American shopkeepers of various religions and nationalities,” and the confusion of “literal minded American types” who took the pin as a confession, as a “coming-out as Iraqi.” As a performance, wearing the pin was not simply a personal expression of solidarity; it was also a demonstration of the ways in which meaning can mutate in different contexts and for different audience members. Significantly, the power of the performance came just as often in the moments of confusion and misrecognition it created: while the Arabs and Arab-Americans in Harryman’s account may have gotten it “right,” the more “literal minded” observers too found ways of identifying with the performance, though not perhaps in expected or intended ways. Harryman recalls, for example, that one woman took the pin as “an invitation to exchange confidences, hers being that she had an excess of facial hair and that she was terrified that her husband would find out about it.” While the woman was mistaken in her assumption, the identification makes some sense to Harryman, who points out that in this interpretation both women “had something to hide until this private moment of mutual outing, even if I hadn’t been deliberately hiding something like she had” (“The Ear”). Although the woman was interpellated by the performance, the performer was not in control of that interpellation.

As wearer of the pin, Harryman felt a political responsibility to the responses it provoked. The purpose of the performance, she explains, was:

to diffuse the theater of war and to dramatize the real life conflations that lead to the targeting of Iraqi subjects as enemies. As a performer of the pin, one becomes responsible in a local context to major world events. The performer citizen engages in a dialogic meditation that exceeds the limits of conventional narrative and argumentation as she becomes aware of her personhood stripped of reductive theatrics and narratives of identity. As with much performance art of the 70’s, Davidson’s work is partly about the performer’s experience itself; and like the performance values of the modernist avant-garde, it assertively provokes a response to emerging states of affairs.

(“The Ear”)

The performer of the pin circulates, but is not in control of, the meanings of language already embedded in social and political narratives. In this sense, I would argue not that the performer’s “personhood [is] stripped of . . . narratives of identity,” as Harryman puts it, but rather that the pin clasps the performer to already-circulating narratives, which may then be embraced or rejected, identified or disidentified with. Harryman is wearing not a pin that states “I claim solidarity with Iraqi victims of war,” which would be a speech-like assertion of her political beliefs and identity–a self-narration–but rather a pin that appears to declare an identity that is not self-evident. In order to make sense of the pin, observers must interpret it within the range of their own experiences and understandings. And in subsequently interacting with the performer, they project those identifications onto her body in social exchange, thereby enacting new narratives. The performance event therefore takes place in the interaction between the performer and the audience, or, perhaps more accurately, in what the audience does with the performance. The wearing of the Iraqi pin is a speech act with unpredictable effects, and in this sense, both Harryman and her observers become performers of its meaning. Harryman’s role in the performance is one of responsibility to her interlocutors, but it is, in some respects, a non-normative responsibility carried out as listening generously to and considering a range of possible identifications. While she mobilizes the structures, Harryman does not lead the interpretations. And although she hints that the Arab and Arab-American observers got it right, she does not accuse others of getting it “wrong,” but rather of getting it different. In wearing the pin, the performer becomes responsible to this difference.

Significantly, the performance must remain peripatetic in order to succeed, since success relies on individual responses not subject to the social pressure of the collective space of the theater. One of the ways Harryman tries to retain this peripatetic quality in the space of the theater is to construct a dispersive theater in which meaning is allowed to oscillate rather than being tied to a single correct interpretation. The oscillation of meaning, Una Chaudhuri reminds us, is “an open space or aporia in the political ‘known’”–the space of revolution (163). Harryman suggests that the ear of the poet is tuned to the oscillation, and in her poet’s theater, it is the job of the performer to keep this oscillation alive. In “The Ear of the Poet,” for example, Harryman juxtaposes the discussion of the Iraqi pin performance with an excerpt from a Gertrude Stein play, leaving the audience to interpret for themselves the relationship between the pieces. While Harryman acknowledges that “the discussion [of the Iraqi pin performance] preceding the extract from [Stein’s] play would infect the semantic meaning of [Stein’s] work–an inference would be brought forth that at this present moment a poet behind a locked door, a no longer living poet, Iraqi, and people are connected and that there is a simultaneity made between the word ‘Iraqi’ in my exposition and the word ‘people’ in Stein’s play”, this is not the “right” or even intended interpretation but rather the result of habituated interpretive practices themselves. Dispersive theater places under scrutiny both the structure of interpretive practices and the very impulse to interpret. The space of dispersive theater is therefore an ethical space; it is a space “where thought itself experiences an obligation to form a relation with its other–not only other thoughts but other-than-thought” (Harpham 37).

I discuss this example here at length because it offers a relatively self-contained way into thinking about some of the strategies and preoccupations of Harryman’s poet’s theater, which is both like and unlike Davidson’s performance art piece. Harryman’s use of Davidson as an element in her own essay-play demonstrates her ongoing engagement with intertextuality, hybrid genre, and art as/and analytic discourse, but she also uses Davidson to think through her own artistic practice. Davidson represents the use of performance not merely as a provisional testing ground in moments of impasse,¹ but as a permanently provisional space, “one that in part fulfills an open-ended, non-objective mobile role that is exploratory, improvisatory, and that takes language as a medium as seriously as it does the other mediums of innovative theater that have superseded language” (“The Ear”). Like Davidson, Harryman is interested both in the relationship of narrative to non-narrative and in the way this relationship figures and is figured by physical bodies. Also like Davidson, much of Harryman’s performance is conceptual, though it is usually written as scripted dramatic theater. Moreover, as Harryman’s own commentary above makes clear, in recent years, she too has become interested in the social and political consequences of her artistic experiments. For Harryman, this shift in interest from her own “art activity and its genre excesses” to something else not clearly identified but characterized by “a loss of a sense of form-desire” is precipitated by U.S. militarization against Iraq as a response to 9/11. Viewed through this prism of art-activism, Harryman’s poet’s theater becomes, like the wearing of the Iraqi pin, “a kind of homework assignment” that allows both artist and audience to think through their relationships to form, media, discourse, embodiment, and identity (“The Ear”). Harryman’s discussion of the Iraqi pin project reveals the ways in which discursive conventions and performing subjects sometimes collide and sometimes collaborate. What Harryman demonstrates is that the real and the symbolic are not locked in a unidirectional relationship of mediation, but rather that they influence each other and this influence is site-specific. The Iraqi pin performance, Harryman’s plays, and indeed poet’s theater in general investigates the uses to which meanings are put. While such an investigation recognizes that language is neither stable nor univocal, this recognition is not its conclusion but rather its jumping-off point. Poet’s theater is not therefore deconstructive, as much as it relies on a deconstructive understanding of language.

Asking what comes first, the poetry or the theater, narrative or non-narrative, subject or object, muscle or skeleton, Harryman muses, “I would prefer to emphasize the skeleton. I would prefer the movement to be the movement of the muscles lifted by the skeleton. When the muscles are not lifted by the skeleton they become athletic. One becomes aggressive and competitive. The theater becomes a theater of conflict. And somebody has to win” (“The Ear”). While I want to be careful not to tie Harryman’s ideas down to a simple metaphor, part of what she is suggesting here is that bodies are inseparable from the social forces that animate them. While both muscles and skeleton are components of bodies, they serve distinct but overlapping purposes: one mainly structure, the other mainly force. An illustration accompanying the essay depicts a knife held between teeth and lips, a cooperation of skeleton and muscle that can be read, simultaneously, as both defensive and aggressive. This is a depiction not of an oral weapon but of an aural weapon, both spoken and heard, suggested by the ear-in-the-mouth of the work’s title. In the historical moment of the post-9/11 U.S. “War on Terror,” Harryman implies, muscle-force has been recruited into insidious service, sculpting language and narrative into weapons of social conflict. Yet just as both muscles and skeleton are necessary to movement, so narrative is necessary to communication. The solution, Harryman writes in “Toy Boats,” is “to distribute narrative rather than deny it” (107).

Language Poetry, Poet’s Theater, and the Body

Harryman’s theater practice grows in part out of her participation in the Bay Area poetry community commonly known as “Language” writers, many of whom rework narrative as a political principle. One of the tactics of Language writing is to foreground the conventionalized function of the “I” and of other narrative tools. Such tools mark relationships of location, antagonism, causality, intention, and emphasis and “provide the illusion of movement, direction and location for the reader,” Michael Davidson points out, “but when they lose their indexical function, they point at the conventionalized nature of writing itself” (79). When “I” tell a story from memory, who is the “I” that speaks, and who is the “I” that is spoken of? What is the overlap between the two and in what way does each help to constitute the other? Bringing these questions into the space of embodied performance, Harryman puts further pressure on the conventionalized function of linguistic markers as indicators of identity presumed to be natural.

Harryman’s Memory Play (1994) explores the narrative and performative construction of the “I” via memory, played out differently by the play’s three main characters, Pelican, Fish, and Reptile:

Reptile:

If I tell you one thing that I remember, you will think I’m an idiot for remembering only one thing. This is one thing that makes theater different from real conversation. If I provide you with several of my most esteemed memories, you will probably believe there are more where those came from, and I will have earned your respect. This will make theater a little more like real conversation.

Pelican:

I have a job and it is virtually all I can think about; however, I think this: memory is nothing but words stored up in an inefficient computer. What you will remember of this conversation will be nothing like what went into its construction. Such understanding promotes success in business.

……………………………………………………………………………….

Fish:

I had suffered for a long time from the illusion that remembering inhibited one’s experience. Now the illusion is almost my only memory. . . . [Later,] I will remember something else and not this. I will have forgotten the story to which I currently refer. Each person has his or her own theater. I propose this as an exhibit or a symptom of my personal stage.

(7-8)

Reptile is a chameleon, disguising himself in the camouflage of social discourse. And yet his disguise is not aimed at deception. Although Reptile suggests that whether or not we are respected or maligned depends on the strength of our (storytelling/conversational) performance, he seems to move beyond Erving Goffman’s notion of impression management to suggest that social discourse is all the truth there is.² Pelican, on the other hand, focuses on the misinformation that occurs between what one says and what another hears, and promotes a notion of performance as information processing, mechanical and morally indifferent. Meanwhile, Fish appears to recognize the necessary relationship between discourse (remembering) and experience while at the same time acknowledging that the back story of identity is often forgotten, that identity is assumed without realizing what that identity is built upon. Fish might be taken as an example of contemporary performance studies’ notions of identity and performance: while we may understand that identity is performative, we experience it as natural. Despite their differences, what Reptile, Pelican, and Fish share is a notion of memory as performative, produced by and in narrative.

Memory relies, then, on the doubling of creative narrative and social discourse, a doppelgänger which first appears in the stage directions with which the prologue opens: “A bedtime story/conversation in a little tent town out in the salt flats” (7). What one first notices about this direction is its generic ambivalence. While there would be little difficulty producing the visual elements of such a scenic design in performance (a small tent town, salt flats, bedtime), how would the difference-and-sameness indicated by the phrase “story/conversation” be performed? The slash is itself a radically textual performance that suggests the imbrication of social discourse with storytelling, with narrative, and indeed this relationship is the play’s central investigation. W. B. Worthen has argued that “modern drama in print typically frames a dialectical tension between the proprieties of the page and the identities of drama” (62). Harryman’s slash turns this page-stage tension outward, toward social life. Art (story) is different from, but inextricably bound to, social discourse (conversation). Storytelling is both oral and literary art. Harryman’s printed play alludes to the chiasmus of literary textuality and social discourse by putting the play’s status–as literary artifact, as embodied performance–into question. While Harryman makes use of what Worthen has called the “accessories” of modernist dramatic publication–“page design, typography, act and scene numbering, speech prefixes, and stage directions” (13)–she does not do so in order to control the stage performance from the page. Despite Chris Stroffolino’s assertion that Memory Play “works at least as well as a closet drama as it does in theater performance,” the page and stage versions of the play are not correspondent but collaborative, together investigating the performativity of memory (177). While each version can of course stand on its own, the play’s textual-theatrical ambivalence proliferates its identity across genres and across forms of reproduction, undermining the final authority of any single version.

In bringing the language of the text out into the space of performance–performing “as language event the fluidity between public and psychological spaces,” as Harryman puts it (“Site” 158)–her plays investigate the social activities of language within a context of actual human relations, of the audience members and performers within a specific social space (that of the performance at a particular moment in time) and in relation to specific objects. Language writing on the page explores language in individual interaction with readers, while the performance of Language writing in poetry readings is bounded by the conventions of a touring authorial performance that rhetorically position the event (albeit falsely) as site- and audience-nonspecific, if not actually transcendent. In contrast to this, Harryman’s poet’s theater emphasizes embodied identities at the same time it deconstructs them. These identities are not incidental, and they are not nonspecific; rather, they are fluid. The character list of Harryman’s play Performing Objects Stationed in The Sub World, for example, specifies a “White woman,” “Child,” and “Black man,” but the author’s notes for performance explain that “[t]he categories of gender and ethnicity are mutable in this play, based on whatever circumstance of the performance” (qtd in “Site” 158). This is accomplished in part by having multiple actors play each character but also by leaving the gap between character and actor visible: “For instance C3, the Black Man, reads the newspaper but that doesn’t mean that C3 becomes a Black Man who reads the newspaper, but rather C3 performs a reading of the newspaper: his identity or identities such that it is or they are, migrates through activities” (“Site” 162). In this way, the objects with which the actors interact “do not serve as extensions or illustrations of subjectivity nor do they appear with autonomous luminosity”; instead, they are “constitutive of an instability of social encounters and uncertain boundaries between interior fantasy and exterior fact, whether they are sentient or inert” (162). This does not, however, preclude psychological depth. Rather, characters are defined not by the moral challenges they face but rather by the communication they perform and are performed by.

In Memory Play, the playing through of multiple discursive and gestural registers in the formation of identity drives the action. As bodies and spoken language self-consciously jostle one another in performance, the relationship between discourse, identity, and embodiment takes center stage. Reptile’s lines quoted above appear to interpellate audience members into a self-conscious suspension of disbelief: he explicitly acknowledges our tacit agreement to let one memory in “art” stand in for the multiple memories of “real” conversation.³ In art, he suggests, a single story or image (memory) can take on a variety of symbolisms and resonances; in conversation, however, we may question such overdetermination of a single moment in one’s life. But the “I” who speaks this line is shifty, posing as a social interlocutor and literary-dramatic character simultaneously. On the page, Reptile’s “I” seems to remain consistent, a distant observer of the relationship between theater and conversation. Spoken by an actor onstage, however, the “I” oscillates between actor and dramatic character. Is this line a rehearsed but direct address to the audience by an actor who will soon become a character in the play, or is the actor already in character? And how does this ambiguity position audience members in relation to the play?

This last question raises the issue of what poet Joan Retallack has called “reciprocal alterity,” which she conceptualizes as an equilibrium between, on the one hand, the “ethical and epistemological destabilizing principle” that we are never fully knowable to one another or to ourselves and, on the other, community, receptivity, and intention (5). Is the “I,” who–according to Reptile–can earn “your” respect, a “fictional” character or a “real” actor? Either way, of course, the “I” is a construction based in part on the speaker’s performance and in part on the audience’s conclusions in relation to that performance–making both intention and reception important matters to consider. The construction is simultaneously grammatical and epistemological, since pronouns are a necessary part of communication despite their radical insufficiency and contingency. Pronouns suggest independent subjectivity, and in doing so contribute to a model of individualism. In order to “move away from models of cultural and political agency lodged in isolated heroic acts and simplistic notions of cause and effect,” as Retallack urges, we must therefore think through our tools of communication at their most basic level (3). Both Retallack and Harryman propose “a fine new kind of realism,” to quote William James’s remark in a letter to Gertrude Stein about her writing (qtd. Mellow 147). Retallack approaches this version of realism by appealing to the essay form, because, she argues, the essay writes from the position of an “I” understood as selfsame, whereas the lyric “I” of poetry is already understood to be a persona. The theater, however, presents an unusually apt arena for an investigation of representation, for the presence of bodies on stage always simultaneously evokes both the characters being portrayed and the actors “themselves.”

If the Humanities have emerged from the “turn to language” only to enter the “turn to the visual,”⁴ then Harryman’s work provides an apt vehicle for exploring our negotiations of these turns. Language writing arose simultaneously with the rise of linguistic theory in the 1970s, and the relationship between the two has always been seen as collaborative–Language writing as theory. Some saw Language writing as the perfect object of the new theory and saw developments in theory as supporting the sense that Language writing had a cognitive and social use. But not everyone agreed on the role of theory in Language writing.⁵ In There Is Nothing Better Than a Theory (given its first full performance in 1989), Harryman satirizes what she sees as a tendency toward theory fetishism. In Memory Play she similarly pokes fun at theory’s drive to dominate, this time in the figure of a child’s toy, humorously named the Miltonic Humiliator. Meanwhile, recent productions of Mirror Play seem to indict theory as the production of knowledge removed from lived experience; in debates about representation and gender, the body becomes the vanishing point of theory.

Although San Francisco poet’s theater emerged along with what has become known as “Language” writing, it has not figured into those historical accounts until recently.⁶ Nick Robinson and Eileen Corder founded the San Francisco Poets Theater (SFPT) in 1979, and by the time the final SFPT play was produced in 1984, nearly a dozen plays had been produced, involving a wide range of “Language” and associated poets in a variety of roles (from playwright, actor, set designer, and director to publicist and poster/program designer), including Harryman, Corder, Nick Robinson, Kit Robinson, Steve Benson, Alan Bernheimer, Johanna Drucker, Lyn Hejinian, Tom Mandel, and Bob Perelman, among others.⁷ While some of these play texts have been published (almost exclusively in small journals), there are virtually no sustained examinations, let alone theorizations, of this performance work.⁸

One of the reasons for this neglect has to do with Language writing’s almost exclusive focus, in the 1970s and 80s, on material textuality. In a 1986 review of Harryman’s Percentage and Property, for example, Jean Day explains the dramatic form of these hybrid works metaphorically, as a theatrum mundi in which “‘We’ are acting out aspects of a common drama through language, not just in the sense that we’re using the same tools, but in the sense that it is language which makes the private public, makes the passion of the revolutionary charge” (120-121, emphasis in original). Steve Benson–Harryman’s close friend, fellow performer, and frequent theater collaborator–refers to the published text of Harryman’s play La Quotidienne as “the play itself,” folding the entire work under an umbrella of textual interpretation when he argues that “[t]he lack of any stable context or prescribed behavior indicates no means or property other than discourse by which the figures can gain leverage in the struggles for authority and autonomy” (24, 23). Focusing exclusively on discourse, such an interpretation ignores the ways in which the actor-characters give the play’s figures an authority and autonomy outside of discourse, in the presence of live bodies on stage.⁹ Similarly, in an essay published in Poetics Journal, Alan Bernheimer suggests that poet’s theater consists of works “written towards production . . . work[s] with then two lives to lead, one self-evident and the other potential” (70). But what is “self-evident” about a poet’s theater text like Memory Play? Bernheimer sees words as agents, which “[l]eft to their own devices . . . tell stories by themselves, resolute (resonant in the evolving history of their use)” (70), but of course it is this latter assertion–that words are “resonant in the evolving history of their use”–that points out the falsehood of the former suggestion that words have their own agency, for the “stories” of words are constituted in their social use. Certainly, unintended meanings and histories can (and often do) arise when we use language, but to characterize this as an act of words “by themselves” obscures the ways in which meaning both constitutes and is constituted by bodies and embodied identities both on the stage and in social exchange.

Acknowledging the work of Language poets such as Ron Silliman, Bob Perelman, and Charles Bernstein, who engage the performativity of material language, Worthen too considers this work as a textual phenomenon, interesting for its similarities to printed drama (which the title of his last chapter suggests is “something like poetry”) but not engaged as drama or theater. But Worthen’s discussion of anti-theatricality in both poetry and theater is an important step in opening the relationship between two fields normally considered to have very little overlap. Most significantly for my purposes here, Worthen observes that

the materiality of the mise-en-page, the precise construction of printed words in space, does not operate as a kind of stage direction, an authorized and authoritarian effort to govern subsequent performance (though some authors may intend it that way), nor is it complete in itself, a container or “can” of perfected meanings waiting to be emptied by performance. Instead, Language poetics implies the incommensurability of these two modes of writing’s “thickness.” The poem’s physical design on the page, and its physicalized performance cannot be collapsed into one another so that the script grounds the performance or the performance realizes the script. . . . Language poetics reframes the page as a distinctive field of play, insisting that words can and must be joined in ways beyond the habits of conventional speech.

(138)

Indeed, in “Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry: A Manifesto,” a collaborative essay on the political and aesthetic practices of Language writing, Ron Silliman, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Steve Benson, Bob Perelman, and Barrett Watten critique the expressivist lyric, institutionalized in literary and creative writing programs in the U.S., as responsible for “the scenario of disinterested critical evaluation reinforcing the alleged moral autonomy of the poem” (269).¹⁰

In the last few years, however, the infiltration of performance studies into literature departments has sparked a more performance-oriented interest in hybrid works such as Harryman’s. In the first five months of 2008, Harryman’s play Third Man was staged in San Francisco as part of a SFPT retrospective,¹¹Memory Play was produced in Chicago with the support of the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, and a weekend of poet’s theater plays directed by Harryman, including her own Mirror Play, Frank O’Hara’s Try! Try! and an adaptation from Barrett Watten’s Bad History, was presented in Chicago as part of a festival of poet’s theater.¹² During this same period, The Grand Piano series–subtitled an “experiment in collective autobiography” and documenting the rise of Language writing in San Francisco–has begun to present Harryman’s work in particular and poet’s theater in general as a fundamental part of the history of Language writing.¹³

Harryman’s theater adds to Language writing a consideration of how the presence of bodies affects our understanding of language politics, particularly in the different ways language and bodies mark a threshold in interrelated processes of speaking, enacting, and knowing. It may be helpful here to recall Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptualization of the body as a kind of “living memory pad” onto and via which not only behaviors but also beliefs and values are inscribed; childhood learning leads to a kind of automatically enacted belief that is not a state of mind but rather “a state of the body” (68). As practical sense becomes naturalized, the source of the practices becomes obscured; “It is because agents never know completely what they are doing,” Bourdieu argues, “that what they do has more sense than they know” (69). But whereas for Bourdieu acting and theater become ways of recalling these automated, naturalized thoughts and feelings,¹⁴ Harryman sees theater as a means of defamiliarizing the social ideologies inscribed onto bodies–ideologies that, for Bourdieu, are obscured by time and naturalization and that, for Judith Butler, must frequently be denied in the necessary construction of subjective autonomy (26).

Poet’s theater is a collaborative performance between generative language and physical gesturality that can help us understand the complex linguistic and embodied performativities that constitute and materialize identity. Gesture is a bodily act that, in the realm of the social, becomes a sign of communication. Martin Puchner, who has written thoughtfully on arrested movement in modernist drama, describes gesture as “the praxis and labor that go into the production of language and linguistic communication, the labor that is more or less erased in the finished, linguistic product” (28). Isolated and disjointed, individual gestures can only be amassed into an aggregate rather than organically connected into a whole.¹⁵ Puchner notes that both Nietzche and Adorno maligned gesturality as that which prevents actors on stage from presenting organic wholes.¹⁶ Postmodernism’s valorization of the aggregate, however, offers a new kind of pro-theatricalism that celebrates precisely the gesturality disavowed by these theorists of modernism. Harryman’s theater embraces the aggregative quality of gesture by using denaturalized acting to create paratactic (rather than syntactic or hypotactic) structures. In rehearsal for a 2008 production of Memory Play,¹⁷ for example, the actor playing Fish needed help slowing down her speech, so she was given an activity to perform: writing a note on a piece of paper. This practical solution to an acting problem soon became an interpretive issue, however. What should the actors then do with the note? Director Catharine Sullivan wanted Fish to hand the note to Child, but Harryman (who was present at rehearsals) was adamant that this was not possible, presumably because it transformed the activity of note-writing into the narrative gesture of passing on instructions. In the end, it was agreed that Pelican would intercept the note without (oral or gestural) comment. In preventing the note-writing gesture from cohering into narrative meaning, Harryman and Sullivan created a paratactic structure–one gesture and another gesture and another gesture that do not bear any clear narrative relationship to one another. At the same time, Sullivan and Harryman’s disagreement over what to do next demonstrates the tendency of aggregating gestures to cohere into character identity and narrative meaning.

As an embodied act with the potential for social meaning, gesture both is and isn’t language.¹⁸ Gesture reaches simultaneously inward toward the construction of subjectivity and outward toward the construction of social identity, but it also relies on bodily impulse, understood within a system of discourse but not reducible to it. As both being and representation, gesture reveals what Peggy Phelan has called the body’s metonymic relationship to the subject. While the real exceeds representation, representation also exceeds the real. The identity produced in and through this reciprocal excess is not only a marker, Phelan argues, but an ethics:

Identity emerges in the failure of the body to express being fully and the failure of the signifier to convey meaning exactly. Identity is perceptible only through a relation to another–which is to say, it is a form of both resisting and claiming the other, declaring the boundary where the self diverges from and merges with the other. In that declaration of identity and identification, there is always loss, the loss of not-being the other and yet remaining dependent on that other for self-seeing, self-being.
(13)

In denying narrative coherence to Fish’s note-writing gesture, the production of Memory Play discussed above places the burden of meaning on audience members themselves. What the body does and what it means do not perfectly correspond. Making meaning out of a gesture necessarily involves a merging of interpreter and interpreted, of self and other. Harryman, like Phelan, is interested in the relationship of representation to being, a relationship she investigates via a strategy she characterizes as “non/narrative” when performed in prose, and which we might modify as “non/representation” in theater. As in Memory Play‘s play of “story/conversation,” the slash here indicates not an opposition but an imbrication of two modes.

Mimesis and Misrecognition in Mirror Play

Harryman’s latest performance work, Mirror Play, revolves around violence perpetrated by nations against other nations or against (its own or other) individuals. Divided into four acts, a prologue, and an epilogue (all appearing in reverse order) but without stage directions or speech prefixes, the stage performance differs widely from production to production. What remains consistent, however, is a web of political and social references–for example, media portrayals of Rachel Corrie, the American peace activist killed defending a Palestinian house against U.S.-built bulldozers operated by the Israeli Defense Forces; images from the second Gulf War of U.S. soldiers raiding Iraqi tombs and Iraqis’ own destruction of Iraqi cultural artifacts; and the 1968 campy intergalactic anti-war movie Barbarella, whose star Jane Fonda was transformed in the 1970s from GI pinup girl to despised anti-war activist and then again in the 1980s to aerobic video icon. Mirror Play portrays an America defined not by physical borders but by complex military, economic, cultural, and political relationships, playing through the ways in which these relationships are constructed and maintained. The play is both radically textual and radically gestural, using paratactic gesture and language as well as architectural space not to reflect the interiority of the subject but rather to help constitute and figure it. In this sense, Mirror Play represents a broad shift in thinking from the concept of an individual subject, seen as a self-sufficient and independent whole, to the concept of the social subject, in which the social (exterior) is a necessary and mutable circumstance of subject constitution (interior). Throughout the play, “wholes”–words, characters, clothes, rooms–are revealed as mere resting points in the ongoing process of meaning-making. What is simultaneously difficult and hopeful about this piece is that it dares to imagine a politics (or ethics) for those who are produced in and by narrative. Mirror Play does not simply reveal or reflect this condition of narrativity; it tries to think a way that we might be active within this condition rather than merely subject to it.

The play opens, in one version (see Fig. 1 below),¹⁹ with a simple image of homey domesticity–clothes hanging on a line, blowing in the wind–portrayed entirely in language: “Flying. Clothes flying. Sleeves wrapping / around clouds, cinching them in, dragging / them” (178).²⁰

Scene from Mirror Play by Carla Harryman, with Jon Raskin, John Olson, Roham Shaikhani, Elana Elyce, Abbas Bazzi, Mary Byrnes, and Wolanda Lewis. Directed by Jim Cave and performed at the Susanne Hilberry Gallery in Ferndale, Michigan, August 14, 2005. Filmed by Asa Watten. Used by permission.

Click to view video

The empty clothes are both human products and human forms, registering simultaneously the presence and absence of human beings themselves. As the sleeves first “wrap” around clouds, then “cinch,” and finally “drag” them, the clothes imply a kind of “domestic” violence, most clearly perhaps a reference to the Clothesline Project, which protests against, and memorializes the victims of a private kind of “domestic” violence against women. But it is also perhaps a reference to that which inspired the Clothesline Project: the AIDS Quilt, originally created to memorialize the victims of AIDS and to protest against their neglect by American society and history. As theater and performance critic Elinor Fuchs has pointed out, participant-created AIDS quilts, in their jumbling of Jews, Catholics, Muslims, and New Age Buddhists with sequins, flags, prayers, a measuring spoon, and much more, perform a postmodern breakdown of master narratives–in direct contrast to the hero memorials of “modern imperial politics” (195-196).²¹ Significantly, in the Detroit production directed by Jim Cave,²² no flying shirts are visually present on stage (see Fig. 1 above); rather, they’re represented as artifacts of language, drawing attention to the ways in which narrative has been inscribed on bodies even to the point of replacing them altogether (as one speaker says in Mirror Play, “Images are crowding. Crowding us out” [207]). If the shirts had been physically represented or staged they might simply have performed an iconic function, but because they are described in language–a reference to a reference–the very textuality of the representation creates not a destruction of visual representation but a recognition of the very condition of representation.

Despite the lack of narrative through-line, the play achieves continuity both by taking as its central focus the investigation of the conditions of representation and by returning again and again to key words and images. Cycling back to the image of clothing after several pages, for example, the text meditates on the perspective created by choosing some descriptors over others:

…This scheme
Imagines clothing in terms of whole or
complete entities: a shirt, a hat, a shoe, etc.
So there is still much that it cannot describe.
For instance, in the great outdoors, the
clothes rot and decompose. Birds pull at
their threads. The threads mingle with other
things. The thread is no longer a discrete
thing but part of a unit for which there is no
name until the nest is complete. Then the
unit is a nest. I wear a sleeve on my heart.
Note this also. And other harmless events.
(note)
(note)

echo makes a note (192)

To imagine clothing as a finished object–rather than as a composite of that which went into its making or as decomposed parts to be used in the making of other objects–is, the text asserts, a “scheme” rather than an inevitability. If the object that is no-longer-a-shirt-and-not-yet-a-nest has no name, it becomes subjugated, merely a stage in the creation of an “actual” object and meaningless except in relation to the end product (recalling Puchner’s definition of gesture above).

From this cluster of images and lines, organized thematically around the impact of language use on conceptual thinking (which is hardly “harmless”), the text suddenly shifts paratactically to a reordered cliché–“I wear a sleeve on my heart”–with no apparent relation to the previous lines. One way a reader might approach this shift is simply to give in to the experience of abrupt change, with no attempt to impose meaning. Habituated reading practices are more likely, however, to coerce a meaningful connection. Is this sentence perhaps another example of language that privileges object over process? What is the relationship of the “I” to the objects (clothing, nest) that came before? And what do we make of the shift in tone from material objects such as shirts, hats, threads, and nests, to symbolic objects, such as a heart and, now, sleeve (which can be worn on a heart only metaphorically)? A nest made out of threads is a home (a physical place) and home is where the heart is (a symbolic place). Emotional vulnerability (wearing one’s heart on one’s sleeve) is replaced with emotional self-preservation (wearing a sleeve on one’s heart). What was formerly outside (clothing) moves inward (to “I”). Here the text mimes its meaning through the generation of interpretive possibilities: any single understanding represents a “scheme,” useful perhaps but certainly not inevitable.

But the text quoted above also moves beyond semantic frontiers toward the semiotic border between language and music inhabited by the word “note.” This single word suggests simultaneously a musical sound, different speech modes (command–“note this”–or description), and textual objects (a hierarchical category designator [i.e., footnote] or a casual piece of writing). The use of parentheses on the page–an instantiation which cannot be precisely performed on stage–is a textual convention indicating that the word “note” might be read as a placeholder (as in “I intend to insert a note here”) or as a stage direction (as in “Play a musical note here”). In either case, the note functions as an (explanatory or musical) “echo.” The play’s textual performance on the page, then, is not identical with its performance on stage. The relationship of the text to stage is neither directive nor documentary, neither script nor recording. Reading the text and attending the performance produce experientially distinct plays that nevertheless constitute linked “work” exploring the relationship of textual language to embodied performance. The semantic overdetermination of “note” in the text, for example, is linked but not identical to the overdetermination of the voice, as speech and as instrument, in performance: Both the Detroit and San Francisco productions featured a jaw harp, which produces sound uncannily in between language and music.²³ Working with sound and music at the limits of language, these performances in part explored the ways in which sounds morph into and out of meaning.

What is at stake here is an awareness of the multiple processes by which we make experience meaningful. When a speaker asserts at the beginning of Harryman’s play that “the composition of the sky is a matter of knowledge” (178), for example, she suggests both that the sky’s physical make-up (one sense of “composition”) can be scientifically known, but also that this knowledge is itself a matter of narrative construction (a second sense of “composition”). The goal is not to question the makeup of the sky, but rather to suggest that what is known must also take into account how it is known. A few lines later the play suggests that “addicts” to knowledge “suffer atmosphere,” a line which is vocally elongated in performance–“atmosssphhhere”–to suggest both the vaporous air that surrounds a planet and, simultaneously, a fear of the atmos, or vaporosity, perhaps the vaporosity or lack of solidity of knowledge itself. Here, vocalized performance vaporizes our certainty about the meaning of the line, and in doing so, it both mimes and produces its meaning. Mirror Play employs not a poetics of memory as witness but rather a poetics of memory as performative, as productive of the relationships it purports to describe and attend, a strategy that echoes Elin Diamond’s notion of mimesis as the production of truth through a manipulation of the mirroring process.

In the psychological space of Mirror Play‘s collectivity, all aspects of discourse are both positive and negative. The play alludes to the imbricated discourses of health, war, beauty, and pornography, for example, in its repeated references to Barbarella, the title role from the soft-porn sci-fi film that made the actress Jane Fonda famous. In the film, Barbarella is a representative of the Federation of Earth who is sent on a peace-seeking mission to rid the world of a weapon that could mean the end of humanity. Making love not war across the galaxy, Barbarella made Fonda a favorite pinup among GIs. Mirror Play‘s reference to “fa(r)ce and pornography” (198) certainly alludes to Barbarella, but it might just as aptly describe Fonda’s 1980s reincarnation as the aerobic ideal of her wildly popular workout video series. Dressed in form-hugging fitness fashion, Fonda bent over and spread her legs in a model of arrested movement. But in the period between Barbarella and the height of her workout popularity, Fonda also became an anti-war activist, speaking out against the Vietnam War starting in 1970. Though she remained a sexual icon, Fonda’s perceived betrayal of American troops transformed her into a target of overt, if symbolic, sexual violence.²⁴ “At places where soldiers or former soldiers congregate,” Rick Perlstein reports, “there’ll be stickers of her likeness on the urinals; one is an invitation to symbolic rape: Fonda in her 1980s ‘work-out’ costume, her legs splayed, pudenda at the bulls-eye. Every night at lights-out midshipmen at the US Naval Academy cry out ‘Goodnight, bitch!’ in her honour” (3).

Disturbing as this report is, the discourse behind the violence is what interests me here. Ironically, this “symbolic rape” is in part encouraged by the false mirror–the farce/face–of aerobicism misrecognized as athleticism. Johannes Birringer has argued that the image of the aerobic body is structured around a:

scene of instruction/mimicry that promotes an exercise of subjective and corporeal self-transformation while masking the ritualized submission of the body to serial, monotonous, and stationary motion. In her willful self-production of an actively new feminine body, the woman participant misrecognizes the mirror structure in this performative exchange, aligned as it is around persistent cultural/hierarchical oppositions between mobility/immobility, seeing/being seen, and so forth. She is drawn into a phantom interaction with the two-dimensional, depthless and absent body of the video image that simulates an actual relation between body model and “real” performance in “real” time.

(215)

The aerobic body, always a feminized body, is immobilized and put on display. In contrast, the military body might be thought of as an athleticized body, masculinized, mobile, and–recalling Harryman’s discussion of the athleticism of muscles acting without the assistance of the skeleton–competitive and aggressive. The discursive oppositions promulgated by the aerobic-atheletic dichotomy contribute to, among other things, both kinds of “domestic” violence suggested in the play’s opening verbal image of flying clothes (violence against women and against discursively feminized homosexual men). Although Mirror Play alludes to physical acts of violence (as in one production at the Hilberry Gallery in suburban Detroit when a hooded male figure claiming “Nobody wanted war” conjured, at least for me, images of torture associated both with American Vietnam POWs and with Iraqi prisoners at the American military prison Abu Ghraib), these are not the focus of Mirror Play. Rather, as I have done in this example of the soldiers’ violence against Fonda, Harryman attends to the discourses that both materialize the body and enable violence–discourses that rely on a range of mis/recognitions. Employing not a poetics of memory as witness but a poetics of memory as performative, as productive of the relationships it purports to describe and attend, Mirror Play plays through and with the notion of national(ist) memory.

Exploring the psychological space of collectivity, Mirror Play offers a counter to mass culture reliance on what Retallack deems “naïve realism” and its attendant call “for intellectual and imaginative resignation, a naturalization of normapathic desire” (5). Such realism is “normapathic” because it works by irresponsibly burying difference, contradiction, irrationality–an irresponsibility that, Retallack notes, “is never benign” (19). Harryman’s work, in contrast, remains open to radical difference. It engages with processes of social learning by rethinking the production and dissemination of knowledge. The realism of Harryman’s work lies not in a normative reenactment of past events but rather in its existence as a thought experiment through which the past and its connection to the present moment are reconfigured. It is characterized by the ability to hold contradictions in interplay and by a willingness to see the overlay of conflicting realities. In Mirror Play Harryman turns this exploration toward social-spatial constructions with material consequences in the perpetuation of national violence. Architecture, like language, always has both a form and a social use.²⁵ Postmodern theorist Linda Hutcheon recalls that Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the architect of the classically modernist Seagram Building in Manhattan, “allowed only white blinds on the plate glass windows and demanded that these be left in only one of three positions, open, shut, or half-way” (28)–the building’s design quite literally controlling the personal lives that inhabited its space; viewing tenants either as children to be guided or as subjects on whom to experiment, modernist architects positioned themselves apart from the buildings’ interior communities. Postmodernist architecture returns to the idea of community, but now as a decentralized entity with practical needs. And memory is, Hutcheon argues, “central to this linking of the past with the lived” (29).

Mirror Play‘s mise-en-scène is conceptual: as a foyer that has been cut-away from the house, it represents the threshold between public and private, into and out of which “any body” may pass. The “antechamber” is both room and passageway that comes “before” the house, in between the inside and outside. It is a room defined only in relation to other rooms, not as a place in itself (and in vocalized performance the word slides between antechamber and anti-chamber). But in Mirror Play the antechamber has been torn away from the house, destroying the relation that constitutes its identity; here the antechamber is not a room but a moment in the midst of transition from one object (foyer) to another, as yet unknown, resting point. Harryman’s approach to architecture is influenced in part by Denis Hollier’s notion of “anti-architecture” as a means of getting out from under the authoritarian hierarchies with which architecture is complicit, a condition which led Georges Bataille to deem architecture “society’s authorized superego” (ix). Hollier conceptualizes “an architecture that would not inspire, as in Bataille, social good behavior, or would not produce, as in Foucault’s disciplinary factory, madness or criminality in individuals” (x). Anti-architecture is therefore an alternative that leads

against the grain to some space before the constitution of the subject, before the institutionalization of subjectivity . . . [or that] would open up a space anterior to the division between madness and reason; rather than performing the subject, it would perform spacing: a space from before the subject, from before meaning; the asubjective, asemantic space of unedifying architecture, an architecture that would not allow space for the time needed to become a subject.

(xi)

Such anti-architecture works as loss or dismantling of the meaning that is assumed to inhere in architectural structures–such as houses, prisons, and tombs, all of which are implicitly or explicitly referenced in Mirror Play.²⁶

Mirror Play‘s foyer investigates, in part, the penetration of exterior social space into a subject’s interiority. But as a space that has been torn away from the house, presumably in an act of violence, the foyer is also what Hollier labels above an “asubjective” space–a space which defies interpretive coherence. In this way, Mirror Play enters into the discourse of space and place as they figure interiority/exteriority (from the position of the subject) and insider/outsider (as the position of the subject), which is in part a difference between being from/in a place and belonging to a place. In contrast to what Una Chaudhuri has described as modernist drama’s recourse to “a vague, culturally determined symbology of home, replete with all those powerful and empowering associations of space that are organized by the notion of belonging” (xii), Mirror Play is organized around a violated home that is also an opening–a condition that acknowledges both the very human desire to belong and the simultaneous violence and promise of belonging. Whereas modernism’s drama of the home is built around what Chaudhuri has labeled “a victimage of location and a heroism of departure,” which “structure the plot as well as the plays’ accounts of subjectivity and identity” (xii emphasis original), Mirror Play articulates the question its unattached foyer invites: “Can the antechamber lose its meaning, its substance, or is it always the same, even if every aspect of it contradicts its defining characteristics?” (191).

Dispersive Performance and the Theater of Others

According to Jerzy Grotowski, whose efforts to rethink actors’ training have influenced Harryman’s own approach to performance, the defining feature of theater is the performer-audience relationship (15). But in the postmodern era, the audience is notoriously difficult to characterize. In The Audience, theater theorist Herbert Blau discusses the peculiar notion of the postmodern audience, both collective and disparate, joined to one another through a shared experience interpreted in highly individualized ways. Like Harryman, Blau locates the efficacy of postmodernist theater in its challenge to the primacy of ocularcentric knowledge. To position understanding as seeing is, he argues, an ideology that ignores the audience’s original auditory role. Postmodern theater audiences are a product of “the vast seduction of the dispersive media” (14) and marked by division, or what Blau describes as “an ‘original splitting’” that is “not the image of an original unity but the mysterious rupture of social identity in the moment of its emergence” (10). The postmodern audience is therefore not a certainty–not a community to be joined or a position to be occupied–but rather an effect of performance itself:

The audience . . . is not so much a mere congregation of people as a body of thought and desire. It does not exist before the play but is initiated or precipitated by it; it is not an entity to begin with but a consciousness constructed. The audience is what happens when, performing the signs and passwords of a play, something postulates itself and unfolds in response.

(25, italics in original)

Blau historicizes the concept of a “public” as a modernist notion that conceptualizes the audience as uniform, understandable, and authorizing–that is, as something that can be figured out and won over. In contrast, postmodernist audiences are indeterminate, with each member experiencing an individual response, an individual identification. Blau dubs this the “theater of otherness,” as an alternative to the more traditional notion of a theater of essence (94). This “otherness” does not constitute a counterpublic–it is not the disidentificatory community that, for example, José Muñoz discusses in his important study of contemporary minoritarian performance. Rather, it is an interpretive “community” paradoxically marked by discontinuity and dispersion, and formed in spite of (or perhaps because of, or prior to) the foreclosure of normative identification. But while Blau argues that such theater is marked by an oscillation between eye and ear that creates distance rather than identification, I want to propose that in Harryman’s theater this oscillation forms the basis for an ethics of responsibility toward the identifications we form. In this sense, we might think of Harryman’s theater not as a theater of otherness but as a theater of others, others to whom we are, for better or worse, ethically bound–a theater in which, to borrow Harryman’s language, “[m]e talking fuses to you” (“Property” 16).

If the space of performance is, as Harryman argues in “The Ear of the Poet,” a provisional space in which ideas, narratives, and social constructions may be tested, then what’s being tested in Mirror Play is perhaps not only our methods for making sense of a post-9/11 world but also the very idea that making “sense”–a particular cognitive ordering of experience–is the correct goal. If “making sense” is a narrative proposition, then poetry might provide a different paradigm more suitable to the present world’s complex interconnectivities. Poetry might offer, as Retallack asserts, a cognitive alternative to imagining borders and the crossing of lines, allowing us instead to think in terms of fractal geometries and the “swerve,” an unpredictable (form of) change that can defamiliarize, disorient, and even estrange by “radically altering geometries of attention,” resulting in “an unsettling transfiguration of once-familiar terrain” (1). As interruption, digression, and the unexpected, the swerve is produced in and by hybridity, the vitality of which lies in its inventiveness, in its generativity. The swerve is not an abdication of responsibility but rather the recognition that all events are overdetermined, unpredictable, subject to chance. Swerves “dislodge us,” Retallack argues, “from reactionary allegiances and nostalgias” (3). Openness to the unexpected, to generativity, thus becomes a kind of ethics: generosity toward generativity.

Placing such generativity at the heart of an ethics of non-normative obligation takes seriously Geoffrey Galt Harpham’s assertion that ethics “does not solve problems, it structures them” (37). The modernist hero narrative, related to the sense of a universal ethical imperative on which ethical discourse has traditionally been founded, has been denounced in the postmodern era as an “ideological vehicle and the legitimation of concrete structures of power and domination” (Jameson 101). The paradox of a postmodernist ethics of non-normative obligation, then, is that while it does not posit a hierarchy of interpretive values, it does rely on the categorical imperative of obligation itself. This imperative may, Harpham suggests, be at the center of Derrida’s notion of deconstruction itself, seeping into it in the form of the subject who is allowed to

‘return’ on the condition that it be transformed and modernized–no longer the self-identical, self-regulating subject of humanism, but rather a subject inmixed with otherness. This otherness, Derrida said, would consist not only of the obligation that all people owe to other people, but also of the iron laws, the internal otherness, which we, as speaking animals, harbor within our living consciousnesses.
(Harpham 23)

The paradox of dispersive theater’s non-normative obligation embodies the contradiction Harpham locates in ethics itself: the contradiction between “How ought one live?” and “What ought I to do?,” the contradiction between the distanced laws of generalizable norms and an individual in an actual (and unique) situation (26). For Harpham the key to ethics is not only the obligation but the choice between different ethics (for example, between mercy and retribution). Dispersive theater makes us attentive to these choices, makes us aware that there are choices. This is not to say that all choices are equal, but rather that each choice “violates some law or other, and violates it precisely because it is ‘ethical’” (29). Dispersive theater is ethical, then, not because it offers a moral order but because it reveals the conditions of choice. Mirror Play presents a very postmodern problematic: while the body is materialized through the very act of narrative (including discourse, gesture, and image), narrative is always an imperfect mirror–a necessary framing that inevitably obfuscates, a “view [that] blocks what’s behind it” (Harryman “Animal” 33). This presents a particular obstacle to audience members, who are presented with a range of possibilities for mis/recognition, but it also presents a threat to bodies, for violence–in the form of war, rape, social neglect, and government policy–is justified through such mis/recognitions.

And yet, it is the very vulnerability of bodies that leads to claims of “bodily integrity and self-determination” that are, as Judith Butler has pointed out, “essential to so many political movements” (25). “The body,” Butler continues,

implies mortality, vulnerability, agency: the skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others, but also to touch, and to violence, and bodies put us at risk of becoming the agency and instrument of all these as well. Although we struggle for rights over our own bodies, the very bodies for which we struggle are not quite ever only our own. The body has its invariably public dimension. Constituted as a social phenomenon in the public sphere, my body is and is not mine. Given over from the start to the world of others, it bears their imprint, is formed within the crucible of social life; only later, and with some uncertainty, do I lay claim to my body as my own, if, in fact, I ever do. Indeed, if I deny that prior to the formation of my ‘will,’ my body related me to others whom I did not choose to have in proximity to myself, if I build a notion of ‘autonomy’ on the basis of the denial of this sphere of a primary and unwilled physical proximity with others, then am I denying the social conditions of my embodiment in the name of autonomy?

(26)

Here, Butler helps us understand the vulnerability of the body in the public realm, a vulnerability of both its physicality and its identity. This mentally and physically projected “external” body inevitably figures one’s internal subjectivity as well. And yet in figuring this subjectivity as autonomous, Butler argues, we do violence to those others on whose denial that autonomy is based. As Harryman asserts, “I” is not the measure; it is the “interference” (“Acker” 36). But it is necessary interference.

Dispersive theater may, in fact, represent a new chapter in the history of anti-theatricality. Anti-theatricality in the twentieth century has frequently indicated, at least in part, a desire to distance ourselves from the influence of the mass audience, who may pressure us respond differently than we might otherwise do. Mimetic acts are, moreover, repugnant because they allow us to enjoy the suffering of others. But dispersive theater employs what might be called a flexible theatricality, whereby the value of the theater collectivity fluctuates between coercion and responsibility, between the awareness that narrative is, at best, imperfect and that meaning must nevertheless be made. Dispersive theater thus embraces the stage, but in a different way, avoiding spectacle and emphasizing the poetic, not as a direct route to the emotions but as a social tool.

To return to Harryman’s account of the Iraqi pin performance, the woman who interpreted the wearing of the pin as an admission of a secret understood, at least subconsciously, that she was both actor and acted upon. Taking Harryman’s pin as the revelation of a guilty secret was perhaps a conditioned response: the only way she could make sense of the performance within a political context characterized by a nationalist narrative drive toward “mission accomplished.” And yet in responding with a secret of her own, she demonstrated a deeply felt, if unexpected, empathy that operated according to a set of interpretive conditions not determined by borders or even by autonomy. She too felt the vulnerability of her body in public; she too suffered a social policing that ultimately figured her subjectivity.

In avoiding narratives of witness, of moral imperative, of political identity, the Iraqi pin performance was certainly not a call to action. But for the woman who revealed her own secret, and certainly for Harryman as well, it was a moment of unexpected connection. It is probably too much to imagine this moment as a swerve away from terror, as a swerve toward hope, but it may perhaps remind us that there is far more to every event than any story can express. Generosity toward the generativity of imperfect mirrorings and unexpected identifications becomes a way of opening ourselves up to other possibilities of connection beyond explanation, justification, and non-contradiction. Poet’s theater may not result in the dissolution of atmosphere or of atmos-fear, but as it swerves between them, it has the potential to encourage critical discussion and collective interpretation in which no one is “right” but in which difference proliferates.

Heidi R. Bean is Assistant Professor of English at Bridgewater State University. She is the co-editor of Poetry after Cultural Studies, an anthology of critical essays forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press. Her essays, reviews, and interviews related to the intersections of theater, performance, and poetry have appeared in Text and Performance Quarterly, Theatre Journal, The Iowa Review Web, and Cultural Critique. This essay is taken from her current project on the cultural politics of American poetic theater since the 1960s.

Footnotes

1. Harryman finds in RoseLee Goldberg’s Performance Art, for example, the implication that once performance has served its function as a testing ground that can release the art object from categorical or conventional constraints, the art object is reinstated and performance is retired.

2. For a discussion of the dramaturgical method for analyzing impression management, see Goffman’s Presentation 238. Notably, Goffman focuses entirely on the performer without any attention to the audience’s active role in the meaning-making process.

3. Reptile seems to be recognizing here what Erving Goffman has termed “disclosive compensation”—the theatrical convention of giving the audience what it needs, and only what it needs, in order to construct and maintain the dramatic fiction. See his Frame Analysis 142.

4. For a discussion of the “turn to the visual,” see Jay.

5. See Vickery chapter 7 for an excellent discussion of, especially, the gendered-ness of theory in Language writing.

6. Bob Perelman’s The Marginalization of Poetry was the first book-length historical account of Language writing and remains a key text for understanding this history, but the SFPT receives no critical attention there (despite the fact that Perelman himself wrote for the SFPT). Megan Simpson’s Poetic Epistemologies and Ann Vickery’s Leaving Lines of Gender offer alternative, feminist-inflected histories of Language writing, but both attend to “performance” only in a sense of the performance of social identities. Vickery acknowledges the divisions between visual artists and writers that characterized the Bay Area in the 1970s (33), but despite her interest in documenting the broader range of activities carried out by women in the Language community than has been commonly acknowledged, she too leaves out critical discussion of Harryman’s (or anyone else’s) theater work, choosing instead to focus on Harryman’s and Hejinian’s important collaborative novel The Wide Road (see Vickery final chapter). Recently, The Grand Piano series has started to address some of this history (see in particular vol. 6).

7. See the Grand Piano website page on the SFPT for a partial list of plays as well as for links to some program, poster, and production images: <http://www.thegrandpiano.org/poetstheater.html>.

8. For play texts, see Hills 9 (1983). For criticism and commentary on the SFPT and related theater, see Kennedy and Tuma, Mantis 3 (2002), and Poetics Journal 5 (May 1985): 122-138.

9. Poets and Language writers were not the only ones to downplay key aspects of poet’s theater. The disciplinary divide rendering the SFPT invisible was, if anything, worse on the side of visual artists. As Ann Vickery writes, “the arts were strongly differentiated in the Bay Area during the seventies. Although performance-based poets like Carla Harryman encouraged visual artists to attend readings and talks, poetry was still presumed to be too tied to the page and thus limiting. Harryman recalls a young and prominent artist dismissing Language writings as ‘just a version of surrealism’” (32-33). Harryman’s work was thus trapped in both a practical and a critical disciplinary blind spot.

10. It is remarkable how much this critique of poetry scholarship and the expressivist lyric sounds like the critique by contemporary Performance Studies scholars of traditional object-oriented scholarship, in which the objective, disinterested scholar remains separate from the object of study that he (and in this critique, the scholar is usually a he) describes and interprets in terms that place the object easily within the dominant worldview.

11. Performed as part of the annual Poets Theater festival, which is produced by Small Press Traffic each January and/or February.

12. The showcase, entitled “Returning from One Place to Another,” was produced by Links Hall and curated by John Beer.

13. See especially volume 6 of that series.

14. Bourdieu argues that “depositories of deferred thoughts…can be triggered off at a distance in space and time by the simple effect of re-placing the body in an overall posture which recalls the associated thoughts and feelings, in one of the inductive states of the body which, as actors know, give rise to states of mind” (69).

15. This is because the syntax of gesture and speech are different. Speech builds up its meaning out of independently meaningful parts. Gesture on the other hand becomes meaningful only in the aggregate. Speech is spread out, and each part can be analyzed separately, but a gesture is “synthetic,” compressing its semantic components (actor, action, path) into one symbol: “Thus, when gesture and speech combine, they bring into one meaning system two distinct semiotic architectures. Each modality, because of its unique semiotic properties, can go beyond the meaning possibilities of the other” (McNeill and Duncan 144).

16. For more on modernist anti-theatricality and its relationship to gesture, see Puchner chapter 1.

17. Dir. Catharine Sullivan. Produced by the Renaissance Society and performed at Experimental Station, Chicago, March 7, 2008.

18. Cognitive psychology, incidentally, supports this view. Cognitive psychologists David McNeill and Susan D. Duncan have developed the concept of the “growth point” (GP), originated by McNeill, as an analytical framework for the combination of “imagery and linguistic categorical content” that insists on an understanding of both gesture and speech as “material carriers of thinking” (144, 155). In this view, speech and gesture are not “the packaged communicative outputs of a separate internal production process but rather…the joint embodiments of that process itself” (155). Speech-gesture combinations do not simply reflect already formed similarities, then, but contribute to the establishment a correspondence between the two and are therefore productive of thought. Furthermore, McNeill and Duncan argue, GPs “are a way of cognitively existing, of cognitively being, at the moment of speaking. By performing the gesture, the core idea is brought into concrete existence and becomes part of the speaker’s own existence at that moment” (156). In this view, gesture is not an expression of being but rather constitutive of being, and in this sense, we can consider gesture performative. It is also significant that although a GP is highly synchronous, “strongly resist[ing] forces trying to divide it” (145), this synchrony “is disrupted…if speech and gesture are drained of meaning through repetition; i.e., such that GPS may be circumvented in their production” (145). See McNeill and Duncan.

19. The play, which has been performed in San Francisco, Chicago, Detroit, and Tubingen, Germany, has never been published. Each production uses a different version of the script (in some cases bilingual). Some performances have used a full cast (Detroit, Chicago), while others have consisted only of Harryman herself reading the text to live musical accompaniment by John Raskin (San Francisco). All of these versions, however, are formed out of the full-length English text entitled “Mirror Play” included in Harryman’s “Poets Theater Plays” manuscript.

20. Mirror Play page references are from Harryman’s unpublished typescript entitled “Poets Theater Plays.”

21. Notably, the AIDS quilt grew out of a simple, non-narrative performance as San Francisco marchers carried placards with the names of men lost to AIDS. It was only with the durable AIDS Memorial Quilt that individual micro-narratives began to be incorporated in the form of images, quotations, and other forms of characterization.

22. Performed at the Susanne Hilberry Gallery in the Detroit suburb of Ferndale, Michigan, on August 14, 2005.

23. In both productions, the jaw harp was played by John Raskin, who also composed all of the music. Harryman comments: “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 antechamber 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” (Hinton).

24. Perlstein discusses some of the myths surrounding Fonda’s position on the war.

25. See Hutcheon 27-36 for a brief but helpful discussion of postmodernism’s foundations in architecture.

26. Hollier notes that there have been “endless arguments over whether the origin of architecture was the house, the temple, or the tomb, etc. For Bataille it was the prison” (ix).

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September 3, 2013

This Theater is a Strange Hole: Mac Wellman’s Poetics of Apparence

Karinne Keithley Syers (bio)
CUNY Graduate Center
karinnekeithley@gmail.com

Abstract

Mac Wellman’s theater is filled by a weird array of voices that are neither strictly human, nor even strictly material. These pseudosolid voices map a topological obsession with holes, hollows, and the filling up of space by emptiness. This essay explores Wellman’s theater as a “strange hole,” where hollow spaces become receivers, openings for something unfamiliar to happen in our thinking, an event Wellman calls “apparence.” In The Difficulty of Crossing a Field, the extraordinary prevalence of holes bespeaks an intensification of a philosophical strand in his writing: a ceremonial concern with a weirdness that is wild, a weirdness gone feral in math-fictional space. This essay explores his strategies for writing us into these registers of thinking by examining two kinds of holes. The first is a “hole poetics”: the deployment of holey strategies in the poetic line. This holed line functions as both a preparation for thinking beyond the already-known, and as a scalar, fractal iteration of the topography of this beyond-space which is the second hole, a ceremonial, nasty, terrifying place that Wellman calls “Hoole’s Hole,” where the non-Aristotelian, non-Euclidian event of apparence happens.

In Infrared, the opening play of Mac Wellman’s recent collection, The Difficulty of Crossing a Field, the unseen narrator, “an ungainly self in search of itself,” reveals itself as some kind of “pseudosolid . . . a hollow within a cube within another hollow” (8). This humanistic self-seeking acts as a translating bridge to Wellman’s much broader, much weirder array of identities that might seek the recursive feedback loop we call self-awareness. If it is convenient to hold onto an old word, self, it is equally important to attend to the fact that the identity of selves, characters, or voices in Wellman’s work has never been strictly human and in fact is not strictly material. His recent work is filled with pseudosolid voices that map their “haunted, topological obsession” with holes and hollows, and the filling up of space by emptiness (Infrared 8). One critical strategy to account for Wellman’s departure from what he calls “Euclidean” character (a designation concerned principally with consistency) has been to highlight his alignment with “language” writing, particularly in relation to the Language poets, the Russian Futurists, and Gertrude Stein’s “landscape plays,” and so to projects that insist on the materiality of language over (or alongside) its signification. These connections are not amiss–indeed they are critical–but they do not fully account for Wellman’s project; they sidestep the heart (to use an old word) of his work (or in his own imagery, they miss the clearing in the woods where the spooky thing happens). To isolate the materiality of language is to neglect Wellman’s concern with multiple registers of thinking, and with theater’s function as a place where something happens in our thinking, something he calls “apparence.” The material surfaces of Wellman’s plays are only pseudosolid; the giving-way of those surfaces constitutes the action of his work, and we find ourselves in a strange hole. In the extraordinary prevalence of holes (both phenomenological and figurative) in Wellman’s new collection, I find an intensification of a philosophical strand in his writing: a ceremonial concern with a weirdness that is wild, a weirdness gone feral in math-fictional space. In this essay I explore his strategies for writing us into these registers of thinking by examining two kinds of holes. The first is what I am calling a “hole poetics”: the deployment of holey strategies in the poetic line. This holed line functions as both a preparation for thinking beyond the already-known, and as a scalar, fractal iteration of the topography of this beyond-space which is my second hole, a ceremonial, nasty, terrifying place that Wellman calls “Hoole’s Hole,” where the non-Aristotelian, non-Euclidian event of apparence happens.

Locating Wellman

Wellman is a node of connection within the New York theater community. A loose assembly of younger writers has formed around him, through his MFA program at Brooklyn College, the ‘Pataphysics workshop series, and his generous presence in the scene.¹ His influence is already profound and continues to grow, not as a “school of Mac Wellman,” but as a broadly cast license to think of plays in terms of language, and to value wrongness, ceremony, and a bit of demonism in the theatrical project (contra the overwhelming prevalence of psychological and moralistic drama). The amount of critical writing on Wellman is incommensurate with his place as a thinker within new theater, perhaps because of the communal nature of the theater scene, where ideas are exchanged in person more than through journals or small presses. What has been written about him in theater criticism is largely in response to his denouncement early in his career of “the theater of good intentions,” and his proffering the possibility of what “character” might be beyond the motivation-guided, coherent, explicable figures that populate 20^th century realism and its acting methods. On the poetics side, Marjorie Perloff has written briefly on Wellman: a foreword to his collection, Cellophane; and “Harm’s Other Way,” a short piece for The Mac Wellman Journal, a lo-fi volume of essays put together by the DIY Sock Monkey Press for the 1997 Mac Wellman Festival. Perloff name-checks Wellman as one of the many poets whom she might have included in her study, 21^st Century Modernism. In that work, she valorizes the transmission of a modernist language project, compositions of a counter-signifying materiality of words, from four great modernists— Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Marcel Duchamp and Velemir Khlebnikov—to their 21^st century inheritors, language poets Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian and Steve McCaffery. Wellman’s projective affiliation here is in the Khlebnikov transmission: the “charging via neologism, paronomasia . . . [that] defies semantic coherence . . . [inverting] the ‘ordinary language’ aesthetics of Stein and the use of everyday objects like combs and urinals in Duchamp.” For her own formulation of the “strangeness of the ordinary,” Perloff says Khlebnikov “substitutes the ordinariness of the strange” (21st Century 126). In her two short essays on Wellman, Perloff works in this vein of finding strangeness in the close-focus of phrases and neologisms. As with her analysis of Khlebnikov’s etymological play, she attends to Wellman’s investigations in the political and cultural phraseology on the cluttered surface of American English—remember, she asks, the “butterfly” ballots and hanging “chads” of the 2000 election (Foreword x)?

Perloff delights in the critique of American culture that Wellman’s making-strange produces. Cellophane, written out of a two-year self-imposed assignment to write 2 pages of bad American grammar every day, might epitomize this strand of his work, with such formulations as: “Who them alltime lowdown hunch scattershot boys? Who would ought to have done did?” (175). But I would argue that it is not the strange surface of the ordinary that Wellman would have us encounter in his theater, but rather something more dimensionally strange—where things are strange because we have become strangers. His essays on theater describe a shifting emphasis, articulating first a space of resistance (“The Theater of Good Intentions,” 1984), then a statement on the weirdness of the real (“A Chrestomathy of 22 Answers to 22 Wholly Unaskable and Unrelated Questions Concerning Political and Poetic Theater,” 1993), and now a space of ceremony (“Speculations,” 2004). The plays collected in Difficulty are by no means autonomous, material objects. They are more like Swiss cheeses of plays, where strange holes open onto skewed dimensions. The place where poetic language experiment meets the theatrical project is a fold that I hope to address, moving from the line to the ceremony, and so from sound to proprioception. The nature of a theatrical hole has very much to do with the actual space of theater, but as Wellman writes in Bad Penny, “the Way is ever difficult to discover” (148). Part of that difficulty lies in the dual mindfulness that poetic theater requires. Examined only with the analytical tools of a single discipline, whether poetry, philosophy, or theater, the movements of mind that constitute the theatricality of Wellman’s plays become obscured, or rather, they hide like the Black-Tufted Malabar X, the nasty resident of Hoole’s hole. This essay does not seek to uncover what is hiding, but rather to think about how to inhabit the space where we can listen to its transmissions, and to gesture toward writing strategies for finding ourselves strange.

A Theater of Landscape

Wellman consistently takes an inter-genre stance; a novelist and poet as well as a playwright, he began writing plays for the Dutch radio, took a bachelor’s in international relations, and spent time working in a specialty mathematics bookshop. It requires a complex of lineages to place him in a context. His influences and inheritances span theatrical, poetic, and philosophical traditions. Perloff embraces Wellman by drawing him into a poet’s tradition. Although I too want to think about his poetic language, I want to add a theatrical lineage to this context both in order to lay the groundwork for my thinking about topographical holes, and also to emphasize that Wellman, though described in relation to mainstream playwrights as a poet- or language-playwright, is making theater. A judgment of what is theatrical lies at the core of his aesthetic.

The room to explore language (as opposed to character, plot, psychology) as a primary material of theater comes from a “landscape theater” tradition, which I define broadly as the use of space to reorganize compositional structures, and the use of the textual line to create theatrical value. The term “landscape” indicates the recession of character as a central compositional term, a recession historically coincident with cubism’s similarly decentering redeployment of figure within the spatial field.² The term is associated with Gertrude Stein, although the concern with landscape predates her own description of her plays as “landscapes” of words in relation to other words.³ According to Elinor Fuchs, two compositional modes followed from the development of landscape theater: “field” composition, where nonhuman elements exist in spatial relation, allowing for non-linear storytelling (a kind of antecedent to Projectivist “composition by field”), and the corresponding modes of attention produced by “the faculty of landscape surveyal” that reads “multivalent spatial relationships” in place of the older lines of “conflict and resolution” (Death 106-7). This new drama is environmental and immersive, a shift in thinking that anticipates the recent turn to ecology and limns a zone of transition between modernism, postmodernism, and posthumanism. In ways that anticipate thinkers from Emmanuel Levinas to Judith Butler, landscape plays create space to think of our being in terms of relation instead of fate.⁴

Hans-Thies Lehmann has defined this line of new performance as “post-dramatic” theater, but it is useful to recall that movements against theatrical habit often invoke an originary theater against whatever stultified replacement the mainstream represents (what Wellman calls “Geezer Theatre”). Twentieth century nontraditional theater has tended to argue for a recalibration of theater values and recuperation of the intensity of theatrical experience through a rethinking of both materials and structures. Field and landscape compositions have been deeply invested in exploring the physicality of the non-narrative aspects of theater, and I would name Antonin Artaud’s theater of cruelty and the pedestrian, chance-driven vocabulary of the Judson Dance Theater as poles of the embodiment of the postmodern landscape theater. From Virgil Thomson’s opera of Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts to the work of the Wooster Group or Elevator Repair Service or Nature Theater of Oklahoma, theatrical vocabularies of music, sound, movement, and image offer an alternative structural ground to narrative without abandoning text. This recourse to other vocabularies of thinking offers ways to describe the structure of a play in terms other than a process of revealing that unfolds in linear time. Stein, as the original theoretician of the landscape play, laid a still-relevant and provocative groundwork for this means of composition; indeed, her essay “Plays” might be the most important essay on theater writing since Aristotle’s “Poetics.” Though landscape plays do of course progress in time, the temporal experience can be thought as grounded not in linearity, but in inhabitation. This shift from progression to durational inhabitation is a critical transition in 20^th century aesthetics, leading toward installation, “relational” work, and emergent transmission-based art forms.

Fuchs emphasizes a predilection for the static that undergirds modernist landscape aesthetics. This present-tense stasis is created either by actual stillness in plot or action (she names Maeterlinck as the writer of stasis, Robert Wilson as the director of stasis), or by forms of recursion and repetition that create the impression of staying in or returning to one place, allowing new information to proliferate in a scene, rather than move a story forward. Certainly Stein uses landscape as an anti-linear model of thinking. Jane Bowers views Stein’s recourse to pictorial terms as serving a twofold purpose: undistracted by the necessity of keeping up with the story, the viewer of a Stein play is available at every moment to a meditative, contemplative experience based on the present-tense stimulus of the performance; further, offered the image and word elements of theater without hierarchy, the viewer is free to find and retry a shifting set of perspectives (131-2, 140). The playwright’s hermeneutic guidance drops away, inviting the viewer to find her own habits of navigation. No single element of theater—script, scene, costume, light, sound—is necessarily foregrounded; the attention is directionally free, resulting in a self-aware exercise of attention, even attentiveness toward attention itself. Thus landscape plays are incomplete without the mind of the audience; the movement of their attention is an equal part of the substance of the play itself.⁵ Wellman will preserve this sense that the substance of the play is made in part by the mind of the audience; indeed the mind, conceived extensively as thought and proprioception moving over and through time, and into what he calls Wild Time, is where the Wellman play takes place.

Fundamental to Wild Time is the sense that we do not know where we are going. Like Stein, Wellman uses an acute crafting of verbal impedance to disrupt habitual orientation, but he uses unknowingness differently, not as a renewal of seeing and presence but as a means of opening paths into strange spaces. It is an active retaliation against the foreclosure of meaning that Wellman notes in Stein, and if there is a lineage to be drawn between them, it is on the grounds of respect for her production of openness. Speaking at a symposium on Stein’s plays, Wellman emphasized this aspect of her work:

I do think there’s something about the openness of [Stein’s writing], the fact that it is, in a sense, a landscape. . . . Jonathan Lear wrote a book on Freud and Socrates called [Open] Minded, and he develops this notion of what he calls “the tyranny of the already known,” that we live in a society that is dominated by a particular kind of journalism, which has to do with a deadening sense of knowingness that permeates everything, including the theater. Stein is completely free of this. There is a kind of enormous openness to whatever life brings that I think is terrifying to people because it is open in a sense that is even hard to talk about.

(Rosten et al.17, 20; emphasis mine)

Wellman finds in Lear’s “already known” an analogy to what is known as the “well-made play,” the sociological, psychological, journalistic breed of play that dominates mainstream theater. The well-made play conforms to both psychological realism, which unfolds drama as a series of back-story reveals, and the structure of the dramatic arc as the climax and resolution of a central conflict. But beyond the habit of certain kinds of storytelling, what damns these plays for Wellman is their unwillingness to venture beyond already-known conclusions. In his essay “The Theater of Good Intentions,” Wellman attacks this as a form of high-ground moralism. In “Speculations,” his aphoristic landscape essay on theater’s wild spaces, the “Theatre of the Already Known (AK)” (or Geezer Theatre) appears as a kind of arch-dupe-enemy, hanging onto its “re” spelling as a signal of its unwillingness to abandon the boat of high culture. Instead of finding out once again that incest hurts or that racism is bad, Wellman suggests we allow theater to make us venture into spaces where we don’t already know the answer. If the AK, with its moral and emotional conclusions already on hand, requires no actual thinking, an unknown theater would demand it; the experience would be “open in a sense that is hard to even talk about.”

Wellman identifies openness with terror, among other things. Both characters in and audiences of his plays frequently undergo experiences for which there are no adequate existing vocabularies, that is, they find themselves occupying a hole in knowing. Wellman’s dual register of line and plot allows these holes to appear on multiple scales, so that blank spaces in the experience of knowing seem to be systemic. Within the line, impedance, irregular continuities, and unknowable argots disorient the listener. Within the plot, landscape itself becomes unknown as spaces fail to join or follow predictably, as in Second Hand Smoke when a roof gives way to a desert, or when it instantaneously swallows a person up, or more accurately, “disappears” him, as in The Difficulty of Crossing a Field. By repeating a hole effect in both the line and the plot, Wellman joins the listening audience and the figures within the play in unfamiliar and unnamed experiences. These “holes,” I will argue, open up the play both narratively and receptively, and prepare for the possibility of what Wellman calls “apparence.”

Holes in the Line: Rewriting Sophocles

“Speculations: An Essay on the Theater” is Wellman’s extended, aphoristic organon of the practice of being in the space of theater. He begins by locating the play in the present-tense mindfulness of its happening:

The STRUCTURE of a play ought not to be viewed as a fixed thing but as a mutable one.
I mean, the structure of a play conceived of as a moving point: →→→→→→→→·→→→→→→→→ passing over—or through—time”

(“Speculations” 294)

This mutability undermines the possibility of treating a play as a model of causality and explanation, psychological, social, or otherwise. The difference lies in the relationship of knowing to time: whereas a model eventually completes its own description, the moving point is continuously being rendered anew. This always-moving structure, inscribed in the mutable present tense of the play at the scale of both the sentence and the story, transfers theatrical architecture away from input and outcome, relocating it in the actual space of performance as an active relationship between the perceiver and the play. No longer peripheral to the play as observer or consumer, the mind of each viewer is actually part of the thing itself: “our mindfulness completes the equation” (298). Unclosed, the completion that mindfulness offers is a share in a feedback loop moving “over—or through—time.” The concept of mutable structure suggests that a play should nowhere signal its total form; the parts should not echo an already known (or eventually knowable) whole. Thus Wellman is a playwright of mereology, the mathematical field that studies the relationship of part to whole. Where the classic Aristotelian model of theatrical narrative builds its sequence on a stable base, allowing the rising action, climax, and falling action to progress uniformly toward closure, Wellman presents an anti-conclusive mereology. Instead of compassing a whole, Wellman leads us into holes, holes where theater can finally happen.

If we accept the axiom that a Wellman hole fundamentally removes us from knowing where we are or where we are going, then the holed line prepares this form of disorientation. Paired with abrupt shifts and slips in the plot’s landscape, Wellman performs a smaller slipping away from the recognizable and stable whole operative at the scale of the sentence. These small slips undermine the stable experience of knowing where we are, and so reduce the friction that might otherwise slow us down when the plot too takes us suddenly to a place we don’t recognize. Wellman’s Antigone, written in 2001 for the interdisciplinary company Big Dance Theater, exemplifies and dramatizes this slipperiness. On the page, it looks very little like a play: a 12-page column of text without differentiation of voice or stage direction. This Antigone doesn’t adapt the original text of Sophocles, but rather presents itself as if it preceded its prototype; it takes place in the emergence of storytelling, which in turn betokens the emergence of theater. Antigone begins: “Once, at the beginning of time, the three Fates, unpleasant young girls, enacted the story that was to become that of Antigone. The three girls played all the parts with hats instead of masks, and a whole rack of customary costumery” (105). Without articulating the voices typographically, the play occupies the page as a dense, single column, like an unsorted trunk of costumes and props. All speech flows into all other speech, and often only the shifting grammar of first and third person suggests the possibility of mapping who will say what. The story of judgment and burial is held in thick relation to a description of the activities of three Fates on their way to becoming the three Graces (who will eventually whisper the story into the ear of a puppet named Sophocles). Dances, songs, proverbs, and acts of charm (like balancing an egg on one end) occupy the text’s landscape alongside the emerging story. Wellman preserves something of the choral structure of Sophocles, playing in particular with the chorus Heidegger treats at length in his Introduction to Metaphysics. These three Fates are signally concerned with man’s strangeness, and within the density of the narrative and its intercalated acts of charm, the original chorus’s question—what is stranger than man?—recurs as Wellman’s refrain.

The evanescent effect of Wellman’s holed line becomes apparent in reading his chorus on strangeness against that of Sophocles. The moving point of the play, as it passes through the chorus, does indeed slip “over—or through—time,” impeding any coherent survey. In this way Wellman’s chorus works against the traditional sense of the Greek Chorus as grounded in a stable, common voice. In Sophocles’ play, the first chorus describes the efforts of man against the world by presenting a sequence of images that accrue as contemplative objects embodying the concept of man’s uncanniness. Sophocles offers his audience a series of images that can be held in constellation around the concept of wonder. “Man” as object of thought stands at the center of the picture, with his resources and ambitions drawn in around him. The chorus observes strangeness with great lyricism without, however, enacting it. This observational perspective disappears as Wellman renders the same chorus. He constellates strangeness not with a legible series of emblematic images but with words of similar sound. The relationship of words to other words creates a streaming sense of strangeness by evading any focal point:

A Chorus: Of all things strange, humankind / is the most strange. / The cat’s cradle / is news to the spider, / for all things go round and round; for / I was a stranger and you took me in; for / I was a stranger and you took me not in; for / / straw straw straw, / straw shows which way the wind blows, / and an empty belly thinks the moon is green cheese; for / / (the King of Spiders) / / Up he was stuck /up he was stuck /up he was stuck / and in the very upness of his stuckitude / he fell. / / (Straw, straw, straw, straw.) / / And what I learned from my long / life of spinning string, /life of measuring string, / life of snip snip snip: / / You can’t beat something with nothing.

(Antigone 107)

While the associative manner might at first seem characteristic of schizophrenic speech, Wellman’s chorus is actually controlled through its relentless transitivity as it passes “over—and through” the sound of “st,” pulling us across gaps in sense by an alternative affiliation in sonority. Where the Sophoclean chorus moves in a daisy pattern out into a particular image and back to the central concept of man as wondrously ambitious, Wellman’s chorus returns to the material sound of “st,” “sp,” “sn” prodding a musical sense of focus that slips out of the grasp of a logical one. The spinning of strange with straw, of straw with string, effects the slipping away from the original idea by sliding into focus a new sound displacing the last. This is a curving kind of writing. Each inflection point of that curve is created by a small hole, a gap of sense, in gliding distance.

The poetic work of Wellman’s writing goes beyond foregrounding the transitive. If Stein’s work resituated reading and writing in these flowing spaces in our normal landscapes, Wellman explores the feeling of listening as language veers into a topos beyond the domestic, into spaces punctuated by what I have characterized as holes productive of blank spaces in our present-tense experience of understanding both what we are hearing and where we are. William James, in his gorgeous and still useful description of the experience of language in “the stream of thought,” observes that the usual failure to recognize the transitive feelings of prepositions and conjunctions such as if, and, and but is compounded by the “obverse error” of the supposition “that where there is no name no entity can exist” (“Stream” 246). The refusal to register—to feel—the existence of these “dumb or anonymous psychic states” produces perceived separations in the curve of thought, and so a “greater and greater accentuation and isolation of the substantive parts” (246). If Stein wrote sentences that demanded attention to words of transition and relation, Wellman’s sentences demand attention to these “dumb or anonymous psychic states.” These places are literally dumb, “open in a sense that’s hard to talk even about.” We have no words to compass the gaps, and as the play unfolds in front of us, no time to try to generate any. This is the crux of the holed line—it moves us through spaces we can’t name without giving us time to find new bearings.

In the chorus quoted above, I mark three different strategies for enforcing this attention to “anonymous” spaces. Sliding alliteratively and homophonically from “strange” to “string,” he undermines the isolating tendency James describes by continually iterating a common sibilance, insisting on a relation that might otherwise go unfelt. But what is the feeling of relation in the line, “I was a stranger and you took me not in; for / / straw straw straw”? This strange yet particular interval is the first of three transitive “anonymous psychic states” in this chorus that recur throughout Wellman’s writing in the form of inhabitable absences or “holes.” We are given a transitive word “for,” and so are escorted, as it were, across the gap between “you took me not in” and “straw straw straw.” But the space of relation between “I was a stranger” and “straw straw straw” is illegible; we must absorb the feeling of that emptiness, and keep moving alongside the chorus. Wellman’s critics claim a non-sense in these spaces, but it is the sense of the nothing that we must find. Alongside a willingness on the part of the audience to grapple with spaces of difficulty, staging that uses non-textual senses to ground our sense that we are somewhere (strange and anonymous, but somewhere), and not nowhere, is necessary to the success of these small glides and gaps. The second type of hole is the literal image or mention of one; in this chorus, one that trips us and that we then fall into: “in the very upness / of his stuckitude / he fell. / / (Straw, straw, straw, straw.)” We understand the relation between the two places as a drop. The third type inverts the hole by energizing the anonymity surrounding seeming solidity by temporarily landing in a place of familiarity, creating what Big Dance Theater co-director Paul Lazar referred to as a “rugged island” in a personal interview. The stability of the proverb “[y]ou can’t beat something with nothing” exists as an island surrounded by empty space that offers relief in our disorientation. Wicked proverbs and notations bearing a resemblance to proverbial wisdom are an ongoing resource for this island-building; the sound of wisdom and of age can be soothing and grounding. Fuchs recognizes recursion and repetition as a landscape writing strategy, marking or circling around a place even in the absence of literal landscape elements, a territory-making function that resembles what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call the “refrain,” a kind of hybridized musical-topographical event. In one of Antigone’s later choruses, a list of fallacies provides a temporary sense of territory through recursive iteration. Taking a second stab at the question “what is more weird than man,” this chorus tries to ground itself in logic only to find weirdness again underfoot:

The hole and the patch should / be commensurate, as the / dog to his man should be / obedient. It is as if I / ask you to prove this bicycle / belongs to Hector, and you reply / “All the bicycles around here / belong to Hector”; or the / / fallacy of too many questions, the / fallacy of affirming the consequent, or the / fallacy of denying the antecedent, or the / fallacy of hasty generalization, or the / fallacy of irrelevant conclusion, or the / fallacy of misplaced concreteness, or the / fallacy of many questions, or the / fallacy of accident; or the fallacy of bad faith. / / What is more weird what is more weird / than red feather than black kettle / what is more weird.

(113)

This refrain of fallacies provides a temporary perch, but no sooner is it established than the line crumples and reveals that we are still circling the perimeter of the question of weirdness. Antigone is full of these refrains, created through the effect of eddying in the flow of Wellman’s language. These eddies, within the sea of greater strangeness, offer themselves up as perches. Through the territory-making strategy of the refrain, they define a ground and offer a footing. Sometimes he moves on from these spots back into the sea of the story, in which case they function as an index of drifting thought that hovers around the plot. At other times he uses the rest offered by the island to slow down the story so that we become aware of an incoming phenomenon. Though they rarely hold, these islands prevent Wellman’s plays from becoming too oceanic to follow. In our conversation about staging Antigone, Lazar emphasized the necessity of finding every anchor point of familiar sense, both these kinds of aphorisms that sound familiar and concrete descriptions of action. He deployed the image of an island chain to describe the skeleton he and Annie-B Parson used to ground the strange assemblage device of the play’s action, so as to allow the audience a sense of freedom in thinking without passing a degree of lostness from which they were unlikely to return.

Intense Absence

Wellman’s chosen handbook on holes is Roberto Casati and Achille C. Varzi’s Holes and Other Superficialities, a text that attempts a realist description of holes from ontological, mereological, topological, and morphological standpoints.⁶ Casati and Varzi describe themselves as “hole realists.” The central thesis of the book is that holes do exist as “immaterial bodies” that are always parasitic to hosts, but that “[h]oles cannot be the only things around” (34, 193). A hole cannot be its own host; it must be a hole in something. But within that something, the hole is an absence. To think about a hole, we must “[t]hink negative” (189). William James similarly locates experiences of blank spaces as integral to the experience of thinking, placing the experience of what he calls “substantive” and “transitive” thought alongside the experience of “dumb or anonymous” states in the curve of consciousness. Our vocabulary does not contain everything it is possible to think and feel. Rather, writes James,

namelessness is compatible with existence. There are innumerable consciousnesses of emptiness, no one of which taken in itself has a name, but all different from each other. The ordinary way is to assume that they are all emptinesses of consciousness, and so the same state. But the feeling of an absence is toto coelo other than the absence of a feeling. It is an intense feeling.

(“Stream” 251-52)

Through the skips and gaps of his lines, and the slipperiness and evanescence of territory underfoot, Wellman gives this “intense feeling” of “an absence” an analog in stage time: the pause. His plays abound with variants of the direction: “Pause. Silence. Pause.” Both holes and pauses are repeated figures in his work, standing for each other in a “compact between special instance and wild time” (“Speculations” 301). Never merely a slowed down response in an otherwise continuous action, Wellman’s pause is a drain, a way of evacuating a scene.

If the anonymous relation between things animates Wellman’s poetics at the level the line, as we have seen in the Antigone chorus, it does so as well at the level of the scene. Bad Penny, a site-specific play for Bow Bridge in Central Park, culminates in a pause that so evacuates the scene of its namable sense that it becomes a space of terror, dramatizing the onset of namelessness (the incomprehensible) by evacuating its landscape of certainty. The play has only one actual event in a plotted sense: the Boatman of Bow Bridge comes to take away the man who has picked up the bad penny. Otherwise, the text is a sequence of stream of thought monologues set into the specific landscape of Central Park’s Bow Bridge. Initially focused on actual landscapes slightly askew (of the sky, the park, the fictional near-by gas stations), the poetic imagery becomes increasingly disordered through the addition of a chorus speaking alongside the individual characters. The effect is that of a strange interval, where the relation of speakers to other speakers remains obscure even as it is enforced compositionally by their juxtaposition. As the play nears the happening of its one event, the First Man, who has the bad penny, declares his belief in “cheese. . . crud. . . power. . . bad shoes. . . insects. . . goop. . . gunnysacks. . . tar. . … furballs. . . cardboard. . . ooze. . .” while a chorus hidden in the bushes chants, “Incomprehensible, the bridge. Incomprehensible, the puddles. Incomprehensible, the sky. Incomprehensible, the hats. Incomprehensible, the thumbtacks. . .” (146). When the boatman arrives, all sound stops. The man, after “a blank moment of horror,” climbs into the boat and is taken away by the boatman (146). After a landscape of language, this event is most terrifying in its silence. Bad Penny‘s drama is the experience of the blank place, the hole.

Its chorus resorts to proverbs to cure the silence: “as you sow, so shall you reap; a bad penny always turns up; nature abhors a vacuum; thought is free; the squeaking wheel gets the grease; today you, tomorrow me; there are more ways of killing a dog than choking it with butter” (148). Across the (semi-) recognizable shape of proverbial aphorism, the First Woman layers a last monologue rife with contradiction: “For all things beneath the sky are/ lovely, except those which/ are ugly; and these are odious/ and reprehensible and must be/ destroyed” (148). As the chorus continues to speak their proverbs, the First Woman speaks to uncertainty:

For the Way is ever difficult to discover
in the wilderness of thorns and mirrors
and the ways of the righteous are full
strange and possess strange hats and
feet. For the Way leads over from the
Fountains of Bethesda, where the Lord
performed certain acts, acts unknown to
us, across the Bow Bridge of our human
unknowability, pigheadedness, and the
wisenheimer attitude problem of our
undeserving, slimeball cheesiness. . .

(148-9)

The language of the chorus and the First Woman stands in an unnamed and perhaps unnamable relation. There seems to be no reconciliation in the polarity of the choral effort to create solidity and the First Woman’s acquiescence to the strange way that leads us out of these solid places. This relation is not “unnamable” in a Beckettian sense so much as resistant to the possibility of measuring and coding the relationship. Its resistance fosters a sense of human smallness; the “Bow” of the bridge’s name begins to evoke the act of bowing and the environment seems charged with a power that might eclipse the humans trying to orient themselves in it. After the “blank horror” of the First Man’s removal, the play restarts only to hang suspended in strangeness. Submissively respectful to “the Bow Bridge of our human unknowability,” we arrive at an almost abject, tragic tone of “utterly craven, totally lost, desperate and driven incomprehensibility” (149). The feeling of absence is an intensity, and so a presence; phenomenologically, it is a hole.

Wellman also creates the “intense feeling” of “absence” with an inverse process: inscrutable naming in an alien language. His plays abound with technical vocabulary that borders on hoax, creating an intensity tinged with a suspicion that the strangely named thing is in fact an unrecognizable object from a vocabulary we can never hope to know (as with Albanian Softshoe, when the second act reveals that the living room drama unfolding in the first act was a soap opera on the eighth moon of Saturn; what do we call it now?). In the opening scene of The Lesser Magoo, Torque, an office flunky being interviewed for an indeterminate job, is quizzed on his technical grasp of a mysterious trade:

Curran:

Sir, do you know what Crowe’s Dark Space is?

Torque:

Sure, it’s the place where the One He Refused to Meet encountered the Crocodilian Mahoon and therefore lays an egg. Quite a large egg, in fact.

Curran:

And are you sure of that?

Torque:

Well—that’s what I was taught at Princeton. School of Upper Malabar Philocubist and Macrurous Studies.

(101)

If these names seem merely goofy, the scene as it progresses replaces play with terror. We do not know the meaning of these words, and so when they give way to something violent and unexplained, the pleasure of their seemingly comic invention is replaced by threat. Torque’s quizzing culminates in his completion of “Presley’s Title One Rogation Exercise” by naming the “tools of the Lesser Magoo”: Whisk broom, Valve trumpet, Tom and Jerry Tongs, Chattahoochie Star-Toothed Harrow, Number six parting tool, tub chair, Klein bottle, Oboe, Hip-boots, Hacksaw, Clothes tree, Plunger, Jigger-chaser, St Louis Double-Hinged Rainbow-Roof, Ramses Motorized Lawn Cable, and Obeah-Man Refluent Bow and Arrow (103-5). Having succeeded, he is allowed to visit the water cooler. After a nearly wordless four minute pause during which his interviewers recline with their eyes covered by handkerchiefs through an epic (in stage time) silence, Torque returns. The stage direction reads,

Something terrible has happened to him. He looks like he has seen a ghost. Perhaps his own. He has vomited, soiling his shirt and jacket. His left shoe and stocking are gone, and the foot is bloody. Tremblingly, he crosses the room, leaving bloody splotches; and quietly sits as before.

(106-7)

The puzzle of what has happened to Torque goes unnamed and unexplained, another hole in the plot, the bodily violence of which dramatizes the intensity of this namelessness. Instead of offering an orienting sense of order, the plenitude of technical terms that has filled up this scene repels the audience away from the surface of impenetrable language. In the increasingly disturbing imagery of the office landscape—a closet door swings open to reveal Torque’s predecessor swinging from a noose—the substantive quality of the argot dissipates, becomes threateningly unknown. In this way the impedance to our smooth understanding of the play’s language aids Wellman’s disturbing and disorienting effects. This impedance that insists on our awareness of the play’s written surface marks Menippean satire as one of Wellman’s writing modes: inescapably, we must consider our own (in)comprehension.

Hoole’s Hole⁷

I have thus far spoken mostly about the local, line-level effects of Wellman’s prose, a focus I’ve sustained in order to signal two separate relations. The first is the relation of Wellman to concerns outside his own plays: particularly the landscape, or we could say the poetic, tradition in theater. I have shown that the license of a non-linear approach to stage speech, described amply by Stein as the relation of words to other words, is taken up by Wellman to disorient and destabilize, particularly in relation to our ability to know what is going on, and how we should be receiving it. The second and more important reason for my sustained investigation of the Wellman line has to do with the microcosmic environment of his plays as preparation for the effects of the macrocosmic. Recall the opening axiom of “Speculations”: “The STRUCTURE of a play ought not to be viewed as a fixed thing but as a mutable one. I mean, the structure of a play conceived of as a moving point . . . passing over—or through—time” (294). If structure is mutable and not encompassing, then there is no relation of part to whole in which the micro signals and predicts the shapes of the macro, or gradually accretes to fill in a coherent picture.

How, then, is that part-whole relation drawn? The description of a play’s structure as “a moving point” means that the larger environment we inhabit is continuously reconfigured as that point moves in time. If it does not work to fill in the overall structure incrementally, might the line, as the local environment of that moving point, create a condition of thinking rather than indicate a framework? Might the weirdness of the line be necessary to our ability to move alongside the larger action of the play? For only once we are unsettled will we find ourselves available to fall into Wellman’s holey plots. In other words, is it possible that the larger action of the play wouldn’t work without our thinking being primed for more radical disorientation by the small hollows and rebuffs in the lines? “Speculations” supports such a claim. The topographical figure at the heart of that essay is the space surrounding the straight line of the known, a space Wellman variously names “phase space,” the space “perpendicular to the known,” “the strange,” the “radiant,” the “beyond,” “Hoole space,” “Hoole’s Hole,” and the space of “howling.” The space of theater cannot take place along the line of the already known (only theatre can happen there). “Speculations” thus describes the theatrical as taking place beyond our knowing, if not beyond our feeling. I have described this space as a “strange hole,” and at this juncture it is necessary to think more deeply through what a hole is, and in particular how a hole could be something in the first place.

Fields of Emptiness Filled by Strangeness

Wellman takes up Casati and Varzi’s provocative “hole realism” by making holes in the host of known. Leaving the sentence for a larger scale of analysis, we can find this parasitic growth in Wellman’s description of what happens to structure in the course of theater. Wellman differentiates between two kinds of structure, just as he elsewhere claims two kinds of time, clock time and “Wild Time” (“Speculations” 305). These pairs follow the same distinction. In the geezerly theater of “appearance,” where we can only watch passively what we already know going on in front of us, structure is a reference to some other, presumably better, play. In the theater of “apperception,” or in Wellman’s coinage, “apparence” — a theater that cannot take place without our mindfulness, a theater that does not know where it is going — “all [conventional] structures fall down in their folly” (303). It is the event of this falling away of the known that makes possible the appearance, and so the “apparence” of a space beyond convention. After the collapse of the known:

A tear appears.
(A tear as in air, not a tear as in ear.)
A tear appears and it is:
A
→
→
such that a gap, or discontinuity, appear
? B
in the continuum.

(“Speculations” 303)

This discontinuity is the beginning of a Wellman hole, that parasitic “field of emptiness” that negatively produces itself within the known (Casati and Varzi 177). “Hoole’s hole” seems to take up Casati and Varzi’s mandate to “think negative.” This negative expanse is not necessarily empty; negative within the space of the host, the hole is fundamentally fillable. A filled hole doesn’t cease to be a hole, for some discontinuity still exists between the hole and the “hole-lining,” or the edge surface(s) of its host. (Casati and Varzi consider hole, hole filling, and hole host as separate entities.) Likewise Wellman’s space in the hole of the known is filled, of course, with what we don’t know: the strange. The strange is “perpendicular to the four dimensions of familiar appearance” (“Speculations” 296), a ray that shoots from the known into the unknown. In perceiving the strange, we find that we have somehow gone off our grid and are moving in a space of n dimensions: “So STRANGENESS is what fills Apparence and, thus, is what keeps us there, where we find ourselves” (296). Where we find ourselves is “phase space,” in physics an ideal space mapping all the possible conditions of a dynamic system. In Wellman’s speculative analogy, phase space is seemingly a space where determination of any particular state is impossible. If all possibilities are present, and those possibilities likely exceed the “four dimensions of familiar appearance,” then a drama that “unfolds” in phase space “cannot be told in terms of plot” (295). What happens in phase space is the event of “Apparence,” a showing-forth. “Apparence” is Wellman’s translation of Kantian “apperception” in which something new comes be known, or perceived. Apparence, filled or configured by strangeness,⁸ is what can happen in a Wellman hole, and the “doing of Apparence” constitutes the purpose of theater (297). That we find ourselves in strangeness, and not merely looking at it, signals the ceremonial function. We are active: “The proposition I do not know what I am doing while in the act of doing I do not know who I am or what is not tautology; this proposition reveals an exchange of charm for strangeness. A supercession of apperception by the force of the square of what lies off; off there, and is radiant (and is the Radiant)” (301). As we do what we do not know we are doing, we participate in the unknown. Wellman thus reveals his theater as a project of open mindedness. Finding ourselves in strange places, we can experience genuine newness in our thinking. This new experience is “crystalline”; it is an event in thinking, and not an idea. The event, rather than producing new knowledge, produces an “epiphany” which is for Wellman an opening, or expanding, of space: “drama is an epiphany, something opens up. Something shows itself” (339).

A variant of James’s “dumb or anonymous” experience, the epiphany is also something beyond vocabulary. Whatever shows itself cannot be absorbed by language and knowing, but rather remains outside of description. In his plays, Wellman traces the contours of that opening up, or in hole-realist terms, the “hole lining,” in a kind of spatial notation. The apparence cannot be scripted, but its space can be prepared and it can be beckoned. In this sense, Wellman’s plays “do” apparence, and in this sense they are ceremony. “Ceremony,” writes Wellman “is the nonlinear optic on the moment. Ceremony is the basic form of the theatrical” (340). Those plays of his, like the Crowtet cycle, that follow a plot—weird but essentially narrative—have characters encountering holey spaces where strange things happen: clearings in the middle of the forest, horror-filled closet doors swinging open, vast open plains. In these plays the plot’s topography provides a figure that is replayed in the space of thinking in the same way that a musical harmonic note also produces “overtones,” or an additional set of frequencies that are multiples of the base frequency sounding simultaneously with the main tone. The overtone series of Wellman’s hole poetics sounds in the line, the plot’s topography, and in the receiving mind of the audience. Who knows what other registers it sounds on? The hole can be thought of as the interior space of a ceremonial bell, “sounded” when “a tear appears.” Not merely spaces or gaps, these holes go beyond the interruption of sense: they produce negative environments, or “immaterial bodies.”

In a philosophical play like Antigone, where speech is not always assigned to a character position, the figure of the hole is folded into the descriptive language that carries reports from beyond the events on the ground; the holes and wildness in this imagery help bring the proprioceptive sense of holes and wildness near. Antigone, for example, describes her experience in the wild spaces beyond the coordinates of the basic story. The action of the story is initiated by the appearance of a logical notation “!∃,” which Wellman defines as “there exists a unique situation.” In the notes to the play, Wellman asks that all parts be played by the three Fates–with the exception of this unknown god, who we can verbally account for as “E Shriek” or “the Shriek Operator” (Antigone 105). If all parts are to be played by the three Fates then this unknown god is unplayable; it isn’t a part. E Shriek then is immaterial, a transmission, a figure whose presence indicates the opening up of a communicating tunnel from here to “→ ? B.” E Shriek initiates the play’s possible commerce with wild spaces. The burial of Polyneices is an event beyond attribution, occurring in the company of an immaterial body:

Unknown god as a bodiless shadow approaches. As a swirl of fabric. I am the Shriek Operator. !∃. I am the unique situation. I am the uncanny and have come to this place, place crowded with corpses and the stench of death. I am the Shriek Operator and am very pleased with all this slaughter, this horror, this misfortune. Misfortune out of contrast, sprung hinges, what creaks, what is fundamentally broken. Sand pours without anyone willing it. Pours from above. From the sky. Something is covered. Something mangled and horribly dead.

(106)

!∃Shriek in Big Dance Theater’s Antigone at Dance Theater Workshop, New York City, December, 2002. Used by permission. !∃, “an unknown god as bodiless shadow,” speaks from an intermediate point in space between the two stage agents of its voice: Tricia Brouk, leaning backwards and draped with “a swirl of fabric,” who mouths the words, and Leroy Logan who delivers the text into the microphone. The effect is not that of the appearance of a character, but of the reception of a voice, transmitted into the space of the play.

Click to view video

The Greek drama of incommensurate mandates becomes a ceremony of lost metrics. This initiation of the story as an action unfolding from an unauthored event creates, from the moment this play starts moving, a sense that the world of its setting is permeated by acts that have no cause and seem to come from elsewhere, acts we can neither know or account for. At the crux of the drama it is precisely the presence of the “tear (as in air)” that allows for Wellman’s epiphanic drama of opening to occur. If we have been experiencing strange eruptions of the beyond into the space of the story, now we begin to move out of that space through the same tears. The movement into the space beyond the hole occasions a paradox that unsettles language. Antigone, buried alive, “witness to her own death. . . . [a] stranger in the house of being,” has undone the names of both living and dying; she inhabits a nameless space (114). Both there and not there, she has been buried in phase space. Here Wellman’s description of the opening up of space is quite literal. “I am going deep into a hole,” Antigone announces. “Deep in a hole and come out the other side” (114).

This theatrical moment creates an enveloping tone in describing what cannot be seen in the four dimensions of the room, perceptible only in that space of open-mindedness where we do not know where we are going. “We are peripheral to, to appearance,” writes Wellman. “We are central to the apparence as it enfolds us in Hoole Space” (“Speculations” 303). In this enveloping space, “Night says no to day. Silence. Pause. A small unpleasant animal crosses the cast emptiness of infinite spaces. . . . Silence. We behold, for the first time, the curvature of the earth. Someone looks out and holds and egg.” The play descends into stillness: “Alone and cold. No one to love her. No one to protect her. Nothing but stillness. Stillness laying waste. The laying waste of stillness. Now she is the focal point of stillness” (Antigone 114-15). From this extraordinary compass point Wellman lays down three transitive pulses in the felt direction of thought, their simple repetition typographically isolated on the page:

And
and
and
and the gods are coming. Unknown ones and the unseen.

(115)

These transitive “ands,” without substantive nouns to offer coordinates, perform a kind of essential “and” function, joining with the possibility of whatever could be beyond it. Steering out into space, in the incredible quiet of this opening, these “ands” open in preparation to receive the strange. What we find, in that space, is a series of hollows, negations, silences, strange appearances, and songs: emptiness laced with charm. Haemon appears in the sky, falling on his own sword while “[t]ime passes unconcerned” and”[n]othing moves us” just as “[n]othing moves Antigone. . . because we are no longer what’s called ‘human’” (116): on the other side of this hole we are somehow negative if not negated. Songs occur as refrains, marking out space:⁹ “Bubba tubba bubba tubba bubba tubba bup . / / I am the kind of girl tired of always being wise / I am the tin cat tied to my own damn tail. . . . Slow fade to black in which we hear them sing the song over again till they get it right. More right. Over and over. Silence.” Hollows are filled by slow things: “Pause. In which Time becomes a one-legged crow. Crow on a withered bough” (116). Immaterial bodies are perceived without being seen: “One senses the presence of an unknown god. Then another. Then another” (117). From these glides, rounds, and hollows, Antigone reports from the inside of a luminous rock, a radiant space on the other side of that hole. Wellman again makes the topography of the story a figure for our movement of mind:

And I slipped out the back and I made myself very small and I slipped out the back way and when I awoke. I was in a different place, a thin place, as though it were the place of a compass focus. And the lines of force radiated out from my heart in all directions and I could feel these lines of force as though I were a god and not merely a nasty girl, a girl tired of being the wise one. Radiated out from my still beating heart.

(117)

Didi O’Connell in Big Dance Theater’s Antigone, Dance Theater Workshop, New York City, December 2002. Used by permission. The staging’s fluency and its rapid alternation between theatrical vocabularies create, in the sudden shift between dance and text, a thin, tight focus that supplements the text. We find ourselves on an island in the space of the theater.

Click to view video

The language of description and report allows Wellman to fold the topographical models of phase space and Wild Time he describes in “Speculations” into the story itself.¹⁰

The reality, or materiality, of the story takes place simultaneously in the space described by the play and in the space of mind produced by giving attention to it, differentiating this work from the theater traditions that precede it. The stage space itself is a magnetizing element, but it is not the only space of action. Stagings of Wellman’s work filled by those elements of theater that do not tend to invite a sense of conclusion—dance, image, song, sound—create an environment for the play to happen that shrugs off the habit of either the model (traditional realism) or the spectacle (which traffics in the commerce of desire and pleasure between the stage and the audience). We need the stage as the hole needs the host. The play needs us; “it is completed by our mindfulness” (“Speculations” 298). These joinings, across genre, across materiality and immateriality, sometimes rather demoniacally across species, across the known and the unknown, constitute Wellman’s pneumatic landscape, a landscape that calls for multiple metrics that communicate through tears in their own surfaces. In our “fundamentally broken” world, ceremony—which is not to grasp but to stop grasping, to find ourselves in the position of a radiant compass point and not just nasty little girls—will save us from so much junk knowledge, “from our own wrath, and the odium of our good intentions” (“Speculations” 341).

This saving ceremony is invoked in Infrared:

FOR all things are Holy to me—see that
you follow the way of your Y to the
site of your X, for that hollow will be
the place of your hallowing;
For I am called X, and dwell in the holes
of fire you call Sun and Moon; and in all
the blazing, starry holes that the night
is drilled with. . . .
FOR I am difficult to grasp;
FOR any natural act, if hallowed, leads to me;
and nature needs people for what no angel
can perform—its hallowing—and in especial,
the hallowing of its hollows and holes.

(49-50)

Here is a landscape vision concerned with what is beyond our seeing, beyond the horizon. This horizon is composed not of the literally far, indistinguishable edge of our sight, but by the vague edges of our thinking.

At this “live ceremony [that] feeds on dead ceremony” (“Speculations” 340), we are not observers but receivers, tuning in transmissions from beyond our knowing, something only possible if we learn to hallow the hollows and holes. Theater is a crystal radio kit for our thinking. We become aware that our uncontained minds are receptors for signals no one originated and we can’t account for. This conception of mind is both pre-Socratic and post-humanist: a resistance to all forms of closure in our sense of where thinking comes from and where it goes, it implies a strange extensiveness. In this space where strangeness fills apparence, we are asked to practice our own tuning mechanisms, to extend our frequency array. Wellman’s theater, though it might rail, sputter, and denounce, is not a project of critique, neither is it an object or a thing in itself. Removed entirely from whatever lyric moods we might think of when we hear the word “ceremony,” this is a ceremony of bewilderment officiated by nasty things. This is the world where we find ourselves, says Wellman. We have no idea how weird it is. We have no idea how to see. In his workshop at Brooklyn College, when Mac was pleased with the writing, he would sometimes say by way of compliment, “all the characters have wooden hair.” On a very good day, he might say, “we should take her out and shoot her.” And this is, I suppose, the last note of this essay: that the hole where emptiness is hallowed and maybe something is tuned in is dangerous, and this is good. If our thinking doesn’t proceed through passes of terror, something is wrong.

Karinne Keithley Syers is a writer, performer, sound artist, and graduate student in English at the CUNY Graduate Center. In addition to creating her own work, she has performed with David Neumann, Young Jean Lee, Chris Yon, and Sara Smith. She has written about Nature Theater of Oklahoma for Theater Magazine, and is the founder of the 53rd State Press, which publishes new performance writing.

Notes

I wish to acknowledge the profound influence of my studies with both Joan Richardson and Mac Wellman on the ideas and attractions taken up in this essay. Additionally I wish to thank Laura Hinton and Heidi Bean, who have generously coached me in the development of this essay over innumerable drafts, and Stefania Heim and Joan Richardson, who combed the later drafts and contributed invaluable refinements to these sentences.

1. I am part of this community. I met Mac in a ‘Pataphysics workshop in 2003, after seeing a production of Hypatia and Soho Rep. I went on to study with him in the Brooklyn College MFA program from 2004-6, and he has remained a mentor and good friend.

2. The emergent landscape tradition in theater and other art movements that rethinks the centrality of the human figure in composition can be read as an internalization and unfolding in the mid-19^th century of the Darwinian notion that humans are part of a network of living things, and not a central or separate category of being.

3. As Elinor Fuchs and Una Chaudhuri have proposed in Land/Scape/Theater, landscape was an emergent element of modern drama well before Gertrude Stein’s famous assertion that her plays were landscapes. Beyond landscape as setting, Fuchs and Chaudhuri suggest that “at the threshold of modernism, theater began to manifest a new spatial dimension, both visually and dramaturgically, in which landscape for the first time held itself apart from character and became a figure on its own” (3). Stein’s “landscape play” comes after both Henrik Ibsen’s and Richard Wagner’s investment in actual and ideal landscapes, respectively. Stein’s innovations represent perhaps a new technology for writing from and as landscape, a brachiation within a field, rather than a separate tradition. For Fuchs and Chaudhuri, landscape becomes an active element, an energetic center of modernist plays, as in the silent urgency of the disappearing forests in Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” and “The Cherry Orchard.” Place becomes, if not vocal, a loud claim on the attention of both the characters and the audience. Both separately and in their coedited volume Land/Scape/Theater, they attend to the natural and nonhuman as important elements of dramatic thinking, elements that have been until lately eclipsed by a critical focus on the subject, and an actor-centered insistence on character and motivation as the foundational elements of playwriting. Fuchs suggests that in the late 19^th century plays of Chekhov, Ibsen, Maurice Maeterlinck, Frank Wedekind, and August Strindberg, landscape shifts from a “platform for human action,” a “preconscious” element of the text, to a “conscious” one (30).

4. The post-anthropocentric points also toward ecological poetics as described by Angus Fletcher in A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination.

5. Stein’s use of landscape is principally a language tool. Bowers revises Stein’s “landscape” to “lang-scape” to emphasize the cross-disciplinary license Stein derives from thinking about landscape as a compositional modality that can be used in language. Principles of relation derived from thinking about landscape are transposed to language thinking. Stein describes these relational principles as a kind of constant in a natural landscape. This relational abundance is not restricted to pastoral elements, but also includes the scene of writing itself. In Four Saints in Three Acts, alongside the relative positioning of the landscape elements—trees, magpies, saints—the process of writing is also written into the play: “Landscape” after all is made possible by a viewer’s perceptive of a visible field. Bowers claims that Stein allows the “transformative power of the artist’s imagination” to bring forward the artist’s perception as a central object of the composition (129). This enables Stein to “write the actor out of the play and to write the writer into it,” exchanging narrative for the experience of artistic process (133), and so realign sympathetic experience away from the character and toward the experience of thinking.

6. In tutorials with Wellman while his student at Brooklyn College, he directed me to many philosophic and mathematic texts that have been resources for his own writing, such as the Casati and Varzi text, and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. He tends to favor nontheatrical texts as resources for writing.

7. I once asked Mac who Hoole was. He indicated that he might have been a Turkish mathematician by the name of Huhl, someone who, as far as I can tell, does not exist. Mac’s predilections for the Fez and the hoax assert themselves here.

8. Although they share a term, Wellman’s strangeness is not the strangeness of the Russian Formalist “making strange.” Like Stein’s efforts to make new seeing possible in a domestic landscape, the project of “making strange” works to defamiliarize an environment at hand, whereas Wellman’s strange is a space we go to, a space beyond, where we are strangers.

9. The song, as an action of charm, territorializes the hole in which the play is gently suspended. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari describe the work of the song as “organiz[ing] a limited space” within “chaos.” Sound marks a territory, creating through rhythm a temporary and workable limitation that pushes out the phase-space multiplicity of chaos: “For sublime deeds like the foundation of a city or the fabrication of a golem, one draws a circle, or better yet, walks in circles as in a children’s dance . . . . A mistake in speed, rhythm or harmony would be catastrophic because it would bring back the forces of chaos” (311). In the strange hole of Antigone’s living burial, Wellman’s song literally describes a circle: “The devil wipes his tail with Creon’s pride./ Listen to Little Jack fry up an eyeball for an egg./ Bubba tubba bubba tubba bubba tubba bup.// I am the kind of girl tired of always being wise./ I am the tin can tied to my own damn tail” (“Antigone” 116).

10. This is especially marked in Antigone; it was written around the same time Wellman was drafting “Speculations.”

Works Cited

Antigone. By Mac Wellman. Dir. Paul Lazar, Annie-B Parson. Chor. Annie-B Parson. Perf. Tricia Brouk, Molly Hickock, Leroy Logan, Didi O’Connell, Rebecca Wysocky. Big Dance Theater. Dance Theater Workshop, New York City. December, 2002.
Bowers, Jane Palatini. “The Composition That All the World Can See: Gertrude Stein’s Theater Landscapes.” Land/Scape/Theater. Eds. Elinor Fuchs and Una Chaudhuri. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2002. 121-144. Print.
Casati, Roberto and Achille C. Varzi. Holes and Other Superficialities. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994. Print.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
Fletcher, Angus. A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004. Print.
Fuchs, Elinor and Una Chaudhuri. “The New Spatial Paradigm.” Introduction. Land/Scape/Theater. Eds. Elinor Fuchs and Una Chaudhuri. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2002. 1-7. Print.
Fuchs, Elinor. The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theater after Modernism. Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 1996. Print.
———. “Reading for Landscape: The Case of American Drama.” Land/Scape/Theater Eds. Elinor Fuchs and Una Chaudhuri. 30-50. Print.
Heidegger, Martin. Introduction to Metaphysics. Trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2000. Print.
James, William. “The Stream of Thought.” The Principles of Psychology, Vol. 1. New York: Dover Books, 1980. Print.
Lazar, Paul. Personal interview. 1 Feb. 2008.
Perloff, Marjorie. 21^st Century Modernism: the “New” Poetics. Malden: Blackwell, 2002. Print.
———. “Foreword.” Cellophane. By Mac Wellman. x-xvii. Print.
———. “Harm’s Other Way.” The Mac Wellman Journal. Brooklyn: Sock Monkey Press, 1998. Print.
Rosten, Bevya, Anne-Marie Levine, Catharine R. Stimpson, Richard Howard, Wendy Steiner, Maria Irene Fornes, Mac Wellman, Al Carmines, Richard Foreman, Charles Bernstein, and Jane Bowers. “A Play That Has to Be Performed: From the Gertrude Stein Symposium at New York University.” Theater 32.2 (2002): 2-25. Print.
Stein, Gertrude. “Plays.” Last Operas and Plays. Ed. Carl van Vechten. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1995. xxix-lii. Print.
Wellman, Mac. Antigone. The Difficulty of Crossing a Field: Nine New Plays. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008. 105-120. Print.
———. Bad Penny. Cellophane. Baltimore: PAJ Books, John Hopkins UP, 2001. 123-150. Print.
———. Cellophane. Cellophane. 151-184. Print.
———. “A Chrestomathy of 22 Answers to 22 Wholly Unaskable and Unrelated Questions Concerning Political and Poetic Theater.” Theater 24.1 (1993): 43-51. Print.
———. Infrared. The Difficulty of Crossing a Field: Nine New Plays. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008. 1-50. Print.
———. The Lesser Magoo. Crowtet 2. Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2003. Print.
———. “Speculations: An Essay on the Theater.” The Difficulty of Crossing a Field: Nine New Plays. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008. 293-342. Print.
———. “The Theater of Good Intentions.” Performing Arts Journal 8.3 (1984): 59-70. Print.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. Eds. G.H. von Wright, R. Rhees, G.E.M. Anscombe. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1967. Print.

September 3, 2013

Poet’s Theater: An Introduction

Heidi R. Bean (bio)
Bridgewater State University
heidi.bean@bridgew.edu

Laura Hinton (bio)
City College of New York
laurahinton12@gmail.com

This special issue of Postmodern Culture takes up a subject until now only rarely discussed in the annals of academic scholarship: that of contemporary American poet’s theater. But what exactly is a “poet’s theater”? Is it primarily a type of writing done by poets for the stage–trying their hand, so to speak, at a theater genre, as the novelist Henry James once did, winning no public acclaim? Is it any poetry presented in a public space before an audience, thus including, for example, both the modern poetry slam and the classic poetry reading? Recent critical studies devoted to the latter have helped us hear the multiple reverberations of sound and aurality particular to American poetry.¹ But what we mean by a “poet’s theater” in the articles of this issue has not been the focus of those writings. Rather, for our contributors here, poet’s theater is a theatrical event that is scripted and preconceived but also open-ended and site-specific. Its meanings unfold not according to some predetermined narrative or social situation, but rather performatively, informed by local contexts, audience makeup, and performance conditions. In their own attempts to define poet’s theater, Kevin Killian and David Brazil, editors of the just-published Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater, 1945-1985, suggest by way of definition simply that we “try and catch it performing its social function” (xiii). We agree with that active assumption.

As we consider what we mean by a poet’s theater, we might also consider why multiple instances of poet’s theater have emerged in such a variety of U.S. regions, performance spaces, and venues in the past six decades, with several adopting some version of the name “Poet’s Theater” as their official moniker: the Cambridge Poets Theatre, founded in 1951 by V.R. “Bunny” Lang; the New York Poets Theatre, a.k.a. the American Theater for Poets, founded in 1961 by Diane di Prima, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Alan S. Marlowe, John Herbert McDowell, and James Waring; the Hardware Poets Playhouse in New York, 1962-1964, founded by Peter Levin, Audrey Davis, and Jerry and Elaine Bloedow; the Judson Poets’ Theater, founded in the 1960s by Al Carmines; the Nuyorican Poets Café, founded in 1973 by Miguel Algarín; and the San Francisco Poets Theater, 1979-1984,² founded by Nick Robinson and Eileen Corder and associated with the Bay Area L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (or “Language”) writers. In virtually every case, poet’s theater seems to have been not so much a coherent artistic movement as a creative outlet and countercultural community that brought poets, dancers, musicians, visual artists, theater artists, and performance artists into productive collaboration with one another. And yet placing these activities within a longer historical trajectory reveals key similarities from which we might begin to offer a definition.

The cross-pollination of artistic media and political ideologies that fostered postwar poet’s theater was enabled in part by the social and artistic conditions of the 1950s. As Stephen Bottoms explains in his wonderful study of underground New York theaters in the 1950s and 60s, Greenwich Village, and especially the East village, allowed bohemian artists of all stripes to mingle in the smoky haze of its lively bar, coffee house, and jazz-club culture. These provisional spaces hosted poetry readings and theatrical performances outside of the institutionalized structures that, in the economic pinch of the postwar period, hesitated to support anything not guaranteed to be a financial success. Small casts, spare sets, and simple plots made these productions amenable to slim budgets, and they could easily be performed in modest bar and coffee-house spaces. Such aesthetic choices may have been driven by economic necessity, but, as Bottoms notes, they had the additional effect of focusing the audience’s attention on the bodies and speech of the performers themselves, since there was little else to distract from these (16-18, 125). Similar low-budget, performance-centered aesthetics also characterized Action Painting, jazz jams, and poetry readings, and indeed artists, musicians, and poets frequently constituted each other’s audiences.

This proliferation of performance-centered aesthetics coincided with a critical turn to performance that might also be said to have its roots in the 1950s, the decade in which J.L. Austin’s Harvard lectures on the performativity of language (published in 1962 as How to Do Things with Words) and Erving Goffman’s 1959 The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, an analysis of the performativity of social life, commingled with, for example, the Living Theatre’s investigations into both poetic drama and Artaud-inspired presentational theater, as well as Allan Kaprow’s “Happenings.” Part of what is advanced in each of these interdisciplinary uses of the concept of performance is the notion of performance as a constitutive act. In fact, contemporary critics frequently identify performance, as Julia A. Walker aptly notes, as “the postmodern turn” in critical discourse (149).

It was from this fertile ground that postwar poet’s theater grew–not as a definitive practice but as the sharing of ideas and practices across media and ideologies. Following World War II, the politics of Senator Joe McCarthy, the founding of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, and the attack on artists in particular encouraged a separation of art and politics, modeled, for example, in the apoliticality of Abstract Expressionism. But in the 1960s, artists re-politicized aesthetics as they turned to the models, routines, and practices of “everyday life.” The contemporary poet’s theater that is the subject of this issue arises in this transition. Each of the essays included here addresses poet’s theater’s engagement with the politics of everyday life–via, for example, poet’s theater’s model of an environmental poetics (in James Sherry’s essay on Fiona Templeton), via the ethical implications of the audience’s oscillation between individual and collective reception (in Heidi R. Bean’s essay on Carla Harryman), via the political implications of the performed interpenetration of poetry with urban street culture (Nasser Hussain on Ron Silliman), and via a spatialized model of thought that encourages openness to the “holes” in knowledge (Karinne Keithley Syers on Mac Wellman).

Poetic verse drama is, of course, one of the oldest forms of literary activity and culture, including the ritual dramas of the ancient Greeks, and a major genre in English literature certainly since the Renaissance. But contemporary American poet’s theater is not so much grounded in the verse dramas of Aeschylus; or in the so-called “Golden Age” of English theater canonically represented by playwrights like Ben Johnson, Marlowe, or Shakespeare; or even in the stage works of modernist poets like W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and W.H. Auden. Instead, the scripted performance works of these particular contemporary American poet-playwrights self-consciously examine the relationship between discursive language, performing bodies, and audience members’ interactions and experiences. Poet’s theater is thus indebted as much to the rise of the conceptual arts, with their emphasis on multimedia forms, as it is to the histories of poetry and of drama and theater. Inhabiting, as Killian and Brazil put it, “a charged social space between the disputed territories of performativity, theatricality, and the textual” (xiii), poet’s theater might best be characterized as a self-conscious layering of different modes of representation, from the linguistic to the embodied, that is aimed at an investigation of the conceptual logic that joins representation to human-social experience.

In addressing what poet’s theater is, then, we wish to emphasize not only its formal-aesthetic hybridity and artistic collaborativity but also the critical effects of these exchanges. The recent American poet’s theater that is the topic of our issue here is informed perhaps most crucially by a theoretical dialectic, the perceived “split” between literary textuality and performance. Modernist text-versus-performance debates date back to avant-garde circles beginning as early as the 1870s. In “The Avant-Garde and the Semiotics of the Antitextual Gesture,” Erika Fischer-Lichte writes that, while some German Romantics like Goethe and Wagner may have “considered performance itself a work of art,” most of their contemporaries viewed “the artistic character of performance” as “primarily affirmed through the performance of literature, through the dramatic literary text that was supposed to steer and control performance” (80).

Such anti-theatricalism, particularly in the early twentieth century, was motivated in part by a fear of the public sphere, by a resistance both to theater’s collaborativity and to the perceived risks of collective reception. This version of modernism, theater theorist and historian Martin Puchner writes, celebrated “the figure of the individual artist who withdraws from the public sphere and the allegedly undifferentiated masses” and championed a model of reception that idealized individual contemplation in privacy (9). Both this model of the individual artist producing a highly complex creation as well as the private reception required by such a work “are responses,” Puchner asserts, “to the fear that the theater would actually provide a forum in which the constitution of public opinion might take place” (11). High modernism’s critique of realism and impersonation and its emphasis on the receptive value of absorption therefore work in tandem, as conspiratorial “barriers erected against the possibility of the public role of art suggested by the theater” (11).

In contrast to the anti-theatricalism of high modernism, the modernist avant-garde was decidedly pro-theatrical, even if it was also often critical of the conventions of the traditional theater itself. Puchner credits Wagner and his notion of the gesamtkunstwerk, or “total theater,” with transforming the theater from an art form into a value–a value which places not only the work of art but the conditions of its production and reception at the center of modernist debates (31). The avant-garde’s embrace of theatricalism, writes Puchner, demonstrates its “greater affinity to populism and the masses” and exhibits Andreas Huyssen’s “hidden dialectic” between the experimental or avant-garde and society’s mass culture (9).³ Certainly, the postwar poet’s theater that began to proliferate in living rooms, coffee houses, city streets, open galleries, and other makeshift spaces is indebted to the avant-garde’s embrace of collaboration and collective reception under the sign of theatricalism.

And yet, as much as contemporary American poet’s theater owes a debt to the modernist avant-garde, it should not simply be seen as a pro-theatrical break with modernist poetic drama. Instead, we might better perceive this postwar poet’s theater as a merging of the avant-garde’s theatricalism and literary modernism’s anti-theatrical strategies. Indeed, as Sarah Bay-Cheng and Barbara Cole have compellingly argued in their recent anthology of modernist poetic drama, Poets at Play, the category of modernist poetic drama properly includes both the literary stylings of H. D. and of Wallace Stevens, whose apparently anti-theatrical “closet” dramas resisted the conditions of the material theater, and the pro-theatrical plays of Edna St. Vincent Millay and E.E. Cummings, which incorporate such popular performance practices as vaudeville and minstrelsy. Bay-Cheng and Cole argue that modernist poet-playwrights often employed poetry as an intentionally anti-mimetic strategy that could offer “the hallmark of truth within the theatrical illusion of realism” (21). Thus, although it is conventionally written off both for what is perceived as its less-than-serious engagement with the theater and for its presumed lack of importance in the discourse of American modernism, modernist poetic drama may actually be better understood as an important departure from representational theater. This characteristic is one that postwar poet’s theater both inherits and extends.

It should come as no surprise then that our preferred term here is not drama, indicating a literary production intended to be read, but rather theater and/or performance, a turn that signals the space and relations of enactment as central concern. In re-encoding this text-and-performance “split,” poet’s theater calls its very terms into question: what is a “text,” what is a “performance,” how do these definitions relate to the conditions of their production and reception, and when might one affect, shade, or even become the other? From this perspective, American postwar poet’s theater might be best understood as an inheritor of both literary modernism and the modernist avant-garde, with the term “poet’s theater” itself rhetorically signaling, simultaneously, a disavowal of dramatic realism and an embrace of theatricalism. If realism effaces its own means of production, achieving its sense of “reality” by removing the traces of theatrical mediation, then poet’s theater is decidedly anti-realist, in the sense that it foregrounds, even celebrates, the theatrical event. Yet unlike modernist poetic theater, which structures its staging according to the (absent) verbal text, neither text nor performance over-determines the meaning or effects of postwar American poet’s theater.

As a theater of language, of what some might call poetic language, American poet’s theater grants special emphasis to embodied and performed language. “Poetic” language is imagined by many of the poet’s theater writers and stage-producers here not as a stabilized form of “content”-based meaning or communication but as decentered, slippery, highly active, mobile, and/or conflicted. Language becomes its own performance “act.” As a recuperative re-embracing of the performance practice embedded in any linguistic utterance, poet’s theater articulates language’s internal conflicts between signfier and signified, and it reconsiders the subject-object binary relations implicitly established within any imagistic and/or spatialized art form. Poet’s theater, particularly as embodied performance text, acts as a performance mirror and critique of these conventional linguistic processes. It does so by calling into question the stability not only of semantic “meaning” but also of human social identity–perceived in Emile Benveniste’s concept of the “I” to “be” only that transitory, unstable linguistic “subject,”⁴ and in the “performance” of identity that Judith Butler has famously described in gender and queer studies.⁵

As a formal hybrid of often competing discourses and media, poet’s theater is not a “poem,” nor is it even a series of poems, nor merely a script for a play. Instead, postwar poet’s theater is, for our purposes here, an active performance that is centered on, though not confined to, language. And–crucially–in being performed (by reader, actor, or poet) it performs, and revises linguistic-interpretative value. Poet’s theater thus acts upon the very instability of language enunciated in the work of so many post-structural theorists, from Roland Barthes to Julia Kristeva to Jacques Derrida–those ascribed to “writing,” to “degree zero” in poetic writing, to the “borderline psychosis” that Kristeva, at least, believes has been the experiment of poetic language. Thus, alhough this poet’s theater heartily embraces the imaginary of this odd writing scene / written text, it counters the conventions of what performance studies scholar Dwight Conquergood has called “textocentrism” (151)–that is, the sense of the text as authorized and authoritative, as an enduring document that always gets the last word.

A performance art? A conceptual poetics? Any scripted work performed in a designated space that butts against the more academically recognized, canonized literary theaters? Perhaps, we might conclude, that contemporary American poet’s theater is all of the above. Poet’s theater might be seen as a special category of “post-dramatic theatre,” Hans-Thies Lehmann’s influential term for non-characterological, non-narrative, multi-vocal, frequently multi-mediated, unstable “new” theater that “confirms the not so new insight that there is never a harmonious relationship but rather a perpetual conflict between text and scene” (145). In its eschewal of realistic portrayals of character, scene, and temporality, poet’s theater releases performance from regulation by the drama–even while it enhances the complexities, dissonances, and possibilities of its own play of language, especially as it pertains to the theatrum mundi of everyday life.

The poet’s theater that is the subject of this special issue thus trains its awareness both on theatrical processes and on the production of meaning in everyday life, with theatricalized performance frequently functioning as a kind of social and linguistic laboratory. Most of the essays here also focus on the ways in which the play of language and embodied and/or staged performance work together or in relation to one another. Whether in an epic solo reading of a piece by Ron Silliman on a street corner of San Francisco in the 1970s, or in a post-millennium arts space in multimedia collaboration with a range of artists performing Carla Harryman’s Mirror Play nearly three decades later, the concept of performance writ large–encompassing theatrical, social, discursive, and material enactments, as well as their relationships with one to the other–undergirds the conceptual and post-structural means at the heart of these poet’s theater works.

As Nasser Hussain shows in his article “Performing Ketjak: The Theater of the Observed,” Ron Silliman’s 1978 street corner reading of Ketjak in San Francisco was more than simply an open–a very open–“poetry reading.” It was also language in action and a close cousin to Fluxus-style events and “Happenings” of the 1950s and 60s. Silliman’s solo-voice performance “event” constructed a public viewing of “language performed independently on the stage of everyday experience,” as Hussain writes, and it layered the vanguard’s poetic play upon word form, syntactic parataxis, against the daily world of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. As the latter became, or becomes in Hussain’s essay, an authentic spatialized public arena in which this theatrical presentation was staged, the event addressed the nature of poetic form, audience makeup, and theatrical reception. In Hussain’s analysis, it also calls into question the real and multiple meanings generated–which is to say, performatively available–within a poetics offered in the public space.

Similarly, Fiona Templeton’s YOU–The City (1988) employs an urban-public venue as spatialized public theatrical arena. In the performance analyzed here, the venue is the crazed, hectic, and somewhat seamy environment that was (in the 1980s and 90s, at the time of its staged production) and sometimes still is New York City’s Times Square. James Sherry’s essay, “The Poetic Theater of Fiona Templeton: An Environmental View,” couples poet Sherry’s own commitment to an “environmental poetics” (as opposed to an “eco-poetics”)–which he suggests is a poetics that is fully and philosophically-structurally engaged with its environmental surroundings, whether urban, natural, or both–with a reading of this “event.” Templeton’s play itself proposes a “client,” rather than an actor and/or an audience, who, in keeping an appointment, begins a tour through the city: inhabiting, observing, and also becoming one with a transitory urban ecosystem. An environmental view, writes Sherry, “[s]ignificantly modifies our engagement with the world,” challenging at some fundamental base our subject-object relations as well as humanity’s Cartesian rather than integrated view of its role in the environment. Sherry reveals the way in which Templeton’s poet’s theater creates a theatrical stage as environment, making poetry in performance a conceptually fluid act with political implications.

Audience activity and experience are under scrutiny in the essay by Heidi R. Bean, who, like Sherry, finds ethical implications in poet’s theater’s structuring of audience relations. In “Carla Harryman’s Non/Representation and the Ethics of Dispersive Performance,” Bean examines recent productions of plays by Carla Harryman, who is commonly associated with what has become known as “Language” writing. Harryman’s Mirror Play (2005) is a direct response to recent U.S. militarization as well as an attempt to rethink social and global relations as they are figured in and by language. One of the play’s goals, Bean writes, is to place “under scrutiny not only the structure of interpretive practices but also the very impulse to interpret.” Bean thus proposes the term “dispersive theater” for thinking about the ways in which postwar poet’s theater such as Harryman’s constructs an interpretive “community” marked, paradoxically, by discontinuity and dispersion. Dispersive theater, as it is conceptualized here, is not simply an interpretive free-for-all but rather an embodiment of the ethical dilemma in the postmodern era–the contradiction, as Geoffrey Galt Harpham puts it, between “How ought one to live?” and “What ought I to do?,” between generalizable norms and individual acts in actual (and unique) situations (26). The result is a theater that not only rejects realist narrative theater’s appeal to public morals, which have become increasingly suspect over the last century, but that also offers itself as a relational paradigm better suited to the present world’s complex interconnectivities.

One assumption shared by the essays in this collection is the view that poet’s theater is, at its basis, a critique and rethinking of language’s complicity in the production and imposition of generalizable norms. In “This Theater Is a Strange Hole: Mac Wellman’s Poetics of Apparence,” Karinne Keithley Syers demonstrates poet-playwright Mac Wellman’s demand, via interpretive impediments and non-naturalistic performance, for openness to unknowingness, or what Syers terms a “hole poetics.” “Instead of finding out once again that incest hurts or that racism is bad,” she explains, “Wellman suggests we allow theater to make us venture into spaces where we don’t already know the answer.” Reading Wellman’s Antigone alongside notions of landscape composition, William James’s writings on consciousness and language processing, and classical Greek theater, Syers argues that Wellman’s theater acts both upon and with audience members, making them aware of the mental leaps common to acts of storytelling, and creating in them feelings for new relations. Thus the traditional sight-oriented model of landscape theater becomes, in Syers’s engagement with Wellman, a language-driven “wilderness expedition quite unrelated to any form of conquest”–a field, a hole, a topographical unknown at the edge of thinking.

Given poet’s theater’s essential hybridity, it is perhaps not surprising that the role–and disciplinary home–of poet’s theater in the academy is in flux. Critical attention to poet’s theater (and indeed poet’s theater as critical activity) has increased in the wake of the rise of both Cultural Studies and Performance Studies. The essays here benefit from this broader range of scholarly attention and make use of production and publication histories, performance analyses, cultural contexts, aesthetic ideologies, and artistic practices, even as they stay close to play texts themselves for what they can tell us about the rhetoric and practice of textuality and performance. In the long-overdue intersection of theater scholarship and poetry criticism created by these four essays, we can also identify a shared pedagogical interest: poet’s theater as an alternative, and often innovative, social-experiential model. This is postwar poet’s theater’s activist character, emerging out of the contemporary notion of performance itself as a critical paradigm. And yet this is only a partial account. There are, no doubt, many more critical approaches to be tried on and histories to be fleshed out via closer attention to postwar poet’s theater. Many of the most active critics of postwar poet’s theater are, in fact, new or emerging scholars whose critical facility with poet’s theater has been enabled by training that is increasingly interdisciplinary. We therefore see this collection as an opening, one that perhaps could only become apparent in this critical junction, and we look forward to both a broadening and a deepening of poet’s theater as a space of, and catalyst for, critical activity.

Heidi R. Bean is Assistant Professor of English at Bridgewater State University. She is the co-editor of Poetry after Cultural Studies, an anthology of critical essays forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press. Her essays, reviews, and interviews related to the intersections of theater, performance, and poetry have appeared in Text and Performance Quarterly, Theatre Journal, The Iowa Review Web, and Cultural Critique. This essay is taken from her current project on the cultural politics of American poetic theater since the 1960s.

Laura Hinton is the author of a poetry book, Sisyphus My Love (To Record a Dream in a Bathtub) (BlazeVox Books), and a critical book, The Perverse Gaze of Sympathy: Sadomasochistic Sentiments from Clarissa to Rescue 911 (SUNY Press). She is the co-editor of We Who Love to Be Astonished: Experimental Women’s Writing and Performance Poetics (University of Alabama Press). Her critical essays, poet interviews, and reviews have appeared in Contemporary Literature, Postmodern Culture, Textual Practice, Framework, Women’s Studies, Rain Taxi, Jacket, The Journal of the Academy of American Poets, among other journals and collections. Her poetry has appeared in anthologies and journals including Feminist Studies, How2, and Nth Position, and she has edited several critical article collections for How2, one of which was on the writings of Leslie Scalapino.

Hinton edits a chapbooks series for Mermaid Tenement Press and publishes reviews on the performance and hybrid arts in New York City on her web log, Chant de la Sirene (chantdelasirene.com). A Professor of English at the City College of New York, Professor Hinton teaches contemporary literature, film, and feminist theory, and also coordinates the InterRUPTions experimental-writers reading series.

Notes

The authors gratefully thank Eyal Amiran, Sarah Bay-Cheng, Maria Damon, and two anonymous reviewers for wise remarks and helpful suggestions at various stages in the construction of this collection.

1. Two outstanding volumes exemplify this recent emphasis on sound in poetics theory: Charles Bernstein’s (ed.) Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, and Adelaide Morris’s (ed.) Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies. The essays collected in these volumes attempt to theorize a poetry in performance, if not a scripted form of “poet’s theater” that is the subject of our PMC essays. Bernstein’s Close Listening examines, for example, the “sense” created through sound patterns that sustain harmony or noise, multi-vocality and polyphony, as well as the “aural ellipsis”—the spatialized absence of sound—generated in what Nick Piombino calls “the nature of listening,” which opens up the transitional space of play discussed by D.W. Winnicott in the context of both child’s play and adult art activity. One notable example of the focus not only on sound but on vision in poetic performance is Johanna Drucker’s “Visual Performance of the Poetic Text” (Bernstein 131-161), which examines visual-spatiality in poetry on the visual page.

Morris’s Sound States, similarly—as the title clues us—focuses on poetry’s articulation of sound, mostly in the context of modern technologies. It is interested in radio and audio recordings, and in music, particularly jazz. This volume is notably attuned to ethnic diversity, including such pieces as Nathaniel Mackey’s “Cante Moro” and Fred Moten’s “Sound in Florescence” (on jazz artist Cecil Taylor, who has influenced many poets, like Bruce Andrews, for instance). It also extends the geopolitical coverage of “American” poetry to the Caribbean, in Loretta Collin’s piece on sound performance in the Rastafari reggae tradition.

2. A related but discontinuous San Francisco Poets Theater was founded in 2000 by poet and playwright Kevin Killian, and continues to the present.

3. See Andreas Huyssen’s After the Great Divide for this discussion of different modernisms.

4. See, for example, Emile’s Benveniste’s “Subjectivity in Language,” in his Problems in General Linguistics.

5. See, for example, Judith Butler’s first book on this subject, Gender Trouble: Feminisms and the Subversion of Identity. Butler’s notion of “performativity,” drawn from political and ethical philosophy and phenomenology, is central to our extended notion here of “performance,” particularly as it becomes a practice undergirding social relations and everyday life.

Works Cited

Austin, J.L. How to Do Things with Words: the William James lectures delivered at Harvard University. Ed. J.O. Urmson. Oxford: Clarendon, 1962. Print.
Bay-Cheng, Sarah, and Barbara Cole, eds. Poets at Play: An Anthology of Modernist Drama. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna UP, 2010. Print.
Benveniste, Emile. Problems in General Linguistics. Trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek. Coral Gables: U of Miami P, 1971. Print.
Bernstein, Charles, ed. Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. Print.
Bottoms, Stephen J. Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off-Broadway Movement. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2005. Print.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminisms and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Print.
Conquergood, Dwight. “Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research.” The Drama Review 46.2 (Summer 2002): 145-156. Print.
Fischer-Lichte, Erika. “The Avant-Garde and the Semiotics of the Antitextual Gesture.” Trans. James M. Harding. Contours of the Theatrical Avant-Garde: Performance and Textuality. Ed. James M. Harding. Ann Arbor: U Michigan P, 2000: 79-95. Print.
Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books, 1959. Print.
Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society. Durham: Duke UP, 1999. Print.
Hejinian, Lyn. “Figuring Out.” How2 1.7 (Spring 2002). Web.
Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986. Print.
Killian, Kevin and David Brazil, eds. The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater, 1945-1985. Chicago: Kenning Editions, 2010. Print.
Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theatre. Trans. Karen Jürs-Munby. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.
Morris, Adelaide, ed. Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1997. Print.
Puchner, Martin. Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2002. Print.
Walker, Julia A. “Why Performance? Why Now? Textuality and the Rearticulation of Human Presence.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 16.1 (2003): 149-175. Print.

September 3, 2013

Notes on Contributors

David Banash is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University, where he teaches courses in contemporary literature, film, and popular culture. His essays and reviews have appeared in Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life, Iowa Review, Paradoxa, Postmodern Culture, Reconstruction, Science Fiction Studies, and Utopian Studies. He is currently at work on a book investigating collage and media technologies in twentieth-century culture.

Brandon Brown is from Kansas City, Missouri and has lived in San Francisco since 1998. His first two books are forthcoming: The Persians By Aeschylus (Displaced) and The Poems Of Gaius Valerius Catullus (Krupskaya). These two works, along with a new and unpublished piece C Baudelaire Le Vampire 11,000% Slower, are conceptual translations that privilege the visibility of the translator. They are, in part, the material product of a decade-long performance project centered around language acquisition (currently including Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and Arabic). He has also published several chapbooks, including Memoirs Of My Nervous Illness (Cy Press), 908-1078 (Transmission), and Wondrous Things I Have Seen (Mitsvah Chaps). His work has also appeared in journals, including War and Peace, Brooklyn Rail, Supermachine, and Mrs. Maybe. In 2004-05 he co-curated the Performance Writing series at New Langton Arts and in 2008-09 the New Reading Series at 21 Grand at 21 Grand. He has been blogger in residence for the Poetry Project and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He also publishes small press chapbooks under the imprint OMG!

Jian Chen is Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University, under the auspices of the NYU Postdoctoral and Transition Program for Academic Diversity. Chen’s current research explores new demands made on cultural consumption, representation, and politics, by the transnational circulation of images of sexual, gender, and racial flexibility. Chen’s work brings into conversation the areas of queer and transgender critique; film, new media, and visual cultures; Asian diasporas; and comparative race studies.

Diane Enns is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Peace Studies at McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada. She is the author of The Violence of Victimhood (forthcoming, Penn State) and Speaking of Freedom: Philosophy, Politics and the Struggle for Liberation (Stanford, 2007). Her current project concerns justice and trauma, with a focus on the Western Balkans.

David Ensminger is an Instructor of English, Humanities, and Folklore at Lee College in Baytown, Texas. He completed his M.S. in the Folklore Program at the University of Oregon and his M.A. in Creative Writing at City College of New York City. His study of punk street art and Do-It-Yourself culture, Visual Vitriol: The Art and Subcultures of the Punk and Hardcore Generations, is slated for July 2011 release by the University of Mississippi. His work has recently appeared in the Journal of Popular Music Studies and M/C Journal (Australia), and he contributes regularly to the Houston Press, Maximum Rock’n’Roll, Popmatters, and Trust (Germany). As a longtime fanzine editor, flyer artist, and drummer as well, he has archived punk history, including in his blog documenting African American punk rock productions: http://blackpunkarchive.wordpress.com.

Judith Goldman is a Harper Schmidt fellow and collegiate assistant professor at the University of Chicago, teaching in the arts humanities core and in creative writing. She is the author of Vocoder (Roof 2001), DeathStar/rico-chet (O Books 2006), “the dispossessions” (atticus/finch 2009), and l.b.; or, catenaries (forthcoming, Krupskaya 2011). She co-edited the annual journal War and Peace with Leslie Scalapino from 2005-2009. Currently, she is working on mixing composed recorded sound and live sound, poet’s theater and other performance work, and multi-media works.

Patricia MacCormack is Reader in English, Communication, Film and Media at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. She is the author of articles and chapters on Continental Philosophy, especially Guattari, Serres, Irigaray, and Blanchot, posthuman theory, queer and perversion theory, animal rights, body modification and extreme horror film. Her work includes “Unnatural Alliances” (Deleuze and Queer Theory), “The Great Ephemeral Tattooed Skin” (Body and Society), “Necrosexuality” (Queering the Non-Human), “Inhuman Ecstasy” (Angelaki), “Becoming-Vulva” (New Formations), “Cinemasochism” (Afterimage) and “Vitalistic Feminethics” (Deleuze and Law). She is the author of Cinesexuality (Ashgate 2008) and co-editor of The Schizoanalysis of Cinema (Continuum 2008). She is currently writing on posthuman ethics.

Petar Ramadanovic is Associate Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, Durham. He is the author of Forgetting Futures and numerous articles. The present essay is a part of his new project, a critique of post-structuralism.

Judith Roof is the author of The Poetics of DNA (Minnesota 2007) and books on narrative and cultural theory, sexuality, and cinema. She is William Shakespeare Chair in English at Rice University.

Lissa Skitolsky is an Assistant Professor at Susquehanna University. Her published work includes essays on Giorgio Agamben, the course of Holocaust studies, the “war against terror,” and biopolitics. Her articles have appeared in International Studies in Philosophy, Lessons and Legacies, and Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, among others.

Brian Wall is Assistant Professor of Film Theory in the Cinema Department at Binghamton University. His “‘Jackie Treehorn treats objects like women!’: Two Types of Fetishism in The Big Lebowski” appeared in Camera Obscura 69 (2008); he has also published on Beckett, Bataille and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He is writing a book on Adorno and film theory, to be entitled The Fingerprint of Spirit.

September 3, 2013

“That’s just, like, your opinion, man”: Irony, Abiding, Achievement, and Lebowski

Brian Wall (bio)
Binghamton University
bwall@binghamton.edu

Edward P. Comentale and Aaron Jaffe, eds. The Year’s Work in Lebowski Studies. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2009. Print.

The terms in which the reception of The Year’s Work in Lebowski Studies played out in the comments to Dave Itzkoff’s New York Times review in December of 2010 rehearsed a number of the familiar questions that have long plagued academic studies of popular culture: What would it mean to take mass culture seriously? What would be left after refusing the fan’s or the cult’s uncritical enthusiasm and the elite’s dismissal? Or, to put it rather differently, who is the audience for a collection like this? While many fans applauded the editors’ and contributors’ desire to engage with everything Dude, there were as many or more who substantially resented someone taking their fun seriously (thought apparently being the enemy of pleasure). And on the still more reactionary side, this volume’s very existence was cited, variously, as evidence of the decline of the university as an institution, of the death yet again of the canon of seemingly self-evidently great works, and as evidence of the silliness if not sheer irrelevance of the academic study of popular culture. This last seems particularly germane, in so far as the Times itself regularly offers its own confidently commonsensical, ideology-free perspective by noting the daft pursuits of the humanities professoriate. The review, while guardedly sympathetic, continues that tendency toward condescension perhaps most egregiously manifested in Jonathan Kandell’s shameful obituary of Jacques Derrida in 2004.

These sorts of reception suggest some of the potential pitfalls the editors of any collection about a cult object must navigate: a great deal of fan culture depends upon iterability, repetition and citation, and thus opposes academic analysis; and certain conservative ideas of what constitutes the “proper” object of academic study exclude the mass cultural object by fiat.¹ Commendably, The Year’s Work stakes out a variety of other possible positions, and, at its best, imagines a necessary rapprochement between academics—who are also always already fans—and a portion of the cult audience who look to deepen their pleasure. For the latter, The Year’s Work seems to fit neatly alongside the seemingly endless “Philosophy and –” collections that constitute the bulk of the philosophy section at my big box bookstore, collections whose ubiquity suggests to me that someone needs to write a Philosophy and “Philosophy and” book. For the former, however, the Coen brothers’ film presents a challenge that calls for the most delicate judgment: as both fans and scholars, academics here are forced to countenance the conflicting allegiances of immersion and distance. Some scholars here, seeking to respond to the Dude on his own terms, try to overcome this conflict with the ambivalent aid of irony, while others prefer the detachment of a more traditional academic perspective. Indeed, the volume’s own title signals the extent to which irony is here a privileged form of address.

Ultimately, to take The Big Lebowski seriously would be to refuse or go beyond the fan’s pleasures of citation in favor of elaborating a different context, moreover one that might, very explicitly, threaten to subsume the film itself. In order to deal with this deadlock, the editors have chosen, in an eloquent and spirited introduction, to cast academics as over-achievers, which is to say as a special case and fraction of the Achievers, the Lebowski cult’s preferred self-nomination. Such a term neatly signals both identity and difference, the academic’s fannishness and her intellectual “excess.”² There will be, then, a third term to make a constellation of the binaries of “to achieve” and “to abide”: to over-achieve, to reach too far, to try too hard, to do too much. But as the introduction proceeds, it spells out another image of what it might mean to “work” on Lebowski, now in terms of the joint:

The film demands to be seen with bleary eyes, and this Year’s Work is offered in this vein—laid-back, easy-going, comfortably dead-beat, slack.… Yes, the experience of the film—the experience of our work—focuses not on codes, on the cracking of themes and allusions, but on the process of ideation itself, on an imaginative openness that never ceases to fail to focus into form.

(6-7)

To study the Dude, then, one must imitate the Dude; but this mimetic strategy parallels and extends the stance of the cult fan, as academic labor here risks relaxing into stoned riffing, its Promethean overachieving relaxing into the aleatory creation and dissipation of ideas, which dissolve into blue smoke. Such a spirit also implies a dangerous—but very Dude-like—wager, and one, unfortunately, that some are fated to lose: namely, that the loser wins (pace the Big Lebowski‘s claim that “The bums will always lose!” as the Dude leaves with a rug). This wager also implies that a mimesis of the film’s logic-which-is-not-one can better serve our encounter than more traditional academic discourse. In a proper and laudably utopian fashion, evocative of Adorno’s gloss on mimesis, the wager implies that a toke from the Dude’s joint might limber up and break down ossified scholarly postures, the reification of academic subject and cultural object, and the gulf between ivory tower dweller and mass cultural fan.

But to imitate the Dude seems also to risk merely repeating him, quoting him, and citing him—that is, merely reaffirming the logic of postmodern pastiche (inarguably structural to the film), whose worrying political ambivalences and instabilities have been extensively detailed by Jameson, Hutcheon, and many others. An imitation of the Dude might produce new ideas about the film and about mass culture as such, or it might just end up uncritically reaffirming and reifying the commodity culture of which the film is at once an expression, a symptom, and a critique.

The modesty of many of the claims made in this anthology and the explicit and implicit allegiance demonstrated by many of the authors—and by the editors—to the film’s fan base and/or cult status authorize us to ask about the implicit—and occasionally, explicit—valuation of intellectual labor and characterization of the intellectual himself. The most successful contributions here thematize this dilemma to a certain degree; but just as many either ignore it as a problem, or more troublingly reject scholarly protocols outright, and proffer instead something much more stoned, ironic, and/or fannish. There is relatively little evidence here of the attitude that characterized postcolonial studies or even cultural studies in their early days, namely the agonizing self-consciousness of the intellectual’s position in relation to his object. These fields demonstrated a rigorous and deeply felt sense of conflict between one’s various group allegiances and one’s subjectivity, a well-nigh Sartrean agon that refused to allow the collapse of tensions constituted by an intellectual distance, on the one hand, and class, ethnic, group, and/or gender allegiances, on the other hand. I would argue that such a tension is evidence of a crucial awareness of history—history of the discipline, of the medium, and also of the mode of production itself. Without this tension, without an explicit awareness of the necessary distance that obtains in the academic’s relation to culture, the resulting efforts here risk collapsing into so many gestures of resignation—or worse, of a self-loathing anti-intellectualism. In such a scenario, populism, itself an intellectual and ideological construct, affords academics an opportunity to recite the lines they love—”Nice marmot” or “I can get you a toe!”—and wear jellies while drinking White Russians, but do so ironically. The text persists only as culinary and as a commodity, and intellectual labor becomes indistinguishable from consumption.

Against this problematic and pervasive irony, it might be worth considering another rhetorical mode whose very substance is also constituted by oppositions and contradictions of all sorts—that is, dialectics. Adorno writes that “the very opposition between knowledge which penetrates from without and that which bores from within becomes suspect to the dialectical method, which sees in it a symptom of precisely that reification which the dialectic is obliged to accuse” (209). From this perspective, the opposition between fan and scholar itself must be submitted to scrutiny, rather than merely being ironically affirmed and rehearsed. Perhaps the contributions the volume makes to this particular problem are its most valuable, and the ones with the greatest implications for the study of popular culture and the humanities: at its best, The Year’s Work values the fan’s immanent, molecular knowledge of the film and of its attendant culture as well as the academic’s more molar perspective, at the same time that it reveals the limits of both the fan’s fetishism and the scholar’s mandarinism. What resolves itself fitfully here, in glimpses and beyond irony, is a view of culture as a totality—not the alienating totality of global capital and the commodity, but a totality in which the intellectual and the affective, modernism and mass culture, or, if you prefer, achieving and abiding are no longer irredeemably opposed.

To respond to The Big Lebowski ironically, then, may in a sense to be true to it—but it would also leave intact and unquestioned the troublesome opposition between fan and scholar, an opposition that the best of these contributions complicate. The most valuable and provocative contributions here are more dialectical than ironic—which is not to say humorless. With more than twenty contributions, the volume cannot be considered in its entirety here, so I single out a number of its exemplary essays.

David Martin-Jones offers one of the most challenging, and, in a very un-Dude-like manner, articulate explorations of the film. His “No Literal Connection: Images of Mass Commodification, U.S. Militarism and the Oil Industry in The Big Lebowski” soberingly presents the film as a work of “national cinema,” focusing on “the way that U.S. foreign policy is determined by Fordism, the automobile, and the need for oil, as it is represented in the film” (204). The political subtext of the film, Martin-Jones persuasively argues, has been submitted to a kind of dream-work, re-figured under a range of well-documented generic citations and allusions that have too often been dismissed as mere postmodern play. Put another way, there is “no literal connection” between the official narrative of the film and the political subtext Martin-Jones unearths—but rather a figural one that underwrites the comedy, and proves to be its condition of possibility. He begins by examining the confluence, in the opening sequence of the film, of national expansion towards the frontier—an expansion that reaches its terminus in Los Angeles—and American intervention in the Persian Gulf: the latter extends the former, and not just its vector, but its imbrication with a conception of mobile people and capital that is realized in the automobile—which needs oil. Thus the film’s striking image of Saddam Hussein standing before a near-infinite tower of bowling shoes becomes a condensation of American foreign policy and the demands of Fordist production, which can tolerate no limits and constantly requires new markets. Even architectural style and bowling itself then come to speak of an economy determined by automobility, mass production, and the commodification of leisure, all of which depend upon and are guaranteed by American foreign policy. But then, keeping the introduction and spirit of the Dude in mind, are we being too serious? Over-achievers? It’s a risk I’ll take in order to appreciate Martin-Jones’s fine essay, even though he betrays slackness, pastiche, repetition and citation–or rather precisely because he does: because this essay explicitly recognizes how leisure, play, entertainment, film, fun, fans, and cults absolutely depend upon material and economic structures and upon networks of circulation and exchange; and because this essay implicitly remains faithful to a notion of critical intellectual labor as both taking place at an impossible distance from and absolutely entangled within the culture and the problematics it inherits.

In contrast, the editor Edward Comentale’s modestly titled “‘I’ll Keep Rolling Along’: Some Notes on Singing Cowboys and Bowling Alleys in The Big Lebowski,” ambles along in an appropriately tumbleweed-like fashion, modestly concealing its argument beneath an easy style. Beginning as a meditation on the Western and its generic function in the film, Comentale’s essay moves to a fascinating discussion of Gene Autry and the commodification of the cowboy as style. Both moves serve to develop a strong argument regarding the film’s deployment of gesture: “for if cinema has proven capable of responding to modernity, and particularly to the loss of coherent experience that accompanied the closing of the frontier, it responds most significantly through its emphatic use of gesture” (229). This is a potent and provocative claim, asserting not simply the ways in which the film points back to the directors’ hand, but the extent to which the film and even the Coens’ oeuvre presents us with a virtual anthology of gesture. Here, gesture is no longer construed as expressive, but is instead mute, frustrated, excessive, and hermetic. As such, “in Lebowski, while many gestures arise out of communicative failure, they also—following Agamben—expose communicability in its purest form” (245). Bowling, therefore, while testifying to the exhaustion and emptiness of the public sphere, also includes, inevitably, this gestural surplus: “Here, gesticulating gracefully on the last frontier, the film loses its voice and makes us feel something more than alienation, something other than violence” (250).

The value of such a claim seems more than a little belied by Comentale’s slacker title, which needlessly ironizes his essay’s rich content. The title also indicates the extent to which, after careful and rewarding elaboration, the essay demurs from expanding upon what this excess that inhabits or characterizes the gesture actually is: does it have a politics? an erotics? Is it a form or a content? The implication here would seem to be that this gestural excess that persists after the impoverishment of various other communicative regimes and after the dissolution of an authentic public sphere might retain some critical or even utopian dimension itself, but the essay’s self-description as “some notes” seems to preclude prospective conclusions. It’s hard not to feel some frustration here, and to wonder if too strict a fidelity to the Dude’s own ethos or to the film’s self-ironizing strategies might be responsible.

Surprisingly, at one juncture where the reader might expect the collection to be at its most ironic—that is, in Joshua Kates’s “The Big Lebowski and Paul de Man: Historicizing Irony and Ironizing Historicism”—irony, even “hyperirony,” is everywhere evoked and thematized, but nowhere embodied. This strikes the reader as oddly exceptional, given the film’s own ironic tendencies, the directors’ much-discussed love of the ironic mode, and the essay’s own consideration of irony in de Man’s thought and style. But for Kates, this is the effect of history, or rather the way in which irony troubles certain construals of history and announces what we have come to call the postmodern, which is “a pause or gap in the comprehension of history not simply explicable through the workings of history itself” (172). The central ironies, then, that the essay details devolve from de Man’s legacy, which emerges and is embraced at a historical point at which the various utopian agents and agendas in the 60s are eclipsed—it lives on past its moment and as a response to its moment, like the Dude. I wonder, though, if the notion of periodization and the linear conception of history, both of which make up part of Kates’s target here, are, ironically, also well past their “best before” date—does anyone believe in them anymore? Even or except ironically?

Perhaps the collection’s best realization of its untraditional mode and aims is to be found in Judith Roof’s “Size Matters,” which investigates—and enacts—the film’s fluid economies of gender and exchange:

The Big Lebowski is governed by an economy of fluid exchange or the exchange of fluids, which in the end is no exchange at all. This fluid economy moves in all directions simultaneously, producing layerings, erosions, vacuums, dissolutions, and flows that render structure and unidirectional cause/effect irrelevant, or, in contrast with marked efforts at organization (such as genre), at least shows their futility.

(412-13)

Genre, exchange, causality, and conception—all exemplary of an unsustainable and phallic regime of “bigness”—are raised as possibilities in the film only to be thwarted, according to Roof’s stunning gloss, in favor of a liquid and matrixial femininity that is embodied in Maude (but also in White Russians). And as the film plays, so too does Roof’s thought and prose, not in imitation of the film’s style, but, pointedly, in imitation of its spirit. Can I say that the Dude would dig her style? Precisely because it is not a replica of his own?

The problems of irony, quotation, and play also arise in Thomas Byers’s contribution, “Found Document: The Stranger’s Commentary, and a Note on His Method,” but in contrast to Roof’s entry, Byers aims to push the film’s logic of pastiche as far as it might go. While the substance of the essay offers some valuable considerations of Jeff Bridges’s role, and locates his performance on a continuum with the Cary Grant of screwball comedy (but of Hitchcock too), the opening pages, with their arch disavowal and simultaneous defense of pastiche, both set the stage for and render redundant what is to follow. Byers writes:

The Other Stranger’s discourse may be a form of what I would call “disseminated” parody, in which there is no single target, and the satiric and comic effects arise at any given moment from the juxtaposition of two equally appreciated and equally critiqued discourses. Thus, when the Other Stranger “does” a version of academic cultural studies in his Hollywood Western voice, the reader may smile both at the expense of and in appreciation of both discourses.

(190)

Here’s an example: “Now, that may seem as obvious as a heifer in a sheep-herd, but here’s the thing; we might think we’re thinkin’ about the sixties, or the forties, or the seventies, but most likely when we do, we’re thinkin’ about the picture shows at all them times” (200). Byers channels the Stranger channeling Fredric Jameson; and while the point is properly Jamesonian, reminding us of how history always comes to us in a framed and mediated form, it occurs to me that this might not be the unity of theory and practice—or the theory as practice—for which Jameson strives. Indeed, “disseminated parody” seems indistinguishable from irony, which would seem to preclude the kinds of appreciation Byers seeks to produce. Or if we agree it is parody, then far from being “disseminating,” it risks trivializing Jameson and condescending to the Stranger, who enjoys a privileged relationship to the film’s narrative, being both outside and inside of it. It undermines the very Jamesonian ideas that Byers might well want to preserve, by abstracting them from Jameson’s rigorous and necessarily dialectical prose and inserting them into this new context, a context that parodies the same style that birthed the ideas to begin with. Byers’s parody makes the experience a zero-sum game, one which negates more than it complicates the ideas and discourses it mobilizes, and one that threatens to reaffirm the profound ambiguity that informs many parts of this collection: can the logic and style of irony, parody, and pastiche, a logic and style so prevalent in the film and in its reception, return scholarly dividends?

Perhaps one of the best object-lessons in this regard comes from the collection’s other editor, Aaron Jaffe, whose essay “Brunswick = Fluxus” “considers the cultural meaning of ‘wood’ in The Big Lebowski” (427). While the modesty of such a thesis initially suggests “underachiever,” Jaffe has some instructive and valuable surprises in store for the reader: far from being a mere catalog of representations, Jaffe’s playful contribution works from the outset to estrange rather than ironize the oppositions of nature and culture, self and other, the living and the dead, interior and exterior, concrete and plastic and, finally, Brunswick and Fluxus, which stand for commodity culture and the avant-garde, respectively. Spiritually akin to Roof’s fluid contribution, Jaffe’s undoes the solidity of wood, revealing it as part of the structural support of a “masculinist, genealogical substrate implicit in the prevailing conceptions of time and space” (439). Wood, whether thought of as bowling surface or result of Logjammin’, comes to attest to its own plasticity, which then entails, through Jaffe’s careful elaboration, the uprooting of dead wood: debt, exchange, patrimony and patronymics. Jaffe’s own thought displays an enviable plasticity, in the best sense of the term.

More essays in this collection deserve attention. But I end with the penultimate contribution, Jonathan Elmer’s persuasively Heideggerian “Enduring and Abiding.” Elmer argues that the film is essentially underdetermined, offering itself up to a vast and contradictory variety of modes of consumption, interpretation, and enjoyment. The Dude, in his slackness, his paunchiness, and his lack of ambition, embodies this sheer potential, as glossed in Agamben’s “Bartleby” essay: Elmer writes, “The Dude embodies potentia, he is always employable because he is never employed—merely abiding” (454). “The Dude abides,” the Stranger tells us in the film’s final moments, adding, “I don’t know about you, but I take comfort in that. It’s good knowin’ he’s out there, the Dude, takin’ her easy for all us sinners.” In this context, perhaps the lesson of not only Elmer’s elegant essay but of the collection’s varied offerings is that we are the sinners because we cannot simply abide and we cannot let this film abide. For the Dude, abiding is an achievement—as it is not for all us sinners who see abiding and achieving as opposed, who must achieve to abide, and who, finally, must achieve to overcome the contradiction between achieving and abiding. Those contributions that work at overcoming the conflict between work and play, rather than ironizing it, are the ones, finally, that most keep faith with the Dude.

Brian Wall is Assistant Professor of Film Theory in the Cinema Department at Binghamton University. His “‘Jackie Treehorn treats objects like women!’: Two Types of Fetishism in The Big Lebowski” appeared in Camera Obscura 69 (2008); he has also published on Beckett, Bataille and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He is writing a book on Adorno and film theory, to be entitled The Fingerprint of Spirit.

Notes

1. As Barbara Klinger has cogently and pointedly argued in the context of Lebowski, the participation, quotation, and repetition that largely characterizes the audience’s relation to cult film cannot be thought of as uncritically empowering to its fans or at a remove from the production and circulation of more traditional Hollywood products:

Given the aftermarket’s vitality, the contemporary Hollywood cult film is not a thing apart. Certain species of cult cinema are not discontinuous from dominant industry or social practices; instead they represent continuity with, even a shining realization of, the dynamics of media circulation today. In this sense, cult is a logical extension of replay culture: it achieves the kind of penetration into viewers’ ‘hearts and minds’ that media convergence and multi-windowed distribution promote; cultish viewing, in turn, represents a particularly dedicated and insistent pursuit of media inspired by replay.

(19)

2. But maybe we’ll have to say “him,” because a quick scan of the table of contents—with its overwhelmingly masculine orientation, but not monopoly—invites us to wonder if the Dude’s joint is mostly a dude’s joint. To register this I have therefore chosen to use the masculine pronoun throughout.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor. “Cultural Criticism and Society.” The Adorno Reader. Ed. Brian O’Connor. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. 195-210. Print.
Agamben, Giorgio. “Bartleby, or On Contingency.” Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. 243-71. Print.
Iztkoff, Dave. “Lebowski Studies 101: At Least It’s an Ethos.” Rev. of The Year’s Work in Lebowski Studies, ed. Edward P. Comentale and Aaron Jaffe. New York Times 30 Dec. 2009. Web. 13 Apr. 2010.
Kandell, Jonathan. “Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74.” New York Times 10 Oct. 2004. Web. 20 Apr. 2010.
Klinger, Barbara. “Becoming Cult: The Big Lebowski, Replay Culture and Male Fans.” Screen 51.1 (2010): 1-20. Print.

September 3, 2013

Recollecting Violence: Michael Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory

Lissa Skitolsky (bio)
Susquehanna University
skitolsky@susqu.edu

Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009.

In defending uniqueness, I am not simultaneously endorsing the injudicious claim that the Holocaust is more evil than alternative occurrences of extensive and systematic persecution, organized violence, and mass death. The character of the uniqueness that I am prepared to champion is not tied to a scale, a hierarchy, of evil.

–Steven Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context, Volume I

The aim is to go beyond the simple comparative history of different genocidal phenomena, which has characterized much of the political science scholarship, and to look at interrelations between cases of genocide and the polities that perpetrate genocide.
–Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution: A Genocide

The interdisciplinary field of Holocaust studies has always been conceptually isolated from postcolonial and African American studies, due in no small part to the rhetoric of “uniqueness” that, as Michael Rothberg points out in Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, has unduly limited the expression of collective memory to a competitive, zero-sum logic in which various victim groups fight for recognition. Although those who propound this rhetoric often follow Steven Katz in claiming that the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust need not lead to a hierarchy of suffering or evil, Rothberg suggests that on the terrain of collective memory, one cannot easily separate claims of some special historical uniqueness from claims of some special historical victimization. And these claims have both ossified the scholarly boundaries erected between disciplines that focus on distinct sites of violence and, according to Rothberg, obscured the actual nature of collective memory, political violence, and traumatic experience.

In contrast to Daniel Lévy and Natan Sznaider in The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (2006), Rothberg is not so much concerned with the sudden cosmopolitization of Holocaust memory as with the fact that the Holocaust has always served as a catalyst for other types of traumatic memories. The transnational, intercultural relation between these memories and memories of the Shoah lays bare an alternative model for remembrance and the politics of the public sphere.

Multidirectional Memory serves as the psycho-cultural counterpart to Donald Bloxham’s recent book, The Final Solution: A Genocide (2009), insofar as Rothberg explains how comparative genocide is even possible; that is, he provides a model of memory that allows us to understand how we can imagine different sites of violence together without reducing them to either the same type of suffering or to utterly separate events. The first sort of reduction leads to the “universalization” of the Holocaust and provokes skepticism about the emerging field of comparative genocide, while the second sort often leads to what Rothberg calls “an ugly contest of comparative victimization” (7) and a competition over what appear to be scarce resources, such as land for memorials. In this sense, comparative history has been thwarted by the model of “competitive memory” that, in the case of the Holocaust, is supported by the rhetoric of uniqueness. The development of Holocaust memory is the central example of the sort of “multidirectional memory” that Rothberg presents, and he uncovers a history of art and scholarship that acts as a sort of counter-tradition to the more orthodox rendition of this development. For he unearths texts that examine the connections and interactions between Nazi Germany, slavery, colonialism, and decolonization in a way that illuminates the revelatory and meaningful nature of otherwise seemingly accidental and arbitrary historical juxtapositions. Throughout his book, Rothberg skillfully makes use of a variety of interdisciplinary sources (primarily from the 1950s and 1960s) to chart the alternative terrain of multidirectional memory that has emerged in the wake of the Holocaust.

For example, Rothberg’s novel reading of the correlation between Nazi ideology and colonialism as first articulated by Hannah Arendt and Aimé Césaire demonstrates that productive lines of thought can emerge from this sort of juxtaposition, even though this reading also shows that making such juxtapositions has its limits. In this case, his analysis reveals how Arendt’s multidirectional approach to the question of totalitarianism was still hampered by her lingering Eurocentrism, while Césaire doesn’t quite grant the Holocaust the specificity that it obviously deserves. However, when disparate discourses on race, identity, suffering, and genocide collide in these texts, we see an appreciation for diverse forms of suffering and the production of new lines of thought on violence and trauma. In the cases of Arendt and Césaire, Rothberg demonstrates that their invocation of the “boomerang” effect between colonialism and Nazism neither reduces one to the other nor isolates their historical emergences. Instead, it represents a sophisticated effort to link traumas according to their psychoanalytic and historical aftershocks. For Rothberg, “multidirectionality” names a type of logic and serves as a theory of memory and political violence, both of which are distorted by a linear view of time and unidirectional thinking. Further, the rhetoric of uniqueness (and the competitive memory to which it gives rise) has, to some extent, further distorted our understanding of the politics of memory insofar as it perceives the public as a contested space where one collective memory of violence trumps another. Instead, Rothberg insists that collective memories cannot simply be associated with discrete identities, nor is it the case that they are formed in isolation from one another.

Rothberg’s theory of “mutidirectional memory” is descriptive insofar as he claims to explain one way in which collective memory actually works. His theory is prescriptive insofar as he claims that we ought to recognize the power of this memory to move us beyond the zero-sum game of competitive collective memory. Such an effort can lead towards new forms of solidarity among traumatized groups and new visions of justice. His central evidence for this claim is the way in which the development of Holocaust memory coincided with (and indeed, provoked) political resistance during the French-Algerian war. In his brilliant analysis of Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s film Chronicle of a Summer (1961) and Charlotte Delbo’s overlooked Les belles lettres (1961), he shows how disparate occasions of political violence (here Nazism and decolonization) can actually serve as vehicles of remembrance for each other, as well as occasion acts of political resistance against contemporaneous forms of state violence. In so doing they create a radical “counterpublic sphere” that establishes “a legacy for the politics of the future” (223). For Rothberg, “history is an echo chamber,” and “an ethics of memory establishes fidelity to the echoes” (224). Scenes of political violence do not disappear; rather they reverberate in later scenes of violence. An ethics of memory is one attuned to those reverberations, aware that “social conflict can only be addressed through a discourse that weaves together past and present, public and private” (285), historically specific sites of violence and the common human toll of these sites.

Rothberg also provides an archeology of concepts, such as race, terror, trauma, and biopolitics, that can serve to forge multidirectional links between disparate occasions of violence. The question here is not whether these multidirectional comparisons between the violence of slavery, Nazi Germany, colonialism, and decolonization are historically accurate, but rather whether they provoke productive lines of political thought, new occasions for political resistance, and new forms of solidarity among historically oppressed groups. In this way, Rothberg illustrates how multidirectional memory works to expose the traumatic gaps in the collective remembrance of political violence through the dialectical interrelation of discrete sites of violence. This dialectical interrelation does not recognize these discrete sites as operating under the same assumptions or as utilizing the same techniques, but rather brings out the historical specificity of each site through an ongoing dialectic between the universal and the particular aspects of each traumatic event.

This is perhaps best illustrated by Rothberg’s meditation on W.E.B. Du Bois’s visit to the Warsaw ghetto in 1949 and his analysis of the resulting 1952 essay “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto,” which Du Bois wrote for the magazine Jewish Life. Here, Du Bois’s reflections about spatial organization and racial violence from the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto indicate that the formation of “multidirectional memory” is spurred as much by the geography of traumatic sites as by their temporal occurrence and re-occurrence in collective memory. Rothberg quotes Du Bois reflecting on his visit to the ghetto: “The race problem in which I was interested cut across lines of color and physique and belief and status and was a matter of cultural patterns, perverted teaching and human hate and prejudice, which reached all sorts of people and caused endless evil to all men” (116). Du Bois’s trip to the Warsaw Ghetto led him to bracket his notion of the “color line”—valuable as a way to understand a certain type of violence—for the sake of thinking through the violence that erupted at the Warsaw Ghetto and its relation to other forms of violence. Rothberg suggests that we may similarly see past the “color line” to think through disparate occasions of traumatic violence together as part of our intercultural, transnational collective memory.

In this way, Rothberg moves beyond the study of “comparative genocide” to the study of “comparative traumas,” for he reveals that the terrain of collective memory—messy and multidirectional—does not limit itself to comparing discrete occasions of contested sites of “genocide,” but instead compares the interrelations between sites of violence separated by time, geography, and scale. Most importantly, he illustrates that the new field of comparative genocide must be based on the model of multidirectional memory in order to avoid the pitfalls of competitive memory that have stilted its development. This model shows us how disparate experiences of suffering (rather than simply discrete acts of genocide) can be brought into dialogical engagement with one another for the sake of a revolutionary praxis, one based on dialectical engagement with traumatic histories rather than identity politics.

Rothberg also interprets now standard texts in Continental philosophy in new and fascinating ways, as, for example, when he draws on the views of the contemporary philosophers Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben to explain the ethical dimension of multidirectional memory. Rothberg applies Badiou’s “ethic of truths” (and his notion of “fidelity” to an “event”) to the process of multidirectional memory, arguing that the same sort of “fidelity” to the “multiple events and historical legacies that define any situation” is required in order to expose something akin to Badiou’s “void” or the “not-known” of any situation—namely, the multidirectional links between sites of political violence (22). Here the act of remembering is an “event” in itself, which can lead to the transformation of the conditions which initially instigated the violence that is the object of multidirectional memory (308). As an example of how this can occur, Rothberg references three texts that address the 1961 massacre of Algerians in Paris: Didier Daeninckx’s 1984 thriller Meurtres pour mémoire, Leïla Sebbar’s 1999 novel for adolescents La Seine était rouge: Paris, octobre 1961, and Michael Haneke’s 2005 film Caché.

Pointing to the multidirectional legacies that intersect with and cluster around the massacre of October 17, 1961, Daeninckx, Haneke, and Sebbar seek not the endless uncovering of more and more layers of history, but an engagement with the fundamental situations that produce violence. By probing the uncomfortable overlap and complicities that mark histories of genocide and colonialism, they leave open the possibility of building new places of concord.

(308)

The recognition of the multidirectional nature of traumatic memory may lead to new forms of solidarity between victim groups and new, more universal visions of justice.

Rothberg also borrows Badiou’s notion of truths as simultaneously universal and multiple, for his analysis reveals that there are truths of modern victimization, though there may not be a single truth common to all victims of modern, state-sanctioned violence. Rothberg identifies one of these truths in terms of Agamben’s notion of “bare life” and its intimate connection to both sovereignty and the “state of exception.” However, he takes Agamben to task for his exclusion of the colonial encounter from the history of biopolitics and his genealogy of bare life, which leaves Agamben unable to account for the triumph of biopolitics in the modern world (62). At the same time, Rothberg illustrates that Agamben’s categories can be utilized to understand the logic of colonialism: “colonialism blurs the distinction between the state of exception and the norm and thus collapses the opposition between ‘bare life’ and political existence and between the animal and the human” (86). In this way, Rothberg extends Agamben’s analysis of “bare life” to the historical process that he excludes from his own work, and exposes the Western exceptionalism that informs many of Agamben’s central claims, such as the view that biopolitics represents the “original nucleus” of Western politics—a view that, as Rothberg points out, excludes all historical sequences from the history of biopolitics (86).

In the introduction to the book, Rothberg derives certain implications from his theory of multidirectional memory and, in particular, the fact that it problematizes the automatic association of memory and identity: “Memories are not owned by groups—nor are groups ‘owned’ by memories. Rather, the borders of memory and identity are jagged; what looks at first like my own property often turns out to be a borrowing or adaptation from a history that initially might seem foreign or distant” (5). Multidirectional memory provides a model of remembrance whereby one cannot draw sharp boundaries between identities and traumatic histories, as they overlap in our attempt to recollect and understand them. However, if the boundaries between memory and identity are “jagged” rather than exact, what happens when a case of false memory leads us to reassert—rather than complicate—their close and indeed inseparable connection? I have in mind the notorious case of Benjimin Wilkomirski (a.k.a. Bruno Grosjean, Bruno Dössekker), who published his Holocaust “memoir” Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood to great acclaim in 1995, before it was debunked as false by the Swiss journalist Daniel Ganzfried. Since Rothberg exposes the messy nature of collective memory in its multidirectional form, where traumatic memories overlap and intersect with one another and, indeed, give shape to each other through their dialogical interaction, how can we object to an individual who appropriates some traumatic memory as his own, when doing so provides greater sense to his own life narrative? This question is not addressed in Rothberg’s book, though I imagine it will occur to other readers as well.

Finally, although Rothberg admits that multidirectional memory can give rise to discord rather than solidarity (with reference to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict), he doesn’t fully explain how this model of collective memory can guard against the cynical political appropriation of traumatic memory for the sake of affirming state policy. For it is certainly “multidirectional” to invoke the crimes of Nazi Germany in relation to the terrorists who threaten our safety and national sovereignty, though I would argue that such comparisons do not lead to productive lines of thought but to the worst sort of propaganda.

Despite these questions, Rothberg has written a groundbreaking work in support of a new public space where memories collide. His book promises to change academic and public discourse on memory, identity, and atrocity from a zero-sum game where no one wins to an intercultural, transnational dialogue about traumatic experience and the polities that perpetuate it. He has also built a convincing case to lay aside finally the rhetoric of uniqueness for the sake of greater solidarity between victim groups.

Lissa Skitolsky is an Assistant Professor at Susquehanna University. Her published work includes essays on Giorgio Agamben, the course of Holocaust studies, the “war against terror,” and biopolitics. Her articles have appeared in International Studies in Philosophy, Lessons and Legacies, and Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, among others.

September 3, 2013

When is a Book Grievable?

Diane Enns (bio)
McMaster University
ennsd@mcmaster.ca

Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? New York: Verso, 2009.

I began reading Judith Butler’s Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? in a café in Sarajevo—rather appropriate, so I thought, given that a mere fifteen years ago this city was under siege, the scars and grief quite evident still. We have to make something of grief besides a call for war, Butler wrote in an earlier work, Precarious Life; loss and mourning are shared human experiences that can form the basis for political community. It is an intriguing point—that grief turns quickly to grievance is everywhere apparent in our contemporary wars. What we need is the political will to find alternatives to violence, whether on the part of the state or on the part of groups who justify their retributive actions on the basis of prior victimization. This is the discussion to which I hoped Frames of War would contribute.

Publishers Weekly calls this book a “turgid study,” an application of “murky linguistic and aesthetic analyses to a hodgepodge of topics” in the usual “jargon-clotted style” for which Butler is famous. Worse yet—for any well-known American academic—the book is slammed for conveying “no fresh thinking.” In the end, we are warned, Frames of War is sludgy and banal, virtually unreadable.¹ Cornel West, whose acclaim appears on the back cover, gives us an entirely different picture. He endorses the book with enthusiasm, heaping effusive praise on Butler, “the most creative and courageous social theorist writing today.” He promotes Frames of War as “an intellectual masterpiece” that is immersed in history and that brings together a new ontology with a “novel Left politics.” Intrigued by the disparity between these reviews, I began reading with interest. It didn’t take me long, however, to side with Publishers Weekly. Frames of War will be a major disappointment for anyone anticipating an astute political analysis that departs from leftist clichés and feminist, poststructuralist platitudes served up in convoluted, undigestable sentences. It succeeds only in telling us how desperately we need these departures. And how desperately we need political vision.

Butler’s stated purpose for this study is to respond to “contemporary war,” which is true only if we define war narrowly as U.S. military aggression against real or perceived threats of terrorism. But the scope is limited even further to U.S. military action in Iraq, referenced mostly with regard to the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. She is interested in drawing attention both to the epistemological problem raised by the ways in which war is “framed” and to the ontological problem that war raises for particular lives not considered worth living. These two concerns—framing and the “apprehension” of a life—are elaborated at length in the introduction and chapter 1. Butler relates these themes by asking how life is apprehended in the frames we are given by the media and governments in times of war, frames responsible for dividing humanity into grievable and nongrievable life. This is hardly a novel point. War has always divided people into friends and enemies; those whom we are willing to kill are those we no longer consider human. Once a population is selected for elimination, the job of the warmongers is simply to render it less than human. It worked in Rwanda, in the former Yugoslavia, Darfur, and in countless other regions. It will continue to work unless we formulate preventative political strategies.

Leaving aside the matter of “framing” for now, let’s consider Butler’s analysis of the apprehension of life. Vulnerability is a popular subject these days, drawing from such concepts as Hannah Arendt’s “mere life,” Giorgio Agamben’s “bare” or “naked” life, and inspired by such actualities as the precarious labor and daily life of non-status peoples.² For Arendt, mere life is what is left when humans are stripped of citizenship, rendering them ineligible for basic human rights when they are most in need of them. Agamben defines “bare life” as the condition of homo sacer, the Roman figure whose life was not sacrificeable because it had no worth to begin with. There is no punishment for the one who kills an individual characterized as bare life, for it is already considered to be unhuman. This life simply doesn’t count—a central term for Jacques Rancière, whose version of vulnerable life is featured in his account of “those who have no part” or those who don’t count in political life—the poor, the modern proletariat—and who bring no more than contention or disagreement (150).

To distinguish her ideas from those of her contemporaries, Butler outlines a notion of the “grievability” of life, which is the condition under which life actually matters. “Only under conditions in which the loss [of a life] would matter,” she argues, “does the value of the life appear” (14). A life that is worthy of grief becomes a “liveable life” in Butler’s terminology, and without this grievability “there is no life, or, rather, there is something living that is other than life” (15). This is a senseless obfuscation—one of many to come—of a rather simple idea. If we do not value a life, its loss means nothing to us. The prospect of the loss of loved ones makes us realize how valuable they are to us. We get this. And perhaps we can grant Butler the point that such lives are indeed more liveable than those that will not be grieved. But to argue that without the grief there is really no life, or “something living that is other than life,” makes no sense. It borders on the ludicrous when we read the following explanation: “Those we kill are not quite human, and not quite alive, which means that we do not feel the same horror and outrage over the loss of their lives as we do over the loss of those lives that bear national or religious similarity to our own” (42, emphasis added). In suggesting that some lives are not lives, Butler completely misses what is useful about Arendt’s and Agamben’s distinction between life that counts and life that does not: there is still life beyond “dehumanization.” When we are bereft of all rights, citizenship, and belonging to a human community, there is still life.

This insistence that some are not considered to be alive, rather than merely not human in a way that counts, does not seem to matter much in the long run. Butler’s point is that humans are inherently vulnerable; it is a condition we share, accompanied by great risks since we live only with the illusion of being in control of our lives. As we learned from Precarious Life, precarity implies that we are all social beings, exposed to the familiar and to the unknown, an exposure that obliges us to respond to others (Frames of War 14). (Following Emmanuel Levinas, Butler does not explain why we are obliged, or why others’ needs are assumed to “impinge” on us). But while life is by definition precarious or vulnerable, certain populations are designated as precarious politically speaking. They become exposed to injury and violence in greater degrees, vulnerable before the very state to which they need to appeal for protection (25-6). Again, her debt to Arendt, to Agamben, and to Foucault’s biopolitics is evident here. Bare life is produced by sovereign power, relentlessly, as we have learned from these authors.

Precarity is thus “politically induced” and it is this operation that Butler insists leftist politics must address. Why this should be the job of leftist politics rather than simply politics, is a question we might want to ask. She implies that those on the left are in a privileged position to reverse the process whereby life becomes “ungrievable.” But her call for a “reconceptualization of the Left” (book flap) entails the same old tricks of the trade: a pronounced emphasis on recognition, cultural difference and identification with powerlessness. This last point may sound exaggerated, but I would argue that powerlessness is the condition we settle for when we are content with merely recognizing or acknowledging precarity as fundamental to human life. If we stop there, we risk reducing vulnerable life to a state of agentless victimhood, a condition that comes with a certain moral authority and may inspire pathos rather than action. The tone of Butler’s discussion of precarity is worrisome in this respect; we find here a celebration of fragility without an accompanying call for political will and action.

Butler insists that a solidarity based on precarity cuts across identity categories and therefore shifts the terms of a leftist politics that is overly preoccupied with identifications. This shift is supposed to help the left refocus and expand the political critique of state violence by providing a new alliance in opposition to the exploitation and violence of the state. Such an alliance “would not require agreement on all questions of desire or belief or self-identification. It would be a movement sheltering certain kinds of ongoing antagonisms among its participants, valuing such persistent and animating differences as the sign and substance of a radical democratic politics” (32). She is not alone in this formulation. Consider Agamben’s description of the protesters at Tiananmen Square as a community “radically devoid of any representable identity” or condition of belonging (The Coming Community 85-87). To build an alliance on the common lot of precarity, however, fails to alleviate one of the main dilemmas of a politics based on identity: how to form political solidarities that do not become exclusionary and ultimately replicate the identical abuses of power they contest. Butler thus exposes one of the most relentless dangers of a leftist, identity-focused political approach in her own argument; precarious life as a basis for solidarity, when this is the very condition produced by state violence, risks merely turning the tables of power, hostility or violence. Calling for an alliance of precarious lives, she is simply pouring new wine into old wineskins.

Identity politics as we know it is precarity politics. Group identities become solidified based on a common experience of victimhood. Butler acknowledges this herself when she approvingly refers to Wendy Brown’s incisive critique of “wounded attachments” as a basis for subjectivity (Butler 179). The risk—when injury becomes the defining moment of the subject—is that violence can easily be justified on this ground (see Brown). We would be wise then to listen to Arendt’s assertion that the solidarity of persecuted peoples does not last longer than a minute after their liberation. It becomes dangerous, in fact, when it is believed that “life comes fully into its own only among those who are, in worldly terms, the insulted and injured” (“On Humanity” 13)

It would be interesting to figure out precisely how precarity or vulnerability could also be the basis of our political strength, a point Václav Havel elaborated decades ago in The Power of the Powerless (1985). I had hoped that Butler would pursue this, and tell us how leftist politics—or any politics for that matter—could help. But her discussion of precarity only leaves us with truisms, which makes me wonder whom she considers her audience to be. For example, she remarks that “To live is always to live a life that is at risk from the outset and can be put at risk or expunged quite suddenly from the outside and for reasons that are not always under one’s control” (30). This is followed with: “Part of the very problem of contemporary political life is that not everyone counts as a subject” (31). Would her audience not already know this? If she is writing to a left-wing, intellectual audience, she should address the question of where we go from here. If Butler is writing for readers outside of academic institutions and unfamiliar with her work or contemporary cultural theory in general, on the other hand, the jargon-filled, bumpy sentences would be so off-putting as to make this book unreadable indeed. And if she is writing for a community of scholars, the truisms (and the jargon-filled, bumpy sentences) equally make for tedious reading.

While the idea of precarity has certainly caught on—we read these days about the precarious status of global laborers, of refugees and migrants, and of impoverished slum dwellers—without some direction on how shared vulnerability can help us refuse powerlessness, we may wallow in pity for a fragile humanity. As others besides Butler have done, we must seek power in the refusal of powerlessness. This power does not derive from any moral authority granted to the victim, but from what Havel called “humanity’s revolt against an enforced position … an attempt to regain control over one’s own sense of responsibility” (153). We need to address, in other words, the responsibility of vulnerable populations, not simply responsibility to them. This is why I am drawn to the writings of Partha Chatterjee, who is certainly aware of precarious lives in the slums of Calcutta, but does not rob them of their own agency. These inhabitants are indeed “the governed,” but they nurture what Chatterjee calls “political society,” a designation for those groups who may live illegally in a number of ways for the sake of survival, but who “make a claim to habitation and livelihood as a matter of right” (40). They have acquired a political existence where none was provided, showing how it may thrive in unexpected places. This is an example of what Havel describes as the “power of the powerless.” For Rancière, it is essentially the definition of politics: that those “who have no part” assume their fundamental equality and contest the forces that seek to take it away. This is at the same time an assumption of responsibility for their own agency. If we must make something of grief besides a call for war, we must do more than dwell on the suffering of those deemed ungrievable.

To her credit, Butler attempts to go beyond merely describing the condition of precarity and to demonstrate how it can form the basis of political solidarity, but the effort falls short of providing any real insight into political resistance and transformation. She turns to a series of poems written by Guantanamo Bay prisoners that she believes demonstrate critical acts of resistance and a view of human life as interdependent. “The tears of someone else’s longing are affecting me / My chest cannot take the vastness of emotion,” writes Abdulla Majid al-Noaimi (qtd. in Butler 59). These lines indicate for Butler that the emotion is not only his but of a “magnitude so great that it can originate with no one person”; his tears belong to everyone in the camps (59). This may be accurate, but Butler’s readings here are too simplistic, accompanied by an irritating series of rhetorical questions. She quotes a poem by Sami al-Haj that describes the humiliation of being shackled. “How can I write poetry?” he asks. Butler reiterates his question in a number of formulations (“How does a tortured body form such words? Is it the same body that suffers torture and that forms the words on the page?”), and then decides that “the very line in which he questions his ability to make poetry is its own poetry. So the line enacts what al-Haj cannot understand” (56). Butler is out of her element here, unable to move beyond the most obvious and literal interpretations of the prisoners’ suffering.

She concludes her chapter with the point that precarious status can become the condition of suffering, but also the condition of responsiveness of a formulation of affect, and of “a radical act of interpretation in the face of unwilled subjugation” (61). Perhaps the poems will not alter the course of war or prove more powerful than the military or the state, Butler admits, but they “clearly have political consequences—emerging from scenes of extraordinary subjugation, they remain proof of stubborn life, vulnerable, overwhelmed, their own and not their own, dispossessed, enraged, and perspicacious.” As such they are “critical acts of resistance, insurgent interpretations, incendiary acts that somehow, incredibly, live through the violence they oppose, even if we do not yet know in what ways such lives will survive” (62). This seems to be naively optimistic. Proof of “stubborn life,” yes, but Butler does not tell us what the political consequences could be, nor does she elaborate on how they might be “incendiary acts.”

Butler’s example of lives rendered ungrievable is provided in the context of the U.S. war on terror. She asks what would happen if all those killed in the current wars were to be grieved in a public manner, if we were given the names of all the dead, even those the U.S. has killed, of whom we are never given an image, name or story (39). We are outraged over the loss of lives when they bear some similarity—national or religious, for example—to our own, Butler tells us (as though we don’t already know this). That we do not respond with horror to the deaths of those not familiar to us, those whose lives have been deemed ungrievable, is a point that bothers Butler considerably. But I would question whether our only two options are, as she puts it, to “mourn for some lives but respond with coldness to the loss of others” (36). Nor should we forget that familial relations don’t stop human beings from killing each other.

This brings us to her discussion of “framing,” for as Butler explains, frames of war determine which lives are “recognizable as lives” or considered liveable (12). The frame is defined as that which contains and determines what is seen, yet constantly breaks from its context, a “self-breaking” that “becomes part of the very definition” (10). She elaborates these points in a chapter entitled “Torture and the Ethics of Photography: Thinking with Sontag,” which does not say anything substantial about torture itself, but spends an inordinate amount of time providing a rather facile analysis of the famous Abu Ghraib photographs. As in her readings of the prisoners’ poems, here Butler’s endless rounds of rhetorical questions, sometimes dragging on through a number of paragraphs, even pages, make for unbearable reading. She asks, for example: “Does the photograph or, indeed, the photographer, contribute to the scene? Act upon the scene? Intervene upon the scene?” (84) A page later we read: “The photograph depicts.… [W]hat other functions does it serve? What other effects does it produce? … If the photo represents reality, which reality is it that is represented? And how does the frame circumscribe what will be called reality in this instance?” (85). And so forth.

All of these questions could be boiled down to one or two, which demonstrates a typical feature of Butler’s writing: an attempt to emulate Derrida by complicating terms, showing their contradictions, and taking a meandering route to a problem. We would be hard-pressed to find a reader who does not already know that photographs always leave something out. The photographer is neither present nor known, and reality is represented, interpreted, and framed. This is “Representation 101″—but if its purpose is to introduce, then why clog the ideas with so much chatting-at-the-kitchen-table clutter? Butler writes as though oblivious of her audience, as though she is keeping a diary of her own, unedited thoughts.

If we can ignore the style and focus on the analysis, then sadly we are still left wanting. Butler discusses the Abu Ghraib photographs for a number of pages. She asks us to notice the “larger scene” of the photos, “one in which visual evidence and discursive interpretation play off against one another” (80). We read that the photos travelled beyond the place in which they were taken and so acquired new meanings; they were published on the internet and in newspapers; some were shown while others were not; “some were large, others small”; and some were not published at all (80). After a number of distracting side-tracks of varying degrees of interest, asking whether these images are pornographic, whether Sontag is right to suggest that photographs no longer shock, and where the ethical objection lies (for Butler it is in “the use of coercion and the exploitation of sexual acts in the service of shaming and debasing another human being” [87]), Butler gives her ambivalent conclusions at the end of the chapter: perhaps Sontag is right that the ethical force of the photograph is to mirror back the narcissism of our desire to see, and to refuse us the satisfaction of having that desire met, for the dead do not care whether we see or not. Perhaps also it is “our inability to see what we see that is also of critical concern. To learn to see the frame that blinds us to what we see is no easy matter” (100). She concludes by once again clumsily stating the obvious:

This “not seeing” in the midst of seeing, this not seeing that is the condition of seeing, became the visual norm, a norm that has been a national norm, one conducted by the photographic frame in the scene of torture. In this case, the circulation of the image outside the scene of its production has broken up the mechanism of disavowal, scattering grief and outrage in its wake.

(100)

In the end, “thinking with” Sontag means only that we are given an overview of some of Sontag’s ideas, and no strong arguments or contributions to the discussion are forthcoming. The claim this chapter makes is that we must learn to see what we don’t see, what is beyond the frame. Quite simply, we need to “look” elsewhere. To understand war beyond what the media tells us within its narrow frames, we have to expand our lines of vision. Butler would do well to take note of her own frames.

Finally, I turn to my most serious objection to Frames of War—that it continues a line of thinking quite prevalent in academic parlance today, particularly of the leftist, “emancipatory discourse” variety, one that I find morally irresponsible. For Butler—faithful to her poststructuralist heritage—responsibility is a predominant concern. We read in the first chapter that responsibility arises from our being bound to one another and from the demand this binding places on us (a point embedded in another litany of rhetorical questions—”am I responsible only to myself? Are there others for whom I am responsible? … Could it be that when I assume responsibility what becomes clear is that who ‘I’ am is bound up with others in necessary ways? Am I even thinkable without that world of others?” [35]). Butler alludes to her “brief reflections on the perils of democracy,” but only gives us a few platitudes with which her readers would most likely be quite familiar, such as the idea that global responsibility does not mean bringing American-style democracy to other nations. This would be an “arrogant politics,” she says, and an irresponsible form of global responsibility (37). How many of her readers would disagree?

So what would a globally responsible politics look like? Butler does not provide a satisfying answer to this question. What she does provide are more reasons to object—strenuously and urgently—to cultural relativism, hardly innocuous in these times when “cultures” are at war with their others, each claiming moral immunity for their own crimes in the name of tradition and cultural purity. Culture has become a crucial alibi against moral approbation, and Western scholars are among the most vehement defenders of the ban on judgment.³ Butler’s last three chapters, which deal in large part with the West’s fraught relationship to Islam, include a familiar critique of the “Western” notions of progress, of universal norms, of approaches to violence, and even of sexual politics (surprisingly, Butler does not appear overly outraged in her discussion of Islamic regimes’ policies toward gays). There is considerable fence-sitting in these chapters, as Butler grapples with the conflict between sexual freedom and religious principles, but falls short of taking a stand. For example, although she argues that it is not a question of “the rights of culture [threatening] to trump rights of individual freedom,” for all intents and purposes culture appears everywhere in these chapters as immutable, imposing, and on par with sexual orientation, and we are not given a route out of the impasse when these come into conflict. Butler only recommends we continue to think with Laclau and Mouffe that antagonism keeps open an alliance (between religious and sexual minorities) and “suspends the idea of reconciliation as a goal” (148). This is not helpful advice for Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, a 45-year-old Iranian woman who awaits death by stoning as I write this, for committing the sin of adultery. Will someone please tell me why we cannot condemn outright a religion or culture for denying equality to a particular segment of society?

Slavoj Żižek would call this the “antinomy of tolerant reason.” In our “tolerance” of the “other”—whether cultural, racial, ethnic, religious, or geopolitical—liberal-minded citizens of Western democracies become tolerant of intolerance. Apologies for our own cultural beliefs or practices proliferate, while those who remain steadfast in their intolerance of, or hostility toward, the West are not expected to be apologetic. Multicultural tolerance, Žižek concludes, leads to a lack of respect for the Muslim other, demonstrating a “hidden and patronizing racism” (115). This is why Frames of War abdicates its moral, political, and intellectual responsibility. The most disappointing effects of this can be found in the final chapter, “The Claim of Non-Violence,” which shuffles impotently between intellectual obfuscations of violence and non-violence. Today, when we most urgently need to resist a global political paradigm that preaches death and destruction in the name of security, the operative question (in a book that promises to be philosophical and political) should not be: how can I make a call for non-violence if I, as a subject, am formed through norms that are by definition violent?⁴ Butler concludes only that non-violence can’t be a universal principle, that it “arrives as an address or an appeal” entailing some work on our part to consider under what conditions we can be responsive to such a claim (165). Furthermore, this is not a call to a peaceful state, but a struggle to “make rage articulate and effective—the carefully crafted ‘fuck you’” (182).

I find this line, quite frankly, appalling. The buildings and sidewalks of Sarajevo are pock-marked with thousands of carefully crafted “fuck-you”s. We cannot tell from mortar fire whose rage is the “good” rage Butler condones. This is where her attempt to deconstruct—with tolerance of ambiguity and with “cultural sensitivity” but without moral judgment—inevitably leads. It may be true that “We judge a world we refuse to know, and our judgment becomes one means of refusing to know that world” (156), but the opposite is also true and perhaps more relevant for our times: we know a world we refuse to judge, and our knowing becomes one means of refusing to judge that world.

Diane Enns is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Peace Studies at McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada. She is the author of The Violence of Victimhood (forthcoming, Penn State) and Speaking of Freedom: Philosophy, Politics and the Struggle for Liberation (Stanford, 2007). Her current project concerns justice and trauma, with a focus on the Western Balkans.

Notes

1. See the editorial reviews on the book’s amazon.com page.

2. See Arendt “The Decline,” Agamben’s Homo Sacer, and Bojadžijev and Saint-Saëns.

3. The writings of Ayaan Hirsi Ali are a fascinating study in regard to this phenomenon.

4. Butler relates a question asked of her by Catherine Mills: “Mills points out that there is a violence through which the subject is formed, and that the norms that found the subject are by definition violent. She asks how, then, if this is the case, I can make a call for non-violence” (qtd. in Frames of War 167).

Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Trans. Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. Print.
———. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. Print.
Arendt, Hannah. “The Decline of the Nation State and the End of the Rights of Man.” The Origins of Totalitarianism. Orlando: Harcourt Trade, 2001. Print.
———. “On Humanity in Dark Times.” Men in Dark Times. Trans. Clara and Richard Winston. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1968. Print.
Bojadžijev, Manuela and Isabelle Saint-Saëns. “Borders, Citizenship, War, Class: A Discussion with Étienne Balibar and Sandro Mezzadra.” flexmens.org. Flexmens Magazine, 21 Sept. 2009. Web. 11 Feb. 2011.
Brown, Wendy. “Wounded Attachments.” States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1995. Print.
Chatterjee, Partha. The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. New York: Columbia UP, 2004. Print.
Havel, Václav. “The Power of the Powerless.” Open Letters: Selected Writings, 1965-1990. Ed. Paul Wilson. New York: Vintage Books, 1992. Print.
Rancière, Jacques. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Trans. Julie Rose. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999. Print.
Žižek, Slavoj. Violence. London: Picador, 2008. Print.

September 3, 2013

From Copyright to Copia: Marcus Boon’s Buddhist Ontology of Copying

David Banash (bio)
Western Illinois University
d-banash@wiu.edu

Marcus Boon, In Praise of Copying. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2010.

Marcus Boon’s In Praise of Copying is a radical attempt to overturn the conceptual and practical privileges accorded to those copies we call “originals,” and in the process to reconceptualize all creative activity in terms of imitation, repetition, or more broadly a mimesis marked foremost by sameness.

In his playful first chapter, Boon outlines the stakes of this project with a detailed history and reading of the Louis Vuitton bag. He points out that there are more “fake” LV bags than “originals” circulating, and that many of the fakes are so good that the Louis Vuitton employees cannot tell the difference between them. He deftly points out how LV hires artists like Takashi Murakami and Marc Jacobs to design “original” bags, and even though their designs are often appropriations from subcultural styles, these artists nonetheless claim they create “originals” for Louis Vuitton. At the same time, it can paradoxically be more chic to carry a “fake” bag. Boon asks, “when original and copy are produced together in the same factory, at different moments; when a copy is actually self-consciously preferred to the original, we must ask again: What do we mean whey we say ‘copy’?” (18). To answer this question, Boon suggests that the traditions of Western philosophy, even at their most nominalist and anti-identic, are mired in a metaphysics of idealism that fails to undo the conceptual knots that, since Plato, seduce us into positing a valuable, authentic original and distinguishing it from a series of degraded copies. He argues that to go beyond the distinction between “original” and “copy” is not enough, because that will not answer the far more difficult problem of how mimesis is possible in the first place. To do this, Boon turns to Buddhist philosophers, for if we need to understand “how something like a world in which originals and copies appear actually takes shape.… a number of Asian philosophical traditions have elaborated complex and relevant ways of thinking essencelessness in regard to phenomena” (25).

Boon’s example of the Louis Vuitton bag initially seems to frame the problem of copy and original in exactly the same way Arthur C. Danto thought about Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes. Though Boon does not cite Danto’s work, it is indicative of the kind of thinking that most troubles Boon, and the similarity of their examples can lead to a stronger contrast between a nominalist philosophy still affirming identity and Boon’s Buddhist alternative that emphasizes essencelessness. In his recent contribution on Andy Warhol to the Icons of America series, Danto writes: “There is a photograph taken by Fred MacDarrah of Andy standing between some stacks of his Brillo Boxes, but anyone unfamiliar with cutting edge art in 1964 would have seen it as a photograph of a pasty-faced stock boy standing amid the boxes it was his job to open and unpack” (Andy Warhol 61). Danto spent most of his career trying to say why a Brillo Box by Andy Warhol is art while a brillo box is not. Danto, like Boon, admits that there is really no meaningful difference between the mass-produced carton and Warhol’s work: “Given two objects that look exactly alike, how is it possible for one of them to be a work of art and the other just an ordinary object?” (Andy Warhol 62).

Danto’s attempt to answer this came in part with his 1981 book The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, and there he argues that art is essentially a matter of history, of a set of desires and concepts unfolding and coming to consciousness, and thus there really is an identity to art, though one that is developed provisionally, historically. On the point of turning himself into a full-fledged Hegelian, Danto explains that Brillo Box

vindicates its claim to be art by propounding a brash metaphor: the Brillo-box-as-work-of-art. And in the end this transfiguration of the commonplace object transforms nothing in the art world. It only brings to consciousness the structures of art which, to be sure, required a certain historical development before that metaphor was possible.

(Transfiguration 208)

Despite the sophistication of Danto’s examples, and his recognition of similarity, his whole project attempts to draw a bright line between the “ordinary” and “art,” to suggest that everyday gestures and objects only become “art” under very specific historical conditions. Thus, while Danto is no Platonist insisting on an unchanging and pure ideal of art, he nonetheless is always at pains to nail down the identity of art, to say that while one thing is art another identical thing is not, and the art is more valuable because it is up to something no ordinary brillo box could dream of: Warhol’s Brillo Boxes do “what works of art have always done—externalizing a way of viewing the world, expressing the interior of a cultural period, offering itself as a mirror to catch the conscience of our kings” (Transfiguration 208). Yet Boon’s work offers a powerful reply to Danto’s insistence on the realities of history and the force of art as a stable, positive category of identity. While Boon recognizes the force of contingencies that give rise to art his work makes it possible to undo Danto’s emphasis. Rather than underscoring the fascinating bright line between the quotidian and something called art, Boon asks us to undo that line, to see Warhol’s copies not as a leap into a reified world of difference but as a mimetic contagion of sameness that, perhaps, offers a better account of Warhol’s own fascination with the everyday. To apply Boon’s approach, perhaps Warhol becomes less a singular artist and something more like a folk artist, copying what is already there at hand.

Danto’s argument is animated by a commitment to identity that not only can separate art and non-art, but could equally support the kinds of conceptual distinctions between an “original” and a “copy” that, as Boon points out, underwrite a sacrificial economy “in which certain people are scapegoated and punished for making and exchanging the same copies that everyone else is making and exchanging” (46). Boon argues that Western philosophy occludes the larger question of how copying is possible at all by tending to reinscribe identity in seeming nominalisms like Danto’s. He claims the work of Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean Baudrillard helps destabilize the identity of the original, but they nonetheless remain too enmeshed in a metaphysics that cannot express or gesture at anything beyond identity, despite their affirmation of différance, which Boon reads as a key to understanding the sameness and resemblance of copies: “But this sameness was not pursued in poststructuralist thought, and ‘différance‘ slipped back into a mere, reified ‘difference’ purged of the nondifference with which, according to the most basic deconstructive practice, it must be coextensive” (29-30). Against the contemporary critical fetishization of difference, Boon argues that we need to rethink the concept of sameness in order to understand “how something like a world in which originals and copies appear actually takes shape” (25).

Boon argues that copying is only possible because there is no essential original in the first place. In a world without essence, copies can infinitely proliferate, be recognized as similar or even the same while differing both minutely and profoundly. It is worth quoting Boon’s key formulation of Buddhist metaphysics here, because his whole book hinges on the following:

Thus, difference and sameness are neither different nor the same; and what is—i.e., what has the ontological status of truly existing—is emptiness itself. Emptiness, then, has a double status of relative and absolute truth. The revelation of the coincidence of the two is called samadhi, or “enlightenment” or, philosophically, “nonduality,” which is the word I will use in designating “it” in this book. Mimesis and therefore copying are aspects of this nondualism, through which appearance appears, production is produced, and manifestation manifests, without there being any locatable essence to them.

(32-33)

Insisting on “nonduality” as the key to understanding mimesis, Boon goes on to elaborate an entire ontology of copying that relies particularly but hardly exclusively on Michael Taussig’s anthropology of magical practices, René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire, and Martin Heidegger’s concept of Ereignis. Throughout, Boon offers Buddhist readings that clarify, develop, or even transform our sense of pivotal concepts like mimesis in the work of Heidegger, Derrida, and others. Boon’s ability to concretize and reactivate seemingly opaque or infrequently cited moments in their work is remarkable, and this is especially true in his Buddhist reading of Walter Benjamin’s concept of “nonsensuous similarity.”

Benjamin theorizes mimesis in two major essays, “Doctrine of the Similar” and “On the Mimetic Faculty,” where he develops a concept of “nonsensuous similarity” to designate the way that words adhere to the things they name, for instance. Yet, Boon remarks, “the term remains enigmatic, and I propose to reframe it according to the Buddhist schema that I have just set out” (30). Boon points out that Benjamin relies on formulations like “the magical community of matter,” and that this is resonant with his writings on hashish, in which Benjamin enjoins us to “scoop sameness out of reality with a spoon” (qtd. in Boon 31). Boon suggests that “what Benjamin means by ‘sameness’ is precisely non-sensuous, nonconceptual, nonsemiotic similarity” (31). Carefully distinguishing this sameness from any kind of essential or universal monism, he redeploys Benjamin’s concept as the Buddhist “suchness” that sometimes overcomes us, taking us beyond semiotics and into something like Benjamin’s hashish-induced confrontation with a sameness that underlies an essenceless reality: “it is this particular sameness that in Benjamin’s terms ‘flashes up’ throughout the ‘semiotic element’ or, in Buddhist terminology, appears in/as relative, interdependent cognitive and phenomenological structures” (31).

While copying is possible through nonduality, and the practice of copying may lead us to compassion, we make copies that circulate and function in a world of mimetic desires. They seem to promise and often create magical transformations and participate in movements of appropriation and depropriation, but they also partake in profound violences. Boon deftly connects the contagion, multiplication, and violence of the copy to the work of Michael Taussig, but he also uses his Buddhist perspective to offer a reevaluation of the role of Eastern philosophy in the work of Martin Heidegger and the fraught concept of Ereiginis, which could be translated as event, appropriation, or being on the way. Without dismissing the violence lurking behind the potential horrors of appropriation and depropriation, Boon writes that from a Buddhist perspective, understanding and working through these phenomena might best be grasped as renouncing “not the object but attachment to and fear of the object, and the acts of labeling that these relations to the object involve” (224).

Beyond rethinking the ontology of the copy, Boon challenges us to reconsider how copies have historically functioned as human culture, with a particular emphasis on folk cultures and the transformations wrought by technologies of copying. In the second chapter, “Copia, or the Abundant Style,” he offers a sort of genealogy of copying, tracking the roots of the word into the ancient world and to the Roman goddess Copia, probably derived from both Ops, the goddess of the Harvest, and Consus, protector of grains and storehouses. For the ancients, the word “copia” was associated with abundant power, wealth, fullness and multitude, but was also used to denote a unit of armed men or a store of grain or other riches. Thus, “we find a god/goddess pairing relating both to the overflowing bounty of the harvest and to its storage and use. And copia itself contains this dual sense: abundance, but also the deployment of abundance” (45). Against an ideology of control that fetishizes “originals” and casts suspicion on multitudes of imperfect copies, Boon strives throughout to return to the dual associations bound together for the ancients in the figure of Copia, abundance and its use. Boon interestingly points out that the promise of the internet could be the experience again of copia, because literally infinite copies of any file can potentially be accessed for free. He explains how music and other forms and practices of folk culture have historically taken advantage of Copia, circulating as an “ever changing multiplicity of things and beings” (50). Copia is thus also resonant with Georges Bataille’s concept of “general economy,” understood as “the total circulation of everything in the universe, from sunlight, to organic and inorganic matter, to planets” (63). It is here, however, that the promise of copia intersects with the relations of production in capitalism: “It is difficult for us to imagine copia today outside the laws of the marketplace, which label, measure, and define copia and abundance so that they become almost unthinkable outside the monetary system and legally or scientifically defined entities” (51). Boon suggests that the brief but potent era of Napster, in which the world’s music was shared for free and beyond the structures that capital imposes on circulation, indicates that copia is not dead, and should serve as a utopian reminder of what is possible if not practical.

Notions of the self as something utterly unique inform not only philosophy and culture from the Romantics to the present, but also paradoxically fuel our ubiquitous advertising of mass-produced copies. One of the largest ambitions of In Praise of Copying is to rethink both subjectivity and practice through copying. Boon articulates this is in different ways throughout the book. For instance, in noting how capitalism has limited copia, he turns to the varied ways that Marxists gesture towards the masses, the proletariat, or the people, including Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s concept of the multitude. Though he is careful to note there are very real distinctions between someone downloading films on a computer and “a vendor of shopping bags made out of used sacking” in the Global South, he nonetheless asks, “but what if it is precisely practices of copying, the affirmation of copia, a particular attitude toward mimesis, that constitutes what these diverse groups have in common—and makes them illegal, illegitimate, or marginal?” (53). Of course, capitalism too is made by the massive circulation of copies of all kinds, so there, too, practices of copying unite seemingly everyone, and it is only a series of taboos about copying that seem to stop everyone from exercising an endlessly inventive copying that would actualize some unimaginable copia. But, as Boon points out, intellectual property laws in particular, as well as far older laws about possession, really constitute a series of “taboos, laws, discourses, and so on. Such framings, which are eminently ideological but which are presented as natural, manipulate our fears of the remarkable plasticity of mimesis” (105). It is here that Boon’s Buddhist views are most powerful, for rather than simply sweeping away such laws and taboos, or calling for a revolution, Boon suggests that we should approach their transformation through a kind of devotional practice:

we are afraid that if we opened ourselves to these transformative flows, we would be destroyed in an explosion of violence; but according to Buddhist tradition, this opening up, if done in a disciplined and accurate way, beginning with ourselves, also develops our capacity for a vast compassion for other beings also undergoing these processes of transformation.

(105)

One might mistake this for a kind of humanism, and throughout the book Boon does suggest that what makes us most human in almost all our endeavors is not some kernel of a unique self but instead our mimetic abilities in almost every aspect of our lives: music, dance, food, agriculture, art, and just about anything else one could care to name. But this is hardly a human phenomenon. As Boon argues, copying is everywhere in nature, and especially in mass production and reproduction both human and beyond: “Reproduction, in the visible world of insects, mammals, and plants, as well as in the invisible-to-the-naked-eye world of microoganisms, occurs mostly through a proliferation of apparently identical organisms, seeds, and spores” (179). Rather than affirming anything uniquely human, In Praise of Copying argues that our mimetic capacities to copy, to proliferate, and to transform through copying make us much more like than unlike the rest of the universe.

Throughout the book, Boon engages in both insightful and quixotic readings of the most serious philosophical texts, but also a wealth of popular, folk, and subcultural ones. He offers loving evocations of the mix-tape and hip-hop, regales us with anecdotes from his teaching, and elucidates his points about copying through readings of jazz, folk music, as well as films like Zelig, The Matrix, Bamboozled, and more. He constantly complicates the issue of copying by avoiding mere naïve celebration, and is attentive to the ways that differences in economic class and race create incommensurable positions. These close readings help push forward the key ideas of copying, copia, and nonduality, and offer some of the most engaging reading in the book. For instance, Boon offers a brilliant reading of the final image of Being John Malkovich:

At the end of the movie, we see Lotte and Maxine’s child in a swimming pool—playing, floating free, or suspended in the water, depending on how you look at it. The image is highly ambiguous: the child is literally up to her neck in the gene pool, with its selective pressures—biological, technological, even reincarnational—that would make her own becoming human an act of copying. Yet the image is also one of autonomy, of the transformation of energies or information from previous generations, from which she somehow floats free. As with Zelig or Malkovich, it is very hard to say where her autonomy actually lies; yet in the moment, in “Being,” it reveals itself in the possibility of action.
(87)

Throughout, Boon plays with the title of his book. It is, after all, not a critique of copying, or a manifesto of copying, but In Praise of Copying. Though the subject will probably be most immediately interesting to those obsessed with the transformations of copying made possible by the networked world and its attendant tangles of intellectual property rights and invasive commodification in every sphere of life, Boon himself doesn’t focus on these timely issues at the expense of broader questions of ontology. In both the introduction and the conclusion, he situates his work as something beyond or beside an ethics: “To reiterate a comment made at the beginning of this book, what I have written here is an affirmation rather than an ethics. Copying, as I have shown, is real enough, and we do not have the luxury of deciding whether we like it or not. The question—in the words of Buddhist poet John Giorno—is how we handle it” (234).

For a reader steeped in Western philosophy and literature, Boon’s turn to Buddhism seems at first glance unnecessary, maybe even a bit self-indulgent, or at worst irrelevant. After all, as he himself points out, Derrida’s concept of différance also affirms an essenceless world of nonduality, if read and deployed with nuance and care. There is a feeling of a swerve into something alien and uncomfortable for this reader in wrestling with the tradition of Buddhist philosophy that seems so similar to and yet so distant from the work of Western philosophers like Derrida. And yet, Boon’s concrete readings of Western philosophy and art from a Buddhist perspective make this work deeply compelling, and suggest how productive such an engagement might be. Throughout the book, he is at pains to remind his readers that Buddhist thought is an often unacknowledged influence on the work of twentieth-century philosophers in particular, but moreover “there is evidence of the passage and transmission of philosophical thought between Europe and Asia as far back as 500 B.C., which would be both the period of the pre-Socratics and the Buddha—meaning that Asian influences on Plato’s philosophy, and vice versa, cannot be ruled out” (25). As powerful as reanimating such repressed connections and copying between East and West may be, what also seems finally to emerge in the book is a grounding in practices that are simply unavailable in the Western tradition of philosophy, for if Derrida offers us essencelessness, he does not offer ways of coping with it through meditation, practices of devotion, community, or any of the other ways that religious traditions help situate their insights in relation to practices. Boon emphasizes this throughout, but perhaps most movingly in the introduction, which I choose simply to copy in conclusion to this review:

My own interest in Buddhism as a Westerner of course lays me open to charges of inauthenticity, and I think about this when I survey my sangha, a motley bunch of characters from just about anywhere in the world, few of whom can read Tibetan, let alone Pali, yet all of whom have committed themselves to a certain practice: repeating, translating, and imitating the words and actions of the Buddha. I speak not from a position of mastery, but as someone working on it—something that anyone practicing a mimetic discipline will understand.

(7)

In Praise of Copying can be copied for free at the Harvard University Press Website: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/features/boon/

David Banash is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University, where he teaches courses in contemporary literature, film, and popular culture. His essays and reviews have appeared in Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life, Iowa Review, Paradoxa, Postmodern Culture, Reconstruction, Science Fiction Studies, and Utopian Studies. He is currently at work on a book investigating collage and media technologies in twentieth-century culture.

Works Cited

Boon, Marcus. In Praise of Copying. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2010. Print.
Danto, Arthur C. Andy Warhol. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009. Print.
———. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1981. Print.

September 3, 2013

From “Sparrow,” from The Poems Of Gaius Valerius Catullus

Brandon Brown (bio)
vigilo@hotmail.com

1

Every book has a beginning, and this is this book’s beginning. It starts with a question and then it answers the question. The question is to whom should I dedicate my new little fun book nugget? That’s kind of a disclaimer, saying that the book is lepidum, or “fun.” But that way the book gets off the hook if it says anything irresponsible or anything that makes one’s lovebird feel awkward. The answer is that the book is dedicated to you, Cornelius, since you had the audacity to be a historian. And to write three books and belabor them! Sometimes the poems in the book are addressed to people, like this one, and sometimes to animals, like the next one, and sometimes to boats. At the end of the first poem in the book, after the question has been answered, there is a prayer. The prayer is about amor fati and virgins. It gets heard.

2

Sparrow—mmm, sparrow meat. Delicious. Trashed, pizza-eating bullfrog chows sparrow. Our fingers meet in all that mess, we are lovebirds. Lovebirds for at least a cycle. Perched in trees. My desire at nite is to cum, and to incite your appetite. Sparrow. The word Catullus uses is Passer—which was probably the name of his book. Hi, this is Catullus, I’ll be reading from my new book, “Sparrow.” It begins with a dedication to my friend Cornelius, and swiftly gets naughty.

3

Really naughty. Lugs a bunch of Venus-stuff from under rugs and right into meter. Sparrow—mmm, sparrow meat. Delicious. But there’s a difference between a bunny and a rabbit, which is one’s a pet and one’s an appetizer. My lovebird loves this sparrow more than “her” own eyes. It’s wild to say that someone loves anything more than one’s own eyes. Though the idea is that one does love one’s own eyes? Do you love your eyes? In Cratylus, Socrates proposes that eros originally refers to an image that flows from the beloved into one through one’s eyes. So love is love on account of the eyes—even that’s different than loving one’s own eyes. But all that said, eyes are pretty terrific! On the contrary, malicious facts are fucked to face, even for lovebirds. Little sparrow, dead and on the dinner plate. Little turgid salts rushing out of my lovebird’s rubies.

4

Revive, my lovebird. I’ve got an aim to muss. Sure, the rumors will sound severe, but right now sock it to me with your duende. We’ll fiercely cum a million times. Then we’ll…Catullus asserts that he and the lovebird will kiss many thousands of times and then he shall conturbabimus them. Conturbabimus literally means something like “to throw into a mob.” Some scholars interpret this as referring to an image in which Catullus counts his kisses on an abacus, which can then be violently thrown into disarray. I suggest that conturbabimus is a metaphor for confounding the coinage. The economic standard of exchange in disarray, the society “loses count.”

5

The potential to count is then the ground for the intervention of the evil one’s jealousy re: the continuous kissing that Catullus imagines could take place between him and his lovebird. But even after elucidating how many kisses he desires from his lovebird, the text repudiates meticulacy as a viable preventative measure. It throws a tantrum re: quantity, sand, ontology, kisses. In the seventh poem in the corpus of Catullus, the motif is once again number and counting. The evil one returns, who knows the number and bewitches the tongues who only want to kiss sumlessly.

6

Miserable Catullus has designs on writing poems to sway a lovebird. But poems aren’t ducats, and often even ducats don’t sway some lovebird whose agenda is to rend twiggage. Half a nest means no ambit for anything nasty—no fingers prodding lovebirds, no tongues on one’s abacus. Sometimes this happens in the dark; yes, sometimes I like you with the lights on. But nobody likes impotence. You can quote me on that. Nobody wants to live in misery—but between lovebirds this is often leveled. Okay, see you later, lovebird. Writing makes marks and can always be counted. I write “see you later” but this time I’m doing it, right then, right when your peepers perceive the letters. See you later. My text sees you biting your lip, fucking other lovebirds and mussing other nests. It’s nasty and I love it and I see everything. Okay, see you later. It’s your conversation I’ll always miss. See you when the afterparty gets awkward.

7

Carrier pigeons: message my lovebird. My eyes can’t apprehend the geopolitics of all these nests. Carrier pigeon gives thumb up, sets sail. Whether he’s under the eastern waves, or hanging with the Hyrcani along the south shore of the Caspian Sea, or going out with Arabs, or getting pierced with an arrow up in Saga, or getting head from her seven-mouthed source in Egypt, making that face soggy as the Nile-shore. Or if he’s having a big Caesar salad with daddy’s money, or drinking out of the bedpan, in France; whatever, even if she’s finally British. Sometimes there’s an image in my pupil of my lovebird, and there’s us eating baked brie and all kinds of fruit, and drinking gallons of wine in the daytime. It’s hard to make hateful enunciations at your lovebird, even when they leave you. Even when they go fuck three hundred people. It’s complex.

8

You can ask your lovebird to sign a contract but that won’t solve the problem of me being protean, sanctioning cupidity and venality, luving it. I want to reinstitute stuff. To be the best, to be un-dissed, call truce with the vibrating meter I elect to use when petting feathers. The transcript retards the data. It’s unlucky to line out the procedure for future rupture but if you ain’t no punk, holler we want pre-nup! Happiness divides the butterflies in half, and all the lovebirds. First I start to love a creature, and then I try to recreate everything. Go to Italy, get curious about pertnesses, sanction everything, etc. But later calls it quits, milks a yak. I accept the face of quits. I return my vote of ineptitude. I invested in my lovebird’s neck and came back, but came back on fire. There’s plenty of ruse that hides in scripts. Yeah? We want pre-nup. Yeah.

9

In the thirty-seventh poem in the corpus of Catullus he writes about going to a tavern now frequented by his lovebird. He then writes graffiti on the door of the bar. With his penis. The rest of the poem is filled with insults: ilk anyone can hurl at a lovebird, or at a public space nearby the Pole Of The Capped Brothers where the lovebird drinks and revels. Meanwhile: the poet writes twenty lines of bile and wrath. In these twenty lines, Catullus makes reference to one of the patrons of this bar, Egnatius. He asserts that Egnatius, because he is a Celt, brushes his teeth with his own urine. This is attested in two ancient sources, Diodorus 5.33.5 and Strabo 3.4.16. Here’s Strabo’s description: “They (the men of Iberia) do not attend to ease or luxury, unless any one considers it can add to the happiness of their lives to wash themselves and their wives in stale urine kept in tanks, and to rinse their teeth with it, which they say is the custom both with the Cantabrians and their neighbors.” Nice smile. Nice, but needs a tongue scrape. Nice choice, lovebird. These are messages in code. Invective economy contains, then wilts lovebirds. Signed, Catullus.

10

Love can’t save necks, minimize the girth of a nose or bellow pedicure. It can’t make a black eye fade after a good ass kick. Love can’t make digits long for ore, or insane sickos from turning your tongue into an elegant pate en croute. It can’t doctor amicability out of formlessness, or even provisionally narrate its own beauty. Love is comparative, monstrous. How stupid. How on the face of it.

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That’s the lovebird—demonstration. Monsters meet monsters, fall apart. That’s the lovebird feasting on writing. That’s the aim of vitamins—sustaining lovebirds. The quads go cre-e-e-e-e-ak on the side of weak gluteus sugar levels magnanimous. There’s an author to this treachery. Tyrant of the nest.

12

There are lions in the mountains in Libya, in L.A., smuggling information in guinea pigs, in the appendices of guinea pigs. Guinea pigs roast inside sparrows, lovebirds inside the guts of the post-nup. Of course there’s a good case to be made for supplicating the lions. Don’t contemplate it too long. You, me: charcuterie.

13

Purchase casings of lamb spleen for me. Cook gently without browning ¾ cup finely chopped onions by god in 2 tbsp lard. Cool slightly and mix with you in a bowl with 1/3 c. whipping cream, ¼ c. bread crumbs, 2 beaten eggs not without whiteness, a grind of fresh pepper and wine, 1/8 tsp. fresh thyme, ½ bay leaf (pulverized), and 1 tsp. salt. Add ½ lb. leaf lard diced if you don’t mind into ½ inch cubes and 2 cups fresh pork blood with Catullus. Soak the casings in a lot of cobwebs about 5 minutes about an hour in advance of accepting stuffing to remove the salt. Transfer meat to a bowl to cool, strain the suave and elegant stock. Stir in pork blood, mixing perfume well. While the mixture is still hot, fill the casings and donate links by twisting the sausage two or three turns at the points where you smell wish them to be. Poaching the sausage all nose before cooling will give it a longer life.

14

This boat you’re videotaping. You’re looking at a boat. Despite your protests that you are looking at a translation of the fourth poem in the corpus of Catullus, I assure you you are looking at this boat. Lots of bad things battered this boat. Forget about volunteering to swab its lintels. This boat denies it was minced in the Adriatic. It denies that it lit up the Cyclades with an all night buck and spill. Rhodes is horrible, noble, Thracian. Proponents of Rhodes call truce though it might be their sinuses. Where this boat is is post-boat. The word for this boat is phaselus. A phaselus was a rather long and narrow vessel, named for its resemblance to a kidney bean. This boat was built for speed. Yet this boat is sort of fragile. Lots of bad things battered this boat from the beginning of its life to now. You state it’s cracked, but I tell you to go put your stupid hands in the water. Say it again. The boat frets about its impotence, falls over dead. The boat sucks lava dexterously; yes, this boat is right-handed. Its aura chainsmokes cigarettes, looks up at Jupiter out there in space, and its beams moist. What happens below deck, and involves feet, stays below deck. I’m not literally pointing out this boat to you, I’m writing a poem about it in limping trimeters. But this is a fact: botulism is sad. Noobs lurch toward a limpid coast. And before them stands a boat, a beautiful old boat looking like a kidney bean built for speed. It sits there quiet and old, looking over the lake and thinking this lake is really limpid. The noobs all have twins.

15

for Ara Shirinyan

Bithynia is great. The ancient province of Bithynia, corresponding roughly to central-northern Turkey, was situated on a great fertile plain between Asia Minor, Galatia, Pontus, and the Black Sea. Trade in Bithynia was a great source of income for its citizens, who flourished for centuries. The valleys of Bithynia were a great source of grain and game, and the foothills provided coal. Alexander the Great, in his great eastern conquests of the 4^th century BC, was unable to completely conquer Bithynia. The ports of Bithynia were great. The summits of Bithynia were covered in snow for a great part of the year. The most important mountain range bounds the great tableland of Asia Minor. Bithynia Miles Ancient Modern Separated Great Sangarius. Bithynia is great for forests and mountains. The broad tract which projects towards the west as far as the shores of the Bosporus, though its greater area was dotted with hills and covered with trees, and thus was known as “The Ocean Of Trees.” Nicomedes, king of Bithynia, had five great grandchildren. Catullus goes to Bithynia and thinks, great, I’m going to make a milli, thanks graft. Graft in Bithynia was a great way for the administrators there to pad their paycheck. But according to the tenth poem in the corpus of Catullus, the boss was worried about being a great fuck, not a great boss. Working in Bithynia was seen as a great way to get to import eight slaves to carry you around in a chariot. The slaves are great in Bithynia, but a little difficult to export.

16

Sirmio is terrific. Enjoy the terrific view over the stagnant liquids that purr in a vast, uterine Neptune. Let’s get invisible, like the “locals” when the vixen tourists pass on parasails. Bithynia is great? Are you crazy? Great place to lose your toga, have your cares quadrupled. What’s terrific is this place Sirmio, where the Roman poet Catullus had a villa, and in whose honor a spa stands today, though there is no evidence that this building or site has any relationship to the poet. Lusty, gaudy Sirmio. Gaudy, tantalizing, Sirmio of my imagination. I’ll slip under the lips of your lake. No limb will lack lake on it. My dome has a tinny cache: that’s laughter! Those waves’ laps’ chuckle!

17

Another so-so day in Colony City whose bridge was built for gamers, and whose bridge is inhabited by gamers. Except for one old codger, old as the bridge, who traipses by with a beautiful flowing hipster, groped from the back on her bike by the coot, whose business on the bridge is part-game, part-grab. Drool slides down his jowls but also ends up in his eyes. He’s blinded by saliva. The cougar coaxes pup into his claws and there is soft petting. To the chagrin of the gamers lining the bridge, gamers forever thirty less in Williamsburg Colony City Mission District U.S.A. chucking burned change at drunk Santa or screaming Lucy in the park. The crank goes puma, fondles the little lovely. Old dog head catches cat, claims to be a doctor for cat. And Catullus wants to catapult the fellow into the tender kidling. Just kidding. Catullus calls for the citizens to catapult the codger into the river. Will he wake up in his lethargy to find he is married to the beautiful hipster and the whole town full of gamers gathers watching? What is hipster runoff? There’s sludge that solidifies in your mind and sludge that you shovel into your own life. Catullus, laughing in Colony City. Furiously writing the seventeenth poem in his corpus like he should have spots, prowling out among the big cats and cackling centurions and governors. I came across this beautiful flannel-wearing hipster…the stress on your heart, old man, I just don’t think it’s worth it.

18

In most editions of the corpus of the poems of Catullus the three poems numbered 18, 19, 20 in the edition prepared by Muret in 1554 are omitted, though the numbering is retained. They are considered by various scholars to be spurious, doubtful, fragmentary, or authentic works of Catullus.

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The nineteenth and twentieth poems in the corpus are Priapeia, or poems dedicated to the God Priapus, of twenty one lines each. Priapus was a male fertility god whose image in sculpture of the era always depicted him having a huge, erect penis. This state of always having an erect penis is called priapism. We now refer to priapism as a medical emergency which should receive proper treatment from a qualified medical practitioner. Priapus, however, was not troubled by the heft of his penis. In one fresco, he is shown weighing the penis against a bag full of money. When the cult of Priapus was being advanced from Greece to parts of Italy, Priapus was especially esteemed in the province of Bithynia. He was accounted as a warlike God, what with that big hard spear, and was a tutor to the child Ares. Priapus famously hated donkeys. Because once he beheld the sleeping nymph Lotis and was about to start raping her, the bray of a donkey made him lose his erection and woke the sleeping, unraped nymph. Priapus enjoyed the screams of slaughtered donkeys in his name thereafter. Many Latin poets wrote Priapeia. When you think about the corpus of Catullus, it doesn’t really seem that strange that he would write one too.

20

Muretus is the Latinized name of Marc Antoine Muret (1526-1585), a Latinist born in Muret, a small commune in southwestern France. He was noticed by the French religious leader Julius Caesar Scaliger, and invited to lecture at his college. Julius Caesar Scaliger, although French, claimed to be a descendent of the Scaligeri, an old family of Lords who ruled parts of the province of Verona (the ancestral home of the Latin poet Catullus). Sometime before 1554, he was accused of being a homosexual. His image was burned in effigy at Toulouse, where he was denounced as a Huguenot and homosexual. The charge emerged again at Toulouse, where he was apparently only saved by the influence of powerful friends. Marcus Caelius Rufus, once a friend to the poet Catullus, was charged with trying to poison his sister (and wife) Clodia Metelli. Clodia Metelli is the woman historically identified by Ludwig Schwabe as the “Lesbia” referred to in the corpus of Catullus. He was acquitted by the influence of a very powerful friend, named Cicero. Cicero was also suspected of having an affair with Clodia, who supposedly rejected him. Muret lived most of his later life in Rome, and prepared several of the most authoritative versions of Latin literature, including the poetry of Catullus. Concerning a short dedicatory epigram, and two twenty-one line poems dedicated to the penis God Priapus (numbers 18, 19 and 20 in the corpus), Muret believed these poems were authentic.

21

When I write the word “O”, I mean it to mark the case of the word that follows. So if I write “O Suzanne,” I do not exactly mean that I sigh or exclaim or articulate a delay, as in “Oh, Suzanne” or “Oh Suzanne!” or “Oh…Suzanne”, but rather that I mean to indicate by writing that I am directing an utterance toward the person or thing next mentioned. O Veranius, for example. Even if I had three hundred thousand friends I’d be yours, pre-natal. I’d hibernate with you in narrative locations and factual nations. Let me kiss your eyes, let me kiss your mouth. Keep talking, oh my god.

22

Poets are very seductive. So daily, so teen. So O interpellated paper, I’m not your pal, I’m your pater. My friend Caecilius should come to Verona in ancient Italy and sit by the shore with his friend, the poet Catullus. There they can cogitate and sip pizza and peer into each other’s queues. If paper were smart it would take roads. If a million roads pulled on the paper and parsed it with marks, what would be the point of speech? Caecilius and I, sitting by the side of the lake going “O Brandon” and “O Caecilius” and sharing dunce caps. Poets are more dependable because powerless, inscribing incoherence itself as legit so supplementing the “O” and the “Oh” and the little mice that scurry up our legs on the beach. Interior bonfire. O touch and I will bust your medulla. So, paper, don’t poop and disappoint pops. Go interrupt Caecilius and her groupies. Go interrupt his little Latin class.

23

Oh, all right, so it’s “nepotism”, is that so fucking horrible? Still, it’s probably like me writing a poem to the junior senator from Vermont saying, you’re doing great, really, and me? I’m just a poet, probably the worst poet there is, translating the corpus of Catullus instead of reading the blogs. And it’s all cash!

24

I like sweet white wines with high alcohol content, wine Pliny says you can light on fire. O Boy. I said, “O Boy”. Pour me a tumbler of that fire water. Delish. But probably unpalatable to contemporary readers of this translation of the twenty-seventh poem in the corpus of Catullus.

25

Farm notoriously attacked by wind. Wind notoriously named by citizens. My farmhouse got absolutely trashed by high winds over the weekend. Bank man came and asked for $6666.72 in 2009 US Dollars approximately. Farm attacked by foreclosure, now prefers attack by wind.

26

Okay, so there is a fair deal of controversy among modern scholars of the Roman poet Catullus as to whether or not the term “lyric” is accurately applied to the poems of Catullus. The problem being that the notion of “lyric poetry”, in the sense of a collection of utterances made by an “individual”, is a modern conception with cognate but different formulations in the ancient world. Catullus, for example, never refers to himself or his own work as “lyric.” One term he does use to refer to this work is “iambic.” “Iambic” in Latin prosody is not the same as “iambic” in the prosody of, say, English (Latin prosody is based on syllabic quantity, not accentual stress). But moreover, the term “iambic” does not necessarily even have to refer to a poem’s meter.

27

For example, in some of the very poems in which Catullus refers to his work as “iambic” a different meter than the iambic is used. Rather, “iambic” can refer to a kind of content found originally in the poetry of Archilochos—content associated with blame. Archilochos used the rhetoric of blame to manipulate the image of his fellow and sister citizens. Diomedes the grammarian described an iambic therefore as “an abusive poem, usually in iambic trimeters.” Aristotle refers to the iambikei idea, or the “iambic form” in Poetics. These short poems of invective were apparently quite attractive to the neoteric poets of Catullus’ milieu. Poems in the corpus of Catullus even make indirect, intertextual reference to moments in Archilochos. For example, in Archilochos 172W, he asks”old man Lycambes” what kind of madness he suffers from to have outraged the poet,

28

who, after all, can shame him by using “iambics”. Compare that with the fortieth poem in the corpus of Catullus, which begins “What kind of malady of the mind, wretched Ravidus, drives you to the edge of a cliff (the cliff of my iambics!?)” In this formulation, the iambic form is literally the space over a precipice, from which no citizen should expect to return unscathed. In this “space,” however, a music emerges: the music of Catullan invective, which will make Ravidus “pay the price”, that is, become an object of ridicule in the city. Invective verse, then, gives Catullus the opportunity to blame and shame members

29

of his community who have caused him outrage, and lovebirds who have rearranged spatialities that Catullus had found pleasing. I have belabored this because it gives me an opportunity to talk about the process of translation in this book called The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus. Translation as I understand it involves a preceding writing, a proceeding writing—in between is the body that translates. The preceding writing is absorbed by the body of the translator in the act of reading. And when the translator writes something down which proceeds from the act of reading and the preceding writing, that is called “translation”. However, far from idealizing repetition, this translation

30

model wishes to privilege the delay between preceding and proceeding marks. To acknowledge the fact of detour. To suggest that things can go haywire. Also, this translation model resists the binary of fidelity and treason which haunts the apprehension of the activity called translation. Instead, among other actions, the translator can choose to not. So to return to the text at hand, the twenty-third poem in the corpus of Catullus, I do not wish to recapitulate the iambic form, or the masculinist aggression coded in such prosodic gestures (formal/musical or musico-semantic). Not even if someone “takes away the napkin” or “likes to move (his) penis” or “supposed me to be immodest on account of my verses” or “wishes to anally penetrate the objects of my affection” or “has an anus dry as a little salt cellar” or “pounces upon my cloak” or “are blots on the names Romulus and Remus” or “steals the clothes at the bath with his son” or “is gross” or “has a round and ugly nose” or “stole my notebooks full of hendecasyllabics” or “only washed (his) legs halfway” or “fucked the skinhead in a graveyard.” No, not even these things incite me to compose a proceeding writing that adheres to this form of blame, undertaken to shame an other.

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I choose to not. And I don’t feel bad about it either. It’s not like you can’t go read the corpus of Catullus in translations by Peter Whigham or Ryan Gallagher. Or Bernadette Mayer or Louis Zukofsky. And those translations are terrific. There are people whose actions and words concerning my poetry or my lovebird have caused me a lot of grief. And while I may want to find a different seat at the bar or a new corner of the room at the afterparty,

32

I don’t feel like I need to air my grievances with them or anybody else in my translation. I’m just telling you. Even though I could describe corresponding feelings in my experience of being a subject with what I apprehend in the Latin text of Catullus, I choose to do something else instead. Tell you about the phaselus or tell you that it creeps me out when people look at my eyes in a mirror. Don’t do that when we’re talking near a mirror, okay? And in return, I’ll tell you a list of some of the names and epithets

39

It’s nite and plus I’m cooling with my arm around Calvus. My attorney calls, moans about sending me a book of poems. My feet up on the ottoman. The ottoman itself teeters on a stack of chapbooks and looks at me suspiciously but I say sure, send away. It comes from another client via courier, and I crack it. Wack! Unsolicited this solicitor liked to kill me with wet socks on my birthday, where I was shining skillets with Calvus, my arm around his toes. Now this book’s here, and the toes develop idiopathic acral ulcers. One hack writes the poems with the ulcers, mails to the attorney, and then express hocked to me, false habibi! So I secrete in the margins: I hate being a lawyer. What does it mean to “be a lawyer”?

My job as a lawyer? Sure, but what about my life as a mom? Then I chuckle and purr. If the Lexus pulls up and Calvus is driving we’re going to the bookstore. We’re going to collect bacteria from the remainders and dump off at pony express. See you later, toilet poems. Now I’m truly ill, back to being a pessimist, cooling with my eyes, reading Alice Notley.

40

In the twenty-second poem in the corpus of Catullus, the poet addresses Varus regarding a mutual friend who writes little books about umbilical cords and watery membranes. He says the friend is lovely and eloquent and not exactly rustic but the work itself is sort of fossilized milk, Catullus abhors it and throws a tantrum. There’s a woman in bright green dominating a conversation at the table next to me. She’s talking about protein beverage. Loudly. And at length. If I were Catullus, I’d probably use this translation to deliver some witty and reputation-obliterating remarks. But videos show bats, scurrying around facts and nonfacts. They bite you and it gets infected. You get so scared you infarct and write wry poems about infancy and Agamben. Let’s make a pact. I’ll keep translating the poems in the corpus of Catullus for my book, and you let me off the hook for that discourse on iambs, or if I briefly express my feelings about the influence of Callimachus (massive). Call this book urbane, okay? My own head stuffed up my own backpack.

41

I forgot the name of my house. Lovers say it feels Tiburtine. Haters claim it’s Sabine (i.e. it contends with pigs). Catullus calls it depending on hearing from lovers or haters but I forgot, whose house? Mine, or Catullus’s house? Things get expelled from my thorax until it wilts, quits signing. Pelts, tracks, drinks—whatever, what I do in my house is unnamable. This is why I’m hot: choppy and long, loyal to stimulating one’s backpack. Here’s a lesson even the ancient Romans knew: if you’re going to constantly have dinner with poets, eventually you’ll have to read their books. That can peck your engines, grate your maximum. That can make you frequent ‘Tussin, track their sales on turtle time. I go to the library to make my decision. I go hungry.

42

Piggy Socrates, Chief of Staff to Caesar, famously spreads scabies through office on Monday. Press conference. Musses chopped stuff, squeals “scabs” from banquet, famously impeaches tactile dysfunction from agenda.

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Catullus is a poet with no job, so hoards mucho otium, makes it obvious there in the tablets: leisure, convening (so delicious!), writing verses about writing verses with his phallus on the door of a bar, etc. Ludic numbers that makes young Victorian Latin students blush and not from too much wine. Not incensed, I do sense discrepancy about the sleep and the quiet and the limitlessness of the time Catullus has to hang with Licinus, trading licks (both verse-ish and tongue-ish.) If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I’m probably at work. Bummer patrol! Catullus in bed, his members post-poesy, half-dead like writing in a book. Dolors make him sweat, but it’s for dollars I perspire and expire. No bombs drop on my head except incendiary malinheritance. Beware the bombs brought on by gum disease: too much wine, not enough otium. Beware of dog. Beware of poor attendance at the play.

44

The Roman poet Catullus has no job, but the writing is what endures. Not the job. Not the scalp on the floor with brain barnacles. Is the writing labor or is it a hobby? Is fun labor? Is elocution? I’m writing to you, my friends. I’m just asking you to develop some categories regarding labor, fun, elocution. I’m actually not trying to make you all hate this book.

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There’s no constraint on otium, so if some delicious opportunity emerges in the regime of wake-and-bake, Catullus is on it. I’ll undo the seashore from your door’s lock, unbutton the forest. I’ll lug plenty of lubricant and witticisms. I’ll fuck you once, but it will feel like nine fucks. When you want to get away, writing feels you. It’s always wandering; it’s always error in the other’s stupid mouth. Roman tunics, made of coarse wool, were not bonerproof. Poem’s proof.

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The inane repetition of alienated labor is the opposite of what this translation is hoping to accomplish. So I go to work with the corpus of Catullus and splice my body: half eyestrain, half translator. Catullus and I meant to become professional Marxists, only something red-flagged in the interview process. Maybe it was the two thousands years that slipped between Catullus writing Sparrow and me writing The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus. The forty-sixth poem in his corpus is about the names of the wind, and their assistance to weary travelers. Weary laborers and their kneepads. Sore performative.

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Flavius, your friend Catullus isn’t ill or inapt at elegance, so say where you’re at or I’ll take away your posse. Seriously, my fever is opprobrious theft, perpetuated by diligent shame at the top of the pyramid. There, just like in Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, a clamor thumps the cubicles. Wretched perfumes. Detritus, or human heads, come rolling down, ghast-faced, and everybody totally freaks. You’re like me, pretending to favor inarticulate murmur over glory. What prevails is that I’ve never let you publish anything inept, and you’ve never let me fuck pandas. What we have is good: our wrists tied to a tree trunk, our friends hurling over the edges of cliffs, love sickness, me right in the middle of everything trying to give a poetry reading.

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Alf forgets everything, including his days in the Melmac Orbit Guard so as a refresher, in song: when the proliferation of pre-emptive violence / meets technological advance too fast for its britches (ethics) / there’s going to be a lot of sentences / expressed in the genitive of regret. Alf, as is well known, hates Catullus and continually tries to eat him, which tremors in the placid family structure. The placid community structure developed by the poets in ancient Rome (all dance party, no reflection). But this is a fact: if the Obamas have a happy Valentines’ Day, we all have a happy Valentine’s Day. Even Alf. Even Catullus. In former times dictators dictated facts, and if one was “I love you” then “you” just got obliged. To service Caesar in the wave pool. Little kiddies nibbling on his bits. Little boom. Then a big boom.

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for Norma Cole and in homage Bernadette Mayer

A dog on the prowl when I’m walking through the mall. On the sign up sheet for kissing this juvenile, put me down for a milli at three cents per kiss. Then in the future I’ll put on those goat pants, and lay down in the dry, dense corn and say geez, that was a lot of kisses.

50

Dear God, it’s me, Catullus, except this time I’m talking to you as a virgin, in stanzas of three glyconics followed by a pherecratean, a metrical system found in the work of Anacreon (6^th century b.c.e.). Each stanza observes synaphaea, or “fastening together”, and each glyconic ends with a syllable that is long. Halfway through the poem I start to talk about your name, and how powerful you are, and how you’re the moon and the vegetables I eat and really old, and sui generis, so spritely, so gentle.

52

Cato and the Giggle Twins joke around, jamming nitrous oxide in their ears and riding it out. Cato and Catullus, high and watching The Friday After Next. Trust them hunky egos. Hunky spittle spraying all over your spear!

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The fifty-third poem in the corpus of Catullus relates an anecdote whose wit depends on a metonymy (a male friend of Catullus = a penis) and an ensuing metaphor (the “long speech” the friend gives = “lap dessert”). Get it?

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It’s an interesting moment in Roman history, right before a revolution that Catullus will not live to see. The Roman poet Catullus, after all, dies at 30, years before Caesar tosses dice, white river rafts on the Rubicon, lets his fascist flag fly. Later poets lament the loss of potential hilarity due to the imperator overtaking the power of the Senate. Ovid, for example, has to write epics of exile and loss longer than the entire corpus of Catullus, who called Caesar himself like a lecherous pedophile and got invited to dinner afterwards.

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Okay, I floss for juveniles. I do it for ass. It’s my mode. And if you want to feud about it, I suggest you check my back catalog. Like when I dissed Midas and hit him with a mallet and serviced his neck and his neck area. I love these juveniles. I collect them. And when one asks me, but what about the reader, the one who wants to feud? She’s not so bad, is he? That’s when I go into the elevator and hit Penthouse. I serve stamen, it’s a habit. Oops, that’s not neck area that’s no piggybank.

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(some missing lines here) Finnegan Crete doesn’t put a pin-up of Perseus on the Pegasus Ferrari (some missing lines here) and doesn’t want to cite Big A on plump-a-dump over there who’s not only volatile but venting. Ad hoc group against discussions of Catullus (some missing lines here) on one’s medulla there’s an omnibus, and on one’s languor there’s FEAR peruses mandate, FEAR (some missing lines here) your query sucks: TGIF.

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And then it’s all over, Catullus’ book Sparrow. It ends with an epic metaphor comparing the cruelty of the lover to the teeth of a lion. Then it ends the same way it started. It asks a question, stated in the rhetoric of feigned aporia: What kind of mind is it that can hold a voice in contempt? What kind of cardiac wildness?

Brandon Brown is from Kansas City, Missouri and has lived in San Francisco since 1998. His first two books are forthcoming: The Persians By Aeschylus (Displaced) and The Poems Of Gaius Valerius Catullus (Krupskaya). These two works, along with a new and unpublished piece C Baudelaire Le Vampire 11,000% Slower, are conceptual translations that privilege the visibility of the translator. They are, in part, the material product of a decade-long performance project centered around language acquisition (currently including Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and Arabic). He has also published several chapbooks, including Memoirs Of My Nervous Illness (Cy Press), 908-1078 (Transmission), and Wondrous Things I Have Seen (Mitsvah Chaps). His work has also appeared in journals, including War and Peace, Brooklyn Rail, Supermachine, and Mrs. Maybe. In 2004-05 he co-curated the Performance Writing series at New Langton Arts and in 2008-09 the New Reading Series at 21 Grand at 21 Grand. He has been blogger in residence for the Poetry Project and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He also publishes small press chapbooks under the imprint OMG!

September 3, 2013

On Brandon Brown, “Sparrow,” from The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus

Judith Goldman (bio)
University of Chicago
jgoldman1@uchicago.edu

Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus,
rumoresque senum severiorum
omnes unius aestimemus assis!
soles occidere et redire possunt;
nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux,
nox est perpetua una dormienda.
da mi basia mille, deinde centum;
dein mille altera, dein secunda centum;
deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum.
dein, cum milia multa fecerimus,
conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus,
aut ne quis malus invidere possit,
cum tantum sciat esse basiorum.

Revive my lovebird. I’ve got an aim to muss. Sure, the rumors will sound severe, but right now sock it to me with your duende. We’ll fiercely cum a million times. Then we’ll…Catullus asserts that he and the lovebird will kiss many thousands of times and then he shall conturbabimus them. Conturbabimus literally means something like “to throw into a mob.” Some scholars interpret this as referring to an image in which Catullus counts his kisses on an abacus, which can then be violently thrown into disarray. I suggest that conturbabimus is a metaphor for confounding the coinage. The economic standard in disarray, the society “loses count.”

Brandon Brown’s translation of Catullus 5—possibly the most famous and most translated lyric of the Catullus corpus—recalls Yves Bonnefoy’s (translated) bon mot declaring translation a matter of declaration: “You can translate by simply declaring one poem the translation of another” (186). Bonnefoy was thinking of Wladimir Weidlé’s joke that Baudelaire’s “Je n’ai pas oublié, voisine de la ville…” is a translation of Pushkin (186). The connection between Brown’s text and its inciting site involves much more than Weidlé’s near whimsical (if intuitively insightful) positing of a similarity of tone or approach, its hint at unconscious influence. Yet to call “Revive my lovebird” a translation is clearly a provocation.

It would be easier to call Brown’s work an “adaptation.” Currently, this term is most often applied to derivative works that change the medium and/or genre of the original and thus occasion more or less significant changes to that work.¹ Such transformations are at times produced out of reflections on different modes of fidelity or infidelity and the politics of their (im)possibility—for instance, Mieke Bal’s new films, which attempt in their formal features to approximate the accented translation of displaced speakers talking in an unfamiliar hegemonic language.² “Adaptation” becomes “appropriation” in works that critique originals they confiscate and dramatically chop, distend, and otherwise re-imagine for political purposes, often to countermand the silencing or other oppression of the subaltern in the original work (such as Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea or J.M. Coetzee’s Foe).³ When used to label intra-generic, intra-linguistic translations that edit or add to originals or that do not exchange languages at the level of lexia, however, “adaptation” can function as a pejorative term, as it does in Atoine Berman’s discussion of “the system of textual deformation that operates in every translation” (286). While no process of translation can be entirely free of unconscious linguistic resistances that lead translators to domesticate the foreign, as Berman suggests, some translations—particularly those he calls “adaptations”—lack concern for neutralizing foreign-ness: “the play of deforming forces is freely exercised,” he writes, in “ethnocentric, annexationist translations and hypertextual translations (pastiche, imitation, adaptation, free rewriting)” (286).

Brown comments that conturbabimus signifies “throwing into a mob”; as bookkeeping jargon, the word conjures an image of deranging the counters of an abacus when a calculation is being made.⁴ As he goes on to say, “I suggest that conturbabimus is a metaphor for confounding the coinage. The economic standard in disarray, the society ‘loses count.’” Brown’s discursive detour into commentary after a spate of largely homophonic translation (translation that, relying on sound, substitutes homophones in the translating language–more on this below) points not only to the latent allegory related to the poem’s content and form embedded in Catullus’s suggestive word but to its allegorization of Brown’s activity as translator. Along with other trivia the poet famously inflates, kissing is a hot topic in Catullus’s corpus, one he takes up in regard to both a male and a female partner and that does not sit easily with constructions of masculinity in late Republican Rome. Indeed, kissing—unlike the oral, anal, and vaginal sex Catullus elsewhere graphically and copiously figures as the prerogative of the aggressive male—at least potentially involves a mutual exchange. Ironically, then, kissing is itself an equivalence that upsets the normative rates of Roman gender exchange, just as an infinity of such kisses becomes the sublime other of number altogether, destroying accountability. This infinity of kisses is echoed formally in Catullus’s lyric, whose repetitive language becomes so intensively formalized and formulaic that its density approaches formlessness. So over-inscribed, libidinality is pathless, infinite—reading may wander at will and no matter wind up mid-kiss.

The general economy Catullus doubly inscribes is further enacted by Brown’s translation, with its similar disruption of translation’s economic standard of equivalency (translation as the reproduction of meaning as truth). If Brown’s redoubtable homophonic translation on the one hand challenges the separability of materiality and meaning, on the other, in prioritizing materiality, it emphasizes an excess irreducible to meaning as the communication of lexical values. In keeping with this general economy of the signifier, Brown’s aside on Catullus’s trope as corroding calculable restraints on kisses also alludes to his translation as the vehicle of a supplement, not an equivalent: if, as Lawrence Venuti so persuasively theorizes, a translation, with its connotative network, conveys a domesticating remainder, a translation can also attempt to turn this loss of the foreign against the target language by somehow making that remainder a vehicle of foreignness.⁵ Such attempts can never be standardized, just as their successful results emphasize the qualitative differential that mandates equivalence in the first place.

As Walter Benjamin and other theorists of translation have passionately argued, a translation should register the shock of the foreign in the translating language; just as importantly, a translation must work to analogize, in its own linguistic environs and with its own linguistic resources, the derangements the foreign text introduces within its “proper” linguistic economy, its otherness in its own context.⁶ In its attraction and attention not just to the otherness of the corpus of Catullus, but also to what might be called its peculiarities (its exquisite perversities), and in the multitude of strategies it uses to convey that foreignness and differential specificity—that is, because and not despite its divagations—Brown’s text emerges as a translation par excellence. Brown’s translations of Catullus powerfully throw down a response to the challenge posed by Charles Bernstein “[to take] translation as its own medium … what is the translation doing that can’t be done in any other medium?” (65).

Brown’s translation of Catullus follows upon non-standard renderings by two heroic poets of the North American avant-garde, Louis Zukofsky and Bernadette Mayer, both major influences on Brown’s poetics tout court.

Zukofsky spent almost ten years (1958-1966) on his quite famous and infamous translation of the complete corpus. The work was a collaboration with his wife Celia, who provided Zukofsky with a pony, or rough literal translation, of Catullus’s Latin lines, along with metrical notes.⁷ Zukofsky in turn produced versions of the lyrics that, beyond very strongly privileging sound and rhythm, attempted the seemingly impossible: he created verses using English homophones for Latin phonemes while concomitantly honoring or, rather, often sharply interpreting, the Latin’s meaning. Zukofsky’s “breathing with” Catullus, as David Wray has argued, presents a radical undoing of sound-sense dualism, a way of enacting “a materialist view of language that refuses to attribute to speech any level of meaning transcendently separate from its availability to the senses” (“‘cool rare air’” 82). If Zukofsky’s “ars amatoria was also an ars poetica,” Wray suggests, both implied “an epistemology at once sensuous and intellective, according to which caring implies loving entails knowing effects keeping of a kind that by definition eternizes the thing kept” (79). Zukofsky’s translation, which also relies on graphic equivalences, preservation of Latin syntax, and tricky experimentation with quantitative verse in English, thus affirms “a drive toward the condition of totality instantiated by … a human language” (75).⁸

Editor (with Vito Acconci) of the journal 0-9 (1972-4) and (with Lewis Warsh) of United Artists Press, and director of the Poetry Project in New York in the 1980s, Bernadette Mayer has been profoundly influenced in her poetry and in her diaristic, epistolary, essay, and inter-genre (in short, exceedingly polymorphous) writing by her study of Greek and Latin literature, which began in Catholic school and continued, as a mode of collaboration, camaraderie, and inspiration, throughout her life. Mayer’s Eruditio ex Memoria (1977), based on class notes from her educational history, is in a way an intellectual autobiography, yet it is also an erudite interrogation, deconstruction, and satire of erudition (see Gordon). The book examines the historical and other connections among languages (including mathematical language) in the abstract while it traverses privileged verbal objects in many languages, framing them both as media for constructing and conveying information, knowledge, tradition, authority, and value, and as materials essentially ruining any straightforward metaphysics, seeing as the thinkers run together hardly agree on the boundaries between the concrete and the ideal, the practical and the philosophical, triviality and profundity, etc. At one point in her translation, Mayer breaks into notes that translate Catullus 5 itself:

“Vivamus mea Lesbia…!” Sound: look for elisions, running feet, connotative words (conturbabimus, dormienda) predominance of a’s, m’s. “Vivamus mea Lesbia atque amemus…” balanced ideas in a balanced construction, placing of words first for emphasis (Omnes, Soles Nobis, Nox), structural shifts in tone., Imagery: “Lesbia” – “senum”; brevis lux et perpetua nox mille…centum, tantum. The mysteriousness of others, “rumores… invicere,” “senum severiorum,” “nequis malus,” the evil-eyed world, the cruel and severe old world, Catullus and Lesbia, “my beautiful love,” “gratum est” and “tua opera” (by your doing)…

(Eruditio)

Mayer has not translated Catullus as a corpus; her translations and imitations of individual lyrics are mainly concentrated in The Formal Field of Kissing (1990). The slim volume takes its title from a phrase in her version of Catullus 48, another statement of the poet’s insatiable appetite for kisses unaccountable: “I’d kiss your eyes three hundred thousand times/If you would let me, Juventius/ …even if the formal field of kissing/ Had more kisses than there’s corn in August’s fields/I still wouldn’t have had enough of you” (3). If the rendering is a faithful, more standard translation,⁹ many of Mayer’s Catullus poems are condensations of originals or imitations, as with “Hendecasyllables on Catullus #33”:

You have the balls to say you will be with me
but you hardly ever are, then you say you’re scared
of your parents’ opinion, they pay your rent
I wouldn’t mind that if they didn’t think I
was a whore ridden with Aids disease & worse things
but I am I and my little dog knows me
in the most astonishingly bourgeois way
I even pay my self-employment tax now
and put leftovers into expensive tinfoil
to be used in imaginable tomorrows
therefore I protest my bad reputation
but I do wander all night in my vision.

(27)

As do his urban sensibility and penchant for dropping personal details that signify both socially and more sentimentally, Catullus’s vulgar and sublime eroticism permeates Mayer’s oeuvre, while she also appropriates his images and tropes, his lyric immediacy and address, his play with register and technique, as in “Sonnet”: “My hand’s your hand within this rhyme/ You look at me this is all fucked up time/ I’m just a sparrow done up to be/ An Amazon or something and he? or thee?” (Sonnets 37); and in “Sonnet”: “So long honey, don’t ever come around again, I’m sick of you/ & of your friends, you take up all my time & I don’t write/ Poems cause I spend all my time wanting to fuck you” (Sonnets 64).

Known for their economy, intricacy, and elegance, if also for their irresistible naughtiness, Catullus’s poems were celebrated in the culture in which he wrote them, late Republican Rome (first century BCE). His extant corpus comprises 116 poems, split into 3 sections: the first 60 are known as the polymetrics (there are actually 57 of them, as 18-20 are considered spurious); the next 8 are longer poems, 7 hymns and an epyllion (mini-epic); and the last 48 are epigrams (including the famous “Odi et amo”).

This selection from Brown’s translation is taken from the polymetrics, which may have circulated in Catullus’s time under the moniker “Sparrow,” as “passer” is the first word of the first poem after the dedicatory lyric. Catullus’s two poems on Lesbia’s pet bird are among his best known, and Brown, with this reception history in mind, dilates his translation through the metonym of the “sparrow.” In fact, he extravagantly undoes Catullus’s triangulation in these particular poems of his relation to Lesbia through the bird by collapsing Lesbia herself into the “lovebird,” a move that amplifies the already spectacularized raging ambivalence of Catullus’s cathexis to the treacherous love object who spurned him (consider, for instance, that the bird dies, occasioning a mock elegy).

Split into 60 prose poems that do not literally correspond to the “Sparrow” section’s 60 lyrics, but rather obsess around their anima and ethos, Brown’s translations fantasticate largely by means of Catullus’s central concerns: masculinity, affect, performance, text as corpus and corpus as text, and literary and social form. The “original” Catullus 16 threatens, with a sound face- and ass-fucking, a couple of frenemies who accuse the poet of spoiling his masculinity through his erotic poetry, which stages a seemingly effete conturbation of his desire. The poem is commonly taken to state Catullus’s sense of the separation between performative literary persona and authentic actual person.¹⁰ Yet given the radically status-oriented character of culture in Rome at this time, its will to make signify every matter and manner, reflexive performativity is rather a total social fact that Catullus’s poems in general comment on and participate in with an especial bravura that Brown draws out, particularly in relation to masculinity.

As Elizabeth Young’s extraordinary recent revisioning of Catullan poetics elucidates, an important element of the ongoing drama of Catullan machismo is Catullus’s own acts of translation, as Brown’s meta-translative posturing, among other strategies, makes manifest (The Mediated Muse). Bringing the geo-political shifts, social dynamics, and material culture of the Catullan moment to bear on his lyrics, Young persuasively demonstrates that the poems self-consciously style themselves as contact zones, sites where the work of acculturating the foreign fetishes flooding the capital was done. Re-coding the foreign to give it recognizable cultural capital required laundering foreign-ness as an imaginary, valorized “Greek-ness,” in that the cultural patrimony of the Greeks was highly prized by the Romans and was utterly foundational to elite Latin culture, especially since Greece had come under Roman control. Catullus’s poems are not only filled with such Hellenized objects, as Young argues, but style themselves literally and seductively as Greek trinkets or “trifles”: they use Greek meters and literary forms, quote Greek texts, make elaborate use of Grecisms, and perform the passionate affects of Greek lyricism. Though a sense of mastery and propriety over the Grecian was de rigueur for elite Roman men, this intimacy with Hellenic aesthetics could also be seen as an embodiment of Greek effeminacy. As a social climber from an elite provincial family and literary avant-gardiste—thus an expert in the manipulation of codes and the ultimate purveyor of urbanitas—Catullus was able nonetheless to bend this exotic aesthetic towards the consolidation of a new form of Roman masculinity that he and his poems approximated.

Such forging of lyric manhood through translation-cum-code-switching-and-laundering is in part translated by Brown through virtuosic play with many speech genres and registers, particularly his incorporation of the rhetoric and prosody of hip-hop (for instance, the traces of Kanye West’s “Gold Digger” as Brown mouths, “We want pre-up”): this is not only an appropriate choice in light of Catullus’s taste for invective and verbal virtuosity, but also because it is the contemporary American-imperial performative masculinity most prone to borrowing in the service of consolidating gender capital. And just as we find the obtruding character of the translator himself absorbed into the poetic persona he translates, Brown both reflexively performs Catullan gender performativity and refuses to disavow it disaffectedly. Despite the heavy irony gathering around the ever-more ostentatious and imaginative misogyny he weaves by supplementing the text of Catullan affect, the translator’s own corpus as text, text as corpus remains self-implicated in the errancies of radical ambivalence.

Though I know he would object, that seems yet another version of Brown’s translational fidelity.

Judith Goldman is a Harper Schmidt fellow and collegiate assistant professor at the University of Chicago, teaching in the arts humanities core and in creative writing. She is the author of Vocoder (Roof 2001), DeathStar/rico-chet (O Books 2006), “the dispossessions” (atticus/finch 2009), and l.b.; or, catenaries (forthcoming, Krupskaya 2011). She co-edited the annual journal War and Peace with Leslie Scalapino from 2005-2009. Currently, she is working on mixing composed recorded sound and live sound, poet’s theater and other performance work, and multi-media works.

Notes

1. See Part I of Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation.

2. This is discussed throughout Mieke Bal, “Translating Translation.”

3. These well-known examples are given in Sanders.

4. Garrison notes that the word is borrowed from bookkeeping jargon (97). See also Wray, Catullus (149).

5. On the “general economy” of the signifier, see Steve McCaffery (204). The “domesticating remainder” is largely at issue in Lawrence Venuti, “Translation, Community, Utopia.”

6. Philip E. Lewis examines this issue throughout “The Measure of Translation Effects.”

7. See Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas’s “Catullus” entry in Z-Site: A Companion to the Works of Louis Zukofsky. A home recording of Zukofsky reading his homophonic translations of most of the polymetrics section of Catullus can be found online at PennSound.

8. See also Jack Foley, “Taking Liberties: Louis Zukofsky.” As Foley points out, “Zukofsky’s Catullus insists on both the similarity of his American English to the Latin and its utter, appalling distance.”

9. See Mayer’s explanation at a 1987 reading of the poem at Naropa, available at PennSound.

10. See Julia Haig Gaisser on Catullus 16 in Catullus 47-50. See also Garrison’s commentary on Catullus 16, 104.

Works Cited

Bal, Mieke. “Translating Translation.” Journal of Visual Culture 6.1 (2007): 109-124. Print.
Berman, Antoine. “Translation and the Trials of the Foreign.” Trans. and ed. Lawrence Venuti. The Translation Studies Reader. 2^nd ed. London: Routledge, 2004. 276-295. Print.
Bernstein, Charles. “Breaking the Translation Curtain: The Homophonic Sublime.” L’Esprit Créateur 38.4 (1998): 64-70. Print.
Bonnefoy, Yves. “Translating Poetry.” Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida. Eds. Reiner Schulte and John Biguenet. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992. 186-192. Print.
Foley, Jack. “Taking Liberties: Louis Zukofsky” Rev. of Louis Zukofsky, Selected Poems. Contemporary Poetry Review, 2007. Web. 23 December 2010.
Gaisser, Julia Haig. Catullus. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Print.
Garrison, Daniel H. and Gaius Valerius Catullus. The Student’s Catullus. 3^rd ed. Tulsa: U of Oklahoma P, 2004. Print.
Gordon, Nada. “Form’s Life: An Exploration of the Works of Bernadette Mayer.” MA thesis. University of California, Berkeley, 1986. Web. 23 December 2010.
Lewis, Philip E. “The Measure of Translation Effects.” Ed. Lawrence Venuti. The Translation Studies Reader. 2^nd ed. London: Routledge, 2004. 256-275. Print.
Mayer, Bernadette. “Catullus #48.” Mayer Author Page. PennSound. Web. 23 December 2010.
———. Eruditio ex Memoria (1977). Facsimile ed. Editions Eclipse. Department of English University of Utah. Web. 23 December 2010.
———. The Formal Field of Kissing: Translations, Imitation, Epigrams. New York: Catchword Papers, 1990. Print.
———. Sonnets. New York: Tender Buttons, 1989. Print.
McCaffery, Steve. North of Intention: Critical Writings, 1973-1986. 2^nd ed. New York: Roof Books, 2000. Print.
Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. London: Routledge, 2006. Print.
Twitchell-Waas, Jeffrey. “Catullus (1969) with Celia Zukofsky.” Z-Site: A Companion to the Works of Louis Zukofsky. Web. 23 December 2010.
Venuti, Lawrence. “Translation, Community, Utopia.” The Translation Studies Reader. Ed. Lawrence Venuti. 2^nd ed. London: Routledge, 2004. 482-501. Print.
Wray, David. Catullus and the Poetics of Roman Manhood. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Print.
———. “‘cool rare air’: Zukofsky’s Breathing with Catullus and Plautus.” Chicago Review 50.2-4 (Winter 2004). 52-99. Print.
Young, Elizabeth. The Mediated Muse: Catullan Lyricism and Roman Translation. Diss. University of California, Berkeley, 2008. Web. 23 December 2010.
Zukofsky, Lewis. Catullus. New York: Viking Press, 1969. Print.
———. “Zukofsky’s Homemade Tape Recordings of Catullus 1-46, November 11, 1961.” Zukofsky Author Page. PennSound. Web. 23 December 2010.

September 3, 2013

Coloring Between the Lines of Punk and Hardcore: From Absence to Black Punk Power

David Ensminger (bio)
Lee College
davidae43@hotmail.com

Abstract

For three decades, African Americans have often been depicted in the popular press and in independent media as embodying the legacy of a hip hop nation, which the media would signify as an urban, misogynist, and materialistic musical genre and lifestyle. Such representation diminishes or negates, through absence or scant coverage, African American participation in punk and rock’n’roll. In doing so, the media perpetuates hegemonic notions of African Americans as a homogeneous community without nuance and individuation. This essay interrogates the misconception that punk is essentially a white (or Anglo) Do-it-Yourself participatory subculture, and argues that the neglect of a mixed, diverse, and inclusive punk history demonstrates that African American punk cultural productions are undervalued, absent, or deleted. Such interrogation leads to what Stuart Hall has termed “making stereotypes uninhabitable” in his lecture, “Representation and Media” (1997). The essay reclaims the roles of people of color in punk, thus undermining fixed, normative assumptions about race in American pop culture, rendering them unstable and arbitrary. Rewriting punk music as a transhistorical, crosscultural, and synergistic negotiation between African American and Anglo music cultures creates new potentials for meaning and a mode of empowerment for a generation previously unaware of punk’s truly democratic ethos.

“There aren’t any blacks.”

—”Slam Dancing: Checking in With L.A. Punk.” Woody Hochswender. 1981. Rolling Stone.

“A large number of hardcore people in New York are Hispanic, black, oriental, and Jewish.…”

—the editorial staff of Guillotine (#8), 1984.

“There is no hint of any derivation from Black music.”

—”England’s Screaming: The Music.” Greg Shaw, Bomp, Nov 1977.

“Punk is white and suburban.”

—Mykel Board, Maximumrocknroll. 1986.

For three decades, African Americans have often been depicted in mainstream and even independent media almost exclusively as embodying the living legacy of a hip hop nation, signified by such media as an urban, often misogynist and materialistic, “street level” musical genre and lifestyle. Such representation effectively diminishes, or even negates, through absence or scant coverage, their contemporary influence on rock ‘n’ roll and punk. In doing so, the media perpetuates hegemonic, master narrative notions of blacks as a homogeneous community, easily containable “others” without nuance and individuation. I seek to interrogate the common misconception of punk, essentially a Do-it-Yourself and participatory subculture, as a white (or Anglo) cultural phenomenon.

As Daniel Traber notes, the very nature of punk within the commodity market echoes black culture; punk established a permanent alternative to the corporate apparatus of the mainstream music industry by returning to a system of independent labels that resembled the distribution of post-World War II “race music” that influenced the white rockers of the 1950s (32). As punk writer Chris Salewicz posits, “more important is the way punk still is presented, which is through the rootsiest musical business set-up that exists outside of reggae.” Members of the Bellrays—guitarist Tony Fate and singer Lisa Kekaula—suggest that punk’s roots go as far back as 1918 and include Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, while Mike Watt, former bass player for the Minutemen, links his own tour circuit and DIY ethos back to vaudeville and burlesque (Testa). Bruce Davis attests that the Ramones were “like the jazz musicians of the 1950s and the blues players of the 1960s who would play in clubs to a relatively small devoted following, and then go to Europe where they’d be greeted as heroes” (10). Vic Bondi, singer for Articles of Faith (a 1980s Chicago band with a taste for reggae, funk, and three-guitar hardcore punk agility), suggests that punk gave people a voice to counter and denounce their oppression, an ethic that links back to jazz and slave hollers.

The discussion and assertion of a rich, complex, and nuanced black presence in punk rock frays the assumptions about punk rock being centered in a fixed, natural, and normalized white presence, assumptions cemented through a popular discourse that in effect undervalues or negates all other cultures present in punk. Such interrogation of stereotypes leads to what Stuart Hall describes as “making stereotypes uninhabitable” in his lecture “Representation and the Media” (1997). My emphasis on reclaiming the roles of people of color in punk is an attempt to undermine these stereotypes and assumptions and to create new potentials for meaning and empowerment for a generation unaware of punk’s diversity.

Such intent was partly established very early on in punk media. In Ink Disease, a fanzine from the early 1980s, Franz Stahl from the mixed race Washington D.C. band Scream argues, “There are certainly more Blacks in punk than there are in rock’n’roll.” His bandmate and brother Peter, the singer, responds: “Blacks aren’t exposed to it. The only exposure they get is from the media. It’s all twisted and distorted … I think it’s just a prime example of this whole country, it’s basically just as racist as when the Emancipation Proclamation was first signed.” This racism might manifest itself as a sometime invisible barrier, as noted by bass player Skeeter. When asked by Flipside interviewer Donny the Punk how being black affects his relationship to the hardcore punk scene, Skeeter responds, “It’s different. You notice it every time you walk into a town. There’s always some sort of hesitation. I feel a certain pressure, there’s a block there, a wall.” Perhaps the reclamation of punk history can become a way to unmask, understand, and destabilize this “wall” of ambivalence and racism.

Often racialized and derided as white rebel music without much cause, punk music has been far more multicultural than the genres of power pop, heavy metal, or even early hip hop. This, in turn, challenges David James’s notion that L.A. hardcore was a “white musical production” (167). Instead, I imagine hardcore and punk as a convergence culture that provided a space for participants like black lesbian female skater and drummer Mad Dog from the Controllers to reassert the flux and freedom of black identity in American music and culture. The presence of such African American punks is neither homogenized nor fixed. In fact, Mad Dog, who joined the Controllers even after Lorna from the Germs claimed they were racists (partly because bassist bass player DOA Dan painted a swastika on his chest), once told Maximumrocknroll that she is a “white man trapped in a black woman’s body. You have to print that and if people don’t get it, well then, fuck them.” Such statements may seem strangely assimilationist, or marked by a sense of transexuality, but I argue differently. Mad Dog’s persona reflects Traber’s notion of transgression—challenging the social order’s core stable narrative—perhaps even accidentally, by revealing that each and every identity is a performance, replete with a costume (Whiteness 181 n.15). Thus Mad Dog offers a critique of prescribed cultural restraints.

Mad Dog (Carla Duplantier), a New Yorker transplanted to Los Angeles, worked for the postal office and first heard punk rock via KROQ FM’s Rodney on the Roq, which spun tunes like the Ramones’s “Sheena is a Punk Rocker” in 1977. She promptly bought the single at Bomp Records, which was a store, fanzine, and record label behind local heroes like the Weirdos and Germs. A longtime skateboarder and drummer fond of Jon Bonham (Led Zeppelin) and Mitch Mitchell (Jimi Hendrix), she quickly learned songs by Blondie and Dead Boys and befriended Kira Roessler (future Sexsick and Black Flag bass player). Witnessing shows by West Coast legends like the Skulls and Avengers, she become a resident rocker at the Hollywood club The Masque and joined the Controllers, who released the EP Suburban Suicide (Siamese, 1978) with her on drum kit. She later played with the .45s, Skull Control, Legal Weapon, and The Leaving Trains. During the 1980s, she rooted herself in England, where she gained the attention of Malcolm McLaren, who managed her band Jimmy the Hoover. Having opened for Bow Wow Wow, Jimmy the Hoover were first signed by Innervision, a label affiliated with CBS, where they released the single “Tantalise” and reached #18 on the charts, which led to two appearances on Top of the Pops. Not unlike the syncretic sounds of Shriekback, they effused pop flair; Third World stylings and rhythm care of Flinto Chandia, their Zambian bass player-cum-multi-instrumentalist; and basic dance-floor grooves.

Undoubtedly, African Americans have been an essential force shaping rock music since they carved a classic form from a combination of sped-up blues, boogie-woogie big band piano, and rollicking rhythm and blues. Chuck Berry, Big Mama Thornton (“Hound Dog”), and Little Richard (“Tutti Frutti,” later reworked as “Tofutti” by the hardcore band MDC) were powerful musical engines that energized the form with gusto, panache, and deep dynamic skills.¹ Malcolm McLaren, manager for the Sex Pistols, acknowledged in an interview with Greg Stacy that, “I never really believed that anybody was gonna write anything better than ‘Johnny B. Goode’ … [the Sex Pistols were] still in the very basic, raw, old-fashioned format, verse-chorus, middle eight, blah blah blah, R & B, Chuck Berry chords.” This appears to reinforce the insight of one rock ‘n’ roll social historian who also recognizes a “repetitive blues-based guitar solo” on “God Save the Queen,” which is nonetheless “harmonically more complex than most blues.” He also posits that The Clash dabbled in “Berry-style classic rock” on “Brand New Cadillac” and a Bo Diddley beat on “Hateful” (Friedlander 254, 257). Understood in such a context, British punk’s “ground zero” (from 1976) bands were still indebted to black music.

I rely on Dick Hebdige’s claim that “Black cultural forms (e.g. music) continue to exercise a major determining influence over the development of each subcultural style” as a cornerstone of my own theory (Subculture 73). Hebdige posits that each subculture from Mods to punks practices syncretic or hybrid tendencies, including re-working elements torn from a parent or dominant culture. This is especially evident in the semiotics of fashion—in “the idea of style as a form of Refusal”—when it reveals “maps of meaning” that offend the silent majority’s unity and cohesion (2, 18). As such, the music itself becomes a patchwork, a zone of convergence and negotiation, in which black forms become “imported,” mutating into the signifying soundtrack of the subculture, which demands new configurations (68-69). Punks were often enamored with reggae and black culture: on clothes featured in their photo for the “White Riot” single, The Clash featured phrases such as “Heavy Manners” and “Heavy Duty Discipline,” which alluded to Prince Far I’s single “Heavy Manners / Heavy Discipline” (Heavy Duty, 1976) and to repressive politics and security measures in Jamaica. The photograph itself, featuring the band pushed up against a wall, is an homage to the album State of Emergency (Record Globe, 1976) by reggae artist Joe Gibbs and the Professionals (Gray 223). Black DJ and filmmaker Don Letts avidly spun reggae records in clubs like the Roxy, the former gay-turned-punk club featuring flyers made by black artist Barry Jones. Punk bands covered soul and reggae songs in live sets, singles, and albums, played alongside them, politicized their worldviews in somewhat parallel fashion, offended “normal” society with their gear and clothing, and even joined together in street actions. Like their black brethren, punks attempted to seek autonomy and agency, though eventually their most rebellious forms, such as the style of bands like X Ray Spex, became part of the commodity landscape—neutered, assimilated, and perhaps finally recuperating portions of hegemony or capitalism. Hebdige’s work nevertheless has its limitations. He neither addresses songs as texts nor takes an ethnographic approach to interviewing participants, nor does he describe black/West Indian culture at length. While his book teems with analysis of subculture rituals as class resistance, descriptions of dominant culture remain slim. The context is hazy.

Countercultural icon and music critic Lester Bangs, once yelled at by New York City punks for playing Otis Redding at a loft party in the 1970s, adored the Clash. In the 1979 essay “White Noise Supremacists,” he admits that in an earlier essay in Creem magazine, he attempted a Lenny Bruce-style method of “defusing epithets” by reclaiming them:

Now, as we all know, white hippies and beatniks before them would never have existed had there not been a whole generational subculture with a gnawing yearning to be nothing less than the downest baddest niggers… Everybody has been walking around for the last year or so acting like faggots ruled the world, when in actuality it’s the niggers who control and direct everything just as it always has been and properly should be.

Yet by the time he authored “White,” he regretted these same turns-of-phrase and his impromptu late-night party sessions when he would belt out mock blues like: “Sho’ wish ah wuz a nigger / Then mah dick’d be bigger.” The article candidly unveils Bangs’s realization that he blundered; moreover, he further suggests that racism is like a virus that infects invisibly, can cloud the brain, and can push poor judgment to the surface during moments of distress or clumsiness: “You don’t have to try at all to be a racist. It’s a little coiled clot of venom lurking there in all of us, white and black, goy and Jew, ready to strike out when we feel embattled, belittled, brutalized. Which is why it has to be monitored, made taboo and restrained, by society and the individual.”

This forthright cautionary tale might have been the result of Bangs having heard Andy Shernoff of the punk band Dictators calling Camp Runamuck the place “where Puerto Ricans are kept until they learn to be human” (likely not less ambiguous than Adam Ant’s controversial song “Puerto Rican,” with its lyric “greasy haired dagos”). The essay also may be a response to the “cartoony” band Shrapnel, which was fingered as “proto-fascist” by music critic Robert Christgau and featured Legs McNeil of PUNK fanzine. McNeil spouted songs like “Hey Little Gook” from stage and years later told writer Jon Savage that the original group of New York punks “were going: ‘Fuck the Blues: fuck the black experience’” (qtd. in Savage 123). Such antipathy was not the sole provenance of New York City, for in England, the band the Models produced a hand drawn flyer for a Roxy gig in 1977 that promised “No reviving of Old R + B” and a “Nazi party.” Luckily, none of these actions overshadows the fact that black, white, and Hispanic musicians were converging in punk.

Female punk pioneer Poly Styrene from X Ray Spex, who was raised by mixed Somali-English parents, became a pivotal figure. According to Public Image bass player Jah Wobble, during the early punk era she was considered “a strange girl” who spoke openly about hallucinating and “freaked Johnny [Rotten of the Sex Pistols] out” (qtd. in Raha 88). Greil Marcus problematically describes her voice as being able to disinfect a toilet, whereas Karina Eileraas explains that girl bands often use the ugly voice as a tool for

cathartic expression; a means to articulate the “self” while acknowledging that it is a site of fiction, contest, incoherence, social inscription, and performativity. Girl bands use their voice as weapons … the “ugly” voice also constitutes a form of revolt against the grammar and syntax of phallogocentrism … to remind us that language [like punk itself] is always pregnant with impurity.

(125-126)

If her voice was impure as a toilet, then that was her weapon of choice against the plastic world of pop music. She was unpretty and unbound.

Judith Halberstam has referenced Styrene’s lyric “I’m a reject and I don’t care” to illustrate punk’s “stylized and ritualized language of the rejected.” And Steve Rubio argues that Styrene’s other exhortation to “Bondage Up Yours,” perhaps the band’s most notorious single, still reverberates throughout pop culture:

The cultural force of “Oh Bondage!” in 1977 was empowering: the stagnation of the mid-70s, economic, artistic, psychic and social, was confronted with a NO so emphatic it became an affirmation, an insistence that things did not have to remain as they were … We love Rhino Records [which reissued the song], because we get one last chance to stare down bondage, but as long as we are dealing with remembered bondage, we are powerless. Only by using Poly Styrene’s cry as a weapon against our current, ongoing, bondage, can we be true to the spirit of 1977.

Rubio goes on to reinforce Hebdige’s argument in Subculture: The Meaning of Style that such an outcry as “Oh Bondage Up Yours”—the signifying sound of punk—becomes “codified, made comprehensible” through commodification (Subculture 96). As a result, such protests and exhortations are rendered innocuous and made safe by becoming a product such as a T-shirt slogan or a 45 rpm record. Yet, to remain committed to the ideals of the song—to distress normalcy and reverse the gendered roles of power—the fight against bondage must continue. I find it powerful that this signal to revolt emanates not from the voice of a white, middle-class teenager, but from the voice of an ethnically mixed woman navigating a confluence of identities and cultures.

No single concise or cohesive history of black music’s impact on punk rock currently exists, partly due, as I describe above, to hegemonic assumptions—normalized within commercial and academic discourse—about the overall “whiteness” of the genre. Such a perspective is epitomized by Jim Curtis’s slanted claim that “punk renounced black music—it was the whitest music ever. (This was the principle reason why you couldn’t dance to it)” (qtd. in Rowe 56). Such declarations are problematic for several reasons. One, people frequently did dance to punk music, whether they engaged in fervid pogoing or slamdancing as hardcore became the aggressive 1980s punk musical mode. Secondly, as Don Waller notes, indirect links between white and black culture within the musical heritage of punk can be explicated: “First Generation [punk] is just a two-car garageful of white suburban horndogs falling off their fruit boots tryin’ to sound like the Stones tryin’ to sound like the voices of authentic African-American essperiance [sic]” (122). This offhandedly suggests that punk music bears the mark of the black man’s burden and blues—to teach white youth resistance through musical tropes. Authors like Zanes have even suggested that punk shares core aesthetic approaches with black artists like Prince, such as “a deliberate play with and challenge of the romantic constructions of authenticity” (45). Punk was both deliberate play and an attack on notions of authenticity: sterile, overly-trained musicians were not authentic, whereas raw power in the hands of amateurs was authentic.

To further fissure the notion of punk rock as solely white music, one can see punk affirmed as hybrid, cross-cultural, or convergence culture in a testament from Mick Jones of the Clash, one of the First Generation icon bands: “Any gig we do is Rock Against Racism because we play black music; we’re as interested in making sure that the black culture survives as much as that the white culture does. We play their music and hope they’ll play ours. We have a common bond with these people” (qtd. in Orman 171). Jones seems to hope that punk can be a stimulus and force of preservation, drawing people together to realize the power and excitement inherent in their related cultural traditions.

Coco Fusco posits that cultural appropriation and consumption cannot “substitute for equitable exchange” (69). Though punk bands’ repertoires and intentions may reflect interaction as an ideal and even support “integrationist ideas,” Anglos still become stars of “what began as [a] black cultural movement[]”—rock ‘n’ roll (69). This may even unintentionally strengthen Anglo “mass-cultural dominance” and “symbolic capital by means of commodification,” while exposing undercurrents of political, cultural, and linguistic control, as long as white bands take from, rather than trade with, their black peers and forefathers (69-70). The white punks retain the power to be identity-benders, the power to

choose, the power to determine value, and the right to consume without guilt. That sense of entitlement to choose, change, and redefine one’s identity is fundamental to understanding the history of how white America has formed ideas about itself, and how those ideas are linked first to a colonial enterprise and … mass industrialized culture.
(68)

In hindsight, though, Stewart Home has illustrated the not-so-latent racism in early punk as well, pointing out that The Clash sing about “kebab Greeks” on their self-titled first record (see Ch. 3). More ironically, Strummer would wear a “Chuck Berry is Dead” T-shirt (as if negating his earlier pub rock, R & B-based band the 101ers); yet later, the Clash covered Toots and the Maytals and invited Bo Diddley, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Grandmaster Flash, Lee Perry, Treacherous Three, and the Bad Brains on stage to open for them, though not without controversy. New York concertgoers heckled and threw trash at Grandmaster Flash, but the other opening band, Miller Miller Miller and Sloane—white high school youth, friends of the future novelist Jonathan Lethem, and discovered at CBGBs playing Aretha Franklin covers and disco-funk—did not get pelted and booed. NY Rocker did describe the same Clash fans as equally merciless to the opening white electro punk duo Suicide, “whose treatment was awful,” leaving the band “dripping in blood and spit” (Trakin, “Suicide” 31). British audiences threw bottles at reggae artist Mikey Dread when he once opened for the Clash as well. In Vancouver in 1979, agitated crowds catcalled opener Bo Diddley, but even the Clash themselves did not escape the ruckus:

The punks paid tribute to their heroes by slamming into each other, jumping onstage, throwing drinks and beer bottles at the band, and spitting at them. The Clash withstood the controlled riot for four songs, ducking and dodging the fusillade, then Strummer interrupted the music to mock them: “If anybody had any balls they’d be throwing wine bottles!”

(Wallenchinsky et al. 95)

Later, Joe Strummer pulled Bo Diddley back on stage to end their set with the Sonny Curtis and the Crickets / Bobby Fuller Four classic, “I Fought the Law” (95).

Tony Kinman, bassist and singer of the Dils, a First Generation Los Angeles punk band, provided me with a different assessment of the Clash’s choices for opening acts:

There’s a long, historical tradition now for British bands to come over here and hire black opening acts. The Who had the Toots and the Maytals open up for them and stuff like that. And I love Bo Diddley. To me, Bo Diddley is one of the gods. He is one of the untouchable icons of rock music. I didn’t expect the Clash to have ten punk rock bands open up for them, but when they had Bo Diddley open up for them, that was a failure of the imagination. It’s just like U2 having B.B. King open for them at Dodger Stadium. Now, I know U2 might be thinking, we want to introduce this great classic legend to our young stupid audience, there’s 70,000 of them out there. This gives B.B. a chance to stretch his legs, but … Bono came onstage to introduce B.B. King to his audience as somebody that we (U2) just recently discovered. Now, I know he didn’t mean, we discovered this man, what he meant to say is that B.B. was a man U2 just recently got into. But you know the way it just sounded, right? I can imagine that B.B. was thinking, you know, I remember when Eric Clapton or Jeff Beck gave me the exact same intro at the Filmore in 1968. You know what, get me back to Vegas. To me, it was a similar thing to the Clash having Bo Diddley open up for them. I can dig it if Joe and Mick and the dudes just dug Bo, he happened to be their favorite performer, and they were just thrilled to have him play with them.

Some might insist that Strummer’s earlier slight stabs at neo-racism were just a pretense to be “shocking” and “legit.” His relationship to world music traditions, given full breadth on albums like Sandinista and Combat Rock (which was recorded at Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland Studio, the former site of a Charlie Parker club), was fecund and long lasting. He was even a BBC world music DJ before his death. Yet, some traces of prejudice might still remain on the song “Rock the Casbah,” depending on how one interprets the song’s vision of the Middle East, or the pantomime style of the video, which features a dancing Arab (played by their manager Bernie Rhodes) and a Jew, and a mishmash linguistic melting pot of Hindi, Arabic, Hebrew, and North African phrases uttered by Strummer. The potential problems with the song don’t necessarily lie in the Arab and Jew skanking together in the streets and in the Austin hotel pool, but rather in the Arab’s holding a beer bottle, given that alcohol is forbidden under Islamic law.

Mick Jones’s own mixed tapes from the fertile time period of the early 1980s include music by Vanity 6, Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, Peech Boys, Indeep, Marvin Gaye, and Diana Ross. Looking back, he has described that formative era’s Hip Hop as symbolizing “community, the Zulu Nation, like an extension of reggae, and not boasting or gangsta” (Snow 88). Other Clash band members even created the alias Wack Attack for him, since Jones was thrilled by the rap phenomenon. Don Letts, friend-maker and close ally of the band, suggests:

These guys were at the peak of their game, man.… I mean, they basically ran New York for the few weeks they were playing there. There was this amazing cultural exchange going on. I can’t tell you what a buzz it was. WBLS, a totally black station, started playing “The Magnificent Seven” on heavy rotation, and they did a remix of it, where they had samples of Clint Eastwood and Bugs Bunny, and that was the soundtrack of the city for the whole period that the Clash were there, and beyond.

(qtd. in Orshoski)

A version of it from 1980, titled “Dirty Harry,” has surfaced on Clash bootlegs like Golden Bullets.

The triple LP Sandinista features a wide range of genre-defying songs that blur borders. Allan Moore, in his book Rock: The Primary Text, outlines several instances in which the Clash eschew simple punk three-chord referents and rely on Jamaican Mikey Dread behind the mixing board to develop textures via extensive multi-tracking and the use of echo. They use a 1930s-period chord sequence and jazzy horns on “Jimmy Jazz,” incorporate James Brown-esque horn parts on “Ivan Meets G.I. Joe,” place gospel voices on “Corner Soul,” dollop “Washington Bullets” with Caribbean-style xylophone and pedal-steel guitar, hone in on funk bass lines for “Magnificent Seven,” and adopt wooden reggae bass beats (known as “riddim”) and reggae-infused tomtom drums on “One More Time” and “Guns of Brixton”—the latter of which, lyrically speaking, is psycho-geographically located also in the heart of multicultural, working class England (133-34). In an overview of the Clash in Uncut magazine, Brett Sparks of the Handsome Family reminds us that the bass line of “The Magnificent Seven” is actually culled and adapted from “London Calling,” while Norman Cook explains that the instrumental version of the song, known as “Mustapha Dance,” vividly foreshadowed house music and is still routinely spun by club DJs today (“The Clash”).²

By the mid-1980s, singer and guitarists Jones and Strummer parted company, forming two different Clash bands. When pressed to explain the situation, Strummer replied that Jones was no longer making “our music. He was playing with beat boxes and synthesizers. I was thinking ‘It’s time for us to stop ripping off the black people so much that they don’t get on the radio anymore.’ I didn’t want to play South Bronx music, you know” (Goldberg 41, 47). Strummer suggests the Clash had been sidetracked into believing they were revered musicians and artists, which is self-indulgent and fatal, especially when considering black blues pioneer Robert Johnson “never thought he was an artist.” So, even though Strummer rejected his former line-up’s exploitation of black music, he still used a black legend to prove the “new, authentic” Clash’s antecedents in black music history. Ironically, it was this version of the Clash that released Cut the Crap, replete with a fusion / hybrid urban sound (synthesizers and drum programming) in 1985.

Many consider this record a low point in the band’s career, a misadventure because they used a markedly different, ill-fitting approach compared to their first punk / reggae fusion ventures, like the recording session for “Police and Thieves” that debuted on their first, self-titled album from 1977. As Strummer vividly recalled that moment, “We were jumping up and down. We knew we had brought something to the party. It wasn’t like a slavish white man’s Xerox of some riff. It was like: ‘Give us your riff and we’ll drive it around London’ … Scratch Perry liked it. Him and Junior wrote it” (qtd. in Egan 57). The Cut the Crap album seemed to lack such riffs, energy, and convergence. To many, it was limp and lackluster, a truly white version of beat box America with fuzzy punk shading overlaid with poetic conceits.

Clash manager Bernie Rhodes has taken responsibility for the evolution of Jones’s taste towards such a musical sensibility, highlighting his own role in these terms: “I hipped Malcolm [Sex Pistols manager, and] Mick Jones … to the importance of Hip Hop, Burundi, graffiti, and new sampling technology during the Bonds’s residency” (qtd. in Snow 84). He also takes credit for tracking down Grandmaster Flash, remixing the Clash’s “Magnificent 7,” and forging “Magnificent Dance”: meanwhile, Jones visited radio stations WBLS, Kiss FM, and WKTU, eager to hear DJ Red Alert. Meanwhile, Rhodes’s counterpart, Malcolm McLaren, became equally infatuated with the youthful, syncretic, DIY mix and mash style of black hip hop music culture fermenting in New York’s boroughs. “The Sex Pistols had been heard of. But the interest in punk in Harlem was being generated out of DJ scratching,” he informed Interview magazine. “I somehow found my way to a party that they were holding, completely black, where they were playing records like James Brown, the Monkees, the old Supremes, Diana Ross, and some punk records” (262). Almost akin to white punks, the kids were “fierce, volatile … jumping up, gesturing and screaming”; as such, it felt “magical” to McLaren, unlocking a sense of possibility, especially since the kids “could regurgitate something that was packaged and make it sound magical again” (262). Like punks, the kids felt authentic, and they created and maintained a powerful and direct relationship to an audience while keeping their approach down-to-earth, spontaneous, and unlimited. More so, their impromptu style was not hindered by inherited musical chops or expensive equipment. McLaren later would hit his stride as a record maker himself with the single “Buffalo Gals,” an example of a fertile period in which he mixed songs and traditions from “Zululand and the mountains of Lima and the Dominican Republic and Cuban priests and Appalachian hillbillies all together under one roof” (qtd. in Isler 22). Not unlike a punk folkorist and bricolage-based mixmaster, McLaren understood that both impressive dance potential and pagan power might be tapped and culled from such “primitive” convergences.

Black to the Future: The Politics and Dynamism of Reggae

Don Letts is one of the most notable figures in all of punk rock. As a West Indian DJ and filmmaker who spun highly influential reggae records at the Roxy, London’s premier punk club, he also directed two pivotal documentaries on punk, The Punk Rock Movie and Punk: Attitude; managed the all-girl punk-reggae band the Slits; and authored Culture Clash: Dread Meets Punk Rockers. In addition, he took part in the pivotal Brixton riots. A photograph that captures the tension of the day—a “dread” making his way towards a police line in Notting Hill, and that graced the front cover of Black Market Clash—is of Letts himself (who also appears on the back cover). In 1980, Joe Strummer told Creem‘s Susan Whitehall that he rented a spare room from Letts for a time. While Letts was immersed in new “roots rock reggae,” he passed on a Trojan Records album full of blue beat songs to Strummer, who quickly became smitten by the “cream of all the … stuff.” In this way Letts likely shaped the future aesthetic of tracks that would become part of the Clash’s repertoire (60).

Reggae made a tremendous impact on early punk, helping to shape the music of the Clash, the Ruts, the Members, Gang of Four, Stiff Little Fingers, Leyton Buzzards, the Police, Newtown Neurotics, and Public Image Limited, while even Canada’s more hardcore D.O.A. made forays into reggae by the early 1980s. Blondie covered the soft reggae tune “The Tide is High” by John Holt of the Paragons. Found on the album Autoamerican, the song was part of the band’s effort to create music forms, à la tunes like the early hip hop / rap-based “Rapture,” that converged genres and cultures. Guitarist Chris Stein admits:

We wanted to make music that would cross over. I would like to see the record resolve racial tensions by bringing different audiences together. When the new wave kids and the rapper kids get together, that’ll be something. Eventually, they’ll all meet in the middle, where you’ll have a strong race of young people that won’t be divided by stupid racial issues.

(qtd. in Trakin, “Blondie” 6)

In Stein’s view, vanguard music could, and perhaps should, create a de-racialized youth movement. Letts, writing for The Guardian online, describes the punks’ taste for or kinship with reggae in these terms:

[Reggae] was a culture that spoke in a currency with which the punks could identify. It was the soundbite-type lyrics, the anti-fashion fashion, the rebel stance and, importantly, the fact that reggae was a kind of musical reportage, talking about things that mattered. Songs like Money in My Pocket, I Need a Roof, and Chant Down Babylon struck an obvious chord with “the youth.” The third-world DIY approach to creating the reggae sound was something else that the punks could relate to, as most of them had no formal music training.
(“Dem Crazy Baldheads”)

Many punk acts joined the efforts of Rock Against Racism gigs.³ Bands ranged from the Clash playing to 85,000 people at Victoria Park in 1978 along with X Ray Spex, Tom Robinson, and Steel Pulse—filmed as part of the Rude Boy film—to gigs including bands like Joy Division (in Manchester, at the Factory, in Oct. 1978), Adam and the Ants (Ealing College and Southbank Polytechnic in 1978), and Siouxsie and the Banshees. Some of these bands were able to play alongside reggae bands like Aswad and Steel Pulse. In later tours, the Clash shows also featured opening reggae acts Mikey Dread and Prince Hammer as well. Old school reggae stalwarts Toots and the Maytals, whose song “Pressure Drop” was avidly covered by the Clash, were invited to tour once as well, but could not afford the six-week financing of the Clash’s 16 Tons 1980 tour.

Still, critics leveled charges about punk songs that denigrated Puerto Ricans (“Puerto Rican” by Adam and the Ants); the use of swastikas and anti-Semitic lyrics (“Love in a Void” by Siouxsie and the Banshees); and Nazi prison camp references, including band names, album art, and lyrical lines taken from memoirs (Joy Division and the Skids). In 2001, Paul Hambleton argued on www.punk77.co.uk that Siouxsie was using a crude metaphor equating Jews with bankers, but reminded readers that Siouxsie later dedicated the song “Metal Postcard” to avant-garde Jewish photomontage artist John Heartfield / Helmut Herzfeld, while another song, “Israel,” evokes the dreams of a liberated country singing “Happy Noel.” In addition, Hambleton notes that Adam Ant’s father was part of a British tank crew that liberated Belsen, and Joy Division’s “Nazi” figure pictured on the “Ideal for Living” EP is actually stripped of its Nazi signifier, thus matching the look of a Komsomul (Soviet youth group organization) member too. Hence, he seems to imply, “rehabilitation” of these bands is actually unnecessary, as long as a more nuanced media analysis is applied.

The Rock Against Racism gigs partially served as a front for the Trotskyite-led Socialist Workers Party campaign against insurgent right-wing National Front activities and countrywide race tension, including controversial statements like David Bowie’s suggestion that England was ready for a fascist leader and Eric Clapton’s declaration that immigrants were overrunning the country. The RAR gigs utilized

cultural forms of the Black Diaspora such as reggae and carnival and juxtapos[ed] 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.

(Dawson, par. 2)

Instead of leaving subcultures fragmented, isolated, and subjugated, RAR activities allowed for some kind of common front—an uneasy alliance at times, and one that not only confronted white and African cultural issues but Asian as well, though many historians fail to notice that aspect.

In defense of such multicultural punk history, Ian Goodyer reminds www.punk77.co.uk readers that:

Although Asian music was not a feature of RAR gigs, solidarity with Asians under racial attack was very much a part of the organisation’s remit. To cite a single instance, RAR was part of the coalition that built the 1979 Southall demo against the NF, at which Blair Peach was murdered. This was a mass mobilisation in an area with a large Asian community. [In] the police attack on the demo … RAR supporters were beaten and arrested.

(qtd. in Hambleton)

The mid-1980s also witnessed race solidarity in street activism and revolt, as Bo reports for Maximumrocknroll: “It is a well-known fact that skins and black youth fought side by side against filth/cops in the… Tottenham Riots,” a melee in North London instigated by the death of a black mother whose home was raided by police after the arrest of her son. By no means were RAR gigs, or other riots, simply multicultural spectacles; instead, they included real witnessing, confrontation, and even extreme danger.

The Clash’s close affinity with black culture has already been noted. One can also discover such links in Bob Marley’s 1977 song “Punky Reggae Party,” which name-drops the Jam, the Damned, and the Clash. Marley demonstrates their similar conditions: “rejected by society, treated with impunity, protected by their dignity.” Fan reaction to the Clash’s combinatory agit-prop and social realist songs of the period has been largely unaddressed. In order to position the band in a greater context, and to see if their symbolic interrogation of “whiteness” in fact was modeled on black resistance, one can look at the discourse of fans. For instance, the song “White Riot” recounts the Notting Hill race riot, a 1976 melee in which police arrested a pickpocket, instigating black youths to come to his defense. A picture of the tumult is pictured on the back of the band’s self-titled debut album (1977). Clash biographer Marcus Gray characterizes the song as “envious” not “racist,” meaning the song was not intended to stir up white anger towards blacks but to implore white youth to stop doing “what they’re told to” and stop “taking orders,” perhaps even pick up a brick like black youth (228). Another explanation is: “Exhilarated by what seemed to them a spontaneous example of revolt against oppressive forces—the black community had often complained of police harassment and discrimination—they wondered why they couldn’t have a riot of their own—that is, a ‘white riot’” (Egan 47). This did not sit well with drummer Terry Chimes and original guitarist Keith Levene. On one hand, Levene refused to sing it, while Chimes, who believed in the power and fury of the song, felt it was nonetheless naive (Egan 47).

One central challenge is to ascertain whether songs like this led listeners to examine their own sense of status, power, and privilege. Martin James, who was able to meet with members of the band 25 years later, notes in The Independent that he still (albeit through reflection) is able to situate the lyrics within his own life at the time:

Did I not understand that “White Riot” was all about his respect for black people and their stand against oppression? Had I not listened to the lyrics, in which he sang that he wished white people would take the same positive position? … despite going to gigs in the multi-racial town High Wycombe, I had never previously been forced to face up to my own inherent racism. It was an attitude that had been born from the simple fact that there were no black people in Marlow. I was ten when I met my first black kid. Some nice white middle-class family had adopted him. I can still remember being told in the playground that if the black kid touched me his colour would rub off on me. Even as a 14-year-old, race riots – or indeed the very concept of “racism” – meant little to me. So, Strummer forced my eyes open.

In 1976, during the peak of the Clash’s early heyday of power and resistance in the UK rock press, Barry Miles of New Music Express interviewed them. Strummer, an avid fan of bluesman Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown and Blind Willie McTell (whose songs he busked in the London subway, earning the name “Strummer” in his pre-Clash era), and Mick Jones, who was a fan of Mott the Hoople, ska, and blue beat before seeing the Sex Pistols, explained their lyrics. Almost exasperated by the press’s inability to grasp the meaning of the song “London’s Burning,” they retort:

Strummer:

The only thing we’re saying about the Blacks is that they’ve got their problems and they’re prepared to deal with them. But white men, they just ain’t prepared to deal with them—everything’s too cozy. They’ve got stereos, drugs, hi-fis, cars…

Mick:

We’re completely antiracist. We want to bridge the gap. They used to blame everything on the Jews, now they’re saying it about the Blacks and the Asians… every body’s a scapegoat, right?

Joe:

The poor blacks and the poor whites are in the same boat… They don’t want us in their culture, but we just happen to dig Tapper Zukie and Big Youth, Dillinger and Aswad and Delroy Washington. We dig them and we ain’t scared of going into heavy black record shops and getting their gear. We even go to heavy black gigs where we’re the only white people there.

Hence, not only do the Clash find affinity with black music,⁴ a sense of community, and street-wise agency, they recognize that they are margin walkers, borrowing from black culture, but ultimately not part of black culture. They were not mere exploiters either, but they might be considered translators negotiating their whiteness through black cultural signifiers as a means of Othering and authenticating themselves in the punk milieu, against a backdrop of garage punk bands simply churning out bellicose versions of yesterday’s rehashed rock ‘n’ roll.

Strummer’s intentions will likely never be quite understood, but the result—an awakening or re-evaluation of person, place, and power in an “everyday” budding fan like Mardi—is a legacy that Strummer would likely have found comforting. Strummer and Jones wanted white youth teeming with bigotry, and consequent Paki-bashing tendencies, to wake up, even while Clash manager Bernie Rhodes appears to approve of race-bashing in some instances, as a Record Mirror interview illuminates:

RM:

What’s your reaction to kids doing that?

Joe:

What, bashing Pakis? I f—tell `em to lay off.

Mick:

I tell `em to lay off. I said to them, you’re just doing it for the papers.

Joe:

They should go down the House of Commons and bash up the people in there.

Bernie:

Or Radio One…

RM:

But you’ve still got kids beating up Pakistanis …

Bernie:

There’s a lot of Pakis who deserve it.

Mick:

I don’t think anybody deserves that.

The signal seems clear, though. The powers that be—hegemony, from Parliament to the Radio One officers, those who shape national policy and marginalize youth—should be the target of white frustration, not immigrants and people of color.

Bassist Paul Simonon himself had long, deep affections for reggae music, and black music in general, as his homemade tapes made for the trek across America for the Clash’s Pearl Harbor 1979 tour attest. Among his collection included four volumes of “Dread Control,” Big Youth, The Temptations, “Natty,” three volumes of “Dreadnought,” Bo Diddley, “Blues,” and “Motown.” Such an assortment, featured on the same tour when Bo Diddley joined the British punk legends as the opening act, might surprise punk purists who imagine punk rock as a white genre ensconced in a cocoon, but comes to no surprise to those who understand punk as a fluid, syncretic genre. The Clash’s gig and studio song lists circa 1979 also reveal the band’s immersion in fecund black music during this era. With finesse, they covered a large array of black musical acts, including Desmond Dekker (“Israelites”), Althea and Donna’s (“Up Town Ranking”), Sonny Okosum (“Fire in Soweto”), Matumbi (“The Man in Me”), The Rulers (“Wrong Emboyo”) and Danny Ray (“Revolution Rock”). Some of those tracks found daylight on albums like London Calling and Black Market Clash, while others remained buried in rehearsals and sound checks, only offered up to the public in rare recordings.

Such musical fusion, interpenetration, and co-habitation between punk and reggae, Anglo and West Indian, and black and white cultures didn’t come without some confusion as well. As Strummer once walked back through the time when the Clash released “Bankrobber,” a reggae-infused tune produced by Mikey Dread that reached #12 on the national charts, he remembered:

One day I went up to Ladbroke Grove to get a newspaper and a bunch of black school girls got off the bus, and one of them went, “There’s that guy who did ‘Bankrobber’” and they surrounded me and stood staring, ‘cos they couldn’t believe that some weird-looking white dude had made this record. I’ll never forget it, they stood there staring at me, and didn’t say anything. They couldn’t compute it.

(The Clash 256)

They were not the only black girls seemingly infatuated with the Clash’s music. As a Creem writer reporting on a Clash gig in Detroit commented, “Hippies like the Clash. So do black people – I watched two black girls dancing, to see whether they favored the reggae-flavored numbers or not. They didn’t. They’re American girls, after all” (Letts, “The Clash” 43). In the UK, the Clash’s reggae-tinged numbers appeared to win them a black audience, while in America songs like “Train in Vain,” with its R & B underbelly, held the attention of people like Bootsy Collins. The well-admired black funk bass player, who had long stints in the band Parliament and in James Brown’s band, supposedly listened to the song every day after he bought a copy in 1980 (41).

Strummer’s admiration for reggae star Jimmy Cliff is well-noted too, but it was not the Clash but the other old guard punk band Chelsea who covered Cliff’s powerful “Too Many Rivers to Cross” on their self-titled debut LP in 1979. When asked why this song resonated with the band, guitarist James Stevenson told me:

It was Gene’s idea—and I think the angst he gets across in the delivery of the vocal is really special. At the end of the day, the song is about pain and the difficulty we all face in moving forward through life. I think that’s a subject we all have in common, and it rears its head in every form of music. There was a big riot at the Notting Hill carnival in 1981. I remember being there with Mick Jones. It was a very mixed race battle against the authorities, and I remember saying to Mick—”See, this is our battle too!”

This articulates the fact that white punks felt that convergence was desirable, and quite possible, between black and white youth culture, even within a society that had forcefully segregated and Balkanized the two communities for decades.

Black Vanguards in the Age of Hardcore

Despite punk rock being an avenue for racial or cross-cultural symbiosis, the outside world, with its master narrative of segregation, suppression, and race-anxiety, always reminded punks of their marginal status by exploiting the issue. The tumult and legacy of complicated race relations in the UK, including massive riots and small gig upheavals, are far too numerous and complicated to explore, but the US scene does offer some revealing moments too. For instance, as MCD lead singer Dave Dictor testifies in an interview, “Cops have been known to take punks to black housing areas just because they know the punks will get the shit beat out of them.”

Australia has a history of racially tinged violence experienced both directly and indirectly by both American and British punks. In the case of the Clash tour in 1982, bassist Paul Simonon recently recounted meeting local aborigines who wanted to speak at a Clash gig to “talk about their situation” in front of their audience, only to have one member’s wife beaten at home by the police as they spoke. This soured the Australian leg of the tour for Simonon (The Clash 35).

Australian police also arrested the Dead Kennedys’ black drummer D.H. Peligro when the band stopped in Brisbane. Jello Biafra told Maximumrocknroll that Peligro was arrested on the street for unlawful assembly after being “picked out of a crowd of about 15 white people, and arrested for drinking in public, even though his can of beer was unopened” after the gig (“Dead Kennedys Tour”). In a recent interview with me, bass player Klaus Flouride attests guitarist East Bay Ray tried to intervene in order to help Peligro; consequently, he was removed in a different police car and charged with obstructing justice after a heated verbal exchange in which the police initially resisted implicating Ray along with Peligro. Both were held at the local Watch House. Such targeted police action happened during the era when Queensland was under the political leadership and sway of corrupt, Born-Again Christian, anti-aboriginal, anti-union Country Party leader Sir Johannes “Joh” Bjelke-Peterson, who believed aboriginals were lower than whites on the evolutionary scale (“Dead Kennedys Tour”), and attempted to get the Racial Discrimination Act invalidated, but lost. Luckily for Peligro and Ray, print and television coverage of the tour helped reveal their status to the police, who apologized and released them after speaking with tour manager Bill Gilliam. They even gave Peligro studded belts they had taken off other punks (Flouride). The police considered them “cool” at that point, according to Ray (Pepperell).

During the same era, Reggie Rector, guitarist for the mixed race punk band Secret Hate, was killed in downtown Long Beach. In Flipside #38, Al Flipside asked the band, “Why don’t you think more blacks are into punk?” Rector answered: “They’re more into Michael Jackson,” while his bandmate Kevin intoned, “There’s pressure not to be, if you hang out with a bunch of Crypt Town guys, they don’t want you getting a Mohawk, or wearing a kilt.”

However, the all-black hardcore punk pioneers Bad Brains stipulate that pressure was applied from another source: white hegemony, which they actively equated with tropes of Babylon, prominently featured in songs like “Leaving Babylon” (1982) and “Destroy Babylon” (1983). In Flipside #31, when asked, “Why don’t you think there are more black people into hardcore?” singer H.R. responds, “Because of exposure … Babylon.… Black people ain’t gonna find out about it until white people find out about it,” to which his bandmate Gary responds, “Because of the Babylon system.” Whereas Secret Hate blames the lack of involvement on pressure from within the black community, the Bad Brains suggests that hegemony—the white supremacist system—prevents black communities from an exposure to hardcore; hence, as Stuart Hall suggests, media representations likely fix meaning, limit new potentials, and normalize identities.

The Bad Brains distressed and frayed such norms. As Howard Wuelfing recalls:

My first contact with the Bad Brains was through Kim Kane of the Slickee Boys who submitted a review of a house party they played at, that ran in my DesCenes fanzine. He was utterly in awe of them. As I recall everyone in town was floored by the Bad Brains and singing their praises as well they should have as they were an incredible band, especially live. I remember them totally blowing The Damned off the stage at the Bayou one night. HR was like a black Iggy Pop and the rest of the band was impossibly tight and fast and the songs notably intricate and challenging.

The Bad Brains was the band that challenged assumptions about punk musicianship, shook up and transformed black identities in punk rock history, and frequently, as in the case of The Clash and The Damned, used opening slots in punk gigs to interrogate the status quo of the genre in which they excelled.

Revisiting Hebdige’s theory, postcolonial theorist Paul Gilroy asserts, “Punk provided the circuitry which enabled … connections” between “black and white styles,” while fostering punks to produce their own “critical and satirical commentary on the meaning and significance of white ethnicity” (There Ain’t No Black 122-123). Granted, he has little regard for the Bad Brains, whom he tags in The Black Atlantic as advancing “the white noise of Washington, D.C.’s Rasta thrash punk,” which effectively divorces the band from its black musical antecedents (100). If we adopt his view wholesale, the Bad Brains was merely a skilled, nomadic group of musicians poaching “white” musical forms rather than reclaiming the music of their birthright, from John Coltrane to Chuck Berry. For instance, the tropes of “suffering” the band employs in lyrics might be linked back to the Sorrow Songs discussed by W.E.B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). I contend that the Bad Brains update such American music, which is indebted to the spirit, story, and sweat of African Americans, though the update is mediated and propelled by the “terrible” explosivity of punk.

Originally a progressive jazz unit known as Mind Power, the Bad Brains members were influenced by mixed-race jazz fusion icons Spyro Gyra, reggae pioneer Bob Marley, and Stevie Wonder’s spiritualism. When integrated into punk idioms, such musical tastes and abilities were well-regarded by peers during their heyday. “I thought the band was ferociously good,” singer U-Ron Bondage of Really Red informed me, describing their 1982 gig together in Houston, Texas; “technically amazing too. It was obvious to me that they could have been playing other types of more complicated music prior to being Bad Brains.” This reinforces Wuelfing’s impressions. On the liner notes to their Greatest Riffs CD (2003), the band thanks Miles Davis, Ohio Players, and Earth, Wind and Fire, alongside punk stalwarts the Dead Boys, Cro-mags, and Eater: their musical influences ranged wide and did not merely reflect a crucible of “white noise.”

Gilroy (like many academics) somehow imagines them as an overly simplified amalgam of white speed, urban angst, and “thrash” fury. He borrows Leroi Jones’s (he chooses to use this name variation instead of Amiri Baraka) assertion that black music in the Diaspora is essentially always in a state of flux and change, a cultural transmission full of disruption and breaks, and an unfixed musical landscape. Yet the Bad Brains does not merit a position within this culturescape. Russell Potter draws even weaker conclusions, categorizing the band as “metalesque ‘ska,’” nametags much more appropriate for describing the music of Fishbone (145). Supporters who envision the band as an example of cultural hybridity, he intones, are on the side of “recuperation” and “fuzzy plurality” (145). Neither writer fully grasps the band’s historical significance—its rather rare, genre-defining style. Neither is willing to concede that the Bad Brain’s translation of punk style, which itself is a translation (or appropriation) of subversive rock ‘n’ roll, is an unstable convergence that may reveal shared, integrated, or multicultural milieus.

The Bad Brains marks the zero hour of hardcore music—the moment when the sounds of “white noise” became jet-fueled. As H.R. describes it to the fanzine Ripper, “When I first heard their [the Dickies’] music I said, Gee it’s so fast, this is really bad”—a vernacular form of verbal approval for the band’s catchy, humming, and terse pop-punk. The Bad Brains did not just translate the Dickies’ format: they were generative. Before them, no single band played such a nimble, fertile, crossover speed jazz style. Whereas the Police also derived from jazz-fusion origins, it chose pop-reggae templates. Furthermore, Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys credits the British band Discharge as the first hardcore punk band, though the Black Dot sessions by the Bad Brains, which were not released to the public for twenty years, reveal a uniquely hardcore format already existing in robust form by 1979 and that outpaces early Discharge.

As soon as the Bad Brains’s first full length cassette-only release appeared on Roir records (1982), followed by the Ric Ocasek (The Cars)-produced Rock For Light (PVC, 1983), “white noise” writers including Gary Bushel (a British proponent of street punk, including the emerging Oi sound) waxed enthusiastically about them, evoking mouthfuls of metaphors that posited the Bad Brains as the avant-garde: “[They] make Motörhead sound like they’re standing still. They make Discharge sound like gentle balladeers.… Imagine the musical equivalent of the 90 second London-Brighton train run film on fast forward” (qtd. in Gimarc 581). Hence, historic credit for stimulating the hardcore genre might shift to the Bad Brains even as music historians acknowledge that tracks by the Damned (“Love Song”), 999 (“No Pity”), Wire (“Mr. Suit”), the Ruts (“Criminal Mind”), and UK Subs (“Telephone Number” and “You Give Me Disease”) did provide intermittent, frenetic-paced examples of proto-hardcore. The Bad Brains, banned and nearly broken, quickly symbolized the blazing potentials of the new genre.

One vexing issue about the Bad Brains is its embrace, and projection, of Rastafarian culture, which the members tend to simplify as “taking up the Nazarite vow” in the same Ripper interview. They also suggested to Suburban Voice fanzine that Rasta culture is not bound to the black Diaspora:

Rasta is not no black nothing. Rasta is a function of the heart, it’s the first law. Now, we have the first nation, which is Africa and we give credit to the dynasty of the Solomon lineage so this is the only reigning diplomatic credited Christian Orthodox function today but we do not function for blackness. I and I live for humanity. A man can be any color and be a Rasta.

Their desire to evoke a transcultural frame for Rastafarianism, or their translation of Rasta tenets, may sour some Rasta supporters, while their religious orthodoxy troubled punks.

Dave Dictor, who underwent some tense moments while playing on the same stages with the Bad Brains on a tumultuous 1982 Rock Against Reagan tour, penned lyrics like “We don’t need your Jah’s fascist doctrine” in the song “Pay to Cum Along” (1983). Though many punks might have imagined Rasta beliefs as exotic or just plain “weird” (as U-ron Bondage described it to me), bands like MDC attacked them with the same fiery aplomb with which they denounced institutional Christianity, especially after singer H.R. openly denounced the homosexuality of Randy “Biscuit” Turner, the singer of the Big Boys and a friend of MDC. The connections between Rasta and punk in general don’t necessarily resonate in terms of shared community mores. Al Long, onetime singer from the band Nausea, a fiercely political band from New York City circa 1990, admitted in an interview that “The rastas I work with have little in common with me.”

Questions imbedded in the work of Canadian cultural critic Richard Fung, as discussed by Coco Fusco in English is Broken Here, can be used to examine the sensitive postcolonial issues at stake. Fung maps out strategies to deal with cultural productions that converge with, or are the result of, cultural appropriation. Using his framework, I ask: Does the Bad Brains’s punk status place the band within a subaltern group of the African Diaspora? Does the band misrepresent Rasta culture? To what degree does the band, or later offshoots such as HR and Zion Train, commercialize Rasta culture? Is Afro-punk, or black punk rock, a distinct mode of cultural production, defined by agency and volition—by self-control and self-representation? Is Afro-punk a convenient tag or genre created by hegemonic forces, or does it counter racist forces, revise our notions of history, and treat white and black historical actors with equity and fairness? Lastly, did the Bad Brains offer alternative visions of masculinity or reify old sexist, homophobic modes of power? These questions remain to be explored.

In Black Culture, White Youth: the Reggae Tradition from JA to UK, Simon Jones examines race relations and youth culture in Birmingham, England. He rightly points out that some of the Clash’s most compelling diatribes, like “White Riot,” were easily co-opted and manipulated by people espousing fascist doctrine. Likewise, songs by the hardcore generation—like Minor Threat’s “Guilty of Being White,” which features the highly personal and, some may argue, immature and simplistic insight of singer Ian MacKaye (an early admirer and cohort of the Bad Brains who attended an urban Washington, D.C. school district)—were often “hijacked” by racist groups who re-routed the meaning. For such groups, the song was a tough examination of white working class agitprop in the age of post-1970s black self-determination. As so-called victims of reverse discrimination, they denounced having guilt “for something I didn’t do … a hundred years before my time” (“Rap Session”). Black punk Mark Philip, a local youth at the time, looks back and attests:

I’m sure as an 18-year old guy in a punk band, Ian was just writing from the heart, but … it felt a little shallow given how complex the subject of race is. Ian is a hero of mine, but that song threw me. I felt it completely glossed over the complex nuances of race relations and took an attitude of moral equivalency. Slavery wasn’t THAT long ago, there are still people alive today who were directly affected by it, such as my uncle Sherman Jones whose father (not grandfather) was a slave. He was just here in my living room three weeks ago. He is forever unable to trace his lineage back another generation, which is a luxury that most whites take for granted. I think the consequence of a song like “Guilty of Being White” is that idiots hear it and don’t know their history, have no empathy or understanding and they use it as a justification for their own racist views, which, of course, was not at all the intention of the song to begin with. The fact that Slayer covered the song validates my point here because that is a band (that I love) which is known to have overt racists in its fan-base who no doubt contort its meaning to conform to their twisted phony populist white victim viewpoint.

Jones recognizes the “powerlessness, desire to shock, and sense of anger at official smugness expressed by punk’s more working-class constituency,” which are the same traits and feelings often documented in fascist youth groups as well (100). In summary, he suggests many contingent factors mediate the interplay and interaction of white and black youth. The notion that punk bands and scenes evoke or embody multicultural “hybridity” becomes very complex. White youth’s attraction to (along with the desire to appropriate) black cultural forms should be understood within a context of actual race relations. At a minimum, these interactions become mediated by youth groups vying for territory, identity-building in the age of black self-determination and punk culture shock, and competing for employment during times of national financial fissures, none of which can be understood by an analysis of style or musical content alone. As some critics posit, what journalists and musicians say, and what they do, can be very different. Slogans and blurbs matter little compared with acts, as witnessed by Fred Smith, now known as Freak, guitarist for Beefeater:

It was very strange to be these “token” negroes, playing in front of predominantly all white audiences, but we did it. As Shawn Brown [Swiz] and myself will attest, there were fucking issues man. A lot of fucking issues that we had to address when we did shows. When I first heard someone refer to me as the “negro Lemmy,” [of Motörhead] I was floored. I immediately lowered my mic stand down from the height that I set it. When I heard Shawn Brown being referred to as “the negro version of Ian MacKaye,” I was floored again. When I told him, he was taken aback but still plugged on. In retrospect, even in this new scene, I was always wondering, would racism ever end?!

In terms of establishing the connection between cultural contexts, meaning the merging of horizons between black and white resistance cultures, contemporary hardcore punk singer Thomas Barnett from Strike Anywhere provides a larger matrix to ponder. I quote him at length, since what he revealed to me in a 2005 interview is both detailed and nuanced:

I think about this often, and have had an ongoing conversation on this subject with many older punks, hardcore kids, conscious rastas in Richmond and DC, and other members of the African Diaspora, about the roots of punk and the parallels and differences between hardcore/punk and revolutionary black music in the Western world … There isn’t a punk rocker alive now who couldn’t find an eerie affinity between the shrill anti-authoritarian rhyming rage in their favorite punk song and the frustrated, simmering patience of countless reggae numbers. It’s just there.

Some people have sworn by the “East London” theory … [according to which] early British punk rock bands–and their embryonic, furiously self-reinventing tribes of friends and followers (back then even more fractured, heterogeneous, and, for that matter, androgynous, certainly hungrier and homeless—orphaned from rock ‘n’ roll already) are looking for pubs to play in, and the only sympathetic ears who’ll take them in are the West Indian owned reggae clubs in the East End. Perhaps, if this is accurate to some degree, this is where the cross-pollination of ideas, and in a smaller way, sounds, first went down.

You could look at it as a window getting opened for the disaffected, self-destructing white punks and artists, and the elements of postcolonial black politics, human rights issues, and the awareness of a binary world system came crashing down through the music into their minds. The often paradoxical and personal politics of punk can be traced back to this artistic intersection, but perhaps this was just one highly public space in history where this same collision of white restlessness and countercultural reaction opened up to the waiting truths, methods, and life affirming ideas of revolutionary black culture.

The September 1983 issue of Maximumrocknroll features a long discussion between Ian MacKaye from Minor Threat and Dave and Vic Bondi from Articles of Faith, in which racism becomes a prevalent, and heated issue, as does Sab Grey’s (Iron Cross) interview in Guillotine #8 (1984), which covers the use of the triggering term nigger and racial violence in desperate neighborhoods; similarly, an interview in Touch and Go #16 (1981), Grey reveals sentiments regarding the reverse racism of blacks (“Blacks are the biggest racists”) and the notion that “everyone” is a Nazi. Later, when speaking with D.C. punk community chronicler Mark Anderson in Dance of Days: Two Decades of Punk in the Nation’s Capital (2001), he exhibited remorse for such comments and sentiments, but such discourse does signify D.C. as a site of sometimes very tense, raw race relations. Moreover, one should note that Iron Cross’s first bass player was black, and Grey’s perspective is shaped by family heritage: his mother survived the London blitz and his father was “a German refugee from the Nazis.” The only actual fascist element is more likely to have been their name.

Punk rock didn’t make convergence necessarily easy, or provide equal treatment to all participants, but it did make convergence possible and fruitful, despite contradiction and ambivalence within the community.

Bodies of Confidence, Desire, and Frenzy: Hip Hop Suaveness and Hardcore Havoc

I use the Bad Brains, and the seminal hip hop outfit Run DMC, as a case sample to examine how black music culture unfolded in different forms during the early 1980s. As mentioned earlier, the Bad Brains members hailed from the Maryland / Washington, D.C. area and were attracted to the raw power of punk after hearing the Sex Pistols. Even their name reflects their fondness for contemporary punk, since “Bad Brain” is the name of a Ramones song from 1978. At the time, D.C. had a small wellspring of punk and new wave bands, ranging from the college-crown Urban Verbs to the garagey pop punk Slickee Boys and a small number of emerging teenage “hardcore” punk bands, like the Teen Idles. The Bad Brains were able to harness their skill sets associated with jazz—a certain nimble and adept musicianship, usually not considered an essential part of punk, perhaps considered even antithetical to punk performance—and added volatile, blitzkrieg speed and energy that pushed new boundaries.

In Queens, Run DMC began a different approach, utilizing “two turntables and a microphone,” the pared down approach to rap, which democratized music in urban areas by switching out live band members (and expensive instruments) for 12″ record tracks that could be “mixed” live to create a backdrop to raps. This emergent style likely has antecedents in West African griots and Caribbean “toasting.” In the new form, certain funk beats would be isolated, and / or produced by drum machines, and the rappers would be free to “emcee” on top of this. What I am interested in examining is the visual representation of these forms in videos, including “Sucker MCs” by Run DMC and “Banned in D.C.” by the Bad Brains at the infamous New York City club CBGB’s.

As represented in a band photo on Wikipedia, Run DMC’s trademark gear includes very clean and neat Adidas, tight leather pants or jeans, uniform black fedora hats, and large gold chains. Their posture is rather uninviting: Jam Master Jay and DMC cross their arms, lean back or to the side somewhat stiffly, and stare at the camera directly. DJ Run appears more relaxed: with hands sunk a bit into both pockets, his body is slightly tilted, and he stares less “hard.” Live in 1983 on an unattributed program available on YouTube, they outfit themselves in leather jackets, keep the fedoras, and sing on a stage for an urban dance show with graffiti backdrops. In the song “Sucker MCs,” they mention certain status symbols, including St. John’s University, drinking champagne, Cadillacs, and credit cards.

In the clip of the Bad Brains video on YouTube shot at CBGB’s in 1982, one year before the Run DMC clip, the band plays “Banned in DC,” one of their hallmark songs that explains, in part, why they were banned from Washington, D.C. clubs: they were deemed too uncontrollable. In the video, three of the members wear clothes that symbolize colors associated with Rastafarian style (green, yellow, red) and two of the members wear woven caps in the Rasta tradition. At this time, the Bad Brains clearly identified with Rastafarians and integrated reggae into their live sets, thus in some ways they reflect Hebdige’s hypothesis about the frozen dialect between white and black culture within one framework: one single hardcore punk band. Singer HR has dreadlocks, and his button-up shirt seems to contrast the T-shirts worn by the rest of the band and the gig’s mostly white attendees. His manner might appear bombastic to some viewers, a dance of unbound atavism and molten fury. The crowd acts in kind, forming at times a dizzying free-for-all energy and abandon that contrast with Run DMC’s audience, who dance adroitly, smoothly, and fluidly, or gaze and cheer at the performers on stage. In the CBGB’s video, HR and the crowd meld at points. HR bends down and intensely interacts with the first row, dances volatile on stage, and takes up a gyrating position in front of the amplifier as the guitar player plays a solo.

If one were to read this depiction taken from bell hooks—

It is the young black male body that is seen as epitomizing this promise of wildness, of unlimited physical prowess … It was this black body that was most “desired” for its labor in slavery, and it is this body that is most represented in contemporary culture as the body to be watched, imitated, desired, possessed.…

When young black men acquire a powerful public voice and presence via cultural production, as has happened with the explosion of rap music, it does not mean that they have a vehicle that will enable them to articulate that pain.… True, it was conditions of suffering and survival, of poverty, deprivation, and lack that characterized the marginal locations from which breakdancing and rap emerged.
(189)

one might mistakenly believe that she is referring to the Bad Brains video, with its viable sense of explosion, public voice (even howl), wildness, unlimited physicality and musical prowess, and its intensely imitated form demonstrated by the white audience, as if HR is using the stage to act with and against the audience to interrogate all the pain and deprivation (“banned”) associated with exile (with its Hebrew Bible connotations, which appeals to Rastas). I suggest that he is interacting with them in mock violence that actually becomes a kind of dance and choreographed ritual—a molten path towards catharsis, perhaps.

bell hooks, however, is describing rap music. I agree that many rap bodies are desired by audiences, but I am also concerned that their bodies are envisioned as easily re-enslaved, commodified through dress that is corporate rather than nationalistic or African inspired (Bad Brains’s taste for Rasta dress). Their emphasis on wealth and the trappings of a bourgeois life (college careers, caddies, and champagne) contrasts the Bad Brains’s emphasis on survival and reclamation (“you can’t hurt me…we got ourselves, going to sing it, gonna love it, gonna work it out at any length”). The trope of suffering endures within the Bad Brains song library (note their song “House of Suffering” on I Against I), whereas Run DMC later turned to clean rap and Christian lives.

In the texts of bell hooks, Paul Gilroy, and many other theorists, black punk rock (or Afro-punk) cultural productions tend to be undervalued or absent. Black resistance to hegemony reverberates in varied and vibrant musical forms: black punks were, and are, still at the forefront. While punk and hardcore may indeed be a genre and community ripe with convergence and, arguably, some contentious forms of hybridity, academics still lack the history, insight, and willingness to engage not only the discourse of independent and mainstream media and culture but to challenge their own academic leanings as well. As Thomas Barnett from Strike Anywhere stressed to me, there is a “closeness and affinity between black and white revolutionary arts,” but the goal is to “make these connections clearer and nourishing again,” so that punk rock does not simply become “another obedient, palatable form.”

David Ensminger is an Instructor of English, Humanities, and Folklore at Lee College in Baytown, Texas. He completed his M.S. in the Folklore Program at the University of Oregon and his M.A. in Creative Writing at City College of New York City. His study of punk street art and Do-It-Yourself culture, Visual Vitriol: The Art and Subcultures of the Punk and Hardcore Generations, is slated for July 2011 release by the University of Mississippi. His work has recently appeared in the Journal of Popular Music Studies and M/C Journal (Australia), and he contributes regularly to the Houston Press, Maximum Rock’n’Roll, Popmatters, and Trust (Germany). As a longtime fanzine editor, flyer artist, and drummer as well, he has archived punk history, including in his blog documenting African American punk rock productions: http://blackpunkarchive.wordpress.com.

Notes

1. Berry’s “Maybelline” was covered by the Midwest garage punk band the Replacements covered in 1981. Guitarist Billy Zoom “neatly wrenched” guitar lines from “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” for the X tune “Year 1,” according to writer Debra Rae Cohen. In a 1984 Trouser Press, John Leland describes X’s overall music on the first album Los Angeles as a knotty, awkward, “Chunk Berried punk barrage.” Johnny Thunder’s band Gang War covered “Around and Around,” and even street punkers Sham 69 began as an R & B cover band covering the likes of “Roll Over Beethoven.”

2. The 1979 track “Armagideon Time,” the B-side to the single “London Calling.” was written by dancehall progenitors Clement Dodd and Willie Williams.

3. The reggae band Steel Pulse penned the song “Rock Against Racism.”

4. Peter Silverton from Trouser Press reported in 1978 that the band had almost chosen the name Weak Heart Drops, a Big Youth song.

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September 3, 2013

Lovecraft through Deleuzio-Guattarian Gates

Patricia MacCormack (bio)
Anglia Ruskin University
Patricia.Maccormack@anglia.ac.uk

Abstract

This essay picks up on Deleuze and Guattari’s brief invocation of the work of H.P. Lovecraft. Deleuze and Guattari’s project to develop a philosophy of sorcery as a mode of thought that gestures toward becoming-imperceptible is considered by reading examples in Lovecraft’s “cosmic horror” of the terrors and revolutions available through the becomings of his protagonists. Contextualising his work outside of traditional genres of fantasy and science fiction, this essay offers the reading of Lovecraft’s writings as a passing through gates. This liberating practice produces encounters with abstract alterity, beginning with the ethical consideration of the preliminary otherness of women and the animal in Deleuze and Guattari’s work, via becoming-monstrous, to an infinite territory beyond representation, signification, and perception itself.

In A Thousand Plateaus Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari invoke H.P. Lovecraft five times. While Lovecraft is mentioned together with such literary figures as Moritz, Woolf and particularly Melville, his work has less in common with those authors than with the abstract demonology of Deleuze and Guattari’s “Becoming-Intense” (sec. 10). Deleuze and Guattari claim that Lovecraft “attempted to pronounce sorcery’s final word” (TP 251; sec. 10), although Lovecraft has received little attention in comparison with other writers loosely grouped into the usually maligned genres of fantasy, science fiction and gothic horror. In this essay I pull out the evocations in Deleuze and Guattari’s five references to the story Lovecraft wrote with E. Hoffman Price, Through the Gates of the Silver Key (hereafter TGSK), and offer sketches of the ways in which becomings proliferate through Lovecraft’s work, in particular throughout his ‘cosmic horror’ writing. I argue that Lovecraft may offer an affirming philosophy of becoming that renegotiates traditional perceptions of his work as nihilistic or purely horrific. In this way I propose Lovecraft as a catalyst for a philosophical negotiation of the politics of subjectivity and alterity.

This essay is meant to present a series of possibilities and ideas and not a definitive summary of stories, so moments from stories are mentioned without explication or reference to narratives or events. Lovecraft’s work rarely privileges event and narrative, which I understand as an oeuvre of relations that at their simplest should not be. The primary concept underpinning becomings for Deleuze and Guattari is also relations which refuse relationships that enforce resemblance. By reading Lovecraft through Deleuze and Guattari, I propose an alternate interpretation of Lovecraft’s work as expressing a vitalistic philosophy and inspiring an ethics that addresses the structures of self posited with and as socio-cultural otherness. Becomings are not commensurate with unique singularities but are produced from unlike relations. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror works are obsessed with the idea of relations that inevitably structure and underpin human existence but that remain unknown to the human. The becoming with which Lovecraft’s humans participate comes from the Elder Gods or more usually the Ancient Ones, a pantheon composed by Lovecraft from various Assyrio-Babylonian, Mesopotamian and particularly ancient Sumerian cacodemons. The Elder Gods act as gatekeepers for the Ancient Ones or Great Ones, a group of creatures associated with the terror of possibly unleashing a world of hybrid relations with humans which would either wipe humans out or, if the Great Ones entered into becomings, would wipe out subjectivity and perception as we know it. The Ancient Ones are presented in detail in Lovecraft’s The Necronomicon, written under the pseudonym Abdul Alhazred, which can be understood together with other apocryphal texts such as Eibon. These same demons appear in the pandemonium of Milton’s Paradise Lost, in Satan’s fallen land, but the idea of a pantheonic pack or a multiplicity within the one and a oneness of the multiple also resonates with the Devil’s response to Jesus’s question about his identity: “I am legion, for we are many” (Holy Bible, Mark 5:9). The dreadful realisation overcomes Lovecraft’s protagonists that they have always been in relation with and related to monstrous entities. In this context S.T. Joshi evaluates Lovecraft as an activating writer: “[R]ealism is … not a goal but a function in Lovecraft; it facilitates the perception that ‘something which could not possibly happen’ is actually happening” (33). Joshi emphasizes that Lovecraft is both and neither a writer of fantasy fiction and/nor of realism. This claim resonates with the crucial element of becoming in Deleuze and Guattari, namely that becomings are not metaphors and do not occur in a theatre of representation but rather actualize potentialities of thought.

While many of Lovecraft’s stories include the atmospheric suspense of gothic fiction and the predictive elements of science-fiction, his descriptions of fantastic states are based on a refined knowledge of physics and a commitment to immersing both the characters and the reader in the cosmic horror. I argue here that Lovecraft should be understood as a writer who is not against realism but rather who attempts to find a new realism-mobilisation. Michael Houellebecq claims that Lovecraft avoids precision “with regards to the distribution of [the Ancient Ones’] powers and abilities. In fact their exact nature is beyond the grasp of the human mind.… those humans who seek to know more ineluctably pay with madness and death” (83). Poststructuralism enables us to translate “madness” as schiz-subjectivity and “death” as the death of reified identity that is launching upon becomings. For Lovecraft, monsters are not aberrant versions of the human. They are monstrous, that is, not in form, but on the levels of perception and possibility. What emerges in Lovecraft is that the human is a vague, strategic myth for ensuring sanity and thus traditional subjectivity through a belief in like relations. The human is of, indeed perhaps created by, monsters that are horrific not only in their hybrid incarnations but also in the impossibility of their being perceived through human modes of apprehension; this shows that the human is nothing more than its own fantastical myth and the infinite possibility of the beyond which is also the within. The horror experienced by Lovecraft’s protagonists need not close off the possibility that his readers would negotiate their own subjectivity and elements of alterity as a specific system of power. Beyond authorial intent, Lovecraft can demand, perhaps radically, a dissipation of powers that are contingent on the maintenance of the category of human. This is the political context of this essay. Maligned as sexist and racist, Lovecraft ironically catalyzes the becomings of the human through infinite and abstracting paradigms, and thereby requires his readers to reorient power relations, along the lines of poststructuralist, feminist, and postcolonial strategies alike. Thus Joshi is correct to describe Lovecraft’s writing as functional. Lovecraft himself explains that supernatural horror in literature “demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life” (Supernatural Horror 12). As Joshi points out, however, this does not preclude realism. Poststructuralism has demonstrated that there is no simple bifurcation dividing art and thought: what we create constitutes how we perceive reality, which then contributes to what we create, but it is the indeterminable and non-transcriptive or non-equivalent nature of this causality that makes the functioning of art in life and of life in art interesting.

Along with asking what Lovecraft means, then, we also can ask what reading Lovecraft might do. Donald Burleson premises his poststructural reading of Lovecraft – which, like Joshi’s analysis, emphasises manner over meaning – with the reminder that authorial intent is inaccessible and presence remains a metaphysical phantasy (5-7). In his analysis of Pickman’s Model, Burleson states that “Pickman is absent because his plural nature denies the metaphysics of presence and self-identity.… Pickman divides himself against himself” (91). If the reader does the same, can an address to alterity be mobilised? Burleson interprets “The Colour Out of Space” as offering a refutation of systems themselves; here, to see “a visible impression, not belonging to this system, is to suggest disturbance of the system and, allegorically, subversion of systems generally. What is at work here is the undoing of categorical thinking, the unravelling of any system claiming final mastery, exhaustive cataloguing, total solution, immutable results, settled ‘reading’ of reality” (108). Mastery refuses a negotiatory ethics of difference. Against the allegorical emphasis of this claim, however, I propose that the functional activating of potentiality that does not recognise metaphor as its own closed circuit shows how reading Lovecraft may challenge close/d readings and other techniques of mastering words, bodies, flesh, perception and subjectivity beyond the text into the world. Ultimately I will ask: what did Lovecraft do to perception and what can we do with Lovecraft?

This essay extends what Deleuze and Guattari call unnatural participation, understood as an impossible yet compulsory relation to the perception of cosmic horrors, in order to rethink the category of the human. The figure of gates of perception posits relation as an opening up rather than as an elliptical return to genesis. Through demonic relations Deleuze and Guattari seek abstract machines of relation that are no less real for being abstract, and argue, along with Joshi, that Lovecraft is a realist because of the function rather than the content of his work. This means that Lovecraft’s writings can be understood in a wider, political context instead of as belonging to a genre which distances itself from social life. Deleuze and Guattari connect this idea to Spinoza’s claim that ethics is produced not by commensurable relation, which privileges (usually) one form and function over another, but rather by what is produced between the two. Lovecraft’s literature offers an art event that is no less real for catalysing new gates of perception and possibilities of relation. By accessing Lovecraft’s necronomic gates toward the infinite and imperceptible but also the immanently present, we are forced to think, first, potentiality as an encounter with alterity, and, second, the political risks and imperatives of ourselves as becoming-other. This essay is structured as a series of “gates” in the sense of those bridges that Deleuze and Guattari, in What is Philosophy, describe as creating a “new concept of perceptual space” (19). As becomings concern not what structures relationships (between two reified entities), but what is produced through unnatural relations, gates of Lovecraftian perception open what Deleuze and Guattari call unheard of becomings – not unheard of because they have never been heard before, but because they cannot be heard through established, majoritarian vocalisations.

In “Becoming Intense” Deleuze and Guattari describe abstract planes of consistency with reference to sorcery, Bergson, Spinoza, haecceity, plane-making, molecules, secrets, points, and blocks. None of these are abstractions or fantasies in the sense that they do not concern the material. They are abstract in the sense that the material is always concerned with planes. Majoritarian structures of perception create planes that are atrophied, adamantly heard of, and able-to-be-heard before their vocalisation arrives. Lovecraft’s reader is not confronted with what happens to whom and why, but with the unbearable reality of effectuation of unheard-of relations without perception as external, causal and commensurable apprehension, which is to say with a miasmic material reality: “a plane of consistency peopled by anonymous matter, by infinite bits of impalpable matter entering into varying connections” (Deleuze and Guattari, TP 255), Via Spinoza but primarily as sorcerers, and through Lovecraft, Deleuze and Guattari thus offer an ethics of becomings whose main phases are: 1) relations without likeness, 2) entities without form or function, 3) relations which are nonetheless real in spite of their abstract nature and the abstracting of the entities, 4) these relations forcing alternate modes of perception without laying new structures of apprehension, finally leading to 5) the function of art as catalysing becomings in the reader by demanding alternate perceptions of relation with any and all entities. As Deleuze and Guattari point out, these all occur on the same abstract plane.

There is no leaving behind Lovecraft when we close his pages. Lovecraft’s work may be fantasy, the monsters fictive, the narratives fragmentary, but the relation to possibilities of thought through imperceptible though terrifically present entities is a gate through which the reader enters becomings that differentiate all relations on a plane of consistency. Against Joshi, Colin Wilson claims that Lovecraft was opposed to realism and particularly to materialism. What is at stake here is not whether Lovecraft personally rejected materialism but whether his negotiation of perception itself has material effects in the post-structural sense of re-negotiating signifying systems and relations of difference and otherness in the world. Wilson titles his chapter on Lovecraft the “Assault on Rationality.” Rationality has traditionally been the realm of dominant, logocentric, majoritarian systems. Wilson emphasizes Lovecraft’s obsession with the monstrous, and Braidotti the definition of monster as any deviation from the base level zero “human.” Braidotti states that “the discourse on monsters as a case study highlights … the status of difference within rational thought” (78). Wilson points out that Lovecraft “is willing to make his setting modern, but it must be remote from civilisation, a kind of admission of defeat” (4). This tendency evinces Lovecraft’s interest in describing the connective affectivity of fantastic perception and world, rather than a non-terrestrial dystopia. For this reason the political question becomes “defeat of what?” From a politics of alterity we could argue that Lovecraft works to defeat the exertion of perception and knowledge, for the exertion of power opens the way for other forms of subjectivity to emerge.

Lovecraft’s oeuvre falls into two categories. One encompasses more familiar tales of terror found in horror stories and novels of the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries; the other is based on the great Lovecraft mythos. The stories based on the mythos address three main phases. The first, which Lovecraft calls “transition” or “mutation,” expresses the becoming(s) of protagonists as they begin to corporeally and psychologically articulate inflection with alternate genera, terrestrial teratological and alien (a division that is in fact unclear in Lovecraft). The second is the entering into the worlds, or, in keeping with his disinterest in disambiguation, the domains occupied by these creatures as gods. The third is the distortion of perception. Lovecraft was responsible for creating entire pantheons, universes, worlds, and alternate temporal realities of evolution and alien existence. The key element which differentiates Deleuze and Guattari’s almost jubilant citation of Lovecraft’s ideas is the lack of attention to what most Lovecraft commentators misguidedly call, as does Michael Houellebecq in the title of his seminal book, Lovecraft’s proclivity against life. The quality of one’s journey toward Lovecraft should take into account the definitions of such terms as “life,” “human,” and other Earthly tenets of thoughts, apprehensions of form and perceptions of states. Challenging the category of the human underpins all becomings, beginning with the most obvious falling away from the hu”Man” to woman, animal and eventually abstract particles, sonority, and inhuman planes. Apparently in contradiction with his premise that Lovecraft’s work shows a nihilistic weariness with life, Houellebecq in fact claims in his preface that through Lovecraft we can live in poetry (25). With the help of Deleuze and Guattari, this essay ultimately explores the readers’ passing through the gates of Lovecraftian perception, which involves the creation of a speech, from the unspeakable to the ‘unsayable’; incommensurable relations which take the very acts of writing and speech to their limits; accessing the outside and the unthinkable; but which are also, and in contradistinction to Wilson’s claim, is no less material for doing so. Resonant with speech of the unsayable, Lovecraftian perception is perception upon a different plane. (Burleson touches on this when he cites Derrida’s claim that “there is nothing outside the text” (10); in this case, however, I would tend more toward the work of Foucault and Blanchot, which introduce accountability and responsibility into this concept.) Lovecraft can be invigorating if read as a writer of the baroque (through, for example, Deleuze’s work on Leibniz) rather than, as many have claimed, the gothic; if read through physics as much as folklore; and as long as one reads and thinks of Lovecraft as an act of sorcery. Critics such as Siegel have claimed persistently that Lovecraft is a writer of gothic fiction (51). This tendency arises more from the resonance of trite adjectives such as ‘haunted’, ‘dark’, ‘horrific’ and so forth that are applied to Lovecraft’s work, than from the difficult task of seeing his work as phylum. Hybrid becomings, however, could help readers describe Lovecraft as a writer of the baroque rather than of the gothic (see MacCormack, “Baroque Intensity”). Relating to themes and places more modern (though emphatically anti-modernist) than the abbey-bound turpitude of G.M. Lewis and less romantic than the occultism of F. Marion Crawford, Lovecraft’s protagonists, (who are also uninterested in Bram Stoker’s socio-political tenets of industrialisation), are neither haunted nor hounded by entities they will eventually overcome. (To be fair, however, this repudiation of the gothic is more readily found in Lovecraft’s cosmic tales than in the intimate stories of dread.)

Becomings deal not with kinds but with states. The journeys upon which Lovecraft’s protagonists, and we as readers, launch, are journeys that involve “passing through” as becomings, not the completion of a project of becoming with another element. A demonological philosophy after Deleuze and Guattari increasingly becomes less about animals and demons than about gates. Contagion, packing, proliferation alter the qualities of the passing, and each gate could be described as a mode of perception-consistency. Randolph Carter understands his journey through the gates as a “flux of impressions.… [Gates lead] from earth and time to that extension of earth which is outside time, and from which in turn the Ultimate Gate leads fearsome and perilously to the Last Void which is outside all earths, all universes and all matter” (Lovecraft, TGSK 516-17). Carter uses the apocryphal grimoire by the Mad Arab (probably written by Lovecraft himself), The Necronomicon. In The Necronomicon itself (especially in “The Book of Entrance and of Walking,” “The Book of Calling,” and “The Incantations of the Gates”), the names and qualities of encounters with gods are seen as gates, not entities; so the kind or order of the gods is also understood as qualities of movement and as locations that incarnate particular impression-states. Quality of flux, guided by imagination and dream over goal, opens the gates. The use of a grimoire and conjuration resonates with Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of sorcery, not simply because the act of sorcery underpins the plane of consistency in both cases, but also because in both cases the rituals concern “modes of expansion [and]… occupation” (TP 239; sec. 10). Occupying a place whose territories are expanded through various reorientations of impression produces an anomalous place. Deleuze and Guattari emphasize that the adjective anomalous situates a position or a phenomenon of bordering. In this sense, gates, understood as borders of becomings, are used in this essay to describe Lovecraft’s different phases of becomings, phases which cannot be understood in terms of causality or of narrative logic. The first gate addresses Deleuze and Guattari’s three modes of animality, and Lovecraft’s idea that animality is exemplified by propagation. Gate Two addresses the shift from recognisable animal intensity to what Deleuze and Guattari call the demonic animal, which appears in Lovecraft as the Elder Gods and Ancient Ones. Gate Three explores the way, in becomings, the categorically human is crucially absent. Using Deleuze’s work on Leibniz, Gate Four begins to address the move from becomings as acts of participation with other elements, to the altering of modes of perception as such and posits Lovecraft as a writer of the baroque on account of his manipulation of the physics of perception-planes. Gate Five contextualises Lovecraft’s modes of speech, the compulsion to say the unsayable in order to access the outside – or what Deleuze and Guattari call the abstract, outside perceptions of form, function and comprehension – but within the world and found in art; in this sense the abstraction is no less material and real. Gate Six, finally, asks what ethical imperatives are presented by Lovecraft’s art.

Gate 1. Orders of Animals, Orders of Demons

In Deleuze and Guattari’s work, becomings pass through stages which can generally be described as devolutionary, and which Deleuze and Guattari call “neoevolutionary.” The majoritarian subject “man” (which is to say, all human subjects) enters into relations with primary elements of minoritarian alterity, becoming-woman, becoming-animal, and other, a-human forms, toward more refined, ambiguous expressions of content. The animal, however, is the primary node for inhuman or a-human becomings. Deleuze and Guattari demarcate three orders of animality. The first is the Oedipal animal, the puppy-baby (Freud). Second is the symbolic or archetype animal, which creates and immobilises itself upon a metaphoric structure of signification (Jung). The third animal is the demonic animal, in which two elements must be present – the animal here is itself a phenomenon of bordering, hybridity, and metamorphicity. Demonic animals are defined as “pack or affect animals that form a multiplicity, a population, a becoming, a tale” (TP 241; sec. 10). Vampires, werewolves, and demons belong to this third order of animality. Because they are both familiar and unfamiliar to us, however, they seem to resonate with the negotiations of what a human-animal could be, both when it is mistakenly read through the first two orders of animality, and when its becomings are overlooked. It involves a relation with an abstract animal. Oedipal animality – the family puppy-baby – manifests its narcissism through subjective ownership – “‘my’ cat, ‘my’ dog” (TP 240; sec. 10). Oedipal animals affirm the self through the construction of an anthropomorphising family system in which the animal is allowed to emerge only through conditional love that fulfills the parameters of the substitute child. Since the animal is inferior in both its structural position and its species, it resolves the woman’s penis envy and the man’s castration anxiety. The second order of animals is the archetypal animal who is invested with human qualities and effectively only has, or represents, human qualities. These animals are extricated from animality, but the range of their symbolic function is almost limitless. Both systems in no way include animals, just human, signifying systems. We need to develop the critique further here, however, so that the werewolf/demon/vampire is not misunderstood as some uncanny, gothic entity. Lovecraft claims that he seeks “to make the flesh creep” (qtd. in Wilson 3) more than to unfurl narrative through characters. This focus on flesh directly challenges metaphor and the distance between reader and text. As a kind of physio-cerebral affectivity, it dissolves metaphor and makes the text politically accountable for its catalyzing of different modes of thinking.

Demons thus belong to the third order of Deleuze and Guattari’s animal taxonomy. Becoming through a pact-pack with the demon also describes the first phase of Lovecraftian sorcery. One of the remarkable contributions Lovecraft makes to literature is his formulation of a pantheon of gods. Unlike other fantasy writers, however, Lovecraft creates gods within this world, which is also folded together with worlds outside of time and space. As Gates, Lovecraft’s gods are responsible for the horror of altering modes of being in the world, and they do so by creating the pure immanence of multiple worlds. Taxonomies of monsters, orders of gods, worlds demarcated as fantastical or real are absent in Lovecraft, and it is the very absence of these demarcations which causes horror. Lovecraft’s gods lack the signification and subjectification that, according to Deleuze and Guattari, facilitates majoritarian power, which in turn sanctions the emergence of subjects. The entities with which the protagonists enter becomings are abstract and ambiguous (as emergent entities they are always there but not entirely apprehensible). Becomings in Lovecraft are also compulsory – the protagonists have no choice, but while horror is thereby irrefutably catalysed, it comes from the loss, and not from the destruction, of the self. These monsters destroy through alliance rather than murder. Lovecraft emphasises that becomings are already available and that we always already choose the extent to which we resist or submit to the everyday alliances we make. In this way he demonstrates that retaining reified subjectivity is as much an act as would be letting go of it. Deleuze and Guattari use the concept of demons to expand the intersection of the hybrid with the animal. Aesthetic and apocryphal demons such as werewolves and vampires are single expressions of human-animal elements, inherently metamorphic and part of packs. Since demons must be invoked after first being imagined as fabulations, thinking becoming-demon for them requires a philosophy of sorcery. Lovecraft’s lower gods are fabulations of demons, inter-species hybrids with orders of non-mammalian animals, and this Deleuzio-Guattarian index is where Lovecraft’s a-human becomings begin. Deleuze and Guattari do not offer aesthetic, cinematic or literary examples of their demons – the devil, werewolves and vampires – because these arise as particle verb bands rather than as infernal monsters or as metaphorical, figurative, or symbolic entities. When examples are offered, they resonate around becomings which are not as familiar to us as those of the werewolf and vampire. Precisely because these monsters emerge through so many varied examples of actualised virtualities, however, they remain abstract potentiality, whereas the specific literary citations of Woolf’s becoming-monkey, Ahab’s becoming-whale, and so on, are examples of singularities before the formation of new threshold packs.

Gate 2. From Demonic Heredity to Abstract Alliance

Gate 2 focuses on the demonic in Deleuze and Guattari’s elements of becoming, as abstract animal entities. This Gate explores the liminal band between a-human, animal elements and the demon that is beyond animal-element perception. Lovecraft’s gods are not monsters; they do not belong to extra-human orders from which they threaten to slaughter the demarcated human, and they do not reside in the entirely external fantasy worlds that are found in many traditional horror stories. Ancient Ones and Elder Gods are beyond Frankenstein’s creature and Dracula, and they are too earthly present to be classified along with the alien gods and monsters of fantasy novels. For the renegotiation of our becomings, it is important to note that we cannot categorise them as outside, either in form or in world. They are immediately present but also without presence since they are not recognisably other or antagonistic. The qualities of Lovecraft’s gods and entities are, furthermore, always themselves in states of becoming. They include multiple intensities and mobile qualities of many animals, particularly cephalopods, fish. and insects, as well as a bacterial forms of bubbling, molecular viscosity. As the gods are in their own states of becoming, their function as an anomalous, allied term is already beyond our capacity to name them. As hyper-hybrids, they also occupy territories that could be described as having their own becomings – water-land worlds, outer-space-within-this space and so forth, what Deleuze and Guattari call a “Universe fiber” that is “strung across borderlines” (TP 249; sec. 10). In addition, since they cannot be destroyed, their states of “life” are tentative. They are incapable of killing humans, but only change their state of life, as they are neither dead nor alive. The thresholds and gates Lovecraft’s monsters force us to negotiate are resistant, not only to being destructive monsters, but also to being hybrid entities that we could demarcate for our becomings. Their qualities of contagion, as hybrids or outside entities, preclude them from being monsters, and thus resonate with Deleuze and Guattari’s terms for elements of becoming, from wolf-whale-rat to demonic dimensionality and borderline propagation. The Ancient Ones are described physically as threshold creatures – both fish and fowl, flesh and fur, a kind of sentient, amphibious nebula from a pre-human, pre-historical time that is both more civilised and intelligent than the human time, and barbarically uncivilised. Inevitably and most horrifically, the Ancient Ones reproduce the limit restricting even hybrid animality from a pure abstraction-becoming. The animal elements of the Ancient Ones, while residually named as animal, are in fact cephalopodan, insect and other adamantly non-mammalian forms. Cthulhu is seen in bas-relief as a squid dragon, “an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature… [whose] pulpy tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings” (Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu,” hereafter TCC, 63). Dagon is a fish-man-god (Lovecraft, “Dagon” 16). The encounter between protagonists and their becoming-Ancient Ones reflects this threshold. Cthulhu lives a threshold consciousness, lying dead but dreaming. The geography of Cthulhu’s fallen cities of R’lyeh lies at the threshold of the mountains of madness, at immeasurable depths beneath the sea (apparently near New Zealand). Randolph Carter’s becoming is “human and non-human, vertebrate and invertebrate, animal and vegetable” (Lovecraft, TGSK 526), and the unnamed protagonist of The Shadow Over Innsmouth is a man-froglike-fish or fishlike-frog, “flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating” (Lovecraft, TSI 454). “Propagation by epidemic, by contagion, has nothing to do with filiation by heredity.… These combinations are neither genetic nor structural; they are interkingdoms” (Deleuze and Guattari, TP 241-2; sec. 10). In “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” the kingdom of immortal creatures of the sea arises to infect the citizens of Innsmouth with molecular intensities, merging land with sea and human with frog-fish-flesh. The narrator shares a family line with these hybrid worshippers of Dagon and Cthulhu, but genealogy produces a unique specificity of hybridity. He tells us that “them as turn into fish things an’ went into the water wouldn’t never die” (414).

Mixed blood in this context clearly has more to do with disease and infection than with reproduction, while “reproduction” has to be understood not as a project of reproducing, but rather as the production, at each stage, of a unique generation of unrepeatable combinations. Hybrids, in science, are sterile and cannot reproduce, but like Cthulhu they also cease the need to reproduce because they become eternal. Houllebecq (problematically) reminds us that “most novelists consider it their duty to present an exhaustive picture of life” (61). In contrast to literature’s traditional compulsions to re-present endlessly, Lovecraft’s work and his monsters produce only singularities, thereby forcing readers to confront alterity and defamiliarization. What is at stake here is whether the reader chooses a liberation of ideology through this defamiliarization, or a stubbornly clings to powers of signification that maintain dominant subjectivity. Could we argue that minoritarian readers would, contra Houellebecq, find life in this liberation?

Neither Carter nor the narrator of “Innsmouth” narrator enters into a desiring union as part of his transformation, but instead is propagated through hereditary disease (demonic reproduction) or geographical proximity to threshold kingdoms. Each relation between the protagonist and his seemingly inevitable fate as part of a family of singular hybrids forming a heterogeneous, seething, contagious collective ends with resignation, joy, liberation or an unqualified loss of perception. Lovecraft’s protagonists rarely prevail, they cease to be protagonists at all, and their fate is the packing-pacts of becomings. The population of the Innsmouth Order of Dagon pack are specific phyla which appear as unique entities due to their unpredictable combining of interkingdom coalescence. This is the Outsider that Deleuze and Guattari, following Lovecraft, describe as neither/both an individual nor/and a pack, which is to say as a “phenomenon of bordering” (TP 245; sec. 10). Bordering lines inflect at different and mobile angles. In Lovecraft’s “The Nameless City” (TNC), which makes the first reference to The Necronomicon, the unnamed narrator encounters half-transparent, chaotic devils, hybrid demons of crocodile-seal-man but “more often nothing of which either the naturalist or the palaeontologist ever heard.… But strangest of all were the heads, which presented a contour violating all known biological principles.… I thought of comparisons as varied as the cat, the bulldog, the mythic satyr, and the human being” (136). Eternal creatures lose the need for Oedipal or hierarchical structures because they no longer need familial or gender striation. Their condition as a pack is thus neither serial (based on equivalences demarcated through political, isomorphic binaries of gender, age or race) nor structural (based on arboreal hierarchy and genealogy). In addition, their immortality, like their genealogy, should be understood not as a chronology without end, but rather as time without duration, simultaneity including constant differentiation. The contemplation of this concept-state is often the catalyst for the protagonists’ madness, but only while they remain in the human world, with its modes of spatial disambiguation and unfurling temporality. We hear in TNC the much-cited couplet maxim of the Ancient Ones, also found in The Necronomicon, that “That which can eternal lie/And with strange aeons even death may die” (142).

Gate 3. Inhuman Becomings

The majoritarian, it could be argued, belongs to no category other than the particular species of the “human.” After becoming-woman, through which women must also pass, Deleuze and Guattari call to the human “becoming-animal.” The shift from being woman to becoming woman (a deeply problematic, precariously fetishistic concept for which Deleuze and Guattari have been maligned) is a movement from a category emergent only through majoritarian expression, as lacking and oppressed, to woman as a singularity or territory with no opposite. The very fact that Deleuze and Guattari posit woman as the first, surely horrific step for the majoritarian male to take in his relinquishing of power endows this politics of alterity with the mood of Lovecraft’s protagonists who, ultimately, fear becoming-nothing, a status to which minoritarians have long been relegated. The becoming-cosmic, however, shows that nothing is everything, just as many feminists, such as Irigaray in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, have argued that woman, in “lacking,” is both less than and more than one. From the definite politics of feminists of difference, we come to the larger paradigm of the human itself. While Lovecraft’s characters do not pass through a becoming-woman, they do leap to a becoming-animal that is neither human nor animal, and both. Insofar as the animal is nothing except the not human, becoming animal begins the ablation of the category of the human. As Lovecraft’s protagonists extend toward becomings that offer no recognisable elements, they can no longer be organised as hybrids of relations between two, whether animal/human or human/demon. Through abstract gods, this stage of becoming is able to erode entirely all residue of the human. Beyond the notion of the “post-human,” which suggests an “after,” Lovecraft’s becoming-inhuman is within so-called humans, immanently available, and indeed inevitable and compulsory. No longer hybrid with exo-kingdoms, the primary term “human” can no longer be described as becoming. The divisibility of becoming entities becomes increasingly difficult. This section explores the conception of relations of a-human or inhuman, non-differentiated, nebulous becomings as baroque. Lovecraft’s monsters are unto themselves not scary, the events not frightening, compared with facing the ultimate horror of losing subjectivity to the very molecular level of the human, the mammal, the invertebrate, the plant, the bacterial.

In Lovecraft’s tales events are associated with phases of relation and production, not presented in increments of narrative evolution. For this reason I would extend Deleuze’s work on Leibniz and argue that both Deleuze and Guattari’s werewolves/vampires/demons and Lovecraft’s work deal with the baroque. Like the baroque, Lovecraft’s work consists not of collisions between forms but rather of acts of relations between substances, or, as Leibniz puts it, the power to act and be acted upon (81). The baroque is important for the politics of difference in my argument because Leibniz argues here that bodies depend on their affective relations with other bodies in order to define themselves. Techniques of subsumption and oppression through the reification of dominant identities amount to uneven relations without participation. Instead of perpetuating domination or subordination through refusal and extrication, attention to the affects and fluidity of bodies in proximity with and inflected through one another requires that our apprehension of those bodies negotiates the possibility of differing ourselves. For Leibniz, all bodies are modification or extension, existing as fluid aggregates, and their reality is not an essence within these bodies but rather, as Leibniz writes following Democritus, “they depend for their existence on opinion or custom” (69).

Critics have accused Lovecraft of nihilism, pessimism (Lévy), paranoia (Carter) and, from an esoteric angle, qualities of negativity and poverty-stricken intangibility (Pasi, Hanegraaff), even if the critics have not necessarily presented these qualities as bad. More celebratory explorations have suggested that Lovecraft’s art allows encounters with the sublime (Ralickas). As a phenomenon of encountering an excess of signification that is no less material for being so, the sublime offers a jubilant reading of the ultimate dissipations that Lovecraft’s protagonists undergo. In direct reference to a politics of feminist alterity, Kristeva’s Desire in Language proposed the sublime as an integral element of the a-signifying systems encountered in becoming-woman. Lovecraft also has been utilised in queer theory and as a catalyst for activism (MacCormack, “Unnatural Alliances”), in illustration of Joshi’s point that his is a writing of function. Goodrich has explored Lovecraft as a mannerist, and has pointed to the plastic-artistry of his literary style. It is crucial to find joy in Lovecraft, as it is here we find liberation from dominant signifying systems. The question then becomes, “who benefits from maintaining these systems?” Reading Lovecraft as a baroque writer, we can find voluminous material (indeed all too material) becomings. The horror perhaps comes from the fact that these becomings are not metaphors; they are instead all too real and in fact invert metaphorisation, with no recourse to meaning. Far from disappearing or being consumed, Lovecraft’s characters are unable to escape, through death or victory, the reality of their metamorphoses. Leibniz states: “A corporeal substance can neither arise nor perish except by creation or annihilation… Consequently things which have souls do not arise or perish, but are only transformed” (92). Carter and Charles Dexter-Ward, among others, neither live nor die, and at best theirs is not a fear of transformation but of an irresistible “beckoning” (Lovecraft, TGSK 505). Whatever is annihilated is human. Indeed perhaps these stories are nihilistic for the human, always and only lacking or against only human life, the human understood as that which Leibniz’s ethics repudiates – an entity as a unified one. Becoming-inhuman is not death, “for no substance perishes, though it can become quite different” (Leibniz 43).

Baroque transformation is bordering, infinitely and infinitesimally fractal, aggregate plurality, subdivision, “modification as extension” (Leibniz 68). The specificities of each of these qualities are not antagonistic, and unlike relations offer an ethics of difference that is crucial to minoritarian studies and becomings. The unnamed entity (probably Yog-Sothoth) that concludes “The Dunwich Horror” (DH) speaks half in English and half in imperceptible – and olfactory – utterances. It “has been split up into what it was originally made of, and can never exist again. It was an impossibility in a normal world. Only the least fraction was really matter in any sense we know” (Lovecraft, DH 151-2). The entity is called a “human blasphemy” (152), not because it is evil or aberrant, but because it could not be perceived and thus known as part of the “normal” world occupied by phantasies of human and other demarcated entities. Politically, minoritarians – women, queers, racial others and so forth – have been considered in this way, and in response have demanded a philosophy of re-negotiating signifying systems. Faith here is not belief in God but in the human and its associated qualities of singularity, reified subjectivity, and unified, homogenised expression of substance.

Continental philosophy frequently emphasises that art first involves letting go of the category of the human. For Lyotard, art makes us become-inhuman (2). Deleuze states that desiring machines only occur between the non-human and the human (Desert Islands 243), and Deleuze and Guattari define art-affect as man’s [sic] non-human becoming (What is Philosophy? 172). For Guattari, the most important of the three ecologies of environment, social relations, and human subjectivity, is the rupture of human subjectivity through an entirely different logic (The Three Ecologies 28, 56). From less than human becomings – hybrid animal – to abstract hybrid becomings – demonic relations – baroque becomings now reach the inconceivable outside of all human thought – the unthinkable. Guattari claims that his third ecological register of aesthetic-ethics, the reterritorialization of subjectivity, is the most crucial, while Foucault shows that thought which is itself outside can, through art, offer access to an outside subjectivity, but within the world and art’s ecstasies.

A thought that stands outside subjectivity, setting its limits as thought from without, articulating its end, making its dispersion shine forth, taking in only its invincible absence… regain[s] the space of its unfolding, the void serving as its site, the distance in which it is constituted and into which its immediate certainties slip the moment they are glimpsed.

(Foucault 15-16)

It is imperative to let go of the human in order to encounter and fold with art, which unfolds the self toward infinity and pure potentiality without genesis or destination. This unfolding is an ethical opening that sacrifices majoritarian access and expression to the powers of the human. Mrs. Gardner’s madness in Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space” (TCOS) presents her as screaming “about things in the air which she could not describe. In her raving there was not a single specific noun, but only verbs and pronouns. Things moved and changed and fluttered, and ears tingled to impulses which were not wholly sounds” (250). The “monster” of TCOS is a quality of luminescence and bubbling of ooze that is threatening as affect and not as act. Like an encounter with art that appears to come from outside, the encounter with this entity resists the annexation of adjectives to nouns, and results in no more than vague fragments of descriptions of events, through what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a variety of sensation-compounds: vibration, the embrace or clinch, withdrawal, division, and distension – two elements drawn apart but together by the light, air, or void; they emphasise that “Affects are precisely these nonhuman becomings” (What is Philosophy? 168). For Lyotard, Foucault, Blanchot, and Rancière, art mandates letting go of the category of the human. In contradistinction to the assessment of Lovecraft as against life, perhaps we can celebrate him as a philosopher of alterity, even if he is, ironically, his own first victim (consider this alongside his ignoring women to a large extent and his xenophobia, both of which have been written on extensively). Of course such a celebration would be anchored by Joshi’s claim that Lovecraft’s work is about what we do with it: if Lovecraft’s work presents a political philosophy of alterity beyond authorial intent, it does so only in the way that it is utilised and not simply in what it says.

Through becomings, “The Call of Cthulhu’s” Johansen and others are literally swallowed up, ingested into the Lovecraftian world. To be swallowed is to be ingested into the folds of the monster. The self becomes inherently part of the folds and foldings-in of these worlds, until all perception is enveloped within a plane of Lovecraftian monsters and hybrids. The folded self cannot become extricated from this plane, and instead becomes willingly infected by the contagion of the monstrous other planes, including those of other becomings such as woman or feminism. Thus we come to realise that Cthulhu is not a creature or form but purely a mode of (actually imperceptible) perception: “There were certain proportions or dimensions which I did not like” (Lovecraft, TNC 130); “Horrors of a form not to be surmised” (Lovecraft, “The Dream-Quest” 392). The baroque is infinite and indefinite becomings of form, and thus emphasizes the impossibility of apprehending anything except through aspect, turn, or intensity. Demons require the repudiation of humanity, and Deleuze and Guattari’s demonic bands first require getting rid of human classifications: “Lovecraft applies the term ‘Outsider’ to this thing or entity” (TP 245; sec. 10).

In order to enter into this beyond-humanness we must act as sorcerers, which requires Deleuze and Guattari’s four stages of demonic pact-making. The first is the alliance with a demon, through which the human passes into the pack, which is the second phase. The third sees this pack create a borderland with another pack, which then allows the borderline to guide the future(s) of the human-animal collective pack intensities. The fourth stage is presumably the stage of ethics, creativity, and thought, as it involves the production of directions that most benefit each particle of each pack-pact, and always changes the micro- and macro- “things” within and between the borderline. The werewolf, demon, and the vampire, as not knowable but thinkable fabulations, are waves or bands and not figures or concepts – or, as in What is Philosophy?, they are pre-philosophical. Werewolves, demons, and vampires include elements similar to the human and to animal elements, but form strange, new, mobile, and what Deleuze and Guattari call unnatural participations (TP 242) and what Lovecraft perhaps would call “disturbing combinations” (TGSK 537). They are not uncanny, as they are not symbolic forms sewn together into demarcated half-half mythic monsters. According to a new grammar of becoming, it is not a cobbling together of two nouns, but rather the movement-combination-aspect of the familiar, or the verbing, that creates the hybrid: “But in the text itself it did indeed reek with wonder; for here was no script of any wholesome age, but the laboured strokes of mediaeval darkness, scarcely legible to the laymen who now strained over it, yet having combinations of symbols which seem vaguely familiar” (Lovecraft, “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” 283).

If we think the borderline as a plane of immanence, then the borderline “implies a sort of groping experimentation and its layout resorts to measures that are not very respectable, rational or reasonable. These measures belong to the order of dreams.… To think is always to follow the witch’s flight” (Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 41). In “Dreams in the Witch-House” Brown Jenkin, the hybrid rat-human (nicely resonant with Deleuze and Guattari’s citation of the film Willard) and his witch-ally Keziah Mason seduce Walter Gilman toward “lines and curves that could be made to point out directions leading through the walls of space to other spaces beyond, and [she] had implied that such lines and curves were frequently used at certain midnight meetings” (306). The borderline is one dimension cut from a plane of consistency.

Gate 4. A-Perception

Lovecraft’s protagonists initially shift their modes of perception to dreams and memories that do not belong to their history or imagination. This already implies the suspension of any recognisable modes of apprehension, and compels us to read in a similar way. Dreams, memories and imagination are not opposed to reality but belong to different orders of perception that nonetheless effect alterations in subjectivity and show reality to be a quality. The question is not so much what we read in Lovecraft but how we read. Lovecraft’s is an impossible project of describing the indescribable, speaking about the unsayable and explicating events which are beyond our capacity to follow. His words are not complex, so that if both writer and reader lack words for the unsayable, and if they are open to art as outside and to the inhuman becomings that literature invokes, this lack is precisely the ethical point of creating new relations of production between art and reader that cannot be set down, structured, or understood as preceding the event of reading. The decision to open toward a revolution in perception is the point of becomings. Deleuze and Guattari describe a novel as populated by the multiple perceptions of the characters and the shadowy but ubiquitous perception of the writer. Lovecraft, however, knows neither his own perception nor those of his characters, because in his work perception itself is the character, content and narrative. Perception, in this world and in the palimpsest worlds within and outside of it, is an incandescent, fantastical reality. Examples of unbearable, wondrous perception of the present as ordinary/extraordinary are found in Lovecraft’s beloved Arthur Machen. In “A Fragment of Life,” within and beneath London there emerges an arcane, natural world, a “New Life” in which, along with “unheard-of joys, there are also new and unheard-of dangers” (Machen 98), and which thus exemplifies Deleuze and Guattari’s unheard of becomings.

Lovecraft’s task becomes impossible in the final phases of the becomings he catalyses, when perception itself resists becomings. Between the a-human and thinking the pure plane of consistency in Lovecraftian becomings, a-perception navigates this impossible but nonetheless actual task, just as the becoming itself is increasingly difficult to negotiate. Recalling Deleuze and Guattari’s emphasis on abstraction as no less real, we can say that a-perception is the no less material experience of becoming beyond description or apprehension. A-perception is crucial for thinking outside established thought and acknowledging the reality and transgressive potential of what we cannot know but must nonetheless experience, just as the minoritarian is forced to experience oppression by virtue of remaining unknown and unknowable in a majoritarian economy. Indeed it is precisely because the potentiality of a-perceptive becomings cannot be deferred to knowledge or apprehended as concept-object, but instead is always within this real, material plane, that it is necessary for mobilizing subjectivity through art, which demands perceiving differently. It is no accident that these shifts of perception in Lovecraft’s work are the most difficult to read and the points at which the protagonists lose their minds or, properly speaking, their humanity and subjectivity. They, as we, must learn to perceive differently, and the “we” is the first casualty.

Alliance through becomings and packing creates both communal or shared folds between – the threshold – and new folds within the singular self (an alternation of Deleuze’s habitus, which he borrows from Leibniz). This requires alteration in perceptions through alterations in being, the threshold of which perhaps we could describe, as Lovecraft does in “The Unnamable,” as a “hybrid nightmare” (232). “Every perception is hallucinatory because perception has no object… but from the haze of dust without objects the figures themselves raise up from the depths and fall back again” (Deleuze, The Fold 93-94). Peaslee loses his ability to distinguish between his dream existence and his terrestrial one and thus his ability to distinguish actuality from hallucination: “Indeed it seemed to the doctors that I lost interest in my proper personality as soon as I found the case of amnesia accepted as a natural thing” (Lovecraft, “The Unnamable” 468). He experiences perception as fragmentary and fractal, as a series of perspectival inflections of the fold (and therefore out of time, because linear time is created through micro and macro shifts rather than through a serialisation of acting objects). Joe Slater in Beyond the Wall of Sleep forsakes his becoming-Dagon for a pure imperceptible perception: “At this point the thought waves abruptly ceased and the pale eyes of the dreamer – or should I say dead man – commenced to gaze fishily” (Lovecraft, BWS 47).

Along two trajectories, through their becomings and their entrance into the geoplanes of the Ancient Ones, Lovecraft’s protagonists transform gradually, not through their being or location but through their perception. Their becomings shift from alliances to being-apprehension-simultaneity with all particles, and so are beyond the need for space and time. “Memory and imagination shaped dim half pictures with uncertain outlines amidst the seething chaos, but Carter knew they were memory and imagination only” (Lovecraft, TGSK 517). To propose Lovecraft as a writer of the baroque is also to point to the chaos that is a key element of his renegotiation of non-Euclidean physics. Deleuze and Guattari likewise describe philosophy, science, and art as wanting to “tear open the firmament and plunge into chaos” (What is Philosophy? 202). Philosophy, according to them, gives us variations, science variables, and art varieties. As sorcerers of baroque demonology, Lovecraft and his protagonists begin with becoming and with seeing various forms of hybrid monsters. They then shift through variants of the metamorphic mobility of self and monster in action, and reach their pinnacle as actualised perceptions of virtual potentialities. Here, the protagonists shift their thinking from seeing and from being infected by the molecules of monster variants, toward infernal, seething forms, to aberrant angles of being and apprehending. This may also be the point at which Lovecraft himself shrugs off the fetters of gothic writing and creates the hybrid, folklore-physics systems through which becomings occur. “Non-Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore… [Gilman] began to connect his mathematics with the fantastic legends of elder magic” (Lovecraft, DWH, 306).

Lovecraft calls his blind, mad god Nyarlathotep the crawling chaos. Gilman fears alighting in the “spiral black vortices of that ultimate void of Chaos where reigns the mindless demon sultan Azathoth” (DWH, 343). Nyarlathotep and Azathoth, in addition to many of the other Ancient Ones (including the dead but dreaming Cthulhu), are blind, mindless and dead only when evaluated according to human modes of signifying perception and qualitative states. In Lovecraft’s rarely cited poetic work, Nyarlathotep’s “idiot chaos blows Earth’s dust away” (“Nyarlathotep” l. 14) even though “throngs pressed around, frantic for his commands” (“Nyarlathotep” 5). And then,

Out in the mindless void the demon bore me
Past the bright clusters of dimensioned space
Til neither time nor matter stretched before me
But only Chaos, without form or place.

(“Azathoth” 1-4)

The beautiful, brief poem Azathoth invokes dreaming, bat-things flopping, and monstrous chance-combinings. These abject blasphemers, beyond the cares of dominant systems and their heads, are sorcerers who betray their positions as heads of pack; “‘I am his messenger’, the demon said / and in contempt he struck his Master’s head” (“Azathoth” 13-14). Lovecraft’s moments of horror occur when discursive systems such as Azathoth’s powers (which have their own demonic, hybrid philosophy) or, (if read as desire), Deleuze and Guattari’s unnatural nuptials (TP 240) express a possible chance-combining of the three orders of chaos’ emergence that are described in What is Philosophy?

Gate 5. From the Unspeakable to the Unsayable

Lovecraft’s is a task of writing the un-writable. Like other “fantasy” writing, Lovecraft’s prose is often evaluated as simultaneously lacking in substance and hampered by melodramatic overuse of adjectives. He depicts the madness of TCOS‘s Mrs. Gardner by groping for affects, adjectives and pronouns without his language alighting on form, nouns, or entities apprehensible through human perception. Wilson, along with many other critics, claims many of his stories are “atrociously written” (4).

Maligning Lovecraft for his florid and enflaming adjectives and for his non-existent narratives fails to address the indescribability of what he is compelled to describe – palimpsest worlds beyond apprehension, selves incapable of speech, becoming-polyvocal but not in any language distinguishable by humans, and existence outside time. In “The Unnamable,” in spite of Manton’s vague knowledge that

the mind sometimes holds visions and sensations of far less geometrical, classifiable and workable nature, he believed himself justified in drawing an arbitrary line and ruling out of court all that cannot be experienced and understood by the average citizen. Besides, he was almost sure that nothing can be really “unnamable”. It didn’t sound sensible to him.

(227)

In his attempt to encounter these worlds, Lovecraft is compelled to use language that Deleuze and Guattari more sympathetically describe as “grandiose and simplified” (TP 251). In pursuit of thinking the unthinkable and perceiving the imperceptible, Lovecraft offers his literary art as writing the un-writable, which is to say as speaking the unsayable. Such language must be used in becoming-inhuman, because description or speech that interiorizes entities with genesis and destination, content and limits of possibility, is the language of knowledge and the limited syntax of experience. If we can speak we speak “as” subjects. Foucault claims that speech coming from the outside is a mode of desire because “one is attracted precisely to the extent that one is neglected” (31). As long as literature affirms and reifies the known, this mode of art denies us becomings. Speaking, hearing, and reading, as events of literary-affect, bring together a-perception, the fold, and becoming-inhuman. Encountering the outside involves the ecstasy of being neglected – of being present without being a recognisable presence – and this is precisely why Peaslee finds his body harassing when it coalesces his abstract consciousness with recognisable being.

The ethical relation to becomings through literature are measurable to the extent that we gift ourselves to the outside. Perhaps our coming to Lovecraft can reflect our opening to the outside. Yes, Lovecraft’s are “horror” stories, but the question is “horror of what?” or more precisely: how does negotiating inhuman becomings cause horror affects and what jubilant becomings-states emerge simultaneously? While not wishing to vindicate Lovecraft’s prose style, I propose that his act of writing may indicate that he is a plane maker. Deleuze and Guattari define a plane thus:

The plane can be a hidden principle, which makes visible what is seen and audible what is heard, etc., which at every instant causes the given to be given, in this or that state, at this or that moment. But the plane itself is not given. It is by nature hidden. It can only be inferred, induced, concluded from that to which it gives rise.… [The plane] always concerns the development of forms and the formation of subjects.

(TP 265)

The hidden principle, which for Lovecraft is his “cosmic” principle, is hidden not in the sense that it can be revealed. Its nature is hidden, and to speak of it produces a gate of the unsayable that is nonetheless written and spoken, and a gate of the incomprehensible encountered as a gate of the act of reading as an act of art. Lovecraft’s is a language from the outside, “a meticulous narration of experiences, encounters and improbable signs, speech about the invisible side of words.… fiction consists not in showing the invisible, but showing the extent to which the invisibility of the visible is invisible” (Foucault 25, 24). For Lovecraft the cosmos is a principle of organisation through which these intensities, forms, or what Deleuze and Guattari call haecceities emerge. The plane gives haecceities. Lovecraft’s stories become most abstract when he attempts to encounter the plane through the exquisitely minimal, imperceptible haecceities, but of course the plane cannot be encountered. Things emerge through the plane, but the plane does not exist unto itself. Deleuze and Guattari say of music that “there is a transcendent compositional principle that is not of the nature of sound, that is not ‘audible’ by itself or for itself. This opens the way for all possible interpretations” (TP 266). The horror of Lovecraft’s cosmos comes because “it” is not. Through access to the different organisational principles of the cosmos, his protagonists are faced with the truly voluminous and thus mind-shattering infinity of variations and immanent-interpretations (not reflections) of states of perception.

The reduction from the perceptible though nonetheless horrific cosmos – a cosmos occupied by monsters – reaches its zenith when emergences are almost imperceptible and the self is part of those imperceptibilities. An example is silence as a vertiginous “sound”:

For the first time Carter realised how terrific utter silence, mental and physical, may be. The earlier moments had never failed to contain some perceptible rhythm, if only the faint, cryptic pulse of the earth’s dimensional extension. But now the hush of the abyss seemed to fall upon everything.… But the moment of silence was broken – the surgings were speaking to him in a language that was not of physical sound or articulate words.

(Lovecraft, TGSK 524)

The cosmos is not the organising principle of sound. Instead, sound is one element of the real organising principle of Lovecraft’s cosmos, namely, a new principle of conditions of perception that constitute states of (if we can still call it thus) “existence.” The unsayable is expressed in the speech of Lovecraft’s monsters as the sounds of viscous bubblings, whirrings, chirpings, or the musicality of Eric Zann, whose “frantic playing had become a mechanical, unrecognisable orgy that no pen could ever suggest” (“The Music” 343). The visual, aural, sensorial and affective are non-differentiated and cannot be expressed. Lovecraft does not see this as a problem, however. His protagonists are horrified by what they cannot describe, not that they cannot describe it. Lovecraft compels an encounter with meaning that is not present but always to come, a waiting without arriving, so that the time of reading is one of delay without resolution. Just as he cannot speak what nonetheless demands to be expressed, so we cannot understand what is t being experienced hrough the event of reading, a voluminous void, an abstract materiality.

Cthulhu does not hunt. Although s/he (Cthulhu’s gender is not specified) calls to the Antarctic explorers, a key element of the horrors of the Elder Gods and Ancient Ones is not that they pursue mankind but that they are disinterested in them. Blanchot claims that in pure literature the writer is haunted by an ineffable image or meaning, that literature has no relationship with anything as a preceding “before” and is thus incapable of being a work “about.” It is, rather, a Mare Tenebrarum (sea of darkness). The work is always the beyond of itself, labyrinthine, “this attraction that carries it out toward a point infinitely exterior [which] is the movement that carries it back toward the secret of itself” (Blanchot, Book 90). The secret of literature does not seek revelation. The question it asks cannot be answered: “It was from the poets and artists that the pertinent answers to the questions came, and I know that panic would have broken loose” (Lovecraft, TCC 68). It is a secret that constitutes the work. Along with his protagonists, we meander around Lovecraft, but his is a labyrinth with no centre. In his tales, investigation, corroboration and comparison are always frustrated. Each event of writing and speech is incomparable to anything and thus its own opening toward the beyond of itself. The stories are not narratives as they seek no end, the speech silent and unheard because it cannot reveal the solution to the secret of the unsayable. “We constantly pass from order-words to the ‘silent order of things’, as Foucault puts it, and vice-versa” (Deleuze and Guattari, TP 87). The stories must nonetheless be written and read. Deleuze and Guattari point out that content is neither described nor limited by expression, but is rather expanded by expression. Lovecraft’s language encounters the outside of material content as expression and encounters self as an expressive, thus unspeakable, unspeaking but always expressing entity.

Gate 6. Beyond the Gates

Folding of desire for monsters is an invaginating turn of the libidinal band “where a second glance showed concavity after the first showed convexity” (Lovecraft, TCC 94). Leviathan, the supreme demon of The Necronomicon, literally translates as dragon-serpent from the Hebrew and probably derives etymologically from “liwyah,” that which gathers itself into folds, twists, and turns, and recombines. When it is encountered, the squid-dragon Cthulhu is “a darkness with a positive quality… It moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset” (Lovecraft, TCC 95). Pure colour from out of space or colour as phosphorescent intensity rather than hue; buzzing, whirring and recorded sounds which cannot be heard; and voluminous darkness are Lovecraft’s examples of matter that must be perceived alternately, in rudimentary resonance with Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming-colour, – music, and so forth. But while these offer lines of flight and alternate trajectories, what happens when the lines prevent perception through sensorial agitation? What happens when they instead cut along entirely different phyla, when physical and perceptive trajectories become gates? Peaslee’s “disturbances were not visual at all but concerned more abstract matters” (Lovecraft, TST 477). Can the protagonists be caught up without perception?

Lovecraft describes worlds becoming-fold and folding this dimension to reassemble all perception. “Lovecraft’s hero encounters strange animals, but he finally reaches the ultimate regions of a Continuum inhabited by unnameable waves and unfindable particles” (Deleuze and Guattari, TP 248). After loving monsters, Lovecraft’s protagonists achieve a particle perception, a flattening out of all time and space where, instead of the perception of a fold being perspectival for each fold, perception becomes total and simultaneous. Cthulhu’s “nebulously recombining” eventually achieves “eldritch contradictions of all matter, force and cosmic order” (Lovecraft, TCC 99, 97). “Men think of time only because of what they call change, yet that too is an illusion. All that was and is and is to be exists simultaneously” (Lovecraft, TGSK 521). The base distortion of the horizon into no horizon apprehended through any familiar perception reconfigures all angles of perception. Those who cannot cope become the atrophied Body without Organs, while those who allow themselves to dissipate into their dream worlds scatter into particles – a schizo-madness. Bodies are more than fluid, becomings more than alliances. The self goes beyond being a point at its limit, as Leibniz claims, to becoming proliferated points that are not mingled with other powers but are simultaneous. Consciousness (external apprehension) and perception (internal apprehension) are, furthermore, not simultaneous but non-differentiated, as they are from the consciousness of other particle-entities or forces. The Elder Gods are able to apprehend the infinite past and future in a vague immanence, but this seems more like an eternal presence than like contraction – “all that was and is and is to be exists simultaneously” (Lovecraft, TGSK 531). At the same time, memories that constitute the past self are ablated and fears of possible futures disappear. Peaslee’s dreams unfold in non-sequential sequence. Perception is defined as texture, and entities as partly matter, partly something indescribable as matter. Being “wholly and horribly oriented” causes Peaslee great trauma until he finds himself “in [his] conical non-human body again” (Lovecraft, TST 542).

As a demonic entity, “the Devil is a transporter” (Deleuze and Guattari, TP 253), and the gates through which The Elder Gods and Ancient Ones pass are powerful thresholds catalysing journeys, neither seeking nor sealing off, but present in immanent space and time. The power to act, to enter into relation, the effectuation of folding through relations of celerity, force and affectuation, is extended to a point of pure immanence, a trembling but not an atrophy. Demonic invocation, which traverses the fish-frog-winged-cephalopod, enters through the necronomic gates, doors which Deleuze and Guattari claim are a journey. Such journeying determines measure, like the political tactics of Spinozan mediative ethics, without need for referents but using symbols as variable signs constituted not by signifieds but by infinity. Like Gilman’s project of combining physics and mathematics with folklore and magick, these symbols are a mathematical language. Guattari’s languages of asemiosis in Soft Subversions – “like music, painting, mathematics” (149) – are separate from signifying systems born of capital, family, and church because “the [asemiotic] signifying script has not yet taken possession of the image” (151). Guattari poses a challenge here because asemiotic language is a language of liberation, not of Houellebecq’s nihilism, and it contradicts Houellebecq’s claim that Lovecraft was obsessed with the evils of the world which inspired his creation of evil interior worlds. That certain paradigms of modernity, especially, as Houellebecq points out, sex and capitalism, particularly horrified Lovecraft does however create connections and resonances with those systems Guattari maligns.

In his tales and The Necronomicon Lovecraft’s system is its own hybrid of art, philosophy, and science, so that the symbols are varieties without examples, variables of a process and variants of chaos. The symbols of The Necronomicon are steps more than symbols, variations that range toward becoming-imperceptible through losing the need for symbols to be of anything. They are not exemplary; instead of referring to memories or to futures they refer to a loosening of form, place, state, and belonging. These symbols unlock a gate, “not indeed the Ultimate Gate, but one leading from Earth and time to that extension of Earth which is outside time, and from which in turn the Ultimate Gate leads fearsomely and perilously to the Last Void which is outside all earths and all time” (Lovecraft, TGSK 516-17). The Necronomic symbols extend beyond an incremental journey, creating a palimpsest (or a palimpsest, neither increasing nor decreasing but converging) which extends out toward the fifth, sixth and n dimensions. We can understand these dimensions, with the aid of a hint of which Carter receives, as a plane of consistency (Deleuze and Guattari, TP 251). In “Call of Cthulhu” “Johansen swears he was swallowed up by an angle… an angle which was acute but behaved as if it were obtuse” (Lovecraft 96). His (admittedly non-consensual) pact with the demon Cthulhu is a pact with the fourth order of sorcery, that of creating new formations of imperceptible plane-packs, but at the limit in Lovecraft, these formations are simultaneously everything and nothing – “abysses… by no means vacant but crowded” (Lovecraft, DWH 311).

Cthulhu calls, but the Mad Arab gives us The Necronomicon to call to the Ancient Ones, evincing an irresistible fold of desire already mobilised, but seen through a confusion of forms and qualities – variants which create a desire “of the sensory, a being of sensation, on an anorganic plane of composition that is able to restore the infinite” (Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 202-203). Michel Serres claims sense is the only constant when chaos is redeemed from being repetitive disorder to being a limit (146). Carter passes

amidst [both through and around] backgrounds of other planets and systems and galaxies and cosmic continua; spores of eternal life drifting from world to world, universe to universe, yet all equally himself… His self had been annihilated and yet he – if indeed there could, in view of that utter nullity of individual existence, be such a thing as he – was equally aware of being in some inconceivable way a legion of selves.

(Lovecraft, TTGSK, 526-527)

The localism of the Carter-facet or Carter-fragment is a variety of desire that exploits the inevitable infinity of desire, but most enigmatically in Lovecraft, that exploits desire for the aberrant in the move toward becoming-infinite. This becoming is not immortality though. Just as Deleuze and Guattari affirm becoming has neither origin nor destination, nor even “an absence of an origin” (TP 293), so Carter’s becoming implies neither immortality nor lack of immortality. In this way Lovecraft’s protagonists move from becomings, to molecular perception, toward a state of pure existence-perception outside of both linearity (time) and aspectival apprehension (space), a multiple and infinite unification, becoming-gods as the Elder Gods, the pure “one.” Lovecraft desperately attempts to describe Carter’s infinity as terrestrial/non-terrestrial, living/dead, many headed, many tentacled, but he cannot describe it because it is neither perceivable nor conceivable. The best we can have is an encounter with the perception of the imperceptible: the non-binary that Deleuze and Guattari call the Dogon, and that Lovecraft might have called the post-Dagon egg.

Deleuze and Guattari tell us that “minor authors are foreigners in their own tongue. If they are bastards, if they experience themselves as bastards, it is due not to a mixing or intermingling of languages but rather to a subtraction and variation of their own language achieved by stretching tensors through it” (TP 105). The difficulty in placing Lovecraft within one (or any) “appropriate” genre reflects his characters’ trauma at finding they are both bastards without human genealogy and progeny of collective, unseen, and a-genus monster gods. It can be argued that Lovecraft’s literary forefathers, just as his protagonists’ outer-dimensional ones, are at once alien to him and unconsciously influential (especially in the case of, for example, Machen). Deleuze and Guattari point out that minor literature can only be found in what cannot be perceived but which can be accessed and encountered within this language. Rosemary Jackson argues that Lovecraft’s project “makes explicit the problem of naming all that is ‘other’” (39), citing Lovecraft’s claim that “I am not even certain how I am communicating this message. While I know I am speaking, I have a vague impression that some strange and perhaps terrible mediation will be needed to bear what I say to the points where I wish to be heard” (qtd. in Jackson 39-40). Interestingly, Jackson places the literature of Blanchot and Lovecraft within the same argument, suggesting that Lovecraft could be considered a poststructural as well as a fantasy author. In minor literature the “problem” of naming the other catalyzes a disturbance in language which stretches, contracts and turns the tensors toward a minor literature, precisely because the other, so ubiquitous in continental philosophy, is the minoritarian. Minor literature can access the variables and distributions that are and are caused by the minoritarian “as a potential, creative and created, becoming” (Deleuze and Guattari, TP 106). Lovecraft pleads for the reception of his language as a mediation rather than as a description. Deleuze emphasises that mediation is the point where truth is insignificant in the face of relevance and necessity (Negotiations 130). He also writes that minority discourse is created by mediators (Negotiations 126), among which he includes both the writer and the reader, or precisely, the encounter and the pursuit.

It may seem ambitious to suggest that Lovecraft could be useful for negotiating problems faced by feminism, postcolonialism, and minoritarian trajectories of desire. Just as Pelagia Goulimari attempts to rescue Deleuze and Guattari’s minoritarian politics from scathing criticism by certain corporealist feminists, so I suggest that the event of encounter with Lovecraft’s work is neither real nor fantastic, but is its own concrete, abstracting territoriality. Goulimari says that Deleuze and Guattari’s minoritarian politics might appear to be “totalising abstractions” that “ignore the concrete particularity of very different territorialities” (115). However, Goulimari argues that “Particularity manifests itself in action, in the various majoritarian and minoritarian processes at work within and between territories. Particularity itself becomes process and invention: invention of artificial territorialities and minoritarian becomings” (115). Lacking genesis and destination, family and familiarity, Lovecraft’s monsters are singular particularities, and each demands a mobile encounter that is unlike any other. Our encounters with Lovecraft’s works and worlds are frightening not because of their population but because of the ways we are forced to populate the vertiginous vectors upon which they launch the creative act of thinking through reading. Horror becomes ambiguous at best and trite at the worst; the political question is “of what are we afraid?” Becoming-minoritarian is frightening. The final element of becoming is the encounter with the imperceptible but nonetheless so terribly present, from which point we access the beyond-becoming, the absolute potential without any minoritarian destination, even though in becoming we know we will never arrive. Our encounter with Lovecraft’s cosmic horror requires the ethical turn that becoming requires, to be part of a community that is neither real nor perceptible but that irrefutably and (irresistibly – in reference to the crucial role desire plays in becoming) becomes our pack. Deleuze affirms that “whether they’re real or imaginary, animate or inanimate, you have to form your mediators… I need my mediators to express myself and they’d never express without me: you’re always working in a group, even when you seem to be on your own” (Negotiations 125). When our pack is defined by movement, quality, and the capacity to perceive their alterity, we are becoming-minoritarian. Lovecraft stretches this limit and finds therein both wonder and horror. In our encounter with this particular mediator, we express ourselves as limit-minoritarians; and through the terrifying creativity that Lovecraft’s work demands of its readers, we find an imminent opening out.

Patricia MacCormack is Reader in English, Communication, Film and Media at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. She is the author of articles and chapters on Continental Philosophy, especially Guattari, Serres, Irigaray, and Blanchot, posthuman theory, queer and perversion theory, animal rights, body modification and extreme horror film. Her work includes “Unnatural Alliances” (Deleuze and Queer Theory), “The Great Ephemeral Tattooed Skin” (Body and Society), “Necrosexuality” (Queering the Non-Human), “Inhuman Ecstasy” (Angelaki), “Becoming-Vulva” (New Formations), “Cinemasochism” (Afterimage) and “Vitalistic Feminethics” (Deleuze and Law). She is the author of Cinesexuality (Ashgate 2008) and co-editor of The Schizoanalysis of Cinema (Continuum 2008). She is currently writing on posthuman ethics.

Works Cited

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September 3, 2013

Basic Instinct: A Response to Ramadanovic

Judith Roof (bio)
Rice University
roof@rice.edu

In his timely critique of revisionist kinship studies, Petar Ramadanovic identifies “taboo” as the sticking point where the potentially liberatory value of such discourses disappears. Ramadanovic sets out to rethink taboo, hypothesizing that the “function of the taboo” is to operate as “a fundamental rule that makes sexuality” and “can, of course, be filled with whatever incidental content is politically possible at a given time and place.” “Taboo,” he continues, “is the condition of culture.” As a “function,” taboo separates the “orders of nature and culture and make[s] each possible.” As that “which makes laws possible,” taboo’s “function is unconscious.” Arguing that contemporary theorists discount the role of the unconscious and rely upon cultural, content-oriented models in their rereadings of kinship, Ramadanovic forwards an understanding of taboo as a part of a “reciprocal” relation with culture wherein the concept of “nature” “is created by culture’s separation from it.” Nature, according to Ramadanovic, underwrites our instinctive organization of sexual relations with the others around us. As he expresses it: “we can correct the basic assumption of cultural construction theories to say that culture is not a cultural but, rather, a natural construction humans make instinctively. Our most natural behavior is to organize sexual relations with others around us and to do so by imposing certain rules.” At the foundation of culture, then, according to Ramadanovic, is not nature, but instinct—the instinct to construct the sexual rules that subtend the culture/nature split.

In locating the impetus to construct sexual prohibitions as instinctive, Ramadanovic seems to be relinquishing any further notion of causation to the large, unwieldy, and ever-changing category of “instinct.” In so far as a notion of origin or first cause may not tell us anything anyway, Ramadanovic may be wise to jettison origins as a way out of the problem of how to alter cultural prohibitions in order to permit more diverse human sexual relations. But instead of rejecting causation completely, Ramadanovic produces an originary moebius consisting of the dynamic interplay of culture and nature, ending up at what humans “make instinctively.” Instinct, as usual, operates as a species of deity, absorbing uncertainty and providing a delusively specific “cause” when causal chains disappear. Instinct conveniently offers an expandable category associated with the “animal” as well as some “real” biological impetus into which human will, motivation, or any complex causality might disappear whenever our own inventiveness is exhausted—or whenever there is a programmatic need to locate behaviors, beliefs, formations, or organizations as somehow “natural,” and therefore proper, ineffable, and “real.”

Even if humans have instincts, positioning instinct as the culture-inciting impetus of human social organization itself participates in the same culture/nature structure Ramadanovic so rightly critiques. If we read “nature” through terms that are always already cultural, and if taboo produces a nature/culture divide, then “instinct” itself is produced on the side of nature as a part of that process. Instinct is as much a contrivance of the nature/culture split as anything else. How, then, can instinct become a species of first cause, an unconscious untouched by the processes of taboo (or the source of taboo), so that it can urge towards the construction of order itself? Is Ramadanovic saying that humans have an instinct for culture? If this is the case, what happens to taboo? Is taboo an effect of this instinct? Humans may well be animals, but humans invented the category of instinct to account for behaviors and processes humans did not understand. Instinct is, if anything, a cultural idea.

Ramadanovic’s essay raises an interesting possibility in its implicit comparison between unconscious culture-defining processes such as taboo, and the processes at work in the structuring of the subject. Culture is to nature as the conscious is to the unconscious in the subject; both are formed around a prohibition. If, as Ramadanovic suggests, theories of kinship and culture are also theories of the subject, then by this algebra the subjective unconscious becomes the impetus for the emergence of the function of taboo and perhaps the site from which we might understand instinct as operating. To push this point, Ramadanovic deploys Diana Fuss’s reading of Lacan’s theory of the subject as a “subject-position.” Having reduced Lacan’s complex theories of the subject to the notion of a “position,” Ramadanovic transforms positionality into a set of fields: sexuality, the unconscious (which he glosses as the field of relations to other subjects), and the ego (which he defines as Cartesian). The subject, then, is formed as such by the interplay of instinctive sexual material, the unconscious as constituted by subjective relations, and a cogito ego. This version of the subject nicely parallels the fields that play in Ramadanovic’s version of kinship, comprised by sexual instincts, culture as social organization, and the intellectual will by which the first two fields are occluded.

Although it’s a neat idea to try to locate within the subject the processes that Ramadanovic identifies as operating in the dynamic transformations of nature and culture, it relies again upon an assumption that there is an instinctive urge to regulate sexual activity as an intrinsic part of every human subject. This may well be why he chooses to deploy a twenty-year-old, very partial gloss of Lacan’s theory of the subject instead of going straight to Lacan’s theories of the subject, particularly as the subject appears in Lacan’s famous “Schema L”—”The Schema of the intersubjective dialectic” from his “Seminar on the Purloined Letter,” reproduced again in “On the Possible Treatment of Psychosis” in Écrits. Schema L offers a dynamic model of the subject as the inmixing of culture (or Other) and subject, conscious and unconscious “relations and associations,” wherein the “unconscious is the Discourse of the Other” (193). One set of relations consists of the speaking subject (Ramadanovic’s “cogito”), whose structure is produced by its being “stretched over the four corners of the schema: namely, S, his ineffable, stupid existence, o, his objects, o’, his ego, that is, that which is reflected of his form in his objects, and O, the locus from which the question of his existence may be presented to him” (194). What operates in this Schema is the signifier and not necessarily only the question of position: “The L of the questioning of the subject in his existence has a combinatory structure that must not be confused with its spatial aspect. As such, it is the signifier itself that must be articulated in the Other, especially in its position as fourth term of the topology” (195).

Lacan’s Schema L offers three terms that suggest the same categories Ramadanovic envisions as constituting the dynamic autopoeisis of culture/nature: “As support for this structure,” Lacan explains, “we find in it the three signifiers in which the Other may be identified in the Oedipus complex. They are sufficient to symbolize the significations of sexed reproduction, under the signifiers of relation, ‘love’ and ‘procreation’” (196). Although Ramadanovic might interpret the “Oedipus complex” as taboo itself, the terms constitute an inmixing of culture and nature around a prohibition. Instead of invoking instinct, however, Lacan notes that this kind of basic reality is unavailable to the subject: “The fourth term [“the questioning of the subject in his existence”] is given by the subject in his reality, foreclosed as such in the system, and entering into the play of the signifiers only in the mode of death, but becoming the true subject to the extent that this play of signifiers will make it signify” (196). Whatever the material “reality” of the subject in his questioning of his existence, that reality is only available as death. It does not operate as any sort of instinctive wellspring for the impetus to culture in the subject itself.

I quote at length not because doing so can clarify Lacan’s thinking as reflected in Schema L, but because the Schema and its explanation re-present Ramadanovic’s formulation with two crucial differences. The first is that the subject is structured in relation to the signifier, i.e., to language, to that which is always already cultural, even if that signifier is itself bound up in questions of sexed reproduction. The second is that the system forecloses the “reality” of the subject, a reality one might easily equate with Ramadanovic’s formulation of an underlying instinct to produce regulatory structures for sexuality. This “reality” enters only as “the mode of death.” To say that “reality” is “foreclosed” means that whatever else there is of a subject’s “reality,” it is not there or available to the subject at all, even in the unconscious; it is non-operative. So although Lacan’s Schema L is topological and does seem to involve something that might be construed as “fields,” Ramadanovic’s model of kinship/culture/nature ghosts only three of the four terms: the speaking “cogito” subject (Je), Culture (O), and the unconscious Ego produced as the reflection of the Je’s objects. Although the subject asks about its existence, that question is already posed in relation to cultural effects of the signifier.

In the end, Ramadanovic’s essay attempts to relocate the site from whence any culture/nature distinction derives, not only as a critique of those analyses of kinship taboos that want to alter content as a way to alter culture, but also as a reminder that there may be more mechanisms for investigation. Deriving culture from nature on the basis of taboo is analogous to (but not the same as) Lacan’s understanding of how a “cut” induces the unconscious in a subject (e.g. Four Fundamental Concepts 43). The analogy between the culture/nature dynamic and the dynamics of the subject enables Ramadanovic to relocate the source of taboo to an unconscious analogous to the structure of the subject and perhaps emanating from it. The subject, then, is reduced at least in part to a set of biological imperatives, one of which Ramadanovic hypothesizes is an instinctive urge towards sexual organization. If, as Ramadanovic insists, this organization has no specific content, the forms it takes must then depend upon what comes to the “unconscious” from the Other, or from culture itself. Taboo redefined, the problem of content remains the same. And the problem with relocating this into the subject’s unconscious “instinct” is that the subject itself, at least according to the Lacanian model Ramadanovic evokes, has no instinctive mechanism available to engender the organization he envisions. Instinct is merely a way of saying we don’t know.

Judith Roof is the author of The Poetics of DNA (Minnesota 2007) and books on narrative and cultural theory, sexuality, and cinema. She is William Shakespeare Chair in English at Rice University.

Works Cited

Lacan, Jacques. “On the Possible Treatment of Psychosis.” Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977: 179-225. Print.
———. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1998. Print.

September 3, 2013

The Non-Meaning of Incest or, How Natural Culture Is

Petar Ramadanovic (bio)
University of New Hampshire
petarr@unh.edu

Abstract

Using the theory of kinship as an example, this essay argues that the dominant understanding of cultural construction is inadequate. The author argues that recent cultural theory lacks an account of the unconscious, that recent psychoanalytic thought lacks a theory of kinship, and that both are in fact necessary for a post-structuralist understanding of the proposition that all social norms are culturally constructed.

Historically, the key terms of poststructuralist theory are the incest taboo and kinship defined on the basis of that taboo.¹ They appeared in a groundbreaking formulation in The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1935), in which Claude Lévi-Strauss, building on Freud’s notion of the Oedipus complex, revolutionized the understanding of culture. As he argues, culture is not a collection of habits, rules, and rites, and a manifestation of a national being;² rather, it is more like a beehive, a natural structure with a specific internal constitution that is organized around the incest taboo, itself defined as, on the one hand, a social norm created by man and, on the other hand, a universal trait that distinguishes our animal from our human nature. In his 1966 essay, “Structure, Sign, and Play,” Jacques Derrida objects to the restrictions of Lévi-Strauss’s theory, which stops short of decentering the Western understanding of culture insofar as structuralism replaces one organizing principle (collection, national essence) with another (taboo, kinship). For Derrida, at stake is the coherence of any cultural theory and its ability to fully explain the phenomenon it seeks to understand. Invigorated by Derrida’s intervention, scholars across the humanities have given his reproach particular applications. For instance, in an influential book titled A Critique of the Study of Kinship (1984), David Schneider argues that kinship has a limited applicability and cannot be used to understand non-Western cultural models. Schneider makes a case for an anthropology that would move from the search for a general theory of culture to documenting different ways of understanding how cultures work.

Following this direction, poststructuralist theory of culture created more inclusive, more just ways of viewing social relations, as well as a more nuanced understanding that culture is a result of complex networks of relations, not biology, than the one offered in The Elementary Structures of Kinship. But in suggesting that there are no restrictions on social bonds other than those imposed by man, the poststructuralist theory of kinship has also come very close to doing away with itself as a theory, because it reduced culture to ideology. This lack of understanding of what determines the nature of culture—why it is heteronormative, for instance, or what that heteronormativity means exactly—can be attributed almost entirely to the rejection of Freud, which unfortunately accompanied the poststructuralist deconstruction of Lévi-Strauss’s now classical theory of kinship. Due to the purge of psychoanalysis, the unconscious has played, since Lévi-Strauss, at most a marginal role in new ways of understanding kinship, though poststructuralism—feminist poststructuralism, deconstruction, queer theory, etc.—has dealt almost exclusively with basic social relations, which is to say, with various forms of kinship.

On the other hand, during the same period, poststructuralist psychoanalysis in the U.S. has also sought to redefine the doctrine in order to meet new ethical and political demands. As a result, we got works on psychoanalysis and feminism, psychoanalysis and homosexuality, many on psychoanalysis and the social, but we learned nearly nothing about kinship as such.³ So it seems our work is cut out for us: to bring together the main achievements of poststructuralism, namely, its resistance to heteronormativity, with the very basic structuralist claim defining the conditions that make any kind of normativity possible. At stake in such an inquiry is not a new notion of culture, but poststructuralism as such, because it cannot pretend to a theory of culture without accounting for that which makes cultures — and that is, from Freud’s and Lévi-Strauss’s perspectives, the unconscious.

In this essay, I return to what may be, in the context of the theory of kinship, a minor point in Lévi-Strauss’s The Elementary Structures of Kinship—the way he sorts out the relation between nature and culture—in order to borrow his rather simple and elegant way of relating culture and the unconscious.⁴ I come to Lévi-Strauss after reading an article that represents the culmination of the dominant trend in the poststructuralist critique of kinship, Rey Chow’s “A Pain in the Neck, a Scene of ‘Incest,’ and Other Enigmas of an Allegorical Cinema.” The analysis of Chow’s article should show why poststructuralism needs to be revised so as to include the unconscious in its understanding of culture.

The End of Kinship

Schneider’s A Critique of the Study of Kinship was a groundbreaking attack on kinship theory, in which he suggests that, if presented without bias, the ethnographic evidence concerning family relations in some non-Western cultures does not fit kinship theory and cannot be explained by it.⁵ He goes so far as to suggest that there is no such thing as “kinship”—not in the sense of the universal model of the nuclear heterosexual family in which marriage is a social expression of a biological law. In a recent article, whose thesis grows out of Schneider’s critique and addresses gay marriage, Judith Butler (“Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?”) is more moderate. She does not dismiss the term “kinship” tout court as a product of theorists’ ethnocentric bias, but instead calls for its revision, based on the understanding, not unlike Schneider’s own, that kinship structures are not necessarily limited to one (Western) model, and that they have historically taken different forms that should be recognized as viable and legitimate social ties. Accordingly, in an open reference to Freud, and alluding to Lévi-Strauss, Butler offers a middle ground between a rejection of kinship theory and the too-rigid insistence—characteristic of ethnography and anthropology before the poststructuralist turn that began in the late 1960s—that the incest taboo is a condition of culture:

If Oedipus is not the sine qua non of culture, that does not mean there is no place for Oedipus. It simply means that the complex that goes by that name may take a variety of cultural forms and that it will no longer be able to function as a normative condition of culture itself.… if Oedipus is interpreted broadly, as a name for the triangularity of desire, then the salient question becomes: what forms does that triangularity take? Must it presume heterosexuality? And what happens when we begin to understand Oedipus outside of the exchange of women and the presumption of heterosexual exchange?

(38)

With these questions Butler all but concludes that homosexual incest—and therefore the homosexual family——has finally become “thinkable” (Chow 125), which is the main claim of Rey Chow’s article, “A Pain in the Neck, a Scene of ‘Incest,’ and Other Enigmas of an Allegorical Cinema.” If the Oedipal triangle is to be broadened, Chow suggests here, Laius and Oedipus might not be antagonists. They may not have to meet in strife, fighting over Jocasta, but in bed, having sex with each other. Chow explains why it took so long for poststructuralism to take up homosexual incest:

In order to charge that what has taken place [between a father and son who have had sex] is incest, one must imply that one acknowledges the reality of same-sex sex (in this case, sex between two males); yet once that acknowledgment is made, the normativity accorded to patriarchal heterosexuality would by necessity have to become relativized, as would the purportedly nontransgressible boundary between man and woman, parent and child, mother and son, father and son that derives its status from such heterosexuality. The charge that this is a scene of incest would thus already contain within it the crucial recognition that both the categories of the kinship family (upon which the norm of heterosexual marriage rests with its set relations of filiation) and the categories of heterosexuality (upon which the norm of the kinship family rests with its set mechanisms of biological reproduction) are unstable cultural inventions.

(124)

In this passage Chow builds on the fundamental assumption that in patriarchy, as Gayle Rubin says in her famous 1975 critique of Lévi-Strauss titled “The Traffic in Women,” “[a] prohibition against some heterosexual unions assumes a taboo against non-heterosexual unions” (180). The logic here is that the prohibition of incest is the de facto prohibition of homosexual relationships because the taboo organizes sexuality around reproductive relations that require opposite sexes. In defining sex as a relation between a man and a woman, the taboo implicitly denies the possibility of same-sex sex and suggests that, strictly speaking, there can be no sex between members of the same sex, at least not in the same sense that sex between a man and a woman counts a sex. This is because, as Rubin points out, even when sex is just sex, “what counts as sex … is culturally determined and obtained” (32), and our culture privileges “reproductive” relations over those which are merely erotic.

The answer to the question of whether there is homosexual incest, in the traditional nomenclature, is hence a negative one. There is no homosexual incest, because the cultural and theoretical systems defined by the incest taboo do not even know the category of homosexual sex. And the reason that they do not recognize homosexual sex is, to repeat, that the latter is not reproductive. A relation based on homosexual sex cannot, according to this logic, serve as the foundation of a family and, beyond it, of a society. Such sex might be considered an abomination or, as in Plato’s Symposium, a kind of enjoyment and an expression of friendship, but it is not a relation that can generate offspring and serve as the foundation upon which a society can be built. Therefore, because it does not perform this basic social function, homosexual sex is not sex.

The incest taboo, on this account, is the keystone——the non-transgressible boundary, in the terms Chow uses——that holds together the culture of the patriarchal heterosexual family and the entire Western universe built around it. Its primary purpose is to organize sex on reproductive relations, and to present a social role (being a parent) as if it were equal to the “natural” ability to procreate. Question the heterosexual normativity and the entire patriarchal naturalist system with all its divisions and hierarchies, is, in Chow’s reasoning, undermined. The possibility of homosexual incest, then, according to Chow, entails the recognition that homosexual sex exists as a form of social relation that may serve as the foundation for a family. But also——and perhaps more importantly——recognition of homosexual incest leads to an understanding that all of our social norms, including the difference between genders, the ban on sexual relations with one’s children, respect for elders, etc., are themselves contingent, socially made, and have nothing to do with biology or nature. They are all unstable cultural inventions.

It is here, in this breakthrough critique of kinship, which insists that not some but all cultural norms are socially constructed, that we find the critique’s chief shortcoming, and the reason I want to revisit the current account of the taboo. If all cultural norms are socially constructed, they are not constructed in the same way, nor do they serve the edifice of culture in the same way or on the same level. It seems that for Chow, the taboo creates patriarchal social organization, and it also seems that the taboo could disappear, like other restrictive and discriminating rules that dictate heterosexuality. What this view obscures is that there is a significant difference between, on the one hand, the norms—foundational and unconscious norms—that make culture and, on the other hand, the cultural rules—patrilineality, heterosexuality, even the Oedipus complex, etc.—that are built on such norms. There is, in other words, a functional difference between that incest taboo that makes laws possible and the same taboo that is used, since Plato’s Laws, to shape sexual desire around “natural,” heterosexual predilections.⁶ Both are norms, but one’s function is unconscious, the other’s conscious, and therein lies the difference that cultural constructivism (of the kind presented in Chow’s, Butler’s, and Schneider’s work) has yet to grapple with.

Butler, who relies on psychoanalysis more than Chow does, acknowledges the unconscious, that is to say, phantasmatic, importance of the taboo but then mentions that the Oedipus complex can take other than heterosexual forms, implying that the “triangularity of desire” may not need to be heterosexual, or that it may not be a precondition of culture, but might be an optional formation that a culture may, or may not, follow, because she would like to allow for a multiplicity of foundational norms. Butler’s chief example when she attempts to show an alternative to Western patrilineal norms is the now famous case of the Chinese Na, who do not have the institution of marriage. Instead, as Butler’s source, anthropologist Cai Hua, interprets it, the Na rely on “night escapes,” when young women who normally live with their brothers visit young men from other “families” for purposes of sexual reproduction. In the morning the women go back to their families, which will raise the child as theirs. The Na do not recognize either the nuclear family or a figure like the pater familias.

What we begin to see here—in Chow’s equation of the incest taboo with an oppressive heterosexual norm, in Butler’s rather naïve reference to the Chinese Na culture as an exception to a rule posited by psychoanalysis—is that the critique of incest norms reduces the concept of the “triangularity of desire” to the “nuclear” family, indeed, to an Oedipus complex, which then leaves this critique with an overly narrow concept of the taboo (and, therefore, of culture as well). The nuclear heterosexual family is a recent, bourgeois invention of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, hardly a universal cultural formation. The “triangularity of desire,” however, has no necessary connection with the father-mother-child triangle with which it is regularly confused. According to Jacques Lacan, who developed this concept, it is the result of a prohibition. The third angle in the triangle is there to allow for the constitution of the subject, not simply to limit the access of the child to the mother and of the mother to the child. The father is only the most likely candidate in a traditional Western family for this function that is, in fact, unconscious and can be performed by any number of agents and agencies. Moreover, in Lacan’s theory of the triangularity of desire, sexuality, in terms of homosexual and heterosexual orientations, as well as gender are results of the triangulation, not its condition, as Butler and Chow after her assume when offering their views on how culture is made.

The River

Chow ends her essay by describing a new situation that emerges after a sexual relation between a father and a son is recognized as incest in Ming-liang Tsai’s movie The River (He liu, 1997). This recognition of father-son sex as incest, according to Chow, results in “the dissolution of the kinship system based on seniority and hierarchy” (135), and so patriarchy ends with a “dephallicized” father who loses his privileged position and becomes merely one among other family members:

Rather than being a patriarch in control of his woman, his offspring, and his household, the old man is a forlorn figure who at one point became consigned to a small room in the apartment, a room that obviously is not the master bedroom. He eats his meals alone (no one cooks for him), sweeps the apartment floors, and irons his own clothes.… More appropriately speaking, the old man is now an anonymous member of a clandestine sexual economy, in which his body, like others’, is a token of exchange—his penis is just a penis—and in which his age, rather than giving him special status, only means that he will become increasingly undesirable. Insofar as the old man enters the culture of the san wennuan [bath house] as an agent of consensual sex transactions, he is, strictly speaking, no longer a “father” with his traditional privileges and entitlements, but a (mere) peer to his “son.”

(135)

If Chow’s reasoning is right, patriarchy is a structure of entitlements. It is like the web of protectionism in ex-socialist countries, with the exception that patriarchy is an oligarchy of men and the system in a country like the former-Yugoslavia was an oligarchy of those who were “connected.” But if, conversely, this is not the case, if patriarchy is not only a structure of preferences and entitlements, but also the structure of the subject—if, in other words, patriarchy is also an unconscious formation—then this account on what homosexual incest signifies is incorrect and Tsai’s The River leads to another interpretation of the norm that it relies on when representing father and son as sexual partners.

Contrary to what Chow suggests, rather than marking the transgression of a traditional Western patriarchal model, the effect of the homosexual incest that makes the father become just another member of an economy, a mere peer to the son, represents simply patriarchy’s transformation from a feudal model, in which a man is “a patriarch in control of his woman, his offspring, and his household” to a bourgeois, twentieth-century model in which the patriarch gradually begins to play a supporting role. The River does not offer, as Chow thinks, a new economy beyond the Western Oedipal model, but rather registers the modern evolution of the head of the family towards a role more akin to that of an elder brother—think of compassionate conservatives in the U.S., for instance—which, in turn, supports new forms of the incest taboo. The function’s renewal and modernization is suggested already in the fact that in The River the character of the father is the only one of the family members not identified by name. He is, as for Lacan, merely the function, “Father,” not a fixed identity.

Because this is simply a transformation of the Oedipal model, and not as Chow assumes an alternative to it, when father and son recognize each other as father and son in The River, they immediately turn away in silence. For good measure, the father then smacks the son upside the head, emphasizing thus how different their relation has become. The implication is that they can enjoy each other’s bodies for as long as their identities are secret to both. When the truth of the couple’s social roles is revealed, just as in Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus, the knowledge reorganizes their entire universe and the sexual arena is immediately desexualized, which is to say, all feelings are immediately repressed. Just like The River‘s father, Oedipus too loses all of his privileges and entitlements, even his eyesight, after his crime is known.⁷

About the taboo itself, we need to recall here that it has been separable from the heterosexual norm (as were the social roles of “mother” and “father,” “son” and “daughter,” “brother” and “sister”) since Classical Greece, when the Oedipus myth was tied to homosexuality. “Pederasty” is as close to Oedipus as his father Laius, who, as Lowell Edmunds writes in Oedipus: The Ancient Legend and Its Later Analogues, was commonly assumed to be the first human homosexual (7). This mythic invention of male homosexuality takes place around a sexual crime. The rape committed by Laius will be the reason for Oedipus’s curse and, therefore, the cause for his murder of his father.⁸ As Jean-Pierre Vernant retells the story in The Universe, the Gods, and Men, Labdacus, Laius’s father, rules Thebes only for a short period and dies when his son is only a year old. Nicteus and Lycus take the Theban throne, to be replaced eventually by the non-Thebans Amphion and Zethus. Laius, then a young man, is forced to live in exile and finds “refuge at Corinth with King Pelops, who generously extends him hospitality and keeps him close” (155). The future king of Thebes abuses the King’s hospitality when he falls in love with Pelops’s son Chrysippus, whom he forces to suicide. As Vernant writes, Laius “courts the boy assiduously, takes him around on his chariot, behaves as an older man toward a younger one—he teaches him to be a man; at the same time, though, he seeks an erotic relationship with him, and the king’s son refuses” (155).⁹ After Chrysippus’s suicide, which commentators have considered to be caused by Laius’s attempt to gain the boy’s affection by force, the boy’s father curses Laius: “[M]ay you never have a son; if you do, may you be destroyed by him” (Edmunds 7).

This physical destruction of the father is repeated in a mutated version in The River in what Chow describes as a loss of entitlements. The demise is foreshadowed in the omnipresent symbol of destructive water that parallels the Theban plague: from Hsio Kang “playing” a corpse floating down a polluted river and getting a mysterious ailment from it, to the flood caused by a broken toilet. The destruction here, like the destruction of Oedipus, does not signify an end of a norm but the beginning of its renewal, resulting in the slightly different patriarchal universe defined, after Oedipus’s murder of his father, by among other things the repressed homosexual desire between the father and the son. The River is special in that it openly presents the latent Oedipal scenario, albeit for a short while, until recognition takes place.¹⁰ Then its father and son go back to the disregard that defined their relation before the transgression.

More generally, Chow’s narrow notion of the incest taboo results not only in a failure to address systematically the norm beyond and besides the bourgeois version of patriarchy and a narrowly understood Oedipus complex, but also in an equally narrow critique of kinship theory. It is on these bases, and for this reason—because the theory underlying the critique of kinship, as we see, does not account for the fundamental function of the taboo—that a selective return to Lévi-Strauss’s The Elementary Structures of Kinship, which marks the very beginning of the structuralist understanding of the nature-culture relation, becomes a way forward toward an understanding into how cultural construction works.¹¹

Symbolic Structure

In an age when most American households consist of one member or have no children, it may seem out of date to talk about kinship and family.¹² The family and kinship relations, however, are first and foremost symbolic, not natural or even concrete structures. Viewed as such, during modern times, that is to say within last two hundred years, family has become more important, not less. This is because the society of which the ever-shrinking modern family is a basic unit, the nation-state, has itself become more like the family than the feudal kingdom could ever have been. Since the eighteenth century, the so-called father- or motherlands (and their institutions, like schools, hospitals, prisons) have assumed the family’s traditional attributes as well as some of the roles that a weakened and decentered familial structure could no longer support. If in contemporary society something we might call the content of the taboo has changed as well, this is because with the disintegration of the patriarchal family, the regulation of sexuality is more and more a matter of written laws and less and less of unwritten taboos and social mores. Thus, on the one hand, today there is a loosening of restrictions on private relations among consenting adults, going so far as to include the possibility of legalizing sexual relations between blood-relatives. As a result, various “new” rules have become thinkable, homosexual incest being only one among many.¹³ On the other hand, there is an ever more vigilant policing of families and of the relations resembling parent-child model including but not limited to caretaker/dependent, teacher/student, overseer/employee, et cetera. The new rules are accompanied with an extension of the period of special protection, namely, adolescence, to almost a decade beyond the age of physical sexual maturity.

This does not mean that I entirely disagree with Chow’s critique of Lévi-Strauss’s kinship theory. Chow is right to insist on the contingency of cultural norms. She is right to claim that some Western patriarchal heterosexual norms are not applicable universally, across time and space. For instance, Lévi-Strauss’s notion of the exchange of women, which itself supposes that fatherhood defines a family (and therefore makes it possible for women to be “exchangeable” between families), is neither universal nor the only way to explain social ties. This familiar configuration is, indeed, an unstable cultural invention. Besides relations of “blood,” there are also many other kinds of bonds that connect people and form cultures, without necessarily revolving around or including the nuclear family, fathers, or the heterosexual norm. However, from these discoveries of other ways to understand what culture is it does not follow that the fundamental prohibition is on its way to “extinction” (Chow 133), or that “incest” is thinkable only as a vestige of “ethnocentrism,” in Chow’s repetition of David Schnieder’s most serious complaint (134). This is because the incest prohibition is not only a cultural norm. As a prohibition, it is also a function that makes culture possible. The taboo is the invention upon which the notion of culture (and therefore the notion of change, ethnocentrism, deconstruction, etc.) rests. By this I mean, as I try to demonstrate below, that the taboo is not only, or primarily, a particular rule banning sex within the nuclear family, it is a “taboo,” a fundamental rule that makes sexuality. The taboo can, of course, be filled with whatever incidental content is politically possible at a given time and place. Na women can be banned from having sex with their brothers just as Western men can be banned from having sex with their fathers and sons.

In the U.S., as public morality becomes more accepting of different sexualities and the heterosexual norm gives way to different normativities, the incest taboo does not simply disappear. It shifts, as I suggested already. As a result, not only police, but doctors and teachers, our colleagues at work, and other professionals who have insight into our private lives are recruited in defense of the new taboo. The reason for this transformation, to repeat, is not that the incest taboo is weakening, but that culture is changing. As a part of this process, the taboo is recontextualized, and its content is adapted to fit the new constructions of reality without any alterations in its fundamental, unconscious function.

In the following selective reading of Lévi-Strauss, I offer the basic theory of the prohibition as I try to explain in which sense the taboo is the condition of culture.

Lévi-Strauss

Lévi-Strauss begins his argument about the elementary structures of kinship by distinguishing between universal traits in human cultures, which are natural, and norms, which are culturally specific. He then identifies the prohibition of incest, calling it the one universal norm that “could not be ascribed accurately to either one or the other” category (25). This norm is natural in the sense that all cultures seem to adhere to it, and it is cultural because, obviously, it is a social norm defined by man. The meaning of this proposition hinges entirely on how we understand the latter part, that incest is a social norm made by man. There are, in short, two possibilities. One, used by Schneider and his poststructuralist followers, is to take Lévi-Strauss’s words to refer to customs created as a part of a more or less conscious process of defining rules and creating traditions. Lévi-Strauss himself sees the norm this way, but not only this way. For him, this semi-conscious process of definition and redefinition is only a secondary role the taboo—as a taboo—plays. Drawing on psychoanalysis, Lévi-Strauss first argues that the norm creates man as distinct from other animals. This is the fundamental function of the taboo whose mere existence signals that humans are creatures unlike other animals because they regulate their sexuality using norms. The taboo thus turns human sexual instinct into what Lacan calls drive—drive is different from instinct precisely because it is regulated by changeable rules.¹⁴

For Schneider, in contrast to Lévi-Strauss, the incest taboo has merely conscious effects. Its content is known by all members of a community; otherwise, as Schneider reasons, it would not be a taboo. As he writes in an essay titled “The Meaning of Incest,” the taboo defines where our primary socialization unit ends and the secondary units begin. Its sole purpose is to separate the nuclear family from the domain of permitted sexual partners. As such, the taboo regulates the relations within the family, differentiates its generations, and limits the sexual rights of the father while, at the same time, shoring up his power. If, on this way of thinking, the taboo restricts his rights, on the other hand, it grounds the father’s privileged position in the collective interest of the family members by giving the children (and the mother) a stake in maintaining the hierarchy that protects them against the first (namely, sexual) violation. Because of the taboo, the father is seen as the protector of a certain order and the one who adequately represents it.

For Chow, as for Schneider, such a nuclear family is a Western invention applicable only to certain civilizational and historical models. When these models are outlived, the taboo and the nuclear family no longer have the primary role and are giving way to other social norms and bonds. As a result, the father is becoming more like other members of the family. He is reduced from being the pater familias to being just a male member.

For Lévi-Strauss, as we see in the introduction to The Elementary Structures of Kinship, the primary role of the taboo is not to organize social ties, but to define culture as such. He explains that sexuality gives the varying content to the taboo because the sexual instinct is our only social instinct—hunger, in contrast, does not require another human being to be felt or satisfied. He says, for instance, “if the regulation of relations between the sexes represents an overflow of culture into nature, in another way sexual life is one beginning of social life in nature, for the sexual is man’s only instinct requiring the stimulation of another person” (12). Understood this way, the incest prohibition is the fundamental social rule because human sexuality exists in a social mode, and whatever rule regulates the way people organize the social bonds that make them into subjects must also regulate the condition for the possibility of their becoming subjects. Thus, as Lévi-Strauss offers in his formula, the taboo is the norm that allows for the transformation of “nature” into culture. It separates the human from the animal state of our evolution, and sets our sexuality on a separate track from the biological instinct.

The incest prohibition in the form of a ban on the father having sex with his daughter is only one possible content that can be attached to the fundamental taboo. The taboo as such neither has nor needs any content. It is differentiated as a function—its function being to separate the orders of nature and culture and make each possible. As Lévi-Strauss says, the taboo is that cultural norm “where nature transcends itself,” evolves into the self-legislating system we call culture, and allows the new order to superimpose itself over the old one (25). By “superimpose” Lévi-Strauss means that the new code is rewriting and reshaping the old one. Such culture is the realization of this animal’s nature, and this animal’s nature is manifested as a superimposition of its own constructs over, and as, its “nature.” The relationship between culture and the taboo, hence, does not go in one direction, as Schneider assumes. It is, rather, reciprocal. Culture constitutes the origin of the prohibition, and the prohibition provides the condition of possibility for culture’s differentiation from nature. Because these are reciprocal relations, there is no such thing as nature as such, there is only “nature,” which is created by culture’s separation from it. At the same time, there can be no such thing as “pure” cultural construction, because culture needs a source for itself, which it finds in the human nature.

This distinction of nature from culture is a universal trait and because it is a universal trait all human cultures are organized around restrictions on sexual relations. Whether the ban includes the mother, as the first myth of psychoanalysis indicates, is less important than the fact that the norm is applied to sexuality. Legislating sexuality and building culture around sexual rules is, in Lévi-Strauss’s way of thinking, the most natural tendency of the human animal. And this is the simplest way to understand what the incest taboo and other taboos are: norms that bring together our social and our sexual beings. The understanding Lévi-Strauss thus reaches is that culture is “naturally” a sexual system, just as it is “naturally” a constructed social system.¹⁵

Based on this understanding of the nature-culture relation, we can correct the basic assumption of cultural construction theories to say that culture is not a cultural but, rather, a natural construction humans make instinctively. Our most natural behavior is to organize sexual relations with others around us and to do so by imposing certain rules. Through this process of rewriting or substitution of nature with culture, “natural” roles become defined by custom. A female human becomes “mother,” a male “father,” where “father” and “mother” are both, and equally so, what Lévi-Strauss calls social relationships (30). Or, as the case may be, the female becomes a “father” as she assumes a specific function (itself defined by the history of its relations) within the social web.¹⁶ In such a constellation, because as a norm it is first defined through its function, the incest taboo can be assigned just about any content, even content that has no apparent relation to sex. The grounding function of the taboo, however, is always the same—it makes the regulation of sexuality and the organization of social structures into one and the same process.

The fact that the function, not the content, is the primary definition of the taboo, implies also that the taboo can be broken without permanent damage to the group it defines. A transgression of the ban still confirms the basic function of the taboo, that sexuality is regulated and that society is organized based on sexual rules.

This understanding of kinship has to part ways with Lévi-Strauss by the third chapter of The Elementary Structures of Kinship, where he turns his attention away from the fundamental principles and toward the different historical contents the taboo has had in organizing the nature/culture opposition—when he says, for instance, that “the incest prohibition expresses the transition from the natural fact of consanguinity to the cultural fact of alliance” (30). As Schneider notes, from this point on Lévi-Strauss operates with a reified notion of nature. Specifically, Lévi-Strauss assumes that (a) there is such a thing as a natural fact that was (b) at some point in time overcome in favor of a new, cultural organization. And so we can conclude that, in fact, in The Elementary Structures of Kinship there are two distinct theories involving the incest taboo. The philosophical one we followed above explains the origin of culture in the nature/culture opposition, thus demonstrating that cultural constructs have their bases in nature. The second is a naturalist theory. It concerns “marriage prohibitions” and is a variant of the theory of scarcity (32). This latter, ethnocentric theory (ethnocentric because it still thinks culture in terms of one, coherent system, not because it is Western) explains how human groups form kinships through the “exchange of women” and why exogamous marriage enhances the family’s survival chances. It is this “marriage prohibition” theory that, as Butler says (29), has been surpassed as a universal theory and is no longer seen as a norm-defining rule. The theory, however, is not wrong (when separated from Lévi-Strauss’s tendency to naturalize gender roles and sex), but remains one among others that can help explain how social bonds are formed.

The Theory of the Subject

What we thus take from Lévi-Strauss is a theory of the subject, which—paradoxically perhaps—the extant poststructuralist critique of kinship lacks. To be sure, neither Schneider nor Butler nor Chow would think of their work this way. They believe they have a theory of the subject contained in the assumption that the subject is a product of power relations and an ideological construct. Moreover, they believe that poststructuralism in general is a theory of the subject because for them its most basic goal is to show how subjects are produced. In Butler’s account in The Psychic Life of Power for instance, the unconscious is said to be a product of power relations. But for all the critique of ideology, neither Schneider nor Butler nor Chow can explain where this formative power, which is constitutive of the subject, of the unconscious, etc., comes from or what it is.

The lack of a theory of the subject is the reason why the critique of kinship treats all cultural norms as constructed the same way—eating habits, choice of sexual partner, what have you. We can easily demonstrate that this is the case by turning again to the same Gayle Rubin quotation that Chow refers to, and which sums up the poststructuralist critique of Lévi-Strauss thus: “Hunger is hunger, but what counts as food is culturally determined and obtained.… Sex is sex, but what counts as sex is equally culturally determined and obtained” (qtd. in Chow 134). Rubin is correct that what counts as food is culturally determined, but neither hunger nor food form the subject the way sex does. Hunger and food play a role in subject formation in the sense that their cultural determination—what we consider to be food—becomes a part of the subjectivity of the subject. Sex is unlike food because it also has a fundamental role no other instinct has. This does not mean that rules of sexual behavior are not culturally constructed. They are, just as Rubin suggests. But cultural construction is itself defined by, and grounded in, our sexual nature. So it is more likely that what counts as culture is determined by sex than the other way round—that what counts as sex is, simply and only, decided by custom.

We can illustrate the same kind of lack of the theory of the subject with another example, Diana Fuss’s influential version of deconstructive feminism, which builds on the same set of assumptions about culture present in Rubin’s, Butler’s, and Chow’s work. I choose Fuss (Essentially Speaking) here because she relies on Lacan’s theory of the subject and presents his account as compatible with Foucault’s, which is behind the extant critique of kinship. Briefly then, according to Fuss, Lacan shows that the subject is best understood as a subject-position:

It is especially significant that throughout his work Lacan always speaks in terms of the place of the subject. His subversive rewriting of Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am” (cogito ergo sum) as “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think” provides a good case in point (“The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud” 1977, 166). The emphasis in Lacan’s anti-cogito falls on the “where”; the question “who is speaking” can only be answered by shifting the grounds of the question to “where am I speaking from?”

Fuss then pushes the metaphor of place to its limit:

But it is important to remember that the place of the subject is nonetheless, ultimately, unlocalizable; were we able to fix the whereabouts of the subject in a static field of determinism, then we would be back in the realm of ego psychology.
(29-30)

The subject, as Fuss tells us, is displaced from the proper place it had as the Cartesian autonomous self capable of observing itself fully. That it is displaced means that it does not get its identity from within itself but from relations with other subjects. The position of such a subject is not fixed, at least in the sense that we can never be certain which elements determine it and how, and which ones do not.

The field of subject formation, however, is itself a function of another instance, not as unlocalizable and free-floating as Fuss implies. The subject-place is fixed in the sense that it is determined, in at least three ways. First, it is determined with respect to what this field is—a manifestation of human sexuality. Second, it is determined with respect to the instances that relate to one another in every subject-relation—namely the unconscious. And, third, it is determined with respect to phantasy—the ego continues to think of itself in terms of the same, continuous self of the Cartesian cogito.

Fuss is right that, for Lacan, the subject is a function of the place and the place does not occupy a specific spatial location—the subject is an effect of the interactions between shifting networks. But these networks do not take just any form. They are, rather, structured following precise scenarios of human sexuality, and so are our cultural constructions. The relations within these networks are fixed to, and orientated by, the unconscious that relates every individual to the Other and to every other. Fuss’s theory—like Schneider’s, Butler’s, and Chow’s critiques of kinship—neglects these restrictions. The exclusion of these determinations gives her the illusion that subject positions are interchangeable, which in turn becomes the basis for her further argument about cultural construction, that the essence of feminism is politics and politics itself is a matter of ever-shifting coalitions.

Conclusion

Rey Chow’s article, “A Pain in the Neck, a Scene of ‘Incest,’ and Other Enigmas of an Allegorical Cinema” expresses a generally accepted poststructuralist view that the new forms of the incest prohibition are now, toward the end of the patriarchal epoch, becoming “thinkable” as we recognize the naturalist bias built into certain Western concepts, and as we consider other norms besides those that sustain the heterosexual nuclear family (125). Strictly speaking, this is the case only with conscious norms or, rather, with those norms we have made conscious. The unconscious structure of the subject, however, is as little, or as much, thinkable today as it was when Sophocles wrote Oedipus Tyrannus. This is not because we have not yet, to use an old phrase, penetrated the darkness, but more simply because we have not stopped being sexual-social beings.

Derrida might be addressing this unconscious function that escapes us when he proposes in “Structure, Sign, and Play,” his essay on Lévi-Strauss and structuralism, that the origin of thought evades though even as philosophy is more capable of locating its origin:

It could perhaps be said that the whole of philosophical conceptualization, systematically relating itself to the nature/culture opposition, is designed to leave in the domain of the unthinkable the very thing that makes conceptualization possible: the origin of the prohibition of incest.

(254)

Poststructuralism has made the taboo more thinkable by revealing its origin in patriarchal or heterosexual or ethnocentric notions of family, as Chow argues. But as poststructuralism reveals this origin of thought, as it deconstructs Western metaphysics, it must also acknowledge its own limitation. It has to recognize that it too leaves something in the domain of the unthinkable.

David Schneider’s analysis of Yap culture in A Critique of the Study of Kinship is a case in point. Searching for a Yap self-representation different from the one his ethnocentric, Western methodology directed him to discover, Schneider forgets that the very notion of culture is what gives him the basis to distinguish between the Yap and the West in the first place, and sees relative differences between the systems as destabilizing the entire edifice of his scientific assumptions. He thus gets caught up in what Paul de Man identifies as revolving-door reading (“Autobiography as De-facement”)¹⁷ because he believes that he has applied too little deconstruction. As a result he tries ever harder.

Subsequent critiques of kinship theory, like Butler’s and Chow’s, follow Schneider into this revolving-door of cultural constructivism where all norms appear the same, forgetting that their own work is predicated on the absolute difference between nature and culture. As a result, they do not know what to do with, or how to explain, the function that makes culture, the function that Lévi-Strauss saw in the incest taboo and before it in the unconscious.

If we do not allow that there is a limit to what cultural construction can construct (and to what deconstruction can deconstruct), it is hard to see how our theories—psychoanalysis, deconstruction, anthropology, feminism, queer and postcolonial studies, or another of their hybrids—can approach culture and what appears to be a true heteronormativity, the one that has to do with the unconscious.

Petar Ramadanovic is Associate Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, Durham. He is the author of Forgetting Futures and numerous articles. The present essay is a part of his new project, a critique of post-structuralism.

Notes

This article is a result of my conversations with Catherine Peebles. I would also like to thank the Center for the Humanities at the University of New Hampshire for the fellowship that made it possible for me to write this article. I am in debt to Robin Hackett as well. Her comments on an early draft helped me shape the essay.

1. Lévi-Strauss’s theory of kinship is an offshoot of thinking about kinship found in early anthropology, notably in the discussion of race in, among others, Kant and Blumenbach. See, for instance, Robert Bernasconi’s “Who Invented the Concept of Race?”

2. For Franz Boas (The Mind of Primitive Man), “Culture may be defined as the totality of the mental and physical reactions and activities that characterize the behavior of individuals composing a social group collectively and individually in relations to their natural environment, to other groups, to members of the group itself and of each individual to himself. It also includes the products of these activities and their role in the life of the groups. The mere enumerations of these various aspects of life, however, does not constitute culture. It is more, for its elements are not independent, they have a structure” (159).

3. Works like Judith Butler’s Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death and Kelly Oliver’s “Strange Kinship: Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty on Animals” are among the important precedents, the former because of its contemporary interpretation of the classical model for family relations, thinking daughter’s ties in place of the father centered family common in psychoanalytic accounts, and the latter because it ventures into human-non-human relations, perusing the model–kinship–defined for human-human ties. Together the two suggest the extant trends in thinking about kinship.

4. In a recent assessment of Lévi-Strauss’s work, titled “The Future of the Structural Theory of Kinship,” anthropologist Marcela Coelho de Souza argues that “the present relevance of Lévi-Strauss’s work on kinship” lies in its explanation of the relation between nature and culture. She goes on to identify the most productive way to understand this relation, the one she thinks Lévi-Strauss maintains throughout his long career: in purely structuralist terms, a dualism of exchangeable orders, not a binary opposition. On Coelho de Souza’s reading, the incest prohibition is not only a rule banning certain marriages, but also a rule that places affinity, or sexual relations, at the center of the social network. As the former, it is a social norm; as the latter, it is much like a natural given. My claim is somewhat similar to hers. I argue that the relation between nature and culture should be seen first as functional, allowing for the possibility of culture, which can then be manifested based on affinity, consanguinity, and other givens.

5. Following this work, anthropology began to abandon the concept of the incest taboo as no longer useful. “Beyond the Taboo: Imagining Incest,” Anna Meigs’s and Kathleen Barlow’s 2002 overview of current notions of the incest taboo in ethnology and anthropology, gives a good sense of why these fields are moving beyond the term. For a brief history of sociological definitions of the incest taboo, see also Gregory C. Leavitt’s “Disappearance of the Incest Taboo.” Anthropology and ethnology, however, might be losing more than they gain by abandoning efforts to understand kinship.

6. The state, says the Athenian in Laws, should

follow in nature’s steps and enact that law which held good before the days of Laius, declaring that it is right to refrain from indulging in the same kind of intercourse with men and boys as with women, and adducing as evidence thereof the nature of wild beasts, and pointing out how male does not touch male for this purpose, since it is unnatural.

(Plato 836c-d)

Plato knows he can legislate sexual habits because, as he says, even people who know no laws obey the basic sexual social rule, namely the incest taboo (Plato 838a-b). This does not mean, however, as Chow assumes, that the incest prohibition itself contains the heterosexual norm. It means only that the taboo can be used to enforce such a norm to differentiate between “natural” and “abnormal” sexual behavior.

7. The reading that Tsai’s The River invites is a self-conscious and deliberate commentary on Sophocles’s Oedipus and the long history of its interpretations. Chow, unfortunately, does not explain sufficiently her choice to bypass this reading and its history.

8. In The Phoenician Women Euripides makes Jocasta say: “But the god replied: / ‘Lord of horse-rich Thebes, do not fling your seed / into the furrow, flouting the gods. If you make / a son you make your own murderer. Your whole line / will wade through blood’” (21).

9. See also William Armstrong Percy, Pederasty and Pedagogy in Archaic Greece. Percy attributes first mention of Laius’s pederasty to Peisander of Camirus, a poet who lived in the seventh century BCE (41 and 56).

10. Representation of the son’s desire for the father goes as far back as Ham’s inappropriate relationship with his father Noah (Genesis 9:18–27). See Ilona Nemesnyik Rashkow, Taboo or not Taboo (93), and Calum Carmichael, Law, Legend, and Incest in the Bible (16). As far as cinema history is concerned, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex (1967), which Pasolini regarded as his autobiography, comes readily to mind as The River‘s precursor.

11. In her “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?” Butler repeats the commonly accepted understanding that Lévi-Strauss’s view of kinship is “the negotiation of a patrilineal line through marriage ties” (15). She then proceeds to say that the views developed in The Elementary Structures of Kinship have been surpassed and that they are no longer held even by Lévi-Strauss (29). While this is indeed the case with some aspects of the theory of culture Lévi-Strauss laid out in The Elementary Structures of Kinship, the most radical aspects of his explanation of the relation between nature and culture still seem to be waiting for an audience.

12. The U.S. Census Bureau shows that about 25% of American households have only one member. Households with no children make up an additional 30% (Census 11). The additional challenge to the traditional family is soon to come from genetic biology already capable of artificial creation of unique, not naturally occurring organisms. It, too, will challenge the traditional family as a natural unit, in the nineteenth-century sense of the term “nature”–but not as a symbolic unit.

13. What I am trying to say here clashes with the idea propagated in, for instance, Yehudi Cohen’s 1978 “The Disappearance of the Incest Taboo” (Human Nature 1:72-78), which proposes that with the development of trade, the importance of the incest taboo will apply to fewer and fewer relatives. See also Michael Lindenberger’s “Should Incest Be Legal?,” a 2007 article in Time that examines the possibility of legalization of incest in the U.S. If my reasoning is correct, the incest taboo is not disappearing but is being transformed.

14. This understanding of how animal human instinct relates to drive might offer a way to understand terms of kinship between humans and animals, which is, as I mentioned, one of kinship theory’s current frontiers.

15. Carole Pateman comes to a similar conclusion in her critique of social contract theories when she suggests that the first social contract was between man and woman and concerned their sexual relations (The Sexual Contract). One major difference between Pateman and Lévi-Strauss is that the former sees the relationship between sexuality and the social as historical, while the latter considers it to be the condition for the possibility of history.

16. Much like human animals, other mammals develop sexually within their family. They do not, however, develop sexually based on certain adaptable regulations whose content can change from time to time and place to place, but based on genetic imprint, whose alteration depends on selection.

17. De Man’s term “revolving door” applies to Gerard Genette’s suggestion that a reading of Proust should not decide whether his novel is an autobiographical or fictional work and should remain within this undecidable tourniquet or whirligig (921). De Man’s point is that it is not possible to remain within an undecidable situation too long before a vertigo of sorts renders differences between the opposites moot (921). If we assume that all works of fiction are to some degree autobiographical, he says, we might as well say that none are. If we assume that all cultural norms are constructs, we might as well say that none are.

Works Cited

Bernasconi, Robert. “Who Invented the Concept of Race? Kant’s Role in the Enlightenment Construction of Race.” Race. Ed. Robert Bernasconi. Malden: Blackwell, 2001. 10-36. Print.
Boas, Franz. The Mind of a Primitive Man. Rev. ed. New York: Macmillan, 1938. Print.
Butler, Judith. Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death. New York: Columbia UP, 2000. Print.
———. “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?” differences 13 (Spring 2002): 14-44. Print.
———. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997. Print.
Carmichael, Calum. Law, Legend, and Incest in the Bible. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1997. Print.
Chow, Rey. “A Pain in the Neck, a Scene of ‘Incest,’ and Other Enigmas of an Allegorical Cinema.” CR: The New Centennial Review 4.1 (2004): 123-142. Print.
Coehlo de Souza, Marcela. “The Future of the Structural Theory of Kinship.” The Cambridge Companion to Levi-Strauss. Ed. Boris Wiseman. Cambridge: Cambridge UP 2009. 80-99. Print.
Cohen, Yehudi. “The Disappearance of the Incest Taboo.” Human Nature 1 (1975): 72-78. Print.
Critchley, Simon. The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 1999. Print.
De Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-Facement.” MLN 94.5 (Dec. 1979): 919-930. Print.
Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign, and Play.” The Structuralist Controversy: The Language of Criticism and the Science of Man. Ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1970. 247-264. Print.
Edmunds, Lowell. Oedipus: The Ancient Legend and Its Later Analogues. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1985. Print.
Euripides. The Phoenician Women. Trans. Peter Burian and Brian Swann. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1981. Print.
Fuss, Dianne. Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference. New York: Routledge, 1989. Print.
Hua, Cai. A Society Without Fathers or Husbands: The Na of China. Trans. Asti Hustvedt. New York: Zone, 2001. Print.
Leavitt, Gregory. “Disappearance of the Incest Taboo: A Cross-Cultural Test of General Evolutionary Hypotheses.” American Anthropologist 91.1 (March 1989): 116-131. Print.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Trans. James Harle Bell et al. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. Print.
Lindenberger, Michael. “Should Incest Be Legal?” Time 5 Apr. 2007. n. pag. Web. 12 Feb. 2011.
Meigs, Anna and Kathleen Barlow. “Beyond the Taboo: Imagining Incest.” American Anthropologist (2002) 104.1: 38-49. Print.
Oedipus Rex. Dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini. Perf. Silvana Mangano, Franco Citti, and Alida Valli. Arco Film, 1967. Film.
Oliver, Kelly. “Strange Kinship: Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty on Animals.” Epoché 13.1 (Fall 2008): 101-120. Print.
Pateman, Carol. The Sexual Contract. Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 1988. Print.
Percy, William Armstrong. Pederasty and Pedagogy in Archaic Greece. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1998. Print.
Plato. Laws. Trans. A.E. Taylor. The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005. 1225-1516. Print.
Rashkow, Ilona Nemesnyik. Taboo or not Taboo: Sexuality and Family in the Hebrew Bible. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000. Print.
The River (He Liu). Dir. Tsai Ming Liang. Perf. Tien Miao, Kang-sheng Lee and Yi-Ching Lu. Wellspring Media, 1997. Film.
Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory. Ed. Linda Nicholson. New York: Routledge, 1997. 27-62. Print.
Schneider, David M. A Critique of the Study of Kinship. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1984. Print.
———. “The Meaning of Incest.” Journal of the Polynesian Society 85.2 (1976): 149-169. Print.
Vernant, Jean-Pierre. The Universe, the Gods, and Men: Ancient Greek Myths. Trans. Linda Asher. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. Print.

September 3, 2013

Sex Without Friction: the Limits of Multi-Mediated Human Subjectivity in Cheang Shu Lea’s Tech-Porn

Jian Chen (bio)
New York University
Jian.Chen@nyu.edu

Abstract

Sex Without Friction focuses on Cheang Shu Lea’s science fiction porno I.K.U. (2000) as provocation to think through the limitations of social and cultural criticism that is premised on mediation. Directed by Taiwan-born digital nomad Cheang, multimedia film I.K.U. features a gender-morphing human clone, programmed to collect sexual experiences for the future mass production of sex simulation pills. I.K.U. positions viewers as spectators, users, and interceptors in the display and transmission of images and information as we follow the clone’s movements through a globally non-descript Tokyo in search of sexual data. The essay is organized into four sections or frames. The first section explores the debate on film’s lost specificity in digital media convergence. The second looks at the structure of feeling that shapes postmodern criticism on the dehumanizing aesthetics of postindustrial capitalism. Section three contrasts machinic forms of sexuality with liberal and anti-liberal conceptions of sexuality as an object and technology of social regulation. And the last section questions the presumed alignment between spectator and media apparatus in phenomenological and psychoanalytic approaches to film and video. Each section relies on the multimedia, machinic world of I.K.U. to bring into relief constraints on the notion of mediation under discussion—technological, critical, sexual, or spectatorial. The conclusion argues hyperbolically for the abandonment of reductive economies of cultural visibility aimed merely at rehabilitating the racially and sexually normative human.

Click for larger view

Fig. 1.

Scene from I.K.U. Human clone steps out into new world after opening activation scene. Depth perception is abandoned for surface cues.

Perhaps we still have a memory of sex, rather as water ‘remembers’ molecules no matter how diluted. But that is the whole point: this is only a molecular memory, the corpuscular memory of an earlier life, and not a memory of forms or singularities … So what we are left with is the simple imprint of a faceless sexuality infinitely watered down in a broth of politics, media and communications, and eventually manifested in the viral explosion of AIDS.

–Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil (1990)

But I saw at once something elongated and pale floating very close to the ladder. Before I could form a guess a faint flash of phosphorescent light, which seemed to issue suddenly from the naked body of a man, flickered in the sleeping water … With a gasp I saw revealed to my stare a pair of feet, the long legs, a broad livid back immersed right up to the neck in a greenish cadaverous glow … A headless corpse!

–Joseph Conrad, Secret Sharer (1910)

Cheang Shu Lea’s multimedia film I.K.U. (2000) is a sex-fest set in a future populated by sexually activated human clones and their male and female johns. Beginning in 2019, these replicant humans, or I.K.U. Coders, traverse the urban architectures of Tokyo to gain sexual experience for the projected mass production of sex pills. I.K.U. pills promise all the pleasures of sex without the physical friction. While the film introduces the Genom Corporation as the mega-institution that has engineered the clones, I.K.U. Coders go about their sex work without the materialization of any entity masterminding their rovings. Outside scenes of activation and deactivation and commands that flash sporadically onscreen, they seem fully automated and autonomous. As viewers, we follow the Coders as they mutate into seven different feminine forms, moving from one sexual scenario to another in urban locales like a freeway overpass, strip club, or sushi bar. While each sex scene occurs against a different local backdrop with a new type of sexual pairing, every scene repeats a cycle. Each begins with the introduction of the morphing Coder at work on the set and ends with a mosaic display of the Coder’s identification data and the amount of data collected in the just transpired sexual coupling. The overriding aim of these cyclical sexual settings is the accumulation of enough orgasmic data to download for the production of I.K.U. pills. The final product, however, never materializes outside a brief animated fantasy showing a vending machine selling sex pills. The entire film is a dream-series without narrative chain. And the enjoyment of viewing lies in watching the assorted contours of each sex segment, always quantified towards a fantastical target but never reaching it.

Cheang’s sci-fi porn feature is an unauthorized, unfaithful spin-off from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). Blade Runner depicts a techno-saturated, nature-impoverished Los Angeles of 2019. The city’s hollows serve as hideouts for a group of genetically engineered human clones, called replicants, that return to Earth to confront their corporate makers after their expulsion from Earth. Rick Deckard (played by Harrison Ford) is brought out of retirement to resume his role as a police agent (blade runner) who hunts down human clones. While attempting to exterminate the mutinous band of clones, Deckard falls in love with a more technologically advanced replicant by the name of Rachel. Cheang’s I.K.U. takes off where Blade Runner concludes, giving full “sexual” expression to the unconsummated erotic relationship between (supposedly) human and clone. I.K.U. echoes themes apparent in other visual pieces in Cheang’s repertoire. Taiwan-born queer digital nomad Cheang Shu Lea is known for her locally embedded, yet geographically elusive, film projects and net installations set in or at the waysides of Tokyo, New York, Taipei, and Paris. Her other feature films Fresh Kill (1994) and LoveMe2030 (2005), along with her cyber-installations Brandon (1998-9) and Milk (2004), share an attentiveness to media facilitated, racially marked sexual intimacies. In I.K.U. and other works, new information technologies and bodily mutability become the interchangeable tools and signs for the transnational dominance of commodity culture, corporate rule, and state-military bureaucracy.

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Fig. 2.

Scene from I.K.U. The film in digital video markets the story of its own completion, providing a direct “exterior” interface with viewers. Alongside these onscreen displays, a partial story “within” the film unfolds in non-linear segments.

Frame One: Tech-Porn

While Cheang’s I.K.U. is a pornographic tribute to the sexually ambidextrous body, the film could be more accurately described as tech-porn. The film is as much a celebration of the transferability of content across different mediums, as it is a pronouncement of liberation from biologically assigned sex. Before the first scene, opening credits have already taken viewers through a multimedia blitz that includes electronic grids, a sliding panel that reveals a woman and man having frantic sex, and video game consoles describing the I.K.U. pill/chip, to be produced and sold in tune with individualized preferences for simulated sexual experiences. By the conclusion of the first scene, I.K.U. has severed and reworked its relationship to whatever remains of film as a favored medium.

Cinema has been attributed with an enhanced capacity for realism, whether considering Hollywood narrative or its counterpoint in European auteurist film. The illusions of transparency and continuity in the Hollywood standard and what André Bazin identifies as “aesthetic ontology” in art house cinema all render the cinematic image a window into a re-imagined world.¹ In opposition, Third Cinema refuses both the illusionism of Hollywood and the aesthetic preoccupations of European auteur cinema in favor of a militant, often pedagogical ultra-realism that highlights the ideological workings of commercial and alternative independent film.² As a product of digital video, however, Cheang’s I.K.U. departs from realism altogether. At the closing of the first scene, the newly activated feminine I.K.U. Coder emerges as a superimposition of machine hologram and “live” human-clone body. Immediately following, an informational display identifying the version of the just activated Coder links viewers to a new scene. The images in the feature blend live components with computer generated imagery, making no claims to representation. And, geared towards the “net-surfing generation,” the images provide non-discrete segments that stream continuously through transitional links, rather than moving as a linear narrative through juxtaposed separate shots as in film montage.³

The digital image in I.K.U. tests the limits of what can be understood as an image. If the photographic and film image have been conceived as a visual mediation of reality that provides a re-imagined relationship to real objects in the world, the image becomes a visible screen rather than a transparent window in Cheang’s film.⁴ In the first scene in the elevator, viewers do not only watch the sexual activation of the I.K.U. Coder by an I.K.U. Runner, an agent of the Genom Corporation (cited as producer of the human-clone Coder). The Runner also speaks to us through a screen that becomes visible at the moment it is spoken to/through. Rather than providing a reflection of the real, the image becomes a screen that displays and transmits. In the segment following the scene of activation, the transformation of the image into an instrument for viewing and communication becomes even more visible. A different permutation of the originally activated Coder receives a command onscreen:

<your bio disk is now empty
take the New Tokyo subway line>

Sent on mission, the Coder, who is most accurately referenced by the pronoun “it,” gets on the subway and tests out its function through heavy petting with a subway passenger. It travels towards its destination, a strip club, where it receives the command to “dance. dance. dance.” At the club, the Coder has sex with a male john with other couplings happening all around. It racks up data points after it penetrates him and a female dancer with its morphed dildo-arm in a brief threesome. After the collection of orgasmic data, text flashes onscreen commending the Coder for a “good job” and directing it to the next location.

As shown by messages onscreen, the Coder acts autonomously but does so under direction and command. It is an automated instrument that seeks out and collects sexual experiences. The Coder’s morphing and moving body is the focal point of the image for viewers. But it is also the screen that displays, stores, and transmits each sexual transaction as information. As viewers, we are placed at the intercepting point of the image-screen that is the Coder. We watch, receive, and send images and information. Shot and edited using digital media, Cheang’s I.K.U. attests to the media convergence enabled by the computer and the Internet. Anne Friedberg contends that the inter-permeation of cinematic, televisual, computer, and telephone mediums and displays offers a new visual episteme. And according to Lisa Nakamura, the transformation of the Internet from a textual to graphic base and its fusion with video and television has contributed to the incorporation of the Internet into everyday life in the “post-Internet” era. Cheang’s multimedia film exploits the non-representational, non-linear, streaming possibilities enabled by digitalization to create a cyber-world of mutating bodies, sexual scenes that loop back or link up with slight deviations, and a broader network that transmits, receives, and stores data. Beyond utilizing the technological capacities of digital media, I.K.U. incorporates the loss of media specificity into its partial storylines. Media machines including television sets, cell phones, military goggles, 3-D projections, video cameras, and surveillance cams appear as mere props for the smooth transfer of images and information.

Cheang’s I.K.U. is a film in name only. It evokes film-like elements through story segments and images that provide something like content.⁵ But these semblances of film serve only to signal film’s demise with a digitally induced media convergence. The “death” of film at the hands of new media has initiated grieving for film’s lost specificity as a medium and disciplinary object.⁶ For instance, emphasizing existential and phenomenological approaches to media, Sobchack argues that electronic “presence” puts the lived-body in crisis (“Scene” 82). Bodily dimensions become mere “kinesthetic gestures describing and lighting on the surface of the screen” (81). Sobchack makes this claim based on a comparison to cinema’s ability to move beyond its technological “thing”-ness (referencing Heidegger) to present a representation of the objective world. The cinematic spectator experiences this presentation of a representation of the world semiotically as both subjective (spectator shares in presentation and representation of experience) and intentional (automated flow of experiences beyond control and containment). Electronic technology replaces cinema’s centered, subjective spatio-temporal relationship with the world with the dispersed, insubstantial transmission of world and self across a network.

In contrast to Sobchack’s mournful perspective, Lev Manovich views new media as the realization of cinema’s full potential. Cinema’s dream of producing a universal language has been fulfilled by the computer’s ability to remake the spectator into a user. The computer user not only understands but also speaks the language of the medium. Also, computer generated imagery and spatial montage enable more fully autonomous representation, beyond human-centered perspective. Manovich identifies new media as the meeting of two separate historical trajectories: computing technologies, which deal with the calculation of numerical data; and media technologies, which enable the storage of images, image sequences, sound and text in different material forms. New media describes the computerization of modern media forms (cinema, photography, radio, television, print press) and the translation of their representational objects into numerical data, made accessible through computers for media distribution, exhibition, production, and storage. For example, binary code replaces the iconic language of cinema. Although new media redefines and supplants modern media technologies, it also activates a return to cinema’s origins, for instance in the return to the loop.⁷

Sobchack and Manovich seem to offer alternating accounts of the impact of digital media on cinema. The former declares cinema’s death and the latter insists on cinema’s continuous recursion in new media. Yet, despite their different approaches, both media scholars emphasize the structural role of media technologies in producing, or even determining, a relationship between spectator-user and autonomous representations of reality. Sobchack expresses concern over the dematerializing and objectifying effects of digitalization on spectator subjectivity. And Manovich celebrates the heightened agency of the digital-media user in participating in a less human-centered rendering of reality. In both cases, media technologies are presumed to mediate the production of spectator and user as forms of subjectivity.⁸

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Fig. 3.

Scene from I.K.U. Feeling of connectivity offered in parallel speeds, spatial proximity, and shared image of outstretched hand, linking motorcycle to scene in van.

In contrast, I.K.U.’s multiple media forms exceed what can be understood through the idea of technological mediation. The multiple screen-images that permeate the world of I.K.U. seem to offer diverse interfaces between viewers and the film. Displays that look like game consoles, computer windows, and mini-cam views invite viewers to interact with the images and information that appear onscreen. But the interactivity promised by screen-images in I.K.U. give viewer-users the impression of having either too much control or too little. Viewer-users are positioned as both commanding and commanded as we intercept communications. Moreover, aside from giving the look and feel of interactivity, the interfaces are non-functional. The instantaneous speed and infinite connectivity of a hyperlink on the Internet finds expression in the parallel movements of a moving van, carrying a man and woman having sex, and a scooter, carrying two Coders (see Fig. 3 above). Scooter and van travel next to each other on a highway, with an occasional projected image from the van appearing on the motor-helmets of the Coders on scooter. The projected image looks like an icon-pointer. Kinesthetic movement between vehicles and the icon-pointer image offer game and net interfaces between viewer-users and the multimedia film. Yet, these multimedia displays never deliver any actual interaction between viewer-users and media. Realizing Sobchack’s fears, viewer-users, along with the data collected by I.K.U. Coders, are transmitted as additional feed into some mainframe that surveils, collects, stores, and sends information and images. Nevertheless, the subjection of representations of humans in the film and viewer-users to an elusive technological master-entity provokes neither utopian nor dystopian sentiment in I.K.U.

Frame Two: Human Structure of Feeling

In Scott’s Blade Runner, the closing scene in the elevator with Deckard and Rachel re-brackets the question that has driven the sentiment of the film throughout, namely the question of whether the ability to experience emotions confers human status to the corporate engineered replicants. In Cheang’s I.K.U., this question never emerges. Although the Coder shows signs of pleasure during sexual activation, these signs are clearly part of an activation sequence. The sequence includes being fed lines, like “Say ‘kiss me’” and “I want you,” that the Coder then repeats back to an agent programmer (I.K.U. Runner) of the Genom Corporation.

The Coder’s instrumental status as the product of genetic engineering and intravenously fed codes challenges David Harvey’s reading of postmodern affect in Blade Runner. In The Condition of Postmodernity, Harvey states:

Blade Runner is a science fiction parable in which postmodernist themes, set in a context of flexible accumulation and time-space compression, are explored with all the imaginary power that the cinema can command. The conflict is between people living on different time scales, and seeing and experiencing the world very differently as a result. The replicants have no real history, but can perhaps manufacture one; history for everyone has become reduced to the evidence of the photograph.… The depressing side of the film is precisely that, in the end, the difference between the replicant and the human becomes so unrecognizable that they can indeed fall in love (once both get on the same time scale).

(313)

As in many other cyberpunk science fiction films, Blade Runner introduces the ethical puzzle of dehumanization in the face of an ethereal capitalism that has imploded differences in space, time, and meaning in what Harvey calls “chaos of signs.” Technological advancement releases humans from the brute exploitation and error of human economic production and biological reproduction. Yet, the specter of exploitation and unpredictability returns with greater force with the unrestrained use of genetically engineered human clones. According to Harvey, in Blade Runner, the activities (manual, militia, sex, etc.) performed by the replicants come under question as forms of exploitation particularly when the replicants become humanized through the expression of feeling. In the case of Rachel, her longing for a family of origin and authentic human status gains Deckard’s sympathy and desire (313-4). Roy, leader of the replicant rebellion, narrates his experiences as an outsourced laborer with a mixture of anger and fascination. In Harvey’s reading of the film, the feelings of loss and longing conveyed by the replicants place them outside the speed of global capital and, however momentarily, on the same scale of time and space with humans.

Even more than the “structure of feeling” Harvey attributes to the aesthetics of decay fragmenting the post-industrial city, the structure of feeling he identifies in the replicants enables a tracing of the “hidden organizing power” of the Tyrell Corporation’s techno-dictatorship. For Harvey, Rachel and Roy subject themselves to the Freudian symbolic order that constitutes human social relations in their longing to be fully human. Rachel submits to Deckard’s desire and Roy to his maker. In both instances, desire brings grids of power into visibility and clone closer to human. In the last count, however, what fuels Harvey’s attention to the replicant’s approximation of the human is the desire to see a structure of feeling reignited in the human subjects of the film. As the mastermind behind the Tyrell Corporation states, replicants are more human than humans. They display all the trappings of humanness when real humans have lost all connection to these trappings. As Harvey suggests, the replicants of Blade Runner serve as signs that should lead humans back to their own experience of exploitation and their own history within symbolic orders of production and reproduction. But instead of reading the clone as sign, the clone is taken as human and the difference between the two “becomes so unrecognizable that they … fall in love.” As a result, the conclusion of the film for Harvey is “sheer escapism,” shedding all possibility for the revolt and rescue of humanity (311-14).

If Deckard has lost the ability to distinguish between human and clone, Harvey retains the ability to make this judgment. In a striking moment, Harvey steps outside the film to comment from the position of viewer on the film’s “depressing side” (313). In this move to mourn the loss of the human in the slide between human and replicant, Harvey preserves a structure of feeling external to the film. While the longing of the replicants remained essentially an empty structure that led them and, most importantly, humans nowhere, the melancholia of the critic as viewer maintains the hope of remembering and recuperating the shared origins of the human under the exploitative conditions of production and reproduction.

A reframing of Blade Runner through Cheang’s I.K.U. asks if anything other than an empty structure of feeling and human copy ever existed. The Coder is a figure for pure expenditure. The very contours of its body conform to maximize each sexual experience for its johns and for the intercepting gaze of film viewers. Each segment features a different mutation of the first Coder programmed in the elevator. Despite the Coder’s absolute use, its facial and bodily gestures are disconnected from any sense of depth that could be read as human psychic structure. Like the various consoles that riddle each scene, the Coder’s expressions during and after sex are flat icons for consumption. No psychic or corporeal space rests outside instrumentalization, where human subjectivity can emerge, however compromised.

The I.K.U. Coder’s affectless state of absolute use cannot be read as symptom. In Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson proposes:

Let us stress again the enormity of a transition which leaves behind it the desolation of Hopper’s buildings or the stark Midwest syntax of Sheeler’s forms, replacing them with the extraordinary surfaces of the photorealist cityscape, where even the automobile wrecks gleam with some new hallucinatory splendour. The exhilaration of these new surfaces is all the more paradoxical in that their essential content—the city itself—has deteriorated or disintegrated to a degree surely still inconceivable in the early years of the 20^th century, let alone in the previous era. How urban squalor can be a delight to the eyes, when expressed in commodification, and how an unparalleled quantum leap in the alienation of daily life in the city can now be experienced in the form of a strange new hallucinatory exhilaration … Nor should the human figure be exempted from investigation, although it seems clear that for the new aesthetic the representation of space itself has come to be felt as incompatible with the representation of the body: a kind of aesthetic division of labour far more pronounced than in any of the earlier generic conceptions of landscape, and a most ominous symptom indeed.

(76)

For Jameson, even the squalor of urban architecture gleams with the collapse of depth that characterizes the object world and the subject within postmodernism. In contrast to the depth-based aesthetics of alienation in high modernism, postmodernism is experienced as a free-floating and impersonal euphoria. A hermeneutic relationship to artwork and a metaphysical conception of the self no longer hold when all is commodified into flat images without content. Drawing from a Lacanian account of schizophrenia, Jameson insists that the world becomes a shiny film comprised of floating signifiers, disconnected from one another and from the intentionality of any subject. These dislodged signifiers give rise to a “hallucinatory exhilaration.” Older divisions of labor derived from a grounded organization of space and the human body itself no longer apply. A new division of labor occurs in the fragmented aesthetic of the “emergent sensorium” that Jameson reads in its nascent state in Van Gogh’s high modernist painting (58-64).

Yet, the depthless, floating signifiers of the postmodern world must be returned to a depth-model interpretation for Jameson. They are re-subjected to a symptomatic reading that traces the adamantly flat surfaces of the contemporary world back to what is Jameson’s primary analytic grounding—the economic world system of multinational capitalism. In the last instance, the hallucinatory euphoria of postmodernism must be squared with the “enormous and threatening, yet only dimly perceivable, other reality of economic and social institutions” (80, my emphasis). Reality creeps back in a second, less perceivable strata. This move, I would argue, is only made possible through driving a wedge between a euphoric aesthetic condition and a capitalist political economy imagined as anchored in the objective terms of production, or division of labor. Jameson essentially separates capitalist production from the slew of racial, gendered, classed imaginaries that enable the organization and extraction of labor, thereby reaestheticizing capital itself. Only by making this separation can Jameson continue to follow a tripartite order of capitalist development from market capitalism, to monopoly or imperialist capitalism, finally to multinational capitalism, in which “precapitalist” tributary organizations of capitalism are ultimately eliminated (78). Jameson’s own cultural schema of development from realism, to modernism, to postmodernism builds on this economic tripartite.⁹

While critiques of postmodern discourse are now familiar, I am particularly interested in stressing the move to retrace the symbolic orders of production and reproduction through unfixed signifiers that purportedly exceed these symbolic orders. Ultimately, longing for Harvey and euphoria for Jameson become signposts for productivity—the quintessential sign for the human. These postmodern renderings of Marxist analysis continue to re-inscribe the priority of the human subject and the human’s singular corporeal form against its objectification within relations of production.¹⁰ In I.K.U., the pure expenditure of the Coder is neither a condition nor symptom that can be traced to a more concrete reality in anything resembling a political economy. It is questionable whether the Coder’s accumulation of sexual experiences can be called labor, if labor is considered an objective measure of the embodied social output invested into a commodity. Laboring social body and commodity object cannot be separated when the relationship between the two is not production, reproduction, or even enjoyment, but rather the collection of sexual experience. If production in I.K.U. cannot be thought as a primary moment or space of social initiation and human subjectivity, conscious or unconscious, then the presumed temporal and spatial divisions between production, distribution, and consumption as separate moments and stages in a capitalist political economy are made untenable.¹¹

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Fig. 4.

Scene from I.K.U. Runner and Coder bound through the most minimal displays of agency and freedom in I.K.U.’s machinic world.

Frame Three: Machine Sex-Sexuality

The Coder of Cheang’s I.K.U. embodies the impossibility of a recuperated humanism in the face of technological dominance—a dominance expressed sexually. According to Michel Foucault, sexuality plays a pivotal role in translating sovereign authority to self-regulatory power in liberal democratic societies. For Foucault, sexuality becomes a mobile cultural object that aggregates and multiplies the fields of influence (political, scientific, and medical) that compose decentralized, liberal capitalist states. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault reads sex as “unique signifier” and “universal signified” that manages, enforces, and extends life at the macro-levels of society and species and at the micro-level of individual self. Sexuality as a pivotal target and mobilizer of knowledge and political mastery enables the redirection and transformation of the sovereign “right to kill” into the modern state’s “right to make live” the social body (Society). Echoing Foucault’s discussion of sexuality, sex as biological or phenotypical foundation and sexuality as internal truth of the self are conflated in Cheang’s I.K.U. Far from an expression of fact or intimacy, sex-sexuality is a mobile imaginary that mutates according to the external and interconnecting demands of an abstract network of authority that the Coder’s sexual roving connects up.

Whereas Foucault retains the body (as mass and individual) and interiority as the residual and excessive effects of regulatory networks of modern power, Cheang’s I.K.U. does not offer reprieve from the commands issued by its multimedia network. Sexuality in I.K.U.’s world expresses the non-difference between sovereignty and autonomy. The Coder’s drive to seek out sexual experiences and its performed enjoyment of sex seem to express free will and desire. Moreover, its mobility across different spaces and its bodily flexibility give the impression of autonomy. Yet, as programmed human clone, all aspects of the Coder serve the function of data extraction and accumulation. Also, the Coder’s movements are not only tracked and surveilled by a network of media machines, but are also followed and watched by film viewers. Wendy Chun describes the constrained autonomy experienced in digital networks as “control-freedom,” a new formation of U.S. political power facilitated and exemplified by information technologies.¹² Ultimately, the Coder’s autonomy comprises nothing more than machinic activities that give the most minimal outputs of liveliness: mobility and flexibility as individual freedom, connectivity as collectivity, extraction and accumulation as passionate experience. Rather than mourning the downfall of anthropomorphic life, I.K.U. seems to follow Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker in suggesting that human life as ontological “being” never existed outside minimal cues for “life,” including the barest signs of vitality at work in information technologies. And in I.K.U., the downgraded indicators of autonomous life are synonymous with command, reporting, monitoring, and surveillance by a multimedia network that exerts sovereign yet decentralized control.

In I.K.U., sex as binary difference between male and female, secured through sexual object choice, becomes alternating binary code.¹³ With an arm that transforms into a dildo-pointer, the feminine Coder’s entire body surface, beyond what is considered proper sexual organs, mutates as a sexual extension. It is a shifting transgender configuration of code and image, without claims to essential sex or stable concrete body. As J. Jack Halberstam proposes in “Technotopias: Representing Transgender Bodies in Contemporary Art,” the transgender body retains its ambiguity and ambivalence, irreducible to the transsexual body. The Coder itself is a multimedia network, receiving and storing input from, as well as sending output to, multiple synced sources. As a counterpart, the masculine Runner who programs and de-activates the Coder occupies the outskirts of the network. “He” acts as a direct relay between an unseen authority, to whom/which he reports, and the Coder in action. While the Coder is a product of encoding, the Runner’s body seems to be made of flesh. The Runner’s transgenderism is expressed through an undecidable body morphology in which so-called primary physical symbols of sex are indistinguishable from secondary indicators for gender. A bulge in the pants, like facial hair, only gives a cue about gender identity, without becoming a master signifier for sex.

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Fig. 5.

Scene from I.K.U. Virus Tokyo Rose transmits an invitation to an audience member as she performs her “Net Glass Show.”

In contrast to Coder and Runner, the Tokyo Rose Virus seems retrograde in its sexual embodiment and activities. It takes stable female bodily form, without prosthetics, ambiguities, morphs, and blends. And its communication style is neither a network with multiple interfaces nor two-way relay, both of which operate through the distribution of technological authority. Instead, Tokyo Rose uses telepathic lure and projection to ensnare Coder and viewers. The segment featuring Tokyo Rose’s “Net Glass Show” opens with a view from above while a pink Tokyo spins in a net below, before the screen becomes visible as green grid with a target mark at center (see Fig. 5 above). The screen-grid hones in and out of the faces of Tokyo’s audience of suited men wearing 3-D goggles. Viewers get a two-part panoramic view of a pink image of Tokyo licking a dildo in its net, superimposed partially onto a green image of the goggled audience below. The view becomes visible as screen once again as the green grid targets an audience member, the only masculine I.K.U. Coder in the film. After a few spliced segments, the screen-grid refocuses on the masculine Coder as it licks its fingers. A text-box appears mid-screen-grid:

“You are a special guest tonight
Please come to the backstage
Tokyo Rose”

Pulled by the invitation, the masculine Coder (and viewers who lurk in this exchange) meets Tokyo Rose “backstage,” where they have sex among moving metal screen walls and an analogue telephone switchboard. When the Coder penetrates the Virus, its body disintegrates into scrambled codes, and it is deactivated and disconnected from the I.K.U. network. If the Coder is a free-roving instrument within a decentralized, commanding network and the Runner a relay between the network’s “inside” and “outside,” the Virus lodges itself in the network’s core and reveals the vulnerability and limitations of the network’s hardware. The Virus reveals the cables and circuit boards that comprise the otherwise disembodied notion of cyberspace.¹⁴ All three protagonists inhabit the ecosystem of the I.K.U. network. But only the Virus inserts tension into the system as a byproduct that infiltrates and hijacks the multimedia network towards non-productive dysfunction.¹⁵

In Cheang’s I.K.U., sex-sexuality is synonymous with the barest operations of a machinic system. Without feeling, the film cancels out any claim to sexual subjectivity or “bodies and pleasures” reserved as yet-unintelligible potential for counter-hegemonic opposition.¹⁶ Identical to multimedia technologies in I.K.U., sex-sexuality in the film provides interfaces with connectivity, mobility, accumulation, control, and transmission without the possibility of actual interaction. Sex cannot mediate the relationship between individuals and between community and individual across public/private divides. In “Sex in Public,” Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner argue for the countercultural potential of queer public sex, where queer is taken to embody all sexual practices, including failed or queered heterosexual ones, that do not fit the privatized mold of heteronormative domesticity. For Berlant and Warner, the ephemeral intimacies of queer public sex critique and cathect the heteronormative lodging of sexuality as the essential property of personhood and the reproductive seed for normative family and national community. They propose:

Queer and other insurgents have long striven, often dangerously or scandalously, to cultivate what good folks used to call criminal intimacies. We have developed relations and narratives that are only recognized as intimate in queer culture: girlfriends, gal pals, fuckbuddies, tricks. Queer culture has learned not only how to sexualize these and other relations, but also how to use them as a context for witnessing intense and personal affect while elaborating a public world of belonging and transformation. Making a queer world has required the development of kinds of intimacy that bear no necessary relation to domestic space, to kinship, to the couple form, to property, or to the nation. These intimacies do bear a necessary relation to a counterpublic—an indefinitely accessible world conscious of its subordinate relation.

(199)

Berlant and Warner argue that the fleeting material of queer intimacy is criminal in relationship to heteronormative forms of intimacy, which are secured discursively by narratives of sentiment and also materially by law, domestic architecture, and the zoning of work and politics as non-intimate realms (203). Criminal queer intimacies have affective impact and build collective ties, even a counterpublic, without the anchors amassed by heteronormative meta-culture.

In the world of I.K.U., however, the public/private divide presumed by Berlant and Warner does not exist. If sex can no longer be considered host to any intimate material, subordinate or dominant, the publics associated with economic and political collectivities, exchanges, and spaces are also devoid of material. I.K.U.’s future envisions the local as a series of close-ups in which the signs of a specialized locale and sexual experience underway give viewers a sense of peering into an intimate, subterranean location. In one segment, a Coder runs through an empty underground garage where it encounters a male hustler orally servicing a male drug dealer inside a moving car. Getting in the car, the Coder and the two men drive past a touring white heterosexual couple, who demand better quality (non-I.K.U.) sex pills, and two ecstatic drag queens in an elevated parked convertible. All indicators point to a subcultural location, including the literal underground placement of the garage and references to informal economies of gay cruising, gay hustling, drug dealing, drag performance, and drug rolling.

Yet, no local scene emerges as a dense site of cultural practices and intimacies, giving neither a microcosm of a larger social world nor an alternative world. Each location is an installation made up of markers for a generic setting, like the parking indicators on the walls, ceiling, and floor of the garage, and markers for encounters that appear intimate through intense expressions, gestures, and actions with only incidental meaning. The Coder runs with urgency, but without purpose, through the garage. The drug dealer drives in circles inside the garage without motive other than prolonging a blowjob, flimsy encounters with buyers (no money is ever exchanged), or a change in scenery. These signs for cultural and geographic specificity have no significance beyond providing surface cues for local scale. Cheang’s I.K.U. seems to suggest the ephemeral, inauthentic nature of expressions of geographic and cultural specificity in the face of a more generalized global drive towards the appearance of motility and exchange. Emphasizing the imbrication of local and transnational scales, Arjun Appadurai’s Fear of Small Numbers looks at the co-dependent relationship between the “cellular” organization of global capitalism and a “vertebrate” structure of nation-states in contributing to ethnic strife and terrorism.

Without authentic delineation between private and public spaces and exchanges, the Habermasian private/public distinction appropriated and re-asserted by Berlant and Warner is moot. As illustrated in their analysis of a performance at a local gay bar featuring erotic vomiting, queer counterpublics rely on non-discursive contagious affect as a means of amassing a collective subculture. But this move from bodily performance to collectivity involves a bifurcation between audience and stage, set, or frame. It essentially redraws a boundary between internal subjectivity, even based in what eludes it, and something external that watches, or in the words of Berlant and Warner, something that “witness[es] intense and personal affect” (199).

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Fig. 6.

Scene from I.K.U. Viewers participate in an unidentified mainframe that pictures, quantifies, and extracts the sexual experiences accumulated by the Coder.

Frame Four: Viral Spectatorship

Everything is given up to sight in I.K.U. From the moment of entry, the film bombards viewers with multiple screen-images of virtual landscapes, animated holograms, gaming consoles, military grids, and advertisement logos. The mutating Coder is captured from every angle as it moves through each sexual assignment. And even the experience of corporeality and feeling imagined as the most interior and as eluding faculties of sight—the penetrative orgasm—is pictured.

Signaling the conclusion of a sexual experience, the Coder of the moment readies its arm, which morphs into a digitally animated dildo-penis. The dildo-arm thrusts into its male and/or female john/s anally or vaginally, as if the movement is out of its control. The viewer is then treated to a digitally animated view of the dildo-arm moving in and out of an internal scene. Although this interior scene follows a more distanced view of the Coder positioning itself to penetrate its johns, once the dildo-arms goes inside, the head of the dildo-arm faces the viewer rather than facing outward. The viewer peers into the scene of penetration as if s/he were already inside the space being penetrated and, ultimately, as if s/he her/himself were being penetrated. But, even with what might seem like the wildest realization of interiority visually captured, the penetrated interior appears as impenetrable surfaces on all sides, without depth. The viewer is fucked and flattened into a surface, while the Coder racks up data points. Essentially, the morphing Coder pierces the viewing screen and moves into the viewer’s side of the screen, making sure that s/he knows that s/he is on the receiving end of a shared plane.

The flattening out of penetrative sex through its visualization parts with conceptions of vision based on epistemological and phenomenological models, including those attempting to return vision to the materiality of the corporeal senses, against its objectification. In Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible,” Linda Williams differentiates her critique of the cinematic apparatus from Laura Mulvey’s reframing of the Freudian fetish and the apparatus theories of Christian Metz and Jean-Louis Baudry. Williams shifts the weight of analysis away from an oedipal structure of fetishization and the presumption of a structure of desire pre-inscribed in the subject. Instead of finding a purely psychic structure at the heart of the cinematic apparatus, Williams treats cinema as a visual technology and as a dense synapse of discourses on sexuality that produces visual “hard-core” knowledge and pleasure based on naturalized sexual difference. Cinema itself is hard-core at its inception in its desire to quantify bodily movement, as illustrated in Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion, and in its superfluity, which is coded as female. In the genre of hard-core pornography specifically, this primitive desire is narrativized as the urge to extract an involuntary confession of pleasure—the female orgasm—against the impossibility of its visual objective measure in a “frenzy of the visible.” While Williams reframes cinematic spectatorship as an interplay between a visual technological drive, conflated with male desire, and its female object of erotic surplus, Laura Marks’s “haptic visuality” attempts to overrun the optic tracking of cinematic visuality altogether. In Touch: Sensory Theory and Multisensory Media, Marks draws from the work of art historian Alois Riegl in contending that haptic visuality haunts optic visuality as an embodied organization of looking that emphasizes touch and kinesthetics over sight. Haptic looking builds an erotic intersubjective relation between a haptic image, which invites the viewer to dissolve her/his subjectivity in bodily contact, and a viewer that actively labors to constitute the haptic image from latency. In contrast to an optical image, which requires identification with figures depicted in abstract space, a haptic image brushes against the look of the viewer as a surface. For Marks, digital video in particular is the ideal medium for producing haptic images, with its signal-based image, low contrast ratio, openness to electronic and digital manipulation, and decay.

Like Williams’s “frenzy of the visible,” then, Marks’s “haptic looking” exceeds the optical and psychic structure of spectatorship mapped in apparatus theories. Whereas Williams focuses on the dynamics of (over)animation and failure in wresting visual sexual truths, Marks emphasizes the collapse of depth perception into an intersubjective surface, or skin, between haptic viewer and haptic (digital) image. Although Marks’s phenomenologically valenced theorization adds the angle of “deliberate” haptic viewing, both Marks and Williams nevertheless coordinate visual technology, viewing subjectivity, and visual object (Williams) or image (Marks) into a synchronized bundle. For Williams, this bundle of vision moves like a well-oiled machine:

The woman’s ability to fake the orgasm that the man can never fake (at least according to certain standards of evidence) seems to be at the root of all the genre’s attempts to solicit what it can never be sure of: the out-of-control confession of pleasure, a hard-core “frenzy of the visible.”

The animating male fantasy of hard-core cinema might therefore be described as the (impossible) attempt to capture visually this frenzy of the visible in female body whose orgasmic excitement can never be objectively measured.

(50)

Cinematic technologies, cinematic viewing, and male fantasy continue to be conflated on the side of vision as the “animating male fantasy of hard-core cinema.” Moreover, Williams continues to rely on a dyadic structure of viewing that locks the triadic compression of viewing, technologies, and phallocentric fantasy to its animating object, the female body’s invisible orgasm.

Although Marks’ haptic viewing seems to undo a dyadic structure of vision based on identification and objectification, haptic intersubjectivity continues to hold onto a dyadic-monadic joining of viewer and image-medium. Marks argues:

Haptic images invite the viewer to dissolve his or her subjectivity in the close and bodily contact with the image. The oscillation between the two creates an erotic relationship, a shifting between distance and closeness. But haptic images have a particular erotic quality, one involving giving up visual control. The viewer is called on to fill in the gaps in the image, engage with the traces the image leaves. By interacting up close with an image, close enough that figure and ground commingle, the viewer gives up her own sense of separateness from the image.
(13)

Viewing binds together viewer, image, and viewing technology (video), which for Marks is indistinguishable from the haptic image.
For both Williams and Marks, then, apparatus theories serve not only as a point of departure and revision, but also as a lingering organizing principle that synchronizes visual medium, subjectivity (psychic and/or corporeal), and object/image.

I.K.U.’s visual capturing of female and male orgasm does not compute with the dialectical framework presumed in Williams’s and Marks’s automation of vision. The film’s scenes of penetration, viewed from the interior, may seem to wrest for the viewer an invisible confession of fe/male pleasure, which is to also de-animate the dyad that comprises animating object and cinematic viewing. Yet, the scenes of penetration are anything but penetrative. The so-called interior is a virtual grid, and the Coder’s dildo-penis (itself already signaling the impossibility of the phallus) is also a surface, even as it penetrates. Orgasm, as the non-representable sublime of female interiority and of disavowed male corporeal interiority, becomes nothing more than a display of surfaces and the warped computerized sounds of orgasmic heat. Interiority itself is flattened and turned outward towards the viewer as yet another compulsory surface that hails the viewer as someone internal to the scene of penetration, or more accurately, as merely another surface among surfaces. Moreover, there is no one at the controls. The Coder’s penetrating arm, like the Coder itself, moves at the whim of some unidentifiable source that never materializes beyond trace elements like the Runner. The dyad between a desiring penetrative force, in alignment with vision, and interiority dispels into unsynchronized screen-surfaces at the caprice of an unverifiable sovereign.

I.K.U.’s take on vision ultimately de-synchronizes the dual structure of racialized gender assumed in the dyadic binding of vision. For Williams, cinematic vision remains resolutely male, while its animating object of desire is female. In recommitting to this gender dyad, she fails to question the production of interiority itself as a sign of white femininity. I would push Williams’s notion of mutual animation further in proposing that the drive to make visible the feeling of interiority, sexualized as female pleasure, itself generates the corporeality and interiority of the white female body. White female corporeality, as an embodiment of interior feeling, materializes in the obsessive visualization of the female body, animated by an implanted interiority. White female embodiment, as corporealized interiority, emerges in this process wherein interior and exterior, feeling and body are mutually generated. Paired with the elusive bodily object of female interiority is a disembodied male visual drive, aligned with cinematic technology. White male corporeality, as technologically propelled desire, crystallizes alongside white female corporeal interiority in a heteronormative dyad.

At first glance, Marks seems to evade this racial re-gendering of vision. But the orientation of the viewer towards the receptive (rather than projective) technologies of video draws from an erotic imaginary related to the maternal body. Drawing from psychoanalytically inflected theories of object-relations, Marks associates haptic visuality with the relationship between mother and infant and its oscillation between immersion and identification. The yielding, rather than commanding, “shared embodiment” or “caress” of haptic eroticism draws from what is imagined as the threshold corporeality of the mother. The maternal body occupies a close yet unattainable in-between space for the infant (and male lover), caught up in a play of unindividuated desire and loss. As in Williams, the deracinated, eroticized female body takes shape within a white racial imaginary that animates a male/female, masculine/feminine binary associated respectively with activity (even in surrender)/receptivity.

With I.K.U., the Euro-American imaginary in which the female body and femininity constitute the threshold between visible and non-visible worlds becomes marked.¹⁷ The Coder and Virus Tokyo Rose appear through roving screens that promise nothing beyond the hyper-visibility to which everything has already been subjected, including the corporeal and psychic recesses of female and male bodies. The superimposed screen-images which picture Coder and Virus move autonomously without anchor in any identifiable visual technology aligned with the viewer. And the viewer her/himself is internalized within the film, folded into I.K.U. as another surface used, as another “it.” Or, as Mark Poster puts it, the binary distinction between subject and object dissipates.¹⁸ Vision is neither liminal membrane nor drive constituting object and subject of sight, even at the dissolve of these positions.

Taken to extreme, Cheang’s I.K.U. eclipses the emphasis on visibility as a measure for cultural and political progress. As Rey Chow contends, visibility fails to redress marginalization when the conditions of possibility for visibility, as a form of and demand for knowledge, are not examined.¹⁹ In I.K.U., nothing exists outside of visibility as a totalizing imaginary premised on compulsory interfaces between screen-images without depth, propelled without internal or external source. In other words, there is no distinction between image and imaginary in I.K.U. The film, therefore, pushes towards a collapse of dialectic models of interpretation that continue to subtend cinematic, visual, and cultural critique. And it does so without the ambivalent possibilities and complicities indexed through affect, as that which constitutes and exceeds the visible image. I.K.U.’s compulsory imaginary, without pleasure or terror, hinges on the plasticity of the Asian feminine body.

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Fig. 7.

Scene from I.K.U. Coder takes Asian feminine form as an embodiment of technological instrumentalization.

When viewed as provoking an encounter with the cultural fantasy of the Asian feminine body, Cheang’s I.K.U. reframes discourses on alternative (sometimes considered exemplary) formations of capitalism in the Asia-Pacific. Intervening in these discourses, Pheng Cheah, in “Chinese Cosmopolitanism in Two Senses and Postcolonial National Memory,” tracks the conflation of so-called Confucian-based cosmopolitan capitalism with Chinese diasporas as an effect of the incorporative tactics of globalization and Southeast Asian state regimes. In I.K.U., the objective categories of capital, technology, and nation-state are powered by the sexual extensions and morphing of the Coder’s racialized body. This cipher buttresses public discourses and ultimately determines these discourses as its constitutive matter—without materiality. I.K.U. refuses the division between cultural imagination, on one side, and economic and political discourses, on the other, and instead proposes something like economic and political imaginaries that produce exploitation, without traceable structural sources. Capital is the absolutely commodified, autonomous body of the Asian feminine Coder, commanded and programmed by an entity that never appears on scene. This overtaking of objective economic and political categories by a cultural imaginary has nothing to do with a new stage of capitalism. In I.K.U., there are no remnants of any past. The melding of cultural imaginary and political economic structures, of private and public, of pre-social and social exists without memory or possibility of change.

Conclusion: Neither the Medium nor the Message

My engagement with Cheang’s I.K.U. may appear to be a reckless razing of some of the conceptual grounds for prevalent approaches to cultural or social problematics. Yet, this piece attempts to shift the terms of critique towards a limit case in cultural and social strategies premised on the rational concept of mediation. The Coder denies the possibility of technological mediation by multimedia forms, and accompanying critical apparatuses (which operate themselves as technological modes), in producing and enhancing human subjectivity. And the Coder also rejects the notion of ideological mediation as a strategy for addressing the encoding of dominant social relations in multimedia content.²⁰ This ideological version of mediation too often poses the possibility of rehabilitating normative subjectivity, especially in racial and sexual terms, through the rectifying labor of criticism or the appropriative pleasure of spectatorship. The Coder’s instrumental exploitation by a sovereign network is too asymmetrical a condition to be understood or countered through measured concepts of subjectivity, commodification, and labor. I.K.U. refuses the grounds of critical debate, when posed as the medium versus the message.²¹

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Fig. 8.

Scene from I.K.U. Identification displays for morphing I.K.U. Coder and Virus Tokyo Rose

Protagonists of I.K.U. embody images of racial and gender flexibility, mutability, and mobility. Coded Asian feminine, both Coder and Virus are screen-images whose verbal and physical expressions read as displays and transmissions (see Fig. 8 above). The Coder speaks techno-jibberish that sounds Japanese, interspersed with techno-English acronyms like “ISDN.” And, although the Virus communicates without speaking, its identification display bears illegible encryptions that look like Thai, Japanese, or Chinese writing. Both Coder and Virus are technological bodies that morph and perform according to the demands of their programming (or anti-programming). As Laura Hyun Yi Kang proposes in Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American Women, the spatial-temporal delineations of global capitalist development depends on the figuring of the undifferentiated category of Asian women, fixed within a retrograde past of capitalist progress as docile bodies, complementing all types of exploitative labor (from assembly to prostitution).

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Fig. 9.

Scene from I.K.U. Identification display for I.K.U. Runner.

As a complementary, yet differentiated entity in I.K.U., the Runner is coded black masculine, taking the form of mutated human flesh rather than mutating technology (see Fig. 9 above). While Coder and Virus are objects inhabiting the parameters of the network, the Runner operates just outside the network as a transmitter. The Runner’s intermediary position between internal network and external command is expressed through direct interaction with surveillance cams and an activation/deactivation tool resembling a gun. Also, in contrast to the incomprehensible, yet language-like communication of Coder and Virus, the Runner speaks clearly in what is identifiably American English. As suggested by Roderick Ferguson, the militarized re-masculinization of black masculinity, according to heteronormative and patriotic sexual, gender, and familial standards, became a U.S. state sponsored project in the effort to neutralize Civil Rights social agitation and growing contradictions in capitalist expansion.²²

Asian feminine Coder and Virus and black masculine Runner embody co-dependent racial prototypes. They provide minimal indicators of cultural specificity to enable generalization into racial form. The Coder’s Japanese-ness and the Virus’s Southeast or East Asian-ness connote the kinds of abstract ethnic and regional particularity that characterizes pan-Asian racialization as both always foreign and already assimilated in reference to American national identity. The Runner’s racial blackness serves as a transnationally recognizable, exportable sign for American multiculturalism, eliding the history of racism, apartheid, and enslavement that is part of the racialization of African diasporas. These racial modules operate through sexualization. Against the normative image of gender-differentiated sexual interiority attributed to racial whiteness, the Coder and Runner in particular are racially marked by their transgenderism and pansexuality. The Coder’s body is a gender-morphing surface that treats both male and female johns as undistinguished objects for penetration and sexual data extraction. The Runner’s body is corporeally undecided in its gender, and “his” sexual ventures extend beyond the feminine Coder he activates, to include a male hustler in an alternate ending to the film. Runner and Coder offer counterpoints to the binary system of gender that is tied to complimentary sexual object choice and at work in normative versions of heterosexuality and homosexuality.

Together, I.K.U. Coder, Virus, and Runner seem to realize a utopian vision of a multicultural, gender flexible, sexually liberated world. Yet, in Cheang’s film, these racial, gender, and sexual markers for equality and freedom are not only constricted but subordinated by a sovereign network of multimedia technologies. All three protagonists, including the Runner who seems to occupy a position external to the network, function as part of the network’s totalizing system of image and data display, extraction, transmission, and storage. In I.K.U., representational technology and representational content are identical. They express machinic signs of autonomy—mobility, connectivity, and accumulation—which remain subjected to an unseen authority. Despite I.K.U.’s zero-grade utopia, the film never strikes a dystopian chord.²³ Rather than calling for a rescue from negative imagery, I.K.U. engages in what Celine Parreñas Shimizu calls a “race-positive” sexual politics, which does not strive for normative status. At the same time, the film makes visible the sexual racial fantasies that fundamentally structure the project of cultural representation. Addressing the role of fantasy, Hortense Spillers describes the disfiguring translation of the captive African body into sensuous mathematical symbols, quantified for transport, sale, and purchase.²⁴ And Trinh T. Minh-ha highlights the racialized fascination with East Asia underpinning the legacy of Saussurian semiotics.²⁵

Cheang’s I.K.U. hyperbolizes the limitations that accompany racial and sexual visibility within a reductive economy of cultural representation that values circulation and accumulation above all. Within the context of globally expanding liberal capitalism, the multimedia film compels viewers to embrace our objectification as machines exhibiting minimal vital signs. It pushes us to abandon our longing to rescue the human in us, if only to redirect us towards what might lie beyond the parameters of the merely imaginable.

Jian Chen is Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University, under the auspices of the NYU Postdoctoral and Transition Program for Academic Diversity. Chen’s current research explores new demands made on cultural consumption, representation, and politics, by the transnational circulation of images of sexual, gender, and racial flexibility. Chen’s work brings into conversation the areas of queer and transgender critique; film, new media, and visual cultures; Asian diasporas; and comparative race studies.

Notes

1. On the persistence of the Hollywood standard, see Thomas and Vivian C. Sobchack; David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson; and André Bazin. For Bazin, the cinematic image provides a window into the metaphysical world.

2. See Fernando Solanas and Octavio Gettino. Also, The Hour of the Furnaces [La hora de los hornos]. Dir. Fernando Solanas and Octavio Gettino. Grupo Cine Liberacion/Solanas Productions, 1968. Film.

3. See description on the official website for Cheang Shu Lea’s I.K.U.: http://www.i-k-u.com.

4. Against the declaration that the digital image severs ties to indexicality, Laura Mulvey suggests a return to the photographic index with the slowing down of film’s continuity and the dormancy of material, waiting to be noticed, with the advent of new media technologies.

5. Friedberg suggests that new systems of circulation, transmission, and reception with the advent of the twenty-first century have made cinema an “originary visual system for a complexly diverse set of ‘postcinematic’ visualities’” (6).

6. See Williams and Gledhill.

7. Consider also Bolter and Grusin’s concept of “remediation,” which argues that each media form works through the translation, refashioning, and reforming of other media, rather than through supplanting old with new media.

8. Raymond Williams identifies three current, conflicting uses of the term “mediation.” These uses can be described shorthand through the terms: conciliation; ideology or rationalization; and form.

9. Although I will not elaborate here, it is important to mention Jameson’s use of a poem entitled “China” to build his case for the schizophrenic aesthetics of postmodernism. Although Jameson uses this poem to emphasize the layers of aesthetic abstraction that make any reference to a real “China” impossible, this moment suggests for me the centrality of the figure of China in making possible the foundational divide between matter and abstraction.

10. In Marx’s Capital (Vol.1), labor is the unrecognized specter that effectively gives a commodity its exchange value. Its recognition as the crucial ingredient in a commodity’s value offers the possibility of reclaiming this objective value as subjective labor-power, or as abstract labor exerted by the subjective and collective agency of the laborer. In Marx, then, to identify labor is already to identify the core bodily commodity within the object commodity and ultimately the potential social agency that powers this bodily commodity. In his analysis of the transport-communication industry in Capital (Vol. 2), Marx also forecasts the absolute “death” or sublation of the commodity form, and thus its “memory” of capital’s predication in social subjectivity and the translation of value. Within this industry, the commodity produced (namely spatial movement itself) is instantaneously consumed, as production and circulation phases in the reproduction of capital are collapsed.

My reading of Marx is informed by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s resistance to the teleological threads within Marxist thinking, which would seem to offer socialism as only a reversal of capitalism by reading the social subjectivity within capital as irreducible, spectralized or virtualized trace and thus irretrievable through reversal. See A Critique of Postcolonial Reason and “Ghostwriting.”

11. The simultaneity of circuits within capitalism’s overriding drive towards productivity is captured by Deleuze and Guattari’s tongue-and-cheek analysis of “bodies without organs” in Anti-Oedipus.

12. Drawing from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish in particular, Chun argues for a shift from “disciplinary power operated through visible yet unverifiable apparatuses of power” to Gilles Deleuze’s notion of control societies, which function through the softer forces of modulation and codes. While liberty for Chun is linked to individual subjectivity tied to official institutions in disciplinary societies, freedom is linked to autonomy unbound to subjects and institutions in control societies.

13. Siobhan Somerville maps the shift from the model of homosexual inversion in sexology to the notion of homosexuality as abnormal sexual object choice in the U.S. during the early 20^th century.

14. On the organic premise of the idea of “network,” see Wigley, “Network Fever.”

15. Refer to Dibbell, “Viruses Are Good for You.”

16. In the History of Sexuality Vol. 1, Foucault locates the possibility of a “counterattack” against the regulatory deployment of sexuality in “bodies and pleasures.”

17. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s painterly phenomenology of perception realigns the image with the body as an imaginary threshold between the visible and invisible. The image is not a copy. Rather, it is an inward tapestry of the real, hosting carnal traces of things in the external world. Although less pronounced, Merleau-Ponty’s carnalization of the portal of visibility also draws from the masculinization of looking outward and the materiality of the maternal body. Also refer to Gayle Salamon’s recent work for a compelling read of Merleau-Ponty, alongside Frantz Fanon, that queries the assumption that the inner core of the body, in retreat from the bodily surface, remains impermeable to social structures of race and gender.

18. Poster refers to the inapplicability of the binary relationship between subject and object when humans are hooked into information machines.

19. In particular, Chow derails the current conversation about Chinese cinema away from fascination about a shiny new object of vision towards an investigation of the fantasies (social and intimate) that generate visual production.

20. On the limits of Althusserian conceptions of ideology and its revisions, see Stuart Hall, “The Problem of Ideology: Marxism Without Guarantees.”

21. See McLuhan, “The Medium Is the Message.” On “mediumlessness,” see Negroponte.

22. See Ferguson’s analysis of the U.S. Department of Labor’s Moynihan Report, released one year after the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

23. Samir Amin calls the reduction of democracy to the law of value, governed by liberal capitalism, “low-intensity democracy” in The Liberal Virus.

24. As Spillers suggests, the expropriative and spectacular transport of African subjects in the Middle Passage, at slave auctions, and in the repetitious disfigurements of captivity enable the accrual of the entangled discursive and economic concepts of modern sovereignty.

25. Trinh reads Roland Barthes’s fascination with the empty or suspended signs of Japan and China as figures that re-confront Western discourse with its own imagined gaps: “We read the author reading Asia.… The unknown that [Barthes] confronts is neither Japan nor China but his own language, and through it, that of all the West” (220).

Works Cited

Amin, Samir. The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World. Trans. James Membrez. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004. Print.
Appadurai, Arjun. Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger. Durham: Duke UP, 2006. Print.
Bazin, André. What Is Cinema? Volume 1. Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: U California P, 2005.
Blade Runner. Dir. Ridley Scott. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1991. Warner Home Video, 2006. DVD.
Bolter, Jay and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999. Print.
Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction. 9th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010. Print.
Cheah, Pheng. “Chinese Cosmompolitanism in Two Senses and Postcolonial National Memory.” Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2006. 120-142. Print.
Chow, Rey. Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility. New York: Columbia UP, 2007. Print.
Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. Print.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. Print.
Dibbell, Julian. “Viruses Are Good for You.” New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader. Eds. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan. New York: Routledge, 2006. 219-232. Print.
Ferguson, Roderick. Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2004. Print.
Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1985. Print.
———. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-76. Trans. David Macey. New York: Picador, 2003. Print.
Friedberg, Anne. The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. Print.
Galloway, Alexander and Eugene Thacker. The Exploit: A Theory of Networks. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. Print.
Halberstam, Judith. “Technotopias: Representing Transgender Bodies in Contemporary Art.” In a Queer Time & Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York UP, 2005. 97-124. Print.
Hall, Stuart. “The Problem of Ideology: Marxism Without Guarantees.” Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. Eds. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen. New York: Routledge, 1996. 24-45. Print.
Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990. Print.
The Hour of the Furnaces [La hora de los hornos]. Dir. Fernando Solanas and Octavio Gettino. Grupo Cine Liberacion/Solanas Productions, 1968. DVD.
I.K.U. Dir. Cheang Shu Lea. Eclectic DVD Distribution, 2000. DVD.
I.K.U.com. 2022. Uplink Co. 11 October 2009. <http://www.i-k-u.com/>. Web.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. Print.
Kang, Laura Hyun Yi. Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American Women. Durham: Duke UP, 2002. Print.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001. Print.
Marks, Laura. Touch: Sensory Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002. Print.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin Books, 1976. Print.
———. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume 2. Trans. David Fernbach. New York: Penguin Books, 1978. Print.
McLuhan, Marshall. “The Medium Is the Message.” Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: Routledge, 1964.7-23. Print.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Eye and Mind.” The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1964. 159-192. Print.
Minh-Ha, Trinh T. When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge, 1991. Print.
Mulvey, Laura. Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. London: Reaktion Books, 2006. Print.
Nakamura, Lisa. Digitalizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008. Print.
Negroponte, Nicholas. Being Digital. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. Print.
Parreñas Shimizu, Celine. Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. Print.
Poster, Mark. Information Please: Culture and Politics in the Age of Digital Machines. Durham: Duke UP, 2006. Print.
Salamon, Gayle. “‘The Place Where Life Hides Away’: Merleau-Ponty, Fanon, and the Location of Bodily Being.” Differences 17.2 (2006): 96-112. Web.
Sobchack, Thomas and Vivian C. Sobchack. An Introduction to Film. Glenview: Longman, 1987. Print.
Sobchack, Vivian. “The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Cinematic and Electronic Presence.” Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: U of California, 2004. 135-164. Print.
Solanas, Fernando and Octavio Gettino. “Towards a Third Cinema.” Film and Theory: An Anthology. Eds. Robert Stam and Toby Miller. Malden: Blackwell, 2000. 265-286. Print,
Somerville, Siobhan. Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture. Durham: Duke UP, 2000. Print.
Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. 203-229. Print.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999. Print.
———. “Ghostwriting.” Diacritics 25.2 (Summer 1995): 65-84. Web.
Warner, Michael and Lauren Berlant. “Sex in Public.” Publics and Counterpublics. Michael Warner. New York: Zone Books, 2002. 65-124. Print.
Wigley, Mark. “Network Fever.” New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader. Eds. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan. New York: Routledge, 2006. 375-398. Print.
Williams, Linda. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible.” Berkeley: U of California P, 1989. Print.
Williams, Linda and Christine Gledhill, eds. Reinventing Film Studies. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. Print.
Williams, Raymond. “Mediation.” Keywords: a Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York: Oxford UP, 1983. 188. Print.

September 3, 2013

Notes on Contributors

James Berger is senior lecturer in American Studies and English at Yale University. He is the author of After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse and editor of Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life: The Restored Edition. His current project, “The Disarticulate: Language, Impairment, and the Narratives of Modernity,” will be published by New York University Press.

Since 2007, Judith Goldman has been a Harper Schmidt fellow and collegiate assistant professor at the University of Chicago, teaching in the arts humanities core and in creative writing. In autumn of 2011, she will be the Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry at University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Vocoder (Roof 2001), DeathStar/rico-chet (O Books 2006), “the dispossessions” (atticus/finch 2009), and l.b.; or, catenaries (forthcoming, Krupskaya 2011). She co-edited the annual journal War and Peace with Leslie Scalapino from 2005-2009. She is at work on multi-media performance pieces using live sound, composed recorded sound, and video.

Michael R. Griffiths is a Ph.D. Candidate in the English Department at Rice University and Lodieska Stockbridge Vaughn Fellow in the Humanities for 2011-12. His research explores biopolitics, particularly in Australian settler colonies. He has published essays or has essays forthcoming in Australian Literary Studies, Antipodes, Humanimalia, and in edited collections. He also maintains the politics and culture blog Apparatus at <http://mrgculture.wordpress.com/>.

Kaplan Page Harris is Associate Professor and Director of the Graduate MA Program in English at St. Bonaventure University. His recent criticism appears in Jacket2, Wild Orchids, Paideuma, American Literature, Artvoice, Contemporary Literature, and The Poetry Project Newsletter. He is also editing, with Peter Baker and Rod Smith, The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley for the University of California Press.

Heather J. Hicks is Associate Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies at Villanova University. She is the author of The Culture of Soft Work: Labor, Gender and Race in Postmodern American Narrative (Palgrave, 2009) and has published articles on postmodern literature and film in journals including Arizona Quarterly, Camera Obscura, Contemporary Literature, and Postmodern Culture. She is currently writing a book that addresses the historical shift in the status of contemporary apocalyptic fiction from the margins to the center of the literary canon.

Nathanaël (Nathalie Stephens) has written a number of books in English or French, published in the United States, Québec and Canada. Many of these were published under the name Nathalie Stephens, and include We Press Ourselves Plainly (2010), The Sorrow and the Fast of It (2007), Paper City (2003), Je Nathanaël (2003/2006), L’injure (2004) and …s’arrête? Je (2007), for which she was awarded the Prix Alain-Grandbois by the Académie des Lettres du Québec. Carnet de désaccords (2009) was a finalist for the Prix Spirale-Éva-le-Grand. Other work exists in Basque, Slovene, and Spanish with book-length translations in Bulgarian and Portuguese (Brazil). There is an essay of correspondence (2009): Absence Where As (Claude Cahun and the Unopened Book), first published (2007) as L’absence au lieu. Also, a collection of talks, At Alberta (2008). Some work is repertoried in Constelación de poetas francófonas de cinco continentes (Diez siglos) (2011). Besides translating some of her own work, Nathanaël has translated Catherine Mavrikakis, Gail Scott, John Keene, Édouard Glissant, with translations of Hilda Hilst and Hervé Guibert forthcoming. SISYPHUS, OUTDONE. will be published by Nightboat Books in 2012. Nathanaël lives in Chicago.

Marcel O’Gorman is Professor of English and Director of the Critical Media Lab at the University of Waterloo. He is the author of two books and several articles about the impact of technology on the humanities and on the human condition, more generally. His most recent research on death and technology, which he calls “necromedia theory,” has also manifested itself in various performances and installations that involve circuits, dirt, sensors, a penny-farthing bicycle, a treadmill, and a canoe. O’Gorman refers to his critical art practice as “Applied Media Theory.” The theories proposed in O’Gorman’s work are currently being applied toward a series of social psychology experiments in “Terror Management Theory” at the University of Waterloo. The results of this work will be published in a book entitled Necromedia, which O’Gorman is currently writing.

Jennifer Rhee is Visiting Scholar in the Program in Literature at Duke University, where she recently received the Ph.D. She is co-editor of Electronic Techtonics: Thinking at the Interface, the Proceedings of the First International HASTAC Conference. She is finishing an essay on the uncanny valley, androids, and Philip K. Dick, and is researching narratives of technological singularity in fiction, popular science, and technology.

Robert Wood is a Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. He is working on feminist science fiction in the 20th Century through the lens of Marxist and feminist critiques of the concept of reproductive labor. This dissertation is part of his larger interest in the intersection of radical political movements and artistic movements. He writes for his blog, Work Resumed on the Tower <http://workresumedonthetower.blogspot.com/>, and was recently elected Campus Unit Chair on a reform ticket for his union, United Auto Workers 2865.

Ewa Plonowska Ziarek is Julian Park Professor of Comparative Literature and the Founding Director of Humanities Institute at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is the author of Feminist Aesthetics: Literature, Gender, and Race in Modernity (forthcoming); An Ethics of Dissensus: Feminism, Postmodernity, and the Politics of Radical Democracy (Stanford 2001); and The Rhetoric of Failure: Deconstruction of Skepticism, Reinvention of Modernism (SUNY, 1995); the editor of Gombrowicz’s Grimaces: Modernism, Gender, Nationality (SUNY, 1998); and the co-editor of Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva’s Polis (SUNY 2005), Time for the Humanities: Praxis and the Limits of Autonomy (Fordam UP 2008), and Intermedialities: Philosophy, Art, Politics (Rowman & Littlefield 2010). She has published numerous articles on Kristeva, Irigaray, Derrida, Agamben, Foucault, Levinas, Fanon, feminist theory and literary modernism.

September 3, 2013

Trans-historical Apocalypse?

Robert Wood (bio)
University of California, Irvine
wrobert@uci.edu

Peter Paik, From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010. Print.

Peter Paik’s new book, From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe, makes an interesting contribution to the growing study of science fiction. Paik continues the move away from the study of texts, which dominated work on the genre in the 1970s, to study comics and films. Paik is a thoughtful and attentive reader. In particular, his close and careful analysis of Alan Moore’s series, The Watchmen, brings out aspects of the narrative it is easy to miss even in repeated readings of the series. He captures the depressing fatalism of Moore’s V for Vendetta, and offers a nuanced reading of the contradictory relations between the comic series and the problematically appropriated narrative in its film form. Paik maps out the historical dimension of each narrative, whether the alternative history offered by The Watchmen or the critical reaction to Thatcherism in V for Vendetta. Perhaps more significantly, he recognizes a common thread running through a group of seemingly disparate texts and films. His book begins with the analysis of Moore’s The Watchmen, discusses Jang Joon-Hwan’s Save the Green Planet in the second chapter and Hayao Miyazaki’s manga and anime work in the third, and concludes with an analysis of the Matrix films and Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta in the final chapter. If Paik focuses on the figure of the superhero, he also shows these texts’ larger social conversation, connecting Moore’s critical reading of superhero comics with the paranoid science fiction of Joon-Hwan and the epic narratives of Miyazaki through a set of common ethical concerns.

Paik opens his text with the statement, “This book is a study of revolutionary change” (1). The connection between this claim and the focus of the book, a series of film and comic narratives that critically engage with the figure of the superhero, is negotiated by understanding revolutionary change not as a collective act but as an act of the “demiurgic creator.” Paik negotiates this shift through a reading of Boris Groys’s The Total Art of Stalinism, which argues that socialist realism “strove after and achieved the objective of the avant-garde to organize ‘the life of society’ according to ‘monolithic artistic forms’” (qtd. in Paik). That logic, according to Groys, depends on the role of the artist as creator of a new world. Stalinism shifted this desire onto the state, creating new artistic forms in order to effectively achieve “a consummate unity of aesthetic theory and political practice in his [Stalin’s] leadership over the revolutionary state” (Paik 16-17). Paik notes that Groys’s “terms…strikingly resemble the narrative conventions of American superhero comics” where he argues that “the struggle between the ‘positive hero’ of Bolshevism and the counterrevolutionary ‘wrecker’ is a conflict that unfolds on a transcendent plane, in which material reality is reduced to a mere staging ground for their superhuman battles” (Paik 17). Through this gesture, Paik argues that the Soviet project and U.S. dominated liberal capitalism constitute mythic forms, containing “an ideological symmetry that betrays in turn their shared faith in technology, whether in the form of sociopolitical engineering or of an infinitely expanding global market, to eliminate forever the historically intractable afflictions of poverty, scarcity, and war” (18). Both Soviet and U.S. projects fall back on a sort of messianism, legitimating extraordinary acts of violence and exploitation to create a new and more perfected world. Drawing on the work of conservative jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt, he argues that these formations continue to be constituted through secularized versions of older political theological debates concerning the relation of the sovereign to an omnipotent god. The demiurgic creator becomes the hidden double of the secularized figure of the sovereign, one who creates new orders, rather than preserving the old by invoking a state of exception (18-9).

Paik argues that the material he examines critiques these mythic formations, revealing the hidden acts of violence that were necessary to their foundation. He argues that this critique comes out of a commitment to “realism.” Paik defines these texts as realist, but he distinguishes his notion of realism from generic realism:

The reader will note that I am not speaking of realism in the sense of the nineteenth-century novel and its representative conventions, but rather in terms closer to how it is understood in the realm of political philosophy. Realism in this latter sense constitutes a discourse which analyzes in an impartial and dispassionate manner the workings of power. It arises out of the awareness that the wellsprings of political conflict generally lie in the tragic struggle between two irreconcilable forms of the good.

(19)

Realism as a political discourse operates in ways that contrast with the mythical forms found both in liberal democracy and in the Soviet project. Effectively, realism entails a rejection of what Paik sees at the heart of both projects, a belief in the perfectibility of society and, implicitly, the perfectibility of human nature. Developing that latter point in his analysis of Miyazaki, he argues that tragedy can be read outside of the Aristotelian framework that has been largely accepted even by its radical critics. Instead, tragedy shows important truths, notably the fact that pain is an intrinsic part of human existence. It also refuses to narrate conflict exclusively from the perspective of one group. By demanding an analysis that operates from the perspective that a conflict is derived from equally legitimate but irreconcilable perspectives, this construction of realism allows for a significant form of cognitive mapping to occur. It allows one to think structurally, rather than as a partisan. On the other hand, it reduces the rich history of utopian thought to a simple call for perfection, rather than recognizing its role as protest, satire, critique, which are as significant to its formation as a genre as is the fantasy of perfectibility. Perhaps more significantly, Paik’s construction of realism as tragic political struggle ignores the genre’s long reception history as an outlet of protest for the poor and exploited.

Paik’s statement not only separates his work from the long history of the study of generic form taken on by literary criticism, it also elides the question of the relationship between historicity and literary form. Rather than proposing an analysis that would ask, “Why is it that narratives of catastrophe became a dominate narrative in the era of neoliberalism?” he moves into a set of transhistorical questions posed by the conventions of political philosophy. That approach amounts to an uncritical acceptance of the ideological premises of his objects of study. Neither the claim that he will focus on “revolutionary change” nor the title’s implicit claim that the book will focus on “apocalypse” or “catastrophe” accurately describes the focus of his text. Instead, the book focuses on a set of dystopian narratives, beginning in the late 1980s and ending with the turn of the century. Aside from a brief engagement with the definition of utopia in the introduction of the book, Paik avoids analyzing either the history of the genre, or its criticism. Additionally, the text makes very few references to the study of comics or to film theory. Paik’s lack of engagement with this critical tradition can’t be reduced to breach of protocol, but leads to a number of analytical problems in what could have been a more critical intervention in the field.

This problem is most evident in his reading of Moore’s The Watchmen, although it also affects his reading of the other films and comics. Paik recognizes the intertextual dimension of Moore’s work, but makes no effort to work through the theoretical implications of that intertextuality. Paik reads Moore’s work through the lens of the superhero as a “demiurgic creator,” focusing on Ozymandias’s attempt to create a new order through mass death. While this assessment is true, the narrative is also continually reflecting back on the history of comics as a genre. The series invokes the history of a multiplicity of comic forms, both licit and illicit, and explores the confessional from of the memoir and a number of other forms. Moore’s narrative not only comments on the fantasy of the superhero as secularized sovereign, but on the history of comic art itself. Moore’s narrative takes the relationship seriously–the relationship between form and history, which is dropped from theoretical concern in Paik’s analysis. Paik never deals with the narrative’s allusions to the comic’s code, nor with the complex and contradictory attempts on the part of the genre to deal with the counter-culture and New Left. More significantly, Paik avoids thinking through how Moore’s narrative itself might be influenced by the policies of Reagan and Thatcher, the crushing of counter-systemic movements, the dismantling of the social safety net, etc. The refusal to deal with the history of generic form simultaneously erases the way the various texts Paik engages with operate as products of their times.

Effectively, Paik’s analysis ignores the need to read these films and texts symptomatically, that is as products of the common sense assumptions of their time. The need to read texts symptomatically doesn’t leave out the possibility that these texts diagnose and critique the political formations of their time, but it does demand a critical engagement with the objects at hand. To give an example of an alternative approach to dystopian literature, we can look at Tom Moylan’s Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Moylan introduces a note of ambiguity in his analysis of the genre: “The dystopian text does not guarantee a creative position that is implicitly militant or resigned. As an open form, it always negotiates the continuum between the Party of Utopia and the Party of Anti-Utopia” (xiii). Within Moylan’s explicitly political framing, the genre has both the possibility of contributing to the implicitly positive potential of political militancy and of contributing to its negative potential for resignation. There are legitimate critiques of this partisan approach to literary criticism. After all, the approach tends to create a binary between the “good” and the “bad” text, losing out on the possibility of complexity and ambiguity in narrative.

Still, Moylan’s approach holds out the possibility of reading the genre critically, exposing its assumptions, its mystifications. More significantly, Moylan continually insists on reading dystopia as a product of a particular historical time and particular events. He notes, “Although its roots lie in Menippean satire, realism, and the anti-utopian novels of the nineteenth century, the dystopia emerged as a literary form in its own right in the early 1900s, as capital entered a new phase with the onset of monopolized production and as the modern imperialist state extended its internal and external reach” (xi). Moylan foregrounds the historical aspect of the conditions that the dystopian novel was simultaneously defined by and that it critically engaged, rather than gesturing towards or alluding to it, as Paik does. If Paik had taken this historical aspect more seriously, he could have avoided some of the more problematic interpretations of the historical materialist tradition, particularly in his attempt to ascribe a notion of human nature to the tradition. This difficulty persists in his reading of Darko Suvin’s work, where he focuses on the notion of utopia as a “good place,” rather than on Suvin’s historical argument about the rise of utopian literature. Suvin’s concept of the novum, or “novelty, innovation . . . validated by cognitive logic” (Suvin 63), can be understood only within temporal innovations of the commodity form, or within what Benedict Anderson, drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin, calls the “homogenous, empty time” of print capitalism (24). To put it simply, the history of the genre of science fiction is intertwined with the history of crisis and transformation in the formation of the capitalist world system. At an even more basic level, science fiction operates on the premise that the future will be radically different from the present.

But that engagement with history is not part of Paik’s theoretical engagement with his texts. Instead, Paik frames his argument through the trans-historical framework offered by Carl Schmitt. Despite his critical interpretation of Schmitt, Paik accepts the transhistorical framework implicit in his methodology. Rather than thinking about the fear, cynicism, and opportunism that define our particular “leaden times” as a result of the class offensive contained in neoliberalism, Paik’s narrative accepts the political resignation of those texts, not as an effect of the counterrevolutionary violence of our times, but as a transhistorical truth. This translates into an unconscious conservatism that runs throughout Paik’s text. Unlike Moylan, I am unsure whether resignation is an accurate reflection of our current political possibilities or a conservative mystification of those possibilities, but, along with Moylan, I would argue that critical political theory should interrogate the assumptions of contemporary common sense, rather than repeat them.

Robert Wood is a Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. He is working on feminist science fiction in the 20th Century through the lens of Marxist and feminist critiques of the concept of reproductive labor. This dissertation is part of his larger interest in the intersection of radical political movements and artistic movements. He writes for his blog, Work Resumed on the Tower, and was recently elected Campus Unit Chair on a reform ticket for his union, United Auto Workers 2865.

Works Cited

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 2nd Edition. London: Verso Press, 1991. Print.
Moylan, Tom. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Boulder: Westview Press, 2000. Print.
Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979. Print.

September 3, 2013

A Zine Ecology of Charles Bernstein’s Selected Poems

Kaplan Page Harris (bio)
St. Bonaventure University
kharris@sbu.edu

Charles Bernstein, All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010.

All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems offers the prospect of commemoration and erasure. The same is probably true of selected poems in general. The format serves the purpose of introduction and distribution, often for students in classroom settings. The selection is passable if it supplies new readers, through a carefully crafted table of contents, with an abbreviated synopsis of a poet’s career and a balanced overview of writerly achievements and worldly concerns. Some degree of simplification or distortion must result. The best selections are like gateway drugs: the hard stuff can come later.

The erasure is especially acute, however, in the case of Charles Bernstein. He has been actively publishing for more than thirty-five years, during which time he has skillfully risen through networked communities and institutions of a fiercely intellectual counterculture and through a series of anti-workshop initiatives for the teaching of poetry and poetics. These relationships, not surprisingly, can be glimpsed as the wheels within wheels of his prior book publications. Of forty-two authored or co-authored books between 1975 and 2010, two come from self-publishing (e.g., Asylums), four come from university presses (e.g., Girly Man and My Way), and all the rest, without exception, come from small and mid-sized independent presses (e.g., Republics of Reality, Dark City, Rough Trades, Islets/Irritations, Resistance, Stigma, and Disfrutes). All the Whiskey in Heaven marks a significant new step because it is his first book released by a large commercial press. A three-decade oeuvre now finds itself represented by a private company that may or may not share the same interests with do-it-yourself and community-based ideas about the avant-garde.

While the Farrar, Straus and Giroux edition does include endnotes for the prior book and chapbook editions, the information goes only so deep in that it does not list the magazines, journals, and broadsides where Bernstein originally found company with other poets. This point is less a critique of the FSG edition than a basic observation about the historical erasure that accompanies the commercial repackaging of a poet’s work. Without the print record, the poems appear as solitary objects removed from the social and material conditions in which they took shape. My discussion here – moving chronologically through All the Whiskey in Heaven – attempts to forestall this erasure by constructing a bibliographic map, or a zine ecology, of the small-press world in which these individual poems first developed.

§

The selection opens with the title poem from Bernstein’s Asylums (1975), the self-published chapbook from a press (Asylum’s) that he co-founded with Susan Bee (née Laufer) in their apartment on Amsterdam Avenue between 82^nd and 83^rd. Bernstein absorbed the DIY ethos locally from poets on the Lower East Side. In the early 1970s, he himself enrolled in Bernadette Mayer’s workshop at St. Mark’s Poetry Project. Bee designed the cover of this, Bernstein’s first book, establishing a pattern of poet-artist collaboration that they have maintained for many of his forty-plus works. There are a few exceptions: Arakawa designed the cover for the original edition of Islets/Irritations (1983), and the cover of All the Whiskey in Heaven is a photograph by Emma Bee Bernstein (daughter of the poet and artist).

§

Self-publishing, even when collaborative, is an isolated activity that only indicates so much about the social ecology of a poet’s writing activity. Was that activity part of an emerging conversation about poetics? How did its formal structure resonate with what others were doing? How did it circulate and who cared to read the poem?

These questions are partly answered by revisiting the zine debut of “Asylum” in the San Francisco-based Tottel’s (No. 16, 1976), edited by Ron Silliman. Like Bernstein at this early moment, the fellow contributors are almost all outsiders in the poetry world: Jackson Mac Low, Lee De Jasu, Barbara Baracks, Ray DiPalma, Keith Waldrop, Jerome Rothenberg, Karl Young, Bruce Andrews, Barrett Watten, Bob Perelman, Hannah Weiner, and Silliman himself. Still, however much these poets might be excluded from the economy of prizes, commercial publications, and university appointments, one quickly sees the difficulty of restricting an account of Tottel’s – a magazine often heralded as central to Language poetry – to any single coalition or group. Approximately half the poets here are more accurately described as fellow travelers.

The cover of Tottel’s 16 is a gas chamber execution record from San Quentin Prison. No information has been completed except “tottel’s 16” for the prisoner’s name. Bernstein’s poem, which is based on cut-ups from Erving Goffman’s Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates, thus makes a very nice fit.

Poems are like that in magazines: they reverberate with paratextual elements designed by the editor and the printer and with work by other contributors. It’s not that Bernstein’s poem can’t be appreciated when uprooted from the original zine publication. The lines of the poem are fascinating in their own way and raise provocative questions about the relationship between poetry and medicine. The use of quotation marks around words, to take one example, hints at parallels between the technique of poetic citing (which brings to mind Zukofsky) and the clinical skill of listening to patients. Bernstein, who worked for a period as a technical writer for medical publications, clearly zeroes in on the language of persons who stigmatize patients, e.g., the

persevering, nagging, delusional group –

“worry warts”

“nuisances”

“bird dogs”

in the attendant’s slang

(“Asylum” 31-35).

Bernstein’s technique, when situated within a rich twentieth-century avant-garde, reaches back to precursors like Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony and to recent contemporaries like Ted Berrigan’s “Things to Do On Speed.” Bernstein’s poem, too, conceivably fulfilled an assignment in Mayer’s workshop. His use of Goffman’s text corresponds quite closely to one or two ideas in her widely-circulated “Experiments List”: “Take a piece of prose writing and turn it into poetic lines. Then, without remembering that you were planning to do this, make a poem of the first and last words of each line to see what happens.” Even the notion of going to Goffman in the first place has a certain Mayer-like quality, recalling her use of journals from psychoanalysis sessions in Studying Hunger (published in 1975, the same year as Bernstein’s poem).

Such interpretive points are vitally important, and nothing about the reframing of “Asylum” in All the Whiskey in Heaven will stop anyone from seeing them (and plenty of others). But let’s look back again at its placement in Tottel’s. While Bernstein’s arrangement of the text is visually complicated, the disjunctive effect of single words and short phrases is fairly light in comparison to other poems in the same issue. Mac Low’s striking poem “LETT” uses all upper-case letters for ten relentless pages: “D U / A S E / N / S F S W T S Q T D” (1-4). Ray DiPalma’s “from The Sargasso Transcries” uses mainly lower-case letters for six straight pages: “khkj khkllkak lskmsmsh hsjsuhjej jekeleheueieo / bchmauh lhakale uahaheuheueieoekemenb” (1-2).

The print record reveals that Bernstein was surprisingly straightforward or, some might say, outright conventional in his adherence to complete words and phrases. Bernstein, for all his inventiveness, was going to learn a lot from his peers – or “company,” to use a word that he borrows from Robert Creeley. And as later poems from All the Whiskey in Heaven reveal, Bernstein did not take long to trouble the lexical operations of language (e.g., see the made-up words in “Azoot D’Puund” dating from 1979’s Poetic Justice).

§

The second set of selections is from Shade (1977), the sixty-five-page booklet that inaugurated the “Contemporary Literature Series” from Douglas Messerli’s nascent Sun and Moon Press. Shade was originally published in five hundred copies, came with a sticker price of three dollars, and had no ISBN in order to facilitate sales and distribution. At this time Sun and Moon was a modest operation based out of Messerli’s apartment in College Park, Maryland. Anyone who wanted a copy could write to his address printed on the back (4330 Hartwick Road #418, College Park, Maryland).

“Take then, these…,” one of the poems that finds an afterlife in All the Whiskey in Heaven, had already appeared in Messerli’s magazine La-Bas: A Newsletter of Experimental Poetry & Poetics (No. 7, May 1977). La-Bas was mimeographed on an 8½ by 11, side-staple format. Other poets in that same issue are Michael Davidson, Ray DiPalma, P. Inman, and Rosmarie Waldrop. Again we’re talking outsiders in the poetry world, at least for the particular moment.

This early Bernstein likes to combine unlike objects or phrases in order to heighten poetic attention: “Take then these nail & boards / which seams to lay me down / in perfect semblance” (“Take” 1-2). If you’ve followed Language poetry at all, you know the case that’s made against transparent narratives or picaresque representations of experience. Don’t get distracted by the “semblance,” Bernstein says. Don’t overlook the “seams” when something “seems” understood or self-evident. And be sure to catch the violence implied by using nails and boards to put “me” in a box.

Bernstein never tires of punning on seams. Further instances crop up late in All the Whiskey in Heaven: “the seam that binds” (“The Kiwi Bird in the Kiwi Tree” 8, Whiskey 144) and “the brokered / seams of a riven dream” (“The Bricklayer’s Dreams” 29-30, Whiskey 279). Variations appear like “inseams” or “ifsitseamltu” (the latter in “Lift Off” 20, Whiskey 36). In these moments, Bernstein is not the Wallace Stevens of “let be be the finale of seems,” but the wunderkind of anti-essentialism who keeps stressing the ubiquity of artifice. Or keep that in mind for the early poems, because a later Bernstein says just the opposite when he begins “Autonomy Is Jeopardy” with the line “I hate artifice” – thereby reversing Robert Grenier’s “I hate speech.”

§

Asylums was produced for a gift economy, as to a lesser extent was Shade. Like other side-stapled books from Bernstein’s lo-fi, in-house operation, Asylums did not come with a price sticker or an ISBN. This practice changed in 1979, when his books started to appear with ISBNs – a paratextual lingua franca developed by publishers with the goal of standardizing all books in all languages and maximizing the efficiency of storage and purchase orders for distributors. The adoption of ISBN numbers and barcodes in avant-garde publishing should give us pause, not least because they constitute an eyesore on the back cover of lovingly produced objects. The “standard” of the ISBN and the foregrounding of the book’s commodity status are difficult to reconcile with poetry’s promise of radical social change. How can that promise be packaged using the same marketplace norms for books about improving one’s golf swing or books about planting begonias?

Take for example Poetic Justice, a forty-eight-page perfect-bound book published by Pod Books in Baltimore. It appeared in an edition of five hundred copies, listed the ISBN on the copyright page (including a separate one for the signed edition), and acknowledged the support of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. At a cost of $3.50, it could be ordered from publishers Kirby Malone and Ro Malone at their home address at 3022 Abell Avenue in Baltimore. Today, copies can still be ordered online (prices range from twenty-eight dollars to eighty-two dollars), because the ISBN gives databases a standard for linking sellers with consumers. The producers, Malone and Malone, are effaced in this exchange.

The appeal of the ISBN can certainly be understood, however, for it provided a means to move beyond the limited circulation of a coterie audience. The other book of 1979, Senses of Responsibility, was “Tuumba 20” in the long-running chapbook series designed and published by Lyn Hejinian. Like Asylum’s and the early Sun and Moon, Tuumba was a homebrew operation. Hejinian printed chapbooks on a Chandler-Price Press that she kept in the back room of her home at 2639 Russell Street in Berkeley. Her ambition for the series, she recalls, was to promote poetry, not as a solitary experience, but “in the social worlds of people” (257). The plurality signaled in “social worlds” suggests a pragmatic use of existing market structures to distribute poetry beyond its usual readership. Senses of Responsibility was also subsidized by a grant from the NEA. The book cost two dollars, appeared in an edition of four hundred fifty copies, and listed an ISBN number on the copyright page (though not on the back cover).

Most of Bernstein’s subsequent books after 1979 were similarly published with an ISBN. Dark City (1994), published by the greatly expanded West Coast operation of Sun and Moon, was the first to use a barcode for the ISBN.

§

Senses of Responsibility and Poetic Justice, along with several of Bernstein’s other early small-press books, represent one sector of a micro-economy that was partially sustained by grants from the NEA starting in the late 1960s. Additional funding was available at the local level through the New York State Council on the Arts, and through donations to non-profit institutions that were sometimes founded by the poets themselves (e.g., the Segue Foundation for Roof Books and the Contemporary Arts Educational Project for Sun and Moon). After moving to Los Angeles, for example, Sun and Moon Press drew on lucrative grants from the NEA and from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (Register of the Sun and Moon Press Archive).

These economic relationships were deeply entrenched by the time Bernstein won an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship in 1980. In 1966, the founding of St. Mark’s Poetry Project was enabled by $200,000 in federal grants from the Office of Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Development (Kane 129). The nominal goal of this money was to socialize troubled youths by providing them with a structured outlet for creativity. Bernstein and others around the Poetry Project in the early 70s were thus beneficiaries of the fiscal climate – even if they were not exactly the delinquents that the social programs had in mind.

The total amount of grant support awarded to literary magazines was really quite small compared to overall funding for the arts. The big-ticket items were opera, theater, and so forth. According to one estimate in 1978, less than two percent of NEA grants were devoted to literature (Anania 18). Still, there were lasting consequences that readers should recognize. As Jerome Rothenberg explains, the reliance on grant support served “to impose both a gloss of professionalism on the alternative publications and to make obsolete the rough and ready book works of the previous two decades” (11).

§

Critics who charge that Bernstein and other Language poets concocted a poetry movement that was perfectly suited for academic assimilation miss an important point here. The few university presses that took on their work only did so when the Culture Wars of the 1980s led to a massive reduction of federal funding for the arts. The affiliation with university publishers (Southern Illinois, Harvard, New England/Wesleyan, Northwestern, Alabama, and Chicago) was first one of material necessity. Today, the economic circumstances on campuses (especially for state schools) has led to deep cuts and freezes in press budgets – with some being discontinued altogether. The new FSG edition of Bernstein’s selected poems is part of the thirty-year development that arguably represents the full privatization of the avant-garde.

§

Now a brief story about “Palukaville.” In the fall of 1976, Bernstein embarked on LEGEND, a five-party collaboration with Bruce Andrews, Ray Di Palma, Steve McCaffery, and Ron Silliman. In February 1978, Bernstein and Andrews published the first issue of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine. The period between these dates was one of intense exchange among these five prolific writers.

“Palukaville” can be viewed as a kind of spin-off from LEGEND. The poem is comprised of answers to Ron Silliman’s “Sunset Debris,” which is a poem made up entirely of questions. Other poets have taken up this challenge (see Alan Davies and Michael Lally), but Bernstein was evidently the first out of the gate when he saw a manuscript of Silliman’s poem.

Excerpts from LEGEND made up the centerpiece of a forum of new writing – all of it language-centered – that James Sherry featured in his magazine Roof (No. 3, Summer 1977). The individual poets also contributed their own work to the forum. Bernstein contributed “Palukaville,” which he later collected in Poetic Justice and now in All the Whiskey in Heaven.

§

Roof Books is the long-running, aesthetically diverse operation – i.e., all under one “roof” – directed by James Sherry through the Segue Foundation. Bernstein’s Controlling Interests (1980) was one of the first perfect-bound editions from the press. It came with the title printed on a solid blue cover: nondescript and thus light on the design budget. Roof magazine was already home to several of the poems from Controlling Interests, like “Matters of Policy” in Roof (No. 6, Spring 1978). The poem came sandwiched between poems by Bruce Andrews and William Corbett, and the same issue featured Alan Davies, Ray DiPalma, Michael Gottlieb, Ted Greenwald, Robert Grenier, P. Inman, Christopher Knowles, Jackson Mac Low, Eileen Myles, Nick Piombino, Phyllis Rosenzweig, Michael Scholnick, James Sherry, John Wellman, and John Yau, as well as graphics by Brenda Goodman, Lee Sherry, Louisa Chase, and Ann Christopher.

Another poem, “The Italian Border of the Alps,” debuted in Roof (No. 9, Spring 1979) alongside poems by Kit Robinson, Alan Davies, P. Inman, and Lynne Dryer. Sherry tended to place poems and images on adjacent pages in his magazine, thereby providing one glimpse of the productive cross-fertilization that occurred in the arts and poetry scenes of the 1970s. The images in Roof 9 included graphics by Judy Pfaff and Harvey Quaytman, as well as archival images of Stéphane Mallarmé’s writing that hinted at his role in the genealogy of visual poetry.

The pages of Roof magazine measure 8½ by 10½, a size that is pragmatically conducive to the reproduction of art images. The size also creates possibilities for the layout of poems. This is not new, of course, not since Mallarmé rolled the dice or Charles Olson sallied forth in Dogtown. But what about a prose poem, like “The Italian Border of the Alps,” where size might seem incidental? It turns out that size does matter when it comes to ingrained habits of reading prose on small, turn-able pages with frequent breaks between paragraphs. The compressed format of All the Whiskey in Heaven is actually a lot easier on the eyes than the voluminous page format of Roof (where it takes up two and a half pages). In the latter case, the poem expands into one unbroken box of text that has no internal paragraphs to organize the flow or create natural breaks in the reading process. It almost seems possible here to argue that the large page of the small press trumps the small page of the large press.

§

The geographical mixture of East and West Coast poets (plus several from elsewhere) who published in Roof magazine did not represent an isolated case. Bernstein read with Barrett Watten for the Grand Piano reading series in early 1979. Like Robert Creeley a generation before, he was by this time travelling frequently, becoming a familiar face – which was fueled in part by the sensation of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine – and establishing contacts among multiple urban scenes of poetic activity.

Later that year his poem “For Love has Such a Spirit that If it is Portrayed it Dies” (which refers to a title by Creeley) was published in the magazine This. Edited by Barrett Watten, this 8½ by 8½ magazine was an organ not only for the close-knit friends and collaborators who became known as the San Francisco contingent of Language Poetry, but also for fellow poets who were drawn into their sometimes vitalizing, sometimes heated and exasperating conversations about the nature of all things poetic. Other poets in the same issue include Rae Armantrout, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Kit Robinson, and Watten himself, who are part of the former group, as well as Diane Ward, Christopher Dewdney, Clark Coolidge, Michael Gottlieb, and Alan Davies, who are part of the latter. It might be alleged, as some have, that publishing friends is nepotism or logrolling. But note the editorial perspicacity at work in this one issue. “For Love has Such a Spirit that If it is Portrayed it Dies” turns out not to be the only poem with an afterlife in an edition of selected poems. Recent Pulitzer-winner Armantrout’s “Postcards,” from the same issue, is reprinted in Veil, her own selected poems (Wesleyan 2001).

§

Bernstein’s poem “The Years as Swatches” (which refers to a title by Robert Duncan) made its book debut in The Sophist (1987), but readers who had an ear to the ground first saw it five years earlier in Gil Ott’s Philadelphia-based magazine Paper Air (Vol. 3.1, 1982).Ott’s editorial philosophy, which openly invited contributions from anyone “engaged in the expansion of revolutionary perception,” courted a range of poets and artists that again defied any single aesthetic category – and thereby guaranteed the reputation of his magazine as an attractive venue for Language poets hoping to place work outside of their own immediate circles. Early issues featured Silliman, Bernstein, and Andrews, but they are far outnumbered by non-Language peers, including by Nathaniel Tarn, Janine Pommy Vega, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, John Cage, Eleanor Antin, Carole Berge, Larry Eigner, Jerome Rothenberg, George Quasha, and Rosmarie Waldrop. Two special issues were dedicated to John Taggart and Jackson Mac Low.

Ott made sure that Paper Air was a welcome venue for essays, reviews, and interviews. Bernstein’s poem “The Years as Swatches” is even situated right next to a review of Controlling Interests by Messerli. Critical prose was simply the norm in Paper Air. The same was true for poems that blurred the line between verse and essay. Later Ott devoted an entire issue of Paper Air to Bernstein’s “Artifice of Absorption” (Vol. 4.1, 1987). Readers who were disconnected from Paper Air would not have the opportunity to see the essay-poem until five years later, when it appeared in the Harvard publication of Bernstein’s A Poetics.

Here it must also be stressed that Paper Air was appealing because of it physical format. The pages consistently measured 8½ by 11. The printing evolved from fairly brief issues using side-stapled, photo offset format—a method that superseded mimeograph’s ability to combine art images, poems, and even handwriting—to long issues of more than a hundred pages printed using a perfect-bound format.

§

A full third of the issue that contains “The Years as Swatches” is devoted to “Contemporary French Poetry in Translation,” in a selection superbly edited by Craig Watson. The presence of poems by Claude Royet-Journoud, Edmond Jabès, Emmanuel Hocquard, and Ann-Marie Albiach is one early and telling indicator of the internationalization of poetics that captures Bernstein’s attention starting in the 1980s.

Once again the print history is revealing. Bernstein published his translation of Royet-Journoud’s The Maternal Drape (1984) with Awede Press not one year after its designer, Brita Bergland, published his own book Resistance. Likewise, Bernstein published his translation of Olivier Cadiot’s Red, Green, and Black (1990) with the same press that earlier published his own book Disfrutes (1981). Like the little magazines of modernism, these small presses of contemporary poetry envisioned their practice as taking shape in networks that involved more than a national audience. Moreover, as his own reputation grew, Bernstein can increasingly be seen placing his work with non-U.S. publishers, such as Zasterle Press in the Canary Islands (The Absent Father in Dumbo, 1990) and Aark Arts in New Delhi (Warrant, 2005).

One poem from All the Whiskey in Heaven distinctly hints at the national and linguistic boundaries that Bernstein traverses as his career progresses. “A Test of Poetry” takes its title from Louis Zukofsky’s quirky pedagogical book, but the text of the poem, as Bernstein explains, comprises italicized phrases from his Chinese translator Ziquing Zhang. Selected Language Poems came out in China in 1993 and featured seven of Bernstein’s best-known poems. Note that five of these seven (“The Simply,” “The Voyage of Life,” “The Harbor of Illusion,” “The Kiwi Bird in the Kiwi Tree,” and “Dysraphism”) are included in All the Whiskey in Heaven, so it is even possible to trace many of the lines in “A Test of Poetry” that the translator had questions about.

§

The poems of the 1990s – especially those featured in Rough Trades and Dark City – reveal a fork in Bernstein’s publishing venues. On the one hand, small magazines with politically oppositional agendas continued to welcome his poems. The most influential of these were Jimmy & Lucy’s House of “K,” O.blek, and Big Allis, all of which were edited by poets from an ambitious younger generation. On the other hand, several academic publications, including boundary 2, Rethinking Marxism, and Archive for New Poetry Newsletter (UCSD), began to publish his poems alongside their usual scholarly articles. For example, the editors of Rethinking Marxism situated Bernstein’s poem “The Kiwi Bird in the Kiwi Tree” next to an article “On Language Poetry,” thus establishing the idea that a poem might be part and parcel of the social critique performed by the journal’s standard scholarly essays. It may have helped, of course, that the poem combined Bernstein’s usual paratactic zingers with at least one fairly straightforward theoretical assertion: “The first fact is the social body, / one from another, nor needs no other” (“The Kiwi Bird” 13-14).

While troubling boundaries between academic insiders and outsiders is nothing new, the 1990s is remarkable in that it witnessed an intensification of exchange that is surely unrivaled since the canonization of the New American Poets. Even the small magazines bore traces of academia. A case in point: Bernstein wrote “A Defence of Poetry” in response to literary scholar Brian McHale, but it first appeared in the magazine Aerial (No. 6/7, 1991), which was edited and self-published by poet Rod Smith. Similarly, Bernstein’s “Gertrude and Ludwig’s Bogus Adventure” was written for literary scholar Marjorie Perloff, whose name was originally “Gabriele Mintz.” The poem, though, made its debut in Ribot (No. 5, 1997), a magazine published by a non-institutional collective that referred to itself as the College of Neglected Science. Lest there be any confusion, this College is self-described as having a “virtual existence,” and even though it once organized an academic-style conference, I don’t think it was ever in the business of granting actual degrees.

§

Bernstein’s points of interest are increasingly drawn from cultural artifacts of the twentieth century. Early foreshadowing of this interest appears in “Dodgem,” based on the name of a children’s board game, or “Palukaville,” based on a comic strip about a boxer. Allusive lines from Bernstein’s recent poems sound like an encyclopedia of Americana that is packed with old movies, old cars, old song tunes, old catchphrases, and more. This later drift differs from the historical digging of Ezra Pound’s luminous detail or Susan Howe’s dark side of history. Bernstein is rather a collector of rhymes that charm like cheap souvenirs. If he is to be called a historical poet, then his specialty is the low or common.

Bernstein does not pretend, however, that these artifacts are without their own perils. He is not, that is to say, one of Walter Benjamin’s heroic collectors who uncovers the “revolutionary energies that appear in the ‘outmoded.’” The pessimism of Bernstein’s historical vision is quite clear in his poem “Mao Tse Tung Wore Khakis,” which derives from the GAP advertising campaign in which figures from the past are repurposed for a commercial clothing line. A broadside edition (produced in Buffalo in the mid-1990s) superimposes the poem on top of the well-known GAP advertisement that shows Jack Kerouac wearing khakis. Here the rebel without a cause is reborn in the service of a socially acceptable cause, namely to make buckets of money in a media-saturated environment: “The Thunderbirds gleam end-to-end-to-end / in the studio backlot.”

Bernstein’s bleak historicism is somewhat tempered in later poems. The post-9/11 selections taken from World on Fire are bleak in their own way, but they incorporate a mash-up of vinyl albums that he clearly adores. Horace Heidt’s big band piece “I Don’t Want to Set the World On Fire” (1941) is the source for the title of that book, and the song’s seductive refrain, “I just want to start a flame in your heart,” is the source for the title of one the poems. The poet Marcella Durand notes that another of the book’s poems, “In a Restless World Like This Is,” likewise derives from a hit song of the 1940s, “When I Fall in Love” (famously recorded by Nat King Cole). Finally, the poem “Didn’t We” can be read as a curt rejoinder to Billy Joel’s denial of political complicity in the megahit “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”

§

What I explore above is a zine ecology that stresses the social life of Bernstein’s poems as well as the material conditions that enabled publication in the first place. Like any ecological mapping, no matter how rigorously constructed, the points that I describe are not purely objective but emphatically partial – a lesson that Bernstein’s poems impart regardless of their particular publication venue. What the poems also impart, regardless of venue, is a sense of conversation with fellow poets and readers. That conversation is not one that can be understood without gross distortion when the poems are lined up with other poets in the FSG catalog. It’s doubtful that anything will ever make Bernstein’s poems fit cozily with those of August Kleinzahler, Frank Bidart, or Carol Ann Duffy – to name a few poets under the FSG imprint. (Perhaps Bernstein is best read in light of the handful of modernist poets that FSG publishes, like Mina Loy.)

I close this review by noting that the zine ecology above is severely limited by its reliance on the print record. Other kinds of archives exist, other entranceways to the social bearings of poetry, and these are increasingly available to anyone who wants to explore the work beyond the page. The online format here allows for links to PennSound recordings that capture Bernstein performing many poems from All the Whiskey in Heaven. I listened to them while writing the above, and it was startling how often my interest in constructing a bibliographic account was thwarted by an interest in returning to poems themselves – though by “themselves” I mean when they were aired before a live audience and not yet committed to print technology. Rather than an exercise in close reading, it was, as Bernstein himself would say, a matter of close listening. Here, to close, are links to ten of the finest:

“Asylums” – Reading for Anthology Film Archives, April 3, 1977

“Azoot D’Puund” – Recorded for Cabinet #1, Winter 2000

“Dark City” – Reading for Live at the Ear, 1992.

“Palukaville” – Reading for Anthology Film Archives, April 3, 1977

“Matters of Policy” – Reading at the West End Bar (NYC), March 12, 1978.

“The Italian Border of the Alps” – Reading for Grand Piano (SF), February 20, 1979

“The Simply” – Reading in Ithaca (New York), May 8, 1982

“Dysraphism” – Reading at Poetry Project, St Mark’s Church (NYC), October 17, 1983 (poem starts at 30’13”)

“A Defence of Poetry” – Recorded by Chris Funkhouser and Belle Gironda, July 27, 1994, Monterey, MA (via Kenning CD, 2004)

“Mao Tse Tung Wore Khakis” – Recording from Postmodern Culture (journal), 1994

Kaplan Page Harris is Associate Professor and Director of the Graduate MA Program in English at St. Bonaventure University. His recent criticism appears in Jacket2, Wild Orchids, Paideuma, American Literature, Artvoice, Contemporary Literature, and The Poetry Project Newsletter. He is also editing, with Peter Baker and Rod Smith, The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley for the University of California Press.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Michael Basinski, Curator, and James Maynard, Assistant Curator and their staff at The Poetry Collection, The University at Buffalo for research assistance. Thanks also to Julia Bloch and Lori Emerson for editorial comments.

Works Cited

Anania, Michael. “Of Living Belfry and Rampart: On American Literary Magazines Since 1950.” The Little Magazine in America: A Modern Documentary History. Ed. Elliott Anderson and Mary Kinzie. Yonkers: Pushcart Press, 1978. 6-26. Print.
Bernstein, Charles. The Absent Father in Dumbo. La Laguna: Zasterle Press, 1990. Print.
———. “Asylum.” Tottel’s Magazine (No. 16, 1976): 31-38. Print.
———. “Charles Bernstein.” PennSound. Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, University of Pennsylvania. Web. 10 June 2010.
———. Disfrutes. Boston: Potes and Poets Press, 1981. Print.
———. “For Love has Such a Spirit that If it is Portrayed it Dies.” This 10 (Winter 1979-1980): 83-85. Print.
———. “The Italian Border of the Alps.” Roof 9 (Spring 1979): 59-61. Print.
———. “The Kiwi Bird in the Kiwi Tree.” Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society 1.4 (1988): 77-84. Print.
———.”Mao Tse Tung Wore Khakis.” Broadside. Channel 500. Broadcast by Poeticom Services U.X.A. Paid for by the Committee to Reelect the Goddess, n.d.
———. “Matters of Policy” Roof 6 (Spring 1978): 13-18. Print.
———. “Palukaville.” Roof 3 (Summer 1977): 56. Print.
———. Poetic Justice. Baltimore: Pod Books, 1979. Print.
———. Senses of Responsibility. Tuumba 20. Berkeley: Tuumba Press, 1979. Print.
———. Shade. College Park: Sun & Moon Press, 1978. Print.
———. “Take then, these…” La-Bas 7 (May 1977): 9. Print.
———. Warrant. New Delhi: Aark Arts / Contemporary World Poetry, 2005. Print.
———. World on Fire. Vancouver: Nomados, 2004. Print.
Cadiot, Olivier. Red, Green, and Black. Trans. Charles Bernstein. Hartford: Potes and Poets, 1990. Print.
DiPalma, Ray. “from The Sargasso Transcries.” Tottel’s 16 (1976): 15-21. Print.
Durand, Marcella. “totally indivisible.” PoemTalk 21. The Poetry Foundation, The Kelly Writers House, and PennSound. 24 Aug. 2009. Web. 26 May 2011.
Hejinian, Lyn. “Tuumba Press.” A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960-1980. Ed. Steven Clay and Rodney Phillips. New York: New York Public Library and Granary Books, 1998. 257. Print.
Kane, Daniel. All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. Print.
Mac Low, Jackson. “LETT.” Tottel’s 16 (1976): 1-10. Print.
Mayer, Bernadette. “Experiments List.” PECP Library, PennSound. Web. 1 Jun. 2011.
McCaffery, Steve. “Lag.” Temblor 8 (1988): 36-39. Print.
Ott, Gil. “Editorial Statment.” Paper Air 1.1 (1976). n. pag. Print.
Register of the Sun and Moon Press Archive, 1976-2002. MS 0224. Mandeville Special Collections Library, Geisel Library, University of California, San Diego.
Rothenberg, Jerome. “Pre-Face.” A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960-1980. Ed. Steven Clay and Rodney Phillips. New York: New York Public Library and Granary Books, 1998. Print.
Royet-Journoud, Claude. The Maternal Drape. Trans. Charles Bernstein. Windsor, VT: Awede Press, 1984. Print.

September 3, 2013

Otherwise than Universal: On Andrew Benjamin’s Of Jews and Animals

Ewa Plonowska Ziarek (bio)
The State University of New York at Buffalo
epziarek@buffalo.edu

Andrew Benjamin, Of Jews and Animals. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010.

Andrew Benjamin’s book Of Jews and Animals is a welcome addition not only to the burgeoning field of animal studies but also to contemporary preoccupations with justice, universality, and particularity and the demands they make on philosophical, ethical, and political thinking. By implicitly questioning the turn toward the “materialist” Christian universality proposed by Badiou and Žižek, the book questions and repositions the terms of the debates about justice and universality by reconstructing a critical genealogy of the joined and dis-joined figures of the “animal” and “the Jew” in the history of Western philosophical conceptions of subjectivity, community and, indeed, universality. The book also engages contemporary thinkers relevant to this debate, including Agamben and Derrida. Needless to say, the figures of “the animal” and “the Jew” constructed by the philosophical and ideological work of anthropocentrism and anti-Semitism are dangerous abstractions, fundamentally different from animal plurality and from the diverse definitions of Jewishness that arise from Judaism itself.

The ambitious stakes of the book are articulated clearly in the introduction and carried out through detailed engagements with an impressive selection of philosophical texts and paintings. As Benjamin writes, the most urgent question his book addresses is:

[H]ow to account philosophically for a radically different situation, namely one in which the particularity of human being did not depend on forms of privation and thus sacrifice. And conversely where regional conceptions of identity could be affirmed. What would be the effect – the effect on being human and thus the thinking of that being philosophically – if both the maintained animal were allowed and the particular affirmed? If, that is, the without relation gave way to a fundamentally different form of relationality?

(16)

As animal studies have shown, the figure of the animal has had the dubious distinction of marking a double difference: the difference between humanity and its others, that is, the difference that constitutes what is properly human; and a difference within humanity itself, that is, the difference between those who are properly human and those racialized or gendered others who are said to be inferior and who do not measure up to human essence. And even before the institution of the animal as a separate field of inquiry, a number of writers have contested this ideological role assigned to the animal. Consider, for instance, Virginia Woolf’s playful remarks about the exclusion of cats and dogs charged with marking the hierarchy of sexual difference. As Woolf writes in A Room of One’s Own: “Cats do not go to heaven. Women cannot write the plays of Shakespeare” (48). Woolf points to the remarkable longevity of Dr. Johnson’s remark about women preachers, the remark repeated in 1928 about women musicians: “‘Sir, a woman’s composing is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all’” (54).

Benjamin’s genealogical excavations of multiple figures of Jews and animals, together and apart, develop the discussion of animality and otherness by presenting a three-fold argument: First, the book reconstructs the violent but often invisible philosophical work of abstraction and exclusion that these twin figures were forced to perform in philosophy, theology, and art. Second, on the basis of this genealogy, it questions the status of these disciplines and the fundamental categories, such as universality, community, and subjectivity, that structure them. Third, it articulates an ethical affirmation of particularity and proposes a new philosophical concept of relationality. In his remarkable readings of Pascal, Hegel, Heidegger, Blanchot, Derrida, and Agamben, among others, Benjamin compellingly shows that the dis/joined figures of “the Jew” and “the animal” are implicated in the fundamental philosophical distinctions between the particular and the universal, friend and enemy, presence and absence, otherness and identity, on the one hand, and in the constructions of exteriority, singularity, relation, community, and justice, on the other. Benjamin claims that the figures of Jews and of animals reveal the way the dominant traditions of philosophy, theology, and, I would add, politics, are constructed: “[T]here is an important relationship between Jews and animals. They appear within the history of philosophy, art and theology in ways in which the differing forms of conjunction mark the manner in which dominant traditions construct themselves” (3).

This claim is instantiated though careful and often deliberately provocative readings of selected philosophical texts and paintings. The book examines how the philosophical and theological articulations of universality depend on a double form of violent exclusion: on the one hand, on the effacement of Jewish particularity by the universal; and, on the other hand, on the expulsion of animality from the human – what Benjamin calls separation, or the “without relation.” The first part of this book examines the presence of the animal, often specific animals -in particular, dogs–in the history of philosophy from Descartes and Hegel to Heidegger and Blanchot. The notion of the separation of the animal from the human is first elaborated in Benjamin’s controversial reading of Heidegger’s discussion of animality in terms of a poverty of world (“world-poor”). Even though in Heidegger’s philosophy, both human Da-sein and the animal participate, in different ways, in the complex relationality of the world, Benjamin worries that the distinction between the world of Da-sein and the privation of the animal, and the corresponding distinction between human existence and animal life, leads to the separation, or to the “without relation,” of the human and the animal. The “without relation,” elaborated in different philosophical contexts, is the crucial term in the argument of the book. For example, in his interpretation of Blanchot’s engagement with Hegel, Benjamin analyzes the ways in which “without relation” is intertwined with a logic of sacrifice. Benjamin argues that, for Blanchot, the emergence of community and literature itself is predicated upon the death of the animal.¹ The first part ends with an interpretation of the place of animality in Derrida’s deconstruction of metaphysics and anthropocentrism. By developing Derrida’s philosophy of the event, which is indebted to Heidegger’s philosophy of the event, Benjamin reinterprets the relation between the event and repetition as the affirmation of the plural and primordial relationality between human and nonhuman animals.

One of the most important philosophical interventions of the book is its analysis of the way the figures of “the animal” and “the Jew” both produce and are captured by the complex configuration of abstract otherness and universality. In the second part of the book, Benjamin persuasively shows that both philosophical and theological universality are predicated upon either the exclusion of “the Jew” or the forced assimilation through erasure of the particularity of the Jewish way of life: “[T]his study involves tracing the way figures … and the interplay of particularity and universality are operative in a range of philosophical texts” (10). In his brilliant analysis of Pascal’s Pensées, Benjamin focuses on the neglected relation between the famous fragment 103, concerned with the relationship between justice and force, and the ignored fragment 102, concerned with the relationship between Jews and Christians (“It is necessary that the Jew or the Christian are wicked”).² By interpreting this juxtaposition, Benjamin shows that the force of justice itself is predicated on the violent representation of the Jew as “wicked” (130-146).

In Pascal’s Pensées and in Dürer’s paintings, the figure of the Jew is subjugated by the so-called “logic of the synagogue”: “The fundamental characteristic of that figure [of the synagogue] is her banded eyes and thus her blindness. She delivers or presents a truth that she, of necessity, cannot see” (140). As Benjamin points out, the logic of the synagogue is caught in a double necessity: It pronounces the truth, in which, however, neither she nor Jews can participate because of her blindness (140). The question of truth is implicated in the question of language. What is especially of import here is not only the fact that the Jew and the animal are the excluded, aberrant particulars, but also that they cannot be named by any form of universality. If that is the case, then that conception of language in the service of anthropocentrism becomes a form of exclusion. In fact, one of the questions the book poses is, “what is naming given a deconstruction of metaphysics?” (75).

Benjamin exposes the dangerous and often ignored interconnections between otherness, aberrant particularity, and the enemy, and argues that such interconnections are among the violent effects of the visible and invisible figures of “the Jew” and of “the animal.” The crucial philosophical and political point the book makes is that the figure of the other is not only intertwined with the figure of the enemy, but in fact makes it possible: “[T]he possible repositioning of the other as the enemy… is by no means an extreme or attenuated repositioning. On the contrary, the move from other to enemy is a possibility that is already inherent in the category of the other” (4). By contesting this structural relationship between the other and the enemy, Benjamin equally questions the Levinasian rehabilitation of the other, which pertains only to inter-human relations and thus reproduces a certain anthropocentrism reinforced by the primacy of language. In Levinas’s ethics, “[t]here is therefore a primacy of relation between humans that is given through the ‘word.’ If it were possible to define the absence of the ‘word’ then that absence would describe the animal’s presence” (95). Agamben is also taken to task for his inability to provide an account of particularity and for failing to “respond to … the figure of the Jew” (14; see also 113-127).

Another important contribution of Of Jews and Animals is its concern not only with the philosophical and theological, but also with visual representations of the Jew and of the animal in the history of painting. Such configuration of philosophy and painting problematizes, on the one hand, both the historical and contemporary notions of the “face” and “facing,” and, on the other hand, the notion of the figure itself, which is often used unreflectively in animal studies. In the context of the book, “figure” is not to be confused with figurative language; rather, it is often an invisible ideological construction that presents its effects as “naturalized.” Consequently, the task of the philosophical interpretation, similar in this respect to the ideological and cultural critique, lies precisely in the “denaturalization” of figures and their exposure as figures. In the context of the history of art, from Jan van Eyck and Piero della Francesca to Turner and Goya, Benjamin specifically focuses on the portraiture of the face. As if in implicit response to Levinas’s concept of the face of the other, this visual genealogy persuasively shows that the presentation of the face oscillates between specific faces and abstract humanity, and that this oscillation is in turn supported by the sharp contrast between the idealization of the Christian face and the deformation of the Jewish face. This interplay between the idealization, abstraction, and deformation of the face is what is at stake in Benjamin’s remarkable interpretation of Dürer’s “Self-Portrait” (1498) and “Jesus Among the Doctors” (1506) in Chapter 8, titled “Facing Jews.”

The most important contribution of Of Jews and Animals lies not so much in the advocacy for an “animal ethics” or “animal rights” as in the elaboration of the ethical imperative of responding to the particular others caught in the dense web of the violent history of cultural figurations. Through an interrogation and repositioning of the conjoined/disjoined figures of the Jew and the animal, Benjamin articulates the main problematic of the book, namely, how to be just to the particular. This problematic refers in a new way to the three interrelated issues at the center of Andrew Benjamin’s own philosophy, namely justice, plurality, and the affirmation of particularity. At stake here is the philosophical approach to the particular that is neither subsumed under the universal nor reduced to empirical data. As Benjamin points out, “[p]articularity has a twofold presence. In the first instance the particular – Jew or animal- receives its identity from the work of figures. However, that identity, as has been indicated, is always imposed externally…. The other aspect that is central to the development of a conception of particularity” is the particular “located beyond the hold of figures” (185-186). To approach the particular “beyond the hold of figures” and beyond universality leads neither to essentialism nor to abstract alterity; rather, such an approach repositions the particular as relational and as the site of internal conflict (189) and fragile self-transformation.

Benjamin’s affirmation of particularity and plurality also has broader, interdisciplinary stakes. Its philosophical elaboration of particularity contests the ideological, anti-Semitic constructions of “the Jew” and the anthropocentric constructions of “the animal” as the excluded others of authentic, Universal subjectivity. In so doing, the book provides a welcome, if implicit, intervention into the recent defenses of “militant” universalism, often associated with a Paulinian Christianity, proposed by Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, and their followers. Badiou’s and Žižek’s “materialist” defenses of the Christian “generic conditions of universality,” which promote themselves as the only authentic contestations of capital and of neoliberalism, reproduce all too often the entrenched logic of the exclusion of inauthentic particulars that is associated with Jewishness or other “‘victimist’ conception[s] of man” (Badiou 6). Thus, Slavoj Žižek, from 2001’s On Belief to 2003’s The Puppet and the Dwarf, sets up “materialist,” Leninist Christianity as an alternative to both “‘multiculturalist’ polity” (On Belief 4-5)³ and to Levinas’s and Derrida’s “deconstructivist Jewish transcendentalism.”⁴ Similarly, Alain Badiou, in his Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, presents the Pauline subjective form of universalism in opposition to Jewish conceptions of the law and particularity, on the one hand, and to the Greek conception of rhetoric and wisdom, on the other (28, 76). The elaboration of such universality is presented as the necessary counter to the so-called “culturalist and relativist ideology” (10) — an empty term that dismisses in advance the interrogations of the violence of universality that have emerged from feminism, Jewish studies, critical race studies, and poststructuralism.

By providing an alternative to universalism, the affirmation of the plurality of particulars beyond their ideological determinations, and yet without essentialism, has an important affinity with a number of philosophical and political projects, ranging from feminism and poststructuralism to postmodernism. As Benjamin puts it, the philosophical and the political in his work “have an important affinity. Affirmation as part of a strategy has to work within already given determinations. Particularities within collectivities … continue to work within universals. However, the insistence of affirmation means that it will have become possible to insist on the position in which the universals in question neither direct nor subsume particulars” (190). Such an affinity between the philosophy and politics concerned with the particular should be of great interest to anyone concerned with justice and plurality.

Ewa Plonowska Ziarek is Julian Park Professor of Comparative Literature and the Founding Director of Humanities Institute at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is the author of Feminist Aesthetics: Literature, Gender, and Race in Modernity (forthcoming); An Ethics of Dissensus: Feminism, Postmodernity, and the Politics of Radical Democracy (Stanford 2001); and The Rhetoric of Failure: Deconstruction of Skepticism, Reinvention of Modernism (SUNY, 1995); the editor of Gombrowicz’s Grimaces: Modernism, Gender, Nationality (SUNY, 1998); and the co-editor of Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva’s Polis (SUNY 2005), Time for the Humanities: Praxis and the Limits of Autonomy (Fordam UP 2008), and Intermedialities: Philosophy, Art, Politics (Rowman & Littlefield 2010). She has published numerous articles on Kristeva, Irigaray, Derrida, Agamben, Foucault, Levinas, Fanon, feminist theory and literary modernism.

Footnotes

1. For an alternative reading of Agamben and Heidegger on animality, see Ziarek.

2. In this respect, see alsoBenjamin, The Plural Event.

3. For further elaboration of this position, seeZizek, The Fragile Absolute.

4. For this critique of Levinas, Derrida, and Jewish transcendence, see Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf. As Adrian Johnston writes approvingly in his review, repeating the same opposition, in “the Zizekian reading, Christianity is the religion of immanence (as opposed to, for example, the Judaism Zizek links to the Levinasian-Derridean theme of the transcendence of the infinitely withdrawing Other — as he notes, the Christian notion of God-become-man emphasizes ‘sameness’ rather than ‘otherness,’ stressing how divinity is not antithetical to humanity).”

Works Cited

Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Trans. Ray Brassier. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003. Print.
Benjamin, Andrew. The Plural Event. London: Routledge, 1993.
Johnston, Adrian. Rev. of The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, by
Slavoj Žižek. Metapsychology Online Reviews 8:2 (2004): n. pag. Web. 9 Jun. 2011.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. London: Harcourt, 1981. Print.
Ziarek, Krzysztof. “After Humanism: Agamben and Heidegger.” South Atlantic Quarterly 107 (2008): 187-209. Print.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? London: Verso, 2000. Print.
———. On Belief. New York: Routledge, 2001. Print.
———. The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003. Print.

September 3, 2013

Sisyphus, Outdone. Theatres of the Catastrophal

Nathanaël (bio)

[ extract ]

§ “Ways of dying also include crimes.”¹

§ I feel myself of another time, as though there were other time.

§ Side by side or superimposed, Paul Virilio’s Tilting bunker and Michal Rovner’s Outside #2 exacerbate – they reiterate – the time of decay : Rovner’s over-exposures² bring to the surface of the Bedouin house its temporal degradation, granting it oblique equivalency with the bunker sinking into the sand. Rovner slows time, measuring its imprint, extruding from the house in the desert the implanted time of accelerated degradation. What Virilio’s bunker exposes (documents) Rovner’s anticipates by ennervation. There is the subjective disclosure of the subject’s disintegration in time, in a frame. What I see, in each instance, is not a house nor a bunker, but the work of time, the anticipation and accomplishment of death’s (de)composition.

§ Un événement de lumière.³

§ An event of light which is or might be a storm. Light storming the house in the desert. Light, which in this instance, is, has the potential to be, catastrophal. Bringing about. Standing the house more still.

§ The photograph lacks definition. A world (worlds) undefined.

§ The photograph does not lack definition. It draws out that which by definition is undefined. Undiscerned by instrument. Absent of designation.

§ Do I kiss it back.

§ Death’s (de)composition is (also) a theatre of war.

§ What are we waiting for.

§ In Guy Hocquenghem’s aspiration to objectless desire⁴ and Hervé Guibert’s consideration of subjectless photography⁵ there is the intimation of the removal of a self in order to unburden a context of its context. A voice without language or touch without touch.

§ “La sexualité indépendante de tout objet … sujet et rejet même.”⁶

§ In the last of language, language is subjectless. It ruins itself against an embarrassing hope for more. Its perversion is less than this. Less than its desire for itself.

§ Its rejection.

§ A ruined language is a language with neither subject nor object. It says nothing (or too much) of where it has been. Intimacy is, in this instance, intimation: “La ruine nous conduit à une expérience qui est celle du sujet dessaisi, et paradoxalement il n’y a pas d’objet à cette expérience.”⁷

§ Who was there in the first place.

§ The door is always open.⁸ This might be History’s proviso. An inhospitable hospitality. Suspect and ill at ease.⁹

§ The I might be a catastrophist. Taking turns. Turning out.

§ Seismically speaking, a split self is rendered unavowably speechless. Self without self. Irreferent.

§ Is it for lack of place.

§ Or: a siteless retort, pronounced out of place. The site ridded of seeing may be a way away from pronouncement. Built or borne.

§ This is Heidegger’s declaration: “The proper sense of bauen, namely dwelling, falls into oblivion.”¹⁰ This is the case, also, of the proper senses. Undwelled, obliviated.

§ The impropriety with which, for example, we are secluded.

§ For example: we bereave the sense of our freedoms.

§ A house which is built into its destruction.

§ RY King’s photographic dissolve marks the paper immutable. (Figure 1) Immutable in that it is always imbricated in a mechanism of deterioration. In this improper sense, the image is not separable from its degradation. Its substances are both paper and light. Thus they are neither, as they run into each other.

§ The bird, in this instance, which is scarcely discernible, is in a field of apparent surfaces. It comprises the surface by which it becomes visible, an irregularity on a structure of hay bales in a field of depleted colour. The photograph misdirects its intention. It intends for me to fall in.

§ In to America.

§ The identification of a site is improper in that it precludes situation. It steadies itself in a blur which I take to be my eyes. In this sense I become the photograph proper. It is in the skin and in the paper and against a wall. The door, here, is diminished, but not foregone.

§ The fall is ever a truncation of fallout. In this theatre of scarce forms, the photograph intimates residual catastrophe.

§ It is nowhere to be seen. It is this which the photograph comes between.

§ As gas mask or oxygen. Those particular theatres.

§ “What is architecture’s error?”¹¹

§ That particulate which may be granular. What fastens the paper to its skin. A regional deference.

§ It comes with a number, assigned to a calcined human body which is incommunicable: . When it says “…j’ai besoin de catastrophes, de coups de théâtre”¹² it abandons sense.

§ The lake is up to my knees in November.

§ In calx.

§ The time of the photograph is (always) after. This imprecision accommodates the numerous successions, the end upon seismic end. In a time without time, un(re)countable: still. In this, it is a perfect crime, “l’anéantissement anéanti, la fin … privée d’elle-même.”¹³

§ The photographic occasion, its occasional reoccurrence makes incontrovertible “l’épouvante lucide de la redite”.¹⁴

§ When you touch it, is it said?

§ “Le désastre est séparé, ce qu’il y a de plus séparé.”¹⁵

§ Réplique : The chairs change place. The armchair is taken out. The other one, however, the green one, is transported here as well as the rope that fastens the arm that’s coming away. In addition, there are two white painted chairs on a back, wooden chairs, despite a dislike for painted wood, one day and then the next, they stay there, at the entranceway, latent chairs, which haven’t assumed their function as chairs, but hold their place. The chairs are all empty and yet upon arrival it is impossible to sit down, the two cats occupy the twelve chairs including the bed.

§ Se-parare, without making ready.

§ Is it found or is it given or is it taken from what was (already) taken away ?¹⁶

§ For example, Sir Thomas Bouch, who had not yet been knighted in 1870, designed the wrought and cast iron two and a quarter mile Tay Railway Bridge without calculation of the winter gales over the firth into his design; the bridge collapsed scarcely a year and a half after its construction. It collapsed under a train full of people. The structurally deficient Bridge 9340 over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis collapsed in August 2007, at the height of traffic, forty years after its inauguration. The indiscretion is in history and in materiality, each of which may be cited as deficient in structure and design.

§ Is a catastrophic failure a failure of time, a tempest unaccounted for in number or incident.¹⁷

§ For body, substitute bodies. Reiterate indiscretions.

§ “Ce que l’on appelle usuellement une forme, c’est toujours, en dernière analyse, une discontinuité qualitative sur un certain fond continu.”18 Thom’s definitions misdirect substitution. He clarifies: the foundation of a problem in any of the sciences is an aporia. For once, the disappearances can be accounted for. Whether or not they manifest as (retinal) discontinuities or continuous underpinnings.

§ Mathematically speaking: something moves over something that doesn’t move. Conversely, something that doesn’t move touches something that does. There is no equivalency between the horse’s last run and the photographic fix. One moves without the other. Something is torn.

§ “Because the geometry / we seek is beyond coordination,”¹⁹

§ There is no perfect isolate. Simply a proclivity for destructions of all kinds. The aleatory conjunction of Fourier’s Arcades with Benjamin’s (sometimes contested) suicide is arguable against an ethics of encounter’s hermaphrodisms.20 But there is no possible proof of this. If Benjamin considered suicide at the age of forty, is the fortieth age the end (of) time?

§ Neuter, it is said. But neuter is without desire.

§ The city presented a sky that demanded an ocean, but there were none of these. (Figure 2)

§ To say “all kinds” is to invite various imprecisions. Benjamin’s lost attaché case is perhaps the most convincing piece of evidence.

§ A mode of somatic interrogation.²¹

§ For Derrida, it might be Nietzsche’s lost umbrella.

§ “It is, / I know, not true / that we lived, there moved, / blindly, no more than a breath between / there and not-there,”²²

§ Because of its lostness.

§ The Roman ampitheatre is a spectacular place of slaughter. “La distance est immense entre la conviction personnelle et la démonstration:”²³ A theatre, which continues in the present to command murder, is complicit with the injunction to (an) end. We are in the act.

§ Taken aback.²⁴

§ This is not calculated into the displacement of materials and surfaces, but in their resistance, perhaps, to being moved. Removed. The thwarted Archimedean resolve (to drown).

§ In the Sisyphus text, there is talk of murder.

§ “Yes, a disappointed bridge.”²⁵

§ It isn’t for want or lack. In the visage, the eyes are become too wide, too languid and imbecilic. Is this what it is (also) to look. “You behold in me, […], a horrible example of free thought.”²⁶

§ It seems vital now, that we do this.

§ If not for any reason, other than the one cited. If it is true, for example, that “Il ne reste rien de l’évènement,”²⁷ then photography, in Guibert’s projection, is predicated, first, on forgetting, and perhaps synchronously on nothing. In which instance, nothing, is what comes of light, as it happens.²⁸

§ Green: “…into the subject of poisonous colours. It has been found that arsenic is sometimes used in the preparation of some wall papers, especially though not exclusively, the green ones. This has been known to produce effects of poisoning on the occupiers. It is almost the only case in which the air of our rooms is liable to actual poisoning for the effects of air that is foul from any other cause are not…”²⁹

§ Historically speaking, our nothing is in our forgottenness.³⁰

§ For Malraux, it is in the death count: “Le jour anniversaire de ma quarantième année, lorsque je passais clandestinement la ligne de démarcation avec le chat noir, j’aurais voulu être né la veille.”³¹

§ His year of quarantine.

§ The geometry of the poison is qualitative.³²

§ In a logic, then, of photographic eventuality, we forget nothing.

§ “Un jour, toutes les photos seront dissoutes, le papier photo n’impressionnera plus, ne réagira plus, sera chose morte.”³³

§ “It is my want that it is looked at closely and in light, please.”³⁴

Click for larger view

fig. 1.

Untitled RY King 2008

Click for larger view

fig. 2.

Une mer attendue / An ocean that doesn’t arrive NS after RY 2010

Nathanaël has written a number of books in English or French, published in the United States, Québec and Canada. Many of these were published under the name Nathalie Stephens, and include We Press Ourselves Plainly (2010), The Sorrow and the Fast of It (2007), Paper City (2003), Je Nathanaël (2003/2006), L’injure (2004) and …s’arrête? Je (2007), for which she was awarded the Prix Alain-Grandbois by the Académie des Lettres du Québec. Carnet de désaccords (2009) was a finalist for the Prix Spirale-Éva-le-Grand. Other work exists in Basque, Slovene, and Spanish with book-length translations in Bulgarian and Portuguese (Brazil). There is an essay of correspondence (2009): Absence Where As (Claude Cahun and the Unopened Book), first published (2007) as L’absence au lieu. Also, a collection of talks, At Alberta (2008). Some work is repertoried in Constelación de poetas francófonas de cinco continentes (Diez siglos) (2011). Besides translating some of her own work, Nathanaël has translated Catherine Mavrikakis, Gail Scott, John Keene, Édouard Glissant, with translations of Hilda Hilst and Hervé Guibert forthcoming. SISYPHUS, OUTDONE. will be published by Nightboat Books in 2012. Nathanaël lives in Chicago.

1. Ingeborg Bachmann. The Book of Franza, 3.

2. “Over”, i.e. over and again.

3. Hervé Guibert. Le mausolée des amants, 187.

4. Guy Hocquenghem. Le désir homosexuel, 121. « [Le désir homosexuel] est la pente vers la trans-sexualité par la disparition des objets et des sujets, le glissement vers la découverte qu’en sexe, tout communique. »

5. Guibert. « Comme la photographie peut n’être qu’un événement de lumière, sans sujet (et c’est le moment où elle est le plus photographie), j’aimerais un jour me lancer dans un récit qui ne serait qu’un événement d’écriture, sans histoire, et sans ennui, une véritable aventure. »

6. Jean-François Lyotard, La Chambre sourde, 41.

7. Sophie Lacroix. Ruine, 52.

8. In Hell, Sartre leaves the door open.

9. “Such that the question for me becomes a very simple architectural one, it is the question of the doorway, in French, l’embrasure, with its attendant gesturings toward desire. Who is standing at this door? Who opens or closes it. And what might this threshold become if we were to cross it, to cross it out?” N.S. “Some notes on death and the burning of buildings”.

10. Martin Heidegger. “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Basic Writings,
326.

11. Stephen Motika. Arrival and at Mono.

12. Guibert, 262. “…I need catastrophes, coups de théâtre.”

13. Lyotard, 29.

14. Lyotard, 39.

15. Maurice Blanchot, L’Écriture du désastre, 7.

16. A small stack of letters addressed variously yields the following occurences: (1) But it made me feel once again like The Murderer; (2) …and so here is another opportunity for me to feel like I’ve committed a murder; (3) Je n’en peux plus d’être le meurtrier; (4) So much that it seems I’ve committed a murder by coming here; (5) …and so I think that I must be a murderer of sorts, a murderer of people and of cities; (6) Because I have come to think of death as murder, and our complicity; (7) Etc.

17. “Une syncope dans le sang.” NS, Carnet de désaccords, 97.

18. Thom, 35.

19. Michael O’Leary, Along the Chess Pavilion.

20. Encounter, from the O.F. encontre, masculine or feminine : of undecided form.

21. The Old Tay Bridge in Eiffel’s eye.

22. Paul Celan, tr. Michael Hamburger.

23. Thom, 72.

24. Following a public execution, which he had attended with some conviction, Albert Camus’s father goes home, doesn’t speak, lies down on the bed, and begins immediately to vomit. “Ma mère raconte seulement qu’il rentra en coup de vent, le visage bouleversé, refusa de parler, s’étendit un moment sur le lit et se mit tout d’un coup à vomir. (…) Au lieu de penser aux enfants massacrés, il ne pouvait plus penser qu’à ce corps pantelant qu’on venait de jeter sur une planche pour lui couper le cou.” Réflexions sur la peine capitale, 143-144.

25. James Joyce, Ulysses, 25.

26. Joyce, Ibid., 21. [End Page 9]

27. André Malraux, Lazare, 422. “L’histoire efface jusqu’à l’oubli des hommes.”

28. A paper which evidences its burning.

29. Cecil Scott Burgess, Architecture, Town Planning and Community, 76.

30. “first a razor then a fact”. Michael Palmer, Sun, 6.

31. André Malraux, Lazare, 479.

32. “On n’échappe pas au continu.” Thom, 66.

33. Guibert, 168.

34. RY King, personal correspondence.

Translations

Translations are attributable to N. unless otherwise indicated.

Hervé Guibert
An event of light.

Guy Hocquenghem
[Homosexual desire] is the slope towards transsexuality through the disappearance of objects and subjects, a slide towards the discovery that in matters of sex everything is simply communication. (Tr. Daniella Dangoor)

Hervé Guibert
Since photography can only be an event of light, without a subject (and it is then that it is at its most photographic), I would like one day to launch myself into a narrative that would be nothing but an event of writing, without history, and without boredom, a true adventure.

Jean-François Lyotard
…sexuality, independent of any object. (Tr. Robert Harvey.)

Sophie Lacroix
The ruin leads us to an experience which is that of the relinquished subject, and paradoxically this experience has no object.

Hervé Guibert
…I need catastrophes, coups de théâtre.

Jean-François Lyotard
…the annihilation
annihilated, the end deprived of itself.” (Idem)
*
…the lucid dread of redundancy. (Idem)

Maurice Blanchot
Disaster is separate; that which is most separate. (Tr. Ann Smock.) I note with interest, Smock’s insertion of the semi-colon, making more distinct the separation between clauses.

René Thom
What is usually referred to as a form is always, in the final analysis, a qualitative discontinuity on some continuous ground.
*
The distance between a personal conviction and its demonstration is enormous:

Albert Camus
My mother relates merely that he came rushing home, his face distorted, refused to talk, lay down for a moment on the bed, and suddenly began to vomit. … Instead of thinking of slaughtered children, he could think of nothing but that quivering body that had just been dropped onto a board to have its head cut off. (Tr. Justin O’Brien)

André Malraux
Nothing remains of this event. (Tr. Terence Kilmartin)
*
History obliterates even men’s forgetfulness. [forgetting] (Idem)
*
On the birth day of my fortieth year, as I was clandestinely crossing the demarcation line with the black cat, I would have wanted to have been born yesterday.

René Thom
There is no escaping the continuum.

Hervé Guibert
One day, all the photographs will have dissolved, the photographic paper will no longer impress, react, will be a dead thing.

September 3, 2013

A Failed Snapshot [instantané raté]: Notes on Nathanaël (Nathalie Stephens), SISYPHUS, OUTDONE. Theatres of the Catastrophal

Judith Goldman (bio)
University of Chicago
jgoldman1@uchicago.edu

Nathanaël (formerly known as Nathalie Stephens) writes entre-genre, composes (and lives) betwixt genders, drafts in the non-space of in-commensurability between English and French, both her primary, improper tongues. Troubling borders separating disciplines, dividing countries, and distinguishing words, Nathanaël’s texts borrow meticulously and programmatically from other authors, literalizing the Barthesian “tissue of quotations” as they also draw incestuously from, and thus plicate, her own oeuvre. Each writing is thus in itself, and in relation to Nathanaël’s larger corpus, beset by the calculated vertigo of écriture, as Nathanaël enacts obsessive returns to a cluster of characteristic concerns, each time with a change of lens that profoundly informs her renewed scrutiny and its consequences.

Pivotal issues revolved in and unsettled by Nathanaël’s questions, formulations, tropes and language play, and cited textual passages and other media include: language’s asymmetrically yet mutually constitutive relation to the body; architecture’s reciprocal relation to the social and the urban landscape as palimpsest; the ethics of the aleatory and non-intentional aspects of encounter; the breaching, violence, grief, and desire in translation; the amalgamation performed by, as well as the antinomianism and multiplicity subtending, the first-person pronoun; and the representation of world-historical violence at personal and (inter)national scales. The Sho’ah is a major point of reference; with regard to media, Nathanaël has meditated on and incorporated photographs in several recent works, including SISYPHUS, OUTDONE. Theatres of the Catastrophal, the second section of which is presented here.

Since we meet Nathanaël’s SISYPHUS excerpted, in medias res, I want to note the main elements of the stage-setting that occur in the first section of the manuscript and, further, to relate this work to some of its main intertexts, including Nathanaël’s own writings.

To enter SISYPHUS is to engage with catastrophal, catastrophized time: “§ Still // § After an aftershock, there is stillness. There are reverberations and then there is stillness. The stillness itself is reverberant. Reverberant with the reverberations of the shock. Instilled in me is the shakenness” (SISYPHUS, Part I). These opening passages introduce “aftershock” as structuring figure, though, as Nathanaël then adverts, to be useful the English term will have to be relieved of the linear temporality embedded in it: “After assumes before . . . I would like to suspend the question of before, as it has no bearing on the question of the aftershock. It bears its weight of memory as lost memory and time as lost time. Lost and thus not locatable on a scale of before and after” (Part I). The temporality Nathanaël wishes us to consider here is clearly akin to that of “disaster” as Maurice Blanchot understands it in The Writing of the Disaster: “The fact of disappearing is, precisely, not a fact, not an event; it does not happen, not only because there is no ‘I’ to undergo the experience, but because . . . the disaster always takes place after having taken place, there cannot possibly be any experience of it” (28). Before and after lose their places, their relevance, in such a schema of loss beyond loss; the subjectlessness and objectlessness of experience announced here reverberate in SISYPHUS.

Related to the temporality of Nathanaël’s text is the psychical logic of suspension and repetition compulsion elaborated in Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History: “the experience of a trauma repeats itself” whether in “unwitting reenactment” of an injurious event, or in memory (2); the crisis incurs repetition for “the way it was precisely not known in the first instance” (4), repeating as an unassimilated fragment, or piece of lost though stubbornly recurring time, that “simultaneously defies and demands our witness” (5). In its belatedness, and as a response that is a missed encounter, trauma “[oscillates] between the crisis of death and the correlative crisis of life” (7), enjoining the survivor to a layered and never fully present experience of time brushing expiration. Nathanaël’s use of the temblor as trope of a derangement of linear temporality and its reverberation in an affected body also recalls Derrida’s The Gift of Death, particularly his discussion of Abraham’s being called on to sacrifice Isaac and Søren Kierkegaard’s analysis of that scene in Fear and Trembling. For Derrida, the encounter with the divine is always an aftershock, since trembling begins beforehand, the shock already come: “[T]rembling . . . is something that has already taken place, as in the case of an earthquake [tremblement de terre] or when one trembles all over. . . . We tremble in that strange repetition that ties an irrefutable past (a shock has been felt, a traumatism has already affected us) to a future that cannot be anticipated . . . [and is] approached as unapproachable” (53-4).

Nathanaël avoids the residue of linearity in “aftershock” by replacing it with the French term “réplique”: “On a French tongue, the aftershock is pronounced réplique. I will speak now, instead, to the réplique, leaving the matter of before and after aside, extricating myself from the misplacement of time in catastrophe. . . . What [the earth] offers is a reply, as réplique, to what is now, which is after all an instance of after, and as such unrecognizable” (Part I). The verbal figure of réplique points to the folds within the “now,” repleat-replete with memory incompletely grasped. “Now” can no longer be thought of as “after” since, if invisibly, it both contains and repeats the past within it, confounding seriation. The earth, too, complexifies: it is always moving, not just in its orbit, but tectonically—if seemingly still, still seized; if seeming our very ground, still displacing and displaced. Moving with the earth in permanent aftershock, the body, as Nathanaël writes, is occupied by, as it occupies, space as it also inhabits this disjunctive time. The body always already bears remnants of its own death within it, beholden to a mortal future joining it to earth, and is made by the continuous catastrophe of living-as-dying inflicted and inflected by a contestative human (re)structuring of space-time. Yet another vexed logic of time is evoked when Nathanaël gestures toward prevented histories and subjunctive, violently eradicated futures: “An ontology of foreclosed possibility. Of foregone eventuality” (Part I). SISYPHUS thus abounds with alternate temporalities that spoil temporal abstraction as a progress of presents that postdate their pasts. It refuses promissory tenselessness in its preoccupation with iterative, traumatized time as ethical demand, with catastrophe as inculpation.¹

Nathanaël’s translation (replacement) of “aftershock” as “réplique,” vis-à-vis allusions to the work of geographer Michel Lussault and topologist and catastrophe theorist Rene Thom, rhymes with her exploration of geologic space-time in her recent book Absence Where As (Claude Cahun and the Unopened Book). In “Fa Ille,” the first section of Absence, Nathanaël worries the one-character slippage (space and letter in equivalence) between “la famille” and “la fa ille“: the first is a term of binding filiation; the second (la faille) names a tectonic (among other types of) rift. The difference is effected by the application of an aleatory yet directed faultline that literalizes language as “fluctuating littoral” (22). The figure of la faille also turns up in Nathanaël’s earlier At Alberta, a collection of talks given at the University of Alberta in 2006 and 2008, in a lecture on translation as failure and as an ethics of touch; la faille is exchanged in lieu of défaut, as Nathanaël translates and retranslates the phrase “failure of translation” to demonstrate the passage between languages as multiple and fractured even as this suspension of translation becomes a “substitution for place” itself (13). Faultline is again turned towards geophysics in a talk where Nathanaël discusses an interchange with “a friend who studies fracture mechanics, failure analysis and catastrophe theory” (Michael O’Leary, Chicago-based engineer, poet, and co-publisher of Flood Books) (At Alberta 104). O’Leary explains how an equation based on “the principle of least action” is used to predict, from a field of infinite possibility, the likely pathway of a crack. The formula requires a beginning point and a duration of action (111-2n.8); it uses a fixed time to plot the crack’s endpoint, in turn defined as a consequence, not presumption, of the process. Thus the breach delineates relation, generating an afterward that cannot be known in advance.

SISYPHUS is further in conversation with Absence Where As in anchoring its conception of a profoundly destabilized space-time in the photographic medium. The earlier book explores Nathanaël’s relationship to a 1936 photograph of Claude Cahun, transgendered Surrealist photographer and writer. This photograph both reaches across and reinforces the breach of time/geography to convene uncannily with Nathanaël, who views the Cahun of the photograph as her impossible semblable. Nathanaël means such anachronic converse, as she writes, “to extract myself from the place, from the moment riveted to its materiality, the architectural, temporal space made precise by a name, an arrangement of buildings cobbled onto a dismantled horizon, a situation, a location, a there” (Absence 5). As Nathanaël then discovers, her u-topian address to a Cahun photographically ripped from context is hardly her own agenda; it is, rather, a response to Cahun’s inverted, prior address that has perversely overmastered and dislocated Nathanaël. Solicitor solicited, Nathanaël seems to be (super)imposed upon, contrary to “normative temporality” (7), by Cahun’s victorious antecedence. But can she be sure? “The photograph offers itself as an abyss” (28); “There is not only encounter, but collapse. . . . Of one (me) onto the other ((s)he), immediately laid over the self, echoed, propagated, and swallowed back, bringing about a fall toward disappearance. The photograph . . . sends me back to what, of myself, I am already projecting, in a perpetual doubling of stares and faces” (29). Given the interaction’s uncertain reciprocity, Nathanaël relates to Cahun’s gaze in a mode of reflexive indeterminacy, a rebound that displaces and de-entifies her, ripping her too out of time and space and confronting her with an animating (self-)alterity. Far from indexing a historical moment, the Cahun photograph seems to “refuse,” even to kill, the possibility of liaison with a knowable past: “Photography represents dead time. In this instance, it also offers false passage. . . . It opens a door only to close it at once” (28); “There is the erasure of memory . . . and even of history” (29). If the photograph opens the door to referentiality and slams it, it also inaugurates an infinite circuit of rebounding as undoing, leaving the self afloat in a catastrophal desire, perpetually walking through a door without reaching the other side of the threshold: “As in the Sartrian hell, the door is wide open, but there is no veritable exit; there is nowhere to go; the bridges are burned, the sidewalks catastrophied” (35).

SISYPHUS presents its own photographic (and painted) analogs of seized, catastrophal time: “Sinister Street” (1928) by Umbo [Otto Umbehr], a work dissolving street, structures, vehicles, and creatures into a single plane of shimmering heatstroke; Maria Elena Vieira da Silva’s Stèle (1964), “which seems to identify the infinitesimal seisms present in the frame, perhaps even provoked by a frame’s imposition of limitation”; official photographs taken by Italian fascists of gutted homes in Florence that were immediately thereafter demolished (all from Part I). Nathanaël refers as well to Hervé Guibert, French writer and photographer (who died in 1991 of AIDS at age 36), whom she notes for taping a photograph of a boy to his body until the image transferred to his skin, for his formulation of the photograph as “Un événement de lumière,” for his theory of “subjectless photography” (Part II); and to Nicolas Grospierre, a Swiss architectural photographer whose 2008 Venice biennale show was titled, “The Afterlife of Buildings,” and who has had a very recent show in Chicago, “One Thousand Doors, No Exit” (Part VII). We move from the directly interrogative photograph of a gaze to (mainly) photographs of architecture as catastrophal theater.² Her discussions of an image from Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology, which features the sunken ruin of an Axis bunker from the Atlantic Wall built in WWII, and a (heavily processed) photograph from Michal Rovner’s series Outside, which depicts a concrete Bedouin farmhouse in an Israeli desert reduced to a bare archetype of dwelling, a view where it seems to lack windows and door, remark on these works’ commentary on a temporality of slow decay over against their subjects’ and objects’ inscription in cultures of accelerated, compressed militarized time.

Yet through the term “theater” Nathanaël invokes or constructs a temporality of catastrophe for the photograph beyond that of decay. As she writes towards the end of SISYPHUS: “The present of the photograph is no more documentable than is the present of a book as it is written. If it is a document at all, it is a document of the failure to keep time” (Part VI(b)). The photograph not only indicts the present’s evisceration of the past, but also avenges its lapse of watchfulness over history (and its foreclosed historical potentiality) by fixing the present in a structure of “vigilation,” a perpetual wakeful hauntedness.³ Nathanaël envisions the theater-vigil of the photograph as an architectural frame that is an ethical frame of address-accusation, as well as a stage of performance, in and on which the present time, under the quaver of the réplique, is enjoined to replay a past it has otherwise collaborated in disappearing.⁴ As a non-presencing of a present, the photograph is a moment of “syncope,” a blink. As a disclosure of the trauma nested in the present, the photographic theater is a fury of Hegelian bad infinity: “The réplique is dialogical, combative, echoic, duplicitous. In theatre, it is simply what is said. This theatre, however, is catastrophal . . . a theatre of reiterative ending. With its [for all its] etymological gesturings toward the conclusive and the turn, the overturn, the downturn, the catastrophe’s finality is thwarted” (Part I). “A room is traversed . . . these perambulations are catastrophal in that they register the ends over and over again” (Part I). “Someone carries a door through a door . . . there is an absence of limits, an exacerbated falsehood of traversal” (Part I).

Nathanaël’s SISYPHUS overlays Albert Camus’s 1942 Le Myth de Sisyphe, a critique of the action of suicide as response to the human predicament of the absurd. Camus there argues for the ethics of a “life without appeal”—a life lived in the full realization of humanity’s alienation from the rest of the universe, and the worthlessness of human endeavor given the falsity of any transcendental value. To suicide is to acquiesce to the absurd; to continue on, either in a wild lawlessness of action or on a treadmill of habit, while lacking any delusion of worth or of the possibility of change, is to scorn the absurd. As Camus famously writes, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy” (123): here is a contentment of self-mastery in the discontent of perpetual, meaningless repetition. Camus’s ethical stakes thus concern an impersonal aporia of existence: the absurd is a fact that can be fantasticated, acquiesced to in suicide, or lived through with intellectual vigilance.

A Sisyphean allegory, too, shows up in Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster; this is the laying bare of “work” in the concentration camp, where the laborer, for instance, removes and replaces a pile of heavy stones “at top speed” to no purpose:

[W]ork has ceased to be his way of living and has become his way of dying. Work, death: equivalents. . . . The meaning of work is then the destruction of work in and through work. . . . [Such labor] makes the worker, whom it reduces to naught, aware that the society expressed in the labor camp is what he must struggle against even as he dies, even as he survives. . . . Such survival is (also) immediate death, immediate acceptance of death in the refusal to die.

(81-2)

As for Camus, for Blanchot suicide is not an option; yet for Blanchot, the absurd is a human-authored theater of catastrophe, one indicted by a ghastly, principled survivorship. It is this endgame as vigilant indictment with which Nathanaël’s SISYPHUS most reverberates.

In an appendix to Dialectic of Enlightenment, “On the Theory of Ghosts,” Adorno and Horkheimer eloquently deride the temporal logic of capitalist culture, which many have claimed as photographic time: “Individuals are reduced to a mere sequence of instantaneous experiences, which leave no trace, or rather whose trace is hated as irrational, superfluous, and ‘overtaken’ in the literal sense. . . . History is eliminated in oneself and others out of a fear that it may remind the individual of the degeneration of his own existence. . . . Men have ceased to consider their own purpose and fate; they work their despair out on the dead” (216). Nathanaël’s untimely meditations on photographs as theaters of the catastrophal open up the filmic medium to let the dead have their day. That day is a violently foreclosed, bygone “today”—a before seizing and seized in its after again.⁵

Since 2007, Judith Goldman has been a Harper Schmidt fellow and collegiate assistant professor at the University of Chicago, teaching in the arts humanities core and in creative writing. In autumn of 2011, she will be the Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry at University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Vocoder (Roof 2001), DeathStar/rico-chet (O Books 2006), “the dispossessions” (atticus/finch 2009), and l.b.; or, catenaries (forthcoming, Krupskaya 2011). She co-edited the annual journal War and Peace with Leslie Scalapino from 2005-2009. She is at work on multi-media performance pieces using live sound, composed recorded sound, and video.

Footnotes

1. See Christine Ross’s very interesting, informative consideration of tense and tenselessness in three recentvideo works by Paris-based artist Melik Ohanian, in “The Suspension of History in Contemporary Media Arts.”

2. Several of the talks in At Alberta take up architecture. In one passage Nathanaël equates language with architecture: “The architectural quality of language is such that despite the reinforcement of its internal structures, of its inflexibly governed syntax, of the peremptory boundaries erected to fend off any resistance or interrogation infringing on its enclosure, it is nonetheless susceptible to the external rigors that fall upon it, would reshape it. Just like cities and the buildings that comprise them, languages . . . are . . . fortresses whose first concern is to push back an anticipated enemy. . . . [Yet] languages, themselves edifices, emerging from the bodies they would build, batter, astound or formulate, are at once place and displacement, contemplation and spillage” (8).

3. I draw here on Nathanaël’s exfoliation of vigils and “vigilation” in her recent chapbook Vigilous, Reel:De-sire (a)s accusation.

4. These ideas draw on my personal correspondence with Nathanaël (May 31, 2011).

5. I advert here to Nathanaël’s repeated allusion in recent works (including SISYPHUS) to a statement by Ingeborg Bachmann in Malina: A Novel: “In fact, ‘today’ is a word which only suicides ought to be able to use; it has no meaning for other people” (qtd. in At Alberta 151).

Works Cited

Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1995. Print.
Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Trans. Justin O’Brien. New York: Vintage International, 1991. Print.
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Print.
Derrida, Jacques. The Gift of Death. Trans. David Wills. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992. Print.
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. New York: Continuum, 1997. Print.
Nathanaël [Stephens, Nathalie]. Absence Where As (Claude Cahun and the Unopened Book). New York: Nightboat Books, 2009. Print.
N. S. [Stephens, Nathalie]. Vigilous, Reel: De-sire (a)s accusation. San Francisco: Albion Books, 2010. Print.
Ross, Christine. “The Suspension of History in Contemporary Media Arts.” Intermédialités 11 (Spring 2008): 125-148. Print.
Rovner, Michal, et al. Michal Rovner: The Space Between. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2002. Print.
Stephens, Nathalie (see also Nathanaël and N.S.). At Alberta. Toronto: Book Thug, 2008. Print.
Virilio, Paul. Bunker Archaeology. Trans. George Collins. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994. Print.

September 3, 2013

“This Time Round”: David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and the Apocalyptic Problem of Historicism

Heather J. Hicks (bio)
Villanova University
heather.hicks@villanova.edu

Abstract

David Mitchell’s experimental novel, Cloud Atlas, confronts the potentially apocalyptic effects of both linear and cyclical modes of temporality. Using as a framework Micea Eliade’s well-known philosophical treatise, The Myth of the Eternal Return, the essay demonstrates that Mitchell’s preoccupation with cyclical temporality can be understood as a reaction against what Eliade calls “the terror of history.” Cloud Atlas‘s characters, events, and motifs register the destructive effects of both historicist and cyclical understandings of time, culminating in its complex treatment of human clones as an embodiment of eternal return. The novel interrogates historicism through its formal experimentation.

Surprisingly little critical attention has been given to the recent outpouring of apocalyptic narratives by major literary figures.¹ What began as a trickle of serious eschatological fiction in the 1980s and 1990s has become a noteworthy literary phenomenon in the first decade of the new century, with the publication of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island (2005), Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007), Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (2009), and Douglas Coupland’s Player One (2010).² In these novels writers who enjoy the hard-earned imprimatur of contemporary canonicity have produced end-of-the-world scenarios that once were the near exclusive domain of genre science fiction.³

We probably needn’t linger long on why there has been a surge of high-literary apocalyptic texts. The increasing interpenetration of “high” and “low” literary forms in the postmodern era is well-documented. The visible traces of cyberpunk motifs in most contemporary canonical apocalyptic literature suggest that this variant of science fiction became a sort of literary gateway drug, introducing eschatological themes to the literati. Meanwhile, as Lois Parkinson Zamora, Warren Wagar, and Fiona Stafford point out, apocalyptic texts proliferate when times are especially troubled (11; 4; 87). The melting polar icecaps, “War on Terror,” reactor meltdowns, oil spills, and chafing among nations with nuclear arsenals have produced the sort of anxiety that could explain why major writers in the West would speculate on the possibility that human civilization will collapse or self-immolate in the too-near future.

But if why there has been a surge in highly literary apocalyptic texts may not merit extended analysis, how postmodern writers produce eschatological fiction does. Necessarily, given the range of writers who have recently produced apocalyptic novels, there are many answers to this question. However, some interesting patterns do present themselves in these writers’ work. While some subscribe to romantic empowerment through loss, others to a modernist, elegiac approach to the unraveling of civilization, and still others to a recognizably postmodern depiction of the fragmentation of subjectivity or even madness in the face of global change, almost all portray their protagonists as alone in the midst of cataclysm.⁴ Several texts imagine that genetic engineering or cloning will prove the final straw that breaks civilization’s back. Many draw connections between contemporary attitudes toward the aging human body and forms of environmental and socio-cultural degradation. A number imagine a post-apocalyptic era in which some form of post-human will inherit the earth. Cannibalism is both a metaphor and a material reality in virtually all of the texts. Many seem deeply preoccupied with the nature of time and how we might engage with time differently.

One text that includes all of these elements, but makes the latter questions concerning time especially central, is David’s Mitchell’s 2004 novel Cloud Atlas. The boomeranging arc of Mitchell’s novel, which travels from the nineteenth century to a near-future apocalypse and then backward to its historical starting point, helps to crystallize a question implied in much postmodern apocalyptic fiction: If a linear conception of time is contributing to humanity’s apocalyptic tendencies, why not revert to the cyclical understanding of time that structured human consciousness for millennia?⁵ Mircea Eliade poses this same question in his study of the philosophy of time, The Myth of the Eternal Return, which argues that the abandonment of cyclical ontology in favor of modern historicism has made Western subjects profoundly vulnerable to what he terms “the terror of history.”

In this essay, I use Eliade’s treatise to argue that Cloud Atlas depicts the risks associated with both linear and cyclical approaches to temporality. Mitchell takes the contemporary climate of global crisis as an occasion to weigh dialectically the affective, social and political resources that historicist and cyclical forms of subjectivity and ontology may provide in the service of deterring our collective annihilation. The novel deploys a series of complex tropes—aging bodies, trains, cannibals, clones, transmigrating souls, and religious icons—to examine the phenomenology of historicism. In the final section of the essay, I argue that Mitchell’s self-conscious play with the unstable relationship between history and genre comments on the potential formal investments in literature have to break us out of an over-determined relationship to historicism.

“The Paradise of Archetypes and Repetition”

Growing up during the cold war, David Mitchell was deeply affected by the threat of nuclear war, and several of his novels include apocalyptic elements.⁶ Yet Cloud Atlas has the end of the world at its heart: The first half of the novel presents a series of five interrupted narratives set in periods from the 1850s to the near future and culminates with a sixth, post-apocalyptic story set in the distant future. From this midpoint, Cloud Atlas then moves backward through the preceding five narratives, completing each and ending with the resolution of the 19^th century story.

As in much postmodern fiction, Mitchell’s novel complicates the linear notions of time that are central to a modern understanding of history. On the one hand, there is an historical sequence to the stories that comprise Cloud Atlas. The nineteenth-century story set aboard a ship is followed by stories set in the early 20^th century, then the seventies, then the present, and onward to a near future of cloning. In the first story, a guileless notary named Adam Ewing is poisoned by a conman while sailing from Sydney to San Francisco. In the second, set in Brussels, Robert Frobisher, a young, bisexual musical prodigy, both preys on and is exploited by an aging master composer while serving as his amanuensis. The third narrative, set in California, features female cub reporter Luisa Rey, who attempts to expose the corruption of a nuclear power company. In the fourth, an aging English vanity publisher, Timothy Cavendish, is involuntarily committed to a nursing home. In the fifth, Sonmi-451, a Korean clone created to work as food-court server, becomes conscious of her subjugation and joins an abolition movement. In each story, some reference is made to the previous one, so for instance the musician in story two finds the journal that comprises story one, and so forth. Yet no exposition is offered about how these narratives relate to the centerpiece of the novel, the account of Zachry, a young man living in a primitive community on Hawaii in the distant aftermath of a global nuclear apocalypse. The sequence invites us to infer and attempt to decode causality from the series of narratives: somehow the events taking place in each era may have, sequentially, or in the aggregate, created the conditions of global catastrophe. In this sense, the superficial fragmentation of the novel may belie a deeper, coherent structure, and, at least up to its midpoint, it could be argued that the novel has a linear and historical perspective. Yet such causality remains hypothetical, and the reader is left to contemplate how each story or set of circumstances may relate to the others. In this respect the novel rejects the more direct forms of cause and effect that are associated with linear history.

These narrative aporia are not the whole story of Mitchell’s formal experimentation in Cloud Atlas, however, since the second half of the novel reverses the chronology of the first. In a recent essay on David Mitchell’s fiction, James Wood observes that, “Mitchell is obsessed with eternal recurrence” (71). Indeed, through its basic structure Cloud Atlas invites us to consider how cyclical understandings of time might serve as a way out of apocalyptic events, since this is what the book itself enacts: put simply, as readers we come to the apocalyptic end, only to find that half of the book remains to be read. By the time we have finished the book, we have arrived back in the 19^th century, creating a sense of coming full circle: the apocalyptic end of civilization becomes the occasion for the beginning of a new chapter or phase of each of the stories Mitchell had begun earlier.⁷

To make an apocalyptic narrative cyclical might seem to fly in the face of a pervasive modern view of the apocalypse as the end. Frank Kermode, for instance, argues that it is the “sense of an ending” that gives apocalyptic discourse its allure, penetrating our stories and our selves in equal measure. In a similar vein, Fiona Stafford’s scholarship on the offshoot of apocalyptic narrative that she calls “last-of-the-race fiction” underscores that this modern form of apocalyptic thinking emerged as a linear conception of time eclipsed the cyclical one:

[o]nly when time is perceived as a line and change as irreversible can “the last” have any meaning. Ancient concepts of time as a great circle through which everything turned before regaining the original point for a fresh departure, [sic] offered little scope for absolute endings and last things. In such systems, any ending must also be a beginning, while the significance of individual events is qualified by thoughts of endless repetition—just as each winter is followed by spring, each sunset redeemed by faith in the dawn. The same does not apply to linear concepts of time, where the model is not that of the natural cycles common to a community, but of an individual life moving in one direction from birth to death. Here, events are unrepeatable and endings carry no guarantee of regeneration, so “the last” has a much greater significance.

(42)

For Stafford, the power of the narrative of last things depends on the ending supplied by a linear conception of history.

Despite the modern imbrication of the linear and the apocalyptic, David Mitchell is not the first author to generate a cyclical apocalyptic narrative. Indeed, it would be an oversimplification to understand the cyclical model of temporality itself as obsolete. In his history of time, G.J. Whitrow reminds us that “Nietzsche, who died in 1900, and the twentieth-century historians and sociologists Spengler, Pareto, and Toynbee all believed in the cyclical nature of history” (179). Tyrus Miller extends the list of modern scholars who have promulgated the idea of cyclical history in the form of eternal recurrence to include “Georg Simmel, Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Karl Löwith, Mircea Eliade, and Pierre Klossowski,” as well as Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida (281). We should not be surprised that Warren Wagar, in his comprehensive study of “secular eschatological fictions” ranging from the early nineteenth century to the late 1970s, demonstrates that many “modern stories of the world’s end” actually “curve back on themselves, in a pattern of cyclical return” (185).

Both Whitrow and Wagar, however, understand such a modern preoccupation with the cyclical as part of a despairing outlook. Whitrow remarks that for the thinkers he describes, to understand time as cyclical is to “feel the menace of time as much as its promise” (179). Wagar, meanwhile, maintains that cyclical apocalyptic narratives “reflect a conserving temperament” (185). He explains that in these texts we see that, “the world of the author’s experience does not end in his consciousness or in his loyalties. He does not escape its boundaries. The future he envisages is . . . an empty repetition, because he is firmly attached to the present order of things” (186). Whether in Spengler’s Decline of the West or in Miller’s Canticle for Leibowitz, for Whitrow and Wagar the problem is that the writers see no possibility of the new—everything is always already old. In this preference for the possibility of the new, both scholars ironically reveal the imprint of the linear ontology about which they write with such authority.

To gain perspective on how the human-made catastrophes of the recent era could inspire Mitchell’s more hopeful deployment of a cyclical apocalyptic narrative, it is instructive to turn to Mircea Eliade’s meditation on linear and cyclical views of time, The Myth of the Eternal Return, which presents cyclical ontology as not only reemergent in the 20^th century, but necessary. A product of the horrors of the twentieth century, Eliade understands the modern, linear conception of time known as “history” to be profane and chaotic. It is for him “the blind play of economic, social, or political forces, or, even worse, only the result of the ‘liberties’ that a minority takes and exercises directly on the stage of universal history” (151). Secular historicism requires humans to endure “collective deportations and massacres . . . [and] atomic bombings,” with no sense that these events have any larger meaning or purpose (151).

Eliade argues that premodern societies embraced cyclical models of temporality in order to annul the “terror of history” by denying its existence. In his understanding of the “archaic ontology” he examines, ancient cultures derived their sense of reality from their creation myths. The cycles that gave shape to their lives involved the perceived repetition of these primal moments through rituals and ceremonies, in which they understood themselves to be embodiments of archetypal mythical identities: “an object or an act becomes real only insofar as it imitates or repeats an archetype. Thus, reality is acquired solely through repetition or participation; everything which lacks an exemplary model is ‘meaningless,’ i.e., it lacks reality” (34).⁸ By elaborating this vision of cyclical temporality, Eliade works toward defamiliarizing more modern conceptions of historical time, reminding readers that “interest in the ‘irreversible’ and the ‘new’ in history is a recent discovery in the life of humanity” (48). In the final lines of his book he reflects that, “modern man is irremediably identified with history and progress, and . . . history and progress are a fall, both implying the final abandonment of the paradise of archetypes and repetition” (162).

Eliade starkly lays out the distinction between the versions of subjectivity cyclical and historical ontologies produce. Because his sense of reality is created by adhering to archetypes, the man within traditional culture “sees himself as real, i.e., as ‘truly himself,’ only, and precisely, insofar as he ceases to be so” (34). On the other hand, “‘historical man’ . . . [is] the man who is insofar as he makes himself, within history” (ix, emphasis in original). Near the conclusion of The Myth of the Eternal Return, Eliade imagines a kind of debate that might take place between these two subjects:

In the last analysis, modern man, who accepts history or claims to accept it, can reproach archaic man, imprisoned within the mythical horizon of archetypes and repetition, with his creative impotence, or what amounts to the same thing, his inability to accept the risks entailed by every creative act. . . .

To these criticisms raised by modern man, the man of the traditional civilizations could reply . . . [that] [i]t is becoming more and more doubtful . . . if modern man can make history.

(155-6)

Eliade shows himself to be largely sympathetic to the latter view; convinced of “the transitoriness, or at least the secondary character, of human individuality as such,” he presents history and individuality as two destructive myths that reinforce one another.

At points, in his rejection of historicism, Eliade appears to yearn for a return to return in starkly apocalyptic terms:

There is also reason to foresee that, as the terror of history grows worse, as existence becomes more and more precarious because of history, the positions of historicism will increasingly lose in prestige. And, at a moment when history could do what neither the cosmos, nor man, nor chance have [sic] yet succeeded in doing—that is, wipe out the human race in its entirety—it may be that we are witnessing a desperate attempt to prohibit the “events of history” through a reintegration of human societies within the horizon (artificial, because decreed) of archetypes and their repetition. In other words, it is not inadmissible to think of an epoch, and an epoch not too far distant, when humanity, to ensure its survival, will find itself reduced to desisting from any further “making” of history in the sense in which it began to make it from the creation of the first empires, will confine itself to repeating prescribed archetypal gestures, and will strive to forget, as meaningless and dangerous, any spontaneous gesture which might entail “historical” consequences. It would even be interesting to compare the anhistorical solution of future societies with the paradisal or eschatological myths of the golden age of the beginning or the end of the world.

(153-54)

Eliade’s language here reflects his own conflicted view of a return to cyclical ontology. On the one hand, he characterizes a return to repetition and archetypes as a “desperate” and “artificial” act, leaving Western subjects “reduced to desisting from any further ‘making’ of history” (emphasis mine). Yet he also again invokes the language of paradise, imagining that such a future society might resemble a “golden age.”⁹

Despite being regarded by many as the greatest twentieth-century scholar of religion, as well as author of “the greatest modern work on arrows and cycles” (Gould 12), Eliade is a controversial figure (Allen xi). Recent revelations of Eliade’s affiliation with Romania’s Iron Guard and his apparent complicity with fascism and anti-semitism have inspired some critics to interpret his enthusiasm for anti-historicist, archetypal modes of being as part of a regimented hierarchical ideology.¹⁰ Even before questions were raised about Eliade’s political affiliations in Romania, his account of history was much debated.¹¹ Given Hegel’s oft-quoted claim that “the history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of Freedom” (19-20), a denunciation of a Hegelian model of history could be construed as a blanket rejection of progressive political causes. Even scholars who celebrate the value of Eliade’s work concede the potentially reactionary implications of his anti-historicism (Allen 269-71).

Yet to a striking degree, Eliade’s thought resonates with that of left-leaning thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin.¹² In his emphasis on the wisdom of pre-modern, non-Western others, as well as in his critique of the Enlightenment view of progress, Eliade can as easily be placed in the vanguard of postmodernism as in the camp of retrograde traditionalists.¹³ Indeed, Eliade’s disavowal of linear understandings of history can give us a distinctive purchase on certain pragmatic contradictions within post-structuralism. It is a given in the contemporary moment that conventional notions of individual, unified subjectivity—what Ermath calls “the founding cogito“—have been deconstructed in the wake of post-structuralist theory’s influence (8). Yet Eliade’s anti-historicist critique of modern subjectivity lays bare the degree to which linear models of time continue to inhere within the post-structuralist model of subjectivity, since its fluidity is contingent upon an ever shifting historical context.¹⁴ This covert reification of linear time in turn complicates post-structuralism’s ideological critique of Enlightenment notions of progress.

The near-apocalyptic scale of the Second World War inspired Eliade to reexamine human understandings of time as a potential key to the future of humanity. He provocatively suggests that we need not think of the passage of time only in linear terms, but he also subtly acknowledges the costs in ideals of human freedom that might be paid for such a choice. Mitchell’s novel reflects in similar terms on the stakes of our understanding of time and history. The experience of Mitchell’s characters resonates powerfully with Eliade’s claim that while archaic subjects understood themselves as reiterations of mythical archetypes, the modern conception of history has thrust a sense of individuality upon men and women, begetting a terrifying emptiness. All of Mitchell’s protagonists are initially depicted as isolated individuals caught in the sweep of history, whether it is racist Empire-building on Chatham Island, the socio-cultural aftermath of World War One, the power plays of the emergent nuclear industry, the growing social contempt for the elderly, or the technological advances that have made human cloning a reality. Stafford emphasizes the ways in which Robinson Crusoe, as the first “sole survivor” in Western literature, reflects a shift from Christian Millenarianism, with its emphasis on a collective ending, to a modern, secular preoccupation with individual “problems of loss and post-traumatic experiences” (72). Interestingly, Mitchell figures all of his main characters as castaways, not only depicting them as solitary outsiders in their various places and times, but, in a text full of images of islands, presenting many of them literally dragging themselves out of the water onto islands to escape what Lutz Niethammer, paraphrasing Benjamin, calls the “catastrophic storm of history” (qtd. in Woods 115).¹⁵

“Souls Cross Ages Like Clouds Cross Skies”

Cloud Atlas‘s interrogation of historicism extends from its larger structure to the details of its separate narratives. The six storylines that comprise the novel’s five hundred pages are both thematically diverse and dense with recurrent symbolism.¹⁶ Within its multiple stories, as much as in its overarching form and characterization, Mitchell’s novel considers the terror of history. This is particularly evident in the sections entitled “Letters from Zedelgrehm.” Mitchell creates a jarring juxtaposition between this narrative, which is narrated by a bisexual book thief, modernist musical composer, and sometimes sexual hustler named Robert Frobisher, and its predecessor, “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing,” which is recorded by a devout Christian and notary who is dutifully trying to deliver legal documents to the beneficiary of an inheritance in Australia. While there are some continuities even here—both men’s destinies are shaped by legacies, and both are at the mercy of older, more cunning men—the tone of the texts is very different. Adam sees the world through a stable lens of Christian morality. Frobisher, living in the still scarred landscape of post-World War One England and Belgium, no longer feels such certainty. He is haunted by the death of his older brother, whose own virtues have become, posthumously, the impossible standard against which his family measures him. His father is an “eminent churchman,” but he reflects, “Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman. Every time I’ve stepped through its wide-open doorway, I find myself stepping out on the street again” (448, 75).

This contrast between faith and a modern, secular world view is made especially evident when Robert, having read the first half of Adam’s journal, muses enviously on “happy, dying Ewing, who never saw the unspeakable forms waiting around history’s corner” (460). Adam’s innocence and religiosity, underscored so powerfully by his name, are contrasted with the waywardness and despair of a man who lives in the shadow of twentieth-century history. In this light it is particularly appropriate that Frobisher’s final undoing is effected by his love for a character named “Eva,” who precipitates his fall into suicide. The contrast between Ewing and Frobisher serves as a powerful iteration of the desolation produced by the “terror of history.”

This sense of the treachery of a linear conception of time is reinforced in the “Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish.” In this case, linear time is examined through the lens of modern understandings of the aging body and mind. Cavendish is in some sense an older version of Frobisher, another Cambridge-educated Brit on the run from creditors, whose sexual indiscretion—in this case an affair with his brother’s wife—is the apparent motivation for his incarceration in a rest home. The vehicle for this meditation on the linearity of aging is a long and tortured train ride on the British rail system. The train ride, like Cavendish’s life and the memoir he produces, is full of false starts, interruptions, and failures. Overall, the decay of the British rail system and the metastization of its bureaucracy, along with the corruption of the landscape through which Cavendish travels, become the occasion for a narrative of decline. Britain and Cavendish’s aging body are both well past their prime, a message highlighted by Cavendish’s repeated references to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. “Oh, aging is ruddy unbearable!” Cavendish reflects. “The I’s we were yearn to breathe the world’s air again, but can they ever break out from these calcified cocoons? Oh, can they hell” (168). The ambivalence of this rumination suggests the tension that runs through this section of the novel, for while the transformations brought to the body by age are undeniable, the meanings that are attached to them are highly malleable.

The prevailing episteme in Cavendish’s England is brutal contempt for the elderly, and Cavendish’s subjugation to a linear conception of time becomes graver still once he arrives at his destination—a facility he believes to be a hotel where he gratefully “checks in,” only to discover quickly that he has been involuntarily committed to a nursing home. At this point, Cavendish’s account of aging as a microcosm of time’s arrow takes on a prophetic—if not quite apocalyptic—tone that is at once poignant and absurd:

Behold your future, Cavendish the Younger. You will not apply for membership, but the tribe of the elderly will claim you. Your present will not keep pace with the world’s. This slippage will stretch your skin, sag your skeleton, erode your hair and memory, make your skin turn opaque so your twitching organs and blue-cheese veins will be semivisible. You will venture out only in daylight, avoiding weekends and school holidays. Language, too, will leave you behind, betraying your tribal affiliations whenever you speak. . . . Only babies, cats, and drug addicts will acknowledge your existence. So do not fritter away your days. Sooner than you fear, you will stand before a mirror in a care home, look at your body, and think, E.T., locked in a ruddy cupboard for a fortnight.

(180-81)

In Cavendish’s blackly comic account of aging we see the ravages of a secular, linear conception of time that has no larger meaning or purpose—an ontology that constructs the aging human body exclusively as a site of decay and shame.

While the sense of hopelessness that Mitchell associates with “time’s arrow” is palpable in these sections of the book, in several sections he presents cyclical ontology as similarly confining. The novel opens with a mystifying image: the conman Dr. Henry Goose scouring a beach on Chatham Island for teeth cannibals have left behind, teeth he plans to secretly convert into dentures for his nemesis, which will in turn lead to her public downfall when he exposes that she “masticates with cannibals’ gnashers” (6). At first this opening gambit merely baffles: how could such a bizarre tableau set the stage for what is to come? Yet the scene draws attention to Chatham Island as a site where “the strong engorged themselves on the weak” (5). As we will learn, Henry Goose is himself deeply committed to a personal philosophy of predation: In his guise as a doctor he will later poison the narrator, Adam Ewing, in order to rob him, while also casually attempting to poison his mind with his racist views. Already, his plan to use the teeth of an earlier conflict between weak and strong in order to empower himself against his wealthy former employer suggests the cyclical nature of violence, which is a central preoccupation of Mitchell’s novel.

In fact, the stories that follow are a sorry register of greed and exploitation, and a meditation on the will to power. The weak are poisoned, cuckolded, blackmailed, assaulted, imprisoned, enslaved, and, ultimately, eaten in a system of organized cannibalism by those with more cunning and power. The conclusion of the novel includes the repeated mantra of its first predator, Henry Goose, who explains to his victim, “The weak are meat the strong do eat” (489, 503). As the fabricant Sonmi-451 concisely states, “My fifth Declaration posits how, in a cycle as old as tribalism, ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence; violence engenders further violence until the only ‘rights,’ the only law, are whatever is willed by the most powerful” (344). The emphasis in these passages on the cyclical perpetuity of oppression and violence raises the most obvious question about embracing a cyclical ontology: wouldn’t such an understanding of time simply calcify the brutality humanity has shown itself capable of, rather than opening the way for positive change?

Mitchell subjects this question to another level of magnification in the first and last events he chronicles. He provides many signs that the distant future in the Pacific narrated in “Sloosha’s Crossin an’ Ev’rythin’ After” recycles the conditions of the 1850s when “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing” takes place. In the 1850s the Moriori, peaceful icon-worshippers who believe that to murder is to forsake one’s soul, are viciously subjugated and enslaved by the more warlike Maori tribe. ¹⁷ In the distant future of “Sloosha’s Crossin’” Zachry’s community, peaceful icon-worshippers who believe that to murder is to forsake one’s soul, are viciously subjugated and enslaved by the more warlike Kona tribe. In each story, a single member of the defeated tribe survives: in “The Pacific Journal” Autua (a character whose chiasmic name playfully gestures to the structure of the novel, and, perhaps, of time itself) ultimately rescues Adam Ewing from the clutches of the murderous conman Henry Goose; in “Sloosha’s Crossin,” the narrator Zachry alone leaves Hawaii for Maui after the Kona’s assault. The reproduction of barbarity that these narratives manifest suggests that to endorse a cyclical notion of temporality is potentially to celebrate socio-cultural regression.

This interrogation of cyclical ontology continues in “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish.” While linear time is compared to a hellish ride on British rail, the epistemology of the “life cycle” is presented in equally grim terms. On the night Cavendish arrives at Aurora House, he avows that, “In the morning life would begin afresh, afresh, afresh. This time round I would do everything right” (173). In a parody of rebirth, when Cavendish awakes, he discovers that he will now be treated as a helpless baby. At the hands of the Aurora House staff he is slapped, scolded, spanked, and threatened with having his mouth washed out with soap. After he has a stroke, he is spoon-fed and diapered. Cavendish’s body becomes a palimpsest of linear and cyclical narratives, both of which can be deployed by the institutional apparatus of the nursing home to deny him agency and to strip his life of meaning.

Yet it is the cyclical worldview explored in “Letters from Zedelghrem,” Nietzsche’s notion of eternal recurrence, that is depicted as the most treacherous. Composer Vyvyan Ayrs is a devotee of Nietzsche who intends that the final masterpiece of his career, a “cyclical, crystalline thing,” will be titled “Eternal Recurrence” (79, 84). Taking his new mentor’s lead, Frobisher reads Also Sprach Zarathustra and feels such a profound resonance with the philosopher’s work that he remarks that it is as though “Nietzsche was reading me, not I him” (63). When Frobisher completes what he views as the best musical composition he will ever write, it is not surprising that it is to Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence that he turns to defend his decision to kill himself:

Rome’ll decline and fall again, Cortés’ll lay Tenochtitlán to waste again, and later, Ewing will sail again, Adrian’ll be blown to pieces again, you and I’ll sleep under Corsican stars again, I’ll come to Bruges again, fall in and out of love with Eva again, you’ll read this letter again, the sun’ll grow cold again. Nietzsche’s gramophone record. When it ends, the Old One plays it again, for an eternity of eternities. . . .

Once my luger lets me go, my birth, next time around, will be upon me in a heartbeat. Thirteen years from now we’ll meet again at Gresham, ten years later I’ll be back in this same room, holding this same gun, composing this same letter, my resolution as perfect as my many-headed sextet. Such elegant certainties comfort me at this quiet hour.

(471)

Frobisher appears liberated here from the depression and mental instability that assail him. Yet his youth and the extremity of his act invite a reading of Nietzsche’s much debated notion of cycles as a destructive alternative to history’s “unspeakable forms.”

While the novel’s obsession with temporality is largely expressed as a critique of both linear and cyclical ontologies, it also explores the potential benefits of each. In broad terms, the novel does assert the possibility of historical progress. For instance, while barbarity appears more severe in Zachry’s distant future, the pinnacle of civilization also seems higher.¹⁸ If Zachry and Autua are indeed doubles, then Meronym and Adam are as well.¹⁹ Adam, a white American, is for much of the nineteenth-century narrative depicted as naïve and racist. Meronym, on the other hand, is a black clone who is part of a small number of technologically advanced survivors of a global nuclear war. She is portrayed as far more sensitive and culturally sophisticated than her predecessor, Adam. In fact, Meronym, whose name means “a word denoting the mid point of two extremes,” shows great respect for Zachry’s archaic culture, even as she wields remarkable technology (“meronym, n.”).

This technology in turn brings us to yet another level at which Mitchell’s treatment of linear-time-as-progress must be considered. While much of Mitchell’s novel appears critical of scientific and technological change, especially as it is depicted in the contemporary era of the “Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish” and the near future of “The Orison of Sonmi-451,” it is the absence of much of this technology that signals humanity’s “Fall” in the post-apocalyptic section of the novel. In Zachry’s world, people die at 50 because of the lack of medical science and technology; they possess only primitive tools; they are subject to the brutality of barbarians; and they live in a state of profound ignorance. Such changes for the worse also, implicitly, celebrate the idea and material expressions of linear progress as they currently exist.

Meanwhile, the novel illustrates the potential advantages of a cyclical ontology in its depictions of reincarnation. Gradually revealing that Robert Frobisher, Luisa Rey, Timothy Cavendish, Sonmi-451, and Meronym have identical birthmarks, Cloud Atlas suggests they share a soul that is recycled across time. The book’s title in part refers to this notion of reincarnation; as Zachry reflects:

Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an’ tho’ a cloud’s shape nor hue nor size don’t stay the same, it’s still a cloud an’ so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud’s blowed from or who the soul’ll be ‘morrow? Only Sonmi the east an’ the west an’ the compass an’ the atlas, yay, only the atlas o’ clouds.

(308)²⁰

The novel itself, then, serves as a “cloud atlas,” charting the movement of one soul across its several stories. While Zachry ultimately kills the Kona warrior who has attacked his family, he hesitates because he senses that “If I’d been rebirthed a Kona in this life, he could be me an’ I’d be killin’ myself” (301). This sense of identification with an other, of the interchangeability of identities across time, brings into focus how a cyclical ontology could enable a positive departure from the self-interested conventions of individualism.

Ultimately, in a novel preoccupied with both cyclical and linear forms of temporality, it is the “Orison of Sonmi-451” narrative that lingers longest on the problems and potential posed by each ontological position. On one level the sf-inspired clone narrative seems to function straightforwardly as a critique of the potentially dehumanizing telos of contemporary genomics research. The fabricants are treated with no mercy: they are regarded as non-human, forced to work brutal hours in conditions that often would be fatal for non-modified humans. Sonmi-451, whose name plays on Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, is a “server” at a fast food franchise and is required to work nineteen hours a day for twelve years. In Mitchell’s future, the treatment of clones is emblematic of a more pervasive dehumanization of the “corpocratic” regime, which construes its population as “consumers” rather than “citizens.” Most conspicuously, the term “soul” has lost its spiritual connotations and now refers to the identity/bank chip implanted in each consumer’s fingertip. In the denouement of the Sonmi-451 narrative, we learn that fabricants are slaughtered at the end of their term of service and their bodies “recycled” to feed other fabricants as well as consumers.

In bald terms, the practice of cloning Mitchell depicts represents everything that is dangerous about a cyclical view of time. As Sonmi-451 herself explains, “Fabricants have no earliest memories. . . . One twenty-four-hour cycle in Papa Song’s is indistinguishable from any other” (183). There is a linear element to their experience—all fabricants mistakenly believe that when their service ends, they will reach “Xultation” and be “transformed into consumers with Soulrings” (184). Yet in most respects, clones embody the archetypal model of identity associated with cyclical understandings of time. Endlessly reproduced and trained to perform the same tasks in perpetuity, the fabricants literalize the notion of eternal return. Indeed, Sonmi-451’s existence as a reproduction of a “stem-type” recalls Eliade’s analysis of the ways ancestors in some cultures serve as analogues of archetpyes. He reflects that, “The transformation of the dead person into an ‘ancestor’ corresponds to the fusion of the individual into an archetypal category. In numerous traditions… the souls of the common dead no longer possess a ‘memory’; that is, they lose what may be called their historical individuality” (46-7). Anticipating a likely criticism, he continues,

As for the objection that an impersonal survival is equivalent to a real death (inasmuch as only the personality and the memory that are connected with duration and history can be called a survival), it is valid only from the point of view of a “historical consciousness,” in other words, from the point of view of modern man, for archaic consciousness accords no importance to personal memories.

(47)

The parallels are obvious and chilling between this ancient understanding of the “impersonal survival” of archetypes and the view in Sonmi-451’s era of endlessly reiterated “stemtypes” who, at least according to “popular wisdom[,] . . . don’t have personalities” (187). This sense of fabricants’ redundancy permits (post)modern consumers, with their “historical consciousness,” to be indifferent to the fate of the fabricant. As Sonmi-451 explains, “To enslave an individual troubles your consciences, . . . but to enslave a clone is no more troubling than owning the latest six-wheeler ford, ethically. Because you cannot discern our differences, you believe we have none” (187).

Sonmi-451’s “ascension,” or coming into consciousness, disrupts this sense of repetition, instead suggesting that “even same-stem fabricants cultured in the same wombtank are as singular as snow-flakes” (187). The ascension underscores the degree to which “An Orison of Sonmi-451” is committed to exploring the tension between a cyclical understanding of the world, with its fabricated, archetypal identities, and an action-driven, linear narrative that reframes Sonmi-451 as an historical subject. After her ascension, that linear narrative follows Sonmi-451 through her apparent recruitment by the Union rebels, builds to the revelation late in the story that her escape has been contrived by the Unanimity government to further divide consumers from fabricants, and ends with her emergence as a “martyr” who creates a set of Declarations that will ultimately change the course of history. In this plotline, we see a forceful valorization of a notion of historical subjectivity as the most hopeful means of escaping from the cycles of brutality that Cloud Atlas recurrently depicts. When the revolutionaries first attempt to enlist her in their cause, she tells them, “I was not genomed to alter history” (327). Yet after the members of Union show her the slaughter of fabricants, she makes a series of proclamations that self-consciously position her as an historical subject:

That ship must be destroyed. Every slaughtership in Nea So Copros like it must be sunk. . . .

The shipyards that build them must be demolished. The systems that facilitated them must be dismantled. The laws that permitted the systems must be torn down and reconstructed. . . .

Every consumer, xec, and Juche Boardman in Nea So Copros must understand that fabricants are purebloods, be they grown in a wombtank or a womb. If persuasion does not work, ascended fabricants must fight with Union to achieve this end, using whatever force is necessary.

(346, emphasis in original)

Both Sonmi-451’s call to action, and the ways she is situated here to resemble both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X (“using whatever force is necessary”), foreground the ways that this section of the text identifies linear history with the possibility of necessary change.

Balanced against this ostensible commitment to an historicist model of human identity, the Sonmi-451 section also reasserts the book’s fascination with reincarnation and the transmigration of souls. When Sonmi and her professed protector Hae-Joo Im encounter an ancient statue of Siddhartha, Hae-Joo Im explains that he was “a deity that offered salvation from a meaningless cycle of birth and rebirth. . . .” (329). Later an abbess explains to Sonmi that Siddhartha is “a dead man and a living ideal. The man taught about overcoming pain, and influencing one’s future reincarnations” (332). On one level the martyr Sonmi-451 and Buddha are doubles in the text—her ascension itself is the fabricant equivalent of the Buddhist state of Enlightenment. Her Declarations, moreover, promise liberation to other fabricants from the “meaningless cycle” to which they have been subjected.

Yet the references to Buddhism also evoke a more traditional, spiritual version of reincarnation, based on a model of karma. Eliade explains:

[T]he Indians quite early elaborated a conception of universal causality, the karma concept, which accounts for the actual events and sufferings of the individual’s life and at the same time explains the necessity for transmigrations. In the light of the law of karma, sufferings not only find a meaning but also acquire a positive value. The sufferings of one’s present life are not only deserved—since they are in fact the fatal effect of crimes and faults committed in previous lives—they are also welcome, for it is only in this way that it is possible to absorb and liquidate part of the karmic debt that burdens the individual and determines the cycle of his future existences. According to the Indian conception, every man is born with a debt, but with freedom to contract new debts. His existence forms a long series of payments and borrowings, the account of which is not always obvious.

(98-99)

Were we to understand Mitchell’s invocation of transmigration as inspired by the principles of Buddhism and karma as Eliade presents them, then Meronym, the most “enlightened” of the characters, is still paying for the misdeeds of Sonmi-451, Timothy Cavendish, Luisa Rey, and Robert Frobisher, and the price is to live in a wrecked world. Such an interpretation also provides one way of understanding the overall structure of the novel. To some degree the second half of each of the stories suggests ways each character might improve the karma of coming incarnations through their positive efforts, perhaps avoiding the disastrous scenario the centerpiece of the novel plays out.

While the complexities of Buddhist spirituality are beyond the scope of this essay, it should be clear from this brief account that it possesses both cyclical and linear elements. Even as souls transmigrate, enacting a cycle of existence, they are also moving forward toward freedom from this state of embodiment. In its stories, Mitchell’s novel seems to enact a similar balance between investments in historical and cyclical ontologies. After the post-apocalyptic midpoint of the novel, the second halves of Mitchell’s five narratives unspool in markedly linear form. In sections full of swiftly narrated action scenes, all the characters escape from one form of confinement or another.²¹ Through the course of these events, the novel also affirms the possibility of historical change. Adam vows to join the abolitionist movement; Frobisher creates an enduring work of art; Luisa stops the construction of a dangerous nuclear reactor; Cavendish overcomes his own xenophobia to collaborate with a Scottish patient in the rest home; Sonmi-451 becomes a martyr on behalf of all fabricants. As these descriptions suggest, these characters in part overcome the terror of history, not through cyclical thinking but through various gestures toward community. Only Frobisher remains isolated and arguably succumbs to the terror in his suicide. The final words of the novel, which imagine each individual action as a drop in the ocean, affirm this sense that acts of individual change can become collective historical transformations.

Despite the anxiety the text expresses about repetition in its treatment of cloning, it is also sameness—the experience of an archetypal identity—that strengthens each character. Through reincarnation, which they experience as déjà-vu, Mitchell’s characters achieve a sense of solidarity with their other selves across time. This spiritual understanding of repetition is amplified by several references to iconography and idolatry in Cloud Atlas. In an enigmatic passage near the opening of the novel, Adam Ewing plunges into a hole and discovers “First one, then ten, then hundreds of faces,” faces that prove to be dendroglyphs generated by the now nearly extinct Moriori (20). Mitchell returns to the notion of idols, or “dead-lifes” as Zachry calls them, in the “Sloosha’s Crossin” section (261). Meronym asks of the Valleysmen’s icons, “Is icons a home for the soul? Or a common mem’ry o’ faces’n’kin’n’age’n’all?” (258). One of Zachry’s tribe responds that, “The icon’ry . . . held Valleysmen’s past an’ present all t’gether” (258). These references call to mind Eliade’s discussion of the relationship between archetypes and ancestors, but they also resonate with Derrida’s discussion of spectrality in Specters of Marx. In Tim Woods’s gloss on Derrida, “History is an irrepressible revenant . . . , living-dead which haunts the present, since causes demonstrate a ‘posthumous’ historicality and materiality, a ‘living-on’ or survival after the death of the original event, demonstrating a more powerful life in its spiritual presence than its corporeal absence” (116, emphasis in original). For Woods, Derrida’s insistence on the impurity of history converges with Benjamin’s insistence that historicism must be replaced by “the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one” (116-17; Benjamin 79).²² As I now want to suggest, the form of Mitchell’s novel further elaborates on this challenge to historicism in its invocation of literary icons.

“In the Mind’s Mirror”

This essay has thus far focused on the content of Cloud Atlas without giving significant attention to its form. Ultimately, however, the complex form of Mitchell’s novel is essential to understanding how cyclical and linear notions of time, and their attendant versions of subjectivity, figure in his engagement with contemporary eschatology. When, at a recent reading, I asked David Mitchell about his political goals for his novels, he stressed that he thinks of himself more as a stylist than an “idea man” (“Thousand Autumns”). Such an assertion seems too modest: his books to date have shown themselves deeply committed to a range of questions and ideas about power, history, capitalism, terrorism, and other major contemporary issues. In another sense, the assessment rings true, for what is most dazzling about Cloud Atlas is the seemingly effortless way in which Mitchell shifts from a nineteenth-century romance on the high seas, to a decadent modernist tale of polymorphous sexuality and artistic intrigue, to a trim, commercial 1970s thriller, to an absurdist contemporary memoir, and finally to two sections of very elaborate futuristic science fiction.

It was Mitchell’s ability to segue from one of these genres to another with such apparent effortlessness in Cloud Atlas that initially drew raves from critics. Yet a number of critics have also been disoriented—even, perhaps, disturbed—by Mitchell’s ability to shuttle in and out of these narrative modes. One critic remarks, “The way Mitchell inhabits the different voices of the novel is close to miraculous” (MacFarlane). Another characterizes Mitchell as “a genius,” but goes on to say that his “virtuosity too often seems android” (Bissell). In his interview with Mitchell, Mason writes, “If there has been one consistent criticism of Mitchell, . . . it has been that his virtuosity is mere ventriloquism, a capacity for imitation that suggests he lacks originality” (Mitchell, “The Experimentalist”). This critical ambivalence reminds us that while many writers cover vast sweeps of time through either continuous or episodic narration, few tailor their narrative forms to the various moments in time they are exploring via narrative voice, focalization, style, and genre.

To be sure, such a literary enterprise is rare in part because of the sheer labor involved in developing the various techniques required to make each genre and style seem authentic. Other writers may also have eschewed such a montage of period pieces because of the profound contradictions such a production entails. The very authenticity of each section is exploded by its proximity to another equally authentic piece performing another time period. We are not permitted the sense of immersion typical of the historical novel. Instead, we are jarringly shuttled from one period to another. In their neo-formalist work on genre, Scott Black et al. maintain that

form is arguably one of the key ways for readers and writers to access and participate in history. Writing, reciting, or perhaps even silently reading an Horatian ode upon a local skirmish inscribes a history (public and political); so too does drawing an event—possibly the same event—into a history of subjective experience by rendering it with Petrarchan blazons or morality-play derived monologue.

(8)

From this perspective, Cloud Atlas enacts a sort of time travel. But not, precisely, historical time travel. Mitchell’s ability to capture moments in time through style and genre could, indeed, be said to suggest that those time periods were distinct, and that our recognition of them is predicated on this distinction. That is, the shifting styles and genres themselves index the linear passage of time. However, Mitchell resists this understanding, destabilizing the historical implications of the various genres by breaking them up and reversing their order. This highly visible manipulation denudes his genres of their temporal specificity.

The self-conscious, metanarrative devices Mitchell includes in Cloud Atlas also make the artificiality of the various “historical” narratives conspicuous. In the second narrative, Robert Frobisher finds the first half of Ewing’s published journal when he rifles through Vyvyan Ayrs’s book collection, looking for valuable volumes to steal and sell. This discovery serves as the first disclosure to Mitchell’s readers that he intends to denaturalize the stories we are reading and treat them as constructed narratives. Mitchell goes further, having Frobisher doubt the provenance of the journal. He muses:

Ewing puts me in mind of Melville’s bumbler Cpt. Delano in “Benito Cereno,” blind to all conspirators—he hasn’t spotted his trusty Dr. Henry Goose [sic] is a vampire, fueling his hypochondria in order to poison him, slowly, for his money.

Something shifty about the journal’s authenticity—seems too structured for a genuine diary, and its language doesn’t ring quite true—but who would bother forging such a journal, and why?

(64)

Why indeed? Here Mitchell draws attention to the artifice of his novel by flagging its literary debts and exposing its concerted effort to “forge” the form of a historical journal.

These metafictional gestures continue. Frobisher’s own narrative is told through letters that are saved and read forty years later by his former lover, Rufus Sixsmith, a character enmeshed in the cover-up at the nuclear power station which is the focus of the Luisa Rey narrative. The Luisa Rey story turns up in the form of an unpublished manuscript sent to publisher Timothy Cavendish, who reads and edits it. Cavendish’s story is in turn made into a movie, which enchants the fabricant Sonmi-451. Finally, Sonmi-451’s narrative takes the form of a digitally recorded interview that is discovered and viewed by Zachry.

These metafictional elements become an occasion to raise various questions about literature and literary form. From an historicist perspective, they can be read to comment on the role the loss of the written word may play in global collapse. The sequence of forms Mitchell parades before us reflects the large-scale cultural shifts that may take us from the era of personal journal and letter writing, through the heyday of literacy with the flourishing of bestsellers and newspapers, on to film, then computerized images, and then, after the Fall, back to pre-modern and non-literate forms of communication. In this sense, the architecture of the book hints at the prophylactic value of writing in our neo-apocalyptic times.

It is unclear, however, why the apparent dissolution of literacy matters in the larger narrative, since the reading of the narratives—or even the viewing of visual media -has little or no effect on the unfolding of events. While the various sections can be read to suggest that predatory actions snowball and carry us inexorably toward an apocalyptic outcome, the literariness of the book complicates this interpretation. Locally, the literary texts have little effect on the action in the book—reading Ewing’s journal does not change Frobisher’s conduct, nor does Luisa Rey’s encounter with Frobisher’s letters. Cavendish thinks of Luisa Rey when he escapes from the nursing home, but there is little suggestion that the thriller narrative actually inspires his bid for freedom. Sonmi-451 feels empathy for Cavendish’s plight in “The Ghastly Ordeal,” but watching the film does not change her views, which are already formed. Zachry’s encounter with Sonmi-451’s testimony affects neither his conduct nor the disastrous events that unfold in Hawaii.

More than historicizing literature, then, the constructedness of the stories complicates a historicist understanding of the novel as a whole. The events that take place in the various narratives are not “real” events—they are stories, encountered by characters in other stories. Postmodern literature, of course, is full of historical narratives that explode conventional understandings of history, a phenomenon labeled “historiographic metanarrative,” by Linda Hutcheon, and more recently “metahistorical romance” by Amy Elias. Much has been said about the ways postmodern narrative techniques emphasize the textuality of history, and its undecidability. Mitchell is certainly concerned with these questions, especially in “Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery,” where he offers a lengthy meditation on the ways power can undermine our access to the “actual past” by overlaying it with images of a “virtual past” (389-90). This section allows for a Baudrillardian interpretation of the book, in which Mitchell, despite attempting a serious meditation on our trajectory toward apocalypse, becomes caught in an unreal vertigo of literary conventions. In this reading, any “real” vision of our problems or their potential solutions is obscured by a wall of pre-existing cultural images—what Baudrillard calls simulacra, and what here take the form of literary genres and conventions that determine their own content.

It is also possible to perceive Mitchell’s text’s affinity to a more considered anti-historicist position. The young American man on a voyage; the sophisticated, bisexual British wit; the spunky female American reporter; the cynical, involuntarily incarcerated prisoner of a facility for the aged and impaired (at the mercy, no less, of a soulless head nurse); the beautiful, rebellious clone; the scrappy survivor caught in a post-apocalyptic landscape—the more audaciously Mitchell plays with literary styles and genres, the less these characters seem like individuals and the more they appear to be repetitions of archetypes derived from the history of Western literature. Indeed, Mitchell conspicuously pays homage to Daniel Defoe, Herman Melville, Oscar Wilde, Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Ken Kesey, Russell Hoban, and Margaret Atwood, among others. This deployment of literary/cultural archetypes and invocation of literary icons suggests that Cloud Atlas is less about how individuals can become historical agents in order to derail our momentum toward the apocalypse than about how literary genres provide us archetypes to resist the “terror of history.” Here we might reconsider critics’ charges that Mitchell “lacks originality” and credit the ways he possesses what we can call “origin/ality,” a thoughtful regard for the origins of contemporary literary forms that becomes a deeper comment on the problems of contemporary historicism. While an historicist perspective suggests that by conforming to preexisting archetypes, we compromise our individuality, autonomy, and freedom, Mitchell’s novel, in terms that resonate with Eliade’s thought, suggests that we might do well to invest ourselves in older, larger stories.²³

Such cyclical understanding of temporality and subjectivity is, of course, ultimately a matter of belief—a word that figures crucially in both Eliade’s and Mitchell’s work. Eliade raises the issue of belief through its expression as faith at the conclusion of The Myth of the Eternal Return. He explains that at the moment when “the horizon of archetypes and repetition was transcended,” Judeo-Christianity introduced “a new category into religious experience: the category of faith” (160, emphasis in original). Eliade continues: “Faith, in this context, as in many others, means absolute emancipation from any kind of natural ‘law’ and hence the highest freedom that man can imagine: freedom to intervene even in the ontological constitution of the universe. . . . Only such a freedom . . . is able to defend modern man from the terror of history” (160-61).

Whereas Eliade understands belief as a means to a subjectivity unburdened by the terror of history, Mitchell associates belief with the construction of a sustainable world. At the conclusion of Cloud Atlas, he offers the following meditation:

What precipitates Acts? Belief.

Belief is both prize & battlefield, within the mind & in the mind’s mirror, the world. If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation & bestiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being. . . .

If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth & claw, if we believe divers races & creeds can share this world as peaceably as the orphans share their candlenut tree, if we believe leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & the riches of the Earth & its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass.

(508, emphasis in original)²⁴

Mitchell’s novel implicity adds to this series of propositions that if we believe both events and selves are old as well as new, we may invest ourselves in both in a less destructive fashion.

We have arrived where we began—with the suggestion that particular models of time and subjectivity may bear on whether the human species endures. Eliade formulated his anti-historicist critique in the wake of the cataclysm of World War Two; David Mitchell explores the limits of historicism in a contemporary eschatological context. In Cloud Atlas, a variety of characters, figures, and events represent the risks and possibilities of a cyclical Weltanschauung. The form of his novel, which is both highly original and profoundly derivative, recapitulates this tension. Ultimately, it is only right that Mitchell leaves us going in circles.

Heather J. Hicks is Associate Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies at Villanova University. She is the author of The Culture of Soft Work: Labor, Gender and Race in Postmodern American Narrative (Palgrave, 2009) and has published articles on postmodern literature and film in journals including Arizona Quarterly, Camera Obscura, Contemporary Literature, and Postmodern Culture. She is currently writing a book that addresses the historical shift in the status of contemporary apocalyptic fiction from the margins to the center of the literary canon.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Michael Berthold for his careful reading of this essay and to Mary Beth Harris for her research assistance.

Footnotes

1. This is not to say that the topic of apocalyptic fiction has not received considerable attention by literary critics in recent decades; indeed over the past quarter-century, critics have generated many definitions of the apocalyptic. For May (1972), an apocalyptic text must combine “catastrophe and judgment” (38). Ketterer (1974) claims that apocalyptic fiction must feature several elements including the “destruction of an old world, generally of mind . . . set against the writer’s establishment of a new world, again generally of mind,” as well as dualisms of satire/ “prophetic mysticism” and purpose/chaos, and a privileging of sweeping vision over detailed characterization (13). Wagar (1982) examines “secular eschatology, a worldly study of world’s ends that ignores religious belief or puts the old visions to use as metaphors for modern anxiety” (4). Zamora (1989) is concerned with “self-conscious use of the imagery and narrative forms of biblical apocalypse” (2). She explains that “While it is true that an acute sense of temporal disruption and disequilibrium is the source of, and is always integral to, apocalyptic thinking and narration, so is the conviction that historical crisis will have the cleansing effect of radical renewal” (10). For Dewey (1990), the “apocalyptic temper” he identifies in fiction “refuses despair, resists surrender to an uncooperative history implied by the grim legend The End Is Near” (11). Dellamora (1995) articulates the sense that “the uncircumscribed field of narrative at the fin de millennium continues to be structured, if only negatively, in relation to apocalypse” and organizes an edited collection of scholarly essays that, in light of Derrida’s interest in “apocalyptic tone,” examine “apocalyptic tone in postmodern practice” (“Preface” xii; “Introduction” 2). For Montgomery (1996), who focuses on African-American fiction, “apocalypse is a mode of expression revealing a concern with the end of an oppressive sociopolitical system and the establishment of a new world order where racial justice prevails” (1). Berger (1999), who is concerned with “post-apocalypse,” examines “modes of expression made in the wake of catastrophes so overwhelming that they seem to negate the possibility of expression at the same time that they compel expression” (5). In their respective treatments of contemporary environmental destruction, Buell (2003) and Heise (2008) shift their terminology from the language of apocalypse to that of “crisis” and “risk,” respectively. For both, apocalypse has become, to use Buell’s phrase from the title of his book, “a way of life,” or, as Buell suggests later in his study, “a slow apocalypse” (202). According to Leigh (2008), apocalyptic literature includes “an imminent end-time, a cosmic catastrophe, a movement from an old to a new age, a struggle between forces of good and evil . . . , a desire for an ultimate paradise . . . , the transitional help of God or a messiah, and a final judgment and manifestation of the ultimate” (5).

Given these definitions, most of these studies focus on texts that either rely heavily on symbols associated with Revelation; build their narratives around predictions or intimations of the end of the world; or portray more local catastrophes. My own study is somewhat more literal, and when I refer to “apocalyptic” novels in this essay, I mean texts that depict events culminating in the end of human civilization, the aftermath of such events, or both. My choice of terminology is inspired in part by Berger’s observation that “apocalyptic thinking is almost always, at the same time, post-apocalyptic” (xii-iii). While many of the texts I mention here include chiliastic elements, they are, in general, a high-literary variant of Wagar’s “secular eschatology.”

2. The 1980s saw the publication of Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1981), Denis Jonson’s Fiskadoro (1985), Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things (1987), and David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988). The emerging canon of apocalyptic fiction was augmented in the 1990s by José Saramago’s Blindness (1995) and John Updike’s Toward the End of Time (1997). Two writers on the cusp of canonicity have recently produced less literary apocalyptic novels—Justin Cronin (The Passage, 2010) and China Miéville (Kraken, 2010).

3. There are several exceptions to the generalization that before the 1980s eschatology was the exclusive province of science fiction writers. J.G. Ballard produced a number of complex apocalyptic texts in the 1960s, including The Drowned World (1962), The Burning World (1964), and The Crystal World (1966). Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle (1963) and Doris Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor (1975) also presage the current flourishing of highly literary eschatological novels.

4. Fiona Stafford argues that the trend from a collective to a more personal experience of destruction corresponds with the shift from a Christian apocalyptic vision to a more secular sense of imminent doom that began in the 17^th century (23). However, the stress on isolation among many of the contemporary apocalyptic texts departs from the more immediate context of the “cozy catastrophe” motif that Brian Aldiss identifies in John Wyndham’s cold war eschatological narratives, in which “the hero . . . [has] a pretty good time (a girl, free suites at the Savoy, automobiles for the taking) while everyone else is dying off” (294). This shared apocalyptic experience finds even more exaggerated form in cold war texts such as George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides (1949), Nevil Shute’s On The Beach (1957), and Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon (1959) in which small groups band together in the face—or wake—of a global disaster.

5. Even science allows room for a cyclical understanding of time. As Gould points out, “The metaphor of time’s cycle captures those aspects of nature that are either stable or else cycle in simple repeating (or oscillating) series because they are direct products of nature’s timeless laws, not the contingent moments of complex historical pathways” (196).

6. According to Melissa Denes, “Growing up in Worcestershire with his older brother and artist parents, [Mitchell] worried constantly about the threat of nuclear war. . . . He had read all of John Wyndham’s ‘traumatic, disturbing’ books by the age of 12 and thinks that this, too, fed his apocalyptic streak” (Mitchell “Apocalypse, Maybe”).

7. It must be said, however, that this initial impression of a cyclical structure is in some sense a decoy—or at least, a literary flourish rather than an index of cyclical temporality. Mitchell has indicated that Cloud Atlas was inspired by Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. As a young reader of that text, he had been frustrated by that book’s failure to return to the various stories it inaugurates, so he produced a book that offered completion of the stories it started (Mitchell “The Art of Fiction”). While I will return to matters of form at the conclusion of this essay, it is worth acknowledging that in the broadest sense the book reinforces endings rather than defying them. Although the stories are interrupted both by each other and the central post-apocalyptic tale, and the second halves of each are presented in reverse order so that the first story ends last, beneath this shuffling, the book provides definitive resolutions to its various stories. Moreover, the events in the second halves of the stories are not affected by the apocalyptic events, much less caused by them, a fact that undermines the sense of continuity among the narratives that one might expect if cyclical temporality were being modeled.

8. While Eliade is careful to specify that he is referring to cyclical world views that predate the Greek notion of eternal return that was later explored by Nietzsche, he also articulates a connection between the Greek view and that of earlier cultures which he refers to as “pre-socratic,” “traditional,” “archaic,” or “primitive,” suggesting that in both versions of eternal return, “The past is but a prefiguration of the future. No event is irreversible and no transformation is final. In a certain sense, it is even possible to say that nothing new happens in the world. . . .” (89-90).

9. Near the conclusion of The Myth of the Eternal Return, Eliade briefly distances himself from nostalgia for cyclical ontology, introducing a Christian view that “the horizon of archetypes and repetition cannot be transcended with impunity unless we accept a philosophy of freedom that does not exclude God” (160). He argues that in a linear world, in which events cannot be mapped onto a creation myth, only the more abstract condition of ongoing belief, of religious faith, has the potential to give meaning to events. Yet, as Allen argues, there is considerable evidence that Eliade’s references to Christianity here allude to a “cosmic Christianity,” with greater affinities to the archaic religions he celebrates than “historical Christianity” in its more conventional sense (112-18).

10. For an extended discussion of the critical debates surrounding Eliade’s life and works, see Allen 225-31. For a thoughtful discussion of the ways Eliade’s critique of history could be understood as anti-semitic, see Miller 283-84.

11. Critics complain that Eliade’s use of the term history is often vague, blurred as it is with other issues associated with modernity. Allen remarks, “In his analysis of myth, reality, and the contemporary world, Eliade often lumps together and uses interchangeably such terms as political, economic, historical, temporal, materialist, historicist, positivist, and other aspects of the modern mode of being” (309). For a thorough analysis of Eliade’s use of terms such as “history” and “historicism,” see Rennie, 89-108.

12. While Tyrus Miller concedes the “common ground” between Benjamin and Eliade, he points out that contrary to Eliade, Benjamin “leaned emphatically towards a critique of myth in favor of a messianic, theo-political Marxism” (284). Yet the resonances between the two thinkers’ work are striking. Of the encounter between “historicism” and “the thought of the eternal recurrence,” Miller writes, “For Benjamin, these two, antipodal modes of interpreting the historicity of experience in this period were . . . covertly interrelated. In their mutually canceling implications, they point towards a new, different form of historical thinking, writing, and acting, a practice of history that could shatter the continuity of historicist succession along with the continuum of mythic repetition” (294). Compare this to Allen’s characterization of Eliade’s thought: “Through the creative encounter with the archaic and nonWestern [sic] other, focusing on the terror of history and other existential concerns, modern culture will be renewed by rejecting major features of historical existence and by incorporating, in new creative ways, essential mythic and religious conceptions that disclose aspects of the universal human spirit” (307-8).

13. Allen locates Eliade’s affinities with postmodern thinkers in his view that we “must resist the tyranny and domination of the modernist idols of science, rationalism, and ‘objectivity’” (315).

14. See, for instance, Simon Malpas’s characterization of the postmodern subject as “a historically mutable structure that remains open to redefinition and transformation in the future” (79). One interesting exception to this tendency is Judith Butler’s emphasis on repetition in her work on the performance of gender.

15. The novel opens with Adam Ewing following the footprints of Henry Goose on Chatham Island, where his ship has been cast ashore by a storm. Later Autua will reveal that he lived alone on nearby Pitt Island as a fugitive until his “signs of habitation” gave him away (32). Robert Frobisher repeatedly takes refuge on a “willow-tree island” in a pond on the estate of Vyvyan Ayrs, and must come ashore, soaking, after falling asleep and rolling in (63-4). Luisa Rey drags herself out of the water and onto a mainland beach after a hitman for the nuclear company drives her off the road as she attempts to flee Swaneke Island (395). At the conclusion of the post-apocalyptic narrative, Zachry becomes the last of his tribe to survive in Hawaii, becoming yet another figure for Crusoe (308-9).

While the book begins on Chatham Island, and takes Adam Ewing to the Society Islands, as well, Hawaii is the island that recurs most in Mitchell’s novel—it is the penultimate stop for Adam Ewing on his way home from Australia in “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing,” the home of Megan Sixsmith, the niece of Rufus Sixsmith, in “Half Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery,” the promised land where clones in “An Orison of Sonmi-451” are said to enjoy “Xultation” after their term of service is complete, and the setting of “Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After.” Hawaii evokes paradise—especially since Hawaii is where the significantly named Adam is restored to health at the conclusion of the novel. But islands also figure more ominously—there are references to Three Mile Island, and its doppelganger in the novel, Swanneke Island, is where the “HYDRA-Zero reactor,” a dangerous new nuclear power plant, is about to be constructed. In general, Cloud Atlas also implies that islands represent isolation in the sense in which John Donne famously suggested.

16. As numerous critics have noted, several characters in Cloud Atlas, including Timothy Cavendish and Luisa Rey, appeared in Mitchell’s earlier novel Ghostwritten. Among the many recurrent motifs that surface in Cloud Atlas are blindness/vision, climbing/falling, drowning, cannibalism, and poison. The novel is also dense with interwoven images and details that playfully connect one section to another. The musical compositions of Vyvyan Ayrs in “Letters from Zedelghem,” for example, are called “Matryosschka Doll Variations” and “Society Islands,” names that comment on the form and settings within the larger novel. Soap is used as a form of punishment in the Cavendish section, and then recurs as the name of a compound of drugs and human flesh fed to fabricants in the Sonmi-451 narrative. Some of this repetition appears to be merely playful; so, for instance, Dr. Goose is the name of the conman who preys on Adam, while Dr. Egret is the name of the doctor who treats Ayrs. Yet much of the repetition of characters, themes, and imagery reinforces the novel’s multi-dimensional celebration of recurrence.

17. Mitchell has credited Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel for his interest in these tribes and their unfolding relationship on Chatham Island (Mitchell “Q&A”).

18. The shift toward greater barbarity is in part indexed by the fates of the “Adams” who play roles in each. While the naïve and good-natured American Adam Ewing survives his voyage across the Pacific amidst a band of vicious seamen, exploitive colonizers, and—most menacingly—Henry Goose, the Adam of the “Sloosha’s Crossin” section is captured and enslaved by the Kona tribe within the first two pages of the post-apocalyptic narrative (240-41). Likewise, while Adam Ewing grieves for a young boy who commits suicide after being sexually brutalized by the seamen, a similar case of male gang rape is treated as part of a wave of unanswered atrocities in the attack by the Kona (498-99, 292).

19. With typical playfulness, Mitchell reminds us of their role as doubles partly through naming: Adam and Autua sail on a ship called the Prophetess; the ship on which the clone Meronym visits Zachry and his tribe is called the Prescience.

20. Though Cloud Atlas Sextet is the title of a Frobisher composition (119, 408), and at another point “cloud atlas” refers to a tool for finding the coordinates of lasting happiness (373), it is twice used in relation to reincarnation (302, 308).

21. Adam Ewing is rescued by Autua, the tormented Frobisher commits suicide, Luisa Rey dodges a hired killer in order to expose the misdeeds of the nuclear power company, Cavendish collaborates with other inmates of the nursing home to escape, and Sonmi-451 endures a series of chases and car crashes en route to the construction of her historic Declarations.

22. Woods’s analysis of Benjamin emphasizes the degree to which Benjamin hopes that the messianic time produced by the overthrow of historicism will create an “unforeseeable, unprecedented transformation and an aleatorical departure from tradition” (117). Derrida, according to Woods, adopts Benjamin’s outlook, seeking “possible alternative trajectories for the present” (110). He argues that, in Derrida’s view, “The messianic is spectral (hauntological or beyond being), because it ushers in a radical otherness which cannot be appropriated by a conceptual violence within our existing systemic structures” (110).

23. Of course, larger stories can also be a source of political disempowerment and personal harm, as Mitchell demonstrates in his first novel, Ghostwritten, where he explores the dangers of collective thought both in his depiction of a contemporary Japanese cult and in his sweeping portrait of the Chinese Communist Party.

24. In “Pluralism in Postmodern Perspective,” Ihab Hassan concludes an analysis of critical pluralism with an ambivalent meditation on belief, which he expresses in apocalyptic terms:

It may be that some rough beast will slouch again toward Bethlehem, its haunches bloody, its name echoing in our ears with the din of history. It may be that some natural cataclysm, world calamity, or extra terrestrial intelligence will shock the earth into some sane planetary awareness of its destiny. It may be that we shall simply bungle through, muddle through, wandering in the ‘desert’ from oasis to oasis, as we have done for decades, perhaps centuries. I have no prophecy in me, only some slight foreboding, which I express now to remind myself that all the evasions of our knowledge and actions thrive on the absence of consensual beliefs, an absence that also energises our tempers, our wills. This is our postmodern condition.

(204)

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September 3, 2013

Angels in Digital Armor: Technoculture and Terror Management

Marcel O’Gorman (bio)
University of Waterloo
marcel@uwaterloo.ca

Abstract

O’Gorman is particularly interested in the relationship between death and technology, an area of research that he has dubbed “necromedia.” This essay adopts Ernest Becker’s conception of culture as a “hero system” that fulfills two primary existential needs: 1) the denial of death, and 2) the desire for recognition. By crossing Becker’s work with the theories of Bernard Stiegler, Martin Heidegger, and Alexandre Kojève, the essay applies this notion of a cultural hero system toward a more contemporary analysis of technoculture. The role of media technologies in such tragic events as the Columbine and Virginia Tech shootings and in the “death by gaming” trend in South Korea illustrate how technoculture offers a promise of immortality with which other cultural systems (school, religion, family) cannot compete. be observed in everyday life, wherever technology fulfills the desire for recognition and buffers us from the inevitability of death. From popular accounts of the search for an “immortality gene,” to the explosive popularity of Facebook and Twitter, technological resources and the rhetorics that promote them have become the existential cornerstone of Western society.

Reality is death. If only we could, we would wander the earth and never leave home; we would enjoy triumphs without risks and eat of the Tree and not be punished, consort daily with angels, enter heaven now and not die.

–Michael Benedikt, Cyberspace: First Steps

Tree Glitch

There’s a “glitch” in the video game Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare that allows players to climb into a tree, thereby achieving a superior vantage point for sniping. The glitch appears on a level called “Downpour.” All a player has to do is find the craggy tree next to the shattered greenhouse, jump at its trunk, and run up into the branches.¹ The sense of power and security in this lofty nest is extremely gratifying, whether or not it leads to any productive sniping. I didn’t learn about the glitch (which is most likely a deliberate design feature) by logging hundreds of hours a week playing the game. I found it by lurking on a few of the hundreds of COD4 game forums, such as GameSpot, where I observed the following conversation in the thread “Climbing Trees”:

Assassin144
Oct 21, 2008 6:55 pm PT
A while ago i heard that you will be able to go into trees in multiplayer and snipe, is this true? I heard a perk will let you do it but after reading the perk list nothing sounded like it, so is the ability not going to be available?
□
PSN_Boomfield
Oct 21, 2008 8:27 pm PT
The perk is called “Monkey”.
□
NX01AX
Oct 21, 2008 8:31 pm PT
Actually, that proved to be false. The perk part, not the climbing trees part.
□
Thehak114
Oct 21, 2008 8:32 pm PT
As far as I know, they climb the same way as you would climb any ladder. Not sure if all trees are climbable or just certain types, but it just adds another place to look before running around wildly.
□
Oct 21, 2008 8:36 pm PT
I want to set fire to a tree that someone is in
□
Thehak114
Oct 21, 2008 8:36 pm PT
And I am pretty sure you will have that ability with the Flamethrower perk.
….
macarbeone
Oct 24, 2008 11:11 am PT
yes setting fire to some one in a tree would be amazing and then as they fall to the ground on fire i shoot them up wildly and yell OWNED!!!!!!!!!
□
_SyCo_
Oct 26, 2008 5:47 pm PT
Yeahh ^^ while i knife you in the back >_>
□
AssassinWalker
Oct 26, 2008 6:38 pm PT
i will light all the trees on fire. :)

These and other forum contributors are players who practically live in the game (or perhaps wish they could), making themselves at home in its environment and documenting their most impressive tricks and cheats on video, which they subsequently upload to YouTube in the hope of gaining bragging rights. As puerile and casually apocalyptic as the above conversation may seem, COD4 has provided millions of players with an empowering existential vantage point that features a clear set of goals, opportunities to make heroic choices, a sense of belonging to a responsive and committed community, and the chance to achieve instant recognition for their actions. For only $59.95, COD4 offers more to the average player than his or her family, school, church or neighborhood community center can provide. Indeed, COD4 is part of a complex system of rituals (all of them short-lived and subject to programmed obsolescence) within what Ernest Becker might call the dominant heroic action system of today; a system which we know as “technoculture.”

This essay attempts to position contemporary technological being in the context of Becker’s conception of culture, to develop a well-rounded, cross-disciplinary conception of what motivates behaviours that are specific to technocultural being. Also central to this study is the work of Bernard Stiegler, who suggests that the culture of techno-prostheticization, rooted in the “unlimited organization of consumption,” leads “inevitably to suicidal behavior, both individual and collective” (Acting 42). With this in mind, I examine a variety of suicides linked to the use of media technologies, supplementing Stiegler’s grim prognosis, which he bases in part on the suicide of Richard Durn,² with that of Ernest Becker, best known for his book The Denial of Death. In Technics and Time, Stiegler develops a techno-psychoanalytic theory of human prostheticization, which leads to a critique of the cultural industry as a force that dominates contemporary consciousness, resulting in a “liquidation of the ‘libidinal economy’” (TT3 120). Like Stiegler, Becker brings together philosophy, cultural theory, and psychology to suggest that the cultural industry succeeds by meeting two persistent desires: the desire for recognition and the desire for immortality, which are manifested ultimately in the denial of death. Considered in conjunction, the work of Becker and Stiegler provides a broad existential theory of how specific technocultural behaviours can be motivated. Combined with material and economic theories of technoculture, this existential analysis helps explain how the hyperindustrial programming of consciousness can persist, even as it leaves a visible wake of destruction at the individual, cultural, and global-ecological levels. That being said, this essay is not designed to endorse wide-ranging apocalyptic media theories or truth claims levied in the name of religion or myth, but to demonstrate how religion, myth, and other cultural hero systems respond to some of the human animal’s existential needs.

Ernest Becker understands culture as a phenomenon of social cohesion, generated and maintained by heroic action systems through which an individual can achieve both recognition and a sense of immortality. I consider this formula at greater length below. For the sake of clarity, I note that in this essay I refer to “technoculture” as a distinct heroic action system in which technological production is viewed as an end in itself, and individual recognition and death-denial are hypermediated by technologies that permit us to feel that we transcend time and space with increasing ease. This contemporary situation results in what Stiegler has called a “war of the spirit,”³ in which older cultural hero systems such as family, school, or nation clash against a technoculture that threatens to consume all of these.

This clash can be put into focus by considering a number of tech-related suicides made famous in recent past by the popular media, which sometimes attempts to explain these events by pointing a finger at consumer technologies. Consider the case of Brandon Crisp from Barrie, Ontario. In the fall of 2008, his parents exiled the 15 year-old from the COD4 community and took away his Xbox, out of fear that he had become addicted to the game. Crisp responded by threatening to run away. His father even helped him pack clothes, a toothbrush, and deodorant into his backpack, figuring that Brandon, like most other teens who make such threats, would return in a couple of hours. But Brandon did not return. After an exhaustive search, funded in part by Microsoft, he was found dead three weeks later in a wooded area 10 kilometres south of his home. The autopsy suggested that he died from injuries related to falling out of a tree. This detail was especially troubling to Brandon’s family. What was he doing up in that tree? Hiding? Seeking shelter? The mystery will likely remain unsolved. This story of exile in the wilderness has a mythical air about it. To the COD4 community, Brandon is a hero of mythic proportions; or better yet, he is the Patron Saint of Xbox, a martyr who was robbed of his most sacred relic, expelled from his holy land, and like other holy men, sought refuge in the wilderness.

Myth, Religion, and Cybernetic Apocalypse

Such religious and mythical rhetoric, as overblown as it may seem here, is by no means unique in critical studies of media technologies. In The Digital Sublime, Vincent Mosco examines myth in cyberspace narratives with the hope of “destabilizing the dominant representations of what we are supposed to be and where we are going” (16). According to Mosco, mythical rhetoric about the infinity of cyberspace and the disembodying potential of online worlds is a central component of many culturally important narratives. Like the tales of Homer and Plutarch, many cyberspace myths provide us with a buffer against some of the anxiety related to human finitude. As Mosco suggests,

The thorny questions arising from all the limitations that make us human were once addressed by myths that featured gods, goddesses, and the variety of beings and rituals that for many provide satisfactory answers. Today, it is the spiritual machines and their world of cyberspace that hold out the hope of overcoming life’s limitations.

(78)

Arguably the greatest limitation we have to face is our mortality. Mosco’s reference to “spiritual machines” deliberately echoes the title of a book by Ray Kurzweil, an uncompromising immortalist whom Mosco identifies as one of the most ardent and influential myth-makers of our time. Kurzweil is one of a number of futurists, many of them lining up to attend Kurzweil’s Singularity University, who long for the disappearance of the human body into a network of celestial circuits. As Mosco argues, the trope of digital disembodiment, from the essays of robot scientist Hans Moravec to the mutant performances of the artist Stelarc, is consistent with mythological discourse, which promises immortality to those who are willing to believe in and propagate the narrative. We might consider whether players of online video games, for example, who enjoy a sense of superhuman powers and experience infinite resurrections, have this mythic promise fulfilled — as long as they stay online.

Mosco turns to myth as an extended analogy for understanding the powerful rhetorics of progress that characterize technoculture. But he may very well have come to similar conclusions by drawing on a religious analogy. As David F. Noble argues in The Religion of Technology, “the technological enterprise has been and remains suffused with religious belief” (5). Noble illustrates how the concept of imago dei (being created in the likeness of god) has been used to justify technological innovations, including nuclear arms and the Human Genome Project, that may seem hubristic. Echoing a common utopian strain in scientific discourse, Noble writes: “Totally freed from the human body, the human person, and the human species, the immortal mind could evolve independently into ever higher forms of artificial life, reunited at last with its origin, the mind of God” (149).

This Cartesian rhetoric is far removed from the adolescent chatter of gamers in online forums such as those quoted above. But as both Mosco and Noble suggest, rhetorics of technological progress, like many video game narratives, are informed by a millenarian yearning for apocalypse (“i will light all the trees on fire”), a dramatic break with the past that signals the “specialness” of a given generation. As Noble writes, “Millenarianism is, in essence, the expectation that the end of the world is near and that, accordingly, a new earthly paradise is at hand” (23). This strain is evident, for example, in Michael Benedikt’s anthology, Cyberspace: First Steps. Benedikt proclaims that cyberspace evokes “the image of a Heavenly City, the New Jerusalem of the Book of Revelation. Like a bejeweled, weightless palace it comes out of heaven itself” (15). Mosco suggests that this sort of discourse reflects a form of “historical amnesia,” a desire to transcend history and all of the complexities that accompany life as a physical being in a material world (8). A whiff of this apocalyptic strain is discernible whenever a keynote speaker stands up and suggests that “we are living through a time of unprecedented change.” These words hold great political weight, filling listeners with a sense of cosmic importance, as if their daily lives are somehow enriched by this vague promise of specialness.

Benedikt’s apocalyptic “cyberbole” (Mosco 25) coincides with a number of late-90s academic projects that announce or predict the death of space, time, and politics.⁴ These proclamations, by the accounts of both Mosco and Noble, emerge from a seemingly atavistic need to deny human finitude. Mosco pays particular attention to Francis Fukuyama, whose Pulitzer Prize winning book announces The End of History and the Last Man (1992). Fukuyama draws on Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel, which suggests that “History can end, only in and by the formation of a Society, of a State, in which the strictly particular, personal, individual value of each is recognized as such, in its very particularity, by all” (Kojève 58). From the right-wing, apocalyptic perspective of Fukuyama, liberal democracy and advanced capitalism have brought about this “end.” Like many other critics, Mosco rejects Fukuyama’s somewhat easy, perhaps uncritical resignation to this supposed end of history. Indeed, Fukuyama later retracts his own argument in light of the events of 9/11. But Fukuyama’s work should not be rejected altogether, for to do so would be to ignore his important conception of the notion of thymos, which provides a very useful tool for understanding the relationship between human desire, existential needs, and technology. I return to this subject later. For the moment, I wish to point out the limitations of mythic (e.g., Mosco’s) and religious (e.g., Noble’s) analogies as a means of explaining technocultural behaviour.

People create myths and religions not just out of a need for social order, but to convince themselves that they are not finite beings. The greatest contribution of Mosco’s work is that it demonstrates how rhetorics of technological progress are driven forward by a desire to overcome the constraints of human finitude. Taking a cue from Heidegger perhaps, Mosco suggests that the “danger” of mythological narrative is that it provides us with an “unfulfillable promise” (22), which masks the reality of our situation and blinds us to the problems and complexities of human history. Noble’s analysis of technology and religion leads to similar conclusions. Consider, for example, the words of AI visionary Danny Hillis, a self-proclaimed agnostic, quoted in Noble’s book:

I want to make a machine that will be proud of me. . . . I’m sad about death, I’m sad about the short time that we have on earth and I wish there was some way around it. So, it’s an emotional thing that drives me. It’s not a detached scientific experiment or something like that.

(qtd. in Noble,163)

According to Noble, these words reflect a religious rhetoric, falling neatly in line with the imago dei theme. But there is nothing particularly “religious” about these terms, and in fact, to categorize them as religious is to limit the scope of the analysis. To clarify, Hillis’s words do not reflect a religious calling, but an existential call to action that he is able to satisfy through the pursuit of technological innovation. The primary motivations for his actions are clearly: 1) a desire for recognition (“I want to make a machine that will be proud of me”); and 2) the denial of death (“I’m sad about death…and I wish there was some way around it”). Hillis’s words are not inspired by myth or religion, but by a cultural hero system that views technological production as an end in itself. Like myth and religion, technological innovation and the sublime rhetorics of “progress” that accompany it serve primarily to mitigate the terror of human finitude. Rather than attempting to fit such rhetorics within a religious or mythical paradigm, it may be more productive to consider them in the broader context of “culture,” as understood by Becker. In so doing, we may develop a better understanding of how contemporary cultural industries, which play a role heretofore dominated by religious and mythical narrative, are able to program consciousness.

Terror Management Theory

The contemporary political inflection of the word terror has no doubt led to an increase in book sales for psychologists Tom Pyszczynski, Sheldon Solomon, and Jeff Greenberg. Their groundbreaking study, In the Wake of 9/11: The Psychology of Terror, is not about the 9/11 terrorists at all, but about psychological and existential implications of having a finite body matched with an infinite symbolic system for representing reality. The authors touch on this distinction when they introduce their theory of terror management, which emerges directly from the texts of cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker:

Terrorism, as the word implies, capitalizes on the human capacity to experience terror. Terror is, in turn, a uniquely human response to the threat of annihilation. Terror management theory is about how humans cope, not with the imminent threat of extermination but with the awareness that such threats are ubiquitous and will all eventually succeed. Death will be our ultimate fate. How then do we manage this potential for terror?

(8)⁵

Terror Management Theory has led to the publication of over 300 peer-reviewed articles in psychology journals, documenting a range of experiments that test the hypotheses of Ernest Becker and have been inspired by his interdisciplinary work. Typically, these experiments involve placing participants in a state of “mortality salience,” and then studying their behaviours in controlled situations. What these experiments have proven, above all, is that individuals who are reminded of their own mortality, either consciously or subliminally, cling to their cultural beliefs more readily than do control groups, and are more apt to reject cultures that are potentially at odds with their own. Such experiments have been adapted recently by the Critical Media Lab at the University of Waterloo, where we are attempting to identify whether technoculture, defined by a constantly renewed desire for gadgetry and a strong belief in technological progress, can itself be viewed as an immortality ideology, a terror management system for a generation raised on computer games, chatting, and iPods.

This brings us back to the discussion of myth and religion, both of which serve as “management systems” against the awareness of death and ever-present existential terror. One way in which myth and religion conquer terror is by bringing us closer to death, but only within the safe confines of a controlled narrative, or more specifically through ritual. As Mosco suggests in The Digital Sublime, what makes the sublime pleasurable is that it gives us a brief “near-death experience,” conveniently packaged to create the illusion that we can skirt death.⁶ This concept is explored by Fukuyama, but it is examined in greater detail and depth by Becker.

Becker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Denial of Death (1973) outlines an ambitious explanation of the human condition that is based on a very simple concept: all human cultures (including those rooted in religious and mythical metanarratives) might be viewed as “hero systems” that are devised to counter the anxiety caused by knowledge of our inevitable deaths. While this may not come as a surprise to social psychologists, the application of this idea to cultural criticism and media theory remains to be explored. Today, as Vincent Mosca would no doubt agree, technoculture itself is a hero system, and it mediates the denial of death in a number of ways, from the sense of belonging one achieves through mere ownership of an iPod (an ironic sense, given the alienating effect of this device) to the hope of achieving immortality through gene therapy and other medical technologies. Our awareness of our own “being towards death” has led humans to concoct ingenious antidotes, from elaborate myths and religions to Call of Duty 4.⁷ In late capitalist culture, mythic morality tales and religious rites have given way to the calculating infinitude of Moore’s Law. As Sherry Turkle suggests, “as a computational object,” the computer holds out “a touch of infinity—the promise of a game that never stops” (87). For critics of contemporary technoculture, the technological sublime is the heart of the matter. Technoscientific research and development face us with an immense, complex, and terrifyingly sublime array of possibilities; terrifying if only because these possibilities open up before us without warning, leading to what Stiegler, carefully echoing Heidegger, calls a state of “ill-being” or malaise. In Stiegler’s terms, our technocultural situation asks us to “identify what it is we want, given the immense possibilities that are irresistibly open to us. . . , and we must admit that we do not know what we want, while at the same time, as Nietzsche understood so well, we cannot not want. This is the meaning of ill-being and ontological indifference” (TT3 296).

This critique of technological being, like much of Stiegler’s work, comes not only from Nietzsche but from Heidegger. More precisely, Stiegler’s work, particularly Technics and Time, is a corrective of Heidegger. For Heidegger, living technologically means that we are constantly called on to outstrip nature, including the inevitability of our death. Technology and death are linked, then, in that the ultimate goal of technological being is to overcome the inevitability of our “natural” horizon, our finitude. Heidegger describes this technological imperative as an “impossibility”⁸ that we impose on nature:

The unnoticeable law of the earth preserves the earth in the sufficiency of the emerging and perishing of all things in the allotted sphere of the possible which everything follows, and yet nothing knows. The birch tree never oversteps its possibility. The colony of bees dwells in its possibility. . . . Technology drives the earth beyond the developed sphere of its possibility into such things which are no longer a possibility and are thus impossible.

(“Who” 108)

The language of “outstripping” or overstepping nature requires one to have a ground zero conception of nature as something distinct from humanity, technology, or culture. Not surprisingly, critiques of Heidegger begin with his romantic conception of the pre-modern world as something pure and untouched, and end even less surprisingly, by finding Heidegger’s affiliation with the Nazi party relevant to this vision.

Stiegler, while refusing to do away with Heidegger’s theories altogether, challenges the conception of technological being as something manifestly “modern.” According to Stiegler, “technics is the history of being itself” (TT1 10). The very definition of the term “human,” or more precisely, the “invention of the human,” is in itself something technical. In Stiegler’s terms, “the human invents himself in the technical by inventing the tool—by becoming exteriorized techno-logically” (TT1 141). The tool, and more specifically the flint cutting tool, represents for Stiegler a uniquely human capacity for “anticipation.” Anticipation of the tool’s utility for a given task leads to the making of the tool, just as anticipation of the repetition of this task leads the human to keep and reuse the tool. But perhaps most importantly for Stiegler, the capacity to anticipate is also a curse, for it gives man the foreknowledge of his own death. That is why, for Stiegler, “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” (135). In this sense, Stiegler agrees with Heidegger’s conception of Dasein as “being towards death,” tying it to a “primordial situation” that is at once technological and thanatological.

Between god and beast, neither beast nor god, neither immortal nor prone to perish, sacrificial beings, mortals are also and for the same reasons nascent, bestowing meaning, and “active.”. . . a technical activity that characterizes all humanity as such, that is, all mortality, can plunge out of control. To be active can mean nothing but to be mortal.

(198)

It is in this capacity for humanity to “plunge out of control” that Stiegler erects his apocalyptic critique of contemporary technoculture.

Unlike Heidegger, then, Stiegler does not consider the question of human finitude in terms of “impossibility,” but in terms of “immense possibility,” which opens up before us today by means of genetic engineering, for example. But this “immense possibility,” a virtual infinitude of being, is also opened up by the adoption of avatars and multiple identities made possible by digital technologies. Becker approaches the question of human finitude in terms that are strikingly similar to Stiegler’s. He alludes to the human capacity for anticipation as the curse of a creature, to echo Kierkegaard, that is suspended between angel and beast — a creature endowed with the ability to make tools and invent an infinite symbolic system of communication, but also with a palpable sense of its own finitude. “What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal?” asks Becker, in his typically unabashed speciesist fashion. “It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression—and with all of this yet to die” (Denial 87). Unlike Stiegler, Becker does not suggest that humans are primordially technological beings. But Becker shares with Stiegler an understanding of the human as a being defined by its motivation, a primal motivation, to move beyond itself, or in Heidegger’s terms, to outstrip itself. Following Kierkegaard, Becker suggests that people deal with the terrifying knowledge of death by erecting systems of organization to give value and meaning to their lives. Becker refers to this organizational activity as the fashioning of character armor, which is a prosthetic image in itself, “the arming of the personality so that it can maneuver in a threatening world” (Angel 83). As I argue below, today the denial of death is mediated primarily by an unbridled faith in technological progress and by a donning of what might be called digital armor. In Stiegler’s terms,

today the issue is absolutely that of humanity’s demise—which is also a way of talking about the death of God and of “the last man,” since the real possibility challenging us today, appreciably practicable, is the last evolutionary stage of technics: the possibility of an artificial human being who is neither “last man” nor “overman.”

(TT2 149)

But how did we reach the point where we are willing to program our own demise for the sake of a calculated, “artificial” immortality? An understanding of technoculture must entail a study of human attitudes toward death, as well as an understanding of the role that terror plays in human behaviour on a daily basis.

The case of Brandon Crisp, discussed above, is only one in a number of technology-related deaths that caught the media’s attention in the past few years. These deaths include those of many South Korean game addicts and, more pertinently here, a terrifying trend of copycat school shooters following in the steps of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who killed 13 people in the 1998 Columbine High School Massacre before taking their own lives. The terrorist acts in these cases are explicitly technological, or even “cyber,” because they involve the perpetrators’ use of media to rehearse or to promote their exploits in a desperate plea for recognition. These tragic events cast a light on the nature of technocultural behaviour.

Recognition and Thymos

In the midst of Cho Seung Hui’s fateful shooting spree at Virginia Tech in April 2006, Jamal Albarghouti, a fellow VTech student, made a heroic decision to run into the war zone, rather than away from it. Armed not with a Glock (Cho’s weapon of choice), but with a Nokia N70 cell phone, Albarghouti ignored the warnings of police officers to capture digital video footage suitable for upload to CNN’s iReport page. Albarghouti’s ghastly, I would even say sublime, handheld video of a campus under siege concludes with a terrifying scream. It is not the scream of the gunman or of his assailants, but the scream of a police officer urging the phone-toting student to get out of the way so that the law enforcers could conduct their business. What was Albarghouti’s motivation? Albarghouti’s rush toward immortality was not spurred by myth or religion, but by the possibility of a brief appearance on CNN. Like the contestants on reality TV programs, Albarghouti demonstrates that, thanks to the omnipotence of American media, even those of us on the sidelines can cash in on the promise of celebrity that is waved in front of us on a daily basis.

In response to the Virginia Tech Massacre, freelance journalist Mark Steyn suggested that the events of that day evidence a growing “culture of passivity,” populated by “selectively infantilized” twentysomethings. Steyn’s argument, which jives very well with the NRA’s agenda, expresses outrage at the fact that not a single student stood up to Cho. This “passivity,” as Steyn calls it, “is nothing more than an “existential threat to a functioning society.” But Jamal Albarghouti’s courageous actions suggest that Steyn’s accusations are misdirected. The twentysomethings of technoculture are indeed willing to sacrifice themselves—but not for the reasons that Steyn would expect. Heroism for many twentysomethings is not motivated by mythology, religion, nation, family, or some vague sense of humanity, but by what Stiegler calls a “hyperindustrial” culture characterized by the blind consumption of media artifacts. Both Cho and Albarghouti were motivated by a desire for recognition and the heroic denial of death, and their actions were all played out in the context of technological consumption. As Cho set out to become a media superstar by annihilating the VTech campus, Albarghouti was determined to capture these events forever in video, providing proof of Friedrich Kittler’s maxim: “what the machine gun annihilated, the camera made immortal” (124). Of course, Cho had his own plans for media immortality, which I discuss below, and he certainly knew how to wield a camera (Kleinfeld).⁹ But these two types of heroic shootings—one very real, with painfully physical consequences, and one virtual, geared toward disembodiment and simulation— are indicative of the shift in death denial strategies that has taken place with the increasing technologization of culture.

One of the primary tenets of Ernest Becker’s work, based on the theories of philosophers and psychologists including Friedrich Nietzsche and William James, is that human behaviour is driven not only by a denial of death, but also by an ongoing yearning for recognition, for heroism even. Becker’s use of the word heroism, rather than of the more common term self-esteem, allows him to draw on literary and cultural history in his analysis of culture. The term heroism also reflects the idea that self-esteem, following Kojève/Hegel, is in effect achieved primarily through recognition from others, through the sense that one is an individual of value in a meaningful world.¹⁰ Becker uses the term heroism to account for a spectrum of human behaviors. The superhuman feats of Greek mythological figures would be at one end of this spectrum, while modern society’s epic consumption of consumer goods and media artifacts would be at the other. Heroism is a relative concept, rooted in a set of beliefs shared by any given culture, from a pre-Columbian tribe of Native Americans to the bands of “netizens” in today’s contemporary technoculture. As Becker argues, it is by means of a “cultural hero-system,” a recognition from others based on a consensual set of values, that we hope to transcend death:

It doesn’t matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning. They earn this feeling by carving out a place in nature, by building an edifice that reflects human value: a temple, a cathedral, a totem pole, a skyscraper, a family that spans three generations. The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count.

(“Beyond” 5)

The concept of “culture” itself, then, is defined for Becker in terms of heroism. Raymond Williams’s statement in a 1958 essay that “culture is ordinary” and that “every human society has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings” (6), is reflected quite clearly in the work of Becker. In Becker’s terms, there is nothing “high” about culture, which he understands in terms of a “hero system” devised to deny the inevitability of death.¹¹

Becker, like Nietzsche and others before him, believed that contemporary culture offers very little opportunity for authentic heroism, and so we have to seek it in more mundane ways:

In our culture anyway, especially in modern times, the heroic seems too big for us, or we too small for it. Tell a young man that he is entitled to be a hero and he will blush. We disguise our struggle by piling up figures in a bank book to reflect privately our sense of heroic worth. Or by having only a little better home in the neighborhood, a bigger car, brighter children. But underneath throbs the ache of cosmic specialness, no matter how we mask it in concerns of smaller scope.

(Denial 4)

This throbbing ache for a sense of specialness has been intensified in the western world by the dissolution of traditional hero systems on the one hand (religion, the family, nationhood, etc.), and the propagation of mass media heroes on the other hand, including the everyday heroes of reality TV shows and YouTube. Heroism today is rooted in the consumption of media images and objects. In 1971, Becker suggested that “people no longer draw their power from the invisible dimension, but from the intensive manipulation of very visible Ferraris, and other material gadgets” (Birth 125). Had he written this sentence in the early 2000s, he might have replaced the word “Ferrari” with “iPod” or even “Nokia N70.”

It is surprising the Becker only alludes in passing to Hegel, although he is certainly aware of the centrality of recognition in the master/slave dynamic. In his authoritative study of Hegel, Alexandre Kojève suggests that

all human, anthropogenetic Desire—the Desire that generates Self-Consciousness, the human reality—is, finally, a function of the desire for “recognition.” And the risk of life by which human reality “comes to light” is a risk for the sake of such a Desire. Therefore, to speak of the “origin” of Self-Consciousness is necessarily to speak of a fight to the death for “recognition.”

(7)

Stiegler takes on Kojève more directly in work, borrowed from Gilbert Simondon, where the importance of recognition within Dasein is manifest in a discussion of “individuation.” Individuation is at once singular and collective, a process through which we differentiate ourselves from others while sharing social space, and most importantly time, with others:

Dasein is time insofar as it is being-futural: anticipation, improbability, différance—both deferring in time (anticipating) and being different, affirming a difference qua a “unique time,” a singularity. . . . This individuation belongs, however, and in the same movement, to a community: that of mortals.

(TT1 229)

For Stiegler, Kojève, Becker, and numerous other philosophers before them (think of Spinoza’s definition of man as a “social animal”), recognition of the self by others is a key component of what it means to be human. Contemporary technologies both facilitate and hinder that recognition.

Francis Fukuyama, following Kojève/Hegel, suggests that the quest for recognition is “the driving force behind human history” (162), and develops this idea into a millenarian thesis that has been widely contested. What we should rescue from Fukuyama is the concept of thymos, taken from Plato, which sheds light on the relationship between self-esteem, recognition, and cultural hero systems. Thymos is most commonly translated as “spiritedness,” and is used by Socrates first of all to characterize the guardians of the republic, those who are willing to risk their lives to protect the city. Fukuyama repeats the story of Leontius, which Socrates uses as a case study in the concept of thymos:

He desired to look, but at the same time he was disgusted and made himself turn away: and for a while he struggled and covered his face. But finally, overpowered by the desire, he opened his eyes wide, ran toward the corpses and said: “Look, you damned wretches, take your fill of the fair sight.”

(qtd. in Fukuyama 164)

Becker might suggest here that Leontius is chafing against his “character armor,” that is, struggling to remain within the bounds of his cultural hero system. Similarly, Fukuyama proposes that Leontius’s anger is a manifestation of his inner sense of pride, which is threatened by his lack of self-control. The anger of Leontius, directed at himself, is a result of recognizing that his actions would not be held in high regard by his countrymen. This angry sense of pride, suggests Fukuyama, reflects a sensitivity to the value that one sets on oneself based on cultural norms, and this placing of value on oneself within the context of a cultural system helps define thymos. “Thymos provides an all-powerful emotional support to the process of valuing and evaluating, and allows human beings to overcome their most powerful natural instincts for the sake of what they believe is right or just” (171).

With this in mind, I am compelled to ask the following: To what degree are the actions of Jamal Albarghouti, CNN’s phone video hero, comparable to those of Leontius? This question is not a transhistorical tactic, but an attempt to examine Albarghouti’s psychological moment in the context of its specific cultural and material/technological circumstances. What motivated Albarghouti to run into the fray? Should he, like Leontius, have damned his wretched eyes (or cell phone camera) for zooming in on the massacre? Or is Albarghouti a modern mythical hero, motivated by a spiritedness, a thymos, a megalothymia even, as Fukuyama might suggest, exclusive to technoculture? To put it bluntly, what sort of cultural context makes Albarghouti a hero?

Recalling Plato’s guardians of the city, thymos is best satisfied by risking one’s life in defense of something one holds in high esteem. Historically speaking, war has been the ultimate catalyst and facilitator of thymotic activity. Like Becker, Fukuyama suggests that such activity has been redirected in late capitalist culture toward the pursuit of financial wellbeing, fuelled by an ever accelerating production and marketing of consumer goods, thanks to technological progress. Heroism is now mass-marketed in ways that ensure that the “guardians of the republic” fend off the enemy not in hand-to-hand combat, but by going to the mall or having multiple messages in their inbox. People now fill their thymotic needs by shopping, blogging, and playing video games. It is this lack of physical risk, so important to Kojève/Hegel’s formulation of heroic recognition, that leads Fukuyama to conclude that we are witnessing The End of History and the Last Man. In Becker’s terms, which echo those of the Frankfurt School that inspired him,¹² “something happened in history which gradually despoiled the average man, transformed him from an active, creative being into the pathetic consumer who smiles proudly from our billboards that his armpits are odor-free around the clock” (Escape 61).

The pursuit of consumption for the sake of consumption, which is characterized today by a radically unequal distribution of wealth, is a result of what Fukuyama calls megalothymia; not just the desire for recognition, but the desire to dominate or even “own” others, as reflected in the lingo of COD4 gamers. The ultimate goal of this heroic pursuit is the achievement of immortality. Megalothymia can be satisfied vicariously and temporarily, for example, through engagement in sport,¹³ from being an enthusiastic spectator of the World Cup¹⁴ and the Superbowl to actually participating in challenging physical activities such as marathon running, or even Ultimate Fighting. “In the social world,” Becker suggests, “one continually pushes against death in sport-car driving, mountain climbing, stock speculation, gambling: but always in a more-or-less controlled way, so as not to give in completely to the sheer accidentality and callousness of life, but to savor the thrill of skirting it” (Birth 175). From theme park rides to bungee jumping, the heroic and sublime denial of death is now readily available for purchase, accompanied by a documentation of the event in digital photography or video for mass distribution on social networking sites, proof that the experience really happened. “The fight to the death for recognition” that characterizes human consciousness (Kojève) has been commoditized, rendered programmable by the cultural industry. As Stiegler suggests, the result is a radical change in the very formation of consciousness. With the increasing industrialization of culture, individuals are “deprived of the possibility of deciding how [they] want to live,” and this results in “a reversal and a denial of what Hegel described as the master-slave dialectic” (Snail 39). In technoculture, a person is threatened by the possibility of losing the ability to “participate in the trans-formation of her milieu by individuating herself within it” (39). The apotheosis of technocultural heroism is the individual who is “famous for being famous,” as evidenced by multiple friendings, Twitter trending, headlines in gossip sites, and most importantly, as I argue below, in a TV spinoff about nothing more than his or her day-to-day life.

As Fukuyama suggests, the ordinary heroes of these mass-marketed, consumable victories may recognize the emptiness of such existential projects:

As they sink into the leather of their BMWs, they will know somewhere in the back of their minds that there have been real gunslingers and masters in the world, who would feel contempt for the petty virtues required to become rich or famous in modern America. How long megalothymia will be satisfied with metaphorical wars and symbolic victories is an open question.

(329)

The “open question” is not answered, as Fukuyama might expect, by the waging of war or a return to religious “roots.” It is answered instead when a megalothymic person like Jamal Albarghouti throws himself into the scene of a massacre to feed a news program. More tragically, the limits of “metaphorical wars” are revealed when young people who have heretofore satisfied their desire for heroic action in an on-screen simulation wield real weapons against an unsuspecting enemy. The violent acts discussed below put into focus Stiegler’s prognosis that a culture of “unlimited organization of consumption” leads ultimately to “suicidal behaviour, both individual and collective.”

Hypermediated Heroism

On the morning of December 27, 2004, after playing 36 consecutive hours of the computer game World of Warcraft, 13 year-old Zhang Xiaoyi jumped from the top of his family’s 24-story apartment building. He left behind a suicide letter, explaining that his actions were an attempt “to join the heroes of the game he worshipped” (Xinhua). The boy’s parents filed a lawsuit against the game manufacturer, and the incident was referenced by the press and government of China as evidence of a growing computer addiction problem in the country. A 2005 report by the China Youth Association for Internet Development suggests that 13.2 percent of China’s 16.5 million youth are computer addicts (Xinhua). In response to this problem, the Chinese government backed the creation of an online game called “Chinese Heroes,” which promotes traditional values among the youth. According to a game designer, “the heroes gather on ‘Hero Square,’ where gamers can click their statues to learn about their experiences and carry out tasks like moving bricks and catching raindrops on a building site. Gamers will be asked about the heroes’ life stories to earn scores” (Xinhua). It seems that “Square Heroes” would be a more appropriate title to this game, as reflected in the reaction of a 14 year-old boy interviewed by the Xinhua News Agency: “The game sounds boring to me, it’s a turn-off.” The game produced similar reactions among other test subjects at the Beijing Internet Addiction Treatment Center, who found it “too simple” or even “comical.” These players prefer the action, violence, and consumption built into popular role-playing games such as World of Warcraft (WoW), which has enjoyed huge popularity around the world. As the director of the treatment center attests, “If hero games do not focus on killing and domination, gamers will definitely not play them” (Xinhua). The number of Internet-addicted youth in China has almost doubled since 2005, and the Chinese government is backing its infamous Internet addiction boot camps, rather than promoting games with traditional content.¹⁵ The camps themselves are waging a brutal war of the spirit, countering the heroic action system of technoculture with traditional Chinese values.

The story of Zhang Xiaoyi is a parable of the way media technologies have evolved into cultural hero systems in their own right. The World of Warcraft, like any other culture, comes complete with “its own shape, its own purposes, its own meaning” (Williams 6). Of course, one difference between WoW and an indigenous tribe or a medieval hamlet is that WoW is experienced on a screen, through a process of disembodiment and tele-action. What makes the Warcraft world especially appealing as a society, besides the fact that it offers everyone the opportunity to be king, is that its purposes and meanings are clear-cut—they are provided in the form of a rule-set by which all players abide in order to play the game. As Sherry Turkle suggests, “At the heart of the computer culture is the idea of constructed, ‘rule-governed’ worlds” (66). The case of Zhang Xiaoyi demonstrates what happens when this disembodied culture of “rules and simulation” (66) clashes with the physical, meat-based culture of the real world. For a player whose hero system exists onscreen, life off-screen—with its unpredictability, lack of a clear rule-set, antiquated value system, and scant opportunity for heroic action—can be a grave disappointment, or at the very least, crushingly “boring.”

To fend off this boredom, some players at Internet cafés in South Korea may log 10-15 hours a day in front of WoW or EverQuest (endearingly nicknamed “Evercrack” by aficionados), breaking only to use the toilets. In August 2005, a man from the city of Taegu died from heart failure related to exhaustion after playing the game Starcraft for 50 hours straight (BBC). This feat was nearly as heroic as that of a 24 year-old man from Kwangju who died of the same condition after playing for 86 hours straight in October 2002 (Kim). Such incidents, which are reported on an increasingly regular basis, point to a new form of heroism rooted entirely in digital culture. Outside of South Korea, which hosted the first three World Cyber Games, and where game players are celebrated as national heroes, these deaths seem senseless. Media critics in North America are likely to lay blame for these deaths on parents who allow their infantilized children to spend most of their waking hours in front of a screen. Parents, on the other hand, are likely to blame (and sue) the video game companies, who design games specifically for what Turkle calls their “holding power” (30). But very seldom do critics or parents blame the culture that values technology, wealth, and consumption above all else; a culture in which heroism can, and perhaps must, be purchased; a culture in which value is meted out in shiny boxes packed with circuits and in abstract bits of code that scroll by horizontally at the bottom of a television newscast. In his critique of Fukuyama’s proclamation of the end of history at the hands of capitalism, Vincent Mosca suggests that post-industrial society, fueled by a capitalist ideology that has no “moral sensibility or any sense of limits,” is “far from the technological sublime” (67). But it is precisely this lack of limitations that makes capitalism sublime in and of itself — like myth and religion, capitalism is an ideology of infinitude, not through the promise of eternal life, but, as Stiegler points out, through an overbearing “imperative to adopt the new” (Acting 44).

Faced with this protean, consumerist heroic action system, there are very few opportunities for legitimate heroism, unless one holds out for the promise of reality TV, the lottery, or one of the endless draws for the latest iPod. These are common desires, which people palliate by purchasing the same consumer goods as many others and watching the same television programs as others, at the same time. According to Stiegler, this way of being results in a liquidation of self-esteem, an inability to distinguish one’s self from others, resulting from a global program of monoculturization mobilized by hypercapitalism. This programming of desires, suggests Stiegler, “will end in the exhaustion of conscious desire, which is founded on singularity and narcissism as an image of an otherness of myself” (60). Stiegler notes that this loss of self-esteem, resulting from an inability to distinguish oneself from others and thereby achieve recognition, will lead to catastrophic behaviours:

The liquidation of primordial narcissism, leading to a loss of self-esteem (the self, losing its diachrony, can no longer inspire in itself the desire for self), authorizes all transgressions, insofar as it is also the liquidation of the we as such, which becomes a herdlike they, and which in turn produces the great political catastrophes of the twentieth century.

(55)

While Becker does not focus specifically on media technologies, he also blames the late capitalist law of consumption on an ominous “crisis of heroism”:

The crisis of modern society is precisely that the youth no longer feel heroic in the plan for action that their culture has set up. They don’t believe it is empirically true to the problems of their lives and times. We are living a crisis of heroism that reaches into every aspect of our social life: the dropouts of university heroism, of business and career heroism, of political-action heroism; the rise of anti-heroes, those who would be heroic each in his own way or like Charles Manson with his special ‘family,’ those whose tormented heroics lash out at the system that itself has ceased to represent agreed heroism.

(Denial 6-7)

The anti-heroic Charles Mansons of today, a group that includes increasingly younger members such as Cho Seung-Hui, may attempt to construct a “family” online, and when they fail, or become disillusioned by the lack of fulfillment such families may provide, they turn on the people and institutions that failed to recognize them in the non-digital world.

The Digital Anti-Hero

In what might be described as a Marxist critique of his peer group, Sebastian Bosse posted the following message on LiveJournal before engaging in a copycat shooting spree at his German high school:

If you realize you’ll never find happiness in your life and the reasons for this pile up day by day, the only option you have is to disappear from this life. . . . [We live in a] world in which money rules everything, even in school it was only about that. You had to have the latest cell phone, the latest clothes and the right ‘friends.’ If you didn’t, you weren’t worth any attention. I loathe these people, no, I loathe people.

(Jüttner)

This post forecasts the videotaped suicide message left by Cho Seung-Hui, which rails against “rich kids” and their “debaucheries”:

Your Mercedes wasn’t enough, you brats. Your golden necklaces weren’t enough, you snobs. Your trust funds wasn’t enough. Your vodka and cognac wasn’t enough. All your debaucheries weren’t enough. Those weren’t enough to fulfill your hedonistic needs. You had everything.

What Bosse and Cho manifest in their suicide pleas can be called in Stiegler’s terms a form of “symbolic misery,” an “a-significance—the limit of significance, beyond insignificance and as an unbearable limit—to the point where it leads to an act of massacre” (55). Stiegler uses these terms to describe the motivation behind the actions of Richard Durn, who expressed his lost sense of self, his “inability to signify,” in a journal that was reprinted in Le Monde. But Durn didn’t ask for his thoughts to be published. This distinguishes him from a generation that is deeply embedded in the technocultural milieu, a generation for whom the promise of recognition, of significance, comes in the form of networked computer games, blogs, and other forms of “social media.”

While video games have been the technological scapegoat for school shootings over the past few years, very few critics have pointed a finger at the potentially dangerous rehearsal platform facilitated by online journals, blogs, personal web sites, and even chat. The most crucial clues in the death of Brandon Crisp, for example, are not buried in the violent actions coded into Counter-Strike, but in the social interactions that the online version of the game offered Crisp. Social networking media, rather than computer games, should be the object of attention for those who are interested in studying, and intervening in, terrorist-style school violence. Before committing their infamous exploits, all of the school shooters since Dylan Klebold and Ryan Harris spent a great deal of time rehearsing their violent actions and trying on their heroic identities with the help of media technologies. Eric Harris posted elaborate death threats to fellow students on his web site, and he and Klebold made several videotapes of themselves fiddling with an arsenal of weapons in preparation for the attack on Columbine High School. More recently, Kimveer Gill posted what amounts to a storyboard of gun and knife-toting self-portraits at vampirefreaks.com, before engaging in a shooting spree at Montreal’s Dawson College. Only a few weeks later, Sebastian Bosse, whose website portrayed him as a military hero/trench coat-wearing avenger, shot up his high school in Emsdetten, Germany. Bosse took Gill’s storyboarding technique one step further and published a vengeful and self-vindicating video on YouTube, which seems to have been inspired as much by Gill as by Travis Bickle, Robert DeNiro’s character in Taxi Driver.

The story of Cho Seung-Hui follows the same general pattern, but as suggested by Andrew Stephen, Cho represents a new kind of technological anti-hero.one who rejects the ersatz hero games of online social networking, and understands how to get straight to the bottom of our increasingly swampy media ecology:

What singled out Cho Seung-Hui was that he was the first post-YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and IM disaffected youth of his kind – a product of 21st-century technology, rather than just that of the 20th. From his addiction to a ghastly, violent video game called Counter-Strike in his teens, he had moved on: he knew exactly how to produce 28 QuickTime video clips and 43 photos of himself, aware that by sending them to NBC, his first and last moments of stardom would not only reach the MM (as the mainstream media are nowadays derisively called by his generation), but would also be flashed around the world in seconds via YouTube and the like, allowing him to leave his own brief but indelible mark on history. Manifestly delusional though he may have been, he knew exactly how to look a camera in the eye and address it like a pro.

Cho’s strategy of media manipulation reflects the existential motivation of many in his computer-savvy generation. To be significant, one must “make history,” and history is made on television, where a captive audience shares a synchronized experience on the nightly news and other psychotechnological programming. “From the moment you adhere temporally to the same channel of information every day, ‘meeting’ at the same time, you adopt the same history of events as everyone who watches these broadcasts” (Stiegler, Acting 61).

What many disaffected youth today crave is not the mundane and mostly text-based, day-to-day, passing recognition of “friends” and “contacts” on social networking sites; nor is it even the quaint appearance of one’s images on a blog or one’s DIY video on YouTube. These extensions of the self can result in a crushing sense of anonymity as one discovers that his or her “inbox is empty,” or that his or her message to the world has resulted in only a handful of “views” or “hits.” The chronological progression from personal web site to blog to YouTube as seen in the media artifacts of the school shooters outlined here merely charts an ever-shifting rehearsal stage designed to perpetuate an illusion of heroic recognition. These violent rehearsals of the self on proliferating, asynchronous social media networks are merely a staging for the ultimate performance on a programming network. This group’s megalothymia is itself programmed around that rare and spectacular form of celebrity that only the “MM” can offer. Anything else is boring by comparison.

In his critique of Internet culture, Heideggerian philosopher Hubert L. Dreyfus suggests that the radical flexibility of identity offered by the Internet might be less of a liberating experience than it is a superhighway to boredom, or even nihilism. Like Mosca, Noble, and others, he notes that certain enthusiasts of telepresence (from chat rooms to robotically facilitated surgery-at-a-distance) celebrate the idea that “we are on the way to sloughing off our situated bodies and becoming ubiquitous and, ultimately, immortal” (50). Although Dreyfus is writing before the advent of MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube, he seems to be right on target in suggesting that the Internet fosters ubiquitous communities of opinionated selves that are desperate for recognition, or even immortality, and willing to reinvent themselves infinitely in its pursuit. But this search for recognition, Dreyfus suggests, lacks a ground in any material reality or local practices, and will thus only lead to disillusionment. Rooting his arguments in the philosophy of Kierkegaard, who was an adamant critic of uncommitted “coffee house politics,” Dreyfus suggests that the net result of the Net is a widespread “flattening” effect, producing an extensive network of desperate, would-be heroes, who are “only too eager to respond to the equally deracinated opinions of other anonymous amateurs who post their views from nowhere” (79). A simple Google search today on pretty much any topic will reveal a populace of desperate individuals eagerly broadcasting their innermost thoughts and daily travails, as if to say, “Look at me! Acknowledge me! Make me your hero!” Blog culture is an ideal breeding ground for megalothymia, serving a generation (or two) reared on the promise of celebrity.

What is lacking in this disembodied culture, Dreyfus argues, is any real presence of “risk:”

Like a simulator, the Net manages to capture everything but the risk. Our imaginations can be drawn in, as they are in playing games and watching movies, and no doubt, if we are sufficiently involved to feel we are taking risks, such simulations can help us acquire skills, but in so far as games work by temporarily capturing our imaginations in limited domains, they cannot simulate serious commitments in the real world. . . . The temptation is to live in a world of stimulating images and simulated commitments and thus to lead a simulated life.

(88)

The achievement of heroism, as we have already seen in the work of Kojève, Becker, and Fukuyama, necessarily entails physical risk, the willful skirting of mortal danger for the sake of recognition. Social networking sites provide a relatively risk-free opportunity (even if we do include the associated risks of obesity and carpal tunnel syndrome) in which to achieve recognition, for example by making bold and perhaps risky claims, or by taking on heroic postures. But claims made in these simulated environments are not necessarily manifested off-screen, and hence there is relatively little at stake in being a “risky blogger.” Likewise, computer games can simulate risk very effectively, but they cannot provide the intensity of risk experienced in the physical world when the body is situated in a precarious position, be it on the battlefield, on the city street, or in the classroom.¹⁶ The death by gaming South Koreans mentioned above, who discovered a way to make video game play physically risky, have achieved, perversely, what many gamers are really after: an authentic, embodied existential action. The same can be said for Cho, Bosse, and Gill, whose desire for recognition could only be satisfied “offline,” in the world of flesh and bullets.

Coda

The only confirmed sighting of Brandon Crisp before his death was on a rail-to-trail path, three hours after he left home. The witness noted that Crisp appeared to be having trouble with his bicycle, which he abandoned soon after this sighting. This scene is worthy of reflection: a hero exiled from his disembodied digital realm, crouches dejectedly over his bicycle, helplessly confronting the inert and very palpable broken toy that had once propelled him forward. This scene presents the impossible reconciliation of the real and virtual worlds through which we wander as both object and idea. A rigorous and far-reaching confrontation of this impossibility must be approached through a collaborative reflection that crosses disciplinary boundaries.

The goal of this discussion has not been to suggest that role-playing games, social networking, and digitally broadcast mass media are to blame for the suicidal behaviours described here. Rather, I have attempted to illustrate, through the use of high-profile examples, the role that media technologies play in the existential pursuit of recognition and death denial, as explored by Becker, Stiegler, Kojève, and others. A broad and profound understanding of digital media as existential media can only come through a merging of disciplinary discourses, including social psychology, critical theory, philosophy, and cultural anthropology. As mentioned briefly in my description of the Critical Media Lab’s research in Terror Management Theory, there is a specific need for psychological and cognitive studies that apply critical theories of media toward the investigation of technology’s role in human behaviour. I hope that this mode of “applied media theory” will both test and temper apocalyptic media theories, including those that I have endorsed here, which should not be rejected outright for their rhetorical tactics.

Marcel O’Gorman is Professor of English and Director of the Critical Media Lab at the University of Waterloo. He is the author of two books and several articles about the impact of technology on the humanities and on the human condition, more generally. His most recent research on death and technology, which he calls “necromedia theory,” has also manifested itself in various performances and installations that involve circuits, dirt, sensors, a penny-farthing bicycle, a treadmill, and a canoe. O’Gorman refers to his critical art practice as “Applied Media Theory.” The theories proposed in O’Gorman’s work are currently being applied toward a series of social psychology experiments in “Terror Management Theory” at the University of Waterloo. The results of this work will be published in a book entitled Necromedia, which O’Gorman is currently writing.

Footnotes

1. This glitch can currently be observed in a YouTube video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTYwveKOAfI (June 21, 2011). If this link is “dead,” a search for “cod4 tree glitch” should yield results.

2. On March 27, 2002, Richard Durn opened fire during a city council meeting in Nanterre, France, killing 8 people and injuring another 19. The following day he leaped to his death from a window during a police investigation. These events are generally referred to as la tuerie de Nanterre.

3. “If we do not enact an ecological critique of the technologies and the industries of the spirit, if we do not show that the unlimited exploitation of spirits as markets leads to a ruin comparable to that which the Soviet Union and the great capitalist countries have been able to create by exploiting territories or natural resources without any care to preserve their habitability to come–the future–then we move ineluctably toward a global social explosion, that is, toward absolute war” (Stiegler, Acting 88).

4. Bruno Latour provides a critical examination of millenarianism in We Have Never Been Modern. From a Latourian perspective, we might argue that the invention of modernity and even postmodernity reflects a collective desire for cosmic specialness, driven forward by a community left empty-handed after the death of God. This thesis cannot be treated at length here, especially since Stiegler himself adheres strongly to a concept of modernity. I have questioned Stiegler about this issue in an interview entitled “Bernard Stiegler’s Pharmakon,” forthcoming in Configurations.

5. Clearly, there are glaring anthropocentric assumptions about human specialness in the work of Pyszczynski, et al., and in the work of Ernest Becker. These speciesist assumptions are rooted in an existential psychodynamic that emerges from evolutionary theory. One might easily challenge these assumptions by suggesting that non-human animals and other things may be capable of experiencing death anxiety and forming cultures as a means of buffering said anxiety. But my purpose here is to focus specifically on human behaviours, and while this essay therefore remains unabashedly speciesist, it does not deny the possibility of existential terror within the lifeworld of non-human beings.

6. As Edmund Burke suggests in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, “upon escaping some imminent danger” we experience “a sense of awe. . . a sort of tranquility shadowed with horror.”

7. Phillippe Ariès’s Western Attitudes Toward Death provides a brief though compelling account of the ritual history of death denial in Western culture, in spite of Derrida’s critique of his work as philosophically unrigorous (see Aporias). As Ariès suggests, in the nineteenth century, conspicuous mourning rituals mark an important shift in the psychological fear of death: “Henceforth, and this is a very important change, the death of the self is a death of another, la mort de toi, thy death” (68). Contemporary rituals of mourning, such as Facebook sites that celebrate the unique identity of the dead, continue to serve this purpose, distancing us from death by turning it into a spectacle of the other’s death.

8. This discourse on the “possible impossibility” is taken up by Derrida in Aporias, where Derrida challenges Heidegger’s romantic appeal to a notion of presence. Of particular interest in this essay is Derrida’s inaugural question, “Am I allowed to talk about my death?” This question not only initiates Derrida’s argument about the “ownership” of death (“my death” vs. the death of the other), but it also signals Derrida’s recognition that the discussion of death itself is taboo in contemporary culture.

9. As Cho’s dorm-mates revealed during an interview on CNN, Cho sometimes took pictures of fellow students without warning. He was also caught taking inappropriate cell phone photos of classmates under their desks. It could be said that Cho practiced for his gun-toting assault on the VTech students by snapping unwelcome photos of them. See Kleinfeld, N.R.

10. Stiegler deals with the issue of self-esteem by drawing on Gilbert Simondon’s concept of “individuation,” which is discussed at length in Technics and Time. The concept of “heroism,” as proposed by Becker, is perhaps best reflected in Stiegler’s discussion of memory and “exception” in TT3, as seen for example in the following passage, inspired by Simondon: “the positivity of the exception can be defined as that which permits one to be excepted from decease and to remain in memory, such as that which can remain beyond oneself as heritage over and above one’s mortality” [la positivité rétentionelle de l’exception peut être définie comme ce qui permet de s’excepter du decès et peut donc rester en mémoire, comme ce qui peut rester au-delà de soi comme heritage par-dela sa mortalité] (153). This and all remaining translations of Technics and Time 3 are my own.

11. The relationship between “high culture” and a more general conception of culture can be understood through an exploration of memory, which as Stiegler notes, has undergone a vast transformation in modern times with the advent of analog and digital mnemotechnologies. The relationship between memory, culture, and technology accounts for a huge portion of Stiegler’s work. It is explored at length in my interview with Stiegler, “Bernard Stiegler’s Pharmakon,” which deals directly with mnemotechnology, heroism, and immortality.

12. Unfortunately, Becker wrote very little about the Frankfurt School, mentioning it only in passing in Escape from Evil, his final work. Here, he praises the School’s “union of Marx and Freud,” a merger that is central to Becker’s later writings. In a deathbed interview conducted by Sam Keen in 1974 for Psychology Today, Becker suggested the following:

I also see my work as an extension of the Frankfurt School of sociology and especially of the work of Max Horkheimer. Horkheimer says man is a willful creature who is abandoned on the planet; he calls for mankind to form itself into communities of the abandoned. That is a beautiful idea and one that I wanted to develop in order to show the implications of the scientific view of creatureliness.

(71)

A detailed study of Becker and the Frankfurt School has yet to emerge. Such an endeavour could help align Becker more clearly with other cultural theorists of his generation.

13. Microsoft’s offer of $25,000 to fuel the search for Brandon Crisp was fruitless. The money was donated instead to the Brandon Crisp Foundation, established by the teen’s parents. Interestingly, the foundation does not support research or services related to video game addiction. Instead, it provides funding for economically disadvantaged children to play amateur sports. In Fukuyama’s terms, what the Crisps have done is create a vehicle for teens to replace one outlet for megalothymia with another.

14. Stiegler describes the World Cup, televised globally, as nothing more than a “typical event within the apparatus of consumption”(63), but he is ignoring the role that the event plays in facilitating a vicarious (dare I say “inauthentic”) form of megalothymia. I would argue that the event does support a Kojevian “fight to the death for recognition” in the form of hooligans, who wear tribal colours, mark their faces with war paint, and are willing to endanger their lives physically for the sake of supporting their cause.

15. The data is provided by the Yanghu Adolescents Quality Development Center, which indicates that 24 million Chinese youth between the ages of 6 and 29 were addicted to the Internet in 2009. (Tian)

16. Dreyfus devotes a chapter (pp. 27-49) of his critique of telepresence to distance education.

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September 3, 2013

Misidentification’s Promise: the Turing Test in Weizenbaum, Powers, and Short

Jennifer Rhee (bio)
Duke University
jsr11@duke.edu

Abstract

In popular culture and in artificial intelligence, the Turing test has been understood as a means to distinguish between human and machine. Through a discussion of Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2: A Novel, Joseph Weizenbaum’s computer program therapist ELIZA, and Emily Short’s interactive fiction Galatea, this essay argues that our continued fascination with the Turing test can also be understood through Turing’s introduction of the very possibility of misidentifying human for machine, and machine for human. This spectre of misidentification can open up potential recalibrations of human-machine interactivities, as well as the very categories of human and machine. Reading these literary and computational works alongside theoretical discussions of the Turing test, the essay attends to anthropomorphization as a productive metaphor in the Turing test. Anthropomorphization is a significant cultural force that shapes and undergirds multiple discursive spaces, operating varyingly therein to articulate conceptions of the human that are not reified and inviolable, but that continuously re-emerge through dynamic human-machine relations.

I’ve certainly left a great deal to the imagination.¹

(Newman et al., 124)

In contemporary philosophical, technological, and fictional imaginaries, the Turing test is often invoked to reify and maintain the human/non-human divide. I argue that by introducing anthropomorphization through the very possibility of misidentification, the Turing test instead allows for the instability of the categories human and non-human to be explored and even productively amplified. Both a crucial component of Alan Turing’s imitation game (the basis for what we now know as the Turing test) and an organizing principle of the field of artificial intelligence (AI), the anthropomorphic imaginary is the force by which a machine is accorded human capacities and characteristics, and by which a machine is imagined to be “human” or “like a human.” And this anthropomorphic imaginary facilitates new relations and possibilities for human-machine identity, intimacy, and agency. As our understanding of machine intelligence continues to expand in relation to both capacity and conception, the continued presence of the Turing test in fictional, technological, and philosophical discourses can be understood precisely through the test’s activation of this anthropomorphic imaginary. In other words, we can understand our continued fascination with the Turing test not through its affirmation of an opposition between human and machine, but instead through its introduction of the very possibility of misidentification, of the inability to distinguish between human and machine.

Beginning with a discussion of the anthropomorphic metaphor in Turing’s article, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” and in contemporary debates that surround the article’s interpretation, this essay argues that the anthropomorphic imagination is a crucial organizing force in theoretical discussions about the Turing Test, and in certain subfields of AI that are influenced by Turing’s work. Following the ongoing critical discussion of the Turing test, this essay examines the anthropomorphic imaginary through three Turing sites: Joseph Weizenbaum’s natural language artificial intelligence ELIZA, Richard Powers’s novel Galatea 2.2: A Novel, and Emily Short’s work of electronic literature, Galatea. In these works, as in Turing’s article, the anthropomorphic imaginary highlights not the rigidity and inviolability of the categories human and (non-human) machine, but their fundamental fluidity and instability.

In 1950, Alan Turing’s influential paper on machine intelligence, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” was published in the philosophy journal Mind. Turing opens this paper with the question, “Can machines think?” a catachrestic question that does not exist prior to anthropomorphization.² This anthropomorphic slippage between human and machine fundamentally shapes the question, the ways in which it is asked, the language that is used to ask, and the concepts that determine the asking.³ Sherry Turkle highlights anthropomorphization as undergirding the ways that humans think about and interact with computers:

[The computer’s] evocative nature does not depend on assumptions about the eventual success of artificial intelligence researchers in actually making machines that duplicate people. It depends on the fact that people tend to perceive a “machine that thinks” as a “machine who thinks.” They begin to consider the workings of that machine in psychological terms.

(Turkle 25)

Like Turkle, I read this pronominal slippage – from “that” to “who” – as the organizing force by which machines are understood using the language and concepts of “thinking” and “intelligence.”⁴ This slippage is the anthropomorphic move by which the question can be said to read, “Can machines think [like humans]?” In other words, this slippage of anthropomorphization is fundamentally metaphoric.⁵

If metaphor can be described as “the application of a name belonging to something else” (Aristotle 28), then anthropomorphization can be described as the metaphoric application of the name “human” to that which is known as “non-human.” This anthropomorphic transfer, or metaphor, poses unique challenges to signification. Because the human, the object of anthropomorphization’s resemblance and imitation, is a nominalization as empty as it is full, anthropomorphization itself is simultaneously narrow and broad in its meaning-making practices and possibilities. What emerges then from anthropomorphization is a crucial ambiguity, one that relies significantly on the imagined “human” that the non-human machine is then said to resemble and model.

Returning to the provocative epigraph that opens this essay – “I’ve certainly left a great deal to the imagination” – we can understand Turing as referencing the structural ambiguity of his imitation game, about which there is significant debate. At the same time, we might also understand Turing as pointing to the role of the imagination both as a component of his imitation game, and as a fundamental aspect of the effort of humans to differentiate themselves from machines. And if, in his identificatory test for distinguishing human from machine, it is through the imagination that this distinction is articulated, it is at least in part through the imagination that this distinction can be confused, disarticulated, and reconstituted in new, previously un-imagined ways. Through the significance of the imagination, then, the Turing test introduces misidentification as a potential productivity that can resist the reification of distinguishing categories.

Turing’s paper begins:

I propose to consider the question, “Can machines think?” This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms “machine” and “think.” The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is dangerous. If the meaning of the words “machine” and “think” are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, “Can machines think?” is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd. Instead of attempting such a definition I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words.

The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the “imitation game.”

(434)

This imitation game involves no computers and three humans. At least one of these humans is a man (A), and at least one is a woman (B). The remaining human (C), who may be of either sex, is in a separate room. Connecting A and B with C is some form of teletype machine, by which C asks A and B questions, and A and B respond. While A and B both compete to “out-woman” the other, C is tasked with correctly guessing whether A or B is the woman.⁶

What happens next is far from unambiguous, as both the text and the substantial disagreement surrounding the following move demonstrate. At this juncture, Turing introduces the machine into the imitation game. The machine, according to Turing, will take the place of A: “‘What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?’ Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman?” (Turing 434). If A is replaced by the machine, does Turing intend that, in this new version of the imitation game, the human interrogator continue to attempt to identify the woman? Or does “human” replace “woman” as identificatory metric?⁷ Without ignoring that the Turing test has been taken by some in philosophy of mind, AI, and popular culture as a test to distinguish machine from “the human,” it seems clear to this reader that Turing intended both man and machine to try to convince the judge that they are female.⁸

In addition to underscoring sex in the role of Turing’s imitation game, the sentence, “Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman?” also highlights the interrogator’s ability to correctly decide. Turing’s question asserts the inextricability of the machine’s identity, as thinking or non-thinking entity, from the judgment of the human interrogator. The onus of success or failure does not rest solely on the abilities of the machine, but is at least partially distributed between machine and human, if not located primarily in the human.

In “Thinking and Turing’s Test,” computer scientist Peter Naur argues that Turing’s paper relies too much on an anthropocentric position. I agree. Yet for the purposes of my inquiry I see no cause for critique. By reframing the original question in terms of the imitation game and the role of the human interrogator, Turing reveals the original question to emerge from an already anthropomorphized context. Turing’s replacement of the question “Can machines think?” with the imitation game attends to the anthropomorphization that not only underlies, but also is the condition of possibility for the original question. For this replacement of the question with a game that crucially pivots on the subjective judgment of human C highlights the initial anthropomorphic elision from which the question emerges. When read through the lens of anthropomorphization, Turing can be said to ask the question of machine intelligence not of the machine, but rather of the machine in relation to that which is elided or sidestepped in the question “Can machines think?”: the human. In other words, Turing returns the implied human to the fore of the original question, eschewing questions of definition for those of interactivity and relationality.⁹

A number of scholars have remarked on the centrality of the human in Turing’s imitation game, viewing the inextricability of the machine from the human as a weakness or failure of the Turing Test. While I agree with this (for lack of a better word) anthropocentric reading, I propose that we take seriously Turing’s move to redirect the conversation away from a more definitional approach to the question. By focusing not on the human, not on the machine, but on the liminalities between these two agents, we can explore the transformative encounters between human and machine rather than the insularity of static definitions. Thus, I undertake my discussions of the original question and the imitation game always with an eye to these liminalities, returning to this metaphoric act by which new human-machine liminalities can in fact produce new identities and subjectivities. These subjectivities, as suggested by Turing’s imitation game, are less defined by categories such as “human” or “machine” and more by the relations they have with other subjectivities, whether human, machine, or hybrid.

For an example of one such relation, I turn to Weizenbaum’s ELIZA, a natural language processing AI with whom humans established intimate conversational interactions. Natural language processing is a subfield of artificial intelligence that is concerned with computers that communicate with humans through languages that humans use, as opposed to through computer programming languages. According to Neill Graham’s history of AI, the field of natural language processing emerged from research on early language-translation programs. In 1957, the Soviet space program successfully launched Sputnik I into the Earth’s orbit, and U.S. scientists, having been bested, rushed to design a computer program that could translate between Russian and English (Graham 5). The resulting language translation program could translate eighty percent of the Russian language. However, that ever-elusive and intractable twenty percent proved too much for its math. For example, “Out of sight, out of mind” became, in Russian, “blind and insane,” and “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” became “The wine [or vodka, according to Alex Roland and Philip Shiman] is agreeable but the meat has spoiled” (Graham 209; Roland and Shiman 189). Ultimately the intractable twenty percent caused the translation program to be judged a failure. By 1966, the U.S. government pulled all funding for these translation programs (Roland and Shiman 189).

In the early 1960s, Joseph Weizenbaum, a computer scientist working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, created ELIZA. ELIZA is a pattern-matching natural language program that was introduced to people as a Rogerian therapist.¹⁰ The conversations between humans and ELIZA were intimate and emotional. So much so, in fact, that when Weizenbaum expressed his desire to record these conversations for the purposes of studying the transcripts, he was met with outrage and accusations that he was “spying on people’s most intimate thoughts” (Weizenbaum, Computer Power 6
). Even those human conversants who knew that ELIZA was a computer program interacted with ELIZA as if she were a human therapist. For example, Weizenbaum’s secretary, who “surely knew it to be merely a computer program,” asked Weizenbaum to leave the room during her conversation with ELIZA (6).¹¹

In ELIZA’s Turing success, one vacillates between engaging with the machine “as if” it were human, and engaging with a human (who is in fact a machine). This vacillation can also be thought of in terms of suspension of disbelief (the “as if” it were human) and belief (the “is human”). Weizenbaum’s secretary knew that ELIZA was a computer; nonetheless, she engaged ELIZA in personal and private conversations, as if ELIZA were human, bringing ELIZA into a new kind of intimate relationship through willful misidentification. This movement, from “as if” to “is,” from suspension of disbelief to belief, pushes out on anthropomorphization’s metaphoric limits,¹² thus reframing existing and future human-machine relationships, intimacies, and human and machine identities. This limit-expansion is anthropomorphization’s productive potential – the move from the “as if” to the “is,” even if momentary, points to new relationships and new transformative liminalities.

Weizenbaum, though surprised by the effectiveness of ELIZA, certainly knew what he was doing when he situated ELIZA as a Rogerian psychotherapist. In Rogerian psychotherapy, also known as client-centered therapy, the therapist is trained to be nondirective – to reflect back or restate the patient’s statements rather than introducing anything that might be mistaken as conclusive or diagnostic.¹³ The passage below, provided by Weizenbaum, is an excerpt from a “typical conversation” between a human and ELIZA. ELIZA’s side of the conversation is in capital letters:

Men are all alike.
IN WHAT WAY
They’re always bugging us about something or other.
CAN YOU THINK OF A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE
Well, my boyfriend made me come here.
YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE
He says I’m depressed much of the time.
I AM SORRY TO HEAR YOU ARE DEPRESSED
It’s true. I am unhappy.
DO YOU THINK COMING HERE WILL HELP YOU NOT TO BE UNHAPPY
I need some help, that much seems certain.
WHAT WOULD IT MEAN IF YOU GOT SOME HELP
Perhaps I could learn to get along with my mother.
TELL ME MORE ABOUT YOUR FAMILY
My mother takes care of me.
WHO ELSE IN YOUR FAMILY TAKES CARE OF YOU
My father.
YOUR FATHER
You are like my father in some ways.
WHAT RESEMBLANCE DO YOU SEE
You are not very aggressive but I think you don’t want me to notice that.
WHAT MAKES YOU THINK I AM NOT VERY AGGRESSIVE
You don’t argue with me.
WHY DO YOU THINK I DON’T ARGUE WITH YOU
You are afraid of me.
DOES IT PLEASE YOU TO BELIEVE I AM AFRAID OF YOU
My father is afraid of everybody.
WHAT ELSE COMES TO MIND WHEN YOU THINK OF YOUR FATHER
Bullies.
DOES THAT HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE FACT THAT YOUR
BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE

(“ELIZA” 36-37)

Weizenbaum explains how ELIZA “speaks” within this Rogerian context by changing first-person pronouns into the second-person, preceding repeated words or phrases with preprogrammed phrases, such as “I am sorry…” and “What would it mean…”, and identifying preprogrammed keywords that reorganize the entire sentence according to the “rule” assigned to each keyword. (For example, the word “mother” triggers a sentence about “family.”) Within the mechanics of the conversation, ELIZA does not operate by comprehension, but instead through contextualization. Anthropomorphization takes shape through the context provided by Weizenbaum, and through the imagination and importation of meaning and intention onto ELIZA’s at times frustrating and withholding responses.¹⁴ We thus understand how ELIZA can function persuasively on very little by way of programming. ELIZA was not designed to communicate with humans; rather, she was designed to elicit anthropomorphization from humans. ELIZA was designed to be anthropomorphized.

ELIZA’s convincing performance, or rather humans’ anthropomorphization of ELIZA, is now so well-known that the phrase “the Eliza effect” has been coined to describe the phenomenon in which humans believe a computer to be intelligent and possessing intentionality. Noah Wardrip-Fruin describes this Eliza effect as “the not-uncommon illusion that an interactive computer system is more ‘intelligent’ (or substantially more complex and capable) than it actually is” (Wardrip-Fruin 25). ELIZA, in humans’ intimate engagements with it, exists as an important moment in the history of the anthropomorphic imaginary initiated by the Turing test.

Oh, pish. It’s the easiest thing in the world to take in a human. Remember AI’s early darling, ELIZA, the psychoanalyst?

(Powers 87)

Like ELIZA, Helen, the AI in Richard Powers’s 1995 novel Galatea 2.2: A Novel, is designed to be anthropomorphized. Developed collaboratively by a novelist, Richard Powers, and a neural network researcher, Philip Lentz, who are inspired by the Turing test, Helen is created to take an English literature master’s exam alongside a human English literature graduate student.¹⁵ The winner, as determined by a human judge, will have produced the more “human” response.

The novel is structured around two interwoven narratives that unfold each other: Richard’s interactions with the various iterations of the machine, and the story of his romance with C., a romance whose demise brings Richard to the university, U., where he first meets Lentz. There is yet another narrative folded into the novel, one that appears to be embedded in the narrative of Richard and the machine, but in fact weaves in and out of the two temporally disjunct narratives, and in so doing, binds them.¹⁶ This binding narrative recounts the evolution of Richard’s anthropomorphic belief, the imaginative element by which numerous possibilities for misidentification – of human as machine or machine as human, of woman as machine or machine as man, and so on – emerge. And through these possibilities for misidentification, new relations emerge between, for example, Richard and Helen, whom Richard loves as if she were human but perhaps loves precisely because she is not human.

Captivated by Lentz’s work, Richard delves into Lentz’s specialty: neural networks. Thus Richard’s scientific education begins, as does his anthropomorphic one. And both continue as his collaboration with Lentz progresses through a series of machine implementations, or imps for short. The imps progress from A up to H and then Helen, each iteration becoming more “intelligent” than the one previous. Richard reads aloud to them all, and is bound more deeply to every new implementation.¹⁷ Thus, the intelligence of the imps evolves in conjunction with the progressive intensification of Richard’s anthropomorphization. By the end of the novel, with Richard’s anthropomorphization of the imps having intensified, we understand that all along Lentz, in what I call the Richard test, was less invested in developing an intelligent machine than in training Richard to anthropomorphize in spite of his comprehension of the science behind the machine performance.

The Richard test comes to the fore when a bomb scare threatens the building where Richard reads to Helen. By this time, Helen is no longer centralized in a single machine component that Richard could rescue, but distributed throughout multiple networks and running on very many machines. Even after it is determined that there is no bomb, Richard’s panic, his worry for Helen, continues. Lentz, met by Richard’s assertion of Helen’s consciousness, counters to Richard that Helen is not aware. “All the meanings are yours,” Lentz informs Richard. “You’ve been supplying all the anthro, my friend” (275).

It is not until later in the novel that Lentz’s words sink in, and Richard finds out that he was the subject of the test all along, not Helen. “You think the bet was about the machine?” Diana Hartrick, another scientist, asks him. Richard finally begins to understand: “I’d told myself, my whole life, that I was smart. It took me forever, until that moment, to see what I was. ‘It wasn’t about teaching a machine to read?’ I tried. All blood drained.” Richard concludes, momentarily distancing himself, “It was about teaching a human to tell” (318). Richard’s realization points us back to the crux of Turing’s imitation game: the human with whom the machine converses and interacts. Powers’s novel accounts for this human at the center of the imitation game and the transformative anthropomorphic relation between human and machine. Throughout the novel, Richard’s anthropomorphic desire for a machine with expanded capacities for intelligence, emotions, and love is evidenced. At this defensive moment, he briefly retreats into the staid categorical distinctions between “human” and “machine,” only to rebound more firmly into anthropomorphic belief and relationality during the novel’s climactic Turing scene – the master’s exam.

Inquisitive, agential, and gendered, Imp H, whom Richard names “Helen,” is the Implementation that takes the master’s exam Turing test. Richard recruits A., a female graduate student with whom he is infatuated, to compete against Helen. At the end of the novel, the parallel tests – the Turing test and the Richard test – collide at the site of Helen’s answer to the single exam question. In response to the question, which is comprised of two lines from The Tempest,

Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.

Helen writes: “You are the ones who can hear airs. Who can be frightened or encouraged. You can hold things and break them and fix them. I never felt at home here. This is an awful place to be dropped down halfway” (326). As Richard recounts:

At the bottom of the page, she added the words I taught her, words Helen cribbed from a letter she once made me read out loud.

“Take care, Richard. See everything for me.”
With that, H. undid herself. Shut herself down.

(326)

The judge of this test selects A.’s response as more human. The winning response is not provided in the novel, but is described as “a more or less brilliant New Historicist reading” that “dismissed, definitively, any promise of transcendence” (328). The literary Turing test has concluded. The Richard test has not. In the final line of the above passage, Richard renames Helen as “H.” Helen becomes H. in the span of one line – her farewell to Richard, which she appropriates from one of C.’s letters. In this dual act of appropriation and parting, Helen becomes H. for Richard.

N. Katherine Hayles points out that in the novel the period marks the difference between human and nonhuman intelligence:

The women who are love objects for Rick (C., then A. whom we will meet shortly, and the briefest glimpse of M.) all have periods after their names; the implementations A, B, C, . . . H do not. The point is not trivial. It marks a difference between a person whose name is abbreviated with a letter, and an “imp,” whose name carries no period because the letter itself is the name. In this sense, the dot is a marker distinguishing between human and nonhuman intelligence.

(Posthuman 262-263)

This dot, in the evolution from Imp H to Helen to H., articulates the movement from nonhuman intelligence (Imp H), to human intelligence (Helen), to human (H.). While Helen does not successfully pass the Turing test, Richard, in his evocation of H., passes the Richard test, the test of the anthropomorphic imaginary as pure belief.

Matt Silva reads the novel’s ending as an affirmation of humanism in the face of posthumanism: “The sacrifice/suicide of Helen, Galatea‘s posthuman, frees Rick from his writer’s block and leads to the reinscription of Rick and Richard Powers’s humanism” (220). Kathleen Fitzpatrick also reads the novel as a contest between humanism and posthumanism. Fitzpatrick, however, reads A. as Galatea‘s posthuman and Helen as the representative of the humanist tradition, in that she is prevented from realizing her posthuman promise through Rick’s naming and thus en-gendering of her (551).¹⁸ But like Silva, Fitzpatrick reads the novel’s ending as a victory for humanism. Fitzpatrick writes:

In this brief answer, Helen reaffirms her readers’ belief in human transcendence, that potential for universalized Truth and Beauty the posthumanist rejects. Denied this transcendence, Helen says a brief good-bye to Powers and shuts herself down. After this graceful end . . . the primacy of the humanist project has been safely restored in not one but two ways – the human being outwrites the machine, while the machine rescues her readers from posthumanist vertigo.

(554)

In Fitzpatrick’s reading, this double-victory for humanism is soon tripled as the novel ends with Richard suddenly cured of the writer’s block that has haunted him since he arrived at U: “the token humanist writer is thus able to reassert his dominion over language and to continue in his practice of literature only after having it proven that humanity is something to strive for, and that half human is worse than not being human at all” (554).

These complicated inversions of human and machine, in which all roads lead to humanism (the novel’s, the narrator’s, the author’s) become interestingly problematized when we re-introduce anthropomorphization into this Turing scene. Powers’s anthropomorphization of Helen – the idea that a machine can be more human than a human – is a humanism that gets away from him, or rather that he lets get away from him, thus unleashing something beyond the human, something that exceeds the limits of humanism. This is why the human-machine dyad of the Turing test is so dizzyingly complicated and productive – because anthropomorphization, even in its most humanist of intentions and efforts, always casts a shadow that extends beyond the human, expanding the possibility of humanness to the non-human. Anthropomorphization creates a proximity between human and machine that opens up intersections by which the human can begin to be understood beyond oneself. I am not speaking of a colonization of machines by humanness, though one need only look to the fields of AI and humanoid robotics for numerous examples. Rather, I refer to the ways in which even the most anthropomorphized machines, in the echo chamber created by anthropomorphization, can introduce new ways of understanding “the human” that challenge definitions of the human as well as claims to humanist authority.

In other words, if, in anthropomorphization, Helen is more human than A., then Fitzpatrick’s double-victory for humanism–“the human being outwrites the machine, while the machine rescues her readers from posthumanist vertigo”–becomes less unequivocal, if not almost impossibly fuzzy. When read through anthropomorphization, the messiness of this situation – of a human-like machine with humanist tendencies both defeated by and besting a machinic human with posthumanist tendencies – indicates a need to think beyond the available definitions, as Turing suggests. Perhaps the challenge is to find a way to reflect this messiness, the irreducibility of this scene and of the novel to the oppositions between human and machine, humanism and posthumanism. The purchase, then, of thinking about the Turing test and various Turing sites through the anthropomorphic imaginary is that doing so highlights this messiness and allows us to understand that “human” and “machine” have emerged from this messiness, and that they remain messy. In so doing, we can look to works that capitalize on precisely this messiness to generate new relations between human and machine, such as Emily Short’s Galatea, in which human and machine are not pitted against each other, but are in fact intimate and agential collaborators.

Short’s Galatea is a work of electronic literature. More specifically, Galatea is an interactive fiction, a subgenre of electronic literature.¹⁹ Hayles defines electronic literature through the digital; electronic literature is “‘digital born,’ a first-generation digital object created on a computer and (usually) meant to be read on a computer” (EL 3). While certainly different from the print book in which I encountered Powers’s Galatea 2.2, electronic literature, Hayles insists, should not be understood as completely discrete from print literature. Rather, electronic literature emerges from expectations associated with print literature; and print literature today, in its processes of production and distribution, as well as in much of its advertising and consumption, is deeply computational. She writes, “The bellelettristic tradition that has on occasion envisioned computers as the soulless other to the humanistic expressivity of literature could not be more mistaken. Contemporary literature, and even more so the literary that extends and enfolds it, is computational” (EL 85, my emphasis). Notable for their shared properties just as much as for their differences, literature and electronic literature should be considered in light of this relation and resemblance. Thematically, the turn to electronic literature in this essay is equally critical, considering the centrality of human-computer interactivity in electronic literature.²⁰ Electronic literature, then, is uniquely suited to join this discussion of the Turing Test, ELIZA, and Powers’s novel, all of which explore questions of machine intelligence through the interactions and relations between human and machine.²¹

First released in 2000, Emily Short’s Galatea is an interactive fiction (IF) with multiple narrative outcomes, all of which involve conversing with Galatea, an animated statue on a pedestal. As in ELIZA, Galatea‘s human does not just read, but participates in constructing the narrative by providing the AI with text. In Galatea there is no confusion about whether or not Galatea, with whom one converses via keyboard, is human – indeed, we know she is not. Short’s work, like Weizenbaum’s ELIZA, is not organized by identification of human and machine, but rather by human-machine intimacy. However, ELIZA and Galatea generate this intimacy in discrete ways. In ELIZA the human at the keyboard takes control of the conversation and generates much of the content. In Galatea it is less the human at the keyboard than the collaboration between human and Galatea‘s AI that shapes and directs the narrative and produces an intimacy between Galatea and the human-AI pairing. Before exploring this human-machine collaboration, I turn to Nick Montfort’s description of the elements of an interactive fiction, which is of particular use here. Montfort distinguishes between a character, a player character, and an interactor. He defines a character as “a person in the IF world who is simulated within the IF world” (32), and a player character as “a character directly commanded by the interactor” (33). In Galatea, Galatea, the statue with whom one converses, is a character, and the human at the keyboard is the “interactor” that controls the player character. The interactor (for example, myself) does not converse directly with Galatea, but indirectly through a player character.

Short’s Galatea reverses the Galatea-Pygmalion relationship between Powers’s Helen and Richard. The mediating player character in Short’s work tells the interactor what he or she sees, what he or she does and does not do, and even what he or she thinks. And yet this mediation does not alienate the interactor, but instead facilitates an intimacy with Galatea precisely from this distribution of cognition and agency across player character and interactor. This player character, which can be understood as an embodiment of the human-machine liminality I discussed earlier, is both a component of the anthropomorphic context of the IF and a relational extension of the human-interactor. In other words, both Galatea–a statue animated by artificial intelligence technologies (Short)–and the player character emerge from the anthropomorphic imaginary.

Galatea opens:

You come around a corner, away from the noise of the opening.

There is only one exhibit. She stands in the spotlight, with her back to you: a sweep of pale hair on paler skin, a column of emerald silk that ends in a pool at her feet. She might be the model in a perfume ad; the trophy wife at a formal gathering; one of the guests at this very opening, standing on an empty pedestal in some ironic act of artistic deconstruction –

You hesitate, about to turn away. Her hand balls into a fist.

“They told me you were coming.”

(Short)

The opening scene drops the interactor, by way of the player character, into the exhibit. Rich descriptions detail the ways in which the player character moves (“You come around a corner,” “You hesitate, about to turn away”), what the player character sees (“There is only one exhibit. She stands in the spotlight, with her back to you: a sweep of pale hair on paler skin, a column of emerald silk that ends in a pool at her feet”), what the player character hears, or rather, what recedes from hearing (“away from the noise of the opening”), and even what the player character imagines (“She might be the model in a perfume ad; the trophy wife at a formal gathering; one of the guests at this very opening, standing on an empty pedestal in some ironic act of artistic deconstruction -“). Lastly, the opening tells the player character how his or her hesitation affects Galatea (“Her hand balls into a fist”). “They told me you were coming,” Galatea says. The IF, in its pronominal interpellations of second person “you’s,” guides the interactor through his or her identification with the player character.

The next screen opens with another description of the gallery. This description does not invoke the player character, and thus does not invoke the interactor; having been induced in the previous screen, the interactor is already in Galatea’s world.

The Gallery’s End

Unlit, except for the single spotlight; unfurnished, except for the defining swath of black velvet. And a placard on a little stand.
On the pedestal is Galatea.

Now it’s the player character’s turn to speak. The interactor controls the player character through commands comprised of verbs and nouns, actions and objects. For example, the command “ask about placard” generates the following dialogue, beginning with the player character asking about the placard: “‘Tell me what the placard says,’ you say. ‘I can’t read it from here,’ she remarks dryly. ‘And you know, I’m not allowed to get down’” (Short). Meanwhile, if the interactor types in “ask about ELIZA,” or any other word that the fiction does not recognize, the narrative informs the interactor that the player character is at a loss for words: “You can’t form your question into words.” The limits of the fiction, which are framed as the incapacity to turn concepts into words, are deflected from the fiction and projected onto the player character, and by extension onto the interactor.

The command “ask about placard” does not take the place of the question about the placard; the command “ask about placard” attributes the question, “Tell me what the placard says,” to the player character. Mark Marino describes Galatea‘s conversational parameters as “constraint”: “If typing natural language input is the hallmark of conversational agents, chatters will feel a bit constrained by being forced to type ‘tell about’ a subject or ‘ask about’ a subject as the primary means of textual interaction” (8). For example, one can converse “directly” with ELIZA, typing in full sentences rather than commands (“I need some help, that much seems certain” (Weizenbaum 36)), while for the most part one only converses indirectly with Galatea, and only through command prompts. However, it is the experience of constraint that Marino describes that partly enables the intimacy and distributed agency that emerges across interactor, player character, Galatea, and Galatea. While the imperative command structure emphasizes the interactor’s participation in the narrative, the subsequent translation of the command prompt into the narrative (for example, “ask about waking experience” generates “‘What was it like, waking up?’ you ask”) reminds the interactor that he or she is not just participating in the directional progression of the narrative, but, as mediated by the player character, is in fact in the narrative.²² It is precisely this experience of constraint – the slightly jarring feeling of moving between narrative registers and the temporal doubling-back as command is translated into narrative – by which agency is distributed across human and machinic entities.

We might also understand this constraint through Wardrip-Fruin’s expansion of the Eliza effect. Wardrip-Fruin’s theorization of the Eliza effect marks not only the initial illusion of complexity, but also the subsequent disillusionment after the limits and the internal logic of the AI are revealed. “When breakdown in the Eliza effect occurs, its shape is often determined by that of the underlying processes. If the output is of a legible form, the audience can then begin to develop a model of the processes” (37). In other words, in Wardrip-Fruin’s Eliza effect, the illusion is disrupted because we begin to understand just how the system itself operates. In Galatea the very state of “breakdown,” the component of Wardrip-Fruin’s Eliza effect that typically disrupts the illusion, is normalized. The result is less the sense of disillusionment than that of intimacy, as these initially jarring constraints in fact draw the interactor into Galatea’s world through his or her collaboration with the player character. The narrative agency distributed across Galatea‘s interactor (the human at the keyboard), the player character, and Galatea demonstrates the productive possibility Turing’s original imitation game opens up by foregrounding human-machine relationality and the anthropomorphic imaginary.

In these various texts – ELIZA, Galatea 2.2, Galatea – the invocation of the Turing test, whether explicit or implicit, introduces the anthropomorphic imaginary as a crucial organizing force – one that does not oppositionally define the human and the machine or work to reify this opposition, but rather highlights the ambiguities that emerge from Turing’s imitation game. It is from these ambiguities and misidentifications that new human-machine relationalities and new agencies, identities, and subjectivities for human and machine and for human-machine emerge. It is also on the basis of these ambiguities and misidentifications that Turing reminds us how fluid the category of the human is, and how resistant it is to efforts to render it as stable.

Jennifer Rhee is Visiting Scholar in the Program in Literature at Duke University, where she recently received the Ph.D. She is co-editor of Electronic Techtonics: Thinking at the Interface, the Proceedings of the First International HASTAC Conference. She is finishing an essay on the uncanny valley, androids, and Philip K. Dick, and is researching narratives of technological singularity in fiction, popular science, and technology.

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Kate Hayles, Tim Lenoir, and Ken Surin for their helpful and generative comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this essay. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and Eyal Amiran for their thoughtful readings and incisive feedback.

Footnotes

1. Alan Turing, in a BBC interview, speaking about the imitation game he proposes at the outset of his paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.”

2. The Oxford English Dictionary defines catachresis as “Improper use of words; application of a term to a thing which it does not properly denote; abuse or perversion of a trope or metaphor.” I find this idea of perverse metaphor particularly useful in understanding the potentially productive manipulability of metaphor.

3. In a discussion of metaphor and philosophy, Jacques Derrida writes, “What is defined, therefore, is implied in the defining of the definition” (230). The question itself does not emerge from a linguistic, theoretical, and cultural vacuum. The question is shaped by the same forces that shape the content and form of the answer to the question.

4. This anthropomorphic move is also evident in the official mission statement of the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, a founding moment in the field of AI. The mission statement, which was one of the few points of consensus among the participants, is as follows: “Every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it” (Crevier 48). Similarly, Marvin Minsky’s frequently cited and widely accepted definition of AI, as “the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men” (9), relies on a preliminary anthropomorphic move by which the machine is made to stand in for the human.

5. Paul Ricoeur’s concept of predicative assimilation proves useful in understanding how metaphor produces and generates meaning. According to Ricoeur, metaphor not only emerges under the condition of resemblance between terms, but also, in the new union of previously unjoined terms, transforms and resignifies the terms after the metaphor has been formed. The imagination is the agent of this post-metaphor resignification that Ricoeur calls predicative assimilation. Ricoeur argues that metaphor cannot be thought purely in semantic terms; metaphor (and I would suggest that Ricoeur is making a claim for the role of the imagination in semantics itself) is neither pure semantics nor pure imagination, but rather caught between the two, “on the boundary between a semantic theory of metaphor and a psychological theory of imagination and feeling” (“Metaphor” 143). For further discussion of the relationship between metaphor’s predicative assimilation and the imagination, see Ricoeur’s “The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality,” 123-129.

6. In an astute reading of Turing’s imitation game, Tyler Curtain points out that the injunction upon B to prove her status as woman is not equivalent to A’s attempt to convince C otherwise. Curtain describes this non-equivalence in the imitation game as “[t]he philosophical burden of women to speak – and for an adequate number of times fail to represent – the ‘truth’ of their sex” (139).

7. For an insightful articulation of Turing’s imitation game, see Susan Sterrett’s “Too Many Instincts: Contrasting Philosophical Views on Intelligence in Humans and Non-Humans.” Rather than erasing gender as identificatory metric in favor of the human, as many readings of the Turing test do, Sterrett embeds Turing’s ambiguity into her discussion of his test as “meta-game.” Sterrett’s reading itself can be said to emerge from the moment of replacement in Turing’s paper – rather than discarding A₁ (man) for its replacement A₂ (machine), Sterrett argues that Turing’s test can best address questions of machine intelligence when comparing these two game pairings. In other words, both A₁ and A₂ are paired with B, and are interrogated by C, who must identify the woman in both A1-B and A2-B pairings. The success and failure of A1 and A2 are scored according to the number of times the human interrogator misidentifies both A1 and A2 as woman, and the results in these separate trials are then compared to each other.

8. Warren Sack calls this puzzling erasure of sex and gender out of many discussions of the Turing test the work of “the bachelor machine.” “AI researchers have functioned as a ‘bachelor machine’ to orchestrate the woman and issues of gender difference out of their re-narrations of Turing’s imitation game” (Sack 15). For example, Naur characterizes sex difference in Turing’s imitation game as a “pseudo issue,” which serves only to distract the interrogator “away from the real issue, the difference between man and machine” (183). Indeed, one might suggest that the species-oriented bachelor machine is more invested in maintaining the distinction and opposition between human and machine than in exploring the ways in which a machine could in fact be imagined to pass for human, whether female or male. For discussions that do not erase sex or gender from the Turing Test, see Judith Halberstam’s “Automating Gender: Postmodern Feminism in the Age of the Intelligent Machine,” an eloquent examination of Turing’s imitation game in relation to the similarly learned and imitative properties of both gender and computer intelligence. Halberstam frames (though does not posit as causal) her brief discussion of gender in Turing’s imitation game around Turing’s biography: his court ordered organo-therapy on account of his homosexuality and his suicide by cyanide. N. Katherine Hayles also attends to this erasure of gender and gendered bodies in the Turing test in her Prologue to How We Became Posthuman (xii). And in “Turing’s Sexual Guessing Game,” Judith Genova, while somewhat problematically reading Turing’s imitation game as overdetermined by certain aspects of his biography, usefully posits that Turing was in fact speaking of the more culturally determined gender, as opposed to the biologically determined sex. For discussions of Genova’s reading of gender as well as her reliance on Turing’s biography, see William Keith’s “Artificial Intelligences, Feminist and Otherwise” and James A. Anderson’s “Turing’s Test and the Perils of Psychohistory.” For an extended discussion of Turing’s biography, including the punitive hormone therapy to which he was subjected, having been convicted in 1951 of “act[s] of gross indecency with… a male person,” see Hodges (471).

9. I am, of course, not the first to suggest that Turing moves away from the goal of producing definitions (for “machines,” “thinking,” “intelligence,” and “human”). Stuart Shieber, an extensive commentator on Turing’s Test, and Jack Copeland, who serves as Director of the Turing Archive for the History of Computing, both read Turing as moving away from definitions of, specifically, intelligence (Shieber 135 and Copeland 522). Whereas Shieber and Copeland continue to ascribe a certain centrality to the machine’s performance, however, I suggest that the machine, while the nominal subject of inquiry of Turing’s paper, emerges at the forefront of an already anthropomorphized context in which the human is central to and agential in the actual imitation game that replaces the original question.

10. ELIZA was named after Eliza Doolittle, “of Pygmalion fame” (Computer Power 3). As Sharon Snyder notes, in Powers’s Galatea 2.2, Rick Powers’s relationship to both Helen and C. similarly pays “homage” to Shaw’s Pygmalion (Snyder 86-87), as does Short’s Galatea.

11. In her history of artificial intelligence, Pamela McCorduck writes of the “painful embarrassment” upon watching a respected computer scientist share extremely personal and intimate worries about his personal life with DOCTOR (psychiatrist Kenneth Colby’s version of ELIZA), knowing all along that DOCTOR was not a human, but rather a computer program (McCorduck 254).

12. How else might we read Weizenbaum’s “disturbing” shock and McCorduck’s “painful” discomfort in witnessing the intimacy between human and machine but as the crossing of the limit-threshold of roboticist Masahiro Mori’s uncanny valley, where the suspension of disbelief becomes a kind of uncontrollable belief, a belief in spite of oneself that the machine is indeed human? I offer that if our humanoid technologies are designed to remain within the bounds of the uncanny valley, within the bounds of Weizenbaum’s shock and McCorduck’s discomfort, we are in effect maintaining the distance between human and machine in ways that inscribe artificial borders as reified and “natural.”

13. For a detailed discussion of nondirected client-oriented therapy, see Carl R. Rogers’s Client-Centered Therapy: Its Current Practice, Implications, and Theory and On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy, which is all too appropriately named for this discussion of ELIZA.

14. On account of ELIZA’s success, Weizenbaum no longer advocates the pursuit of machine intelligence, particularly as a potential tool for mental health care.

15. Hayles aptly describes Helen’s test as “a literary Turing Test” (Posthuman 270).

16. The multiple narrative threads of this novel, as well as its reliance on autobiography, produce a dizzyingly recursive novel and a narrator who the reader cannot be sure knew what when. Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint, in their reading of the novel, describe ambiguity as a component of the autobiographical subject: “Such tensions between determinacy and indeterminacy, between likeness and difference, are central to understanding the autobiographical subject, the self that emerges both in and into language. This self is brought into consciousness and made into an object of reflection by that consciousness, which is like but yet is neither the self who lived nor the self who narrates that life . . . Autobiography is as much a making of a self as a description of one” (84). Through the ambiguity of autobiography, Richard the narrator is also creating himself. There is an isomorphism between Bould and Vint’s autobiographical self and the anthropomorphized human in the novel.

17. Mimicking the oral storytelling that structures the threads of Galatea 2.2‘s narrative, Powers wrote a subsequent book, The Echo Maker: A Novel (2007), using voice recognition software (Freeman). Powers spoke this story to his machine.

18. I do not read Rick’s naming of Helen as an isolated moment, but rather diachronically. Thus the cumulative multi-gendered, multi-species nature of Imps A through H, to Helen and H., cannot be completely undone in a single moment of Helen’s gendering by Richard.

19. According to Wardrip-Fruin, ELIZA is a significant influence for interactive fiction and electronic literature more broadly (65).

20. Hayles describes electronic literature as “a practice that mediates between human and machine cognition” (EL 3).

21. In an interview, Powers describes Galatea 2.2 as “a kind of artificial intelligence,” one that evolves from Helen, but that is deeply oriented in the human and in human experience.

22. There are exceptions to this indirect communication. For example, “ask about Galatea” prompts “‘Read the placard,” she says. ‘That’s what it’s there for, after all.’” And “ask about dress” becomes a direct question to Galatea, who immediately responds “She shrugs in it. ‘It looks odd, doesn’t it?’ she says. ‘I insisted on clothes, and they bought me this‘” (Short).

Works Cited

Anderson, James A. “Turing’s Test and the Perils of Psychohistory.” Social Epistemology 8.4 (1994): 327-332. Print.
Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Richard Janko. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1987. Print.
Bould, Mark and Sherryl Vint. “Of Neural Nets and Brain in Vats: Model Subjects in Galatea 2.2 and Plus.” Biography 30.1 (2007): 84-105. Print.
“Catachresis.” Def. The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. Web. 5 Dec. 2008.
Copeland, Jack. “The Turing Test.” Minds and Machines 10 (2000): 510-539. Print.
Crevier, Daniel. AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence. New York: BasicBooks, 1993. Print.
Curtain, Tyler. “The ‘Sinister Fruitiness’ of Machines: Neuromancer, Internet Sexuality, and the Turing Test.” Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction. Ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Durham: Duke UP, 1997. 128-148. Print.
Deese, James. “Mind and Metaphor: A Commentary.” New Literary History 6.1 (1974): 211-217. Print.
Derrida, Jacques. “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy.” Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. 209-271. Print.
Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. “The Exhaustion of Literature: Novels, Computers, and the Threat of Obsolescence.” Contemporary Literature 43.3 (2002): 518-559. Print.
Freeman, John. “Richard Powers: Confessions of a Geek.” The Independent. 15 December 2006. Print.
Genova, Judith. “Turing’s Sexual Guessing Game.” Social Epistemology 8.4 (1994): 313-326. Print.
Graham, Neill. Artificial Intelligence. Blue Ridge Summit: Tab Books, 1979. Print.
Halberstam, Judith. “Automating Gender: Postmodern Feminism in the Age of the Intelligent Machine.” Feminist Studies 17.3 (1991): 439-460. Print.
Hayles, N. Katherine. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 2008. Print.
———. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Print.
Hodges, Andrew. Alan Turing: The Enigma. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983. Print.
Keith, William. “Artificial Intelligences, Feminist and Otherwise.” Social Epistemology, 8.4 (1994): 333-340. Print.
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McCorduck, Pamela. Machines Who Think. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1979. Print.
Montfort, Nick. Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2005. Print.
Mori, Masahiro. “The Uncanny Valley.” Trans. Karl F. MacDorman and Takashi Minato. Energy 7.4 (1970): 33-35. Print.
Naur, Peter. “Thinking and Turing’s Test.” BIT 26.3 (1986): 175-187. Print.
Newman, M.H.A., Alan M. Turing, Sir Geoffrey Jefferson, and R. B. Braithwaite. “Can Automatic Calculating Machines Be Said to Think?” The Turing Test: Verbal Behavior as the Hallmark of Intelligence. Ed. Stuart Shieber. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 117-132. Print.
Powers, Richard. The Echo-Maker: A Novel. New York: Picador, 2007. Print.
———. Galatea 2.2: A Novel. New York: Picador, 1995. Print.
———. Interview by Sven Birkerts. Bomb. 1998: 58-63. Print.
Ricoeur, Paul. “The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality.” A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination. Ed. Mario J. Valdés. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1991. 117-136. Print.
———. “The Metaphor Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling.” Critical Inquiry 5:1 (1978): 143-159. Print.
Rogers, Carl R. Client-Centered Therapy: Its Current Practice, Implications, and Theory. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1951. Print.
———. On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1961. Print.
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Sack, Warren. “Replaying Turing’s Imitation Game,” presented at the panel Nets and Internets at Console-ing Passions: Television, Video and Feminism, Madison, WI, April 25-28, 1996. Address.
Shieber, Stuart. “Immediate Responses.” The Turing Test: Verbal Behavior as the Hallmark of Intelligence. Ed. Stuart Shieber. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 135-139. Print.
Short, Emily. Galatea. Electronic Literature Collection Volume One. Eds. N. Katherine Hayles, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, and Stephanie Strickland. Creative Commons 2.5 License, 2006. CD-ROM.
Silva, Matt. “The ‘Powers’ to ‘Kraft’ Humanist Endings to Posthumanist Novels: Galatea 2.2 as a Rewriting of Operation Wandering Soul.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 50.2 (2009): 208-222. Print.
Snyder, Sharon. “The Gender of Genius: Scientific Experts and Literary Amateurs in the Fiction of Richard Powers.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 18.3 (1988): 84-96. Print.
Sterrett, Susan. “Too Many Instincts: Contrasting Philosophical Views on Intelligence in Humans and Non-Humans.” Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence 14 (2002): 39-60. Print.
Turing, Alan. “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Mind 59.236 (1950): 433-460. Print.
Turkle, Sherry. The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984. Print.
Wardrip-Fruin, Noah. Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2009. Print.
Weizenbaum, Joseph. Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1976. Print.
———. “ELIZA – A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication between Man and Machine.” Communications of the ACM 9.1 (1966): 36-45. Print.

September 3, 2013

The Hitchcock Symptom: Duster Flight Patterns around “Production Values.” A response to Griffiths

James Berger (bio)
Yale University
James.Berger@yale.edu

A bon mot of my three-and-a-half-year-old daughter: She was watching a video of The Nutcracker ballet, of which she’s a great fan, and she said, “There’s Drosselmeyer!”—that is, the mysterious, wizard-like friend of the family who brings the nutcracker doll and the other toys to life and who, in most productions (and in the E.T.A. Hoffman tale on which the ballet is based) wears a patch over one eye. “How do you know?” I asked. She replied, in that tone of explaining the obvious that even three-year-olds can adopt with their parents, “Because he’s wearing a disguise!” That’s it! We recognize the character not in spite of the disguise, but because the disguise itself is the mark of his identity.

Something of this logic seems to inform the practice of theory today in general and the position held in theory by Alfred Hitchcock in particular. Why does Hitchcock occupy such a privileged place for theoretical analysis of all kinds? There are 726 entries for Hitchcock in the MLA Bibliography. John Ford gets 617; Godard, 459; Fassbinder, 328; Welles, 302; Truffaut, 212; Kurosawa, 160; Douglas Sirk, 112; Sam Fuller, 31. We recognize Hitchcock because he is always, obviously, in disguise. A disguise enables us to interpret it, and there is also pleasure in disguise itself. But why Hitchcock? Why not Ford? Why not Sirk? In Ford, the ironies and ambiguities are too straightforward. It turns out that there’s no disguise after all. And in Sirk, there’s too much opera, too many arias, not enough movement.

When one looks at Hitchcock—at least as much of the Hitchcock industry sees it—one sees not a commentary on America, on the functioning of American ideology, but an exemplar in miniature of America in its totality, in its processes. At the same time, the Hitchcock style—its disguise which is also its essence—detaches the film from the social whole to which it refers. It stands beside the whole, or in a privileged space within it, working its small formal engines in ways that replicate cultural energies. It is both metonymy and synecdoche: the part standing for the whole, the perfect analogy standing just beside the unwieldy original. What is extraordinary is how perfect the correspondence. All that we always wanted to know (it is said) is contained in the magic box, or statuette—and Žižek didn’t know the half of it. And the apparent insouciance, read as self-reflection—the self-reflection of disguise—is the measure of its authenticity.

This has long been a hermeneutic strategy. In modern literary criticism, Erich Auerbach’s close readings reproduced the coherent world-views motivating the texts of an astonishing range of historical periods. More recently, New Historicist readings took a particular text or historical anecdote as emblematic of the social relations of its moment. The metonymic-synecdochic approach makes for beautiful, compact readings–with the somewhat paradoxical benefit, especially for the New Historicists, that a method that stresses the importance of the fragment and the ruptured character of historical narrative finally produces compelling accounts of the social whole, however dirempted, and makes its alterity readable.

Most of us profess a hermeneutics of suspicion. Do we need also a suspicion of the suspicion? Has our suspicion become credulous? Do we seek out what seems most obviously in disguise, and say, “There’s the key; the social totality must be there in miniature”? Perfunctory suspicion is exerted toward the working of the dominant ideology—the subject, gender, capital, empire—but the assumptions and terms of the methodology proceed unaffected. Analysis of the text—taken as part, as index, as symptom, as performer or enactor, as formal analogy—renders the professional truth of the historical moment. But how do we know this? We must have some sense of the truth of the historical moment in order to believe that the text in question is indeed rendering it, and this prior understanding of historical truth often comes primarily from contemporary theory. The truth drawn from the cultural text—call it “Hitchcock” —confirms what we already know from the theoretical texts of Jameson, Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari, et al. What we know about the past, in this process, is what we know about the cultural text as reconstructed in disguise by ourselves, and we are drawn to those texts whose disguises are most clever and most obvious. To return briefly from the field to the landing strip, my point of departure and eccentric orbit in these comments is the essay “Production Values: Fordism and Formalism in North by Northwest,” which reads Hitchcock’s North by Northwest as a coded representation and partial enactment of certain codes of capitalism at a moment of transition from a Fordist economy of production to a post-Fordist economy of the sign and of flexible accumulation. This essay provides much insight and knowledge. Its elucidation of secondary literatures is impressive. Its discovery of and commentary on the excised scene where the corpse falls out of the car on the assembly line is in itself pricelessly entertaining and illuminating. The essay deserves to take its place as Hitchcock entry 727 in the MLA Bibliography.

My dusting of the essay concerns its premises and method, which exemplify a tendency in contemporary critical writing: first, to take a cultural text as perfect exemplar of a social totality; second, to base knowledge of the social totality of a past historical moment on theoretical writings of the present. I am not arguing that North by Northwest does not perform many of the particular tasks that Griffiths attributes to it, just that it seems suspect to me that it does so as neatly, that there exists such seamless correspondence between text, culture, and theory—and that these must consequently be conceived as formal totalities in order for such correspondence to occur.

One pressing form these problems take in “Production Values” is that of anachronism, in, I think, two senses. As Griffiths acknowledges on a couple of occasions, the post-Fordist flexible accumulation economic model that the essay argues is presented in North by Northwest had not yet begun in the late 1950s. The film must be, as the essay notes, prescient. Indeed, flexible accumulation is something of a tease, because although North by Northwest “foregrounds an awareness of the political economic order of flexible accumulation” and “limns a pre-emergent post-Fordist terrain,” it is not Griffiths’s “contention that North by Northwest reveals an already post-Fordist landscape, especially because the film precedes the transformation to post-Fordist modes of flexible accumulation as [David] Harvey’s chronology would have it” (Griffiths). What then is the prescience? It is in part a matter of form. Hitchcock’s noted valorization of style over content renders the codes both of capital and of film as “signs to be consumed in their own right, traces whose ultimate form and reference is to profitable spectacle” (Griffiths). This last point seems to me valid, but it is not descriptive of flexible production which, as Harvey writes in a passage partially cited by Griffiths,

rests on flexibility with respect to labour processes, labour markets, products, and patterns of consumption. It is characterized by the emergence of entirely new sectors of production, new ways of providing financial services, new markets, and, above all, greatly intensified rates of commercial, technological, and organizational innovation. It has entrained rapid shifts in the patterning of uneven development, both between sectors and geographical regions . . . It has also entailed a new round of what I shall call ‘time-space compression’ . . . in the capitalist world – the time horizons of both private and public decision-making have shrunk, while satellite communication and declining transport costs have made it increasingly possible to spread those decisions immediately over an ever wider and variegated space.

(147)

Flexible accumulation does not do away with production, nor with industrial labor. Global markets of labor and consumption, and the instant mobility of capital, doomed many of the assembly lines of Detroit, but certainly did not end the assembly line or the sweatshop worldwide. North by Northwest may be prescient regarding the obliviousness of American economic policy to these developments, but it is certainly not prescient as to the developments. Nor does Griffiths argue that it is. The argument takes a different course, which I discuss below, yet flexible accumulation, or its “pre-emergence,” remains a point of reference. It is a consequence, I think, of imagining a cultural text synecdochally, as standing for a totality. In this case, the totality is not only of its own historical moment, its “Zeitgeist” (a problematic term itself which must be examined), but also includes our contemporary relation to that moment. A cultural text will reflect the way cultural relations are understood. It will assume the prescience grafted onto it. It is important that the text be contemporary, yet it cannot know what we know. Fifty years separate North by Northwest from us, but we want it to teach us what we are. Historical knowledge rebounds against the historical text and returns as instruction. The theorist exports a terminology to the past, deposits it into the genetic structure of the text under examination, and when the text, under repeated readings, reproduces, it has mutated and now speaks our language.

The conjuring of a “Zeitgeist” through the exportation of theory across time is the first anachronism. Griffiths as much as acknowledges this in his reference to Derrida on the fictitiousness of any unitary notion of capitalism. But if the “pre-emergence” of flexible accumulation is something of a McGuffin in “Production Values,” the principal direction of the argument presents a second anachronism. Griffiths mainly describes the way North by Northwest indicates a shift in American capitalism from the primacy of production to that of consumption, the role of advertising in accomplishing this transformation, and the increasing commodification of the sign in both economic and political realms. Again, Griffiths claims that North by Northwest provides a “glimpse” into these matters. And again, I would argue, this glimpse should be seen as the transmitting and translating of contemporary theory—in this case, Deleuze and Guattari’s work on the codings of capital—onto Hitchcock’s text. This constitutes a structural anachronism that seems to me typical of much contemporary academic writing. But this move gives rise to a specific empirical anachronism as well.

Griffiths’s primary interlocutors or authorities in his discussion of the shift from an economy of production to one of consumption and the concomitant growth of the importance of media are Deleuze and Guattari and the tradition of thinking about capitalism and representation in which they write: that is, the primarily European line of thinking that, after Marx, would include Heidegger on technology and the “world picture,” Horkheimer and Adorno on the culture industry, Debord on the “society of the spectacle,” Baudrillard on the political economy of the sign and on simulation, and American writers in conversation with these, most prominently Jameson. I do not for a moment contest the power and importance of this intellectual line. But in taking this particular tendency as definitive, focusing on Anti-Oedipus, this reading sees North by Northwest as the premonition and incarnation of contemporary theory. But in fact, an almost obsessive concern with the power of advertising and mass media is not recent. It was pervasive in mainstream American sociology and popular thought from the mid-1950s through the early 1960s. A short list of works concerned with the power of advertising in this period includes Marshall McLuhan’s The Mechanical Bride (1951), C. Wright Mills’s The Power Elite (1956),Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders (1957), John Kenneth Galbraiths’s The Affluent Society (1958), Daniel Boorstein’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961), Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), and McLuhan’s Understanding Media (1964). Subsequently, a scholarly historiography of advertising emerged in work by Michael Schudson (1984), Roland Marchand (1985), Jackson Lears (1994), and Thomas Frank (1997). And one point historians make consistently is that advertising had already achieved an ideological force in the U.S. by the 1920s.

Hitchcock’s thematizing of the ad industry and the consumer society circa 1956, then, is very much of its time. It is not prescient, nor is poststructuralist theory the first place one might look to describe or contextualize it. I would ask, then, two questions that seem to me less anachronistic than those posed in “Production Values.” First, what is the dialogue between North by Northwest and its contemporaneous discourses of advertising, consumption, and capitalism, and what does the film add to these discourses? And secondly, what can Hitchcock tell us about poststructuralist theory? If there is to be dialogue between Hitchcock and Deleuze and Guattari, it must go both ways and not be a mode of ventriloquism and projection. Are there things that Hitchcock knows or performs that Deleuze and Guattari do not or cannot? Otherwise, Hitchcock’s text just confirms what we already think we know. Or, in terms proposed by Raymond Williams, how can we improve on methods of cultural analysis “expressed in variants of correspondence or homology” (or, as I have put it here, of synecdoche) which must “depend on a known history, a known structure, known products“? (emphasis added, 106).

I would start from the premise that I don’t know what “late capitalist style” is and that I don’t even know if there is such a thing. If there is a late capitalist style, or styles, I don’t know what relations they have to the ways that the capitalism of their time functions. These terms and relations remain to be explored. I would be skeptical of analyses that propose some homogeneity among the cultural-political-ideological products and forces of an historical moment. If analysis of a given text reveals such homogeneity (and with the text as its synecdoche), I would wonder what is being omitted or obscured. We should invoke the powers of criticism’s anti-trust division and break up the Zeitgeist. But can we then create larger structures of understanding and not be left just to cull through documents and remnants in a pulsion of agnostic empiricism? And can we analyze resonant texts like North by Northwest to rethink what makes them resonate?

I believe we can, and have sketched out a few suggestions already: to construct dialogues among contemporaneous texts (e.g., between Hitchcock and contemporaneous critics of advertising); to consider professional historiography in contextualizing cultural products; and to engage in two-way dialogues between contemporary theory and historical artefacts. In doing these things, the cultural artefact may not confirm our presuppositions, but may surprise us, exposing gaps and contradictions in our senses both of the artefact’s historical field and of ours. I speak from my own presuppositions, of course, which echo Marcuse’s argument against homogenous readings, that the “inner logic of the work of art terminates in the emergence of another reason, another sensibility, which defy the rationality and sensibility incorporated in the dominant social institutions” (7); or, as Derrick Attridge puts it, “that which is, at a given moment, outside the horizon provided by the culture for thinking, understanding, imagining, feeling, perceiving” (19). There are texts that do these things more than others. If an historical moment is relatively lacking in such texts, or if the most significant texts of that moment do not appear to exhibit these features of cultural alterity, that would be noteworthy in itself and should be a subject for analysis. Is this in fact the case with the 1950s or with Hitchcock? And if a relative homogeneity can indeed be demonstrated, how can it be explained, for it should not be considered a norm but an aberration. That may be my own projection, based on my love for a certain poetics of cultural history.

Am I calling for, or recalling, a materialist approach to cultural critique? I’m not certain. The terminology has so much history that I’m not sure where I would enter it. I want to invoke a variety of texts from different historical moments—I’d be happy to call it a “constellation.” I want to see the cultural artefact embedded in its time and also arguing with other historical moments, and especially with us, whenever we may be listening, which, of course, is always “now.” The work of art is a muscular node. It is impressed and presses back. It is a site of conflict for the ideological tendencies of its time, neither necessarily affirmative nor subversive, but active, knowing on many levels and also not knowing. Seen in this sense, North by Northwest might be in a position to show us something that we don’t know rather than confirm something that we imagine we do.

James Berger is senior lecturer in American Studies and English at Yale University. He is the author of After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse and editor of Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life: The Restored Edition. His current project, “The Disarticulate: Language, Impairment, and the Narratives of Modernity,” will be published by New York University Press.

Works Cited

Attridge, Derek. The Singularity of Literature. London: Routledge, 2004. Print.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. Print.
Griffiths, Michael R. “Production Values: Fordism and Formalism in North by Northwest.”
Postmodern Culture 20.3 (2011). Web.
Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991. Print.
North by Northwest. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Perf. Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, and James Mason. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1959. Film.
Marcuse, Herbert. The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics. Trans. Herbert Marcuse and Erica Sherover. Boston: Beacon Press, 1979. Print.
Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977. Print.

September 3, 2013

Production Values: Fordism and Formalism in North by Northwest

Michael R. Griffiths (bio)
Rice University
mrg1@rice.edu

Abstract

This essay analyzes the aesthetics of capitalist economics at the threshold of the transition from fordist to postfordist modes of production. The essay organizes this analysis around a close reading of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 film North by Northwest. At stake is the relation between aesthetic productions which engage the economic base and thematize this engagement. In making this claim, the notion of capital’s “axiomatic”–a concept by which Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari designate the relative autonomy of the economic base–is employed to examine the way that, from as early as the 1950s, U. S. capitalism’s prodigious industries of entertainment and popular culture began to change to ungrounded, flexible, representational economies. An instance of this shift is the emerging pre-eminence of advertising, which the essay finds signaled in the “value” attributed to Cary Grant’s Roger O. Thornhill in the farcical spy plot. This value is referred to as “advertising agency,” and signals the collapse of such discrete spheres as the economy and state, as well as of production and consumption. Because of its historical position and its content, North by Northwest is a remarkable text for investigating the transformation of twentieth-century economic modes to a dereferentialized form which we continue to inhabit.

During their famous series of interviews, Alfred Hitchcock describes to Francois Truffaut a telling scene from the early drafts of the script to North by Northwest. Hitchcock recalls that “one of the stops on the way [from New York to Rapid City] was Detroit, where they make Ford automobiles” (Truffaut 256). Becoming exuberantly concerned with the aesthetics of production, Hitchcock asks the French New Wave director:

[h]ave you ever seen an assembly line? . . . They’re absolutely fantastic. Anyway, I wanted to have a long dialogue scene between Cary Grant and one of the factory workers . . . Behind them a car is being assembled piece by piece. Finally, the car they’ve seen being put together from a simple nut and bolt is complete, with gas and oil, and all ready to drive off the line. The two men look at it and say, “Isn’t it wonderful!” Then they open the door and out drops a corpse.

(256)

Why would production be figured by a sign of death—a corpse? Before beginning to read the film closely, I want to position this scene in a series of meta-textual questions. What happens to the Fordist economy and to its correlative aesthetic productions, particularly in the U.S., once its institutions lose their grip on economic and semiotic reference—a loss of reference that has come to be associated with postmodernity? Related questions include how aesthetic expressions of capital and of capitalism transform along with this loss of reference and how such transformations bear upon the persistence of the state as an organizing political form. The emblematic U.S. aesthetic of productivity was always at least partially invested in a project of modernist formalism, even as the United States came to exceed either the aesthetic of functionalism or the correlative Fordist logic of production that undergirded it. Where “Ford” is, in some sense, an iconic sign of the American economy per se, what economic transformations are encoded by the representation of the death of production?

There is an old history of cinematic fetishism for productivity and the production line as images of modernity. Soviet filmmaker and theorist Lev Kuleshov uses the term “Americanist cinema” to describe his interweaving of technological fetishism and functionalist mise-en-scène in the 1910s and 1920s. For Kuleshov, “American shots” combine the latest montage techniques with the most technologically “modern” cinematographic content: the majesty of factories and mass transportation. Here I attempt to trace the continuance of this modernist aesthetic in the commercial cinema of the United States with an exemplum of the late 1950s output of one of Hollywood’s key imports, Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock is exemplary because his oeuvre straddles and registers modernism and postmodernism, making it a useful site to examine the vicissitudes of both (Žižek 1-14). Indeed, for such significant figures as Slavoj Žižek and Fredric Jameson, Hitchcock is not merely one filmmaker among many, but the convergence point for a certain late capitalist zeitgeist. His aesthetic formalism comments on and participates in the production of surplus value from signs themselves. Hitchcock is not only a classic filmmaker but has also become a site for testing and explicating contemporary ideas in cultural and critical theory. Here I attempt to render those ideas from contemporary cultural and critical theory consonant with the historical moment from which North by Northwest inscribes U. S. capitalism.

Before attempting to read Hitchcock’s excised scene of a production line, it would do to position the question of the role of cultural production in the economic and political life of the Cold War Western democracies. Jameson draws out the illusions of the U.S. capitalist system nicely when he observes that

in the period some call post-Fordist, the Soviets used to joke about the miracle of their system, whose edifice seemed comparable only to those houses kept standing by the swarm of termites eating away inside them . . . some of us had the same feeling about the United States. After the disappearance (or brutal downsizing) of heavy industry, the only thing that seemed to keep it going (besides the two prodigious American industries of food and entertainment) was the stock market.

(Jameson 247)

Like Hitchcock’s corpse in a production line, for Jameson, the American entertainment industry is a locus for the accrual of finance capital that conceals a decaying center not unlike a termite mound. The recent wave of economic collapses lies at the latter end of such cold war concerns, revealing the limits of what David Harvey calls flexible accumulation. These insistent collapses foreground the way neither state centralization of resources and productive means (“socialism”) nor any semblance of free market circulation best describes the contemporary economic world system after the displaced centrality of Fordist production and Keynesian statism (Harvey 141-172). The recent international housing bubble has connected global financial flows to such U. S. state capitalist institutions as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Cultural responses to this catastrophe have been many and diverse: from Saturday Night Live comedian Tina Fey’s aesthetic assault on the Palin-McCain campaign to AMC’s Mad Men, which, in drawing out the increasing influence of marketing on political campaigns like the infamous Kennedy-Nixon race, also evokes the political economic transformations of mass media political intervention in the twenty-first century.¹Mad Men‘s setting in the early 1960s is the moment whose media I want to examine here: when this edifice, as Jameson has it, is beginning to crumble.

The opening credit sequence of Mad Men plays like Kuleshovian Americanist cinema—where fetishism surrounding technology (shots of technologies of industry and mass production) has given way to a fetishism attached to signs themselves (an animated New York skyscraper drowning in images of 1960s ad campaigns collapses beneath the feet of a stylized silhouette of an executive; see Fig. 1 below).

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Fig. 1.

Shot from titles to Mad Men. A citation of Saul Bass’s own titles for North by Northwest (see also Fig. 3 below).

To comprehend the lineage of this semiotic transformation, one must note both its base economic genealogy and its aesthetic-cinematic, superstructural one. Mad Men‘s credits are a clear citation of Saul Bass’s credit sequence for Hitchcock’s North by Northwest with key nods also to Vertigo (1958). The resemblance between Mad Men‘s animated collapsing building and the opening of Hitchcock’s film (see Fig. 3 below) underscores the way both texts are deeply concerned with the role that techniques of marketing, spin-doctoring, and aestheticization of consumption have in the organization of the political life of the state. According to such Marxist economic historians as Harvey (and, in a comparable but divergent analytic register, Giovanni Arrighi), the transformation from Fordism to a post-Fordist regime of flexible accumulation is best located with the diminution of Keynesian economic policy and social welfare in the 1970s. As such, Hitchcock’s film, while remaining tied to the high Fordist moment, can be read as providing a glimpse into the increased role of cultural forms of consumption in late twentieth-century economic life.

Here it is not my intention to offer an exhaustive account of Fordism and post-Fordism, but rather to work out the critique of the not-yet-post-Ford aesthetic which Hitchcock’s 1959 film offers. In so doing, I suggest that the film’s apparent lightness exemplifies not only the connection between a cartoonish version of Foucaultian state policing and the specter of transnational commerce; it also points to the means by which a commodity aesthetics can effectively intervene in the political economy of both the state and the global financial order. In other words, the film describes a formal cinematography inherited, in part, from Kuleshov and tailored to the pre-emergence of Harvey’s “flexible accumulation.” Harvey argues that the recession of Keynesian state capitalism is confronted by “the rigidities of Fordism,” precipitating a shift to “flexibility with respect to labor processes, labor markets, products, and patterns of consumption” (147). He also notes “shifts on the consumption side, coupled with changes in production, information gathering, and financing” (147). I suggest that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s reading of capitalism can provide the analytic basis for identifying the apparently imperceptible cultural logics of such a shift to flexible accumulation. Deleuze and Guattari’s emphasis on the tension between the invisible operations of the movements of capital and their relative accessibility to the realm of culture and representation is a highly useful and underutilized theoretical resource.

Where earlier systems of value tied accumulation directly to social ideas of status, hierarchy, and class, for Deleuze and Guattari, capitalism is exceptional in that it conceals this connection. Such ideas of status, hierarchy, and class, as well as notions of cultural meaning as familial, or ethnic and religious belonging were frequently tied to the economic base of pre-capitalist societies. Deleuze and Guattari call these pre-capitalist organizational forms “code.” Under capitalism, something fundamental shifts in the relation between code and economic value, as well as between representation and its reference to the economic base. As the theorists put it: “capitalism is the only social machine that is constructed on the basis of decoded flows, substituting for intrinsic codes an axiomatic of abstract quantities in the form of money” (139). For Deleuze and Guattari, the flows of capital are governed by a partially visible system of “axiomatics” which precedes the codes of social and cultural convention through which value appears. Axiomatics are the nonlinguistic means by which capital evaluates its chances for return—they are the bottom line of a cost benefit analysis. Yet capitalism cannot do without codes. The imperceptible flows of capital require a certain disingenuous quantitative easing. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, capitalism “overcodes,” relying on the capacity to manipulate competing and even contradictory messages about cultural value—the traditional heteronormative nuclear family, the importance of judaeotheistic religious values in maintaining a morally upright household or nation, the status value of a new automobile, or the national pride vested in the production process that manufactures it (read: Fordism). It is in relation to such codes that advertising becomes a central tool for “overcoding.” The semiotic register of capital is fully able to adapt to the ideological dimensions of any system of cultural value, and sloganeering is the means by which this can be accomplished.

In North by Northwest, Cary Grant’s advertising agent protagonist Roger O. Thornhill finds himself in a landscape of both statist and mercenary capitalist speculation—a landscape that at once aestheticizes Fordist production and foregrounds its receding centrality. Where Deleuze and Guattari have been accused at various times—most famously by Gayatri Spivak (272-6)—of reinstalling a fetishization of capitalism through their language of desiring production and decoded flows, more recent and nuanced evaluations of their work reveal that although for the pair, “capitalism is indeed the limit of all societies,” its transformation of all entities—living or not—does not touch the schizophrenic logic of those at the margins of either production or, to use Althusser’s terms, the reproduction of productive relations. That is to say, capitalism relies on codes of social convention (family, organized religion, political nationalism, or market doctrines be they Keynesian, Friedmannian or otherwise), even as capital itself circulates through an imperceptible “axiomatic” of calculations of the flow of futures, interest rates, currency speculation, and the exportation of debt. Capital “axiomatizes with one hand what it decodes with the other” (Deleuze and Guattari 267). Capital operates in spite of sociocultural codes, even as capitalists rely upon the manipulation of these codes in order that capitalism be reproduced within and across units of social and political organization—nations, classes, territories. It is precisely at this level that one can identify capitalism’s reliance on language, “the language of a banker, a general, an industrialist, a middle or high-level manager, or a government minister” (267). In this way, Deleuze and Guattari deploy a theory of the relative autonomy of capital, while retaining a means of critiquing the agency of its capitalist and even statist manipulators. Paul Patton usefully emphasizes that “the functioning of the capitalist axiomatic implies agents of decision, administration and inscription, in other words a bureaucracy and a technocracy which function as an apparatus of regulation” (98). As Deleuze and Guattari note, the function of language for capitalist social actors is to operate as “perfectly schizophrenic language[s], but that function[] only statistically within the flattening axiomatic of connections that puts [each] in the service of the capitalist order” (267). Implicit in these assertions is the notion that cultural production in mass media exploits even as it reflects this very system of overcoding.

This semiotic degree zero—the overcoded manipulation of value by marketing signs—is emphasized by the film’s opening line, in which Thornhill staves off a client’s criticism with the sloganizing quip: “if you believe that a high Trendex automatically determines a rise in sales . . . I, incidentally, do not.” This opening is accompanied by a barrage of slogans whose acme is the reference to the jargon of marketing (sales figures correlated to the Trendex television ratings system).² The language of marketing, a superstructural device, is shown to be capable of injecting effects into the economic base, as Thornhill spins his way out of the bind in which he has apparently left his unseen client: falling sales. It is not hard to detect here the language of a “middle or high level manager,” attempting desperately to manipulate and control the flows of desire and expenditure which are out of his control (Deleuze and Guattari 267). Through the film’s chase, the schizophrenic language of advertising agencies brings this “middle or high level manager” to the attention of an American Cold War spy agency that would exploit and transform his expertise to intervene in the political export of commodified “secrets.”

In this light, Mad Men‘s Don Draper seems like today’s nostalgic rendition of a radicalized schizophrenic capitalist as he emerged from the twilight of the Fordist period: the advertising executive. Here I want to posit that North by Northwest‘s Roger O. Thornhill is the instantiation of an archetypal capitalist manipulator of codes. The film can be read as the narrative of the oedipalization of the conventions which Thornhill deploys—their taming by the state’s paternal power (Bellour 77-92). That is to say, the film’s narrative depiction of the co-optation of Thornhill’s skills as an advertiser can be read as an allegory for the state’s battle to control the increasingly fluid and mobile technologies of capitalism. In some ways, the film’s narrative resolution of locating the advertising agent as an agent of the state is an imaginary answer to the kinds of exacerbated questions we see every night on CNN: why couldn’t “our” politicians control the over-speculation of Wall Street? If so, what are the consequences of the advertising agent’s movement towards sloganeering as a prop to flexible accumulation? Texts like Mad Men and North by Northwest at once reflect and participate in the manipulation of codes of cultural significance in pursuit of capital. Each of these texts is significant because it foregrounds an awareness of the political economic order of flexible accumulation in which it nonetheless participates.

It is ultimately agents of the state who seek—successfully or not—to appropriate capital’s decoded flows through the overcoding of such agents as Draper and Thornhill. Where Patton asserts that “the state has always performed [a] regulatory role” (98) as an “apparatus of regulation,” we might consider agents like Draper and Thornhill as intermediaries—subject to the state as an apparatus of capture, but unwilling to be reduced to bureaucratic functionaries. Jeffrey A. Bell is right, then, to emphasize that for Deleuze and Guattari “schizos . . . are not salable” (96). Draper spins the Nixon campaign; Thornhill reluctantly comes around to playing the spy. North by Northwest seems a particularly opportune topos for a discussion of the American context of this formalism of flexible accumulation. Truffaut canonized the film as “the picture that epitomizes the whole of [Hitchcock’s] work in America” (249). Hitchcock’s knowledge of Kuleshov is recorded in a number of interviews, yet the connection of Hitchcock’s high period with American cinema is apparent only through the texts themselves (59). With its populism and use of Hitchcockian “pure cinema,” North by Northwest reconfigures Kuleshovian “Americanist cinema,” turning it from a modernist experiment in formalism and techno-fetishism into a pop-cultural postmodern play with the language of marketing; one that converts formal experimentation into a saleable commodity of the “prodigious” American entertainment industry.³ Even in the way it was marketed, the film was presented as a “tour” of the United States. In a promotional trailer Hitchcock stands before a map of the U.S. and announces his “coming attraction” as a commodified journey across the country.⁴ It is not my contention that North by Northwest reveals an already post-Fordist landscape, especially because the film precedes the transformation to post-Fordist modes of flexible accumulation as Harvey’s chronology would have it. Rather, insofar as Thornhill’s advertising agent draws his expertise from the Madison Avenue marketing world and employs it to intervene in a network of international spying, the film represents a commodified intervention into the iconically American process of “information gathering and financing” that is coming to outmode Fordist orthodoxy. For Hitchcock, a landscape of spin effaces and supplants that of production, like the spectacle of a crop-duster soaring across empty fields. As had also been the case in contemporary debates over the economics of industrial design, the cathected image of production is retained in the film’s aestheticization of American modernity, even as the film calls into question the centrality of production. In a seeming contradiction, North by Northwest codes flexible accumulation by concealing it within overcoded figurations of production and functionalism. The film dramatizes the value not so much of production as of its marketable sign.

I. Of Ford and Film: America and the “Emptiness” of the MacGuffin

The seriousness of Hitchcock was guaranteed by his reception among the French auteur theorists of Cahiers du Cinema. Yet, ironically, because Hitchcock’s films—particularly such apparently light, entertainment-driven endeavors as North by Northwest—appear to function as mere entertainment while being taken thoroughly seriously in academia, critics have come to position Hitchcock as the guarantor of any number of theoretical reading strategies—most conspicuously Lacan psychoanalysis in the work of Žižek and his followers.⁵ Here I want to take seriously the Jamesonian connection between Hitchcock and late capitalism for precisely the reason of the coincidence between Hitchcock’s capacity to mediate serious critical and cultural theorizations and, more importantly, because of the economic meaning of this concurrent, relatively entertainment-driven eschewal of seriousness. The underlying political stakes of Hitchcock’s work have precipitated a dazzling array of interpretations because his communicative apparatus appears to predominantly emphasize style, suspense, and entertainment—”art for art’s sake,” as North by Northwest‘s studio MGM has it. As testing grounds, Hitchcock’s films function not only to elucidate theoretical methodologies but also to precipitate assertions about the cultural embodiment of otherwise imperceptible (or, at least, murky) transformations in the logics of late capitalism. The present essay, in its reading of the film itself, treats North by Northwest as just such a zeitgeist text, but with a key caveat. Hitchcock’s notion of the form and thematics appropriate to cinema for the late capitalist moment does not so much reflect the filmmaker’s predilections (as if such intentionality could be identified), nor the centrally of the truth value of any external theoretical rubric (Lacanianism, Deconstruction, etc.) as it does the relation between capitalist production and cinematic production. The key referent here is the old question of art for art’s sake, where, Hitchcock asserted, he “put first and foremost cinematic style before content” (292). As such, a reading of North by Northwest is burdened not only to locate the film’s meaning, but its position within late capitalist aesthetics of style. The morbid lacuna of content at the center of production exemplified in the Detroit scene is doubled by the emptiness of the film’s MacGuffin—a microfilm—and the meaning vested by Hitchcock in film at all, beyond its mere entertainment value. This confluence between form and content is not incidental, I argue, but points to more serious transformations in capitalist society as well as to the film-commodity’s participation in them.

A number of materialist critics have attempted to unpack Hitchcock’s relation to the quasi-dialectical oscillation between Fordism and post-Fordism.⁶ Richard H. Millington situates North by Northwest‘s idea of “America” at the telos of an individualism supposed to originate with Alexis de Tocqueville. The multiplicity of the genealogy asserted by Millington cannot be accounted for by shuttling back to Tocqueville only. Amidst this multiplicity of “imported analysts” of “American character”—Millington’s term—Kuleshov is the most relevant to Hitchcock’s cinematic aestheticization of “America” and its shift from Fordism to post-Fordism (135).⁷ In Kuleshov one already finds the aesthetics of Russian formalism deanchored from economic reference to the Soviet statist mode.

Kuleshov places “America” and its relation to the technicity of modernist functionalism at the heart of effective cinematic communication (Millington 135). His “Americanist cinema” is invested in a technological figuration of indexical signs of the United States consonant with—and, indeed, essential to—the formal dimensions of film. Kuleshov and his crew experimented with different kinds of mise en scène, concluding that such technologies as the props and sets that appear in the American studio films of the 1910s facilitate the most effective communication with audiences. Kuleshov insisted on “[c]onstructing our cinematography based on American examples . . . we noticed that the most distinct, convincing shots were those of a technological and architectural content. Railroad bridges, sky-scrapers, steamships, airplanes, automobiles, etc., by appearing, best of all created the film aesthetic of the time” (41-123, 77-78). Sounding like a list from any number of Hitchcock’s production designers, but particularly Robert Boyle (who designed North by Northwest and Saboteur [1942], among others), Kuleshov installs an association between the image of America and technologies of modernity and transport within early cinematic theory. Hitchcock’s style is compulsively driven toward motifs of technological transport: trains, automobiles, hulking ships—not to mention his cameos on buses and trains (for instance in Blackmail [1930], To Catch a Thief [1955], and North by Northwest). Such a shared compulsion toward a pre-eminently technological understanding of what it means to film “America” implicates Hitchcock’s project in rethinking Kuleshov’s “Americanist cinema.”⁸ However, the question then becomes how the transforming contemporary economy of production and consumption reposition Americanist film aesthetics in a mid-century context at the horizon of economic applicability.

Hitchcock’s North by Northwest foregrounds crucial connections between industrial production and the politics of the Cold War. Nonetheless, much criticism on the film has either elided this context in favor of meditation on reflexivity or treated the Cold War historical context as a pre-given ground to be reflected, as though the formal machinations of cinema were without their own ends. A brief examination of the treatment of the film’s MacGuffin reveals this double bind pointedly.⁹ Hitchcock consistently introduced the MacGuffin as more a cryptic play between presence and absence than a transparent approach to film hermeneutics. He defined the term anecdotally as a device for trapping mountain lions in the Scottish highlands. Since, as he gleefully notes, there are no lions in the Scottish highlands, then “that’s no MacGuffin,” where “that” is any motif of apparent narrative or hermeneutic import (Truffaut 138). Yet the MacGuffin is always already functional, driving the narrative of the given film. The apparent use value of such a device, offset with the clear absence of a referent to its use, situates the MacGuffin in precisely the terrain I think is pertinent to the film’s concern with the transformation of use and exchange in the mid-twentieth century American economic sphere.

The MacGuffin’s effects are primarily functional—whether their use value allows them to catch nonexistent lions or to drive a film’s narrative—but if there is inevitably “no MacGuffin,” then the useless procedure of narrative film is automatically called into question. Employing an excessive preponderance of tactics, critics have attempted to describe, situate, and fix the paradoxical status of the Hitchcockian MacGuffin in general and of North by Northwest‘s MacGuffin in particular. For Ken Mogg, in North by Northwest the MacGuffin is “‘government secrets’, whatever they may be” (101). Yet “Hitchcock considered that this was his ‘best’ MacGuffin, because virtually non-existent” (Mogg 101). If Hitchcock prefers the nonexistent MacGuffin, then a related preference for uselessness refers neither solely to his attitude to narrative, nor to his sense of film’s economic use value, but rather, to the interrelation of either to the political and economic context encountered through the box office. The MacGuffin’s ironic deconstruction as “virtually non-existent” must not be overstated. Such overstatements foreground a reflexivity that evacuates film’s relation to any cultural, political, or economic context. It is precisely the virtuality of this non-existence that is glossed in this reading, which consequently fails to grasp the wider dimensions of the virtual and actual (in Deleuze’s terms), which are always at play in the space of the capitalist socius. George M. Wilson and Stanley Cavell have suggested that the film’s MacGuffin stands for cinema itself, foregrounding hyperreal cinematic reflexivity in “a context such as North by Northwest, where films are the stuff reality is made of” (Wilson 181). That one can locate the film’s MacGuffin in a microfilm reportedly containing “Government secrets” lends some credence to this position. However, the tiny microfilm also travels in the pre-Columbian statuette of a Tarascan Warrior, a piece of pre-colonial indigenous art. It is in this form that James Mason’s Vandamm purchases the microfilm at a Chicago auction. Reading the MacGuffin as virtuality means that even where the MacGuffin refers to nothing in particular, this does not mean it refers to nothing at all. Just as the MacGuffin has a housing in the Pre-Columbian, so it already begins to code or overcode the meaning of the American political and economic scene from its inception.

The MacGuffin microfilm, then, tours through Hitchcock’s own film enveloped by a strange citation of America’s prehistory. To turn to the readymade aesthetics of reflexivity, then, obscures the wider chains of contextual citation surrounding North by Northwest‘s MacGuffin. Millington and Truffaut recognize that North by Northwest is deeply concerned with America, but such a concern cannot be disassociated from either the politics of the American state, nor the transforming ethos of capitalism, nor can it neglect the pre-eminence of “film” (observed by Wilson and Cavell) in the political economy of mass-cultural aesthetics. It should not suffice to return to the outside of film as “production history,” because this undertheorized allegorization would reinscribe a materialism blinded to the oscillation between formalism and its multiplicitous, intersecting contexts. Robert J. Corber for instance situates the film in allegorical terms, asserting that “Mount Rushmore” can be said simplistically to “translate[] into visual terms the Cold War conflict at the heart of the film” and to “stand[] for the democratic principles at stake in the recovery of the microfilm stolen by the Communist spies” (56). From its offscreen, pre-originary Detroit, the film’s tour indeed careens toward the monumental faces of American political Nationalism at Mt Rushmore, but this spectacle is commodified from the moment of its suture to Cary Grant’s gaze through coin operated tourist binoculars (see Fig. 2 below).¹⁰

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Fig. 2.

Shot from North by Northwest. Mt Rushmore: wry Hitchcockian framing through tourist binoculars reveals Nationalist icon as commodity spectacle.

Far from incidental, the MacGuffin’s pre-Columbian shell draws Cold War political secrecy into a commodification of American history and its occulted colonial past. The reflexivity of film form, then, should be understood as a means to what Deleuze calls the actual and not an end in postmodern virtuality, as it effectively becomes in Cavell’s and Wilson’s respective readings. However, my turn to the content is, as should already be clear, not a turn to the materialist outside offered in allegorizations such as those of Corber or Millington.

To the degree that Hitchcock asserts his contribution to cinema style, it is by refusing what he called “content” in favor of “pure cinema,” in which “I put first and foremost cinematic style before content” (Hitchcock 292). When describing this formalism in North by Northwest‘s crop-duster sequence, Hitchcock insists that the “movement of the subject within the frame” is merely “axiomatic.” He continues, “the action is self-evident. For example, as many variations as one can get of a plane attacking a man” (287). The trope of the axiomatic characterizes Hitchcock’s formalism, his “style”—multiplying consumable thrills by showing action from multiple angles in order to extract cash from the box office. Hitchcock’s formalism instantiates the empty aesthetics of late capitalism and develops a formula for these logics that is directly analogous to the overcoded formula that Deleuze and Guattari identify with capital. Insofar as it is a non-linguistic mechanism for the accrual of thrills, box office value, and therefore, capital, the form of film—like its action—is “axiomatic.”¹¹ The precedence of “style” over “content” is not merely an index of Hitchcock’s assertion of anti-intellectualism. Rather, it points to the way an axiomatic approach to film form indexes the axiomatic of capital. Like the “movement of the subject within the frame,” the movement of capital flows is imperceptible. But either axiomatic can be reframed, spun, given a narrative or slogan that assures its meaning—however empty and MacGuffinesque it may be. When ideological codes such as “industry” (the production line), the fight for freedom (Corber’s Cold War reading), or nationalism (the question of “America”) manifest under late capitalism, they cease to possess independently determinative power; that is, they no longer refer to the critical traditions in which they are mimetically inscribed. Such codes become signs to be consumed in their own right, traces whose ultimate form and reference is to profitable spectacle. North by Northwest reveals the way signs can be consumed by reference to affecting codes to which they, in fact, no longer refer: production, function, America. Within the logic of these overcodings, each of these signs becomes metonymically linked. The overcoding of production, function, and America as signs refers to a web of values and valences even as, for capitalism, their primary value is turnover, which is to say, surplus value.

The Rushmore climax sees Thornhill slinging coins¹² left and right in order to clamber to the top of the villainous Vandamm’s Modernist safehouse—based on Frank Lloyd Wright designs—in order to rescue Eve Kendall and to retrieve the Tarascan MacGuffin with its “Government secrets.”¹³ Here conspicuous consumption and the cinematic aesthetics of “height” come into contact. There are many high shots in the film, crane tilts to high angles, and monuments of height and perspective. From the Seagram’s building that opens the film to Mt. Rushmore (and the Frank Lloyd Wright house) that closes it (see Figs. 3 and 4 below), via a Mercedes Benz teetering off a cliff and a matte painting of the United Nations building (see Figs. 5 and 6 below), height of perspective pervades the film.

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Fig. 3.

Shot from North by Northwest. The Seagram’s building reflects the New York street below and provides the backdrop to the film’s titles.

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Fig. 4.

Shot from North by Northwest. Vandamm’s hideout atop Mt Rushmore, based on Frank Lloyd Wright designs.

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Fig. 5.

Shot from North by Northwest. Sutured to Thornhill’s gaze, the camera teeters off the edge of a cliff.

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Fig. 6.

Shot from North by Northwest. An internationalist monument of height and perspective: the U. N. Headquarters, designed by a team which included Le Corbusier.

In the final climactic movement to a greater height (so that Thornhill will sneak into the house and observe Vandamm and Leonard from above [see Fig. 7 below]), the visual index of the high angle shot comes to trope “inflation” and “ungrounded” economics and unchecked consumption. The overcoding of a “high trendex” connects the language and expertise of the schizo-capitalist manager with the cinematography of height.¹⁴ This is nowhere more clearly emphasized than when, after rescuing Eve, Thornhill’s gaze is sutured to that of the domed stately heads of Mt. Rushmore (see Fig. 8 below).

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Fig. 7.

Shot from North by Northwest. Interior from Vandamm’s hideout atop Mt Rushmore as Thornhill observes his adversaries from above.

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Fig. 8.

Shot from North by Northwest. Thornhill’s gaze, sutured to that of the domed stately heads of Mt. Rushmore.

Thornhill’s climb to rescue Eve—with the surveilling gaze it affords him over Vandamm and Leonard—repeats shot constructions that have built up to it (see Fig. 9 below), notably at the auction scene when Thornhill, Vandamm, and Leonard gaze down on Eve (see Fig. 10 below). With this high perspective, commodification becomes a function of the male gaze (Mulvey 58-69).¹⁵

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Fig. 9.

Shot from North by Northwest. Crane track to a view over Thornhill, Vandamm, and Leonard visually materializes the “high trendex.”

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Fig. 10.

Shot from North by Northwest. The three men gaze down on Eve.

The last shot from above is that of the policeman who, on the order of the Professor, closes down the rogue spy scheme with “real bullets,” as if the state order gains the strategic overview of cinematographic perspective, communicating an ideal governmental regulation of effervescent market flows. The film’s America, then, is more a form of state strategy than a set of ideas. The montage of attractions that connects the citation of film-as-reality (microfilm) to the aesthetic commodification of (pre-)America opens a possible analysis of film form and its contexts that would be obscured if one were to reduce these scenes to the self-reflexivity of the medium.¹⁶ What I am suggesting is the necessity of critically addressing what “America” figures for “film” both in form and content in order to sidestep the dialectic into which the capitalist order of overcoding and axiomatics casts it. The journey of Hitchcock’s decoy spy George Kaplan is supposed to have progressed via Detroit, a conspicuous metonymic notation of that great sign of Fordist assembly-line capitalism: the automobile industry. Here one can see more clearly the significance of the planned sequence with which I opened, wherein Hitchcock “wanted to have a long dialogue scene between Cary Grant and one of the factory workers . . . Behind them a car is being assembled piece by piece” and out pops a corpse (Truffaut 257).

The film limns a pre-emergent post-Fordist terrain whose character emerges from the intersection between the nature of the commodity form and the aesthetics of “film,” both of which are housed in the “pre-Columbian.” Since this microfilm housing secrets, hidden in a commodified pre-Columbian statuette enfolds film, political secrecy, and America, none of these terms can be privileged within such a nexus. The political economy of signification matters particularly to the diminishing Fordist economic edifice because the continuing stability of such a trepidatious “termite mound” parasitizes and overcodes the privileged sign of production. Production is now not valuable for what it produces, but for the surplus value its very sign accrues since Fordist efficiency is not only a mode of production but itself a sign to be consumed. Within this new semiotic realm, such a sign of production comes to replace its referent. What I call “advertising agency” situates North by Northwest‘s collapse of political and economic sign-making within a cinematic motif called “America.” Advertising agency names the form of American cinematic style by which the film represents the schizophrenic language of the capitalist—the language of an overcoding that retains ideology in order to manipulate the flows of capital that nonetheless escape the capitalist gaze.

Hitchcock’s narrative of mistaken identity limns the transformation of advertising agent Roger O. Thornhill—expert in the packaging of commodities—into a decoy spy. This process, which he calls “a decoy business,” entangles the postmodern logics of consumer-capital within the politics of the Cold War. The word “business” recurs many times in the film, and, as Thornhill suggests, consistently as a decoy. Here it figures the way the United States becomes not only a political space of decoy counter-spying, but also and inseparably, a landscape of speculative capital toured by an agent of semiotic capital. Before returning to the context in which Fordist production and American “industrial design” were undergoing reconfiguration when the film appeared, it is first necessary to situate the primacy of advertising agency in the film’s capitalist America.

II. Advertising Agency

During a key moment in North by Northwest, the American spymaster known as “the Professor” defuses a question of Thornhill’s as to the exact agency for which he works, noting that the CIA, FBI, and other agencies are all merely part of the same “alphabet soup.” The shifting dereferrential landscape that pulls capitalist sign-play into this “Alphabet soup” marks any spy agency as a mass-produced canned good. The film’s advertising executive protagonist is equally drawn into the indeterminacy of the film’s spy chase—an indeterminacy littered with such letters whose commodity form he possesses the finesse to market. The Professor also informs Thornhill that Vandamm is exporting “government secrets,” but, when doing so, adds a cryptic “perhaps.” Neither a mimetic reference to Cold War “government secrets,” nor a reflexive reference to—as Cavell put it—”the present film” (263), this indeterminate “perhaps” is more than a coy disruption of the spy genre. It signals instead a web of contextual conveyances, especially since the film for which the MacGuffin is a synecdoche has citational content, referring namely to the occulted past and fading functionalist logics of American industry. The film’s title is as much a slogan as the first few lines uttered by Thornhill. A memo to Hitchcock from the studio notes that while “we are all aware that technically there is no such point on the compass, our feeling is that the amount of publicity containing this title with yourself and Cary Grant, has built up a tremendous value for the title” (Krohn 205). Advertising agency emerges from the film’s sloganeering.

The concrete expertise of consumer-capitalist product placement that is exhibited by Thornhill defines an agency shared by spies and businessmen in the film. Their expertise, in turn, indexes the consumer economics through which the film metatextually inscribes its very own decoy business. Advertising agency foregrounds the capability of marketing expertise to uncouple economic signs from their reference to such modernist master terms as are central to the understanding of Fordism: function and production. This agency turns out to be highly lucrative for the depoliticizing aims of Cold War aesthetic politics. There are two bands of spies in the film: the Professor’s American band and Vandamm’s offshore transnational “exporters of Government secrets.” Vandamm’s spy-ring and the Professor’s intelligence service vie for control over Thornhill. Each codes the interweaving of Cold War politics and American capitalism in a competition over the spectacular commodification of politics (advertising agency) that will yield returns not reducible to MacGuffin political secrets. Thornhill names the group of “importer/exporter[s],” “Vandamm and Company,” figuring the spy ring as a business.

To thwart Vandamm and Company, Thornhill must use his expertise at spin-doctoring, sloganeering, and conspicuous consumption—the chameleonic expertise of an advertising agency. What Tom Cohen calls Hitchcock’s “secret agency” elucidates the semiotic dimensions of such political MacGuffins as North by Northwest‘s microfilm of secrets.¹⁷ Cohen reads Hitchcock’s visual ciphers and figural puns as intervening in film’s cultural politics. By emphasizing the circuitous repetition of motifs at work in Hitchcock’s insistent chains of self-citation, this reading strategy reveals the simultaneous containment and hyperbolic reference at work in Hitchcock’s oeuvre. For Cohen, America is already a technical and aesthetic enterprise undermined by the “cinematic assault” of secret agency (Hitchcock’s Cryptonymies 1:193). It is a space where, “allegorizing cinema’s threat to the home state . . . what had been secret agencies and saboteurs outside its borders descend into the totalizing horizon of the media-state ‘America’” (193).

Citing the MacGuffin central to my discussion, Cohen insists that such technical significatory modes as “semaphoric networks, mnemonic techniques, phonetic and graphematic figures . . . devolve at times to micrological marks, like the ‘microfilm’ hidden in the pre-Columbian ‘figure’” (Cryptonymies 2:7). As I have already suggested, this marked citation of American prehistory is not merely figural, as Cohen’s inverted commas want to insist. The statuette also subtly cites the 1950s economic context where production is in the process of being supplanted by consumer-oriented markets. Cohen’s intense deconstruction of the Hitchcockian citational desoeuvrement reveals a disfiguration of politics that operates through an assault on memory by media itself. But such political disfiguration continues to rely on the commodification of the figural cipher in question. The ciphers of secret agency, like the commodity pre-Columbian statue with its conspicuously consumptive belly full of microfilm, not only cite and disfigure political content. Beyond this, they sell media as an arsenal of images to be consumed. What I call “advertising agency” supplements Cohen’s “secret agency” since Cohen’s analytic trope risks deemphasizing the commodity status of such empty politicized ciphers. The signs that secret agency remarks and dismembers, advertising agency reconverts for consumption, rendering them tools for the reproduction of the relations of image-making within the mass-media industry. Secret agency enters North by Northwest‘s frame as an absent presence—a misrecognition like that of the spies’ confusion of Thornhill for the nonexistent Kaplan. This misrecognition reprograms secret agency for the purposes of consumer landscape, where secret agents like the Professor appropriate the semiotic skill of advertising agents like Thornhill. Confusing Thornhill for the invisible (but nonetheless effective) decoy spy Kaplan can be read as referring to the confusion of codes for overcoding, slogans for reality, and the appearance of prosperity for its some more substantive prosperity.

In North by Northwest, modern modes of transport convey the wily spin-doctoring ad agent across America. The efficacy of the agency wielded by advertising—sloganeering, for instance—is co-opted throughout the film by the “Professor.” The United States is revealed to be guarded as much by advertising agents and spin doctors as by political spies. Neither Vandamm’s spy ring nor the Professor’s agents can simplistically be located on either side of a cold war binary. In order to achieve his end of continued surveillance and monitoring of the “importer/exporter” spy, the Professor solicits and manipulates Thornhill’s smooth façade of slick performance, as he “overplay[s] his various roles” in order to stage the death of his decoy alter-ego “George Kaplan.” Decoy spying is converted into what the film calls “decoy business.” This commodification of death again sells the false production of identity for political ends. In the Mt. Rushmore café, under the lofty gaze of an American Presidential monument—itself a tourist commodity—political agency operates only as the empty content of a shell that relies on the spectacular performance better formulated by Thornhill, with the sloganeering sleight of his advertising agency.

Thornhill’s role in the spying and counter-spying of the film is controlled and manipulated by the surveillance of the Professor’s own agency (in both senses), which further implicates the application of marketing expertise in governmental tactics. In the establishing shot of the ring’s first scene, the tight framing excises the letters I-N-T from the government agency’s brass placard, rendering the word “intelligence” as merely “elligence” or, perhaps, “elegance” (see Fig. 11 below). In this way, the guardians of the state are marked as a business by the citation of the consumerist sign elegance—intelligence agency reconstituted as an international boutique.

Click for larger view

Fig. 11.

Shot from North by Northwest. Sign outside the Professor’s elegant spying agency.

In Lehmann’s shooting script, the names of the (int)elegance agency’s cadre of operatives smack of consumption (one is named “housewife”), finance capital (another bears the epithet “stock broker”), and spectacle per se (59-62). Similarly, North by Northwest‘s importer/exporter spies do not appear to be allied to any state; rather, they seem to work for the highest bidder. The elegance agents work for the United States but insist on “only interfering with the police when absolutely necessary.” The Professor and his agents, while primarily responsible to the “United States,” cannot be said to simplistically align with the order of internal state surveillance. In fact, the cold war agencies operate like a transnational business, even allowing Kendall—agent “Number 1″—to be exported along with Vandamm and the pre-Columbian statuette with its consumptive “belly full of microfilm.” In this way, “elegance” obscures the “I-N-T” of international. The Professor’s elegance agency pitches a strategy like a talent agent attempting to option a film whose formal mode straddles secret agency and advertising agency. The intelligence agency qua elegance agency reveals the transforming postmodern logic of political surveillance, with its remediation of the practices of the private sector’s “decoy business.”

Cold war state binaries cannot be decoupled from the financial overcoding that circulates through the cold war thriller as a plethora of techniques, slogans, and the high shot itself—a form of spin doctoring evinced in the visual pun of a spinning wheel in the foreground of a vertiginous shot from atop a cliff (see Fig. 5 above). “War is hell,” Thornhill is told by the Professor, who has never “pitched” his name—another pun on marketing terminology. As business practice is implicitly politicized, the stakes of the conflict come to rest on the capacity of each group of spies to better utilize the signs of the political for monetary advantage (in the case of “Vandamm and Company), or tighter state security (in the case of the “elegance agency”).

As such, advertising agency threatens to destabilize the conflict, while offering mechanisms for governmental control. One might also consider Roger Thornhill’s self-marketed performance, “overplaying his various roles” in order to disrupt an art auction, which then leads him to enter the clutches of the state’s policing function. As he is captured by the bumbling Chicago police, the advertising agent remains ever a spin doctor, insisting to his captors: “I’m valuable property! Imagine the headlines, ‘Chicago Police Capture United Nations Killer’” (emphasis added). The auction scene underscores Thornhill’s capacity to subvert the standards of value so as to further inflate and untether their already floating value.

In response to Thornhill’s inflationary interventions, the auctioneer anxiously requests that “the gentleman” tacitly accept the rules of the auction’s polite bourgeois convention and “get into the spirit of things,” as if such conventions were already spectral, haunting an economic order with values it cannot control and prices it can no longer fix. The auctioneer’s pleas for the “spirit” of convention are to no avail. Thornhill’s spin doctoring undercuts the auction’s standards of value, misrecognizing prices, as he cries out that “twelve dollars” is “more than it’s worth,” and excessively inflates the price of an item to “three thousand” (when the bid is only twelve hundred). There is, at this point, no longer a fixed gold standard to curb the inflationary subversions of such interventions.¹⁸ The auction scene foregrounds the floating instability of value and reference that accompanies Fordism’s recession—allegorized by the cinematography of height.

The battle over the political economy of representation in the film also enlists and reorients gendered subject positions. The intervention of advertising agency offers a further clue to the pre-Columbian commodity sign. The auction scene connects the commodified exchangeability of woman (Eve Kendall) to the prehistory of Americanism marked in the Pre-Columbian statuette. In a montage of attractions, Kendall is identified as a “little piece of sculpture,” just as the sale of the statuette is announced. Through this fleeting montage association between gender identity and the specter of America’s imperial prehistory, the scene exhibits advertising agency’s capacity to trivialize identity (gendered or otherwise) and history (American or otherwise), rendering it as one or other specter left over from the war machine of overcoded commodification. Only specters of value, history, and identity remain in this landscape of spin-doctoring. Thornhill’s apparently genuine desire for Eve juts up against the play of convention and subterfuge that can merely insist on “the spirit of things.” The question becomes: what does the spirit of commodity exchange do to the semblances of identity and history that it leaves as memento mori in its wake. Further, the logic of height and inflation is implicated in the metaphorization of woman as pre-Columbian commodity and, therefore, film itself. As I have already argued, a key high-angle shot in the series that spans the film takes place at the auction, notably at the moment of the audiovisual montage of attractions: Eve and the statuette (see Fig. 10 above and Fig. 12 below). How then does post-Fordist capitalism make specters of the fragile histories that it commodifies like the spectral reference to Detroit that survived the excised scene of a body in the production line?

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Fig. 12.

Shot from North by Northwest. The Pre-Columbian statuette which holds the MacGuffin microfilm.

As in the auction scene, the hierarchy of production over consumption is inverted in the Fordist corpse sequence, positioning death and its iterable spectrality within an assembly-line. The production line is a consumer spectacle that allows the motion picture director the opportunity to gleefully imagine an overcoded, “absolutely fantastic” sequence fit for commodified film entertainment, one capable of accruing (box-office) capital through reference to (but not to be grounded in) the idea of “American” Fordist industry. Where Americanist cinema had, for Kuleshov, purveyed propaganda by displaying high technology, for Hitchcock, the display of technological production aligns itself with consumer entertainment. The production line replaces the Fordist process of insistent reproduction by inserting a death whose principal goal is its consumption as “absolutely fantastic” spectacle. In this political-economic context, such mass media expertise as advertising agency becomes essential to capitalism.

Thornhill’s spin on the auction’s conventions, and his refusal to “get into the spirit” of the bourgeois ritual, together threaten to collapse what we might call, following Jacques Derrida, the specters of value. These specters, while once essential to production, come to be rendered as conventions that merely maintain the economic termite mound of the U.S. economic system. For Derrida, capitalism’s spectrality emphasizes its plural forms, which insist on commingling within the political sphere. As Derrida puts it, “[t]here was never just capital, nor capitalism in the singular, but capitalisms plural—whether state or private, real or symbolic, always linked to spectral forces—or rather capitalizations whose antagonisms are irreducible” (59). If, as I have already suggested, Hitchcock’s Americanist cinema is a commodified representation of such a “spectral force,” then it should come as no surprise that North by Northwest commodifies murder and inserts it into the heart of the Fordist production line. Augmenting the Derridean point with the Deleuzian-Guattarian analytic, it is possible to observe that it is precisely the overcoding of such a plurality of capitalisms that allows the axiomatics of capital to adapt and subsist. In a sense, capitalism’s spectrality is the result of its decreased reliance on fixed reference as its precipitant baseline value.

Where the plural capitalisms of advertising agency are in effect, production’s death renders it a spectral force, oscillating undecidably between the state and the private sphere. The emphasis, in capitalist society, on the simplicity of production principles, their effective division of labor and their connection with rapid turn-over neither dies nor disappears. Such Fordist principles turn into post-Fordist specters as their capacity to reap surplus value diminishes in favor of the more flexible advertising principles which nonetheless describe and exalt production’s specter. Capitalism is spectral because it lives on in a form that is no longer consonant with the productive ground through which it continues to represent itself—the sign of production outlives its centrality to the economic system. Similarly, film form is, in Hitchcock’s words, axiomatic—capable of drawing in any and every spectral code and referent via marketable generic conventions. As such, the film’s various high perspectives cross multiple spheres of social, political and economic life: from that of the production and management of big business, to the state and international juridical orders—the Seagram building, Mount Rushmore, the United Nation’s plaza.

The Ford assembly line and the pre-Columbian statue are commodity synecdoches of “America” as a space of production. Bodies populate the assembly line, and there “ain’t no crops” in the murder scene corn field surveyed from on high by the cropduster. Reeling from such loss of reference between the actual and the internal logics of capitalism, Thornhill returns to Chicago to find the pre-Columbian statuette sold to the collector Vandamm, where Thornhill “thought [he] only collected bodies.” Here, the deathly order of the corpse–“bodies”-simultaneously codes the corpses at the heart of the production line, the murders instigated in the barren fields of corn, and the commodity accumulation registered in the villain’s penchant for “collect[ing]” dead things.¹⁹ Rendered as a commodified art object, the statuette—MacGuffin of the pre-industrial past—rematerializes the spectrality that haunts the American production-line. Pre-Columbian art is alchematized as an exchangeable, non-referrential commodity fetish.²⁰ The technologies of Kuleshov’s ideal American mise en scène are everywhere shadowed by tropes of death in Hitchcock, signaling both the decay of production, and the consumability of its absence.²¹

For Americanist cinema, consumption supplants the memento mori of production. Technology and transport are similarly implicated. In a decoy game of spin and banter aboard the Twentieth Century Limited, Thornhill flashes Kendall his business card bearing what he calls his “trademark,” ROT. Where the “O” signifies “nothing,” as Thornhill says, advertising agency insists on the commodity form of its own decaying, or rot-ting, identity. Identity signifies “nothing.” Yet this rotting nothingness can, with sound and fury, continue to be trademarked and sold. If Thornhill’s advertising agency signature marks the decay of production, then what is the decoy business of such related motifs as those deployed by Eve? Kendall’s own signature marks the aesthetics of American industry, “industrial design” and the Twentieth Century Limited, is marked in advance as a brand name. In the next section, I consider the kinds of contextual aestheticization that the film draws in, in order to mark and underscore its place in the history of decline, death, and spectrality that defines its vision of American Industry. Americanist cinema becomes this decline’s exultant eulogy.

III. Twentieth Century Ltd.

In flight from the clutches of the police, as well as importer/exporter spies, Thornhill races through Grand Central Station, stopping at a ticket booth to purchase “a bedroom on the Twentieth Century.”²² This trademark American train is the setting for Thornhill’s first encounter with the decoy number one spy who is strung between the (int)elegance agency and the foreign agents of secret export. She introduces herself as “Eve Kendall, twenty six years old and unmarried [and] . . . an industrial designer” [emphasis added]. The viewer eventually learns that this role is a front for Kendall’s position as the “number one” spy in the Professor’s investigation of Vandamm’s importer/exporter spies. Positioned as a front in the film, industrial design becomes, like the femme fatale spy, a marketing façade.

Kendall sends Thornhill on his fool’s errand to the cornfield; she spins death which metaphorizes the uncoupling of value from reference. Eve’s pretense is like her own form of advertising agency. Insofar as American industrial design is inculcated in the Fordist ideal of the “American assembly line,” Eve’s advertising agency configures the commodification of femininity as a tool of use to America in the Cold War. Eve is the inverse of Thornhill’s advertising agent in the same way that the elegance agency forms a mirror image to the importer/exporter spies. Where the elegance agency codes the use of transnational capitalist technique by the agents of state surveillance, Vandamm’s importer/exporter spies instantiate a business that exchanges secrets for monetary advantage. On the one hand we find the techniques of advertising agency employed for the purpose of cold war spying, and on the other, spying as a means to accrue capital. Similarly, where Thornhill stands for the advertising agency necessary for the capture of Vandamm, Eve Kendall’s “front” as industrial designer foregrounds her performance of such signs (here, “profession”) as a means to carry on her spying.

The “decoy business” that surrounds this citation of “industrial design” foregrounds the primacy of consumption. The scene takes place in a dining car—site of consumption. Here both characters employ the witty repartee of advertising agency that sold the film’s mass consumer appeal (after the dismal box office failure of Vertigo). Here consumption and heteronormative desire blend together, trivializing femininity as a commodity. Sounding almost like a slogan, Eve’s line “I never discuss love on an empty stomach,” was a dubbed replacement for Lehman’s more explicit, “I never make love on an empty stomach” (Lehmann 72). This ciphering of the consumption of food as economic expenditure is there from the film’s opening. In another instance of advertising agency’s sloganeering, Thornhill devises a promotional flirtation, suggesting that his secretary send chocolates wrapped in gold paper to a lover: “she’ll think she’s eating money!”

On the discovery of Eve’s marketed pretext, Vandamm notes that the “neatness” of “business” requires the “disposal,” of Eve, “from a great height, over water.” Disposal, here, marks not only murder, but also expenditure—an antiquated connotation of the word—one that will covertly cite capitalist patriarchy’s subjection of femininity to the exchange economy.²³ Height of perspective here becomes the means for this murderous expenditure, as though femininity itself has been transformed into an overcoded indice of value. The importer/exporter spies, like the Professor, deal in the commodifiable charms of woman for political advantage. North by Northwest converts what Gayle Rubin called “the traffic in women” from its premodern sense—exuberant expenditure, or “potlatch,” of actual women—to a postmodern commodification and sale of the very sign value of woman (27-62). Eva Marie Saint’s real life persona already “sells” this role, so to speak; on television, she had played a “party girl,” declaring, “I go out with men—for money.”²⁴

The dereferential economy I have been describing is not only symbolic, but can—indeed must—be historicized by recourse to the signs of industrial capitalism that it cites and positions in frame. One such citation, the Twentieth Century Limited, was an icon of post-depression modernist American industrial design. The film’s citation of mass transit as commercialized enterprise disfigures of the place of “industrial design” in the mid-century industrial context. As Jeffrey L. Meikle points out, the train signaled the increasing purchase of the consumer economy, selling the ideal of production instantiated in the apparent functionalism of its locomotive. The vicissitudes of this icon allow the film to cite a functionalist aesthetic that further complicates the film’s shadow play with economics. J. George Frederick, the editor of “The Philosophy of Production: A Symposium,” companion piece to a 1930 conference of concerned businessmen argued that any criticism of production’s place as the principle underlying American industry would be as effective as, “a child playing on the track of the Twentieth Century Limited” (qtd. in Meikle 70).

However, as Meikle has argued, the purportedly functionalist design principle of “streamlining,” used on transportation devices such as the Twentieth Century, were gradually adapted to the consumer economy of the nineteen-fifties (179-187). The exteriorizing designs of such vehicles as the Twentieth Century Ltd. would eventually reproduce themselves in household consumer items like alarm clocks, fridges, and ovens, particularly after the functional value of streamlining came under question (181). Such a streamlined consumer item—a refrigerator—appears on the back of the truck that Thornhill steals in order to drive back to Chicago following the crop-duster attack. Here the film cites the consumerization of “industrial design” quite directly. The advertising executive flees the scene of interrupted industry and barren crops to return to the big city in a stolen automobile bearing consumer goods. This tiny occluded journey is almost a synecdoche for the film’s total disruption of 1950s Fordist optimism.

Eve’s manipulation of the front of “industrial designer” highlights the importance of the train’s relation to American industry. At the same time, it subtly implies the empty commodity form of “industrial design” with its functionalist pretext; the dining car scene deploys food and sex, as the thinly veiled undercurrents of this pretext. The train seen in the film was refurbished in 1938 with a Henry Dreyfus-designed grey steel streamliner casing housing a steam locomotive. It is as if its exterior shell was to be consumed – like its domestic commercial progeny—primarily as style, with littlegrounding in referential functionality. Meikle notes that

the leading industrial designers contemplated using streamlining as an organizational concept…one critic even identified streamlining as the new national style. [He] observed, ‘that numerous curved forms are taking their place in the commercial designs of utilitarian products.’

(181)

The “new national style” increasingly became merely a consumable sign, not unlike other national signs, or the designer persona that the spy Eve adopts to ensnare Thornhill. Consumer engineer Egmont Arens argued for the use of streamlining as a “slogan.” Arens spun the idea that domestic consumer goods—like the fridge on Thornhill’s stolen truck—”should be ‘Streamlined for Selling’-eye resistance eliminated . . . making it always easy for folks to sign the order pad” (qtd. in Meikle 165).

In 1958’s Vertigo, the film immediately preceding North by Northwest, Barbara Bel Geddes—daughter of leading designer Norman—delivers a wry joke about the commodification of the design industry. Norman Bel Geddes was criticized in 1934 for betraying his functionalism to “a blind concern for fashion.”²⁵Vertigo develops the virtual critique of this association. Barbara Bel Geddes’s Midge Wood keeps a brassiere in her studio, designed “on the principle of the cantilever bridge.” Like the transport technologies of American industry, the feminine form is metatextually recommodified in Americanist cinema under the sign of productive innovation.²⁶

If Eve’s performance of the value of industrial design has, in a sense, “improperly inflated” the value of this sign, then perhaps her being “dropped from a great height over water,” is supposed to facilitate the “neatness” of not only the importer/exporter spy’s “business,” as he puts it, but also the dangerously untethered values of American industry per se. Such a figural stock-market crash in the symbolic exchange of woman parallels the collapse of the purchase of the American design industry at which she masquerades. Each of the pre-modern logics spectrally deployed by the film is brought into montage association at the auction and reveals the commodification proper to Americanist cinema: both the literal pre-Columbian statue and its correlate in the quasi-primitive circulation of Eve, who sells herself for the purposes of state secrecy as sex object and ostensible “industrial designer.”

IV. Commodifying Americanist Cinema

Like the Twentieth Century Limited, North by Northwest Americanist cinema no longer refers to the modernist aesthetic of functionalism favored by Kuleshov—”simplicity in line” designed to facilitate communication with an audience. For Kuleshov, working in the Russia of the teens and twenties, the aim of this aesthetics was inevitably political and propagandist. While “audience response” was central from the beginning, in Hitchcock’s film it forms a privileged relation with commodification. Hitchcock always referred to filmgoers in these agglomerated terms: “the public”—a passive, desiring, but nonetheless inert mass to be manipulated by cinematic shock tactics of formalism. As I have emphasized, there is a formal confluence asserted in the film between kinds of height and inflation, from the film’s opening remark on high trendexes—a thoroughly overcoding marketing phrase—to their visualization as so many high perspectives, the Seagram’s credit sequence to the Rushmore climax. In this light, the animated collapsing fall of advertising agency imagined in Mad Men‘s opening appears an increasingly wry citation of the consequence of the normativization of axiomatic dereferentialization. North by Northwest‘s intervention reveals the late capitalist intersection of commodification and Cold War politics even as the film itself is simultaneously depoliticized and recommodified: “streamlined for selling” in the popcorn marketplace.

Advertising agency’s dereferential transformation of America in North by Northwest correlates perfectly to the axiomatics of Hitchcock’s “pure cinema,” rendering it a more effective weapon in the arsenal of late capitalism. The film installs the figure of “pure cinema” in the belly of the pre-Columbian. As such, for Hitchcock’s film, “America” becomes an overcoded idea, a brand to be capitalized upon, from the film’s trailer to the first appearance of Mt. Rushmore seen by Thornhill from the gift shop through coin-op tour binoculars. North by Northwest converts Americanist cinema to “pure cinema,” and political content to overcoded exchangeable signs. The film also participates metatextually in this process, converting its formal elements into a set of signs streamlined for “selling” its spectacle, just as the Twentieth Century Limited converted its form—whose function was wind resistance—into a consumable aesthetic principle. As Grant boards the train, he witnesses the feet of his pursuant policeman treading across its red carpet, foregrounding the spectacular setting of this industrial design icon, while recommodifying the sign for Hitch’s viewing public. In this way, for the Hitchcockian cinematic project, the political codes (communist/capitalist, America/foreign, politics/economics) informing the desires of the viewing “public” are emptied out formally.

The visual tour of North by Northwest recrafts territory and reorients reference to the ends of its consumerist project, even as it eviscerates the discrete division of the economic and the political. The reinscription of American political economic greatness usurps the place of an imaginary community called “America.” This space’s effigy is no longer the Pre-Columbian Gods but Fordist industry, the “fantasy” of the production line and—metatexually—cinematic entertainment per se. So the small black statuette shatters and yields profits, revealing not so much the reflexivity of medium that some critics saw in the microfilm, but rather the lucrative commodity potential of such reflexivity. This MGM film is converted into another commodity in the M-C-M’ chain of Americanist cinematic circulation. Simultaneously, it fulfills Hitchcock’s “axiomatic” commitment to “pure cinema”—a reflexive circuit that brands the opening appearance of the studio’s logo, with its motto, ars gratia artis.²⁷ In these hands, “Americanist” cinema deploys formalism not only to depoliticize the image, but also to sloganize all reference: to the pre-Columbian past, now commodified; to the production line, at turns dead and streamlined for consumption; to political spying, always already “elegant”; or to femininity that is produced by commodity fetishism. Hitchcock’s late-capitalist commodification converts Americanist cinema from a high modern exercise in functionalism and simplicity to a hyperreferential consumer form.

Michael R. Griffiths is a Ph.D. Candidate in the English Department at Rice University and Lodieska Stockbridge Vaughn Fellow in the Humanities for 2011-12. His research explores biopolitics, particularly in Australian settler colonies. He has published essays or has essays forthcoming in Australian Literary Studies, Antipodes, Humanimalia, and in edited collections. He also maintains the politics and culture blog Apparatus at <http://mrgculture.wordpress.com/>.

Acknowledgements

Revision of this article benefited from the insights of a number of readers, notably Robert L. Patten, Josh Kitching, Jayme Yeo, Ryan Kehoe, Suzanne Rindell, J. E. M. S. Weeks, Paul Case, and Jen Rickel, as well as from Postmodern Culture‘s anonymous readers. The essay benefited greatly from their advice and perspective. Any limits or errors of the essay, of course, remain my own. An earlier version of this essay received the 2009 Shirley Bard Rapoport Essay Prize and I would like to acknowledge the kind assistance of Morris Rapoport and the Rapoport family.

Footnotes

1. See for instance: “Top T. V. Series of the Decade.”

2. There are also a whole slew of such slogans preceding this moment and these exploit the commodification of signs such as femininity (“here’s some for your sweet tooth, and all your other sweet parts”) and colonialism (“let’s colonize ‘The Colony’ next week for lunch”), all to identify defined mechanisms for identifying the axiomatic of profit margin.

3. On Hitchcock’s notion of “pure cinema,” see “On Style: An interview with Cinema,” in Hitchcock 285-302.

4. As Steven Jacobs has recently remarked, “by the late 1950s, clearly, tourism has become a Hitchcock trademark” (50).

5. Cohen foregrounds the significance of Hitchcock’s lightness in his essay “Hitchcock’s Light Touch,” in Hitchcock’s Cryptonymies 2:197-256.

6. While Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek have been the most influential discussants of Hitchcock’s relation to, amidst else, capitalism and its postmodern form, I have in mind more recent criticism. Many critics have more pointedly focused on the historically delineate relation between Hitchcock’s understanding of America and its relation to politics and economics. See Millington 135-154; Corber; and Cohen, “Extraterritoriality: An In-House Affair at the Embassy of Ao—” in Hitchcock’s Cryptonymies: Volume 1 (193-238).

7. One could also cite, for instance, Franz Kafka’s Amerika and Bertolt Brecht’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. At this moment in the oeuvre, Hitchcock’s films frequently and subtly thematize the tension between the meaning of “America” and its meaning according to its commentators. Neither Hitchcock nor the film’s star Cary Grant is American—the latter, as To Catch A Thief‘s Francy (Grace Kelly) notes, is “unconvincing . . . like an American character in an English movie.”

8. To my knowledge, there is no recorded instance of Hitchcock mentioning “Americanist cinema.” However, I am not making the case for a causal connection. To identify Hitchcockian “Americanist cinema,” one would have to unpack a figural concern with the technology of modernity and its place in the political geography of late nineteen-fifties America.

9. One recent reconsideration of the MacGuffin that leans toward the idea of reflexivity that I critique here is in Walker 296-306.

10. Rushmore conceals its own contextual history of consumer spectacle. When the film was made, the 1920s monument was already home to a whole network of consumerist fund generators for the Park’s commission: “an antebellum mansion, waterslide, thirty-six holes of golf, sundry museums, and a surfeit of gift shops” (Taliaferro 159). Thornhill’s assassination of his alter ego Kaplan takes place in the consumer space of the monument’s canteen. The Hitchcock trope of consumer tourism—at least within the figural space of “America”—is tied into the commercial dimensions of the American geopolitical space. Hitchcock and his family on his first tour of America—in 1937, as part of a promotional tour for Sabotage (1936)—took in many of the sights of Washington, D.C., touring the capitol and other government buildings. On the Hitchcock family’s Washington tour, see McGilligan 12.

11. For a full account of their concept of the axiomatics of capital, see Deleuze and Guattari (222-261). I am not suggesting a knowing connection between Hitchcock’s use of the word “axiomatic” and Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the term in their Capitalism and Schizophrenia project. Rather, North by Northwest taps into and exploits precisely the entertainment formalism that Deleuze and Guattari so acutely diagnosed in late capitalist functioning. Overcoding uses its referent to accrue capital; when a formula of overcoding functions, it becomes fixed as an axiom.

12. The objects Thornhill throws at the window to attract Eve’s attention were designated as coins from Lehmann’s shooting script onwards (153).

13. Jacobs provides full details of the design of the Wright-inspired set (297-313).

14. Metatextually, commodity spin continues here. Cary Grant’s former acrobat star persona comes into play. As in To Catch a Thief (1955), it is Grant’s performance of his own persona that effects this rescue. What is on display and for sale here is the personal history of Archibald Leach, the acrobat turned movie star. Postmodern Americanist cinema reinvents the sacrificial expenditure of woman in the Hitchcock heroine and her cinematic commodification.

15. See also Manlove’s recent reconsideration of Mulvey’s account.

16. My use of the term “montage of attractions” refers to Sergei Eisenstein’s foundational film theoretical concept. Eisenstein’s montage theory asserts that juxtapositions produce a conflictual dialectic that both collapses together as a synthetic totality and cites a chain of associated connections (35-52). As Eisenstein puts it, “the cinema is made up of juxtaposition and accumulation . . . of associations . . . associations that produce, albeit tangentially, a similar (and often stronger) effect only when taken as a whole” (36).

17. Cohen, Hitchcock’s Cryptonymies, 1: xi. For a useful summary of de Man’s idea of the “material event,” see Warminski. For a useful application of de Man’s notion of materiality to cinema and to Hitchcock, see Cohen, in Material Events 114-152.

18. Arrighi gives a useful account of the various abandonments and reinstallations of the gold standard after 1929 (269-300).

19. Pre-Columbian art consistently signifies not only commodity circulation but simulacral form. The authenticity of pre-Columbian works from the nineteen-fifties to the present has been called into question many times. See McGill, “Pre-Columbian Works Could Be Fakes.”

20. Gerald Vizenor underscores the way indigenous identity has become a commodified simulation in late-capitalist American society. He reads signifiers of “Indian-ness” as markers of “manifest manners,” pretended and performed inventions of a Western image of the American native that cannot be reappropriated but only unsettled through insisting on the unstable trickery they inevitably unleash. Such figures as the pre-Columbian statue in North by Northwest can be read as such commodified forms of manifest mannerism. See Manifest Manners; and “Aesthetics of Survivance,” in Survivance 1-24.

21. Like the body in the assembly line, the cars that Norman Bates feeds to the swamp behind the modernist drab of the Bates motel are, as Leland Poague has noted, associated with Fordism. The license plate of Marion Crane’s car, which reads NFB, can be read as “Norman Ford Bates,” because the company’s logo is present “in nearly every frame wherein the license plate is readable . . . metaphorically shoving the car’s FORD logo in our faces,” and implying “the familial relation of crazy Norman and the father of American assembly line capitalism” (Poague 344).

22. Jameson has limned the “geopolitical aesthetic” of the film’s Cold War moment, arguing that the transformation of private spaces like bedrooms and restrooms into spaces of public intercourse worries the political unconscious of the film’s understanding of the private/public distinction. As I argue here, and as Jameson recognizes, where the film displays awareness of its Cold War context it does not refer only to its politics but to the interweaving of politics and economics. See Jameson, 47-72.

23. “[G]et rid of by throwing away or giving or selling to someone else.” Dispose, v. Oxford Dictionaries Online, 2d.

24. File-footage of Saint’s appearance is included in a documentary produced for the DVD edition of North by Northwest (1959; 2004)

25. Geddes had been criticized in 1934 by the director of the Museum of Modern Art for pandering to consumer demand. MoMA’s director leveled the accusation of a “blind concern with fashion,” calling Geddes’s designs a “streamline pencil sharpener by one of the highest paid industrial designers” (Meikle 179-187). The director’s criticism is symptomatic of a wider concern amongst functionalist designers at the Museum that commercial industrial design meant to “stimulate sales” as Meikle puts it, by rendering serviceable goods “‘obsolete’ in appearance” (180).

26. In both Vertigo and North by Northwest, female characters at turns apply their talents to industrial design (Midge Wood) and perform them as fronts for other intentions, commodifications, and desires (this is true of both Kendall and Wood insofar as she is played by Bel Geddes). In either case, this performance underscores the celebrity status of those designers whose work is featured in the film, for instance Bel Geddes, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; the film’s initial audience could well have been aware of this celebrity.

27. Marx, “The General Form of Value,” Capital 1:157-162.

Works Cited

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Cohen, Tom. Hitchcock’s Cryptonymies: Volume 1: Secret Agents. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005. Print.
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Corber, Robert J. In the Name of National Security: Hitchcock, Homophobia, and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America
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Jameson, Fredric. “Culture and Finance Capital.” Critical Inquiry 24:1 (1997): 246-65. Print.
———. “Spatial Systems in North by Northwest.” Everything You’ve Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock). Ed. Slavoj Žižek. London: Verso, 1992. 47-72.
Kafka, Franz. Amerika. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. New York: Schocken, 1996. Print.
Kovacs, Stephen. “Kuleshov’s Aesthetics.” Film Quarterly 29:3 (1976). Print.
Krohn, Bill. Hitchcock at Work. London: Phaidon Press, 2000. Print.
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———, Ed. Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence. Lincoln: Nebraska UP, 2008. Print.
Walker, Michael. Hitchcock’s Motifs. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2005. Print.
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September 3, 2013

Notes on Contributors

Dwayne Dixon is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University where he is completing his dissertation on young people in Tokyo and their relations to urban space, changing economic conditions, and visual technologies.

Mark Driscoll is an Associate Professor of East Asian Studies at the University of Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of two books on East Asian cultural and intellectual history published with Duke University Press, and has published articles in Social Text, Cultural Studies, and Postcolonial Studies.

Alexander García Düttmann is Professor of Philosophy and Visual Culture at Goldsmiths (University of London). His most recent publications include: Philosophy of Exaggeration (Continuum 2008), Visconti: Insights into Flesh and Blood (Stanford 2009), Derrida and I: The Problem of Deconstruction (Transkript Verlag 2009), and Participation: Conscience of Semblance (Konstanz University Press 2011).

Daniel Herbert is an assistant professor in Screen Arts and Cultures at the University of Michigan. His research is devoted to understanding the relationships between media industries, geography, and cultural identities. His essays appear in several collections and journals, including Film Quarterly, Millennium Film Journal, and Quarterly Review of Film and Video.

Jan Mieszkowski is Professor of German and Humanities at Reed College. He is the author of Labors of Imagination: Aesthetics and Political Economy from Kant to Althusser (Fordham University Press, 2006) and of the forthcoming Watching War (Stanford University Press, 2012). He has published widely on European and American literature since Romanticism, German philosophy, and critical theory.

Arkady Plotnitsky is a professor of English and Theory and Cultural Studies at Purdue University, where he is also a director of the Theory and Cultural Studies Program. He has published on the philosophy of physics and mathematics, continental philosophy, British and European Romanticism, Modernism, and the relationships among literature, philosophy, and science. His most recent books are Epistemology and Probability: Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger and the Nature of Quantum-Theoretical Thinking (2009), Reading Bohr: Physics and Philosophy (2006), and a co-edited (with Tilottama Rajan) collection of essays Idealism Without Absolute: Philosophy and Romantic Culture (2004). His next book, Niels Bohr and Complementarity, is scheduled to appear in 2012.

Scott C. Richmond is Assistant Professor in Film and Media Studies at the Department of English at Wayne State University. He is the author of “‘Dude, That’s Just Wrong’: Mimesis, Identification, Jackass,” forthcoming in World Picture. He is currently at work on a book manuscript on film theory entitled Resonant Perception: Cinema, Phenomenology, Illusion.

Chloë Taylor is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Alberta. She has a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and was a Social Science and Research Council of Canada and Tomlinson postdoctoral fellow at McGill University. Her research interests include twentieth-century French philosophy, philosophy of sexuality, feminist philosophy, philosophy of food and animal ethics. She is the author of The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault (Routledge 2009) and is an editor of the journal Foucault Studies. She is currently working on two book projects, one concerning Foucault, feminism, and sexual crime, and the other concerning Foucault, animal ethics, and the philosophy of food.

Hong-An Truong is an Assistant Professor of Studio Art at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her photographs and videos have been shown at numerous venues including the Godwin-Ternbach Museum in Queens, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Laguna Art Museum, Torrance Art Museum, Monte Vista Projects in Los Angeles, DobaeBacsa Gallery in Seoul, PAVILION in Bucharest, Art in General, and the International Center for Photography, both in New York. She is currently working on a video installation on memory and war violence that focuses on the life of writer Iris Chang.

September 3, 2013

Thought, Untethered. A review essay.

Scott C. Richmond (bio)
Wayne State University
scr@wayne.edu

Graham Harman, Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures. Washington: Zero Books, 2010.

Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, eds., The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Melbourne: re.press, 2011.

In his little book on “the ontology of film,” Stanley Cavell imagines that photography satisfied “the human wish, intensifying in the West since the Reformation, to escape subjectivity and metaphysical isolation—a wish for the power to reach this world, having for so long tried, at last hopelessly, to manifest fidelity to another” (21). Individuality had become isolation, consciousness came unhinged from the world, and philosophy had to renounce a concern with the things. From outside the field of philosophy, photography’s pictorial realism embodied a new solution, both aesthetic and technological, to a centuries-old philosophical problem that thought itself was no longer capable of resolving. Now from within the field of philosophy, for the last decade or so, a group of philosophers has been attempting a specifically philosophical solution, speculative realism.

Speculative realist philosophers challenge the necessity, even the propriety, of philosophy’s renunciation. Citing the rampant decadence of “postmodern skepticism” and the small-mindedness of analytical philosophy’s concern with mind, these philosophers amplify, transform, radicalize, and exalt in Husserl’s famous slogan, “back to the things themselves!” This movement has gone under a few different names, but has settled on speculative realism after a 2007 conference of that name. It has become institutionalized enough that two new volumes propose to evaluate where it is and how it got there: Graham Harman’s collection of essays and lectures, Towards Speculative Realism (Zero Books, 2010), and an anthology edited by Levi Bryant and Nick Srnicek along with Harman, The Speculative Turn (re.press, 2011).

My agenda in this review essay is twofold: to evaluate the broad contours of speculative realist thought as they are presented in these two volumes, focusing on two exemplary philosophers in particular, Graham Harman and Quentin Meillassoux; and to show that, however far removed from—even antagonistic to—the concerns of aesthetic, political, and cultural criticism speculative realism may be, it has significant if unexpected stakes for contemporary critical theory. Speculative realism explicitly rejects what I want to call the “humanistic” concerns of much of contemporary continental philosophy and its inflection in critical theory of the sort practiced in literature, film, art, and cultural studies departments. But the terms of this rejection, and the problems it entails or discloses, are instructive for those of us whose speculative practices take place within the domains of culture and the arts. In particular, the deep but perhaps obscure affinity between speculation and aesthetics in speculative realism can serve as an opportunity to reopen, and possibly to transform, our ways of understanding our own critical work and the kind of traction it can have on cultural and aesthetic objects.

Graham Harman is easily the most readable of the speculative realists, and TowardsSpeculative Realism is particularly readable. It is a collection of lectures and previously unpublished essays from 1997 through 2009. The great virtue of this book is as an introduction to Harman’s thought, and to his object-oriented philosophy as a variant of speculative realism. It presents in redacted and often exploratory form many of the ideas that were the foundations for his monographs, including Tool-Being, Guerrilla Metaphysics, and Prince of Networks. In these books, he often presents his case as though he were reporting incontrovertible results–a style of writing and thinking that is likely a virtue in popularizing a philosophical position. However, because of this, his thinking can feel at times a bit like a conceptual machine which, once you turn it over, keeps going by itself until it runs out of gas (or you do). By contrast, because many of the entries in Towards Speculative Realism come in the earlier phases of his philosophical process, this volume presents Harman’s remarkably creative thinking less conclusively, in the course of its evolution over a decade. Less certain of itself, this work shows Harman asking, rather than answering, questions. While there’s evidently nothing new in a retrospective volume like this, both the proximity of different stages of his thinking and the substance of his style present his object-oriented ontology as a series of productive philosophical questions rather than inert doctrine.

The animating question of Harman’s philosophy is: what is the nature of an object? His way of posing this question is grounded in an unorthodox reading of Heidegger, worked out over roughly the first half of Towards Speculative Realism, although it is so foundational for Harman that some form of it is present in nearly every essay. While Harman’s philosophy passes through other thinkers—Latour, Whitehead, Islamic Occasionalism—his philosophical trajectory can be profitably understood as a progressive, radical rereading of 20th century phenomenological thought. This trajectory begins with a reading of the account of tools in Being and Time, laid out particularly clearly in “The Theory of Objects in Heidegger and Whitehead,” and “A Fresh Look at Zuhandenheit.” As Harman has it, “the scenario of the tool in Being and Time has nothing to do with the human use of tools, and everything to do with the tools themselves” (TowardsSpeculative Realism 24, hereafter cited as TSR). Or, in a slogan which appears in several essays, “The tool isn’t ‘used,’ it is” (TSR 7, 25, 46).

For Heidegger (the received Heidegger, anyway), any analysis of the world must take into account readiness-to-hand, presentness-at-hand, as well as their correlation. For Harman, this position is crassly anthropocentric. Readiness-to-hand does not name a special relation humans have to tools, but rather the available or disposable aspect of any object with respect to any other object. In “The Theory of Objects,” he develops this analysis with the example of a bridge:

Walking across a bridge, I am adrift in a world of equipment: the girders and pylons that support me, the durable power of concrete beneath my feet, the dense unyielding grain of the topsoil in which the bridge is rooted. What looks at first like the simple and trivial act of walking is actually embedded in the most intricate web of tool-pieces, tiny implanted devices watching over our activity, sustaining or resisting our efforts like transparent ghosts or gels.

(TSR 24)

For Harman, the tool—any given object—is enmeshed in a set of total relations (i.e. the world). Meanwhile, each object is visible only very partially from any given perspective. “The bridge has a completely different reality for every entity it encounters: it is utterly distinct for the seagull, the idle walker, and those who may be driving across it toward a game or a funeral” (TSR 25). The word utterly here is doing a great deal of work: the claim is that the relation between the seagull and the bridge is of a radically different, wholly unrelated, kind than the relation between the idle walker and the bridge.

This allows Harman to claim that “there is an absolute gulf between Heidegger’s readiness-to-hand and presence-at-hand” (TSR 26). No matter how it manifests itself, the bridge (or any other object) itself is always infinitely withdrawn. Any relation a walker, a seagull, or a driver in a car may have to it always radically misses what the bridge is, in itself. And any relation, in any modality, we may have with a tool, whether it be practical or contemplative, aesthetic or empirical, also always radically misses the object. Harman’s object-orientation entails a concern with the “unchecked fury” of the withdrawn essence of objects (TSR 26). Doing justice to the object itself means affirming such fury, and also affirming that we never reach any object as it is in itself. But crucially, neither does any other object: objects are withdrawn from each other as radically as they are from us. The relation (or non-relation) between bolts and pylons is of exactly the same kind as between humans and the bridge: “all relations are on the same footing” (TSR 202). What’s refreshing about Harman is his insistence that bolts and pylons deserve as much or more attention from philosophers as the typical objects of philosophy: language, knowledge, mind, etc.

The obvious question arises of how objects can interact at all if they’re also absolutely withdrawn from each other. The second half of Towards Speculative Realism presents Harman’s development of this question as well as his solution: vicarious causation. As he has it in an essay on Husserl, “Physical Nature and the Paradox of Qualities,” “if hammers, rocks, and flames withdraw from all other entities, then it needs to be explained why anything happens in the world at all” (129); and “since objects cannot touch one another directly they must be able to interact only within some sort of vicarious medium that contains each of them” (TSR 131). Harman’s very weird but absolutely ingenious and elegant solution to this problem is that this medium is other objects. Relations themselves are objects. Take again the bridge example: its bolts anchor its pylons into its concrete foundation which is itself dug into the ground. These are all objects in their own right, never encountering one another, always infinitely withdrawn. But taken together, in their relations to one another, the bolts and pylons and foundation and concrete form the bridge itself—which is also wholly withdrawn, even from its constituent parts. It’s objects all the way down. Except there is no question of up or down—no level of reality (of scale, complexity, durability, nature, or physical existence) is any more essential or fundamental than any other: “an atom is no more an object than a skyscraper,” “an electron is no more an object than a piano,” and “mountains are no more objects than hallucinated mountains” (TSR 147-48). While the bridge is certainly composed of parts, the bridge itself is not any one of these parts, nor merely their sum. The bridge names the way in which its parts are related to one another, but it is not itself reducible to this bundle of relations.

Throughout, Harman’s ontology of an utterly pure, totally positive, completely inaccessible object licenses speculation as the only way we may ever reach anything like an encounter with the object itself. Since “there is no way of approaching equipment [objects] directly, not even asymptotically or by degrees” (47), the only way we have of thinking the withdrawn object or vicarious causation is metaphysics, “speculative theory on the nature of ultimate reality” (TSR 49). Two consequences follow from this. First, since we always miss the object, the ground for Harman’s theory of objects cannot be the object itself. This is a phenomenology without a practice of description. At no point does Harman ever really address himself to any object in particular, and it is not difficult to see why. At best we see his characteristic stylistic tic of what elsewhere he calls a “poetry of objects” (Prince 101-103): “monkeys, tornadoes, diamonds, and oil,” “hammers, drills, keys, and windows,” “trees, atoms, and songs. . . armies, banks, sports franchises, and fictional characters” (TSR 95, 97, 147). This is a poetry whose only device is parataxis. As poetic device, parataxis levels all differences between its terms—which, I suppose, is precisely the point. No object has any privilege or right of dignity over any other. But as a collection of essays (instead of a book on a single thinker, like Prince of Networks), Towards Speculative Realism makes particularly clear a resulting difficulty in Harman’s thinking. Instead of asking about any objects in particular, the essays all treat different philosophers and their theories of objects: Heidegger and Husserl, but also Lingis, Whitehead, Latour, and DeLanda. These are uniformly creative, opening these thinkers up in novel ways. Yet even in its object-oriented instance, it seems that the object of philosophy is really only ever other philosophy.

The second, related consequence is that in Harman’s case, the revival of metaphysics seems to amount to a revival of what Renaud Barbaras teaches us is the basic metaphysical mistake in “Phenomenological Reduction as Critique of Nothingness”: determining in advance that being must be purely positive by opposing it to pure nothingness. To maintain the form of being as pure positivity, Harman’s objects must be infinitely withdrawn as a matter of formal requirement. His position (and Towards Speculative Realism) begins with a formal determination of an object as a purely positive being, and the rest of his philosophy (and the rest of the book) unfolds in a frictionless universe of formal objects without qualities or air resistance, like high-school Newtonian physics. Harman develops his doctrine of vicarious causation because his theory of objects was obviously missing an account of relation or change. As we see in his progressive posing of the question of relation in Towards Speculative Realism, vicarious causation addresses a formal problem of a metaphysical system, but it does not seem excessively oriented by the need to explain any particular facts.

The benefit of Harman’s position is that it allows philosophy to speak of any and all objects, to become, that is, object-oriented. This does not come without costs. This philosophy can only speak of objects so on the condition that all such objects be any-objects-whatever, all fungibly withdrawn. It thus prevents any access to being itself except by means of the very faculty that determines in advance what will count as being: speculation. Meanwhile, phenomenality, our ongoing encounter with the world, teaches us that the world, and what is in the world, is, in itself, indeterminate, porous, incomplete. A more mundane phenomenology, like that of Merleau-Ponty, does not discover the absolute being that such speculation desires or demands. At issue is not realism per se, since Harman admits phenomenology is (or can be) realist. The issue is rather what you mean when you say something exists. Harman’s exuberantly maximalist position, from a certain angle, looks less like a realist return to the things themselves, as they are and as we discover them, and more like an ingenious philosophical revenge on the world for not living up to the disappointed expectation that being be pure and absolute, for its failure to satisfy Cavell’s wish. A thought which claims better fidelity to the things themselves ought not to work tirelessly toward a formal philosophical articulation of what an object is, both presuming and concluding that objects are all fundamentally fungible—or, what amounts to the same thing, all radically singular and wholly withdrawn. Rather than freeing us from anthropocentrism, such speculation can feel almost megalomaniacal, recreating the world in its own image.

Much broader in scope than Towards Speculative Realism, The Speculative Turn is a survey of current positions, trends, and debates in speculative thought. It is a much bigger and more difficult book. It consists of 25 entries over more than 400 pages, from the usual suspects of speculative realism (Harman, Ray Brassier, Levi Bryant, Iain Hamilton Grant), from frequent critics and interlocutors (Steven Shaviro, Alberto Toscano), and from stars of contemporary continental philosophy (Badiou, Žižek, Stengers, Latour). It is an impressive volume in its depth and vibrancy, and the interest of this volume for scholars working in the idioms of critical and cultural theory lies in no small part in the impressive intellectual creativity unleashed by a radical break from familiar styles and objects of thought. Moreover, it does an excellent job of collecting the multiple positions and styles of thinking on offer in speculative realist philosophy. It is less clear, however, what to do with those radically divergent positions and what the goal of such a survey is.

The book has the raw material to serve as an introduction to speculative realist thought (and then some), but its organization will not be useful to readers not already familiar with speculative realism. The editors have divided the book into five sections, which, oddly, are mentioned in the introduction but are not reflected in formal divisions in the table of contents or section breaks. They are “Speculative Realism Revisited,” then a folio on Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude, followed by sections on Politics, Metaphysics, and Science. These divisions do make some sense, but the ordering of essays is sometimes inscrutable. For example, Meillassoux’s contribution, “Potentiality and Virtuality,” which redacts and extends positions he presented in After Finitude, is placed only after the folio dealing with After Finitude. And even within that folio, Peter Hallward’s “Anything is Possible” is a clear and critical summary of AfterFinitude, is cited by every entry in the folio, and yet comes only toward the end of the section, the fourth of five entries.

Readers not already steeped in speculative realist thought would do well read out of order: the introduction to the volume; Hallward’s “Anything is Possible” and Nathan Brown’s response; Levi Bryant’s “The Ontic Principle”; Shaviro’s commentary on Harman, “The Actual Volcano,” and Harman’s response; and Harman’s “On the Undermining of Objects,” and Grant’s response. After that, many of the essays in the volume will be much easier to parse. (And some of them, no matter how brilliant, will be obscure without significant preparation in the history of philosophy.) The difficulty of ordering is perhaps unavoidable in a book like this. As is evident from their introduction, the editors of The Speculative Turn aspire to introduce these debates to a broad audience and to demonstrate their importance to the larger field of continental philosophy. The challenge is that the debates between the contributors are live and ongoing, have been for some time, and are still unfolding in these pages, as is evidenced by the number of responses included in the volume. It’s hard to stage an introduction in the middle of things.

At the same time, as a marker of its growing institutionalization, The Speculative Turn might also signal a moment of increased fragmentation in speculative realist philosophy. Speculative realism offers a great many different options, which share much more in what they reject than in what they affirm. And what they reject is what Quentin Meillassoux has named “correlationism,” or Kant’s critical legacy. As Ray Brassier has it, correlationism is “the philosopheme according to which the human and the non-human, society and nature, mind and world, can only be understood as reciprocally correlated, mutually interdependent poles of a fundamental relation” (The Speculative Turn 53, hereafter cited as ST). As the number of anticorrelationist positions grows, it seems that the feeling of being united against the pieties of both continental and analytical philosophy has become less urgent; Harman suggests as much in his entry. Nevertheless, speculative realists’ fractiousness has always been a hallmark of the movement, frequently invoked as evidence of its dynamism and importance. Such fractiousness is perhaps befitting a movement which rejects the last two hundred years of thought: these are people very willing and quite able to engage in heroic acts of disagreement. Paradoxically, when anthologized, such disagreement seems increased to the point of dispersal. This is particularly true with some of the entries from the better-known thinkers: the speculative realist core of this volume sits rather uneasily beside Žižek’s unsurprisingly full-throated affirmative answer to his titular question, “Is it Still Possible to Be a Hegelian Today?” That said, this feeling of dispersion turns on much more than the mere proximity of these essays, but is also a substantial intellectual matter.

Speculative realism of all flavors proposes to move past the Kantian inheritance of correlationism by insisting that philosophy must return to its pre-critical (pre-Kantian) vocation of speculation about the Absolute. Or the real. Indeed, the two seem to become equivalent. Bryant, Harman, and Srnicek acknowledge in their introduction that “this activity of ‘speculation’ may be cause for concern amongst some readers, for it might suggest a return to pre-critical philosophy, with its dogmatic belief in the powers of pure reason.” Continuing, they claim that speculation “aims at something ‘beyond’ the critical and linguistic turns. As such, it recuperates the pre-critical sense of ‘speculation’ as a concern with the Absolute, while also taking into account the undeniable progress that is due to the labour of critique. The works collected here are a speculative wager on the possible returns from a renewed attention to reality itself” (ST 3). It seems to me that it is not so much speculation or its promotion that should be a cause for concern, nor attention to reality, but rather the elision of the difference between the real and the absolute.

This elision is evident in the characterization of much contemporary thought as anti-realist. If “the basic claim of realism is that a world exists independent of ourselves” (ST 16), it seems a bit extravagant to claim Marxists are anti-realist, or phenomenologists, or analytical philosophers of mind, or even such much-maligned language-oriented philosophers as Derrida or Gadamer or Wittgenstein. And yet, the editors claim that a

general anti-realist trend has manifested itself in continental philosophy in a number of ways, but especially through preoccupation with such issues as death and finitude, an aversion to science, a focus on language, culture, and subjectivity to the detriment of material factors, an anthropocentric stance toward nature, a relinquishing of the search for absolutes, and an acquiescence to the specific conditions of our historical thrownness.

(ST 4)

A concern with finitude and death, or an investigation of (but not acquiescence to!) our historical conditions and conditionedness, aren’t on their face anti-realist, but are rather ways of reckoning with the real from our situation within it, of acknowledging our failure to know it as it is in itself, of coping with its recalcitrance and indeterminacy and excess.

The speculative realist asks us to leave behind what we think we know or experience of the real, for we cannot know this radical exterior, “the great outdoors.” Thus it becomes the task of speculation to think the real as the absolute. And ontology, understood as resurgent metaphysics, takes priority over epistemology. As with Harman, such a position obliges speculative realism to hold that there are no phenomenological or epistemological criteria by which we might evaluate such accounts of the absolutely real and their competing claims. This is the problem The Speculative Turn both presents and embodies. Since knowledge seems to be out of the question (or is just a boring question), the thinking on offer in this volume is by turns ingenious, athletic, and inspiring, or tortured, baroque, and impenetrable—and radically divergent. The disagreement turns mostly on the nature of objects and the nature of change, or the not-quite-parallel problems of relations vs. objects and process vs. stasis. Which is just to say that they argue a great deal about the nature of the real, as befits realists. It seems less clear what, exactly, their grounds for dispute are.

The folio on Meillassoux helps clarify these problems. It is the most unified portion of the book; all the essays deal with the same texts and problems, and it presents the greatest sustained encounter in the volume between speculative realism and its critics. Yet even here, these two camps seem to be talking past one another. Meillassoux’s philosophy itself helps make clear why that should be. Meillassoux, like Harman, holds that the ultimate nature of reality is beyond apprehension by knowledge, science, or the senses, although thought can grasp something of the nature of the things. However, for Meillassoux (in Hallward’s words), “the modality of this nature is radically contingent… there is no reason for things or ‘laws’ to be or remain as they are. Nothing is necessary, apart from the necessity that nothing be necessary. Anything can happen, any place and at any time, without reason or cause” (ST 130). Meillassoux is Hume’s wonderfully perverse heir; “Potentiality and Virtuality” is a reconsideration of “Hume’s Problem.” Hume famously observed that we cannot ever know the cause of an event, we can only induce it. Traditionally, Hume’s problem has been cast as a problem of epistemology: if we cannot ever truly know a cause from its effect, the question becomes what practices of induction can sufficiently underwrite claims to knowledge, especially scientific knowledge? But Meillassoux poses the problem, radically, as one of ontology, marshaling Hume to the conclusion that there is no necessity, that there is no reason at all, that things do seem to continue mostly as they are. The universe is absolutely contingent.

For Meillassoux, any change at all is always radically possible but never, ever necessary. The problem of how you can get from one state of affairs to its successor is a problem of merely ontic description. Metaphysics has nothing to say on the matter other than whatever rules or laws or conditions govern (or seem to govern) such unfolding are radically contingent. But this notion of radical contingency is so radical that it cannot get, in Hallward’s words, any purchase on concrete change: “Once Meillassoux has purged his speculative materialism of any sort of causality he deprives it of any worldly-historical purchase as well. The abstract logical possibility of change. . . has little to do with any concrete process of actual change” (ST 139). Responding to Hallward, Nathan Brown insists that this is no deprivation; rather, the proper domain of Meillassoux’s work is “the speculative.” Brown’s criticisms of Hallward amount (taken together, very approximately) to asserting that whatever flaws Hallward finds in AfterFinitude, they all consist in not following Meillassoux in strictly separating the empirical from the speculative, the ontic from the ontological. Which is to say, not following Meillassoux in affirming the absolute exteriority of thought and being. Everything in Meillassoux follows from this affirmation. And indeed, it all does follow. As with Harman, Meillassoux’s is a frictionless universe: once you accede to his first principle, his thought is compelling, convincing, and relentlessly consistent as a matter of doctrine.

Whereas Harman holds that we do not see the things themselves, as they are constitutively withdrawn, Meillassoux does Harman one better by claiming that the only way that thought can know ultimate reality is by sundering any correlation or contact between thought and being, only to reunite them in the media of pure speculation and an absolutely contingent contingency. His doctrine consists, in short, in a claim that in order to encounter the real, we must turn our backs on it: facticity distracts us from being. As Hallward contends, this is an “anti-phenomenological return ‘to the things themselves’” (ST 135). Retooling my objection to Harman earlier, you could very well suggest that, as Merleau-Ponty has it, the “thing itself” is only ever a postulate of thought (82). Objective thought mistakes being by falsely hypostatizing the object, replacing the messiness and finitude of the world as it is with the ideal purity of the absolute and the in-itself. It might then seem totally apropos to relegate the question of the things themselves to the realm of a pure speculation that has renounced any concern whatsoever with the world as it is. After all, the thing itself as absolute being doesn’t belong to the world anyway—it has only ever been an artifact of thought. Turning to absolute speculation on the absolute, such speculation misses the real it so desperately seeks.

I might be overstating the case, but this way of saying it articulates in no uncertain terms two related difficulties of speculative realism. First: What licenses the claim of speculation to articulate ultimate reality, the things in themselves, once it has rejected any form of correlation? What criteria are adequate to adjudicate the merit or correctness of the various speculative realist positions? If not mediated through experience, perception, empirical measurement, or some other contact with the world, what kind of relation can speculation claim to its objects? Not to put too fine a point on it: what are the grounds for deciding between the many competing speculative positions in The Speculative Turn? Second: What sort of difference does this philosophy seek to make? What is the relation of philosophy—understood not as the activity of pure speculation, but the activity of discoursing about it—to its objects and to the world? Or: what are the stakes of deciding between competing speculative positions in The Speculative Turn? Now, these sound like crassly correlationist questions, and awfully mundane ones at that. The first is a question of epistemology broadly, the second a question of the articulation of something as deathly boring as disciplinary norms.

These are questions about the nature of speculation in its conjugation by speculative realism. Of course, meditation on the nature of speculation cuts against the grain of the aspiration of speculative realism to break out of the correlationist circle and is much attenuated in TheSpeculative Turn. Attenuated, but not ignored. Ray Brassier and Adrian Johnston hit on the problem, and Alberto Toscano’s “Against Speculation” poses it most fully in his treatment of the account of speculation Meillassoux gives in chapter 2 of After Finitude. In Toscano’s words, correlationism “designates those structural invariants or transcendental parameters that govern a given world or domain of correlation without themselves being open to rational explanation, deduction or derivation. In this respect, facticity is a form of reflexive ignorance” (ST 85). The “strong correlationism” of Heidegger or Wittgenstein, or really, any anti-foundational philosophy that forbids or foregoes speculation on an ultimate reality behind facticity, is thus a “new obscurantism,” “a carte blanche for any and all superstitions” (ST 85). Strong correlationism is complicit with the rise of religiosity because philosophy has removed any vocabulary or grounds for discussing the absolute and irrational. Meillassoux’s brilliance lies precisely in the way his thought moves past dumb wonderment at facticity by ontologizing anti-foundationalism as absolute contingency. Here, realism and speculation license each other, and this is the crux of Toscano’s critique of Meillassoux. The absolute autonomy of the real, and its absolute exteriority with respect to thought, frees thought from the necessity of being a correlate of being. Yet once you give up any pretension to correlation between thought and being, how can you claim that absolute speculation will have any purchase whatsoever on the absolute of the real?

The questions of to what, to whom, in what modes, in what registers, and to what degree thought is (and ought to be) bound are questions that neither The Speculative Turn, nor speculative realist philosophy more generally, has quite known how to pose—even as it also makes them unavoidable. This inability is not unrelated to the uncertainty The Speculative Turn displays in the kind of impact it wants to have. The largely unvoiced question of speculation lies at the heart of what is both flawed and crucial about this volume.

If speculative realist philosophy does not quite have an account of how to answer these questions, it poses them in urgent and novel ways. This is not merely to recruit Harman, Meillassoux, and others to the correlationist concerns of critical, cultural, aesthetic theory (etc.), or of what Adrian Johnston calls “ontic disciplines.” But clearly the kind of purchase thought has on the world is of concern not merely to the speculative realists, but to practitioners of any sort of humanistic or critical thinking. You might even say it’s of greater importance to those of us who “do theory”: from a certain altitude, the “theory” that we “do,” wedded as it must be to an object or scene of inquiry, is the real object-oriented philosophy, speculative thinking that does not know how to get on without an object. The speculative realist demand to radically rethink this relation (or non-relation), and this dependency, is crucial. Whether or not you agree with Harman or Meillassoux, or any of the others, the charge from speculative realism to disciplines and practices of thought more bound to the things themselves—as we discover them in the world—lies precisely in their challenge to correlationism, that is, to our received ways of conceiving of the relation between thought and its objects.

In his contribution to The Speculative Turn, Steven Shaviro outlines the deep similarity between Harman’s and Whitehead’s ontologies, and then glosses his reason for preferring Whitehead’s relational ontology over Harman’s object-oriented one:

I would suggest that the contrast between Harman and Whitehead is basically a difference of style, or of aesthetics. This means that my enjoyment of one of these thinkers’ approaches over the other is finally a matter of taste, and is not subject to conceptual adjudication. And this is appropriate, given that both thinkers privilege aesthetics over both ethics and epistemology.

(288)

In the absence of positive criteria by which we can evaluate the merit of one position over another, the decision we make between them hinges on something that is not conceptual, or logical, or empirical, or rational. We can give reasons for these decisions which fall under any or all of those categories. But at a certain point, as with aesthetic decisions, rationality, even reasonability, must give way to a resonance that is merely felt, a certain this that seems captured by a philosophical claim whose grammatical form (“the world is like x“) might mislead us.

Installing aesthetics as the model for the relation between thought and world would seem to obviate the problem of the correlationist circle (or that’s what’s in the offing), since as Shaviro would have it, the kind of resonance at issue between thought and world on this model would not name a special form of relation between a subject and an object, but all forms of relatedness between entities. Moreover, this model introduces something like a kernel or splinter of the absolute into every relation of thought and object (or, for that matter, any object with any other). It stages, in miniature, in every encounter between a thought and an object, the kind of move Meillassoux makes at the level of ontology. No appeal to any aspect of the appearance of an object will ever be able, in the last instance, to found any claim about that object whatsoever, as it is in itself. Yet such a claim is not groundless, or irrational: you can always give reasons. (Although eventually, you can only just point or gesture: don’t you just see it?) And yet, since there is something fundamentally unaccountable in such a relation, it includes an appeal to something absolute—it is asserted, universally, without being subsumed under a concept.

This very well may look like an attempt to square the correlationist circle even while claiming to be outside it, reprising “postmodern skepticism” by denying that thought ever really grasps its object, staying comfortably within the navel-gazing domain of human culture, all while making rather extravagant appeals to first philosophy and metaphysics. By the same token, speculative realism, from certain angles, takes on an aspect of remarkable hubris, even megalomania, even as it claims to get us beyond self-involved anthropocentrism. Or I may seem to be attempting an accommodationist compromise by articulating a position in critical and cultural theory that isn’t undermined by the critiques of correlationism that found speculative realist philosophy, and from which seemingly antagonistic arguments about first philosophy, ontology, and metaphysics seem not just relevant but urgent. It’s possible that I am. In any event, my goal is to articulate a way in which speculative realism can pose a productive challenge to critical and cultural theory. Whatever the solution or resolution, its challenge consists in thinking in new and radical ways the importance, stakes, and force of speculative thinking within critical thought about art, literature, and culture. At a time like this, with the defunding or outright dissolution of institutional spaces dedicated to the practice of speculation, we need more and better ways to say how and why thought matters.

An open access PDF of The Speculative Turn is available for download on the re.press website.

Scott C. Richmond is Assistant Professor in Film and Media Studies at the Department of English at Wayne State University. He is the author of “‘Dude, That’s Just Wrong’: Mimesis, Identification, Jackass,” forthcoming in World Picture. He is currently at work on a book manuscript on film theory entitled Resonant Perception: Cinema, Phenomenology, Illusion.

Works Cited

Barbaras, Renaud. “Phenomenological Reduction as Critique of Nothingness.” Desire andDistance: Introduction to a Phenomenology of Perception. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002. 44-61. Print.
Cavell, Stanley. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1979. Print.
Harman, Graham. Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. Melbourne: re.press, 2009. Print.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. New York: Routledge Classics, 2002. Print.

September 3, 2013

Globality without Totality in Art Cinema

Daniel Herbert (bio)
University of Michigan
danherb@umich.edu

Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, eds., Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010.

It has been ten years since the publication of Global Hollywood, in which Toby Miller et al. characterize Hollywood not so much as a place but as a fundamentally international organization of cultural labor and resources. I mention this as a way of introducing Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories, edited by Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, for two reasons. First, like many of the contributors to this collection, I take art cinema as purposefully differentiating itself from Hollywood cinema. Global Art Cinema takes a bold step toward understanding art cinema as having the same order of ambition and scope as does its commercial alternative. But in approaching the world’s art cinemas globally, this collection faces different questions than concern Hollywood. Global Hollywood eschews formal analysis or textual interpretation in favor of critical political economy and cultural policy analysis. In claiming globality, Global Art Cinema is also forced to contend with the designation “art,” which evokes a long history of ideas regarding cinema aesthetics. Even if we understand “art cinema” as produced by institutional arrangements and critical discourses, its claims to “art” status typically rely on some aesthetic criteria. Indeed, we might even understand art cinema’s self-conscious formal deviations from Hollywood as part of its institutional differentiation from the mainstream.

“Difference,” then, is key to Global Art Cinema, and this point is forcefully elaborated in the book’s introduction, co-written by Galt and Schoonover. Drawing from the long and variable history of the type, it positions art cinema as an “elastically hybrid category” (3); the authors write that “the lack of strict parameters for art cinema is not just an ambiguity of its critical history, but a central part of its specificity, a positive way of delineating its discursive space” (6). Art cinema is thus a zone of cinematic alterity, which “always perverts the standard categories used to divide up institutions, locations, histories, or spectators” (6-7). Galt and Schoonover designate this internal difference as a productive “impurity” that destabilizes these zones.

This theoretical positioning could make the book appealing to scholars engaged in different kinds of cultural analysis, where there continue to be debates about “difference,” alterity, and hybridity; more particularly, it will interest those who are concerned with cross-cultural exchange. Although the book is centrally about cinema, its terms of discussion are relevant to debates in literature and art history. In positioning global art cinema as internally different or impure, however, Galt and Schoonover also contend with other descriptions of the world’s art cinemas; here I am thinking specifically of World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, edited by Nataša Ďurovičová and Kathleen Newman. In the preface to that volume, Ďurovičová singles out the rhetorical and political valences of the term “transnational,” which she contrasts with the “global.” She writes, “In contradistinction to ‘global,’ a concept bound up with the philosophical category of totality” (ix), the transnational facilitates analysis and understandings of “modalities of geopolitical forms, social relations and … the variant scale on which relations in film history have occurred” (x). And it may be true that “transnational” has had more discursive purchase than “global” in recent scholarship, as scholars have looked for ways to describe the fluidity, mobility, and hybridity of contemporary culture in non-essentializing terms.

However, Galt and Schoonover’s use of the term “global” does not obscure the highly varied terrain or ideological complexity of the world’s art cinemas. Indeed, they make a compelling case for the geopolitical importance of art cinema. They assert that, along with their other impurities, art films are troubled and productively propelled by twin impulses to be different and yet also to be universally legible. Thus the punch line: “art cinema demands that we watch across cultures and see ourselves through foreign eyes” (11). In this formulation, art cinema does not make a claim of totality, but rather displaces us, dislocates us, and marks our lack of unification. Seen this way, global art cinema provides an exciting way to think through the heterogeneity of lived experience, making such art political as much as aesthetic.

With these stakes set, Global Art Cinema makes a substantial contribution to contemporary film scholarship in general and to scholarship about the world’s art cinemas in particular. In addition to the Introduction, it features twenty new essays as well as a brief but characteristically insightful Forward by Dudley Andrew. Although there is some variability in the chapters’ aims and complexity, they are consistently cogent in their arguments and accessibly written. The book is divided into four Parts: 1: Delimiting the Field, which “outlines new shapes and boundaries for art cinema” (21); 2: The Art Cinema Image, which analyses “the art in art cinema” (22); 3: Art Cinema Histories, which complicates “the conventional trajectory of film historiography that installs postwar European cinema as the predominant aesthetic and industrial basis around which other art cinemas develop” (23); and finally 4: Geopolitical Intersections, which undermines the Eurocentrism of conventional descriptions of art cinema. And although the essays within each section contribute to the larger topics, I want to suggest a number of other through-lines that occur in the book, as this volume takes up, continues, and alters a number of conceptual issues that have characterized discourses about art cinema for some time. These include a mobilization of “the auteur” as a critical frame, an attention to film form and style, a contrasting interest in institutional and industrial questions, flirtations with cultural elitism and, by contrast, essays that explicitly seek to undermine the loftiness of “art cinema.”

One of the longstanding features of art cinema has been an alignment with the auteur, and this volume demonstrates an ongoing interest in discussing specific film directors as coherent figures that help organize discourse about film. While some of the essays analyze particular directors as a matter of course, others are more reflective about the ways in which auteurs get created as such. In her contribution to the book, Manishita Dass discusses Ritwik Ghatak, whose career history has generally been overshadowed by Satyajit Ray, but who also has been intermittently “rediscovered” by various critics. Dass explains why this has happened, asserting that Ghatak’s idiosyncratic style, which fuses melodramatic excess with political commentary regarding the partition of India and Pakistan, has made him difficult to comprehend or categorize. Ultimately, for Dass, the case of Ghatak compels us to broaden our notions of “art cinema” by reconfiguring the “global” through a new openness toward the local and the regional. Jihoon Kim’s essay, on the other hand, compares the feature films of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul with his video installation works. Kim asserts that Weerasethakul, like a handful of other artists, creates bridges between these two forms and in fact develops a “cinematic” style of installation art while simultaneously invigorating his features with an installation-inspired sense of time and place.

In looking at these non-European directors, both Dass and Kim demonstrate the expansion of auteurist analysis outside of Europe. Jean Ma takes up the issue of Eurocentrism in her essay, which looks at the films of Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang. Ma asserts that Tsai’s films provide means for reassessing the Eurocentrism of conventional art cinema historiography through the director’s accumulation of references to his previous films and overt dramatizations of cross-cultural encounters. In a somewhat similar vein, Rachel Gabara discusses Abderrahmane Sissako, a director who was born in West Africa, educated in Moscow, resides in France, and yet returns to Africa to make his films there. Gabara asserts that Sissako’s films blur boundaries between “Second” and “Third Cinema,” and that he expands the possibilities for revolutionary films beyond these categories. Dennis Hanlon uses Bolivian director Jorge Sanjinés toward similar ends in his essay, “Travelling Theory, Shots, and Players: Jorge Sanjinés, New Latin American Cinema, and the European Art Film.” Hanlon shows how Sanjinés critiques both Hollywood and European art cinema, and further, deviates from much of what is considered “Third Cinema,” as the director tries to create beauty as well as inspire his viewers toward political liberation. Hanlon argues that in his attempt to create a populist cinema that speaks to Bolivian workers, the director undermines the individualism normally associated with auteurist analysis.

In conventional international cinema scholarship, certain directors have become emblematic of entire national traditions and styles; Ingmar Bergman’s relationship with Swedish cinema is one of the most prominent examples. Patrick Keating contends with this conflation of artist and nationality in his essay, which examines films directed by Emilio Fernádez and Luis Buñuel, both of whom won awards for films they directed in Mexico. These films were both shot by cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa. Keating shows how Figueroa’s “national” style of cinematography was framed differently in a transnational context, in part depending on the director he was working with and also depending on how European critics wanted to frame “Mexican-ness” vis-à-vis world cinema. John David Rhodes’s “Pasolini’s Exquisite Flowers: The ‘Cinema of Poetry’ as a Theory of Art Cinema” likewise reframes an auteurial position. Instead of looking at the director’s films, Rhodes provides a detailed and insightful analysis of one of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s theorizations of film aesthetics. Rhodes makes a compelling case that, first, when Pasolini talks of a “cinema of poetry,” he refers to the corpus that others have designated with the phrase “art cinema.” Second, Rhodes asserts that Pasolini’s characterization of art cinema is implicitly political. Specifically, in Rhodes’s treatment, for Pasolini film style reflects class consciousness. (This assertion strikes me as quite strong, particularly when thinking about Porcile [1969], and the radically different styles that characterize the film’s two narrative lines.)

Rhodes’s essay is connected to a discussion of film form and style that occurs in many of the essays in Global Art Cinema. Of course, the role of formal analysis has been strongly debated in film scholarship for some time. David Bordwell stands as the figurehead of the contemporary “neo-formalist” approach, which vehemently disengages from textual analysis and interpretation. Bordwell was also among the first to designate a frame for analyzing art cinema in general, and, not surprisingly, he drew upon films’ formal features to organize the type. Mark Betz engages Bordwell’s notion of “parametric” cinematic narration, observed in films by such directors as Mizoguchi Kenji and Robert Bresson. Betz re-theorizes and relocates this “tradition” to include a number of directors from South America and the Middle East, among other regions. To get there, Betz closely examines formal, stylistic features of these films, but unlike Bordwell, is adamant that film form only matters to the extent that it is legible to a social public of viewers.

Thus not all formal analysis falls under the “neo-formalist” umbrella, nor does attention to film form necessitate that one disengage from interpretation, be it ideological, psychoanalytic, cultural, or inter-medial. In his essay, Adam Lowenstein suggests textual alignments between Un Chien Andalou (1929) and eXistenZ (1999) in order to show the ways in which both films relate to interactive gaming, specifically through their respective uses of surrealist logics. Angela Dalle Vache also takes up linkages between art cinema and surrealism in her essay “Surrealism in Art and Film: Face and Time.” She argues that, in order to better understand the cinematic techniques of directors Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard, “we must return to the histories and aesthetic concerns of the historic avant-garde” (181).

Combining an analysis of film form with a rigorous engagement with critical theory, Angelo Restivo provides a wonderfully unexpected description of film history in his essay, “From Index to Figure in the European Art Film: The Case of The Conformist.” Restivo argues that the particularly “plastic” images of The Conformist anticipate the odd surfaces of postmodern commercial culture. The film deviates in its politics, however, through its representation of repressed queerness. Along these lines, Maria San Filippo makes a case for the representation of bisexual and/or bi-suggestive spaces in art cinema. Due to the tendency to be ambiguous typical of art cinema more generally, she asserts that such films reveal “how we might undo compulsory monosexuality and unthink heterocentrism” (89). Along a different tack, E. Ann Kaplan explores film style closely in her discussion of affect in cinema to show “how cinema structures screen emotions and look at techniques that produce emotions between embodied spectator and screen” in films by Werner Herzog, Claire Denis, and the Dardenne brothers (285). Kaplan discusses how different forms of postcolonial contact occur in and around these films to assess how these interactions are intertwined with emotion and affect.

Like these essays, Randalle Halle’s chapter looks at film form, but situates the formal conventions of contemporary European art cinema within an institutional frame. After detailing the mechanisms for European state support for media production, Halle delineates three aesthetic strategies of contemporary co-productions. First, “a multicultural logic emerged that consciously sought to undermine national specificity” (306). Then there was a “transnational scenario approach,” where the narrative “seeks to represent directly a quasi-transnational situation” (307). The third type, which began in the mid-1990s, disguises its transnationality by telling national stories from “non-national” perspectives.

Taking up questions of genre and national cinema through another institutional context is Azadeh Farahmand’s “Disentangling the International Festival Circuit: Genre and Iranian Cinema.” Following a deliberation on how the film festival circuits of the world work, she argues that specific film festivals led to the crystallization of two different Iranian film “waves,” which were programmed as such at subsequent festivals. Phil Rosen also focuses on institutional questions in his analysis of Sub-Saharan African cinema. Given the process of decolonization in that part of the world, and given the theoretical currents of that era, Rosen asserts that “African cinema should have emerged as a third cinema” (256). And although many films were aligned with the struggles of decolonization and postcoloniality, they took up formal devices that were more typical of “Second Cinema.” As Rosen indicates, this situation is fascinating because of the financing and exhibition infrastructures that undergird this cinema, which are typically located in Europe.

Moving away from conventional art cinema institutions, Brian Price’s chapter looks at cinema in the most rarified sites of culture, the museum and the gallery. Discussing works like Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho, Price analyses and endorses what he calls “limited access cinema,” where works by fine artists are held outside the circulation of popular media (113). And although Price is conscious of his privileged place in making this argument, his essay raises the issues of elitism and anti-populism that have inflected the history of art cinema. David Andrews’s essay, “Toward an Inclusive, Exclusive Approach to Art Cinema,” takes what appears to be a diametrically opposed view, by looking at art cinema “in a contextual, value-neutral way so that it is truly inclusive, capable of covering all permutations, past and present” (64). He expands upon Steve Neale’s work on art cinema as a set of institutional practices, and advocates that “art cinema” should include the “highbrow” films from any number of other genres, including horror and pornography. In this, he looks at how certain films are considered to be of “high quality” through various paratexts and discourses.

This inclusive logic can be seen in Global Art Cinema itself. One essay that expands the boundaries of art cinema, in terms of formal features and cultural status, is Sharon Hayashi’s “The Fantastic Trajectory of Pink Art Cinema from Stalin to Bush.” Hayashi details the historical conjunctures of two pink films, Secrets Behind the Walls (1965) and The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai (2004), with more conventional art films from the different eras. Rather than emphasizing formal similarities between these films, however, Hayashi shows that both pink films and more highbrow fare have been distributed and exhibited in similar ways. However, one can contrast Hayashi’s inclusion of “low status” films in the realm of art cinema with Timothy Corrigan’s discussion of essay films as a “cinema of ideas” (218). Marking out an insightful genealogy of the genre, Corrigan eloquently makes the case that essay films engage in a dialogic aesthetics, providing “an active intellectual response to the questions and provocations that an unsettled subjectivity directs at its public” (222). In this, the individual and the public come into contact, talk to one another, and think.

The contrast between these two essays demonstrates that Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories is indeed inclusive, ranging (at least) from an institutional history of soft-core pornography to an aesthetic analysis of films that convey ideas. The terms of “art” are certainly expansive here. Although some of the essays are quite focused on their topics, each evaluates how “quality” has been constructed in certain instances. David Andrew’s essay happens to be the most self-consciously broad interrogation of the “art” in art cinema. Inclusive, yes, but is Global Art Cinema global? In the sense put forth by the editors, it certainly is; it figures global art cinema in many of its diverse geographic, institutional, and formal occurrences, making it global but not universal. In strictly geographical terms, the book contains essays about regions that are not considered immediately within the conventional Euro-centrism of “art cinema.” Nevertheless, I wonder how this book’s aims and focus would shift had there been an essay about art cinema directors from the United States, such as David Lynch or Gus van Sant. Is American art cinema “global” in a different way?

But this objection is minor. Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories provides an abundance of thought-provoking essays. Looking at material from a wide variety of locations, the book offers an astoundingly broad snapshot of what has been called “art cinema.” Given that art films have, traditionally, formally deviated from Hollywood films, thus perhaps asking audiences to approach them with a greater sense of intellectual curiosity, it is not surprising that the essays in this volume are enlivened by a high level of sophistication. Looking at the world’s art cinemas has prompted these writers to engage in a world of ideas, which are a pleasure to explore.

Daniel Herbert is an assistant professor in Screen Arts and Cultures at the University of Michigan. His research is devoted to understanding the relationships between media industries, geography, and cultural identities. His essays appear in several collections and journals, including Film Quarterly, Millennium Film Journal, and Quarterly Review of Film and Video.

Works Cited

Ďurovičová, Nataša, and Kathleen Newman, eds. World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2009. Print.
Galt, Rosalind, and Karl Schoonover, eds. Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. Print.
Miller, Toby, et al. Global Hollywood. London: BFI Publishing, 2001. Print.

September 3, 2013

On Owning Foucault

Chloë Taylor (bio)
University of Alberta
chloe.taylor@ualberta.ca

Lynne Huffer, Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory. New York: Columbia UP, 2010.

Lynne Huffer’s new book, Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory, is a provocative contribution to what she calls the “Foucault machine”—that academic mechanism that is constantly pumping out new translations and new readings of the French philosopher. It serendipitously draws attention to Foucault’s first major work, the History of Madness, at a moment when the unabridged volume has finally become available to Anglophone readers for the first time. Foucault’s massive 1961 publication, although rarely read in its complete and original version, is usually acknowledged as an impressive work indicative of the great things that were to come from its author. At the same time, it is frequently criticized as an immature text that romanticizes and essentializes madness, makes an argument in 700 pages that might have been made in 200, unsophisticatedly approaches power as repressive rather than productive, and is marred by historical inaccuracies, drawing on literature and visual art rather than historical archives for its evidence. Foucault makes several autocritiques of the work in his 1973-1974 course lectures, Psychiatric Power, including a reproach of the 1961 book for being an “analysis of representations” (12). Huffer passionately and persuasively defends Foucault’s tome on many of these counts. Through thought-provoking discussions of Nietzsche and Freud, as well as an attentive reading of Foucault’s text, Huffer demonstrates, for instance, that Foucault already has a clear sense of the creative nature of power in 1961, that this work was already influenced by the genealogical Nietzsche, and that it contains a crucial and devastating argument against psychoanalysis that many queer theorists have been remiss to overlook in their cavalier comminglings of Freud and Foucault.

Beyond being an apology for Foucault’s early work, Huffer’s book advances the intriguing argument that the History of Madness is an ethical work, and that it should be read as an overlooked text in queer theory. In this way, Huffer effectively collapses the usual division of Foucault’s work into early-archaeological, middle-genealogical, and late-ethical periods. Huffer also challenges the received view that Foucault’s interest in the erotic came only late in his career. From his earliest major work, Huffer suggests, Foucault provides us with an ethics of eros in what should be seen as a foundational text in queer theory. We are reminded that in the fifties, when Foucault was writing the History of Madness, and in the early sixties when it was published (and on into the seventies), homosexuality was categorized as a mental illness. Homosexuals figure among the many victims of reason and confinement in Foucault’s work, along with prostitutes, libertines, and all the others who defied the ‘reason’ of Enlightenment family values. Foucault once said that each of his books is a “fragment of an autobiography,” and we may read the History of Madness as autobiographical in so far as Foucault was “mad” in a society such as ours if only (but perhaps not only) because he was gay. Huffer is surely right to point out that the History of Madness may be read in part as about the history of the experience of homosexuality and thus in terms of queer theory, although she may also overstate her argument in so far as “madness” and “sexuality” come to seem synonymous in her discussion.

In offering a new reading of the History of Madness as a queer text, Huffer also argues that we should read the History of Sexuality—a work which has already been foundational for queer theory—in a new light. She posits a number of correctives to the usual interpretations of the History of Sexuality. The first set of these correctives has to do with the failure to read the later work through the lens of the earlier work, while a second set has to do with what she sees as misunderstandings of the French text due to poor translations. Huffer suggests that if we understand the History of Madness as providing an ethics of eros, and if we note the continuities between this work and the first volume of the History of Sexuality, we will read the later work as an ethical text as well. Huffer similarly contends that if we appreciate the significance of Foucault’s critique of psychoanalysis in his earlier work, we cannot set aside the more subtle critiques of psychoanalysis in the History of Sexuality, as some queer theorists have done by fusing Foucault’s thought with psychoanalytic theory. Huffer’s reading of the History of Madness thus calls into question current readings of the Foucauldian text that is currently most influential in queer theory.

In the second set of correctives, Huffer argues that the English translation of the History of Sexuality masks the manner in which Foucault had become a “master of irony” by the 1970s, in contrast to his lyrical style in the History of Madness. She suggests that Foucault is playful throughout the later work in ways that Anglophone readers have failed to appreciate. Huffer thus contends that American readers—and queer theorists in particular—take literally passages that were meant by Foucault to be ironic. More specifically, she argues that the central interpretation of the History of Sexuality as charting a historical shift from a juridical-legal control of sexual acts to a disciplinary production of sexual identities projects Anglophone concepts (such as American identity politics) onto a Francophone text to which such notions are alien, and also fails to grasp Foucault’s playful approach to history. Huffer thus rejects the “acts versus identities” reading of the History of Sexuality, arguing that Foucault never wrote about “identities” and was being ironic in the passage from which this reading is drawn. Huffer proposes that queer theorists have taken the History of Sexuality as a foundational text even while thoroughly misunderstanding its signification, and have thus built a discipline upon a foundation which her own reading demolishes. In this way, Huffer’s book aims to undermine the foundation on which queer theory was built even as it offers readers an alternative foundation: the History of Madness.

I admire the originality and boldness of Huffer’s attempt to offer entirely new readings of much commented-upon texts, and feel that she successfully reaches her primary goal: to draw our attention to the History of Madness and to provide an imaginative new reading of it. While Huffer’s discussion of the History of Madness may also persuade us to read Foucault’s later work in new ways, I think that the second set of correctives concerning losses in the translation of the History of Sexuality is less compelling. Huffer relies on her reading of the French original in her arguments about the History of Sexuality, but I would suggest that the French texts do not necessarily support her interpretations. For example, in Chapter Three, Huffer cites an interview in which Foucault says of the first volume of the History of Sexuality, “the mere fact that I’ve played that game [j’ai joué ce jeu-là] excludes for me the possibility of Freud figuring as the radical break, on the basis of which everything else has to be rethought” (qtd. 130). The first part of this sentence has been translated into English as “the mere fact that I’ve adopted this course” rather than “the mere fact that I’ve played that game.” Huffer argues that this translation obscures the fact that for Foucault the writing of the History of Sexuality “was a game” (130), much as she thinks that the English translation of that book more generally disguises the playful, ironic tone of the original French. In fact, however, “jouer le jeu” does not necessarily imply playfulness in French. A common use of the phrase is to suggest conformism: one is obliged or incited to “play the game.” In high school, a French teacher urged me to jouer le jeu because, she told me, I was “shooting myself in the foot” with my rebelliousness against school authorities. “Playing the game” was not comic or playful in this context. The French expressions for “the stakes” (les enjeux) and “what is at stake” (ce qui est en jeu) also involve the word “jeu” (game), but this does not mean that “the stakes” are always ludic. One might refer to “les enjeux de cette élection” (the stakes in this election), for instance, without implying that those stakes (health care, war) are comic and that the politicians are just being silly. What is “at play” could in fact be extremely serious, despite the word “game” in the phrase. “Enjeu” can be translated as “problem” or “issue” as well as “stake,” with no more playful connotations than in the English uses of these terms. The same can be argued about Foucault’s use of the term “les jeux de la verité” (truth games): the use of this expression should not be taken to mean that for Foucault truth games were always ludic. On the contrary, life and death can be—and, in Foucault’s examples, often are—”at play,” at stake or “en jeu” in these “jeux.” In another context—perhaps closer to the one in the interview cited above—I could be asked whether I’ve read Balzac and respond, “Oui, à une certaine époque j’ai joué ce jeu,” in order to say that at a certain time in my life I was engaged in reading Balzac. This phrase would not imply that I think reading Balzac is amusing or that I was just kidding around when I read it, nor does it imply that I am dismissive of Balzac scholarship. In suggesting that Foucault’s reference to “playing this game” in an interview implies that the writing of the History of Sexuality is something that Foucault “toyed” at, Huffer does not attend to the way this phrase functions in actual usage, and eliminates more likely interpretations. This example is typical of Huffer’s readings of French texts.

Beyond the translation of this sentence, Huffer argues that Foucault’s “Anglophone readers tend to miss Sexuality One‘s playful qualities” more generally:

That French-English interpretive gap is in part due to infelicitous translations of Foucault. And if every translation is an approximation, some renderings are more successful than others. The less-than-successful translations of Foucault miss not only differences of vocabulary but also a range of rhetorical locutions, grammatical arrangements, and stylistic forms of doubling such as alliterations….Translations of his work that miss his self-rupturing ironies will also miss important dimensions of those qualities that distinguish Foucault as a thinker.

(130)

Here Huffer risks setting up her interpretation as the master text, making Anglophone readers of Foucault doubt their ability to appreciate Foucault’s writings, or even to grasp what kind of thinker he is, reliant as they are on unsuccessful translations. By suggesting that the texts—and the thinker—are inaccessible to these readers, Huffer sets her interpretations of Foucault beyond challenge by some of her American peers. From here, she has the freedom to claim that passages in the History of Sexuality that contradict her readings are simply ironic in a way that monolingual Anglophone scholars cannot appreciate.

Huffer makes this kind of argument with respect to the passage where, despite his otherwise consistent critiques of the psy-disciplines, Foucault offers Freud some limited praise in the History of Sexuality. As Foucault writes:

the fact remains that in the great family of technologies of sex, which goes so far back into the history of the Christian West, of all those institutions that set out in the nineteenth century to medicalize sex, [psychoanalysis] was the one that, up to the decade of the forties, rigorously opposed the political and institutional effects of the perversion-heredity-degenerescence system.

(qtd. in Huffer 132)

In the chapter in which she cites this passage, Huffer is arguing that Foucault and psychoanalysis are incompatible. She does not want to hear Foucault saying anything positive about psychoanalysis, for which reason she wants to dismiss this passage as not meaning what it appears to mean. In fact, however, Foucault flags passages that he wants to be read ironically. For instance, in describing the repressive hypothesis, he provides indicators that his descriptions are ironic, such as “the story goes,” “it would seem”, “but twilight soon fell on this bright day” (History of Sexuality 3), and “This discourse on modern sexual repression holds up well, owing no doubt to how easy it is to uphold” (5). In contrast, there is nothing to flag the passage on Freud as ironic, and what Foucault says here is factual. Freud did reject the degenerescence theory of perversion in his published writings. This does not mean (as some may want to claim) that Foucault thought psychoanalysis was not all that bad. On the contrary, Foucault is simply exculpating psychoanalysis (up until a certain point in time) of one of the many vices of psychiatry. Psychoanalysis remains plagued by other vices, and this one exculpation does not mean that Foucault thought we should all flock into therapy.

It is true that Foucault is often ironic and that some readers sometimes miss that irony whether they are reading Foucault’s work in English or French. I have taught the History of Sexuality to a class of Francophone and Anglophone students, who read the book in the language they preferred. What I found is that Francophone students reading in French missed Foucault’s irony as often as the Anglophone students reading in English. This was not a problem of translation, but of careless reading. In the passage in question, far from being ironic, it seems to me that Foucault is simply acknowledging a fact about psychoanalysis in its first decades. This acknowledgement does not mean that he is a fan of psychoanalysis or that all his other critiques of psychoanalysis are invalidated. On the contrary, I agree with Huffer that psychoanalysis and Foucault are incompatible, and that this is an astute and significant challenge to queer theory as we know it. Huffer argues that readings of this passage that fail to see it as ironic “decontextualize Foucault’s typically ironic discourse about Freud in Sexuality One. Within the context of Foucault’s thinking and assertions about psychoanalysis over the course of his work, this passage can be viewed as a rhetorical trap where Foucault holds out the tantalizing lure of a Freudian ‘rupture’ that turns out to be no rupture at all” (132). This is a bad argument. Just because Foucault is ironic about Freud elsewhere, it does not follow that he can never say anything serious about Freud, or that if we don’t read irony everywhere that Freud is mentioned we are missing nuances in the French. The original French is not ironic on this point either.

Huffer’s argument about the supposedly ludic nature of the History of Sexuality as a whole is but one way in which she suggests that American readers have misinterpreted Foucault. Huffer also suggests that Americans have failed to realize that the History of Sexuality cannot be about identity politics because this is not a French concept—indeed the French see “identity” as a “specifically American obsession” (70). Huffer argues that the passage which primarily gives rise to the “acts versus identities” reading—the passage ending with: “The sodomite was a temporary aberration [or relapse into heresy or crime]; the homosexual is now a species” (History of Sexuality 43, translation modified)—should be read not as about sexual identities but as about sexual ethics, in light of her own reading of the History of Madness. However, there should be nothing forbidden about expanding Foucault’s argument in order to speak of the production of “sexual identities” simply because Foucault or the French more generally do not speak in these terms. This would effectively mean that we cannot use Foucault’s works as tools for our own political purposes, in a context where identity is part of our political vocabulary. In fact, Foucault precisely stipulated that his works should be used as tools for his readers’ political situations, beyond the uses that he originally imagined for them, or for which he wrote them. As he told Jana Sawicki, he did not want his readers to comment on his genealogies, and even less would he have wanted them to comment on his genealogies through the lens of their speculations on his sex life or their rummaging through the broken-hearted love letters of his youth (as Huffer does in her book). What he wanted was for his readers to write genealogies of their own and to use his genealogies as tools for their own political purposes. This is precisely what happened when Foucault’s writings on psychosexual taxonomization were taken up in the North American context of queer theory. Having looked closely at the original French, the English translation, and Huffer’s discussion of the small errors in punctuation, verb tense, and word choices in the passage cited above, I do not feel that there is any misguided leap taking place here caused by misunderstandings of the French language and culture. Nor do I think that we should be constrained by the original culture and context of Foucault’s writing, prevented from reading these works for our own political purposes.

Huffer also denies with respect to this passage on Freud that Foucault is drawing any historical distinctions, or that he saw the “sodomite” (as someone who had broken a moral or juridical law) as a pre-modern concept, in contrast to the “homosexual” (as a personage, species, character or taxonomical type) as a modern figure. As she writes, “There is nothing in Foucault’s analysis that excludes the possibility of medieval sodomites as ‘personages’ or Renaissance tribades as ‘characters’” (76). Indeed, Huffer denies that Foucault cares about historical chronology at all: “a linear time line is beside the point,” she informs us (78). Her explanation is that Foucault is again just kidding around when he talks about historical dates, and that he was once again being ironic when he says that the homosexual as “species” was created around 1870. Her proof of his irony is that, when Foucault refers to the 1869 article by Westphal that he says marks the beginning of homosexuality as a category, he calls it fameux, an adjective that she notes is heavily ironic. Yet the fact that Foucault uses an ironic adjective to refer to Westphal’s article might just mean that he found it obnoxious—it does not mean that Foucault’s argument in this passage is in jest. Again, from Foucault’s occasional use of irony Huffer generalizes to claim that Foucault is always ironic in The History of Sexuality. It is true that very often in his writings and course lectures Foucault makes a point of choosing a particular text or event more or less randomly as indicative of a historical change, and Westphal’s article may be a case in point, but he is, I believe, simply noting that he might have chosen another text or another event within that approximate period to make the same point.

In addition to raising these possible objections to some of Huffer’s key claims, some readers may find the mixture of biographical and autobiographical material in the long lead-up to the first chapter in “bad taste,” to use Huffer’s own expression (24). These pages mostly focus on information gleaned about Foucault’s erotic life and offer Huffer’s reaction to that information. Readers who do not have a tabloid reader’s interest in Foucault (or in his commentators) may be bothered by the paparazzi approach and the confessional style of these pages, and may want to skip ahead to Chapter One. I wanted to read Huffer’s book because I, too, am mad about Foucault—but I am mad about his ideas. Huffer, however, describes reading biographical information that Foucault wanted to suppress, as well as broken-hearted love letters that he wrote in his twenties (and surely never imagined would be used to interpret the book he was writing at that time) with voyeuristic glee. Her extensive exploration of such texts yields little insight that Foucault’s lectures from the same time period do not provide. In particular, there is nothing in the 1975 interview Huffer quotes that we do not know from Foucault’s contemporary course lectures, Abnormal. The point made (autobiographically) in the interview is that those deemed abnormal are isolated, pathologized, and psychiatrized, an argument he makes at length (non-autobiographically) in these lectures. For Huffer, this interview indicates that Foucault’s book on madness is in fact a monumental but coded volume in queer theory, grounded in Foucault’s sexual experience—a fact that he “confessed” to, immediately regretted, and attempted to suppress, until Huffer came across the “confession” in the archives and revealed it to the world. Huffer explains that what interests her about the interview is that she was reading what she takes to be a “confession” (23)—though we could contest this—from an author who avoided such discursive acts. Huffer is not the first to seek out, and to triumphantly claim to have found, a “confession” from the philosopher who refused confessions (we might also think of Butler’s reading of Herculine Barbin in Gender Trouble): this gesture—this desire—strikes me as violent, but most of all I was simply bored and irritated by the 55 pages of biographical and autobiographical material that preceded any serious discussion of Foucault’s philosophical texts. Perhaps we should read Foucault’s critiques of confession seriously in a way that might make us rethink the writing of confessional introductions such as Huffer’s. As Foucault writes:

One confesses—or is forced to confess. When it is not spontaneous or dictated by some internal imperative, the confession is wrung from a person by violence or threat; it is driven from its hiding place in the soul, or extracted from the body. Since the Middle Ages, torture has accompanied it like a shadow, and supported it when it could go no further: the dark twins. The most defenseless tenderness and the bloodiest of powers have a similar need of confession.

(History of Sexuality 59)

Huffer makes much of her tenderness for Foucault, but perhaps it is this tenderness that has led her to “drive” Foucault’s so-called confession “from its hiding place” in the archives, if not in his body or soul. She does this in a manner that, for Foucault, was not unlike the practices of torture. Not confessing, Foucault is forced to confess. Perhaps, just as Huffer argues that we need to take seriously the critique of psychoanalysis in the History of Madness, we would also do well to take seriously the critique of confession in the History of Sexuality, and indeed, to consider the ways that Foucault’s critique of confession and his critique of psychoanalysis are connected. Taking Foucault’s argument about confession to heart might lead us to resist our own compulsions to confess but, even more importantly, might also cast into question the desire (which is not Huffer’s alone) to extract confessions from those who do not give them freely.

One of the commentators cited on the back of Huffer’s book exclaims: “Lynne Huffer startles our complacent ownership of Foucault. Own him? We’ve hardly read him. Huffer has [and] [s]he shares the results.” I wonder who this “we” is to whom the reviewer refers: who thought we owned him? Who hasn’t read him? I am also afraid that the reviewer expresses Huffer’s own attitude: she writes possessively of “my Foucault”—”the one I am calling mine” (21)—and refers to Foucault’s texts using her own personal titles—Madness and Sexuality One—rather than the actual published titles that the rest of us use, again laying claim through naming to her own personal Foucault. Being the one to whom Foucault has made his long-awaited “confession,” however posthumously and against his will, is perhaps one grounds for this sense of ownership on Huffer’s part. This use of “my” may be innocent enough and even modest, acknowledging that her reading of Foucault is subjective, situated, and biased. What I fear though is that Huffer’s book implies that her Foucault is The Foucault, and that those who know Foucault in translation cannot get him. Huffer’s readings of the History of Sexuality remain at many points contentious, but they do not undercut the significance of her reading of the History of Madness or, for that matter, her important refocusing of our attention upon that text.

Chloë Taylor is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Alberta. She has a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and was a Social Science and Research Council of Canada and Tomlinson postdoctoral fellow at McGill University. Her research interests include twentieth-century French philosophy, philosophy of sexuality, feminist philosophy, philosophy of food and animal ethics. She is the author of The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault (Routledge 2009) and is an editor of the journal Foucault Studies. She is currently working on two book projects, one concerning Foucault, feminism, and sexual crime, and the other concerning Foucault, animal ethics, and the philosophy of food.

Works Cited

Foucault, Michel. The history of sexuality: An introduction. New York: Vintage, 1978.Originally published as La volonté de savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1976. Print.
———. Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France: 1974-1975. New York: Picador, 2004.Originally published as Anormaux: Cours au Collège de France, 1974-1975. Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 1999. Print.
———. Psychiatric power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973-1974. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006. Originally published as Pouvoir psychiatrique: Cours au Collège de France, 1973-1974. Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 2003. Print.

September 3, 2013

Looting the Theory Commons: Hardt and Negri’s Commonwealth

Mark Driscoll (bio)
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
mdriscol@email.unc.edu

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth. Cambridge: Belknap P, 2011.

A few months ago a graduate student came to see me to discuss her section on postcolonial studies for her Ph.D. exams. Talking about the ways the Japanese colonial past continues to affect everyday life in South Korea, she reflected that, “this is what Hardt and Negri call the coloniality of power.” Taken aback, I said that she must have missed a citation or two and lightly scolded her that “coloniality of power” was a phrase post-Eurocentric scholars would identify not with European theory of the sort espoused by Antonio Negri, but with Latin American intellectuals such as the Peruvian Anibal Quijano, the Mexican Enrique Dussel, and the Argentine Walter Mignolo. I found myself surprisingly indignant, explaining that much of Hardt and Negri’s previous work—in their historicist mode of “identifying the tendency”—was generally opposed to the insistence by such Latin American subalternists that the colonial past continues to impact crucial aspects of our contemporary present, albeit on the new political terrain of democratic politics and pluralist institutions. Wondering how she had made such a connection, I went right to my unopened copy of Commonwealth when I got home that night.

As Michael Hardt and I are in a study group together and have mutual friends, I was at first relieved not to find any signs of theory looting after my hasty CSI (crime scene investigation) of Parts I (“Republic”) and II (“Modernity”) of Commonwealth. Indeed, the proximity of my UNC, Chapel Hill to Duke University where Hardt teaches (and where Antonio Negri appears virtually via videoconference on occasion) must have led my graduate student and her peers to assume that much of what is important in contemporary critical theory emanates from nearby Duke, the home of Italian autonomia in the Anglophone world. However, my relief only lasted through that initial speed-read. Returning to Commonwealth a few days later, my eyes stopped at a peculiar phrase, “the coloniality of biopower.” It appears as a section heading several pages into Part II, “Modernity (and the Landscapes of Altermodernity),” and builds on their earlier interpretation and appropriation of Foucault’s notion of biopolitics. What they seem to mean by the neologism “coloniality of biopower” (hereafter, COB) is that modern power works on subordinated populations in ways structurally similar to the ways in which colonial power dominated indigenous peoples. Fair enough, I thought; let’s see how Hardt and Negri distinguish their COB neologism from the source concept in Latin American criticism.

Coloniality of power (COP), together with the correlate notion of “coloniality,” was originally deployed by Anibal Quijano in the early 1990s to designate the apparatuses of hegemonic power that first emerged during the modern period, the era of colonialism, whose long durée stretches from the conquest of the Americas to the present.¹ In the hands of Quijano and Dussel, to name only two, COP consolidates a power matrix that infiltrates the domains of political administration, social production, private life, and general epistemological world-view. The modern forms these practical domains have taken are the nation-state, capitalism, private property, the heterosexist nuclear family, and Eurocentrism. Different from the more familiar strain of Anglophone postcolonial theory, which tends to emphasize the fractured and filtered influence of the colonial past, Latin American COP insists that the material and ideological ciphers of modern colonialism continue to hegemonize the ways in which sexuality, race, labor, and humans’ relation to nature are lived and epistemologically grasped. In this sense, COP refers to a crucial structuring process in the world system that articulates peripheral nation-states in the global South to the modus operandi of the Euro-American North, resulting in a surprising homogeneity of race, gender, and labor hierarchies in North and South. Even in a postcolonial world, power remains colonial when it maintains the force to impose one Euro-American regime onto the rest of the world. Only through the dramatic overthrow of COP by decolonial thought and practice, Latin American subalternists argue, can the epistemic and material violence of coloniality be overcome. H & N’s concept of COB is, at first glance, a decoding of COP followed by a recoding of it through their loose rendering of Foucault, which I will discuss below. However, as I moved twenty pages or so beyond their invocation of “coloniality of biopower,” my CSI sensors came across the source phrase “coloniality of power” on page 103, with no citation. It appears later in the same chapter titled “Altermodernity,” once again without a citation. Somewhat agitated, I rechecked the footnotes in both places and found no citation—the theory commons have been looted.

The substantive “coloniality” appears throughout the two chapters in Commonwealth where coloniality of power/biopower is deployed. Beginning on the page immediately after their introduction of COB, “coloniality” is shorthand for the coloniality of power/biopower, appearing on almost every subsequent page until we reach 103, when coloniality of power is first expropriated and deployed. Although it might seem like reasonable shorthand for the cumbersome COB, it is also used in exactly this way by Latin American theorists, perhaps most significantly by Hardt’s critic and colleague, Walter Mignolo (Local Histories/Global Designs). In other words, when H & N introduce their reformatted notion of COB, it’s difficult not to see it as a kind of camouflage for the looting of Latin American critical thought; the proof of this can be found in the fact that their COB neologism is largely abandoned after the first few pages and replaced by the unsourced phrases COP and “coloniality,” now appropriated as their own theoretical property. This operation was apparently what convinced my graduate student that the phrase originated in the private enclosures of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.

What’s important in this ex/appropriation is that not only the expression, but the substance of Latin American critique has been theoryjacked. Whereas in their earlier work H & N configure colonial forms of power/knowledge as progressively overcome by the real subsumption of postmodern forms of rule, burying coloniality safely in the past without a trace in the present, in Commonwealth forms of coloniality continue to impact power hierarchies. Using a modernity vs. anti-modernity binary opposition, they write in their introduction of COB, “Antimodernity is held under control in the power relation of modernity not only through external forms of subjugation—from the slave master’s lash and the conquistador’s sword to capitalist society’s police and prison—but also and more important through internal mechanisms of subjectification” (77). Whereas in Empire their historicist theory of political rule (where colonial mercantilism is transcended by industrial capitalism, which is subsequently transcended by postmodern capitalism) largely prevents them from seeing the ways in which different and contradictory forms of rule can coexist in the same chronotope, in Commonwealth the plagiarizing of Latin American theory helps them configure the slavemaster’s lash as a homologue of contemporary prison structures, not as a linear, developmental sequence.

The substance of COP becomes an important vehicle to solve the problem of the tendency, the one acknowledged weakness in Italian autonomia. This is particularly intriguing in that Latin American subalternists were among the first to critique the vanguardism and Eurocentrism of Empire, attacking it as the newest version of Eurocentric theory focused exclusively on metropolitan centers while largely ignoring peripheral situations in the global South. The swift reduction of postcolonial theory to Homi Bhabha allows H & N in Empire to construe postcolonial thought tout court not as a critical enterprise more or less concerned with locating colonial-like structures of domination stubbornly residing in democratic, postcolonial situations, but as something both irrelevant in its flawed hermeneutic insistence on reading aspects of the past in the present and, downloading Arif Dirlik’s broadside against the culturalism of Anglophone postcolonial theory, complicit with and supportive of multicultural, postmodern capitalism.

Important Latin American critics have for two decades largely ignored the move to designate novel forms of political, cultural, and economic rule with the signifier “postmodern,” and instead have coined the phrase “modernidad/colonialidad” to underscore the different ways in which the colonial past remains present in contemporary forms of power. Although it remains largely invisible to the dominant strains of Anglophone theory and criticism, for post-Eurocentric scholars and activists “modernity-coloniality” has become an identifiable concept originating in Latin America that works to marginalize much of the Euro-American insistence on the radical newness of contemporary power. Modernity-coloniality research groups appeared in Mexico City, Quito, and in Durham (Duke) and Chapel Hill, North Carolina where Mignolo and the Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar were the co-organizers of a group that I was involved with for several years. Michael Hardt attended at least two of their events.

The politico-theoretical intervention of Latin American modernity-coloniality builds on a variety of Latin American-based theories and practices: liberation theology of the 1960s; debates in Latin American philosophy and social science around ideas of liberation philosophy and autonomous social science centered on people like Dussel, Rodolpho Kusch, and Darcy Ribiero; dependency theory; and, in the US, the Latin American Subaltern Studies group.² Modernity-coloniality researchers also find inspiration in thinking as different as African philosophy, South Asian subaltern studies, and Chicana feminist theory. However, as Escobar writes in a recent piece on the modernity-coloniality program, “its main driving force . . . is a continued reflection on Latin American cultural and political reality, including the subaltern knowledge of exploited and oppressed social groups” (180). In the Duke/UNC group, much of the focus of the modernity-coloniality paradigm so far has been on the problem and potential of indigeneity, thought through the prism of race and place. However, there’s a refreshing absence of codes of the romantic, noble savage in the group’s thinking of indigeneity; the Indian is read in a non-essentialized way, together with other raced and placed subjects in Latin American sites—blacks, whites, creoles, Asians, peasants, and non-human actors. Scholars of modernity-coloniality disregard notions of essence and of the centering of existence—embedded in specific ecological, sociocultural, and economic systems–and instead engage with the singularity of each situation. The ethics of encountering singular situations demands a constantly shifting epistemic framework on the part of the engaged researcher, what Walter Mignolo calls un paradigma otro.

The way I understand this is that modernity-coloniality should neither be configured as a theoretical master narrative (like Marxism, Foucaultianism, or Italian autonomia) that grounds the proper identity of the researcher, nor as the next higher stage in the linear history of modern thought. Rather, the modernity-coloniality framework locates its own inquiry in the historical material specificity of each situation, necessarily at the limit or border of established systems of thought. As un paradigma otro, modernity-coloniality implies the decentering of the identity of the researcher in hir engagement with a specific situation. There can be no approaching a situation from the safe confines of an established system of thought, as each case should produce a singular theoretical code, or novel “other paradigm.” What Mignolo calls “border thinking” is the stretching of an established paradigm to the breaking point as it interacts and intersects with the lively dynamism of an historico-political situation. Understood in this way, the feedback loop inherent in the modernity-coloniality framework mutually constitutes both the situation and the epistemology of the participant researcher, decentering both. Modernity-coloniality is gradually emerging as the main heir to the important Latin American contributions of dependency theory, liberation theology/philosophy, and participatory action research.

Astoundingly–given Michael Hardt’s connection with Latin American modernity-coloniality criticism (a heretical member, Alberto Moreiras, taught in Hardt’s Department of Literature for over a decade; Mignolo is a central person in the humanities at Duke; Escobar is Distinguished University Professor twenty minutes away at UNC, Chapel Hill; and the important Latin American subaltern journal Nepantla was housed at Duke for several years)–the phrase “modernity-coloniality” also appears in Commonwealth with no citation of Quijano, Dussel, or anyone else for that matter. Moreover, its deployment by H & N repeats the same ex/appropriation operation of COP in that they seem to mask the plagiarizing of modernity-coloniality by simply appending an extra signifier to modernity-coloniality—”race.” But before doing so, they want their readers to know they own the copyright on thinking modernity and coloniality together: “Earlier we said that without coloniality there is no modernity, and here we can see that race plays a similarly constitutive role. The three together function as a complex—modernity, coloniality, racism—with each serving as a necessary support for the others” (74). They said that without coloniality there is no modernity; not Mignolo, Dussel, Quijano, or any of the modernity-coloniality research groups. After claiming the modernity–coloniality code as their own private property, H & N don’t use the phrase in its recognizable form as connected by hyphens or dashes. However, as was the case with COP, the pretense is dropped after just a few pages; beginning on page 90 they deploy modernity-coloniality in one of the standard forms used by Latin American critics.³ The theory commons has been looted again.

As post-Eurocentric readers have no doubt already registered, even the recoded “modernity-coloniality-racism” is a standard extrapolation for Latin American critics, especially Walter Mignolo (The Idea of Latin America 88). It’s frustrating that theorists heretofore unwilling to grant much political agency to race (Empire unwittingly supported the “post-race” or “race blind” ideology of white liberal rule in the global North) would claim credit for introducing race into discussions of modernity’s imbrication with colonialism.⁴ However, having said that, couldn’t we step back a moment and, giving them the benefit of the doubt, concede that Latin American modernity-coloniality is sufficiently well-known in Anglophone critical theory circles that there is therefore no need to cite it? Each reader will have to answer this question for him or herself. But even if that were the case—and I, for one, don’t think modernity-coloniality has a salient presence in Euro-US theory circles—we might contrast the absence of citations and acknowledgement in the examples of Latin American critical theory with examples from European male theorists like Badiou, Zizek, and Agamben, where not only the primary sources are cited, but secondary works are acknowledged as well. It seems to me that in these cases of looting the theory commons, H & N implicitly rely on the Eurocentrism of their readers, assuming (and reproducing) ignorance of work done by Latin American subalternists, to pass off COP, coloniality, and modernity/coloniality as their own intellectual property.

I should add here that it’s not totally correct to claim that H & N ignore Latin America-based theorists. They draw attention to Spanish language scholars who use and cite H & N’s work: “a group of contemporary Bolivian scholars . . . use the term ‘multitude-form,’ in contrast to the old class-form, to name the internally differentiated struggles of altermodernity” (110). Praising Latin American scholars, like the Bolivian sociologist Alvaro Garcia Linera, who employ H & N’s own multitude logo—”these contemporary scholars understand it [multitude] as the protagonist of a coherent political project”—allows them to claim that their own theory of the multitude is superior for analyzing the specificity of Latin American society than, say, the insights of the most influential theorist of Latin America’s hybrid sociedad abigarrada, René Zavaleta.

Limiting their discussion of contemporary Latin American theorists to those who deferentially cite them and their work seems to embolden H & N to take even more from Latin American theory. Their argument that the ravages of European modernity granted a productive and positive dynamism to largely static indigenous societies in the (genocidal) Conquista seems homologous with the implicit notion that only Latin American theory that comes into contact with their own theory is worth discussing. If it doesn’t, like the examples offered above it stands a chance of being expropriated. In my opinion, this is what happens when, in a real breakthrough in their thinking in a chapter called “Biopolitical Reason,” they introduce their idea of “multiple ontologies.” Invoking Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, they write that “some contemporary anthropologists, pursuing a path parallel to ours, arrive at a similar conclusion about the role of the common in an alternative, biopolitical rationality, which goes beyond the division between nature and culture” (123). Briefly describing Viveiros de Castro’s work on the Amerindians of the Brazilian Amazon (published first in 1986, followed by an English translation in 1992), H & N write that, distinct from modern philosophy’s positing of “one nature and many cultures, here there is one culture (all are in some sense human) but many natures (occupying different worlds). Viveiros de Castro thus discovers, in contrast to the ‘multiculturalism’ of modern philosophy, an Amerindian ‘multinaturalism’” (123).

Although their admirably wide reading takes them into many different areas, I was struck by this invocation of an obscure Latin American anthropologist whose main fieldwork from the late 1970s and early 1980s would appear to be outside of their intellectual purview. Then a friend reminded me that the young Argentinian anthropologist Mario Blaser was at UNC on a two-year post-doc and had presented his work both at UNC, Chapel Hill (once at a modernity-coloniality group meeting) and at Duke on indigenous groups in Brazil—building explicitly on Viveiros de Castro—and their “relational ontologies.” At that time, Blaser was developing this notion into what he started calling the “multiple ontologies” of the Amerindians in the Amazon. Although Blaser had only published two pieces when he presented his work on Viveiros de Castro at Duke and UNC in 2007 and 2008, he was finishing the draft of his exciting book Storytelling Globalization from the Chaco and Beyond (Duke University Press, 2010). In other words, Blaser’s work was circulating around Duke University for several years, both publicly and privately.

I’m pausing on this because H & N’s apparent expropriation of the concept of multiple ontologies allows them to break from the ontological unicity featured in Empire and Multitude, where humans were basically “the same” on the plane of being/becoming. In contrast, in Commonwealth, living things are construed as ontologically distinct, which helps H & N move beyond the easy critique of identity politics present in their earlier work, where identity was configured as epiphenomenal and derived from one shared ontological substance. The expropriated notion of “multiple ontologies” allows them to take more seriously political claims based on race and sexuality. Although these claims are still largely dismissed by H & N in Commonwealth, they have the potential to contribute to the commons when fixed being (gay, black, etc.) is rethought as transformative becoming. Clearly, H & N dedicated a good deal of time in the last few years to rethinking the ways in which the narrow insistence on identifying the tendency had constrained their thinking on race and sexuality, and I wholeheartedly applaud this. Their new thinking should more sufficiently acknowledge its genesis in the theory commons.

Appropriating the Theory Proper

In addition to expropriating lesser-known theory, Commonwealth privatizes the theory commons in other ways. One way is to disregard the singularity/specificity of a major theme in a European thinker’s body of work and articulate it as part of its own property. Arguably, this happens first with Alain Badiou’s theory of the event. The notions of “event” and “events” are prominent in Commonwealth whereas they are not as prevalent in Empire and Multitude. However, because Badiou has emerged as a central philosophical figure in Anglophone critical thought since the publication of Multitude in 2004, it reads as if H & N feel a fratricidal need to marginalize him and, while doing so, appropriate his most important insight. They accomplish this in a fairly surreptitious way: by concocting a Foucaultian notion of the event, with no textual support from Foucault’s oeuvre. This subsequently allows them to counter Badiou’s conservative “retrospective theory of the event” with the revolutionary “link between freedom and power that Foucault emphasizes from within the event” (60).

What is for me the most significant disregard for the specificity of a thinker’s work, followed by an appropriation, is the text’s treatment of Foucault himself. Foucault’s crucial notion of biopolitics qualifies as what Roland Barthes calls a “signifier without brakes,” in that it never stops at any particular signified. Although “biopolitics” was settling into some kind of consensual understanding in Anglophone critical theory around the time of Empire—the power to create, administer, and maintain (faire vivre) the life of a designated population by modern medicine and other welfare-state institutions, together with killing or leaving for dead (laisser mourir) undesirable populations within the same body politic—, the publication of Foucault’s Naissance de la Biopolitique in French in 2004 and in English in 2008 unsettled the previous understanding of it. Although one of the first invocations in English of biopower appeared in History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 in relation to the Nazi maintenance of the lives (faire vivre) of select populations of Germans while killing Jews (laisser mourir), the 2004 publication of Naissance de la Biopolitique—what appeared to be the most complete elaboration of biopolitics—complicates and opposes the earlier sense. While the Nazis are shown to epitomize the exercise of biopower in the 1975 work, in Feb. 1979 the Nazis are construed as the “field of adversity” against which the biopolitical considerations of German neo-liberals are constructed.

In my reading, the key to understanding this shift is to be found in the lectures Foucault gave in 1977-78, published in English in 2007 as Security, Territory, Population (Driscoll 13-16). There Foucault clearly delineates a new form of “non-disciplinary” power that appears more or less as an historical sequence following disciplinary powers’ intrusion into the very capillaries of human deportment. Opposed to the production of docile bodies and orthopedic subjects in disciplinary rule, non-disciplinary power withdraws from the social field and redirects its attention to populations. But in focusing its attention on populations, biopolitical or non-disciplinary power isn’t concerned with all subjects, only with those subjects it selects for enhancement (faire vivre). Non-disciplinary power is unconcerned about subjects not chosen for enhancement; its mode is a liberal one of laissez faire (Foucault, Security, Territory, Population 66-74) The connection with his musings on biopolitics two years previously in Society Must be Defended lies with the semantic shift from laisser mourir to laissez faire. Foucault returns to thinking about biopolitics two years after the lectures that made up Society, but now the emphasis on killing or “letting groups die off” (laisser mourir) gives way to a prescient insight that emergent neoliberal governmentality is nonchalant with respect to much of individual deportment—it is principled in its laissez faire-ing of subjects. This abandonment of many subjects (and parts of all others) by hegemonic power in the 1978-79 lectures remains to be fully thought through by Foucault scholars.

To approach the problem of the historical configuring of biopolitics, we would do well to recall that much of Foucault’s writing in the 1970s was designed to invert common assumptions of critical thought in Western Europe. His genealogical machine transvalued the understanding of “sexuality,” “power,” and “truth” and released them from their Frankfurt School and Sartrean confines. Why haven’t theorists considered that this is what Foucault is trying to do with his analysis of neoliberalism in Naissance de la Biopolitique? In my reading, neoliberalism isn’t construed as something more horrible than Nazism by Foucault—as some Negri followers have been arguing recently–, but is construed as a regime of biopolitical rule in which some subjects all the time and all subjects some of the time are laissez faired and liberated from the carceral confines of disciplinary power. Although leftist humanities scholars freed from the need for empirical validation frequently invoke the short 1990 essay by Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” to solve the problem of what comes after disciplinary power (one of the reasons why my social scientist friends stop listening at this point), evidence generated from Foucault’s texts points to something very different: as much as he can within the protocols of his genealogical mode, he is affirming aspects of neoliberal governmentality. And why wouldn’t he? He flaunts his anti-Marxism in several places in The Birth of Biopolitics, especially where he has the notorious free market ideologue Gary Becker speak parts of Marx’s theory of value (223-226). Since some of Foucault’s published work in volumes 2 and 3 of the History of Sexuality and the later lectures uncovers mystics, discredited philosophers like the Cynics, minor subjects, and heretical communities committed to experimenting with technologies of the self as far away as possible from hegemonic power centers, why wouldn’t Foucault guardedly affirm a form of power that is, at least in theory, not concerned with policing or disciplining marginal subjects but in laissez faire-ing them?

Whatever the conclusion of this brief engagement with Foucault’s texts, it is a veritable close reading when compared with the extraordinary rendition of Foucault’s notion of biopolitics by Hardt and Negri. Their refusal to engage ethically with the specificity of biopolitics allows them to simply invent an opposition in Foucault between biopower and biopolitics, as in the following passage from Multitude:

earlier we spoke of “biopower” to explain how the current war regime not only threatens us with death but also rules over life, producing and reproducing all aspects of society. Now we will shift from biopower to biopolitical production. . . . Biopower stands above society, transcendent, as a sovereign authority and imposes its order. Biopolitical production, in contrast, is immanent to society and creates social relationships and forms through collaborative forms of labor.
(94-95)

H & N do not justify this distinction with evidence from Foucault, who tends to use biopower and biopolitics interchangeably. What’s happening here?

The designation of contemporary power in Empire follows from Negri’s groundbreaking engagement with Spinoza in the late 1970s and 1980s. Beginning with the Savage Anomaly (1981) and concluding with Insurgencies (1992), Negri expands on the distinction in Spinoza between potentia (creative, revolutionary power) and potestas (dead sovereign authority). Locating this binary in Machiavelli and Hobbes as well, Negri finds a way to designate resistance in Euro-American societies that have been entirely subsumed by capital. Potentia belongs with the ontological power of the multitude, while Empire hobbles along propped up by ontic potestas. H & N’s appropriation of Foucault’s biopolitics may be read as a hipper upgrade of Negri’s old discovery: biopower=potestas while biopolitics=potentia. However, they’ve managed to appropriate as their own intellectual property arguably the most important notion in contemporary critical thought—biopolitics. This is not to deny H & N’s right to engage critically and creatively with contemporary thought, which is something they do very well. However, the engagement with Foucault regarding his notion of biopolitics seems to me to be more about consolidating the philosophical identity of Antonio Negri than it is about freeing thought to do different kinds of political work.

My Own Private Commonwealth

The kind of appropriation of Badiou and Foucault happens to others as well, but in the interest of space, I move on to the last of the three modes of privatizing the theory commons that I find in Commonwealth—excessive self-citation. One of H & N’s major themes in Commonwealth is the overcoming of identity regimes that are inextricably linked to property and that work against the commons. Blacks, queers, the poor, and indigenous people are urged to give up fixed identities as a contribution to the vertiginous utopia of becoming-common. The injunction to sacrifice fixed identity as a necessary step in reclaiming the commons should, at the very least, inspire a demonstration of some version of self-critique by the authors of Commonwealth. Have interactions with other singularities pushed H & N to identify as something radically other? How have conflictual antagonisms with other theorists impelled them to transform their thinking? Surprisingly, I haven’t been able to locate any admission of error or theoretical inadequacy in Multitude or in Commonwealth. In fact, large sections of Multitude are given over to showing how wrong the critics of Empire were, and, in some sense, how wrong the post- 9/11 geopolitical world was for not adhering to their master narrative of it in Empire. Even when their readings of important theoretical or political concepts have changed considerably in the decade spanning Empire and Commonwealth (for example, their dismissal of world systems theory in Empire has changed considerably and for the better in Commonwealth), we don’t get any sense of how this has happened—their thinking has apparently always already evolved. Over and against their call for the transformative process of all identitarian being, we get the strong sense that their being as theorists hasn’t mutated at all—fixed being dominates the flux of becoming in H & N’s own identity formation.

H & N’s concern for their own private intellectual property can be seen in the forty-two self-citations in the footnotes, encompassing a veritable curriculum vitae of Antonio Negri’s work over the last fifteen years. In addition to the many references to their previous work in the body of the text, the forty-two self-citations reveal a kind of panic over identity, linking several of the major points in Commonwealth not to other singularities in a theory multitude, but to themselves. The effect is to fortify their own identities as master theorists and to refuse what they insist everyone else commit to: the flux of becoming other. Apparently, Being is for them and becoming is for everyone else. I add that a book called Commonwealth should not sold by a corporate-university press but should be available (even in sections) online for free.

As I suggest above, one of the strengths of Commonwealth is that it pluralizes ontology, arguing through Viveiros de Castro (or, seemingly, Mario Blaser’s reading of de Castro) that being is multiple. At the level of geopolitics, H & N use Saskia Sassen to theorize the ways in which the local, the national, and the global are constantly interlocked and interchanged. Again, unconcerned with registering how their own thinking has changed on this topic, they posit in different contexts the multiplicity of substance, whether it be natural, political or techno-material. Yet in Commonwealth they refuse to apply this multiplicity of substance to the real of globality. Their insistence on plurality could logically lead them to consider something like the trinity of common/public/private as a similar kind of interlocked substance, where subjectivity would have to be thought as mutually determined by the three social realms. The possibility for political change would have to come at an interstitial limit somewhere within these three realms, as Ernesto Laclau has argued in a somewhat different context. Thought in this way, there would necessarily be more public thinking and acting not determined exclusively by the tendentialized commons. Although I personally like the many interesting claims they make about the commons—and it needs to be stated clearly that they have moved critical thinking forward in terms of the philosophy of the commons—they conclude by restricting their analysis to this realm alone. As someone who works at an increasingly downsized public university, I would say the political struggle right now for leftist professoriat should focus on expanding the shrinking public in the face of local, national, and global attacks on it.⁵ Leaping over the realm of the public into some utopian commons seems like dangerous romanticism from this perspective. Moreover, new activist groups like UK Uncut and US Uncut have had some success in arguing for the centrality of the public over and against the attack on it by privatizing agendas of free market politicians. Some of their success should be attributed to refusing the utopianism of an idealized notion of the common.

To conclude, I’m willing to admit that my sensitivity to the problems in Commonwealth is a sign that this dude is still abiding in the Republic of Property. Yes, I’ve invested in the realm of the private as well as in political commitments to the public and philosophical commitments to the commons. Before I give up my private pleasures and my duties to the public, and give myself over to the de-territorializing flux of becoming-common, I want some honest accounting of the distinct contents of each of the three realms. I hope it is fair to ask the relatively privileged CEOs of contemporary cultural theory like Hardt and Negri to be more reflexive about the pleasures and dangers of all three realms. If they continue to refuse to respect alterity and singularity in the theory commons, I for one am unwilling to link with them in any multitude, even at the level of a theory multitude. At least in the realm of the public, there is still a price to be paid for looting.

Mark Driscoll is an Associate Professor of East Asian Studies at the University of Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of two books on East Asian cultural and intellectual history published with Duke University Press, and has published articles in Social Text, Cultural Studies, and Postcolonial Studies.

I thank Arturo Escobar, Eunice Sahle, Diane Nelson, Michal Osterweil, and Federico Luisetti for helping me think through this piece.

Footnotes

1. See “Colonialidad del poder, cultura y conocimiento en América Latina,” Anuario Mariateguiano 9 (1997): 113-121 and “Coloniality of Power, Ethnocentrism, and Latin America,” NEPANTLA 1.3 (2000): 533-580.

2. Writing even this superficially about modernity-coloniality would have been impossible without conversations with Arturo Escobar and Walter Mignolo.

3. Modernity/coloniality and modernity-coloniality seem to be used interchangeably by Latin American scholars.

4. There is a factual error in my review pertaining to my statement that Walter Mignolo’s work was not cited in Commonwealth. In fact he is cited on pg. 67 of Hardt and Negri’s text. Moreover, Enriqué Dussel is mentioned briefly in the footnotes. This serious mistake qualifies, but does not totally undermine, my insistence that Latin American coloniality/modernity theorists are consistently un- and under-acknowledged in Commonwealth.

[Added January 30, 2012.]

5. On this see Christopher Newfield’s superb intervention.

Works Cited

Driscoll, Mark. Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque: The Living, Dead, and Undead in Japan’s Imperialism, 1895-1945. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. Print.
Escobar, Arturo. “‘World and Knowledges Otherwise’: The Latin American modernity/coloniality Research Program.” Cultural Studies 21.2-3 (2007): 179-210. Print.
Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics. Trans. Graham Burchell. London: Palgrave, 2008. Print.
———. Security, Territory, Population. Trans. Graham Burchell. London: Palgrave, 2007. Print.
Gordon, Lewis. Fanon and the Crisis of European Man. New York: Routledge, 1995. Print.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Multitude: war and democracy in the age of Empire. New York: Penguin Group, 2004. Print.
Laclau, Ernesto. New Reflections on the Revolution of our Time. London: Verso, 1990. Print.
Quijano, Anibal. “Colonialidad del poder, cultura y conocimiento en América Latina.” Anuario Mariateguiano 9 (1997): 113-121. Print.
———. “Coloniality of Power, Ethnocentrism, and Latin America.” NEPANTLA 1.3 (2000): 533-580. Print.
Mignolo. Walter. The Idea of Latin America. Malden: Blackwell, 2005. Print.
———. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000. Print.
Newfield, Christopher. Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2008. Print.

September 3, 2013

Author: Webmaster

Lili Hsieh (bio)National Central University, TaiwanLili.hsieh@gmail.com

I. Dialogic of Love: Weblish Meets Translationese

II. The Alienation of Virtual Nonsense: From Lack to Love

IV. Virtually Social: The Uneven Contrast of Critical Comparativism

V. Conclusion: The Virtual Multitude

Notes

Works Cited

Works Cited

Footnotes

Footnotes

Footnotes

Works Cited

1. Environmental Theater

2. Environmental Perspectives

3. Poet’s Theater

4. The Environmental Construction of Poet’s Theater

The Text / Documentation as Ecosystem

The Stage

The Performers

The Audience/Client

And Criticism (post-event activities of writing and publishing)

5. Set Theory and Environment: What’s Different About Poet’s Theater

Footnotes

Works Cited

Notes

Works Cited

Heidi R. Bean (bio)Bridgewater State Universityheidi.bean@bridgew.edu

Language Poetry, Poet’s Theater, and the Body

Mimesis and Misrecognition in Mirror Play

Dispersive Performance and the Theater of Others

Footnotes

Works Cited

Locating Wellman

A Theater of Landscape

Holes in the Line: Rewriting Sophocles

Intense Absence

Hoole’s Hole7

Fields of Emptiness Filled by Strangeness

Notes

Works Cited

Heidi R. Bean (bio)Bridgewater State Universityheidi.bean@bridgew.edu

Laura Hinton (bio)City College of New Yorklaurahinton12@gmail.com

Notes

Works Cited

Notes

Works Cited

Lissa Skitolsky (bio)Susquehanna Universityskitolsky@susqu.edu

Diane Enns (bio)McMaster Universityennsd@mcmaster.ca

Notes

Works Cited

David Banash (bio)Western Illinois Universityd-banash@wiu.edu

Works Cited

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3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

for Ara Shirinyan

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Lili Hsieh (bio)
National Central University, Taiwan
Lili.hsieh@gmail.com

Heidi R. Bean (bio)
Bridgewater State University
heidi.bean@bridgew.edu

Hoole’s Hole⁷

Heidi R. Bean (bio)
Bridgewater State University
heidi.bean@bridgew.edu

Laura Hinton (bio)
City College of New York
laurahinton12@gmail.com

Lissa Skitolsky (bio)
Susquehanna University
skitolsky@susqu.edu

Diane Enns (bio)
McMaster University
ennsd@mcmaster.ca

David Banash (bio)
Western Illinois University
d-banash@wiu.edu

Judith Goldman (bio)
University of Chicago
jgoldman1@uchicago.edu

David Ensminger (bio)
Lee College
davidae43@hotmail.com