Category: Volume 1 – Number 2 – January 1991

  • Anouncements & Advertisements

     
     

    Every issue of Postmodern Culture will carry notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcments, up to 250 words, free of charge. Advertisements will also be published on an exchange basis. Send anouncements and advertisements to: pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu
     


     

         Journal Announcements:
    
    1)   Sulfur
    2)   Denver Quarterly
    3)   Monographic Review/Revista Monografica
    4)   SubStance--special issue
    5)   College Literature
    6)   differences
    7)   EJournal
    8)   erofile
    9)   Synapse
    10)  Athanor
    11)  Artsnet Review
    12)  EFF News
    
         Symposia, Discussion Groups, Calls for Papers:
    
    13)  Problems of Affirmation in Cultural Theory
    14)  KIDS-91
    15)  MAGAZINE
    16)  Literature, Computers and Writing
    17)  Science and Literature: Beyond Cultural Construction
    18)  Inter-relations Between Mental and Verbal Discourse
    19)  Program of "Postmodernist Postmortem" (Jan. 2, 1991)
    20)  Science, Knowledge, Technology
    
         Other:
    
    21)  Note on UNC Press Fire
    
    1)===============================================================
    
                                  Sulfur
    
    Editor
         Clayton Eshleman
    
    Contributing Editors               Sulfur is Antaeus with a risk.
         Rachel Blau DuPlessis         It has efficacy.  It has
         Michael Palmer                primacy.  It is one of the few
         Eliot Weinberger              magazines that is more than a
                                       receptacle of talent, actually
                                       contributing to the shape of
                                       present day literary
                                       engagement.
                                            --George Butterick
    
    Correspondents
         Charles Bernstein             Sulfur must certainly be the
         James Clifford                most important literary
         Clark Coolidge                magazine which has explored
         Marjorie Perloff              and extended the boundaries of
         Jerome Rothenberg             poetry.  Eshleman has a nose
         Jed Rasula                    for smelling out what is going
         Marjorie Welish               to happen next in the
                                       ceaseless evolution of the
                                       living art.
                                            --James Laughlin
    
    Managing Editor
         Caryl Eshleman                In an era of literary
                                       conservatism and
         Editorial Assistant           sectarianism, the broad
         L. Kay Miller                 commitment of Sulfur to both
                                       literary excellence and a
                                       broad interdisciplinary,
                                       unbought humanistic engagement
                                       with the art of poetry has
                                       been invaluable.  Its critical
                                       articles have been the
                                       sharpest going over the last
                                       several years.
                                            --Gary Snyder
    
    Founded at the California Institute of Technology in 1981, Sulfur
    magazine is now based at Eastern Michigan University.  Funded by
    the National Endowment for the Arts since 1983, and winnter of
    four General Electric Foundation Awards for Younger Writers, it
    is an international magazine of poetry and poetics, archetypal
    psychology, paleolithic imagination, artwork and art criticism,
    translations and archival materials.  Some of our featured
    contributors have been: Artaud, Pound, Golub, Vallejo, Olson,
    Niedecker, Riding, Cesaire, Kitaj, and Hillman.  We appear twice
    a year (April and November) in issues of 250 pages.  Current
    subscription rates:  $13 for 2 issues for individuals ($19 for
    institutions).  Single copies are $8.00.  Numbers 1, 15, 17 and
    19 are only available in complete sets (1-27) at $235.00.
    
    -------------------------------------------------------------
                        (Add $4.00 for mailing outside U.S.A).
    
    NAME________________________________________________________
    
                                       ____$13 for 2 issues
                                            (individuals)
    
    ADDRESS_____________________________________________________
    
    CITY__________________________STATE________ZIP______________
    
                                       ____$19 for 2 issues
                                            (institutions)
    
    Start with ____the most recent issue  ____ issue #____
    
    Mail check to SULFUR, c/o English Department, Eastern Michigan
    Univ., Ypsilanti MI 48197
    (Prepayment is required in U.S. Dollars)
                                       For information: 313/483-9787
    _________________________________________________________________
    
    2)===============================================================
    
                                  DENVER
                                QUARTERLY
                                Announces
                             A SPECIAL ISSUE
                             FOR SPRING 1990
    
                             James Schuyler:
                              a celebration
    
                This illustrated issue will feature essays
                       and memoirs by John Ashbery,
               Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, Douglas Crase,
                             and many others.
    
                Please send me _____copies of the Schuyler
                   issue at $5 each.  Payment enclosed.
    
                __________________________________________
              Name
    
                __________________________________________
              Address
    
                __________________________________________
              City
    
                __________________________________________
              State                         Zip
    
              OR
    
               Please begin my subscription to the Denver
                    Quarterly ($15 per year) with the
                             Schuyler issue.
    
                           UNIVERSITY of DENVER
                 University Park, Denver, Colorado 80208
                                    .
    
                             DENVER QUARTERLY
                          Department of English
    
    3)===============================================================
    
                            Monographic Review
                  ______________________________________
    
                           Revista Monografica
    
               The University of Texas of the Permian Basin
                     Box 8401  Odessa, TX 79762-8301
    
    EDITORS
    
    JANET PEREZ                                   GENARO J. PEREZ
    Texas Tech University              The University of Texas of
                                                the Permian Basin
    
    EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD
    
    Jose Luis Cano                         Rolando Hinojosa-Smith
    Madrid, Spain                         The University of Texas
                                                        at Austin
    
    Manuel Duran                                 Estelle Irizarry
    Yale University                         Georgetown University
    
    David W. Foster                                  Elias Rivers
    Arizona State University                    SUNY, Stony Brook
    
    Juan Goytisolo                               Maria A. Salgado
    Paris, France                    University of North Carolina
                                                   at Chapel Hill
    
                                 Call for
                                  Papers
                          Number 7 (1991) of the
              MONOGRAPHIC REVIEW/REVISTA MONOGRAFICA will be
              devoted to Hispanic Subterranean Literatures:
    
                             *The Comics
    
                             *The Erotic
    
              Papers of twelve to fifteen pages should be prepared
              in accord with the MLA Style and submitted before
                           31 August 1991 to:
    
                        Genaro J. Perez, Editor
                        Monographic Review
                        Dept. Literature & Spanish
                        University of Texas/Permian Basin
                        Odessa, Texas 79762-8301
    
    The MONOGRAPHIC REVIEW/REVISTA MONOGRAFICA, a professional
    journal of criticism in the Hispanic Literatures, will be
    monographic in character in that each number will be devoted to a
    single theme, major writer, or specific literary phenomenon.  The
    first number comprises essays on Hispanic Children's Literature;
    the second treats the Literature of Exile and Expatriation.
    Future numbers will cover such subjects as women writers,
    Hispanic writers in the United States, the oral tradition in
    Hispanic literature, especially in the United States, Spanish
    science fiction and literature of fantasy, and many other areas
    of relative scholarly neglect.  Initially, it will appear on an
    annual basis with occasional special numbers.
    
    Vol.   I (1985) HISPANIC CHILDREN'S LITERATURE
    Vol.  II (1986) SPANISH LITERATURE OF EXILE
    Vol. III (1987) HISPANIC SCIENCE FICTION/FANTASY AND THRILLER
    Vol.  IV (1988) HISPANIC SHORT STORY
    Vol.   V (1989) HISPANISM IN NON-HISPANIC COUNTRIES
    Vol.  VI (1990) HISPANIC WOMEN POETS
    
    4)===============================================================
    
    ANNOUNCING A SPECIAL ISSUE OF _SUBSTANCE_ ON THOUGHT AND NOVATION
    
    What's new?  How do we know that something is new?  How is
    "newness" constituted? These are the questions asked by the guest
    editor of SUBSTANCE 62/63, the Philosopher and Historian of
    Science Judith Schlanger in a special issue on "Thought and
    Novation."  The answers offered by historians, sociologists,
    biologists, philosophers, literary critics, etc. in this 220p
    volume are wide-ranging and provoking.  The issue includes:
    
    Rene Girard: Innovation and Repetition
    Daniel Lindenberg: France 1940-1990: How to Break with Evil?
    Saul Friedlander: The End of Innovation?  Contemporary Historical
         Consciousness and the End of History
    Jacques Schlanger: Ideas are Events
    Benny Shannon: Novelty in Thinking
    Henri Atlan: Creativity in Nature and in the Mind: Novelty in
         Biology and in the Biologist's Brain
    Yehuda Elkana: Creativity and Democratization in Science
    Isabelle Stengers: The deceptions of Power--Psychoanalysis and
         Hypnosis
    S. van der Leeuw: Archaeology, Material Culture and Innovation
    Jean-Pierre Dupuy: Deconstruction and the Liberal Order
    Elisheva Rosen: Innovation and its Reception
    Francis Goyet: Rhetoric and Novation
    Ruth Amossy: On Commonplace Knowledge and Innovation
    Michel Pierssens: Novation Astray
    Judith Schlanger: The New, the Different, and the Very Old
    Pierre Pachet: Self-portrait of a Conservative
    Alexis Philonenko: Reason and Writing.
    
    Order from:
    SubStance
    Journal Division
    University of Wisconsin Press
    114 N. Murray
    Madison, WI 53715
    USA
    
    One year subscription (3 issues): $19.00 (Individuals); $65.00
    (Institutions); $14.00 (Students).
    Back issues: $7.00.  This special issue: $10.00
    
    For more information:
    Michel Pierssens
    R36254@UQAM.BITNET or PIERSENS@cc.umontreal.ca
    or: Sydney Levy
    FI00LEVY@UCSBUXA.BITNET or FI00LEVY@ucsbuxa.ucsb.edu
    
    5)===============================================================
    
                            COLLEGE LITERATURE
                              544 Main Hall
                         West Chester University
                         West Chester, PA  19383
                              (215) 436-2901
    
         A triannual journal of scholarly criticism, College
    Literature focuses on the theory and practice of literature--both
    what is and what should be taught in the college literature
    classroom.  It encourages a variety of approaches (including
    political, feminist, interdisciplinary, and poststructuralist) to
    a variety of literatures.  In addition to the February general
    issues, current and forthcoming special issues include "The
    Politics of Teaching Literatures" (June/October 1990), "Literary
    Theory in the Classroom" (June 1991), "Teaching Minority
    Literatures" (October 1991), and "Teaching Commonwealth or
    Postcolonial Literatures" (June 1992).
         Submissions--in triplicate--should be 5000-7500 words
    (articles) or 2000-4000 words (notes and comments), and should
    use internal citations, following current MLA style.  College
    Literature encourages the submission of papers on disk written
    with Nota Bene or in any other IBM-compatible ASCII format; hard
    copy and SASE must accompany such submissions.  The deadline for
    submitting an article intended for a special issue is eight
    months before the cover date.
         Subscription rates within the US are $15/yr or $27/2yrs for
    individuals, $18/yr or $33/2yrs for institutions; single copies
    $7 (double issues $14).  Outside the US, please add $5/yr for
    surface mail or $10/yr airmail.
    
    6)===============================================================
    
                          d i f f e r e n c e s
    
                  A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies
    
                  Edited by Naomi Schor & Elizabeth Weed
    
    Vol. 1, No. 1                      Vol. 2, No. 1
    LIFE AND DEATH IN SEXUALITY:       SEXUALITY IN GREEK AND ROMAN
    REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGIES AND      SOCIETY
    AIDS                               Edited by David Konstan and
    With essays by Donna Haraway,      Martha Nussbaum
    Linda Singer, Janice Doane &       With essays by David M.
    Devon Hodges, Simon Watney,        Halperin, John J. Winkler,
    Ana Maria Alonso & Maria           Martha Nussbaum, John Boswell,
    Teresa Koreck, Avital Ronell,      Eva Stehle, Adele Scafuro,
    and Rosi Braidotti.  Price:        Georgia Nugent, and David
    $11.75                             Konstan.  Price: $11.75
    
    Vol. 1, No. 2                      Vol. 2, No. 2
    THE ESSENTIAL DIFFERENCE:          With essays by Nancy
    ANOTHER LOOK AT ESSENTIALISM       Armstrong, Karen Newman, Tania
    With essays by Teresa de           Modleski, Cathy Griggers,
    Lauretis, Naomi Schor, Luce        Judith Butler, and R.
    Irigaray, Diana Fuss, Robert       Radhakrishnan.  Price: $11.75
    Scholes, Leslie Wahl Rabine,
    and Gayatri Spivak with Ellen      Vol. 2, No. 3
    Rooney.  Price: $11.75             FEMINISM IN THE INSTITUTION
                                       With essays by Michele Le
    Vol. 1, No. 3                      Doeuff, Ellen Rooney, Rey
    MALE SUBJECTIVITY                  Chow, Rosi Braidotti with
    With Essays by Kaja Silverman,     Christien Franken, and
    Christopher Newfield, Paul         Maurizia Boscagli.  Price:
    Smith, George P. Cunningham,       $11.75
    Marjorie Garber, and Carole-
    Anne Tyler.  Price: $11.75
    
    Order from
    
                   INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
    
    Tenth & Morton Streets * Bloomington, IN  47405 * 812-855-9449
    Major credit cards accepted * Subscriptions available at $28 for
    individuals and $48 for institutions (three issues).
    
    7)===============================================================
    
                                _EJournal_
    
            _EJournal_ is an all-electronic, Bitnet/Internet
    distributed, peer-reviewed, academic periodical.  We are
    particularly interested in theory and praxis surrounding the
    creation, transmission, storage, interpretation, alteration and
    replication of electronic text.  We are also interested in the
    broader social, psychological, literary, economic and pedagogical
    implications of computer-mediated networks.  Texts that address
    virtually any subject across this broad spectrum will be given
    thoughtful consideration.
            Members of the electronic-network community and others
    interested in it make up a large portion of our audience.
    Therefore we would be interested (for example) in essays about
    whether or not anyone should own a communication that has been
    shared electronically, about the pragmatics of cataloguing and
    indexing electronic publications, about net-based collaborative
    learning, about artful uses of hypertext, about the challenges
    that distance learning may offer to residential campuses, about
    the role of The Matrix in cultural history and Utopian polemic,
    about digitally recorded aleatoric fiction, about the
    significance of resemblances between the electronic matrix and
    neural systems, . . . and so forth.
            The journal's essays will be available free to
    Bitnet/Internet addresses.  Recipients may make paper copies;
    _EJournal_ will provide authenticated paper copy from our
    read-only archive for use by academic deans or other supervisors.
    Individual essays, reviews, stories--texts--sent to us will be
    disseminated to subscribers as soon as they have been through the
    editorial process, which will also be "paperless."  We expect to
    offer access through libraries to our electronic Contents,
    Abstracts, and Keywords, and to be indexed and abstracted in
    appropriate places.
            _EJournal_ is now soliciting essays for possible
    publication.  We will be happy to consider reviews, letters, and
    (eventually) annotations that ought to accompany texts we have
    already published.  We would be happy to add interested
    specialists and generalists to our panel of consulting editors.
            Please send essays for review, and inquiries, to
    
            ejournal@albnyvms.bitnet
            ejournal@rachel.albany.edu
    
            Ted Jennings, Editor, _EJournal_
            Department of English
            University at Albany, State University of New York
    
            Ron Bangel, Managing Editor (acting)
            University at Albany, SUNY
    
    Board of Advisors:
    
            Dick Lanham, University of California at Los Angeles
            Ann Okerson, Association of Research Libraries
            Joe Raben, City University of New York
            Bob Scholes, Brown University
            Harry Whitaker, University of Quebec at Montreal
    
    -----------------------------------------------------------------
    Consulting Editors      November 1990
    ------------------      -------------           --------------
    ahrens@hartford         John Ahrens             Hartford
    ap01@liverpool          Stephen Clark           Liverpool
    crone@cua               Tom Crone               Catholic U
    djb85@albnyvms          Don Byrd                Albany
    donaldson@loyvax        Randall Donaldson       Loyola College
    ds001451@ndsuvm1        Ray Wheeler             North Dakota
    eng006@unomal           Marvin Peterson         Nebraska - Omaha
    erdt@vuvaxcom           Terry Erdt              Villanova
    fac_aska@jmuvax1        Arnie Kahn              James Madison
    folger@yktvmv           Davis Foulger           IBM - Watson
                                                    Research Center
    george@gacvax1          G. N. Georgacarakos     Gustavus Adolphus
    gms@psuvm               Gerry Santoro           Pennsylvania
                                                    State University
    jtsgsh@ritvax           John Sanders            Rochester
                                                    Institute of
                                                    Technology
    nrcgsh@ritvax           Norm Coombs             Rochester
                                                    Institute
                                                    of Technology
    pmsgsl@ritvax           Patrick M. Scanlon      Rochester
                                                    Institute
                                                    of Technology
    r0731@csuohio           Nelson Pole             Cleveland State
    ryle@urvax              Martin Ryle             Richmond
    twbatson@gallua         Trent Batson            Gallaudet
    usercoop@ualtamts       Wes Cooper              Alberta
    userlcbk@umichum        Bill Condon             Michigan
    
    8)===============================================================
    
                                 ANNOUNCING
           A NEW RESEARCH TOOL FOR FRENCH AND ITALIAN STUDIES,
    
                      ******************************
                     ********************************
                    ***___ ___  ___  ___        __ ***
                   *** I__ I__I I  I I__ I I   I_   ***
                  ***  I__ I  \ I__I I   I I__ I__ ***
                 ***                              ***
                  *********************************
                   ** ELECTRONIC
                    ** REVIEWS
                     ** OF
                      ** FRENCH &
                       ** ITALIAN
                        ** LITERARY
                         ** ESSAYS *****************
                          ************************
    
    A free electronic newsletter accessible to all on Bitnet
    and Internet.
    ___________________________________________________________
    
    _EROFILE_ takes advantage of the rapidity of electronic mail
    distribution to provide timely reviews of the latest books
    in the following areas associated with French and Italian
    studies:
    
         - Literary Criticism
         - Cultural Studies
         - Film Studies
         - Pedagogy
         - Software
    ___________________________________________________________
    
    _EROFILE_ will disseminate a collection of solicited and
    unsolicited reviews and therefore welcomes submissions from
    QUALIFIED reviewers.  Publishers of scholarly journals in
    appropriate fields may also wish to consider sending backlogged
    reviews to _EROFILE_ for early electronic publication.  The
    well-known interdisciplinary journal, SUBSTANCE, has already
    shown interest in such an arrangement.
    
    _EROFILE_ will also provide an open forum for comments on
    previously published reviews.  In this way, we hope to create a
    on-going dialogue on a variety of issues in the field.
    Consequently, our editorial policy will have two aspects: we will
    reserve the right to edit reviews, while promising to publish
    letters to the editor as they arrive.  In much the same spirit as
    the _HUMANIST_ listserver then, we trust that letters to the
    editor will not abuse our forum by including inappropriately
    offensive or unnecessarily familiar language.
    ___________________________________________________________
    
    We also welcome recommendations of qualified reviewers such as
    graduate students who have formed a specialization on any topic
    in the above areas.
    ___________________________________________________________
    
    Please send submissions, subscription requests, and questions on
    policy to the editors of _EROFILE_:
    
                  EROFILE@ucsbuxa.bitnet
                           or
                  EROFILE@ucsbuxa.ucsb.edu
    
    Submissions should in all cases be forwarded by e-mail or on
    diskette, preferably in the form of an ASCII file.
    ___________________________________________________________
    
    Nota bene:
    
    Those who do not yet share the privilege of Bitnet access will
    miss out on a great resource.  Please tell your colleagues in
    French and Italian to get on-line with the times and to obtain a
    Bitnet or Internet account.
    ___________________________________________________________
    
    editors:
                      Charles La Via
                      Jonathan Walsh
                      Department of French & Italian
                      University of California
                      Santa Barbara, CA 93106
    
    9)===============================================================
    
                                SYNAPSE
    
    _Synapse_ is a new electronic literary quarterly published by
    Connected Education, Inc.  The journal seeks poetry, fiction,
    and criticism on any cultural issue, from new and established
    writers.  _Synapse_ will be issued on MS-DOS and Macintosh
    diskettes, and over networks.  Subscriptions: $15/year.
    (Please state format preference.)  Manuscripts should be
    submitted in ASCII format (with return postage) on MS-DOS or
    Macintosh diskettes to William Dubie, Editor, _Synapse_,
    150A Ayer Road, Shirley, Massachusetts  01464.  Also, submissions
    can be sent to CompuServe account 71571,3323.  Payment is in
    copies.
    
    10)==============================================================
    
                         ATHANOR (a new journal)
    
    Directors:  Augusto Ponzio and Claude Gandelman.
    Published by Bari University (Universita degli Studi di
     Bari-Istituto di Filosofia del Linguaggio).
    
    Address 6, via Garruba, 70100 BARI, Itali.
    
    Price:  35,000 Italian Lire or their equivalent in dollars for
    one annual issue sent by airmail to be paid to
    
    A.Longo Editore, Via Paolo Costa 33, 48100 Ravenna.
    Postal Account 14226484.
    
    ATHANOR is published in three languages: French, Italian, English
    and we are always looking for contributions.  The first issue on
    "The Work and its Meaning" has already appeared.  The next issue
    is on "Art and Sacrifice/Art as sacrific."
    
    The contents of the issue on "The Work and its Meaning" were as
    follows:
    
    Emmanuel Levinas:   The work and its meaning.
    Claude Gandelman:   Le corps comme "signe zero."
    Omar Calabrese:     Il senso nascosto dell'opera.
    Guy Scarpetta:      Warhol ou les ruses du sens.
    Angela Biancofiore: L'opera e il metodo.
    Graham Douglas:     Signification, metaphor and molecules.
    Alain J.J. Cohen:   Du narcisssisme electronique.
    Rachele Chiurco:    Grammatiche dell'immaginazione.
    Carlo Pasi:         Il senso della fine.
    Nasos Vagenas:      De Profundis di Rodokanakis.
    Luigi di Sirro:     Grafie.
    Luigi Ruggiero:     Del movimento e della flessibilita.
    Dialogo con Iannis Kounellis.
    
    The next issue on "Sacrifice" contains texts by Gandelman, Naomi
    Greene (UCSBarbara.CA) on the cinema of Pasolini.  Mikhal
    Friedman
    on "Sacrifice" by Tarkovski.  Marc LeBot on "Modern art as
    sacrificial ritual."  Georges Roque on modern art and Louis Marin
    on baroque painting... and many others...
    
    11)==============================================================
    
     0101010101010101010             E-mail
              A                      pegasus     suephil
       101010101010101               APC     peg:suephil
              R                      UUCP suephil@peg.pegasus.oz.au
         01010101010                 DIALCOM  (DE3PEG)suephil!
              T
           1010101
              S
             010                      Snail Mail
              N                      PO Box 429
           1010101                   EASTWOOD  5063
              E                      South AUSTRALIA
         01010101010
              T
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     E L E C T R O N I C             - - - - - - - - - - - -
        N E T W O R K                Creative Communication .
    
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    An Australian magazine dedicated to Comptemporary Cross
    Cultural, Arts & Electronic Networking issues.
    ----------------------------------------------------------------
              December 9, 1990           Volume 2 : Number 2
    ----------------------------------------------------------------
    
    EDITORS: PHILLIP BANNIGAN, SUSAN HARRIS
    
    EDITORIAL POLICY
    ----------------
    ARTSNET REVIEW is a bimonthly magazine.
    
    This magazine is free to be copied.
    
    To get on our mailing list just email to our above address
    [Note: the UUCP address is recommended for those on Bitnet and
    Internet--eds.]
    
    Contributions on any arts issues welcome
    
    Contributors to supply for inclusion with their article an
    introduction of themselves, including information on their
    background / discipline/s.
    
    12)==============================================================
    
    ************************************************************
    ***           EFF News #1.00  (December 10, 1990)        ***
    ***       The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Inc.       ***
    ***                        Welcome                       ***
    ************************************************************
    
    Editors:  Mitch Kapor  (mkapor@eff.org)
              Mike Godwin  (mnemonic@eff.org)
    
    The EFF has been established to help civilize the electronic
    frontier; to make it truly useful and beneficial to everyone, not
    just an elite; and to do this in a way that is in keeping with
    our society's highest traditions of the free and open flow of
    information and communication.
    
    EFF News will present news, information, and discussion about the
    world of computer-based communications media that constitute the
    electronic frontier.  It will cover issues such as freedom of
    speech in digital media, privacy rights, censorship, standards of
    responsibility for users and operators of computer systems,
    policy issues such as the development of national information
    infrastructure, and intellectual property.
    
    Views of individual authors represent their own opinions, not
    necessarily those of the EFF.
    
    ************************************************************
    ***         EFF News #1.00: Table of Contents            ***
    ************************************************************
    
    Article 1: Who's Doing What at the EFF
    
    Article 2: EFF Current Activities - Fall 1990
    
    Article 3: Contributing to the EFF
    
    Article 4: CPSR Computing and Civil Liberties Project
              (Marc Rotenberg, Computer Professionals for Social
               Responsibility)
    
    Article 5: Why Defend Hackers? (Mitch Kapor)
    
    Article 6: The Lessons of the Prodigy Controversy
    
    Article 7: How Prosecutors Misrepresented the Atlanta Hackers
    
                           --------------------
    
    REPRINT PERMISSION GRANTED: Material in EFF News may be reprinted
    if you cite the source.  Where an individual author has asserted
    copyright in an article, please contact her directly for
    permission to reproduce.
    
    E-mail subscription requests: effnews-request@eff.org
    Editorial submissions: effnews@eff.org
    
    We can also be reached at:
    
    Electronic Frontier Foundation
    155 Second St.
    Cambridge, MA 02141
    (617) 864-0665
    (617) 864-0866 (fax)
    
    USENET readers are encouraged to read this publication in the
    moderated newsgroup comp.org.eff.news.  Unmoderated discussion of
    topics discussed here is found in comp.org.eff.talk.
    
    This publication is also distributed to members of the mailing
    list eff@well.sf.ca.us.
    
    13)==============================================================
    
                           Seminar/Symposium on
                Problems of Affirmation in Cultural Theory
                            October 4-6, 1991
    
    The Society for Critical Exchange will sponsor an intensive
    seminar/symposium on "Problems of Affirmation in Cultural
    Theory,"  Oct. 4-6, at Case Western Reserve University in
    Cleveland, Ohio.  Persons interested in participating should
    contact either David Downing (English, Indiana Univ. of
    Pennsylvania) or James Sosnoski (English, Miami Univ. of Ohio).
    
    14)==============================================================
    
                         ANNOUNCING KIDS-91
    
    Schools, teachers, parents, and others interested in children
    in the age group 10 - 15 are invited to help out with KIDS-91.
    The project aims at having children participate in a global
    dialog from now and until May 12 1991.  Some of it will be
    electronic--for those who have access to modems and computers
    --some of it will be by mail or in other forms.
    
    We want to collect the childrens' responses to these questions:
    
      1) Who am I?
      2) What do I want to be when I grow up?
      3) How do I want the world to be better when I grow up?
      4) What can I do NOW to help this come true?
    
    We want them to draw or in other creative ways "illustrate"
    themselves in their future role/world.
    
    The responses will be turned into an exhibition that will be
    sent back to the children of the world.
    
    By mid-January 1991 responses have been received from Japan,
    Australia, India, Israel, Norway, Finland, USSR, Latvia, the
    United Kingdom, Czechoslovakia, Spain, Argentina, Brazil, the
    United States and Canada.  The responses are available for
    educators and others through the archives of the discussion
    list KIDS-91@vm1.nodak.edu.  There is also a discussion list
    for participating kids.
    
    To subscribe to the discussion list, send e-mail to
    listserv@vm1.nodak.edu (or LISTSERV@NDSUVM1 on BITNET) with the
    BODY or TEXT of the message containing the command
    
    SUB KIDS-91 Yourfirstname Yourlastname
    
    For more information, contact Odd de Presno, Project Director at
       opresno@ulrik.uio.no
    
    15)==============================================================
    
                              MAGAZINE
    
                  An Electronic Hotline/Conference
    
                            moderated by
    
                     Professor David Abrahamson
              New York University Center for Publishing
    
    Interested individuals are invited to participate in an
    electronic conference, MAGAZINE Hotline, addressing the
    journalistic/communicative/economic/technological issues related
    to magazine publishing.  Though MAGAZINE's primary focus is
    journalistic, it also addresses other magazine-publishing matters
    of economic (management, marketing, circulation, production,
    research), technological, historical and social importance. In
    sum, MAGAZINE explores the history, current state and future
    prospects of the American Magazine.  Among the topics included
    are: magazine editorial trends and practices; journalistic and
    management norms in magazine publishing; evolving magazine
    technologies (those currently in use and new ones envisioned);
    the economics of magazine publishing, including the economic
    factors influencing magazine content; the history of magazines;
    the role of magazines in social development; educational issues
    related to teaching magazine journalism; "laboratory" magazine-
    project concepts and resources; and studies and research
    exploring the issues above.
    
    The conference is edited and moderated by Professor David
    Abrahamson of New York University's Center for Publishing, where
    he teaches the editorial segments of the NYU Management Institute
    graduate Diploma Course in Magazine Publishing and the Executive
    Seminar in Magazine Editorial Management.  Prof. Abrahamson is
    also the president of Plexus Research/Editorial Consultants, a
    management consulting firm, and the author of two teaching texts,
    "The Magazine Writing Workbook" and "The Magazine Editing
    Workbook."
    
    The MAGAZINE Hotline began discussion on October 1, 1990.
    Magazine journalism educators, scholars and students, magazine
    publishing professionals and other individuals interested in
    magazine issues are encouraged to participate.  The MAGAZINE
    Hotline is sponsored by New York University's Center for
    Publishing and Comserve (the online information and discussion
    service for the communication discipline).
    
    Those interested in participating in MAGAZINE can subscribe by
    either:
       (a) sending an interactive message to COMSERVE@RPIECS with the
              following command:
    
              Subscribe Magazine First_Name Last_Name
    
              (Example:)  Subscribe Magazine Mary Smith
    
       (b) sending this same command (with no other punctuation or
              words) in the message portion of an electronic mail
              message addressed to either:
    
              COMSERVE@RPIECS      (Bitnet)
              COMSERVE@VM.ECS.RPI.EDU (Internet)
    
    The moderator of the MAGAZINE Hotline, David Abrahamson, may be
    contacted at:
    
    INTERNET: abrahamson@acfcluster.nyu.edu
    BITNET: abrahamson@nyuacf.bitnet
    VOICE: (212) 689-5446
    FAX: (212) 689-1088
    MCI-MAIL: 3567652@mcimail.com
    USPS: 165 east 32, ny ny 10016
    
    For more information about Comserve, send an interactive message
    or electronic mail message to COMSERVE@RPIECS containing the word
    "help" (without quotation marks).
    
    For other questions about how to subscribe to the Hotline, send
    an electronic mail message to Comserve's editors at
    SUPPORT@RPIECS or write to: Comserve, Dept. of Language,
    Literature & Communication, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute,
    Troy, NY 12180.
    
    16)==============================================================
    
                              CALL FOR PAPERS
    
    LITERATURE, COMPUTERS AND WRITING: THE ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING IN
              THE HIGH SCHOOL AND COLLEGE ENGLISH CLASSROOM
    
                               April 19,1991
    
    The fourth annual Computers and English Conference for high
    school and college teachers of writing
    
                    Sponsored by the Program in English
                    New York Institute of Technology
    
    The 1991 conference on Literature, Computers and Writing will
    focus on the shared challenges high school and college English
    teachers face teaching literature and composition in a computer
    environment.
    
    The conference has two primary lines of inquiry:
    
      * how are the English studies canon and curriculum changing in
    response to computerized learning?
    
      * how should we design projects for collaborative learning in
    literature, computers and writing between high schools or between
    high schools and colleges to share pedagogical resources and
    methods?
    
    In addition to keynote addresses the conference supports
    presentations which can be either demonstrations of exercises (no
    longer than five minutes) that work well in the English classroom
    or arguments (ten to fifteen minutes long) that explain or
    justify a philosophy or method for a particular classroom
    practice.  Please submit a brief abstract detailing your
    demonstration or argument.  Panel discussions are also welcome.
    Be sure to include your name, high school or college affiliation,
    address, and daytime phone number.
    
    Suggested Topics:
    
      1.  How can computers develop more active readers of
              literature?
      2.  How can teaching writing teach literature?
      3.  How can we use computers to teach literary genre or
              metaphor?
      4.  How can we use computers to connect writing to literature?
      5.  How do computers widen or narrow the concept of literature?
      6.  How can we use computers to teach the role of audience in
         literature and writing?
      7.  How can rhetoric inform the experience of hypermedia?
      8.  How can speech-act theory apply to hypermedia?
      9.  How will hypermedia affect the student's understanding of
              critical consensus?
      10. How do computer-based research projects affect students'
              conception of literary research?
      11. How do computers in writing and literature classes change
         the role of the teacher?
      12. How can we use computers to connect high school teachers to
              high school teachers and/or college teachers?
      13. What resources are available to facilitate high
              school-to-high school and college-to-high school
    collaboration?
      14. How can student collaborative writing, network writing, or
              talk-writing, be integrated into a literature class?
    
    Dates for Submission of Proposals
    
    The submission deadline is February 15, 1991.  Notification of
    acceptance is March 10, 1991.
    
    Send proposals and requests for information to
      Department of English
      New York Institute of Technology
      Old Westbury, New York  11568
      Attn: Ann McLaughlin (516) 686-7557
    or
      r0mill01@ulkyvx.bitnet
      72347.2767@compuserve.com
      rroyar on NYIT technet (CoSy)
    
    17)==============================================================
    
                           Call for Proposals
    
                   Society for Literature and Science
    
                           Annual Conference
    
                          October 10-13, 1991
    
                                Montreal
    
    International, interdisciplinary organization invites proposals
    for papers and sessions on any aspect of the conference theme:
    
        Science and Literature  --  Beyond Cultural Construction
    
    Possible topics might include:
    
       -- l'ecriture de la connaissance et la connaissance de
    l'ecriture
    
       -- the popular scientific essay
    
       -- literature as technology
    
       -- practices in professional life
    
       -- texts and contexts
    
       -- disciplinary and interdisciplinary language and values
    
    Alternative formats -- workshops, debates, poster sessions,
    roundtables, works-in-progress -- will be welcomed
    enthusiastically.
    
    Deadline for submissions:  February 1, 1991
    
    For further information and for submission guidelines, contact:
    
              David Lux
              Bryant College
              450 Douglas Pike
              Smithfield, RI  02917
              Bitnet:  LDM116 at URIACC
    
    18)==============================================================
    
    II INTERNATIONAL ENCOUNTER IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE
    August 04-09, 1991.
    
    II WINTER INSTITUTE
    July 8 to August 3, 1991
    
    Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Brazil)
    
          THE INTER-RELATIONS BETWEEN MENTAL AND VERBAL DISCOURSE
                    INTERDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES
    
                      c a l l   f o r    p a p e r s
    
    Although the Greek term "Logos" referred both to language and
    to cognition, suggesting an intimate relationship between them,
    this relation has been traditionally assumed to be relatively
    simple: in production, a language-independent train of thought
    ("mental discourse") is translated (or "encoded") into language
    ("verbal discourse"); and in reception, verbal discourse is
    decoded into its appropriate mental counterpart.
    
    Such a picture of the inter-relations between the two most
    important of our intellectual activities has been challenged in
    the course of history on many grounds. Most recently, with the
    development of empirical disciplines such as artificial
    intelligence, cognitive science, semantics, pragmatics,
    neurophysiology, cognitive anthropology, and others -- interested
    both in language and in mental processes -- and with the renewed
    and intense interest of philosophy in these issues, it is clear
    that the traditional picture is, to say the least, excessively
    simplistic. Given the complexity of the two activities involved,
    and the wealth of information on each of them, a proficuous study
    of their inter-relations can only be the result of a
    co-operative, multi-disciplinary endeavor. It is the purpose of
    this Encounter to provide a forum for, and thereby to stimulate,
    such an endeavor.
    
    Here are some precisions concerning the kind of contributions and
    topics that the organizers are seeking:
    
    1. By choosing the term `discourse', we intend to stress our
    interest in processes (mental, verbal), rather than on products.
    The latter are to be discussed only in so far as they illuminate
    the former.
    
    2. The focus should be on the inter-relations of mental and
    verbal discourse, rather than on independent analyses of each.
    
    3. The theme may be envisaged from a number of points of view,
    varying in aspect, methodology, and level of analysis. The
    following list is not intended to be exhaustive:
    
    METHODOLOGY: phenomenological description; experimental studies;
    statistical studies; epistemological analyses;...
    
    LEVELS: historical; comparative; metalinguistic; philosophical;
    pragmatic;...
    
    ASPECTS: description and theory; acquisition, development, loss;
    pathology; neurophysiology; therapy; applications;...
    
    Any particular kind of mental/verbal interaction can be looked at
    through the lense of a specific combination of aspect,
    methodology, and level. For instance, suppose one is interested
    in the mental/verbal inter-relations involved in the production
    and understanding of jokes. One can then investigate how such an
    ability is, say, acquired; one's methodology can be, say,
    experimental; and one can, say, either investigate only one
    culture, or else compare the acquisition of the ability across
    cultures.
    
    Different combinations of the above points of view are likely to
    be characteristic of different disciplines, or of various
    multi-disciplinary combinations, already established or radically
    new.
    
    PRACTICAL INFORMATION:
    
    1. Deadline for submission of 500 words abstracts, in 4
    camera-ready copies: February 28, 1991.
    
    2. Address for correspondence:
    
      International Encounter in the Philosophy of Language
      CLE/UNICAMP
      C.P. 6133
      13081 Campinas SP BRAZIL
      e-mail (bitnet): eifl@bruc.ansp.br
    
    3. Fees:
    
      U$ 40.00 - if paid until if paid until March 15, 1991
      U$ 80.00 - if paid after if paid after March 16, 1991
    
    4. Official Languages: Portuguese, Spanish and English .
    
    5. Winter Institute: There will be a Winter Institute, prior to
    the Encounter, for graduate students and faculty. This consists
    of up to six one-month intensive courses granting graduate
    credits. A list of the courses will be available early in 1991.
    Faculty will include well-known foreign and local researchers in
    fields related to the theme of the Encounter. Fellowships for
    Brazilian and Latin-american students are being negotiated with
    financing agencies.
    
    6. Invited Scholars: So far, the following foreign scholars have
    agreed to participate as plenary lecturers: James Higginbotham
    (MIT), Yorick Wilks (COmputing Research Laboratory, Las Cruces,
    New Mexico), Stephen Stich (Rutgers), John Perry (Stanford
    University), Humberto Maturana (Universidad de Chile), Frantisek
    Danes (Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences).  Yorick Wilks,
    Frantisek Danes and James Higginbotham will also teach graduate
    courses during the Winter Institute.
    
    7. Organizing committee:
    
       Marcelo Dascal, chair
       Edson Francozo, secretary
       Claudia T. G. de Lemos
       Eduardo R. J. Guimaraes
       Itala L. D'Ottaviano
       Rodolfo Ilari, Winter Institute (director)
    
    Please, fill in the form below and mail it as soon as possible.
    
    ----------------------- cut here -------------------------------
    
    Registration Form (fill in with block letters)
    
    Name:____________________________________________________________
    
    Street
    Address:___________________________________________________
            ___________________________________________________
            ___________________________________________________
    
    Country:___________________________________________________
    
    Check those which apply:
    
    __  I WILL contribute a paper. Title: ______________________
        ________________________________________________________
    
    __  I WILL NOT contribute a paper, but will attend the
        Encounter.
    
    __  I wish to attend the WINTER INSTITUTE.
    
    __  I would like to receive further information as soon as
        available.
    
    __  Included is cheque no.____________for US $_________.
    
    ----------------------- cut here -------------------------------
    
    Send the registration form to:
    
        International Encounter in the Philosophy of Language
        CLE/UNICAMP
        C.P. 6133
        13081 Campinas SP BRAZIL
        e-mail (bitnet): eifl@bruc.ansp.br
    
    You can send your registration through e-mail. In this case,
    append your 500-word abstract to the e-mail message. An
    acknowledgement will be forwarded within a week's time.
    
                         PLEASE, PRINT AND POST
    
    19)==============================================================
    
    programme of POSTMODERNIST POSTMORTEM (held on January 2, 1991)
    
    Claude Gandelman. Introductory words on the subject: "Various
    interpretations of the POSTMODERNIST concept... is there an
    "after"?
    
    David Gurevitch (Philosophy, Bar Ilan University):"Postmod:
    rejection of ideology and rejection of the 'avant-garde'
    conception".
    
    Mikhal Friedmann (Tel-Aviv University)"Postmodernist Cinema: from
    Godard to Godard".
    
    Dagan Moshli (Aechitecture Department, The Israel Institute of
    Technology - Technion): "The postmod-deconstructivist
    transition".
    
    Sanford Sheymann (Curator of the University Gallery):"On a
    postmod painter: Robert Yarbur".
    
    Claudine Elnekaveh (Haifa University). "Postmodernist theater in
    Spain".
    
    The afternoon session was devoted to two round-tables:
    
    1. Roundtable session around the book of Brian McHale (Porter
    Institute, Tel-Aviv University):Post-Modernist Fiction.
    Brian McHale answered the numerous questions that mainly focused
    on two main problems: his division of fiction into ontological
    types and epistemological types; and his concept of "breaking the
    ontological frames" as a characteristic of postmod devices.
    
    2. The second round-table was devoted to the state of
    postmodernism in French letters. According to Jacqueline Michel
    (Haifa University) none of the contemporary leading French poets
    use the term "postmodern" though some of them seem to be heavily
    under the influence of postmodernist American poetry. Sylvio
    Yeshuah (Tel-Aviv Univ.) evoked the "NON FINITO" component in
    Postmodernism and the relation between postmod literature and
    "the fragment".  David Mendelson (Tel-Aviv University) evoked the
    Bible as the source of specific postmodernist games with
    typography.
    
    20)==============================================================
    
    Sessions on SCIENCE, KNOWLEDGE, AND TECHNOLOGY
    
    at the Southwestern Social Science Association
    Annual Meetings in San Antonio, Texas.
    
    DATES FOR THE MEETINGS ARE MARCH 27 - 30, 1991.
    
    SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE: CONSTRUCTION, SELECTION, AND DECONSTRUCTION
    Chair: Raymond A. Eve, University of Texas at Arlington
    
    1. "Information Technology as Instantiation of Cultural
        Knowledge."  Brian Moore, University of Texas at Dallas.
    
    2. "Knowledge as Metaphor." Gretchen Sween, University of
        Texas at Dallas.
    3. "The Selection and Ordering of Knowledge."  John Pester.
        University of Texas at Dallas.
    
    4. "Some Social Implications of Chaos Theory."  Alex
        Argyros, University of Texas at Dallas.
    
    Discussant: Alex Argyros, University of Texas at Dallas
    
    SCIENTICE AND LEGITIMATION: SOME CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES
    Chair: Larry Stern, Collin Co. Community College
    
    5. "The Autonomous Scientific Authority of an Unorthodox
        Theory about AIDS."  Christopher P. Toumey.  North
        Carolina State University.
    
    6. "The Cultural Basis of American Medical Technology:
        Implications for Health Care." Kathryn J. Luchok,
        University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
    
    7. "Cultural Risk: An Analysis of the Social Implications of
        Biotechnology."  Will D. Boggs, The University of Texas
        at Austin.
    
    8. "The Reception of Extrodinary Scientific Claims." Larry
        Stern, Collin Co. Community College.
    
    9. "Departmental Structure and Scientific Productivity."
        Thomas K. Pinhey, Cal Poly State University and Michael
        D. Grimes, LSU.
    
    Discussant: Raymond A. Eve, University of Texas at Arlington
    
    21)==============================================================
    
                          NOTE ON UNC PRESS FIRE
    
         The staff of the University of North Carolina Press greatly
    appreciates the many expressions of support following the fire
    that destroyed our office building on December 5.
         Fortunately, no one was injured, and although we lost a
    great deal of Press history, we can now report that all books on
    the Spring 1991 list will be published on time.
         It is not surprising that, hearing news of the fire, many
    are concerned about the future of the Press. Despite the loss of
    our office building, we are in remarkably good shape. We have
    saved many paper and electronic files; our contracts are safe;
    our warehouse inventory was not involved in in the fire. And UNC
    Press editors and marketing staff were at our December book
    exhibits at the AHA, MLA, and AIA/APA as usual.
         Rebuilding our office building will take a number of months.
    In the interim, while we are housed in our temporary offices, you
    can reach us at the same telephone and FAX numbers--and at the
    same mailing address.
         Thank you for your good wishes. We have lost a building, but
    the University of North Carolina Press itself is very much in
    business, functioning well, and publishing award-winning books.
    
    The University of North Carolina Press             David Perry
    PO Box 2288                                             Editor
    Chapel Hill, NC 27515                            carlos@ecsvax
    919-966-3561                                 carlos@uncecs.edu
    919-966-3829 (FAX)
    1-800-848-6224 (Orders)
    
    -----------------------------------------------------------------

     

  • Postface

     

     

    [What follows is a written exchange between the editors about the contents of this issue of Postmodern Culture. As a “postface,” it is meant to be read after the other items in the issue; we hope it will serve as a preface to discussion among other readers. Please send your comments on the issue to the discussion group, PMC-TALK@NCSUVM (PMC-TALK@NCSUVM.NCSU.EDU on the Internet).]

     


     

        John:Many of the works in the last issue of PMC were concerned in one way or another with that “crude particular,” the body: this concern seems to carry over into the second issue, focusing on the body as one pole–positive or negative–in the field of identity. As you might expect, the body brings with it some familiar metaphysical pitfalls– nostalgia for presence and for the unitary sense of self, especially. What’s interesting is the way a number of the works in this issue address these problems.Eyal:While body and voice are conventional opposites, several of the works here also bring out the slippage between them, the way one can become the other. For Howe body becomes voice: the figure of other is “thin as paper,” present in her own writing and so made concrete, part of “invincible things as they are.” For O’Donnell voice becomes body: he singles out the “Frigicom process” proposed as an invention in

    JR

        whereby voice is frozen, made portable. Both are kinds of transferal, bridging gaps, but one is redemptive and necessary to the identity of the present, the other threatening, potential ordinance.John:The technology of communication is directly implicated in both the redemptive and the threatening aspects of ‘language made portable’– redemptive for Ulmer, threatening for O’Donnell. Bernstein, talking about the way some postwar poets accept the materiality of language, makes a point which might be applied to many of these essays: he says that there is a “persistence of dislocation, of going on in the face of all the terms being changed” which nonetheless does not amount to a new “equilibrium grounded on repressing the old damage.” It is at least arguable that language or voice acquires materiality exactly in the moment of being dislocated from the body of the speaker, and though that dislocation is potentially dangerous (in that it makes it possible to commodify voice), it also makes it possible to break up and break into the authoritative monologues of history and identity, constructing a present out of the frozen (and shattered) voices of the past.Eyal:This dis-location, disjunction, and portability of language-as-body, material language, enables both openness and control. Because the self is disjunctive it can be reconstructed, reinvented (Trembath); poetry has a special claim on us because it is its own monument, because in it loss and presence coexist (Hart’s reading of Mills- Courts); and if we are to undertake a critical project that would disown what Bernstein calls the “nonbiodegradable byproducts” of logocentrism (as Ulmer urges us to do), such a project would have to acknowledge that nonbiodegradability and to contain the metaphors it deconstructs, the broken idols now made to dance in a godless pantheon. On the other hand, this disjunction stages language in the theater of mass-media production, making identity (as Dolan implies) especially susceptible to simulation and manipulation.John:These writers respond to disjunction in different ways, though. There’s Howe’s project of understanding how the past structures the present, which is the sort of project Bernstein; then there’s the activity of restructuring the manner in which we appropriate the past, which is a large part of what Ulmer wants us to do; there’s also a sort of reconstruction in bad faith (Dolan discusses this) where the present is justified with reference to a past reconstituted to suit the purposes of the moment; and finally, there’s the sense that one can never really adapt to disjunction. McCorkle’s “Combustion of Early Summer” is an example:

     

     
                 Sorting things out, nothing really fits:
                 The puzzle of mountains with pieces from a
                                                      regatta,
                 We have pieces from other lives,
    
                 The difficulty is to remember them . . . .
    
              If these responses have anything in common, it's a
              lack of nostalgia or the note of loss.
       

        Eyal:There is no nostalgia here because nothing was there in the first place–if nothing was lost then nothing can be recovered–but there is no coldness in relation to the past. These writers feel the past, whether they find it to be immediate (as Bernstein does so explicitly) or inaccessible. In McCorkle’s work the past is intangible but its effect is not:

     

     
                                    the past buzzes around us,
                 A conversation in another room we thought
                                                      dormant,
                 Soon its occupants will crash through the door
       

        The past makes us up, but we do not know it and so cannot be sure of ourselves, either. The effect is a lyrical desire that comes out of ignorance, out of absence rather than loss. Howe also recognizes the task of deciphering the “buried texts” of the past, and feels “haunted and inspired” by them. Hashmi’s posthumous Beckett is a Sibylline figure for the perseverance of the voice despite the dissolution of the body–or especially because of it.

     

  • Graven Images

    Henry Hart

    The College of William & Mary

     

    Karen Mills-Courts. Poetry as Epitaph, Representation and Poetic Language. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1990. 326 pp. $39.95 cloth, $16.95 paper.

     

    It might seem strange that a book erected on the deconstructionist foundations of Jacques Derrida should take its title from that celebrated advocate of hierarchies, T.S. Eliot. Since titles foreshadow unities of theme and stance, at first glance it would appear that Karen Mills-Courts’s Poetry as Epitaph courts the courtly values of Eliot, authorizing and ordering her own critical principles by locating them in Eliot’s authoritative shadow. Eliot’s presence certainly haunts much of her book, most noticeably at the end of the introduction where she quotes from “Little Gidding”: “Every poem [is] an epitaph.” She also provides the longer passage which sketches Eliot’s belief in poetic propriety, “where every word is at home / Taking its place to support the others, / The word neither diffident nor ostentatious, / An easy commerce of the old and new. . . .” For Mills-Courts, this endorsement of a poetic language that is decorous, humble, and unified, organically lodged in tradition yet politely asserting its modernity, mixing memory and desire, ends and beginnings, dead and living, is the gist of “T.S. Eliot’s remarkable moment of insight.”

     

    The moment is also an end and a beginning for her own investigation into poetry’s ability to either present or represent, incarnate or imitate the mind’s inspired thoughts. Her attitude towards Eliot typifies the theme of the book. If she supplicates Eliot’s ghost, engraving his words on the gray, tombstone-like cover of her book, she also argues against and periodically expels his presence and the Platonic and Christian notions of spiritualized language (“tinged with fire beyond the language of the living”) that during privileged “timeless moments” supposedly incarnate the poet’s visions. She explains her own stance as poised between “Heidegger [who] thinks of language as presentational or ‘incarnative’” and “Derrida [who] thinks of language as ungrounded ‘representation’.” Through her bifocal lenses she examines representative texts from the beginning of what she would call, with Derrida, the logocentric tradition of western culture, and proceeds to map a gradual disillusionment with the capacity of the logos to embody or present intended meanings. She moves from Plato, the Bible, and Augustine through George Herbert, Wordsworth, and Shelley, and finishes with a lengthy discussion of John Ashbery. In some ways, however, Eliot remains her shadowy guide, her principle example of the poet torn between an ontotheological conviction that poetry is the living incarnation of the maker’s divinely inspired conceptions, analogous to God’s creation and incarnation, and the more sober recognition that word and world are always already fallen, that “Words strain, / Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, / Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, / Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, / Will not stay still,” as Eliot said in “Burnt Norton.” To this disillusioned view, words are simply dead or dying marks on the page, representations of representations that are continually losing their representational power and slipping into a confusion of tangential meanings.

     

    Although Heidegger and Derrida provide most of the theoretical framework for her debate, dividing the book between a logocentric viewpoint at the beginning and a deconstructionist one at the end, Mills-Courts shies away from taking a firm, dogmatic stand on one side or the other. She is critical of Plato for his denigration of writing as a paltry substitute for speech but she is also critical of Derrida for his repudiation of authorial intentionality. If Plato is too idealistic, Derrida is too skeptical. In the end she sides with the poets who shy away from factional positions, who, in contrast with the ideologues, vacillate in the tense no-man’s-land between rival camps. Referring to Heidegger’s and Derrida’s conflicting linguistic views, she says: “Caught between them, the poet creates a poem that is overtly intended to work as ‘unconcealment,’ as the incarnation of a presence, the embodiment of a voice in words. Yet, he displays that voice as an inscription carved on a tombstone. In other words, he covertly acknowledges that the poem is representational, that it substitutes itself for a presence that has been absolutely silenced. For the very words that seem to give life simultaneously announce the death of the speaker.” Although Mills-Courts acts as a moderator to the two sides, occasionally stepping aside to note inconsistencies or biases in the views propounded by her theorists, the procedures and preoccupations of her book–the way she progresses from one major figure to another in western tradition, outlining and evaluating their attitudes toward speech, writing, being, and meaning–it readily becomes apparent that she favors one over the other, that her largest debt is to Derrida. In Poetry as Epitaph she has written her own Grammatology, although in a less eccentric style and from a more compromising point-of-view than Derrida’s. Still it is Derrida’s deconstructionist perceptions and tactics that captivate her most overtly.

     

    The problem motivating the sort of linguistic discussion that attracts Derrida and Mills-Courts arises from a promise or ideal that language, on close examination, fails to fulfill. Ideally, language would mean what it says; it would communicate an unambiguous message and reveal in unmistakable terms, like a clear window, the being and intentions of its author. But because signs are not what they signify, because there is always a gap between mark and meaning, sign and signified, and because signs usually trigger off chains of significance rather than one, intelligible reference, all sorts of strategies have been concocted to circumvent linguistic imprecision and attain a more fulfilling way of communicating. Plato and Socrates advocated discovering the logos of reason, thought, and spirit through the logos of speech. Writing, they argued, distorted and distanced the mind’s meaning through dead representations which could not be questioned because the author was absent. Meaning and intention were veiled by the text rather than revealed by it. Only the voice through dialogue could present and clarify authorial truths. As a result, Socrates spoke rather than wrote. Christian and other religious ideologies frequently sought to dispense with the cumbersome medium of language altogether, associating it with the corrupt body or the fallen material world. The transcendental silence of meditation provided a more felicitous way to commune with inner spirit and external divinity. Frustrated by the circuitous way words refer to things, Jonathan Swift’s professors at the Academy of Lagado came up with their own way of short-circuiting traditional communication. According to them, it was “more convenient for all Men to carry about them, such Things as were necessary to express the particular Business they are to discourse on.” Swift is obviously ridiculing the linguistic idealists and their schemes to contain the sign’s ambiguous proliferation of meaning–what Derrida calls dissemination or play. In this case the linguistic purists must bear the burden of their rectified language on their backs. Like Mills-Courts, Swift favors a more realistic attitude. Behind her praise for Derrida, Ashbery, and the postmodernists is the same desire to expose and demystify linguistic idealism. She too criticizes the various tribes of Lagado that fail to accept the way language actually works.

     

    Her culminating chapter posits Ashbery as Derrida’s closest cousin among postmodernist poets mainly because his poetry expresses the epitaphic way in which she feels language works. Throughout the book she argues that language, and specifically poetry, resembles a gravestone marking the presence of its absent author and the absence of its author’s presence. It is a dead representation haunted by the presence of a dead but somehow living person, one who once intended meanings though they are now obscure (not unfathomable or nonexistent, as some deconstructionists would maintain). In short, poetic language is Derridean as well as Heideggerean. Ashbery bridges these contraries, Mills-Courts believes, like no other contemporary poet. He is radically skeptical of language’s power to present or incarnate the spirit of the authorial logos, but still he believes–and this is why Mills-Courts celebrates him–in “Poetry as performance, as an epitaphic endeavor that displays both the absence and the presence of an intending ‘I,’ poetry that does not delude itself into believing that it has captured self-presence in a privileged moment, [but still exerts] . . . hope against all odds.” For Mills- Courts Ashbery is heroic and exemplary because he deconstructs the sacred tenets of the logocentric tradition, yet he never bottoms-out in nihilistic despair. His poetry keeps questioning and questing, tracing an elegant, quixotic path toward self-representation that never completely arrives. It resists the death of all conclusive representations and resolutions, all its temporary domiciles along the romantic way, in order to generate the desire for new ones which, in turn, must be deemed tentative and dismantled in order to keep the ongoing quest going on.

     

    In her Acknowledgements Mills-Courts pays homage to one of her teachers for showing her “the elegance of theory.” Like Ashbery’s poetry, her book manages to be elegant and theoretical at the same time, which is quite a feat, especially when one considers the plethora of theoretical books which equate turgid style with profound thought. Deconstruction, she argues, does not necessarily entail stylistic butchery. This is one of the ironies she insists on: deconstructing often requires the most careful and rigorous constructing; it tears apart old, petrified conceptions but erects elegant scaffolding and newfangled equipment in the process. Its judicious reordering of hierarchies which have imprisoned though and oppressed conduct in the past does not simply scatter all thought, being, and meaning to the winds. Instead, it offers different systems for consideration and most notably advocates a tolerance of differences where intolerance and hierarchy were the rule. She makes this point in an examination of Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”: “The irony involved in writing words that ‘are no words’ has its roots in a gesture in which language is employed to convey even as it declares the impossibility of containing meaning.” Although Ashbery and Mills-Courts elegize the death of traditional concepts of meaning, presence, self, author, and so on, as in most elegies they acknowledge an afterlife for the deceased. Their Elysium is the haunted house of language. Their deconstructionist styles do not demolish the graveyards and empty tombs in anarchic revolt but, by contrast, reembody the remains in epitaphic valediction.

     

    While Mills-Courts musters her theoretical arguments with a judicious clarity rare in academic books, and applies her tools to a wide variety of texts with great skill, the book would be even better if more writers were investigated or at least mentioned. After reading Poetry as Epitaph, for instance, one might assume that Ashbery is the only postmodernist poet concerned with such things as authorial status, linguistic dissemination, and logocentric myths. Yet these preoccupations are shared by dozens of other postmodern poets, some conservative and some radical, some formalist and some antiformalist. Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin, James Merrill–to name just a few of the ‘neoformalist’ heirs to the New Critics and Modernists– as it turns out, address the same grammatological issues as the Language Poets, although they are stylistically and often ideologically different. It is odd that none of these poets is mentioned in Poetry as Epitaph. The last word in her book, which is taken from Ashbery, is “guidelines,” and Mills-Courts is probably as aware as we are that her book, which surveys so much, has its limits. Her chosen guidelines contribute to the book’s strengths, but as she says of Ashbery, “longing” surfaces when guidelines are delineated, and our natural response to her own book is to long for more.

     

  • The Satanism Scare

    Gerry O’Sullivan

    University of Pennsylvania

     

    The satanism scare has spawned its share of rumor panics over the last several years. This past Halloween, fundamentalist and evangelical pastors across the country fed faxes to one another about an international convocation of satanists allegedly held in Washington, D.C. in September. The gathering–or so self-described experts claimed–was intended to allow devil-worshippers from around the world to meet in order to further the downfall of Christendom, intensify the war on family values, and to continue consolidation of their stranglehold on government.

     

    Based upon the dubious assertions of one self-styled former satanist, Hezekiah ben Aaron, the rumor achieved widespread currency. Pat Robertson made mention of the meeting on his “700 Club,” USA Today reported both on the tale and the Christian countermeasures, and one California- based ministry used it in a fundraising letter.

     

    While the infernal ingathering never occurred, it did produce a flurry of counterfeit documents. Detailed day-to- day schedules of events were photocopied and circulated among church leaders, complete with reports of satanic weddings and baptisms. Christians across the country convened to wage a prayerful campaign of “spiritual warfare” against the perceived evildoers. And the complete lack of evidence regarding the convention was received as still further proof of the cunning of the conspirators, always able to successfully cover their hoofprints.

     

    Several such “panics”–usually far more localized–have had tragic results. Several churches with largely black congregations have been vandalized or set ablaze when word spread that parishioners were, in actuality, practicing satanic rites behind closed doors. Preschools have been emptied of children by parents fearful that teachers were “ritually abusing” their charges. Timothy Hughes of Altus, Oklahoma murdered his wife after watching the now notorious 1988 Geraldo special on satanism, convinced that she was a devil-worshipper. And armed mobs in upstate New York threatened to assault punks who had gathered at a warehouse for a hardcore concert, fearing that they were “really” assembling to sacrifice a blonde-haired, blue-eyed child to Lucifer.

     

    A handful of folklorists have tracked such regional rumor panics, finding startlingly similar patterns from case to case. One constantly recurring theme concerns the racial identity of the satanists’ “intended victim.” The ideal offering, at least according to popular mythology, is a young and virginal child–always white, always fair-haired, always blue-eyed. Jeffrey Victor, a sociologist at Jamestown Community College (Jamestown was the location of the New York warehouse scare cited above), has collected hundreds of such stories from across the country, all with this theme at its center. And in each case, the racial component is key. The unseen and vaguely identified satanist is therefore defined as desiring his or her other– the pure and virginal as opposed to the dark and contaminated. The binarism is assumed, and the selfhood of the devil-worshipper is automatically constituted, through its ritualized desire, by inversion.

     

    For instance, in the wake of the Matamoros affair, when the bodies of a University of Texas student and the murdered rivals of a drug-running gang were found buried on a Mexican ranch, daycare centers along the Tex-Mex border were rife with rumors that “Mexican satanists” were planning to storm south Texas towns in retaliation for arrests in the case–an occult twist on the myth of the brown invading horde. And said devil-worshippers were again in search of blue-eyed, fair-haired children from surrounding communities.

     

    Central to the satanism scare is a specific social (and, as we’ve seen, racial) fantasy of the family. Mythical satanists allegedly prey upon infants, young children, and pets–threshold figures and “weak links” in the household. Once abducted, the child, cat or dog is offered as a sacrifice during some sexually-charged, moonlit rite. But the victim is never simply slaughtered. In the lore of pop satanism, its body must be cannibalized and its blood consumed by the “coven” of devil-worshippers in order to allow for a transfer of power.

     

    But the family is threatened from within as well as from without. While both children and pets are seen as satanic quarry, adolescents are depicted as ideal candidates for membership in such cults. Teenagers are cast as potential and unwitting dupes of cult leaders, properly socialized for the requisite ritual violence by the icons of their culture –heavy metal, hardcore and neo-gothic music, “occult” jewelry, black clothing, and Saturday morning cartoons which–as some pastors and Christian activists allege–are covertly training children in satanically- inspired, “new age” thinking.

     

    In all of this, the teenager is never described as an agent, possessed of volition. Rather, feeling disempowered, the adolescent is said to seek out power “from below” (but through necromancy rather than, say, insurgency). His or her choice is never, however, seen as a simple act of willful defiance or resistance. It is conditioned by a kind of devious social programming which, in its way, parodies both consumerism and marketing.

     

    The typical teenager, or so the professional lore of the satanologist has it, goes to his or her local music store to buy the latest Judas Priest, Dio, or King Diamond release. Little does he or she know, however, that certain tracks have been “backmasked” with demonic messages which are intended to engender devil-worship, mayhem, suicide and murder (usually of parents). There’s a kind of truth-in- advertising problem here–kids aren’t getting what they pay for. And once so hooked, they move on to ritual cannibalism, itself a fantasy of consumption gone wild.

     

    Hundreds of professional training manuals on satanism and “occult-related crime” have appeared over the past several years, aimed at police officers, pastors, school administrators and psychologists. And in most cases, adolescent behavior of the most typical varieties is described as satanic or “pre-occultic.” Kids who question traditional religion or refuse to attend church, act rebelliously, meditate, or dress in black are, according to several checklists, automatically suspect. Adolescence is itself demonized as something wild, dark and uncontrollable.

     

    Based upon incorrect information in such training manuals, schools in Kentucky, Florida and California–among others–have banned the wearing of peace symbols on t-shirts or in jewelry because it is, in reality, the satanic “cross of Nero”–a broken and inverted cross used by the “pagan” Romans (and later the nazis) to mock Christianity. This is an old right-wing canard originally promulgated by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier in The Morning of the Magicians, later picked up and circulated by “former satanic high priest,” Mike Warnke, in a wildly popular little anti-occult book called The Satan Seller. Unfortunately, this piece of folklore has appeared and reappeared in police guides over the years.

     

    Likewise, one high school principal in Annapolis, Maryland sent letters home to the parents of black-clad teens, warning that their sons and daughters might very well be involved in devil-worship and advising them to search rooms and bookbags for other tell-tale signs of occult dabbling. Anyone wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the name of a metal band was also picked out of the cafeteria line-up by the vigilant principal, to be later reported to parents. Unfortunately, some families have taken the satanic panic one step further, sending their children off to “de- metalizing” and “de-satanizing” camps for “treatment” at the hands of fundamentalist pastors. Centers with names like “Back in Control” and “Motivations Unlimited” have been established to forcibly deprogram the would-be teen satanist.

     

    The satanism scare is “about” several things, among them: the demonization of adolescent behavior through folkloric and often lurid accounts of bloodletting, cannibalism and sex; a struggle over the constitution of knowledge elites (the satanologist–usually a self-described cult cop or pastor–versus “professional” educators and psychologists who may be skeptical of their claims: it’s no coincidence that most so-called cult cops are professing Christians and members of groups like Cops for Christ); and the ideological reinstitution of the family as racially pure, intact, and continually threatened from without by dark and hooded people emerging from the shadows to steal “our” tow-headed children. Combined with forged documents modelled upon The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, fears of bloodthirsty invaders from the south, and tales which simply reiterate the medieval blood libel, the fear of satanism seems to point in several different, and very dangerous, directions.

     

    The satanic panic combines the worst of several scares peculiar to the eighties–terrorism, secular humanism, drugs and child-kidnapping–to frame a largely Christian, populist critique of mass cultural forms. But its analyses remain mired in conspiracy thinking, racism, eschatological anticipation, and the displacement of what are primarily familial ills (child abuse and incest) onto highly secretive and hooded outsiders.

     

  • Crisis In The Gulf, by George Bush, Saddam Hussein, Et Alia. As Told tothe New York Times.

    Frederick M. Dolan

    University of California at Berkeley

     

    . . . the bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions.

     

    — Paul de Man

     

    In the life of a nation, we’re called upon to define who we are and what we believe. Sometimes the choices are not easy. As today’s President, I ask for your support in the decision I’ve made to stand up for what’s right and condemn what’s wrong all in the cause of peace.

     

    — George Bush

     

    The crisis in the Gulf, as today’s President acknowledges, is in large measure a crisis of self- definition: a matter of identity (as in defining America’s role in a post-cold war world, and indeed of writing the rules for such a world), of marking or highlighting the boundary between self and other (as in the ownership and control of “the world’s largest oil reserves,” or as between the civilized and the uncivil). Following a long Orientalist tradition, the West feels compelled to go elsewhere in search of its defining characteristics, even if this means, to use President Bush’s own metaphor, drawing lines in the sand. As his image forces one to reflect, sand–especially the shifting, wind-blown sand of the Arabian Empty Quarter–is a most unstable medium, and a line drawn in it is likely to be erased with the next change in weather. The contours of the boundary lines and identity President Bush hopes to define remain, it is true, somewhat murky. At the same time, for those who have followed literary theory over the past two decades, the battle over what meaning to assign Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait possesses an uncanny familiarity. The seemingly anarchic spin-doctoring of American officials charged with formulating war aims that seem at once defensible and feasible, and the way in which their efforts have been judged and interpreted in the press, have to do, in particular, with the much-discussed questions of allegory, symbol, and irony.

     

    At first glance, the debate in Congress and the media appears to be an argument over the appropriate allegorical reading of the Gulf crisis, with the Bush administration insisting on the pre-text of World War II and the lessons of Munich, and its critics favoring the script of Vietnam. To much of the public, the Bush administration’s deployment of nearly 400,000 troops, and billions of dollars of weaponry both high-tech and low, is allegorically intelligible in terms of the story of America’s tragic and ambiguous “involvement” in Vietnam. As in Vietnam, it is said, the United States is taking the lead in fighting somebody else’s war; as in Vietnam, the Middle East is figured as a “quagmire” in which American troops will become–what else?–“bogged down.” The Middle East will be transformed into a huge Lebanon, with the emergence of hopelessly ambiguous and complex factions intractable to the Manichaean American mind. American morale will gradually be destroyed, and America’s standing in the world will once again be diminished.

     

    Against this allegorical interpretation of the crisis, officials, media pundits, and a farrago of “experts” on matters from national security to Middle Eastern politics insist that the events taking place in the Gulf bear no relevant relationship to Vietnam. Our commitment in the Gulf is clear and forceful where it was ambiguous and shifting in Vietnam. As opposed to the gradual escalation that characterized Vietnam, plans for war in the Gulf, in so far as we can tell from press reports, suggest an all-out, all-or-nothing operation. More importantly–though for ideological reasons this point,qua allegory, must remain tacit–the campaign against Saddam Hussein involves “big principles” and “vital interests” (the tacit point being that Vietnam involved neither). The vital interests are variously described as oil or jobs; the big principles are those of territorial integrity, opposition to aggressive war, and respect for United Nations resolutions. The allegorical pre-text for the Persian Gulf crisis, in this optic, must be World War II, in which economic interests and unassailable principles fortuitously combined to produce a “Good War.” Indeed, the invasion of Kuwait was allegorized almost from the beginning of the crisis. The first reported invocation of the Munich Analogy is attributed to “Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, [who] called Mr. Hussein `the Hitler of the Middle East’ and criticized Mr. Bush for not having moved earlier to forestall an invasion.”1

     

    The significance of the crisis was more fully articulated the next day in a column by Flora Lewis entitled “Fruits of Appeasement.”2 Characterizing the takeover of Kuwait as a “blitzkrieg invasion,” Lewis notes how it caused “European commentators to remember Hitler,” whose lust for power also provoked a “dithering argument over whether it was wiser to indulge him or try to isolate and block him . . . until it was too late.” Like Hitler, Hussein’s aims are not regional, but global: “he is determined to become the great leader of the Arab nation, and not just another nation but a world power based on guns and oil. His relentless drive for a nuclear weapon is not only to threaten his neighbors and Israel; it is to change the whole balance of power.” The day after Lewis’s column appeared, A.M. Rosenthal confirmed her reading, characterizing the invasion as “a declaration of war against Western power and economic independence” and asserting that “Western leaders have failed in their duty to prepare action against the plainest threats of aggression since Adolf Hitler.”3 A few days later he rounded out the picture by placing the invasion of Kuwait within a larger narrative whose plot is driven by anti-Semitism: “Hussein’s dream of dominating the Arab Middle East was never separate from his vision of ultimate duty and destiny–the elimination of the state of Israel. […] For all other Arabs who long for Israel’s extinction, Saddam Hussein’s passion against the Jews is what counts. . . .”4

     

    Bush quickly caught on. Although in his first statements he invoked Hitler only obliquely, describing how “Iraq’s tanks stormed in blitzkrieg fashion through Kuwait in a few short hours,”5 and attempted to justify possible war by reference to U.S. economic and energy interests, by the middle of August he was relying heavily on the allegory of World War II. In a speech to the Pentagon, for example, the President reminded his audience that “A half a century ago, our nation and the world paid dearly for appeasing an aggressor,” and went on to vow that “We are not going to make the same mistake again.”6 Over the next few months, Bush struggled to make U.S. policy in the Gulf allegorically intelligible through reference to World War II. Iraqi aggression, Bush said in early November as he announced new troop deployments, “is not just a challenge to the security of Kuwait and other Gulf nations, but to the better world that we have all hoped to build in the wake of the cold war. The state of Kuwait must be restored, or no nation will be safe, and the promising future we anticipate will indeed be jeopardized.”7 In December Bush was still offering this theme. In Hussein, he insisted, like Hitler, we find “a dangerous dictator all too willing to use force, who has weapons of mass destruction and is seeking new ones and who desires to control one of the world’s key resources. . . .”8 Indeed, Hussein was at one point alleged to beworse than Hitler.

     

    Whatis the allegorical significance of World War II? The obvious meaning has to do with the dangers of appeasing tyrants, of course, and this is the interpretation supplied by the Bush administration. But I think I can discern in the speeches and pronouncements and debates another meaning as well, one that becomes accessible through Paul de Man’s interpretation of the ideological function of the “symbol” in Romantic literature.9 The symbol was understood by the Romantics as a privileged representation whose meaning derived from its evocation of an extra-linguistic relationship as opposed to significance generated through linguistic conventions or relationships, such as allegory, where the meaning of a story depends upon a larger narrative. For de Man, the appeal of a symbolic understanding of representation is to allow the time-bound, finite subject to “supplement” himself with nature’s eternal laws:

     

    The temptation exists . . . for the self to borrow, so to speak, the temporal stability that it lacks from nature, and to devise strategies by means of which nature is brought down to a human level while still escaping from "the unimaginable touch of time." (De Man, 197)

     

    Wordsworth, for example, represents the “movements of nature” as “endurance within a pattern of change, the assertion of a metatemporal, stationary state beyond the apparent decay of a mutability that attacks certain outward aspects of nature but leaves the core intact” as in “The immeasurable height / Of woods decaying, never to be decayed / The stationary blast of waterfalls. . . .” (The Prelude, quoted in De Man, 197). Through such privileged signs, the subject moves beyond temporal limits to a confrontation with the eternal real. For de Man, however, the very idea of a symbol, as a figure, relies on an act of “ontological bad faith,” a mystification of language that suppresses the dependence ofalllinguistic figuration on a range of pre-texts or pre-existing literary signs.

     

    The utility of de Man’s analysis is that it enables us to grasp that the official allegorizing of the Gulf crisis is notput forward as allegory; rather, the intent is to establish Iraqi aggression as asymbol in the Romantic sense. World War II was the “Good War” because it rescued us from our finite, mutable, temporal concerns and put us in direct contact with the Real: the eternal, unchanging moral and political principles that define us as a nation. President Bush hopes to convince us that Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait offers an opportunity to step outside the everyday administrative concerns of politics and business as usual, and renew our commitment to the principles that make us who we are; it is in this sense that, in Bush’s words, the Gulf crisis calls us to “define who we are and what we believe.” According to de Man, the way out of the bad faith of the symbolic leads through irony, but he is quick to warn that irony carries with it its own potential for mystification. Through irony, he argues, the self is led to recognize its constructed rather than original character:

     

    The reflective disjunction [characteristic of irony] not only occursby means of language as a privileged category, but it transfers the self out of the empirical world into a world constituted out of, and in, language--a language that it finds in the world like one entity among others, but that remains unique in being the only entity by means of which it can differentiate itself from the world. (De Man, 213)

     

    It is too crude, however, to say that irony subverts the claim of symbolic language to have accessed the Real by exposing and foregrounding the lack of closure between the linguistic sign and its meaning, because the latter is characteristic of figural language generally: the “structure shared by irony and allegory is that, in both cases, the relationship between sign and meaning is discontinuous, involving an extraneous principle that determines the point and the manner at and in which the relationship is articulated” (De Man, 209). What is unique about irony is its dynamism:

     

    Irony is unrelievedvertige, dizziness to the point of madness. Sanity can exist only because we are willing to function within the conventions of duplicity and dissimulation, just as social language dissimulates the inherent violence of the actual relationships between human beings. Once this mask is shown to be a mask, the authentic being underneath appears necessarily as on the verge of madness." (De Man, 215-216)

     

    For this reason, irony can operate as a trope of demystification, replacing the reassurance of interpretative conventions with the madness of endless interpretation. Yet as the current contest of allegories suggests, a mere plurality of competing perspectives, however healthy for politics, does not suffice for the purposes of demystification. And it is demystification–the sifting and evaluation of truth claims, the establishment of a reliable account of the world–upon which the institutional privilege of journalism thrives. In this context it is noteworthy that the press has resorted to irony in its attempt to cast doubt on official explanations of policy. In a world of agonistic interpretations–literally, apolemicalpublic sphere in which no absolute ground is recognized or can be discovered–the press can fulfill its pledge to deliver the Real only through ironizing the public agon, that is, only by analyzing it in terms of meanings which are different from and displace those signified by the public discourses themselves. To place itself on the ground of the Real, journalism must constantly foreground the discrepancy between the public claims and the “real” meaning of these claims. Thus the press forces to self-consciousness the constructed character of public discourse, in part simply by highlighting the availability of differing allegorical readings of the event. Bush’s Munich Analogy never quite took, and the public and press continued to find in the stories of Vietnam allegorical meanings of a more relevant nature. A few days after Bush’s November escalation of the U.S. troop presence in the Gulf, doubts about the Munich analogy and fear of a “repeat” of Vietnam were front-page news: “In a joint statement, the House Speaker, Representative Thomas S. Foley, Democrat of Washington, and the majority leader, Representative Richard A. Gephardt, Democrat of Missouri, said, `We urge the President to explain fully to the American people the strategy and aims that underlie his decision to dispatch additional forces to the region’.” The article moved quickly to frame the issue in terms of the appropriate allegorical reading:

     

    On explaining the motives for American action, President Bush has stopped emphasizing the need to protect oil supplies, an issue he once cited along with the need to resist aggression. He now concentrates on opposing aggression, comparing Mr. Hussein to Hitler. There are critics of both rationales, and a fear of repeating the Vietnam experience--suffering great loss of life for little purpose. [...] One-third of voters surveyed on Election Day opposed American military action that would produce heavy casualties, a level of opposition reached during the Vietnam War only after several years of fighting. The survey also found the clear beginnings of the sort of partisan division that tore the country during Vietnam: two-thirds of those opposing American action in the gulf, and in particular, Black Americans, voted Democratic. But more than half of those who say the nation should persevere even in the face of many casualties voted Republican.10

     

    A few days later, the public’s insistence on allegorizing the Gulf crisis through Vietnam was again front-page news: “as Americans confront the possibility of another war, history seems to present a troubling multiple-choice question: Would this be another World War II, or another Vietnam?”11

     

    Amidst the clash of allegories, the Bush administration reeled to-and-fro from one explanation to another, to the point where narrative incoherency itself was explicitly thematized as a public concern. In early November, a week before the escalation, Bush tested the waters by issuing more condemnations of Iraq. The result was hysteria among Republicans running for re-election in the Senate and House, who attacked Bush for deploying confusing messages: “Republican strategists continued to express their disdain for the performance of the White House in this critical week before the election. `They don’t have their act together,’ one counselor to the White House said. `They’re living in a fog. They’re confusing the American public.’”12 The inability to tell a coherent story quickly became a public, not merely partisan, issue: “A common complaint . . . [among the public] was that the Bush Administration seemed unable to come up with a consistent–and compelling–account of what the United States was preparing to fight for. Was it to protect oil sources, they wanted to know, or to prevent further aggression, or simply to maintain the status quo?” (Kolbert, A10). Indeed, within a few weeks it began to appear as if journalists were more concerned about the incoherency of the narratives on offer than with the substance of policy itself, and by mid-November, the inability of the administration to construct a satisfying story had become a source of frustration within Bush’s cabinet itself: “Mr. Baker, Mr. Bush’s former campaign chairman, is said to have grown exasperated with White House speech writers’ inability to present the President’s gulf policy in a simple, coherent and compelling fashion so that it will have the sustained support of the American public.”13 Bush himself was eventually forced to acknowledge widespread fears of ambiguity and lack of closure: “if there must be war . . . I pledge to you there will not be any murky ending” (“Excerpts From President’s News Conference” 4). In effect, Bush promised that the war would be fought in such a way as to allow for the telling of coherent realist narratives, with endings implicit in their beginnings and unambiguous resolutions.

     

    But the press also emphasizes the difference between sign and meaning by undermining in its own voice the coherency of the proffered explanations and justifications. Very early in the crisis, Thomas L. Friedman drew attention to the vagueness of the Bush administration’s justifications of policy and attributed this to U.S. officials’ unwillingness to state publicly the real rationale for the policy.14 “[S]peaking privately,” these officials list “three interests at stake in the Gulf. One is the price of oil. Another is who controls the oil. The third is the need to uphold the integrity of territorial boundaries so that predatory regional powers will not simply begin devouring their neighbors.” But Friedman goes on to question even these “private” reasons as valid explanations for the policy, suggesting at one point that, for Bush and his advisers, U.S. control of the Persian Gulf is such a deeply held assumption that they may be incapable of explicitly defending it. The real explanation, Friedman suggests, is that the United States wants to preserve the status quo in the Persian Gulf, a desire prompted by economic interest: “Troops have been sent to retain control of oil in the hands of pro-American Saudi Arabia, so prices will remain low.” Anna Quindlen bemoans the discrepancy between sign and meaning in a similar vein:

     

    Our reality has outstripped the traditional stories of brave men going out to fight and die for a great cause while their women wait staunchly at home and provide security and normalcy for their children. We have become more complicated than the scripts of old movies. Now we have brave women going out to fight and die for a cause none of us is sure of while their children struggle to feel secure with grandparents or aunts and uncles. We are going to war for oil, and, by extension, for the economy. The President trots out his Hitler similes to convince us otherwise.15

     

    At times, the general public awareness of this discrepancy, fueled, of course, by the rhetorical strategies of the press itself, acquires a news value of its own: “what marks the current crisis is the way Americans are talking openly about the President’s inability to `sell’ war to a wary populace” (Kolbert, A1).

     

    The reader will have noticed that in these examples, the “dynamism” or “madness” that de Man attributes to irony is conspicuously lacking; instead, irony is presented as yet another journalistic factoid, to be objectively represented. As practiced byThe New York Times, ironization has the opposite effect of demystification. De Man cautions against seeing irony as “a kind of therapy, a cure of madness by means of the spoken or written word”:

     

    When we speak . . . of irony originating at the cost of the empirical self, the statement has to be taken seriously enough to be carried to the extreme: absolute irony is a consciousness of madness, itself the end of all consciousness; it is a consciousness of a non-consciousness, a reflection on madness from the inside of madness itself. But this reflection is made possible only by the double structure of ironic language: the ironist invents a form of himself that is "mad" but that does not know his own madness; he then proceeds to reflect on his madness thus objectified. (De Man, 216)

     

    This, de Man says, makes it easy to see irony as a kind of folie lucidewhich, in allowing “language to prevail even in extreme stages of self-alienation,” might be viewed as a remedy for the mad displacement of sign and meaning through rigorous self-consciousness about the irony of language. This indeed seems to be precisely the claim of the press, which, under the circumstances of a phantasmagoric public sphere, maintains its claim to a privileged surveillance and objectivity by delivering the truth that all public representations are false.

     

    But to construe irony in this way, de Man argues, is the ultimate mystification. To illustrate, he discusses Jean Starobinski’s reading of E.T.A. Hoffmann’sPrinzessin Brambilla. In Hoffmann’s tale, an acting couple who confuse their own lives with the “meaningful” roles they play on stage are “`cured’ of this delusion by the discovery of irony,” after which they find happiness in domesticity. But as de Man insists, “the bourgeois idyll of the end is treated by Hoffmann as pure parody . . . far from having returned to their natural selves, [the hero and heroine] are more than ever playing the artificial parts of the happy couple” (De Man, 217-218). De Man concludes that “at the very moment that irony is thought of as a knowledge able to order and cure the world, the source of its invention immediately runs dry. The instant that it construes the fall of the self as an event that could somehow benefit the self, it discovers that it has in fact substituted death for madness” (De Man, 218). For de Man, then, “true irony” would be “irony to the second power or `irony of irony.’” Through continual invention, such ironizing would state “the continued impossibility of reconciling the world of fiction with the actual world” (De Man, 218). This is achieved only by refusing to see irony as a trope of mastery or reconciliation; and yet it is precisely as a sign of mastery that irony is deployed by the press. Ironically–I use the term advisedly–the Bush administration occupies the vanguard when it comes to the impossibility of reconciling world and text, in its insistence on the impossibility of knowing what the U.S. Constitution says about the authority to use force, and hence of knowing precisely how the Constitution is to be applied to the real world. While Congress insists on the text’s legibility (only Congress, Congress says, has the power to make war), Bush insists on its ambiguity:

     

    On Tuesday, influential lawmakers pressed Mr. Bush to call a special session, with many members of Congress saying that the President would be usurping their constitutional power to send American troops into combat if he acted without Congressional approval. Mr. Bush responded today by pulling a copy of the Constitution from his suit pocket at a meeting with Congressional leaders from both parties and telling him that he understood what it said about the responsibility of Congress to declare war. But, he added, "It also says that I'm the Commander in Chief."

     

    Later, Baker had a two-hour meeting with congressional leaders and held a news conference:

     

    While agreeing that only Congress has the authority to declare war, Mr. Baker said, "There are many, many circumstances and situations indeed where there could be action taken against American citizens or against American interests that would call for a very prompt and substantial response." Mr. Baker said that Mr. Bush would follow the Constitution, but added with a smile, "It's a question of what the Constitution requires."16

     

    But Bush’s insistence on the ambiguity of the Constitution should not lead us to assimilate his conduct in office to Ronald Reagan’s postmodern presidency. While Reagan taught us to celebrate, and above all to exploit, a political and social world in which distinctions between the simulated and the real were simply irrelevant, Bush, it would appear, intends to lead us back to the Real, to invent a politics beyond that of Reagan’s handlers–which, of course, means war, since death, as always, is the union card of the Real, the one “event” that escapes the handler’s grasp. Bush, we might say, is Romantic where Reagan was postmodern. Arrayed against Bush’s Romantic symbolism is the weak irony–that is, the mystified lucidity–of the press. Indeed, lucidity–in a precisely defined official sense–is fast becoming a condition of death as well as life. In the issue ofThe New York Times that featured the report on widespread public awareness of the discrepancy between political sign and political meaning, an editorial referred to the Louisiana Supreme Court’s ruling that a murderer who became insane after he was condemned to death could be forced to take a drug that would render him “mentally competent” to undergo execution. The weak irony cultivated by theTimes may well involve a similar economy: we must be just lucid enough–that is, just skeptical and uncertain enough–to feel that we master the world, so that we may sacrifice ourselves to its truths, and in particular to the truths of who we are and what we believe.

     

    Notes

     

    1. R.W. Apple, Jr., “Invading Iraqis Seize Kuwait And Its Oil; U.S. Condemns Attack, Urges United Action,”The New York Times, August 3, 1990, A1, A8.

     

    2. Flora Lewis, “Fruits of Appeasement,”The New York Times, August 4, 1990, 24.

     

    3. A.M. Rosenthal, “Making a Killer,”The New York Times, August 5, 1990, E19.

     

    4. A.M. Rosenthal, “Saddam’s Next Target,”The New York Times, August 9, 1990, A23.

     

    5. “Excerpts From Bush’s Statement on U.S. Defense of Saudis,”The New York Times, August 9, 1990, A18.

     

    6. Quoted in R.W. Apple, Jr., “Bush Says Iraqi Aggression Threatens `Our Way of Life,’”The New York Times, August 16, 1990, A14.

     

    7. “Excerpts From Bush’s Remarks on His Order to Enlarge U.S. Gulf Force,”The New York Times, November 9, 1990, A12.

     

    8. “Excerpts From President’s News Conference on Crisis in Gulf,”The New York Times, December 1, 1990, 4.

     

    9. See Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 187-228.

     

    10. Michael Oreskes, “A Debate Unfolds Over Going To War Against The Iraqis,”The New York Times, November 12, 1990, A1.

     

    11. Elizabeth Kolbert, “No Talk of Glory, but of Blood on Sand,”The New York Times, November 15, 1990, A1.

     

    12. Maureen Dowd, “Bush Intensifies A War Of Words Against The Iraqis,”The New York Times, November 1, 1990, A1.

     

    13. Thomas L. Friedman, “U.S. Jobs at Stake in Gulf, Baker Says,”The New York Times, November 14, 1990, A8.

     

    14. Thomas L. Friedman, “U.S. Gulf Policy: Vague `Vital Interests,’”The New York Times, August 12, 1990, A1.

     

    15. Anna Quindlen, “New World at War,”The New York Times, September 15, 1990, A21.

     

    16. Maureen Dowd, “President Seems to Blunt Calls For Gulf Session,”The New York Times, October 29, 1990, A1.

     

  • Sartre and Local Aesthetics: Rethinking Sartre as an Oppositional Pragmatist

    Paul Trembath

    Colorado State University

     

    And that lie that success was a moving upward. What a crummy lie they kept us dominated by. Not only could you travel upward toward success but you could travel downward as well; up and down, in retreat as well as in advance, crabways and crossways and around in a circle, meeting your own selves coming and going and perhaps all at the same time.

     

    –Ralph Ellison,
    Invisible Man

     

    The tension between art and politics looms large in the life and work of Jean-Paul Sartre. The child-aesthete depicted in The Words, the celebrity of Post-World War II Existentialism, the Marxist revisionist of The Critique of Dialectical Reason and, arguably, the uneasy Freudian of The Idiot of the Family–all of these and more seem like a family of conflicting self-representations. Contemporary interpreters of Sartre find themselves addressing several related dilemmas. First, was Sartre a philosopher, an artist, or a political theorist? Second, to what extent did Sartre’s literary writings contribute productively to an effective oppositional politics? Finally, given the early Sartre’s modernist use of phenomenological metaphors (as an apolitical philosopher) and the later Marxist Sartre’s interest in political “totalization,” how can Sartre survive familiar postmodern and poststructural criticisms of phenomenology, ontology, and Marxist theories of totality? I think that the later Sartre understood the hermetic redundancies produced by such questions and–having lost interest in art, philosophy, and totalizing social theory– strove to manipulate his multivalent historical reception in the service of specific political projects. These projects were invariably oppositional. In retrospect, they illustrate how Sartre moved away from professional philosophy, literature, and totalizing social theory toward a commitment to specific political protests calculated to reinvent the social world and our experience of it. I propose that the later militant Sartre makes possible a new understanding of aesthetics itself, one that anticipates John Rajchman’s discussion of Michel Foucault’s “politics of revolt.”1

     

    In his biographical narrative on Sartre, Ronald Hayman writes that Sartre “used his life to test ways of facing up to the evils of contemporary history. If he was not always honest, it was partly because honesty was a luxury he could not afford.”2 Hayman’s suggestion that Sartre “used his life” to affect what he considered the “evils” of contemporary history–racism, dictatorship, colonialism, multinational capitalism, the serial family, and so forth– requires us to consider how Sartre’s “life” was largely made up of the literary, philosophical, and political-theoretical representations that people had come to associate with his name and public reputation. These representations were what Sartre “used” or manipulated to give voice to different political positions and programs. Hayman is unclear about what the word “honesty” implies in this passage, but the word is provocative. Hayman’s use of “honesty” suggests something like an unprofitable lack of social versatility; in a world as diverse in knowledges, truths, economies, and political interests as Sartre’s in the 60s and 70s, unilateral moral concepts like “honesty” serve only to bury any versatile engagement of seemingly contradictory political commitments beneath an ultimately reactionary–and apologist– language of hypocrisy. If Sartre allowed himself to be described variously as an Existentialist, a Marxist, or a Maoist (to name only a few of his provisional “identities”), his lack of representational stability–his inconsistency in Kantian moral terms–made his larger objectives seem dubious to a public trained to recognize in Sartre’s political versatility only his inability to take a definitive political stance of his own.

     

    Clearly such a stance–when compared to the complex, changing, and situation-specific political commitments of Sartre–would have limited Sartre’s concrete ability to contribute to political change. In fact, the “luxury” of political “honesty,” in Hayman’s supramoral sense, would have ultimately re-empowered the problematic concept of historical totality that the activist Sartre arguably left behind with his “theoretical” Marxism, or the luxurious assumption of representational accuracy he had once assumed for himself as the phenomenological ontologist of French Existentialism.3 For the militant Sartre, “honesty” became the political, theoretical, and philosophical luxury of stepping outside one’s specific historical situation, of stressing Truth to disguise the workings of power, of theorizing Totality at the expense of advocating difference, and of describing Consciousness and Authenticity authoritatively instead of letting languages speak uniquely for themselves. Such “luxuries,” I shall argue, became untenable for Sartre toward the end of his productive life, when he was not only post-aesthetic (at least in traditional terms), but post-philosophical and post-theoretical as well.

     

    The working distinction I want to draw between Sartrean philosophy and Sartrean critical theory is roughly the distinction between Sartrean Existentialism and Sartrean Marxism. Sartre became dissatisfied with the former because of its ahistoricism and naive faith in the representational function of phenomenological metaphors. He became dissatisfied with the latter because it attempted to describe authoritatively and comprehensively the social freedom of others. Sartre’s rejection of Existentialism, and his reasons for it, are today commonly recognized and understood in intellectual circles. However, the differences between the theoretical Sartre of The Critique of Dialectical Reason and the militant Sartre of the later demonstrations and interviews remain to be elucidated.

     

    The theoretical Sartre and the militant Sartre are not consistently the same Sartre. Both are Marxist. But the theoretical Sartre of the Critique is a Marxist revolutionary–that is, someone with a total political program in mind that will definitively transform society. The militant Sartre, in contrast, is one who rejects any such authoritative program and, in part, the goal of revolution with it. This Sartre sees “revolution” as the ongoing business of revolt, not as the political end of a long history of class struggles. The militant Sartre emphasizes the historical materialism of Marxism but de- emphasizes the totalizing objectives of Marxist theory; where he once stressed the importance of global revolution, Sartre now stresses the importance of strategic local rebellions. Neither does he do this in particular texts, something of a first for the endlessly writing Sartre; he does it in his acts. His attempts to get arrested in political demonstrations, his participation in explicitly political debates and discussions, his visit to a well-known Western “terrorist,” his endorsement of oppositional political regimes around the world, and his publicized travels to diverse third world countries struggling for political autonomy4–these and additional activities demonstrate how Sartre used his global fame to lend credence and voice to marginal or oppressed political causes worldwide. (I will demonstrate this at some length later on.) In each instance, we see a Sartre who, dissatisfied with his professional reputation as a novelist, playwright, philosopher, comprehensive social theorist, and so forth, strategically uses his Euro-American cultural reception to draw public attention to marginal politics and underprivileged peoples throughout the world.

     

    This shift in emphasis from globalizing social theory, philosophy, and literature to militant local practice is not the only change we can recognize in the activist Sartre. Sartre also undertook an implicit revaluation of the aesthetic. In a historicist or even pragmatist way that anticipates Michel Foucault’s discussion of an “aesthetics of existence,”5 Sartre came to demonstrate that the whole notion of private creativity–so much a reified part of our collective Western culture–needed to be reinvested with a sense of public effectiveness. That is, Sartre strove to reinvent the concept of the aesthetic not merely in commonly expected terms of private expression and production, but in terms of public and historical effectivity. For the later Sartre, “artwork” was no longer something one did in quietistic solitude, only to emerge publically with the hermetic results of one’s private labor (a painting, a play, an opera, a new theory of art, and so forth). The aesthetic became the entire realm of social invention–a realm utterly mediated by our continuous responsibility for the freedom and power of self-determination of other social “selves.” This, I think, is Sartre’s most neglected contribution to contemporary arts, to philosophy and literary theory and, perhaps most important of all, to social criticism.

     

    In Michel Foucault: The Freedom of Philosophy, John Rajchman describes the writings of Foucault in a way that makes possible a post-voluntaristic discussion of freedom. The later, activist Sartre both enacted and anticipated this conception of freedom. In his chapter entitled “The Politics of Revolt,” Rajchman explains that “[l]ike Sartre, Foucault was an ‘intellectual’ with public positions, and as such, he had to worry about the political aims and consequences of both his histories and their methods” (43). Consequently, Rajchman is willing to discuss similarities between Sartre and Foucault that have gone unexamined largely because of the success of poststructuralist rhetoric and its critique of voluntarism or, of late, what has been described as “philosophy of mind.”6 In response to the way Sartre has been received recently (he has been ignored), Rajchman acknowledges that:

     

    Foucault has often been seen as Sartre's philosophical rival. Yet as an intellectual he shares with Sartre an inclination to present his work as nonacademic and nonspecialized, and as addressed in a nontechnocratic way to basic issues in the lives of all of us. And like Sartre, as Foucault assumes this intellectual role, he moves from primarily epistemological to primarily political concerns, identified with an oppositional Left, though not with a party, or with any claim to bureaucratic or charismatic authority. (Michel Foucault, 43.)

     

    What Rajchman describes as the central difference between Sartre and Foucault is their different approaches to freedom. Sartre, who Rajchman asserts “attempted to make freedom into the philosophical problem” (Michel Foucault, p.44), conceptualized freedom in a way that gave the phenomenological subject priority over the contingencies of history, whereas “Foucault’s commitment [is] to a nonvoluntaristic, nonhumanistic freedom within history” (45). Rajchman describes the difference between Sartre’s voluntaristic idea of freedom and Foucault’s historical idea of freedom as the difference between “anthropological” and “nominalist” ideas of freedom. Sartre’s anthropological idea of freedom, according to Rajchman, remains tied to a politics of revolution which has the final liberation of Man as its objective, whereas Foucault’s nominalist/historicist conception of freedom manifests itself in the world as a continuous politics of revolt–a politics that attempts “to occasion new ways of thinking . . . and sees freedom not as the end of domination or as our removal from history, but rather as the revolt through which history may constantly be changed” (Michel Foucault, p.123). As Rajchman explains:

     

    [a]nthropology entails that we are free because we have a nature that is real or one we must realize; nominalist history assumes that our "nature" in fact consists of those features of ourselves by reference to which we are sorted into polities and groups. Our real freedom is found in dissolving or changing the polities that embody our nature, and as such it is asocial and anarchical. No society or polity could be based on it, since it lies precisely in the possibility of constant change. Our real freedom is thus political, though it is never finalizable, legislatable, or rooted in our nature. (123)

     

    I quote Rajchman at some length because his emphasis on a certain tacit idea of “freedom” in the texts of Foucault makes it possible to recast Sartre as a nonvoluntaristic local aesthetician. I suggested earlier that Sartre’s activism might encourage us to re-evaluate aesthetics, not in terms of the beautiful, the sublime, the innovative, the problematic, and so forth, but instead in terms of social efficacy. And because Sartre’s activism is oppositional, because it always takes on explicitly political and counter- hegemonic emphases, critics who wish to aestheticize Sartre’s political activities need to remind themselves that Sartre’s effective/aesthetic practices are always activities of protest against specific configurations of political authority. Thus Rajchman’s Foucauldian conception of a post-revolutionary politics of revolt, as it empowers my reinvention of Sartre, might usefully be redescribed as an aesthetics of revolt.

     

    This use of “aesthetics” may pose problems for many contemporary readers, and with good reason. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin warns us brilliantly and convincingly that the “aestheticization of politics” can coincide historically with the emergence of political fascism.7 Benjamin argues that critics and artists who wish in some way to associate artwork with political power must do so in projects that politicize artwork, not in projects that aestheticize politics. The politicization of artwork, Benjamin argues, helps break down political hegemony in a way that encourages Marxist participatory democracy. The aestheticization of politics, in contrast, elevates political regimes and their leading representatives to an almost mythic status of unquestionable authority, thus obscuring the real concrete workings of power and exploitation by drawing attention instead to transcendental narratives about national destiny, the greatness of the people, spirit of place, racial purity, and so on.

     

    Benjamin’s useful distinction between politicized aesthetics and aestheticized politics has become too general and constraining in discussions of aesthetics and politics. Moreover, its unquestioned heuristic authority might make it possible for critics to interpret Sartre’s pragmatist aesthetics of revolt, prematurely and too simplistically, as an instance of aestheticized politics. Benjamin’s distinction, in short, has taken on a kind of automatic legitimacy in critical discussions; it divides political artists up all too neatly between the good guys and the bad guys, between desirable Marxist artists who shake up the artworld by exposing its complicity with forms of political power and domination, and undesirable fascistic mystifiers who, instead of demonstrating critically how art is a form of historical power, legitimate political power by giving it an aesthetic and mythical identity. The lauding of Hans Haacke in recent art criticism, for instance, and the complementary castigating of Joseph Beuys–the former for his “politicized art” and the latter for his “aestheticized politics”–demonstrate quite clearly just how automatic Benjamin’s overly polaric distinction has become.8

     

    Writing critically of Joseph Beuys in his essay “Haacke, Broodthaers, Beuys,” Stefan Germer claims that “Beuys . . . made all historical reality disappear behind a self-created myth of the artist-hero,”9 and that Beuys’s theory of social sculpture presented “creativity . . . as the means to shape and change society” (OCTOBER 68). In a discussion that defers constantly, if implicitly, to the authority of Benjamin’s metaphors and the critical positions they shape, Germer writes:

     

    [b]y identifying political and artistic practice with one another, Beuys avoids the relevance of his activity, since he borrows for it the aura of the political. The necessary precondition of this is the aestheticization of the political. Abstracting from actual conditions, Beuys in effect invents state and society, thus making both into artistic creation. (OCTOBER 68.)

     

    Germer’s critique of Beuys allows me to demonstrate how Benjamin’s critique of aestheticized politics, although important and necessary, should not automatically discredit my Foucauldian revision of Sartre as a local aesthetician. Germer’s Benjaminian critique of Beuys is based largely on Beuys’s belief “that, by inventing rather than analyzing social conditions, he could actually contribute to their change” (italics mine; OCTOBER, p.66). Germer’s use of “invention” invokes a whole tradition of thinking in which voluntaristic subjects supposedly create the world in which they live, unconstrained by their historical conditions. In such a view politicians are indeed “artists” whose “wills” create the social world–privileged subjects who manipulate social individuals, with truly epic panache, as the medium of their heroic self-expression. But after Rajchman on Foucault, the word “invention” can take on an entirely different sense–one that has nothing to do with the “out- moded concept of creativity,” or of the equally out-moded concept of the voluntaristic hero-artist who invents our political reality in the manner of a high Modernist “genius” creating an innovative painting or poem. It is this more recent view of “invention”–as it implies a nominalist aesthetics of historical effects rather than an anthropological aesthetics of self-expression–that Sartre’s activism and Rajchman’s work on Foucault prepare us to consider.

     

    Clearly Sartre’s “aesthetics of revolt” is as intolerant of aestheticized politics–and certainly of fascism–as is the politicized art Benjamin advocates. Any aestheticization of politics, in Benjamin’s sense as well as Germer’s, coincides with the valorization of a regime, that is, with the legitimation of some form of political authority or domination–precisely what Sartre’s aesthetics of revolt seeks constantly to challenge. In fact, if we were to understand Sartre’s aesthetics of revolt as a politics we would need first to redefine politics as the counter-hegemonic practice of local resistance rather than as the structured and hegemonic practice of political domination. In short, Sartre aestheticizes continual resistance to political power, not political regimes themselves.

     

    I say that Sartre’s practices of resistance are inventive because, in Rajchman’s Foucauldian sense, they freely contribute to the social transformation of polities and groups and, in effect, reinvent the world (and our potential experience of it) by so doing. In no way does this sense of “invention,” as it pertains to a nominalist aesthetics of revolt, reproduce the modernist/anthropological vocabulary of “creativity,” “genius,” the “hero-artist,” and so forth that is so central to Benjamin’s description, and condemnation, of aestheticized politics. Germer, for example, criticizes Beuys’s work by suggesting that Beuys’s privileging of “invention” over “analysis” in discussions of how best to describe and initiate social change–as well as his corresponding belief that people “invent state and society, thus making both into artistic creation”–relies upon an inevitable anthropological conception of invention. But such a (modernist) conception of invention is not the only one at our critical disposal, and Germer writes as if it is. The fact is that after Foucault’s dicussions of ethics and aesthetics in The Use of Pleasure, and after Rajchman’s redescription of Foucault’s aesthetics as a free politics of resistance, Benjamin’s unequivocal identification of “invention” with a mythology of “creativity,” as it sometimes appears in art criticism of a materialist persuasion, has become as out-moded as the very concepts it set out to criticize.

     

    My discussions of Rajchman on Foucault and of the Benjaminian Germer on Beuys put us in position to revaluate Sartre as a kind of oppositional pragmatist or local aesthetician. In contrast with Germer, Sartre realizes that analysis is simply one pragmatic tool that enables the reinvention of society by producing effects within and upon it, but that it is not the only tool at our disposal. In fact, analysis is only one kind of effective/inventive practice; there are numerous others, and no single one is unilaterally the most conducive to participatory democracy. Instead, the context and the desired objective of any political project must determine the tools and practices that, in a given situation, contribute most effectively to social change. Sartre also realizes that abstractions, ideologies, religions and so forth produce specific effects on simultaneously collective and local individuals. Such a critical position makes it possible for Sartre to acknowledge how his public reception as something as general and hopelessly over-determined as an “Existentialist” can nonetheless empower the specific effects his thought and practice have upon concrete social individuals.

     

    The major difference between Sartre’s aesthetics of revolt and Beuys’s social sculpture–at least as Benjamin inspires automatic criticism of the latter–is that Sartre’s work pursues political ends whereas Beuys’s work pursues predominantly aesthetic ends. That is, Beuys’s theory of social sculpture is designed to give us new ideas about art, whereas Sartre’s aesthetics of revolt strives primarily to bring about political change. This suggests enormous dissimilarities between Sartre, as I see him, and Beuys, at least as Germer sees him. Germer seems to believe that Beuys’s social sculpture, as it strives to produce further mythologies for an already ahistorical theory of art, engenders historical confusion in the service of Beuys’s “artistic” reception, and does so at the expense of specific examinations of political praxis.

     

    Sartre’s aesthetics of revolt, however, does just the opposite. At the point in Sartre’s life where his activities take on a local aesthetic emphasis, Sartre already has the received and overly-general identity of an Artist and all the charismatic authority that goes with it; in fact, he is often openly ambivalent about his mythic identity.10 Thus where Beuys’s theorization of social sculpture can be understood, perhaps too one-sidedly, as an attempt to obtain a mythic identity, Sartre’s aesthetics of revolt can be understood as an attempt to use such a troublesome identity in the service of counter-mythic and oppositional practices. Indeed, Sartre has considerably more by way of “myth” at his pragmatist/historicist disposal than the aesthetic Beuys: not only is he a canonical literary writer of mythic proportions (Nausea, Roads to Freedom, The Flies, The Words, etc.); he is also famous as a philosopher who tells us something dramatic about a “human condition” (Being and Nothingness), a political theorist who describes for us our social present and its histories (The Critique of Dialectical Reason), and a social critic who addresses current events in oppositional terms (“The Maoists in France,” “Elections: A Trap for Fools,” “Vietnam: Imperialism and Genocide,” etc.).11 Sartre thus achieves dubious charismatic status, in Benjamin’s propagandistic sense, as a cultural “celebrity.” And despite Rajchman’s claim to the contrary, Sartre does have “charismatic authority,” or at least more than Foucault, even if like Foucault he makes no claims to having such authority.12

     

    Enter Sartre the pragmatist. Now Sartre knows that he has indeed obtained celebrity status as a writer and a philosopher. For example, The Words is in some sense an attempt to come to terms with, and criticize, the socially acquired motivations that encouraged him to pursue such a status.13 But Sartre also knows that, given the levels of fame he achieved as the 20th Century “Voltaire” of Post-WW II France14–and arguably of the North Atlantic area in general–that he can never simply erase his fame. He can, however, put it to some productive counter-hegemonic use, which he proceeds to do.

     

    As a major cultural celebrity of most of the capitalist First World, Sartre realizes that his cultural fame covertly legitimates the political status quo of the Western world at large–with its political and economic interests in the exploitation of Third World countries–despite the fact that he overtly condemns those interests. So Sartre brings his fame to bear upon the very world from which he derives his cultural authority by reproducing it supportively in places where it is not expected to be. Algeria, the Soviet Union (which he later repudiated for its Stalinism), Israel and Palestine, China, Cuba, Yugoslavia, Brazil, and others all acquire some potentially sympathetic attention from Europeans and Americans when they see the “great” Sartre, keeper of the flame of Western culture, clearly advocating the political programs and interests of oppressed peoples contra the imperialist West’s negative representations of their interests and programs. Sartre thus becomes the enemy within, and the unforeseen statesman from without. But it is a curious sort of “statesman” that Sartre becomes for, unlike the comprehensive “theorist” we expect him to be, Sartre refuses to speak for others, to “lead” them on their behalf, or to presume to understand their historical needs and desires (unlike the authoritative West he supposedly represents) better than they do themselves. Instead he gets the West looking at him and listening to him, and then leaves the stage to its proper organic narrators, in Gramsci’s sense, for whom he or any other representative of the First World has nothing to say.15

     

    Sartre’s use of his public identity demonstrates several related things pertinent to my reinvention of him. First, the revolutionary and theoretical Marxist of The Critique of Dialectical Reason has become unexpectedly a pragmatist of revolt. No longer making authoritative or transcendental claims for his pro-revolutionary “theories,” Sartre now uses the over-determined notoriety he has acquired for having “created” such theories to draw attention to specific problems in social polities.16 Sartre thus turns Western expectations inside out by allowing us to decide for ourselves that, politically and morally, we are not always what we proclaim ourselves to be.

     

    Second, Sartre’s oppositional pragmatism coincides with his rejection of celebrity status as a hermetic cultural end in itself. Sartre at once demonstrates his critical dissatisfaction with concepts such as the “artist-hero,” “creativity,” “genius,” “eternal value,” “mystery”– precisely those concepts rejected by Benjamin and Germer in his criticism of Beuys–by moving toward oppositional nominalism while distancing himself, as much as his historical moment will allow, from any aesthetics or politics of creativity. Arguably, this distancing coincides with Sartre’s activist rejection of the voluntarism with which he is still too automatically associated, as well as with his rejection of the anthropology that Rajchman rightfully reinvokes where he distinguishes Sartre’s totalizing theoretical work from the nominalism we find, more profitably, in Foucault’s histories.

     

    I call Sartre’s nominalist activism local aesthetic practice since it is at once inventive in a post- anthropological sense, and micro-political in its pragmatist suggestion that we resist authoritarianism, in Malcolm X’s words, by any means necessary. This last phrase has been popularly interpreted as an advocacy of militant violence; yet it is quite clear that “any means” can and should suggest a great deal more than simply “violent means.” Occasionally Sartre does speak out in support of “revolutionary” violence, as in his strategic 1961 preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth–a book which, in its theories and objectives, does anticipate the thought of the mature Malcolm X.17 Other times, however, Sartre refuses to support the violent practices of militant revolutionaries, although he periodically idealizes what he refers to in one interview as the “militant intellectual.”18 For instance, we know that in 1974 Sartre visits the incarcerated Andreas Baader in a West German prison, that he goes to express solidarity with the oppositional militant and to protest the treatment of political prisoners worldwide, but that he refuses to condone the terrorist tactics of the Baader-Meinhof group.19

     

    What accounts for Sartre’s willingness to support counter-authoritative violence in one instance and his unwillingness to do so in another? I would argue that Sartre chooses to represent himself as a “violent revolutionary” when he thinks it will serve the interests of oppressed peoples whose organic situations clearly demand such a representation, and that in other kinds of specifically oppressive circumstances he sees fit to represent himself in other ways entirely–but always in pursuit of the same political revisionism. I say “revisionism” because the pragmatist Sartre, if we think of him as a local aesthetician, no longer believes in a final revolutionized state, but instead in the ongoing need to invent provisional democratic situations which, because they risk becoming hegemonic in their own right, constantly require revision and modification.

     

    One of Fanon’s critical distinctions can help us see why Sartre’s direct public response to Fanon is necessarily different from his ambiguous public response to Baader. On the one hand, Fanon suggests that capitalist societies rely largely on their infrastructures to keep things in order.20 Such infrastructures are maintained by “bewilderers”–teachers, lawyers, doctors, priests, clerics, and so on–who, themselves unconscious victims of power, mediate the hard realities of power by training citizens to believe that their governments work to protect their interests rather than those of the rich and powerful. On the other hand, Fanon suggests that colonized countries like Algeria require the immediate violent policing of occupied “natives” to protect the interests of the political powers that be. In the cases of both West Germany and Algeria, those who have power are those who either have or manage money. However, the actual tactics of oppression and exploitation in an infrastructural state such as West Germany in the 1970s–although arguably “occupied” by our even more infrastructural United States–are not as obviously violent to oppressed but serialized West Germans as are the visible guns and clubs of French militia to collectively oppressed Algerians.

     

    Unlike the Fanon of French-occupied Algeria, Baader can thus be made to look like the only militant thing that exists in an otherwise peaceful West Germany. And because this is precisely what happens, it is not Baader’s illegality or militantism with which Sartre feels an urgent need to take issue–despite his disapproval of it–but rather with the way that Baader’s identity has been over- totalized by the First World press. Sartre understands that the French-occupied Algerians with whom Fanon is directly familiar, and whose plight encourages Fanon’s militant advocacy of a full-scale African revolution, collectively recognize an oppressive enemy in the French, and that the Algerian revolutionaries have organic narratives that can justify and explain their organic rebellion to counter- revolutionary Europeans. Europeans might not sympathize with the “self-descriptions” of oppressed Algerians, but these self-descriptions nonetheless exist, are collective, and make a certain sense; consequently, colonial countries will have to come to terms with them. This makes it productive for Sartre to support violence openly, for such violence, or its threat, will clearly yield counter- authoritative results by making negotiation necessary.

     

    Baader, however, represents no full-scale revolutionary program and, as such, is easily “psychologized” and represented for public consumption only as a sociopath engaging in random acts of terrorism, when in fact other interpretations of militant protest merit public consideration. Sartre thus finds himself in the following dilemma. He must not allow the state to use Baader to condemn militancy in general on a symbolic level. But neither can he simply support Baader’s militancy on a specific level, for he risks enabling the state’s public representation of Baader as the Zeitgeist of terrorism, irrationality, anti-civilization, and so forth. Sartre is thus concerned that any blanket endorsement of militantism in a passive infrastructural state might affront uncritical citizens and opportunist state management enough for them to suppress those legal outlets for oppositional practice that already exist, and which already produce valuable counter- hegemonic effects. Yet arguably Sartre’s decision to visit the symbolic Baader in prison–an event which he knows will generate some attention–is an attempt to keep Europe’s interpretation of militancy open so people can question the state’s suggestion that all militant behavior is a priori pathological behavior.

     

    Sartre’s strategic support of the student Maoists in France, to give another example, often takes the micro- political form of dialogues and open forums which are in turn publicized–dialogues and forums which then impart all the cultural credibility that a collaboration with Sartre carries in the Western world.21 (This is a specific strategy of Foucault’s as well, who more obviously than Sartre was no Maoist.22) Once again Sartre chooses the means which most effectively empower oppositional representations. Thus his commitment to the contextual specificity of inventive resistances resembles Jonathan Swift’s as Edward Said describes it in “Swift as Intellectual.” Sartre’s aesthetics of revolt is always reactive in Said’s sense23 (or “specific” in Foucault’s24); that is, it always responds to a concrete political situation and shapes the form of its resistance accordingly, despite the fact that Sartre’s aesthetics, unlike Swift’s, is activist to the point of abandoning traditional category of “art” entirely. And the nominalist quality of Sartre’s later oppositional practices demonstrates how Sartre’s aesthetics becomes a politics, and not an anthropology, of freedom; Sartre strives to invent political room for organic speech-acts, protests, and rebellions, and demonstrates that reform is never final in a manner that emancipates people from an oppressive Past, but that reforms are instead ongoing, specific, and endlessly provisional.

     

    Sartre’s oppositional activism also suggests that the “success” of any aesthetics of revolt can never be gauged, as has the success of all aesthetic enterprise in the past, by the degree of fame or recognition it obtains, for local aesthetic practice never conceives of success simply as originality, wealth, cultural canonization, and so forth– all of those representations of success which quickly become commodities within the authoritative market systems they covertly legitimate. Instead Sartre, like Ellison’s invisible man in the epigraph that begins this paper, understands success purely in terms of efficacious resistance. The question is no longer “Am I well-known, rich?” and so on, but instead “Have I released any of the counter-hegemonic potential that is stored up in the current regime? That is, have I affected the world in ways which unleash the possibility of endless resistance to authority?” Sartre, of course, is not the unknown protagonist of Ellison’s novel; in fact, the circumstances of Sartre’s life, existence, and influence are obviously different from those of an impoverished member of a social minority. Nonetheless what goes for Sartre goes for others as well; everyone in their specific and local situations can resist authority in local aesthetic ways and can do so, in part, by manipulating their various socially assigned “selves” in the service of inventive microphysical revolts. Moreover, the story I tell here of Sartre might usefully empower our unique resistances by lending them some (provisional) authority for which they are in dire need.

     

    One inconsistency remains, but it is one that enables Sartre’s aesthetics of revolt in practice as much as it might seem to disable it in theory. If the reactive quality of Sartre’s aesthetics of revolt makes his activism “microphysical” in Foucault’s well-known sense of the word, a large portion of Sartre’s specific power–that is, the power he derives from his fame–is unavoidably drawn from the “mythologies” of creativity criticized by Benjamin and Germer. I think it is unproductive, however, simply to berate mythology for its “ideological” status, for such berating implies that we can “expose” mythology as pure false-consciousness, when in fact no such form of mythology exists. Rather mythology must be understood for what it is: a concrete force of history which can be used inventively and oppositionally against exploitive powers, or which will be used instead, almost invariably, to conserve those powers. In fact, we have no humane choice at present but to follow Sartre’s example and to redirect authoritative mythologies against themselves. Our failure to do so automatically leaves mythologies in the hands of those exploitive powers who, pragmatists already, use mythologies to legitimate their authoritarian politics. Just as honesty is a luxury that Sartre cannot afford, neither can we afford the a priori anti-mythologism of Benjamin’s automatic following. Such a rejection of the historically-constituted currency of struggle is the strategic equivalent of putting down guns in the thick of battle, of refusing to tell Attila a lie, as the famous illustration of Kant’s imperative goes, though it mean the death of an entire population.

     

    Let us then reconsider Benjamin’s distinction between politicized art and aestheticized politics. If there are good reasons to avoid theoretical syntheses of aesthetics and politics (and there certainly are), Sartre’s local aesthetics cautions us against taking these “good reasons” too far, because they risk disempowering us entirely. If we should never equate power, in some mythic and glorious sense, with art, neither should we allow cultural materialism, since it is often our area of critical commitment, to become passive, commodifiable, and politically unengaged. This latter possibility is a far greater threat to critical activism than the social sculpture of Joseph Beuys, for it discourages many of the keenest critical minds in cultural studies, simply for fear of reprisal, from directing their inventive powers explicitly toward political issues. Sartre, for his part, refuses to practice an aesthetics which is not at once an effective historicism, and strives, in keeping with his larger democratic objectives, to affect social polities in ways that encourage us to criticize authority, to conceptualize political alternatives, and to empathize with the plights of suffering social selves. His nominalist aesthetics, which considers invention from a viewpoint radically different from that of Benjamin’s followers, neither simply aestheticizes politics nor politicizes art but, ceasing to privilege artwork altogether, politicizes the potential of our ongoing nominalist freedom.

     

    Notes

     

    1. John Rajchman, Michel Foucault: The Freedom of Philosophy (New York: Columbia UP, 1985). I am indebted to Rajchman’s superb reading of Foucault in this paper.

     

    2. Ronald Hayman, Sartre: A Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 13.

     

    3. See Simone de Beauvoir, “Conversations with Jean- Paul Sartre,” Adieux, trans. Patrick O’Brian (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 165. The later activist Sartre questions the impossibly broad scope of his theoretical Critique of Dialectical Reason when he suggests to de Beauvoir in an interview that he finds it too “idealistic.” And in an attempt to provide the phenomenological vocabulary of Existentialism with something of a historicist emphasis Sartre claims that Existentialism is autonomous with Marxism. See Jean-Paul Sartre, “Self-Portrait at Seventy,” Life/Situations: Essays Written and Spoken, trans. Paul Auster and Lydia Davis (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 60.

     

    4. See Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre, ed. Norman Macafee, trans. Anna Cancogni (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987). Cohen-Solal gives examples of Sartre’s political protests (e.g, 141-22), his numerous travels as an “anti- ambassador” (391-414), his brief arrest in 1970 for distributing La Cause du peuple (479-480), his visit to the imprisoned Andreas Baader (507), and suggests that these and other of his activities are instances of Sartrean engagement. See also Keith A. Reader, Intellectuals and the French Left since 1968 (New York: St. Martins Press, 1987), 31. Reader mentions Sartre’s “involvement with the banned Maoist newspaper La Cause du Peuple, and subsequently with Liberation, participation in demonstrations, and attempts to get himself arrested” which are “shrewdly rebutted by the regime.”

     

    5. For Foucault on his treatment of an “aesthetics of existence” see Michel Foucault, “Introduction,” The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), especially 11-12.

     

    6. See Richard Rorty, “Epistemology and ‘the Philosophy of Mind,’” Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1979), 125-27.

     

    7. See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schoken Books, 1969), 241-242.

     

    8. See Thierry de Duve, “Joseph Beuys, or the Last of the Proletarians”; Stefen Germer, “Haacke, Broodthaers, Beuys”; and Eric Michaud, “The Ends of Art according to Beuys” in OCTOBER, eds. Joan Copjec, Douglas Crimp, Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson (Cambridge: MIT Press), Number 45, Summer 88.

     

    9. Germer, OCTOBER, 71.

     

    10. Sartre indeed has mixed feelings about the fame he has acquired as a cultural figure. He sometimes discusses his fame openly, his early reasons for desiring it, and speculates about his relation to “posterity” in a matter-of- fact manner. See de Beauvoir, Adieux, 162-64. Other times, however, he is defensive about his fame, and attempts to deny that it empowers him since he associates celebrity status very unfavorably with “bourgeois” society. See Sartre, “Self-Portrait at Seventy,” 25-31. Nonetheless, the later politicized Sartre capitalizes on his fame (or his “mythic identity”) to draw attention to political alternatives. Moreover, in reference to Sartre’s 1968 interview of the less famous Daniel Cohn-Bendit–in which Sartre was provided with the opportunity to use his fame while playing it down–Reader writes in Intellectuals that “[f]rom being famous for being Sartre, the curse that had dogged him for years, it was as though he were moving toward ‘un-being’ Sartre,” 32.

     

    11. See Sartre, “Elections: A Trap for Fools,” and “The Maoists in France,” Life/Situations; and Jean-Paul Sartre, “Vietnam: Imperialism and Genocide,” Between Existentialism and Marxism, trans. John Mathews (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974).

     

    12. See Rajchman, 43.

     

    13. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: George Braziller, 1964).

     

    14. See Cohen-Solal, 415. Cohen-Solal writes that de Gaulle’s response to continued French disapproval of Sartre’s political views and activities in 1960 was the famous “You do not imprison Voltaire.”

     

    15. For an excellent summary of Antonio Gramsci’s distinction between the organic intellectual and the traditional intellectual see Edward Said, “Swift as Intellectual,” The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983), 82.

     

    16. For a similar view of how Sartre uses his cultural recognition to enable projects of resistance which are not necessarily his own, see Reader, 32. Regarding Sartre’s close relation with the French student Maoists in the late 1960s and early 70s, Reader writes that “Sartre subordinates himself to the Maoists, using his prestige to amplify and propogate their ideas rather than ideas he has himself developed.”

     

    17. See Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Preface” to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1966); and for an interpretation of how the thought of the later Malcolm X resembled the “revolutionary socialism” of a “Third World political perspective” (237) see Ruby M. and E.U. Essien-Udom, “Malcolm X: An International Man” in Malcolm X: The Man and his Times, ed. John Henrik Clarke (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1969), 235-267.

     

    18. See Sartre, “Self-Portrait at Seventy,” 61. In this interview Sartre characterizes the Maoist Pierre Victor as a “militant intellectual” and expresses hope that Victor “will carry out both the intellectual work and the militant work he wants to.”

     

    19. Sartre discusses his reasons for visiting Baader, the public’s reaction to his visit, and his judgment of the visit itself in “Self-Portrait at Seventy,” 27, 31. Despite all the attention his visit drew, Sartre claims: “I think it was a failure, which is not to say that if I had to do it over again I would not do it.” Sartre acknowledges that, although many people did interpret his visit as an expression of approval for Baader specifically or, even worse, exploited it as a political opportunity to question the aging Sartre’s lucidity through the press, the fact that some attention was drawn to the merits of oppositional militancy more than justified Sartre’s visit, and would have justified it again. I think Sartre used Baader as an available representation of militant activism simply to keep the possibility of such activism alive in the European imagination. For even if Baader’s practices were specifically unproductive and even questionable as activities of “resistance,” Sartre knew that the state would manipulate Baader’s reception on a symbolic level to condemn militancy in general, when militancy might in some cases be necessary, effective, and absolutely desirable. Sartre thus strove to respond to the state’s symbolic over- totalization of oppositional militancy by producing alternative symbolics. See also Cohen-Solal, 507, and Hayman, 462, 465, 467.

     

    20. For Fanon’s characterization of the difference between capitalist and colonized countries and the role that “bewilderers” play in the former see The Wretched of the Earth, 38. Fanon does not use the word “infrastructure” to characterize institutional activities of “bewilderment; however, I think the word “infrastructure,” with some qualification, communicates the sense of his argument well. I am not using “infrastructure” to imply the base (or substructure) of a society, but instead to suggest the more microphysical practices of subjectivization that take place in complex societies which cannot be explained simply in terms of base or superstructure.

     

    21. See Sartre, “The Maoists in France,” Life/Situations, 162-171. This article first appeared as the introduction to Michele Manceaux’s Maos en France (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1972). Manceaux’s book is a collection of interviews with Maoists, and Sartre was eager to endorse the Maoists’ moral commitment to illegal action. Sartre did so, I think, both to provoke France to consider the merits of illegal action, and to provide a moral discourse that could justify the necessity of such action to uncritical citizens who were otherwise trained to understand illegal action as a priori illegitimate action. See also Cohen-Solal on Sartre and the Maoists, 474-88, 494.

     

    22. Michel Foucault, “On Popular Justice: A Discussion with Maoists,” Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 1-36. This interview is largely a conversation with Sartre’s close associate toward the end of his life, the Maoist Pierre Victor.

     

    23. For Said on the “reactive” intellectual see “Swift as Intellectual,” 78. Elsewhere in this essay Said describes Swift as a “local activist” (77) and characterizes Swift’s writings and practices as “local performances” (79). These distinctions are all pertinent to my reinvention of Sartre.

     

    24. For Foucault on the “specific” intellectual see “Truth and Power,” Power/Knowledge, 126.

     

  • A Poem

    –SBB with Alamgir Hashmi
    Islamabad, Pakistan

     

    Post Scrotum

     

    Watt? Yes. But the same when the Mal’oun died
    in the island; this island severed,
    repousse, reeling with peat-reek;
    this drizzle of grief–
    interminable falling on the wide sea.
    Moll’s face saffron-coloured, hair like
    petals plucked from a white chrysanthemum;
    local boys on stout or busy at hurling;
    and our scriveners, on regular beat up in London,
    aping accents of the English gentry.
    I broadcast in Irish then, from Radio Eireann,
    the right embers and all that fall to the ashes
    or whatever I often whispered to myself
    through Murphy, Philips, or Grundig.
    No, not Grundig, for the word grounds the air,
    the mind slips out of form in that language,
    is not hand in glove as now. Example:
    with a handschuh your hands feel they wear shoes;
    the foot’s in the mouth; and you write with your feet.
    Paris is O. K. Paris is all right. Paris is O. K. All right.
    I was lecteur d’anglais in that place, teaching Doublin’
    English and writing like Thom A. Becket what no one,
    except J. J. in some arseholy state or other, would attempt–
    in a language of my own.
    I hear now that across the Chunnel
    one side tells the other it’s French I wrote;
    the other side calls it English, or by other appelatives;
    such as would divide the protestant cake in catholic portions
    and make for a nice debate
    in the Parliament of European Foules.
    If I said Parnell was no string-pulling
    politician, women would be tightening the girth
    of their drawers with double-knotted strings.
    I left because truelove had run out of the vein,
    the earth turning no end but negative;
    its slow poisons free a sweet violet in my lungs.
    And, yes, French had a point or two.
    That dusty potato dropped in 1921 or 1845,
    it named the apple of the earth–
    to say nothing of the rotten core.
    Peeling. Peeling.

     

  • The Second War and Postmodern Memory

    Charles Bernstein

    State University of New York at Buffalo

     

    Now light your pipe; look, what a steady hand, Draw a deep breath; stop thinking, count fifteen, And you’re as right as rain. . . . Books; what a jolly company they are, Standing so quiet and patient on their shelves . . . . they’re so wise . . . .
     

    –Siegfried Sassoon, “Repression of War Experience” (1918)

     

    We never discussed the Second World War much when I was growing up. I don’t feel much like discussing it now. It seems presumptuous to interpret, much less give literary interpretations of, the Systematic Extermination Process or the dropping of the H-Bomb, the two poles of the Second War.

     

    When Stanley Diamond asked me to speak on “Poetry after the Holocaust”–to replace but also to respond to Jerome Rothenberg, who could not attend the symposium–my first reaction was to wonder what qualifications I had to speak– as if the topic of the war made me question my standing, made me wonder what I might say that could bear the weight of this subject matter. Diamond reassured me that the audience would be small: “For many the Holocaust is too far in the past to matter; for most of the rest, it’s too painful to bring to mind.”

     

    My father-in-law, who left Berlin as a teenager on a youth aliyah and spent the war in Palestine, had a different reaction: all these Holocaust conferences are a fad. This reaction is as disturbing as it is right. The Holocaust has come to stand for a kind of Secular Satanism–everyone’s against it, anyone can work up a feverish moral fervor denouncing the Nazi Monster.

     

    Yet I’ve been struck by just the opposite: that the psychological effects of the Second War are still largely repressed and that we are just beginning to come out of the shock enough to try to make sense of the experience.

     

    We stormed the citadel under the banner of amnesia, Winning absolute victory over the Germans in 1943. Fantasy that could leave nothing out but the pain . . . [Barrett Watten,Under Erasure]

     

              Crysiles of cristle, piled
              ankle high,
              as wide as sound carries.  Am I--
              hearing it--algebras worth?
    
              There is a wind
              erases marks.  I felt it on my cheek
              Summers long
              you can cross it
    
              & still not approach time, de-
    
              solidified, approaching mothish mists
    
              felled, the way a price knocked down
    
              puts purchase on its feet.  Stammering
    
              painful clamor   by coincidents
                  appraised.  Refuse
    
                  is a spilled constant.
                  Let it loose. 
    
    [Benjamin Friedlander, "Kristallnacht"]

     

    I don’t remember when I first heard about the war, but I do remember thinking of it as an historical event, something past and gone. It’s inconceivable to me now that I was born just five years after its end; each year, the Extermination Process seems nearer, more recent. Yet if the Systematic Extermination of the European Jews seemed to define, implicitly, the horizon of the past for me, the Bomb defined the foreshortened horizon of the future.

     

              hear
              hear, where the dry blood talks
                    where the old appetite walks . . .
              where it hides, look
              in the eye how it runs
              in the flesh / chalk
    
                   but under these petals
                   in the emptiness
                   regard the light, contemplate
                   the flower
    
              whence it arose
    
                   with what violence benevolence is bought
                   what cost in gesture justice brings
                   what wrongs domestic rights involve
                   what stalks
                   this silence
                   what pudor or perjorocracy affronts
                   how awe, night-rest and neighborhood can rot
                   what breeds where dirtiness is law
                   what crawls
                   below  . . .
    
    [Charles Olson, "The Kingfishers" (1949)]

     

    Fifty years is not a long time to absorb such a catastrophe for Western Civilization. It seems to me that the current controversies surrounding Paul De Man, and, more significantly, Martin Heidegger reflect the psychic economy of reason in face of enormous loss. In all our journals of intellectual opinion, we are asked to consider, as if it were a Divine Mystery, how such men of learning, who have shown such a profound and subtle appreciation for the art and philosophy of the West, could have countenanced, indeed be complicit with, an evil that seems to erode any possible explanation, justification, or contextualization, despite the attempt of well-meaning commentators to evade this issue by just such explanations, justifications, and contextualizations.

     

    The Heidegger question merely personalizes the basic situation of the war: that European learning, the Enlightenment tradition, and the Ideals of Reason as embodied in the Nation State, were as much a cause of the war as a break to it. For to understand how Heidegger could be complicit in the Second War is to understand how the Second War is not an aberration but an extension of the Logos of Western Civilization. Jack Spicer’s dying words–“My vocabulary did this to me”–could be the epitaph of the Second War as well: Our vocabulary did this to us.

     

    Walter Benjamin, Primo Levi, Paul Celan committed suicide; De Man and Heidegger went on to prosper. What did the former know that the latter never absorbed? To acknowledge the Second War means to risk suicide and in the process to politicize philosophy; and if we desire to avoid death and evade politics, repression is inevitable. Which is to say that the death an acknowledgement of this war brings on is not only the death of individuals but also of an Ideal–of reason unbounded to politics, of, that is, rationality as such.
     

     
              fear smashes into
              my double
              out of nowhere
              would shrink
              flesh back in itself
              before it vomits
              a wet night from neck or forehead
              passes
              into the vague air
              swallows
              the liquid stays inside
              my corneas extend
              along the axis of
              the flow
              dries
    
    [Rosmarie Waldrop,The Road Is Everywhere Or Stop This Body]

     

    I’d be reluctant to say any of my own poems was about the war or should be read within that frame–none would hold up to the scrutiny such a reading would promote. But I do want to make a broad, very provisional, claim that much of the innovative poetry of these soon to be fifty years following the war register the Twined events of Extermination in the West and Holocaust in East in ways that hardly have been accounted for.

     

              From the stately violence of the State
              a classic war, World War Two, punctuated by Hiroshima
              all the action classically taking place on one day
              visible to one group in invisible terms
              beside a fountain of imagefree water
              "trees" with brown "trunks" and "leafy" green crowns
              50s chipmunks sitting beneath, buck teeth representing
              mental tranquility, they sit in rows
              and read their book and the fountain gushes forth
              all the letters at once, permanently
              a playful excrescence, an erotic war against nature....
    
    [Bob Perelman, "The Broken Mirror"]

     

    Every cultural development I ascribe to the Second War can be just as readily traced to some other cause and can also be said to preexist the war. My argument is not deterministic; rather I want to suggest that the frame of the Second War, Auschwitz and Hiroshima, transforms the social meaning of these cultural developments. Racism and cultural supremacism do not begin or end with the Second War but they are the precise ideological instruments that mark the most unrecuperable aspects of the war–the Lagers and the mutilated survivors of the bomb. The war did not make racism and cultural supremacism intolerable, they always were, but it demonstrated, as if demonstration was necessary, their absolute corrosiveness.

     

    The war made it apparent, if it wasn’t already, that racism and cultural supremacism are not correctable flaws of Western logocentrism but its nonbiodegradable byproduct. I don’t mean this as a thesis to be systematically argued. Rather, I am suggesting that the war undermined, subliminally more than consciously, the belief in virtually every basic value of the Enlightenment, insofar as these values are in any way Eurosupremacist or hierarchic.

     

     
              Not one death but many,
              not accumulation but change, the feed-back proves, the
                                                 feed-back is
              the law
    
                   Into the same river no man steps twice
                   When the fire dies air dies
                   No one remains, nor is, one . . .
    
              To be in different states without a change
              is not a possibility . . .
    
    [Olson, "The Kingfishers"]

     

    Racism and cultural supremacism contaminate everything that is associated with them; if this guilt-by-association is necessarily too far-reaching, that is because it sets loose a radical skepticism that knows no immediate place to stop.

     

    The Second War undermines authority in all its prescriptive forms and voices: the rights of the Father, of Law, of the Nation and National Spirit, of Technorationality, of Scientific Certainty, of Axiomatic Judgement, of Hierarchy, of Progress, of Tradition. It’s a chain reaction. No truths are self-evident, certainly not the prerogatives of patriarchy, authority, rationality, order, control.

     

    “But it’s not reason but unreason that caused the war! It’s just a parody of the Enlightenment to associate it with Nazi dementia, or to see the telos of science in a mushroom cloud! The Enlightenment was a force fortoleration and consideration as opposed to mysticism, irrationality, and theological or state authority. Didn’t the Allies represent these Western values against the Nazis!” But the matter is altogether more complicated and my account risks swerving into something too grandiose: for this is not a matter of principle but of shock and grief. If the values associated with Enlightenment are undermined, this is not to remove the Romantic legacy from its undoing. For if the Second War casts doubt on systematicity, it is no less destructive to the vatic, the occult, the charismatic, the emotional solidarity of communion.

     

    There are new difficulties. It’s difficult to see order in the same way after the war, hard to accept control as a neutral value or domination by one group of another as justifiable, hard not to associate systematic operations with the systematicity of the Extermination Process or preemptory Authority with Fascism. These associations overgeneralize: but the pairs are subliminally linked, the one stigmatized by the other. Benjamin said it best and the Second War made it ineradicable (roughly): Every act of Civilization is at the same time an act of Barbarism.
     

     
              When the attentions change / the jungle
              leaps in
                   even the stones are split
                                       they rive . . .
    
    [Olson, "The Kingfishers"]

     

    The vehemence of the civil rights movement and the anti- Vietnam War movement can be seen in this context: the shadow of the Second War, growing darker as the immediate compensatory shock of the first postwar decades wore off, spurred the pace of demands for change and contributed to a sometimes millenarian we-can’t-go-on-the-old-way-anymore zeal. In the U.S., the war on the war in Vietnam inaugurates the externalization of the response to the Second War–the beginning of the end of the repression of the experience of the war.

     

    The realization that white, heterosexual Christian men of the West have no exclusive franchise on articulating the “highest” values of humankind was certainly around prior to the Second War, but the war added a nauseating repulsiveness to such “canonical” views; as if they were not just something to dispute but could no longer be stomached at all. The depth and breadth of the challenge to the Western canon may be a measure of the effect of the war, though few of the parties to the controversy choose to frame it this way. It’s now a commonplace to read the poetry that followed the Great War in the context of the bitter disillusionment brought about by that cataclysm; just as we better understand the Romantics when we keep in mind the context of the French Revolution. The effects of the Second War are all the greater than those of the first, but less frequently cited.

     

    I don’t mean “War Poetry” in the sense of poems about the war; they are notoriously scarce and beside the point I want to make here. Of course, there are many accounts of the war–documentary, personal, theoretical–and many visualizations of the war in film, photography, painting. But the scope or core of the Second War cannot be represented only by the conventional techniques developed to depict events, scenes, battles, political infamies. Only the surface of the war can be pictured.

     

    To be sure, the crisis of representation, which is to say the recognition that the Real is not representable, is associated with the great radical modernist poems of the period immediately before and after the First World War. In the wake of the Second War, however, the meaning, and urgency, of unrepresentability took on explosive new force as a political necessity, as the absolute need to reground polis. That is, such work which had started as a heady, even giddy, aesthetic investigation had become primarily an act of human reconstruction and reimagining. Radical modernism can be characterized by the discovery of the entity-status of language–not just verbal language but signification systems/processes; thus, the working hypothesis about the autonomy of the medium, of the compositional space; the flattening of the Euclidian space of representing and its implicit metaphysics of displacement and reification of objects. I think all of these fundamental ontological and aesthetic discoveries and inventions are carried forward into the radical late 20th century work but with a different critical understanding of the implications of this new textual space.
     

     
              as if we could ignore
              the consequences of
              explosions fracture the present
              warm exhaust
              in our lungs would turn us
              inside out of
              gloves avoid words like
              "war" needs subtler
              poisons as if
              conscious of ends and means
              scream in every
              nerve every breath every
              grain of dust
              to dust cancers over
              the bloodstream
              the bloodstream
              the bloodstream
              the bloodstream
              the bloodstream
    
    [Waldrop, The Road is Everywhere]

     

    After the Second War, there is a more conscious rejection of lingering positivist and Romantic orientations toward, respectively, master systems and the poetic Spirit or Imagination as transcendent. The meaning of the modernist textual practice has been interpreted in ways that contrast with some of its original interpretations:toward the incommensurability of different discourse systems,against the idea of poetry as an imperializing or world-synthesizing agency (of the zeitgeist), not only because these ideas tend to impart to the Poet a superhistorical or superhuman perspective but also because they diminish the partiality, and therefore particularity, of any poetic practice. Thus, the emphasis in the New American Poetry and after on particularity, the detail rather than the overview, form understood as eccentric rather than systematic, process more than system, or if system then system that undermines any hegemonic role for itself.
     

     
              In the center of movement, a debate.
              Before beginning, a pause. . . .
    
              Pianissimo.
    
              Curious symptom, this, that the man appears
              mildly self-satisfied, as if, in spite of his
              obvious confusion and . . . so ill at ease
    
    [Nick Piombino,Poems]

     

    After the war, there is also greater attention to the ideological function of language: taking the word/world-materializing techniques of radical modernism and applying them to show how “everyday” language practices manipulate and dominate; that is, the investigation of the social dimension of language as reality-producing through the use of radical modernist procedures.

     

              how we read it
                      line after line
    
                                  given
                             one look
    
                              refresh the eyes
                           against the abyss
    
    [Larry Eigner,another time in fragments]

     

    Poetry after the war has its psychic imperatives: to dismantle the grammar of control and the syntax of command. This is one way to understand the political content of its form.
     

     
                                            We are
                                            in a sandheap
    
                                            We are
                                            discovered
                             not solid
                                            the floor
                                                based
                             on misunderstanding.
    
    [Susan Howe,The Liberties]

     

    If racism and cultural supremacism are no longer tolerable, then literary history has to be rewritten. This has its primary expression in the proliferation of poetry that rejects a monoculturally centric point-of-view.

     

    Jerome Rothenberg’s anthologies epitomize one aspect of this development.Technicians of the Sacred insisted on the immediate (rather than simply historical or anthropological) relevance of the “tribal” poetries of Native Americans (on both American continents), Africans, peoples of Oceania. This was a concerted assault on the primacy of Western high culture and an active attempt to find in other, non-Western/non-Oriental cultures, what seemed missing from our own. Moreover, the “recovery” of Native American culture by a Jewish Brooklyn-born first generation poet-as-anthologist whose aesthetic roots were in the European avant-garde implicitly acknowledges our domestic genocide. This gesture cannot be fully appreciated without recognizing that it functions as a way of recovering from the Second War by refusing to cover over the genocide that has allowed a false unity to the idea of American Literature. Rothenberg’s anthologies present a multicultural America of many voices in a way that explicitly rejects Eurosupremacism fromwithin a European perspective–that is, dispensing with the demagogic rejection of Europe as such in favor of idealized “America.”

     

    The effect of the Second War is audible not only in the subject matter of the New American Poetry of the 1950s but also in its form, in its insistence on form (as never more than the extension of content, in Creeley’s phrase, echoed by Olson).
     

     
              He had been stuttering, by the edge
              of the street, one foot still
              on the sidewalk, and the other
              in the gutter . . .
              like a bird, say, wired to flight, the
              wings, pinned to their motion, stuffed.
    
              The words, several, and for each, several
              senses.
                   "It is very difficult to sum up
              briefly . . ."
                             It always was. 
    
    [Robert Creeley,For Love]

     

    “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked” does not refer to the war, but it can’t help doing so despite itself. “Howl” makes it apparent that something has gone wrong with America by the early 1950s: the whole “calm” of this period can be read as a repression that Ginsberg, and others, reacted– powerfully, resonantly–against. Not as Sassoon–“I’m going crazy; I’m going stark, staring mad because of the guns”; that’s the difference between the two wars: the malaise is not locatable as the official event of the war, the battles: the whole of everyday life has lost its foundations. And the poetry–or some of it–either registered this loss of foundation in the everyday, or invented ways of articulating new foundations, strikingly without the grandiosity or optimism of some of its modernist sources.

     

    On the street I am met with constant hostility
    and I would have finally nothing else around me,
    except my children who are trained to love
    and whom I intend to leave as relics of my intentions.

     

    [Creeley, “A Fragment”]

     

              These lacustrine cities grew out of loathing
              Into something forgetful, although angry with history.
              They are the product of an idea: that man is horrible,
                   for instance.
              Though this is only one example. . . .
    
    [John Ashbery, "These Lacustrine Cities"]

     

    The New American Poetry, by and large, rejected the grandiosity of scheme, of world-spirit, of progress, of avant-garde advance: the positivist, quasi-authoritarian assumptions of Futurism, Voriticism or the tradition of Eliot. It rejected the heroic universalizing of poetic genius in favor of particularization, process, detail; extending the innovations of the 1910 to 1917 period, but giving them an entirely different psychic registration. Think of the role of the ungeneralizable particular in Creeley or Eigner as opposed to the Controlling Allegories of Pound or Eliot, think of Ashbery’s or Spicer’s self- cancellation compared to Williams’s relaxed prerogatives of self or Stein’s exuberant hubris.

     

    This ocean, humiliating in its disguises
    Tougher than anything.
    No one listens to poetry. The ocean
    Does not mean to be listened to. A drop
    Or crash of water. It means
    Nothing.
    It
    Is bread and butter
    Pepper and salt. The death
    That young men hope for. Aimlessly
    It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No
    One listens to poetry.

     

    [Jack Spicer, “Thing Language”]

     

    Or think of Olson suggesting his project as a poet is to find a way out of the “Western Box,” or Duncan’sBefore the War, or Rothenberg, in his essay on the war, writing of discontent with “regularity and clarity as a reflection of the nature of God.” (In his essay, Rothenberg quotes Creeley’s recent poem fromWindows: “Ever since Hitler / or well before that / fact of human appetite / addressed with brutal / indifference others / killed or tortured . . . / . . . no possible way / out of it smiled or cried / or tore at it and died”.) To link the New American poetry with the Second War in this way suggests that the Systematic Extermination Process had a profound effect on American attitudes in the 1950s. No doubt this projects more than is evident. While the effect of World War 2 on the United States has been far-reaching, and not only for those who fought in the war and their families, the Lagers may well have been a distant issue for most Americans. In contrast, the Cold War and the U.S.’s new hegemonic global role would be a more obvious context for a sociohistorical reading of the New American Poets. But something else lurks in these poems of the “other” tradition that suggests a discomfort with American complacency that the Cold War does not quite account for.
     

     
              1st SF Home Rainout Since.  Bounce Tabby-Cat Giants.
                   Newspapers
              Left in my house.
              My house is Aquarius.  I don't believe
              The water-bearer
              Has equal weight on his shoulders.
              The lines never do.
              We give equal
              Space to everything in our lives.  Eich-
              Mann proved that false in killing like you raise
                                                 wildflowers.
                   Witlessly
              I
              Can-
              not
              accord
              sympathy
              to
              those
              who
              do
              not
              recognize
              The human crisis.
    
    [Spicer,Language]

     

    The human crisis seems to have wounded a different, slightly younger cluster of American poets that keeps forming and reforming in my mind and I find it difficult to ignore the fact that they were born during the Second World War. Susan Howe gives an explicit account of what I take here to be significant:

     

    For me there was no silence before armies. I was born in Boston Massachusetts on June 10th, 1937, to an Irish mother and American father. . . . By 1937 the Nazi dictatorship was well established in Germany. All dissenting political parties had been liquidated and Concentration Camps had already been set up. . . . In the summer of 1938 my mother and I were staying . . . in Ireland and I had just learned to walk, when Czechoslovakia was dismembered . . . . That October we sailed home on a ship crowded with refugees. When I was two the German army invaded Poland and World War II began in the West. . . . American fathers march off into the hot Chronicles of global struggle but mothers were left. . . . From 1939 until 1946 in news photographs, day after day I saw signs of culture exploding into murder. . . . I became part of the ruin. In the blank skies over Europe I was Strife represented. . . . Those black and white picture shots--moving or fixed--were a subversive generation.

     

    I wouldn’t want to give an inclusive list of this just more extraordinary part-generation ofNewerAmerican Poets born between 1937 and 1944, but a partial list would include Clark Coolidge, Michael Palmer, Lyn Hejinian, David Melnick, Tom Mandel, Michael Lally, Ted Greenwald, Ray DiPalma, Nick Piombino, Ann Lauterbach, Peter Seaton, Jim Brodey, Charles North, Fanny Howe, George Quasha, Charles Stein, Robert Grenier, Ron Padgett, Stephen Rodefer, John Taggart, Mauren Owen, Lorenzo Thomas, Lewis Warsh, Michael Davidson, Tony Towle, Bill Berkson, Geoff Young, Kathleen Fraser, John Perelman–all contemporaries of John Lennon, Bob Dylan, and Richard Foreman. (I recognize how arbitrary it is to leave off the years just before and after, or not to mention Tom Raworth, born in England in 1938.)
     

     
              o - u -
              u - u -ni -
              form - ity - o -
              u - u - u - ni -
              formity - o -
              u - unit - de -
              formity - u -
              unit deformity
    
    [Robert Grenier, "Song"]

     

    While I don’t want to stereotype individuals who, if anything, stand radically and determinately against stereotyping, generalizing, sweeping claims, ideological pronouncements and the like, I’ve been struck by how much these individual artists havethat in common: as if they share, without ever so stating, a rejection of anything extrinsic to the poetic process and to the poem–an insistence on the particularity of that process, the nonreducible nature of the choices made, the obscenity or absurdity of paraphrase or extra-poetic explanation, and a suspicion or rejection of conventional literary, and equally, nonliterary, career patterns. In short, they share a radical rejection of conventional American values of conformism, fitting in, getting along / going along,–of accessibility to the point of self-betrayal.

     

    An evening . . .
    Spent thinking
    About what my life would be . . .
    If I’d’ve been accepted to and gone
    Where I applied . . .
    Where I’d learned
    Different social graces
    Than the ones I have
    Where some of the material
    Values of the American dream
    Had rubbed off . . .
    If I’d settled down
    And settled
    For the foundation
    On a house
    For future generations
    Instead of assuming
    Immediately past generations
    My foundation to mine
    If I’d been
    A little quicker to learn
    What was expected of me . . .
    I’ve probably been saved
    By a streak of stubbornness
    By a slow mind
    And a tendency to drift
    That requires
    My personal understanding
    Before happening . . .

     

    [Ted Greenwald, “Whiff”]

     

    Uncompromising integrity is one way I’d put it, emphasizing that the social costs of such uncompromising integrity– inaudibility or marginality, difficult immediate personal and economic circumstance, isolation, feisty impatience with less exacting choices–are not unknown to some of these individuals.
     

     
    
              it's embarrassing to feel
    
              my self body image etc (often)
    
              defined by people around me (my reaction to their
    
                                                 reactions)
    
              that embarrasses me a lot
    
              zeal embarrasses me, your zeal for instance
    
              always lining up poets and their poems
    
              one up one down
    
              in relation to you and your poems . . .
    
              most of all . . . I'm embarrassed by death
    
              death is really the only embarrassing thing
    
              and sometimes (unexpectedly these days more often)
    
              it scares the shit out of me
    
    [Greenwald, "For Ted, On Election Day"]

     

    Or put it this way: I find in many of the works of these poets an intense distrust of large-scale claims of any kind, an extreme questioning of “public” forms, a tireless tearing down or tearing away at authoritative / authoritarian language structures. I hear in their works an explosion of self-reflectiveness and a refusal of the systematic combined with a pervasive engagement with dislocation up to the point of personal terror: An insistence on the “human” scale of poetry–on the “human crisis”–in a culture going bonkers with mass markets, high technology, and faith in science as savior.

     

    the lost family of scatter cabal
    thought under disorder and music
    filling the crumpled space owned
    by another taught under disorder
    to make a path through judgement . . .

     

    [Ray DiPalma,RAIK]

     

    While I would surely point to the remarkable amount of what is now reductively called “theory” that is implicit in the work of most of these poets, many of them have eloquently refused the “mantle” of poetics and theory, as if to engage in such secondary projects would implicate them in a grandiosity or even megalomania that the work itself abjures.

     

    What we know is the way we fall
    when we fall off the little we ride
    when we ride away from the things we’re given
    to make us forget the things we gave up

     

    [Michael Lally, “In the Distance”]

     

    While the formal invention and innovations among these poets is enormous, few of them have chosen to promote them in an impersonal or art-historical way; invention is not seen in avant-garde or canonical terms but rather as a necessary extension of a personally eccentric investigation, crucial because of the “internal” needs of the articulation and not justified or justifiable by external criteria.

     

     
              We're strange features, ignoring things.  Our hero
              Separates from a problem in pink, the thought
              To be able to thing in the world. . . .
    
              So this is the perfect plan.  And here's a creative
                                                      code.
              For all its on or off old self, immersion, power and
    
              Command.  When the world was wars and wars, according
              To cause breaking out from the conditions for events
              And their obsessed leaders.  Brute editing, the way
    
              The frame's the response to survival aids to lust
              Contains the round rations on an actual summit.
              One teaches sense to a child saying you sense
    
              How we've always talked. . . .
    
              A deeper shelter, a deeper skin leaving
              Tracks the brain blew away . . .
              Predatory signs which whiz by and stop,
              The lid and the soul, there are reasons for this.
    
    [Peter Seaton, "Need from a Wound Would Do It"]

     

    So the absence of a substantial amount of poetics or commentary (the exceptions are striking but not contradictory), more, the refusal of commentary as explanation, mark a complete engagement with the poetic act asnecessarily self-sufficient. Thus: a reluctance to link up formal innovation–which is understood as eccentric and self-defined rather than ideologically or socially defined–with larger political, social or aesthetic activities, as in groups or movements, while at the same time refusing to Romanticize or sentimentalize “individuality” in place of the values of poetic work itself.
     

     
              Not by
              `today' but
              by
              recurrent light
              its course
              of blossoming
              is not effected
              by the sun at all?
              `powers of
              darkness' at large?
              it `unfolds'
              `unfolding'
              flowering of powers of darkness at large?
              I `see' at `dawn'?
    
    [Grenier, "Rose"]

     

    This formulation suggests a relatively sharp demarcation with the generation born after 1945–the so-called baby boomers who came of age during a time when personal discomfort with, or distaste for, dominant American value could be linked up to national and international cultural and political movements that seem to share these values. In 1958 cultural and political dissidence would have taken place against a totally different ground than ten years later. The situation of the fifties may have induced a sense of isolation or self-reliance in contrast to the sixties version of sometimes giddy group-solidarity.

     

    Damage frightens sometimes–reminder
    of present danger–loss, deprivation. . . .
    One didn’t want to view the wreckage constantly
    but sought the consolation of lovely sights and
    subtle sounds. One could accept a single scratch
    but in the midst of the thicket, the brambles burn
    and the delay in walking at last annoys and one
    loses patience.

     

    [Piombino,Poems]

     

     
              The poetry of murder helped instigate the murder of
                                                 poetry.
    
              Looking for the root, I forgot the sun.
    
    [Piombino, "9/20/88"]

     

    Perhaps this can be described as a process of internalization, looking downward or inward (“the root”) rather than outward (“the sun”)–not upward as in Idealism but falling down with the gravity of the earth, the grace of the body, even the body–the materiality–of language. There is, in many of the poems of these poets, a persistence of dislocation, of going on in the face of all the terms being changed while refusing to return to, to accept, normalcy or a new equilibrium grounded on repressing the old damage. This can be as much a cause for comedy as solemnity.

     

     
              weracki
              dciece
              hajf   wet pboru
    
              eitusic at foerual bif
              thorus
              t'inalie thodo
              to tala
              ienstable
              ate sophoabl
    
    [David Melnick,Pcoet]

     

    Poets are seismographs of the psychic realities that are not seen or heard in less sensitive media; poems chart or graph realities that otherwise go unregistered. And they do this more in the minute particulars of registration than any idea of subject matter would otherwise suggest.

     

    What is said
    long before
    the chronicle
    is told Smokey
    Stuff in damp rooms
    Carved out
    Blocked out
    Piled with slits
    And windows . . .

     

    [Ray DiPalma,Chan]

     
    The psychic dislocation of the Second War occurred when these poets were toddlers; their first experience of language, of truth and repression, of fear and future, are inextricably tied to the Second War. Perhaps poetry presented a possible field for articulation for those who atypically stayed in touch with–perhaps could not successfully repress–these darker realities.
     

     
              A great block of wedge wood stint
              stays at the star of its corner which.
              A divider in pierces depends, wans.
              For is what I have made be only salvage?
              Sat in my robes, folds.  Decomposed, fled.
              The world a height now brine, estuaries drained to the
                                                      very pole.
              Geometric, a lingual dent?  Drainage, albany.  Where at
                                                      the last
              stand all this sphere that herded me?  My cell a corner
                                                      on the
              filtering world, all out herein my belts.  Things in
                                                      trim they
              belt me, beg me, array my coined veils. . . .  The
                                                      world in anger
              is an angled hole?  . . .
              The light that leaks from composition alone.
              Scalded by a tentative.  Expels the tiny expounds thing
                                                           huge,
              things made be.  Any and it's large.  A universe is not
                                                      of use.
    
    [Clark Coolidge,Melencolia]

     

    These tentative angles into the unknown are a far cry from Rothenberg’s explosive, disturbing, graphic struggle with the memories of the Second War inKhurbn:

     

    “practice your scream” I said
    (why did I say it?)
    because it was his scream & wasn’t my own
    it hovered between us bright
    to our senses always bright it held
    the center place
    then somebody else came up & stared
    deep in his eyes there found a memory
    of horses galloping faster the wheels dyed red
    behind them the poles had resolved
    a feast day but the jew
    locked in his closet screamed
    into his vest a scream
    that had no sound therefore
    spiralled around the world
    so wild that it shattered stones . . .

     

    [“Dos Geshray (The Scream)”]

     

    Khurbn risks the pornographic or voyeuristic out of a need to exorcise the images that hold us captive if not spoken or revisualized, marking an end to Rothenberg’s own past refusal to depict the Extermination Process.

     

    In contrast, Charles Reznikoff’s last book,Holocaust (1975), which is based on documentary evidence about the Lagers gathered from the records of the Eichmann and Nuremberg trials, presents a series of details, fragments cut away from the horror. Reznikoff offers no explanation of the depicted events and he provides neither explicit emotional nor moral response to them: he leaves us alone with our reactions, making us to find our own screams or to articulate our own silences. Seemingly flat, documentary, particularized,Holocaust–like all of Reznikoff’s work since his first book in 1917–is a mosaic of salient incidents:
     

     
              A visitor once stopped one of the children:
              a boy of seven or eight, handsome, alert and gay.
              He had only one shoe and the other foot was bare,
              and his coat of good quality had no buttons.
              The visitor asked him for his name
              and then what his parents were doing;
              and he said, "Father is working in the office
              and Mother is playing the piano."
              Then he asked the visitor if he would be joining his
                                                 parents soon--
              they always told the children they would be leaving
                                                 soon to
              rejoin their   parents--
              and the visitor answered, "Certainly.  In a day or
                                                 two."
              At that the child took out of his pocket
              half an army biscuit he had been given in camp
              and said, "I am keeping this half for Mother;"
              and then the child who had been so gay
              burst into tears.

     

    This detail from Reznikoff brings forward, in an ineffably shattering way, the atmosphere of willed forgetting of the 1950s, or now. We blithely go about our business–busy, gay, distracted; until that blistering moment of consciousness that shatters all hopes when we recognize that we are orphaned, have lost our parents–in the sense of our foundations, our bearing in the world; until, that is, a detail jolts the memory, when we feel, as in the fragments in our pocket, what we have held back out of denial.

     

    Denial marks the refusal to mourn: to understand what we have lost and its absolute irreparability. Reznikoff and Rothenberg initiate this process, but no more than other poets, ranges of poetry, that register this denial in the process of seeking forms that find ways out of the “Western Box”.

     

    In contrast to–or is it an extension of?–Adorno’s famous remarks about the impossibility of (lyric?) poetry after Auschwitz, I would say poetry is a necessary way to register the unrepresentable loss of the Second War.

     

    Sources for Poems Cited

     

    • John Ashbery. Rivers and Mountains. Ecco Press, New York, 1966.
    • Clark Coolidge,Melencolia. Great Barrington, Massachusetts: The Figures, 1987.
    • Robert Creeley, “A Fragment,” inThe Charm (early poems) and “Hart Crane,” the opening poem ofFor Love, both in The Collected Poems. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. “Ever since Hitler . . .” inWindows. New York: New Directions, 1990.
    • Ray DiPalma,RAIK. New York: Roof Books, 1989. “Five Poems fromChan” in “43 Poets (1984),” ed. Charles Bernstein, inboundary 2, XIV: 1-2 (1986).
    • Larry Eigner, frontpiece poem inanother time in fragments. London: Fulcrum, 1967.
    • Ben Friedlander,Kristallnacht: November 9-10, 1938. Privately printed, 1988.
    • Allen Ginsberg,Howl. San Francisco: City Lights, 1956.
    • Ted Greenwald,Common Sense. Kensington, California: L Publications, 1978.
    • Robert Grenier,Phantom Anthems: Oakland: O Books, 1986.
    • Susan Howe, The Liberties (1980), inThe Europe of Trusts (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1990).
    • Michael Lally,Rocky Dies Yellow. Berkeley: Blue Wind, 1975.
    • David Melnick,Pcoet. San Francisco: G.A.W.K., 1975.
    • Charles Olson,The Collected Poems, ed. George F. Butterick. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
    • Bob Perelman,The First World. The Figures, 1986.
    • Nick Piombino, “in the center of movement, a debate” and “A Simple Invocation Would Be,” inPoems. Sun & Moon Press, 1988; “9/20/88” in “Postmodern Poetries”, ed. Jerome McGann, inVerse, Vol. 7, No. 1 (1990).
    • Charles Reznikoff, “Children”, inHolocaust. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1975.
    • Jerome Rothenberg,Khurbn & Other Poems. New Directions, 1989.
    • Jack Spicer,Language (1964) inThe Collected Books of Jack Spicer, ed. Robin Blaser. Black Sparrow, 1975.
    • Rosmarie Waldrop,The Road Is Everywhere Or Stop This Body. Columbia, Missouri: Open Places, 1978.
    • Barrett Watten,Under Erasure, excerpted in “Postmodern Poetries” inVerse.

     

  • Two Poems

    James McCorkle

    Hobart and William Smith Colleges

     

    Combustion of Early Summer

     

    The elation of the past is over, the news tells us,
    Suggesting it was there to begin with
    Or recoverable, like a heavy ore or a shipwreck.

     

    But on closer inspection, the past buzzes around us,
    A conversation in another room we thought dormant,
    Soon its occupants will crash through the door

     

    Wearing green sequin blouses that remind us of mermaids,
    The ones seen years ago in waterless tanks among dried starfish
    And draped nets, waving to us from a place free of storms.

     

    You wonder about other places, less advertised,
    If another design had not been accomplished
    That drew upon a new notion of heaven.

     

    Cushioned by the afternoon’s orchid heat,
    Enveloping us with implied betrayals–
    It is possible, the narrator might be whispering–

     

    There we might be unfurling like sails,
    Never going taut, the wind pulls us over the water,
    Whole populations streaming over reefs with marlin and sailfish.

     

    Stories that make us up, until we are bankrupt,
    And we wonder who these people are claiming their pound
    Of flesh off our backs, pushing us into the dusty crowd.

     

    We are trapped in the same voices we’ve known for years,
    Words drop among the glowing debris of streets–
    Which are yours or mine, what was said or when, unknown.

     

    Sorting things out, nothing really fits:
    The puzzle of mountains with pieces from a regatta,
    We have pieces from other lives,

     

    The difficulty is to remember them, hoping
    Caligula or Curie do not figure
    As the locking piece, the keyhole, the knob.

     

    Dreams stare back at us, a coiled snake
    Leading us deeper into houses or along streets
    To a harbor whose palms have rotted, the furniture staved-in.

     

    Along the shore the dead talk with us–they are the waves
    And the salvage-birds, the jackals that swarm
    Through the old hotels and in the weedy temples.

     

    These sidereal landscapes compound: for a moment
    You are there, in the mullein-heat of ruins, before we lose sight
    Of the landscape, the dream chopped to a memory

     

    At other times, there are sections we dimly remember:
    Another bay’s cerulean expanse tips into the sky,
    Scattered sails tack for an unseen buoy.

     

    The regatta holds its shape, like dreams that continue after
    waking,
    The city fills out for us again, with its seepage-stained
    Water-towers and the pigeon-clutter of roofs.

     

    In the dense exhaust of afternoon, we move in and out of shadows
    Along Houston Street, as though bathing in ink
    And then washing clean of all traces,

     

    The remaining light is so strong our white shirts
    Blanch the photographs of all tone: were you to the left,
    Or is that someone else strayed into the frame?

     

    The shield of light expands over the imagined horizons,
    Everything fills itself with all else,
    That anything could be no longer interests.

     

    The traffic lights change like dominoes falling,
    All the way up town as we move each to another,
    A roundel where passion is only in the figure.

     

    Everything said spirals to a period,
    A rose that has dried almost to blackness,
    Its scent a window left open long ago.

     

    We slide to this point perspectives chart,
    Infinite movement allowed only one course,
    What was meant to happens remains off stage,

     

    So much for the pavane we whirled into;
    Sticking your tongue out, crossing your eyes, you spin
    Across stage, into the water-meadows abutting tank-farms.

     

    The stage goes black, the curtains tear,
    Children are sent in to rip the floorboards up
    For firewood, pigeons circle out of the cracked vault.

     

    Returning dripping with sedge and reeds,
    Tannic perfume soaks your clothes: no one can describe
    Your departure or arrival, yet we all have ideas.

     

    Momentary grace or seduction?–no one knows
    Your reasons for taking up with us, perhaps the loneliness
    Of watching cities turn more fatal and rapturous

     

    Each epoch slides into the next and claims its dead:
    What is the cost of all this, what has been put aside
    To keep the body tandem to the sulphur-lit city.

     

    When you spun into your volute, there was a dazzle of sails:
    I saw you spinning on the round stones of a harbor,
    The howling from below the ground stopped.

     

    The first bodies were temples crowded with space,
    With different voices you spun through them,
    Until the howling started again, and the bull slammed the walls

     

    Deep below us, mired in its own demands:
    We talk to the dead, now that the fields far inland
    Are burning up and our history is seen as strings
    Of small blunders, the sky emptied of its regattas.

     


     

    The Love of My Life

     

    Out of practice, all that is left is theory,
    The sun has risen hours ago, but the day
    Hangs like a dream whose edges will be skirted
    In collaboration with gravity. The clouds will lift
    Is all the radio omens, the stage is left
    For newcomers, the bureau cluttered with the weeks’s
    Unforgiving letters and bills. And theory,

     

    An elaboration of what is gone, is not an explanation,
    But the fine ribs lifted from fossil
    Sediments, glistening and senseless
    Unless understood by what followed, if anything.
    And there they are, all twenty-six, sternum side-up,
    The wind catching rags and paper shreds in them,
    The day trudges on, the traffic caught like hair

     

    On the bathroom floor; suburbia not far past
    The bridges. What a day this has turned into
    We exclaim, for once, getting it off
    Our chests. Somewhere each of us has left a corpse,
    Or many, honeyed or scattered by birds.
    While we talk, I too am a diminishing figure,
    Sitting next to you, then in another room, and at last

     

    Across the river, on the other side of the city,
    Walking backwards into what must be only theory
    Of what comes to happen. Discussed later
    Over dinner, the higher forms of life, the cooperative
    Societies of animal species–blue whales and mountain gorillas–
    While we have learned the practice of severing
    And the routes marking separation: this is

     

    The practice, the plan of every city. In this plan
    Someone dragging shimmering cages of ribs already
    Nears you. On pellets of ice, in the store window
    Before you, swordfish arch their black leather trunks
    Around mounds of pink shrimp and mirrored cuts of salmon.
    The avenue is packed and steaming cold: which one
    Is he, nearing you with his theories and criminal good looks?

     

     

  • Incloser

    Susan Howe

    Temple University

     
    Some of this essay has been published in The Politics of Poetic Form; Poetry and Public Policy, edited by Charles Bernstein, Roof Books. [What follows is an excerpt from a book to be published in 1991 by Weaselsleeves Press. –Eds.]
     

     
                             Turned back from turning back
                           as if a loved country
                             faced away from the traveler
                             No pledged premeditated daughter
                           no cold cold sorrow no barrier
    
                             EN-CLOSE.  See INCLOSE.
    
         IN-CLOSE, v.t. [fr. %enclos*; Sp. It. incluso; L.
              inclusus, includo; in and claudo or cludo.]
              1.  To surround; to shut in; to confine on all sides;
              as to inclose a field with a fence; to inclose a
              fort or an army with troops; to inclose a town with
              walls.
              2.  To separate from common grounds by a fence; as, to
              inclose lands.
              3.  To include; to shut or confine; as to inclose
              trinkets in a box.
              4.  To environ; to encompass.
              5.  To cover with a wrapper or envelope; to cover under
              seal; as to inclose a letter or a bank note.
    
         IN-CLOS ER, n. He or that which encloses; one who
              separates land from common grounds by a fence.
    
         Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language
    
                                  Incloser
    
                                THOMAS SHEPARD
                         Anagram: O, a map's thresh'd
                                  (WIII 513)
    
            The first and least of these Books [by Shepard] is
         called, The Sincere Convert: Which the Author would
         commonly call, His Ragged Child : And once, even after its
         Fourth Edition, wrote unto Mr. Giles Firmin, thus
         concerning it: once saw it. It was a Collection of such Notes 
         in a dark Town in, The Sincere Convert:I have not the Book : 
         I once saw it. It was a Collection of such Notes in a dark 
         Town in England, which one procuring of me, published them 
         without my Will, or my Privity. I scarce know what it 
         contains, nor do I like to see it; considering the many 
         Typographia, most absurd; and the Confession of him that 
         published it, that it comes out much altered from what was 
         first written.
                          Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana
    
                        *              *              *
    
            My writing has been haunted and inspired by a series of
         texts, woven in shrouds and cordage of classic American 19th
         century works, they are the buried ones, they body them
         forth.
            The selection of particular examples from a large group
         is always a social act.  By choosing to install certain
         narratives somewhere between history, mystic speech, and
         poetry, I have enclosed them in an organization although I
         know there are places no classificatory procedure can reach
         where connections between words and things we thought
         existed break off.  For me, paradoxes and ironies of
         fragmentation are particularly compelling.
            Every statement is a product of collective desires and
         divisibilities.  Knowledge, no matter how I get it, involves
         exclusion and repression.  National histories hold ruptures
         and hierarchies.  On the scales of global power what gets
         crossed over?  Foreign accents mark dialogues that delete
         them.  Ambulant vagrant bastardy comes looming through
         assurance and sanctification.
    
         _Thomas Shepard:_
              A long story of conversion, and a hundred to one if
              some lie or other slip not out with it.  Why, the
              secret meaning is, I pray admire me.
                                                      (WII 284)
    
            When we move through the positivism of literary canons
         and master narratives, we consign ourselves to the
         legitimation of power, chains of inertia, an apparatus of
         capture.
    
         _Brother Crackbone's Wife:_
              So I gave up and I was afraid to sing because to sing a
              lie, Lord teach me and I'll follow thee and heard Lord
              will break the will of His last work.
    
                                                 (C 140)
                        *              *              *
    
            A printed book enters social and economic networks of
         distribution.  Does the printing modify an author's
         intention, or does a text develop itself?  Why do certain
         works go on saying something else?  Pierre Macherey says in
         A Theory of Literary Production: "the work has its
         beginnings in a break from the usual ways of speaking and
         writing--a break which sets it apart from all other forms of
         ideological expression" (52).  Roman Jakobson says in
         "Dialogue On Time In Language and Literature": "One of the
         essential differences between spoken and written language
         can be seen clearly.  The former has a purely temporal
         character, while the latter connects time and space.  While
         the sounds we hear disappear, when we read we usually have
         immobile letters before us and the time of the written flow
         of words is reversible" (20).  Gertrude Stein says in
         "Patriarchal Poetry": "They said they said./ They said they
         said when they said men./ Many men many how many many many
         many men men men said many here" (123).  Emily Dickinson
         writes to her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert Dickinson: "Moving
         on in the Dark like Loaded Boats at Night, though there is
         no Course, there is Boundlessness--" (L 871).
    
             Strange translucencies: letters, phonemes, syllables,
         rhymes, shorthand segments, alliteration, assonance, meter,
         form a ladder to an outside state outside of States.  Rungs
         between escape and enclosure are confusing and compelling.
    
         _Brother Crackbone's Wife:_
              And seeing house burned down, I thought it was just and
              mercy to save life of the child and that I saw not
              after again my children there.  And as my spirit was
              fiery so to burn all I had, and hence prayed Lord would
              send fire of word, baptize me with fire.  And since the
              Lord hath set my heart at liberty.  (C 140)
                        *              *              *
    
         There was the last refuge from search and death; so here.
         (WII 195)
    
            I am a poet writing near the close of the 20th century.
            Little by little sound grew to be meaning.  I cross an
         invisible line spoken in the first word "Then."  Every
         prescriptive grasp assertion was once a hero reading Samson.
         There and here I encounter one vagabond formula another pure
         Idea.  To such a land.  Yet has haunts.  The heart of its
         falls must be crossed and re-crossed.  October strips off
         cover and quiet conscience.
            New England is the place I am.  Listening to the clock
         and the sun whirl dry leaves along.  Distinguishing first
         age from set hour.  The eternal and spirit in them.
            A poem can prevent onrushing light going out.  Narrow
         path in the teeth of proof.  Fire of words will try us.
         Grace given to few.  Coming home though bent and bias for
         the sake of why so.  Awkward as I am.  Here and there
         invincible things as they are.
            I write quietly to her.  She is a figure of other as thin
         as paper.
            Sorrow for uproar and wrongs of this world.  You
         convenant to love.
                        *              *              *
    
         _Emily Dickinson:_
               Master.
                    If you saw a bullet
                    hit a Bird - and he told you
                    he was'nt shot - you might weep
                    at his courtesy, but you would
                    certainly doubt his word.  (L 233)
    
            If history is a record of survivors, Poetry shelters
         other voices.
            Dickinson, Melville, Thoreau, and Hawthorne guided me
         back to what I once thought was the distant 17th century.
         Now I know that the arena in which scripture battles raged
         among New Englanders with originary fury is part of our
         current American system and events, history and structure.
    
         _Goodwife Willows:_
              Then I had a mind for New England and I thought I
              should know  more of my own heart.  So I came and
              thought I saw more than ever I could have believed that
              I wondered earth swallowed me not up.  And 25 Matthew
              5--foolish virgins saw themselves void of all grace.  I
              thought I was so and was gone no farther. And
              questioned all that ever the Lord had wrought, I'll
              never leave thee.  I could now apprehend that yet
              desired the Lord not to leave me nor forsake me and
              afterward I thought I was now discovered.  Yet hearing
              He would not hide His face forever, was encouraged to
              seek.  But I felt my heart rebellious and loathe to
              submit unto Him.  (C 151)
    
            An English relation of conversion spoken at a territorial
         edge of America is deterritorialized and deterred by anxiety
         crucial to iconoclastic Puritan piety.  Inexplicable
         acoustic apprehension looms over assurance and
         sanctification, over soil subsoil sea sky.
            Each singular call.  As the sound is the sense is.
         Severed on this side.  Who would know there is a covenant.
         In a new world morphologies are triggered off.
                   *              *              *
    
         Under the hammer of God's word. (WI 92)
    
            During the 1630's and 40's a mother tongue (English) had
         to find ways to accommodate new representations of reality.
         Helplessness and suffering caused by agrarian revolution in
         England, and changing economic structures all across Europe,
         pushed members of various classes and backgrounds into new
         collectivities.  For a time English Protestant sects were
         united in a struggle against Parliament, the Jacobean and
         Stuart Courts, the Anglican Church, and Archbishop Laud.
         Collective resistance to political and religious persecution
         pushed particular groups to a radical separatism.  Some
         sects broke loose from the European continent.  Their hope
         was to ride out the cry and accusation of kingdoms of Satan
         until God would be all in all.
    
         _Thomas Shepard:_
              And so, seeing I had been tossed from the south to the
              north of England and now could go no farther, I then
              began to listen to a call to New England. (GP 55)
    
            Schismatic children of Adam thought they were leaving the
         "wilderness of the world" to find a haven free of
         institutional structures they had united against.  They
         were unprepared for the variability of directional change
         the wilderness they reached represented.  Even John Winthrop
         complained of "unexpected troubles and difficulties" in
         "this strange land where we met with many adversities"
         (Heimert 361).
            A Bible, recently translated into the vernacular, was
         owned by nearly every member of the Bay Colony.  It spoke to
         readers and non-readers and signified the repossession of
         the Word by English.  The Old and New Testaments, in
         English, were indispensible fictive realities connecting the
         emigrants to a familiar State-form, and home.  Though they
         crossed a wide and northern ocean Scripture encompassed
         them.
            From the first, Divinity was knotted in Place.  If the
         Place was found wanting, and it was by many, a rhetoric had
         to be double-knotted to hold perishing absolutism safe.
         First-generation leaders of this hegira to new England tied
         themselves and their followers to a dialectical construction
         of the American land as a virgin garden pre-established for
         them by the Author and Finisher of creation.
            "Come to me and you shall find rest unto your souls."
            To be released from bonds. . .  absorbed into catastrophe
         of pure change.
            "Flee, save your lives, and be like the heath in the
         wild."
            Here is unappropriated autonomy.  Uncounted occupied
         space.  No covenant of King and people.  No centralized
         State.  Heavy pressure of finding no content.   Openness of
         the breach.
               "The gospel is a glass to show men the face of God in
         Christ.  The law is that glass that showeth a man his own
         face, and what he himself is.  Now if this glass be taken
         away. . ." (WI 74).
    
            _Widow Arrington:_
              Hearing Dr. Jenison, Lamentations 3--let us search and
              turn to the Lord--which struck my heart as an arrow.
              And it came as a light into me and the more the text
              was opened more I saw my heart.  And hearing that
              something was lost when God came for searching.  And
              when I came I durst not tell my husband fearing he
              would loath me if he knew me.  And I resolved none
              should know nor I would tell. . . . (C 184-5)
                        *              *              *
    
            On October 3, 1635, Thomas Shepard and his family arrived
         in Boston Harbor on the ship Defense.  "Oh, the depths of
         God's grace here," he later wrote, "that when he [man]
         deserves nothing else but separation from God, and to be
         driven up and down the world as a vagabond or as dried
         leaves fallen from our God--" (GP 14).
            There is a direct relation between sound and meaning.
            Early spiritual autobiographies in America often mean to
         say that a soul has found love in what the Lord has done.
         "Oh, that when so many come near to mercy, and fall short of
         it, yet me to be let in! Caleb and Joshua to be let into
         Canaan, when they rest so near, and all perish" (WII 229).
         Words sound other ways.  I hear short-circuited conviction.
         Truth is stones not bread.  The reins are still in the hands
         of God.  He has set an order but he is not tied to that
         order.  Sounds touch every coast and corner.  He will pick
         out the vilest worthy never to be beloved.  There is no
         love.  I am not in the world where I am.
            In his journal Mr. Shepard wrote: "To heal this wound,
         which was but skinned over before, of secret atheism and
         unbelief" (GP 135).
                        *              *              *
    
         Finding is the First Act   (MBED 1043)
    
            After the beaver population in New England had been
         decimated by human greed, when roads were cut through
         unopened countryside, the roadbuilders often crossed streams
         on abandoned beaver dams, instead of  taking time to
         construct wooden bridges.  When other beaver dams collapsed
         from neglect, they left in their wake many years'
         accumulation of dead bark, leaves, twigs, and silt.  Ponds
         they formed disappeared with the dams, leaving rich soil
         newly opened to the sun.  These old pond bottoms, often many
         acres wide, provided fertile agricultural land.  Here grass
         grew as high as a person's shoulder.  Without these natural
         meadows many settlements could not have been established as
         soon as they were.
            Early narratives of conversion, and first captivity
         narratives in New England, are often narrated by women.  A
         woman, afraid of not speaking well, tells her story to a man
         who writes it down.  The participant reporters follow and
         fly out of Scripture and each other.  All testimonies are
         bereft, brief, hungry, pious, authorized.
            Shock of God's voice speaking English.
    
             Sound moves over the chaos of place in people.  In this
         hungry world anyone may be eaten.  What a nest and litter.
         A wolf lies coiled in the lamb.
            Silence becomes a Self.  Open your mouth.
            In such silence women were talking.  Undifferentiated
         powerlessness swallowed them.  When did the break at this
         degree of distance happen?
             Silence calls me himself.  Open your mouth.
             Whosoever.  Not found written in the book of life.
             During a later Age of Reason 18th century Protestant
         gentlemen signed the Constitution in the city of
         Philadelphia.  These first narratives from wide open places
         re-place later genial totalities.
                        *              *              *
    
         _Thomas Shepard:_
              Object.  But Christ is in heaven; how can I receive
              him and his love?
              Ans.  A mighty prince is absent from a traitor; he
              sends his herald with a letter of love, he gives it
              him to read; how can he receive the love of the prince
              when absent?   Ans.  He sees his love in his letter,
              he knows it came from him, and so at a distance closeth
              with him by this means; so here, he that was dead, but
              now is alive, writes, sends to thee; O, receive his
              love here in his word; this is receiving "him by
              faith."  (WII 599-600)
    
            In Europe, Protestant tradition since Luther had
         maintained that no one could fully express her sins.  In New
         England, for some reason hard to determine, Protestant
         strictures were reversed.  Bare promises were insufficient.
         Leaders and followers had to voice the essential mutability
         they suddenly faced.  Now the minister's scribal hand copied
         down an applicant for church membership's narrative of
         mortification and illumination.
            In The Puritan Conversion Narrative; The Beginnings of 
         American Expression, Patricia Caldwell points out that
         during the 1630's, in the Bay Colony, a disclaimer about
         worthlessness and verbal inadequacy had to be followed by a
         verbal performance strong enough to convince the audience-
         congregation of the speaker's sincerity.
             New England's first isolated and independent clerics
         must have wrestled with many conflicting impulses and
         influences.  Rage against authority and rage for order;
         desire for union with the Father and the guilty knowledge
         they had abandoned their own mothers and fathers.  In the
         1630's a new society was being shaped or shaping itself.
         Oppositional wreckers and builders considered themselves
         divine instruments committed to the creation of a holy
         commonwealth.  In 1636 the Antinomian controversy erupted
         among this group of "Believers, gathered and ordained by
         Christ's rule alone. . . all seeking the same End, viz. the
         Honor and Glory of God in his worship" (VS 73).
            The Antinomian Controversy circled around a woman, Anne
         Hutchinson, and what was seen to be "the Flewentess of her
         Tonge and her Willingness to open herselfe and to divulge
         her Opinions and to sowe her seed in us that are but highway
         side and Strayngers to her" (AH 353).  Thomas Shepard made
         this accusation.  Paradoxically he was one of the few
         ministers who required women to recite their confessions of
         faith publicly, before the gathered congregation.  Mr.
         Peters lectured Anne Hutchinson in court: "You have stept
         out of your place, You have rather bine a Husband than a Wife 
         and a preacher than a Hearer; and a Magistrate than a Subject.  
         and soe you have thought to carry all Thinges in
         Church and Commonwealth, as you would and have not bine
         humbled for this" (AC 383).
            Peters, Cotton, Winthrop, Eliot, Wilson, Dudley, Shepard,
         and other men, had stepped out of their places when they
         left England.  She was humbled by them for their
         Transgression.  Anne Hutchinson was the community scapegoat.
         "The Mother Opinion of all the rest. . . . From the womb of
         this fruitful Opinion and from the Countenance here by
         given to immediate and unwarrented revelations 'tis not
         easie to relate, how many Monsters worse than African,
         arose in the Regions of America : But a Synod assembled
         at Cambridge, whereof Mr. Shepard was no small part,
         most happily crushed them all" (M III87).
    
         _Noah Webster:_
              SCAPE-GOAT, n. [escape and goat.]  In the Jewish ritual, 
              a goat which was brought to the door of the
              tabernacle, where the high priest laid his hands upon
              him, confessing the sins of the people, and putting
              them on the head of the goat; after which the goat was
              sent into the wilderness, bearing the iniquities of the
              people."  Lev. xvi.  (WD 986)
    
             Kenneth Burke says in A Grammar of Motives, "Dialectic
         of the Scapegoat": "When the attacker chooses for himself
         the object of attack, it is usually his blood brother; the
         debunker is much closer to the debunked than others are.
         Ahab was pursued by the white whale he was pursuing" (GM
         407).
             Rene Girard says in The Scapegoat, "What is a Myth?"
         "Terrified as they [the persecutors] are by their own
         victim, they see themselves as completely passive, purely
         reactive, totally controlled by this scapegoat at the very
         moment when they rush to his attack.  They think that all
         initiative comes from him.  There is only room for a single
         cause in their field of vision, and its triumph is absolute,
         it absorbs all other causality: it is the scapegoat" (43).
            I say that the Scapegoat Dialectic and mechanism is
         peculiarly open to violence if the attacker is male, his
         bloodbrother, female.  Kenneth Burke and Rene Girard dissect
         grammars and mythologies in a realm of discourse structured,
         articulated, and repeated by men.
    
         _Thomas Shepard:_
                   We are all in Adam, as a whole country in a
              parliament man; the whole country doth what he doth.
              And although we made no particular choice of Adam to
              stand for us, yet the Lord made it for us; who, being
              goodness itself, bears more good will to man than he
              can or could bear to himself; and being wisdom itself,
              made the wisest choice, and took the wisest course for
              the good of man.  (WI 24)
                        *              *              *
    
         A Short Story
    
         _Governor Winthrop:_
              She thinkes that the Soule is annihilated by the
              Judgement that was sentenced upon Adam.  Her Error
              springs from her Mistaking of the Curse of God upon
              Adam, for that Curse doth not implye Annihilation of
              the soule and body, but only a dissolution of the Soule
              and Body.
    
         _Mr. Eliot:_
              She thinks the Soule to be Nothinge but a Breath, and
              so vanisheth.  I pray put that to her.
    
         _Mrs. Hutchinson:_
              I thinke the soule to be nothing but Light.  (AH 356)
                        *              *              *
    
         The Erroneous Gentlewoman
    
         _Governor Winthrop:_
              We have thought it good to send for you to understand
              how things are, that if you be in an erroneous way we
              may reduce you that you may become a profitable member
              here among us.  (AC 312 )
    
         _Thomas Shepard:_
              I confes I am wholy unsatisfied in her Expressions to
              some of the Errors.  Any Hereticke may bring a slye
              interpretation upon any of thease Errors and yet hould
              them to thear Death: therfor I am unsatisfied.  (AC
              377)
    
         _Anne Hutchinson:_
              My Judgment is not altered though my Expression alters.
    
         _Brother Willson:_
              Your Expressions, whan your Expressions are soe
              contrary to the Truth.  (AC 378)
    
         _Noah Webster:_
              EX-PRES SION, (eks presh un.) n.  1.  The act of
              expressing; the act of forcing out by pressure, as
              juices and oils from plants.
                      2.  The act of uttering, declaring, or
              representing; utterance; declaration; representation;
              as, an expression of the public will.  (WD 426)
    
         _Mrs. Hutchinson:_
              I doe not acknowledge it to be an Error but a Mistake.
              I doe acknowledge my Expressions to be Ironious but my
              Judgment was not Ironious, for I held befor as you did
              but could not express it soe.  (AC 361)
    
         _Noah Webster:_
               ERRO NE OUS, a. [L. erroneus, from erro, to
              err.]
                     1. Wandering; roving; unsettled.
                                   They roam
                        Erroneous  and  disconsolate.    Philips.
                     2.  Deviating; devious; irregular; wandering
              from the right course.  (WD 408)
                         Erroneous   circulation of blood
              Arbuthnot.
    
         _Anne Hutchinson:_
              So thear was my Mistake. I took Soule for Life.  (AH
              360)
    
         _Noah Webster:_
                 Noah is here called Man.  (WD xxiii)
                        *              *              *
    
         A Woman's Delusion
    
             A seashore where everything.
             A tumult of mind.
             Sackcloth and run up and down.
             Every durable thread.  Mediator.  There is rebellion.  A
         man cannot look.  The sacrifice of Noah is a type.  We dress
         our garden.  There are properties.  Proof must be guiding
         and leading.
             Stooped so far.
             Bruising lash of the law.  Tender affections bear with
         the weak.  An answerable wedge.  But where is the work?  Why
         is the church compared to a garden?  We are dark ages and
         young beginners.  Apprehending ourselves we want anything.
         These are words set down.  Surfaces.  Who has felt most
         mercy?  Preaching to stone.  A thin cold dangerous realm.
         Tidings.  He appears. Anoint.  Echoes and reverberations of
         love.  Anoint.  Washed and witnessing.  Peter denies him.
         Anoint.  Whole treasures of looks to the heart.  It is one
         thing to trust to be saved.  Selfpossession.  She heard his
         question.  Never thought of it.  No thought today.
         Unapproachable December seems to be.  The sun is a spare
         trope.
            Shadow cast.  Moment of recognition.
            The conclusion of years can any force of intellect.  That
         such ferocities are drowned by double act or immediate
         stroke.  So much error.  Old things done away.  Name and
         that other in itself opposite.
             Expression.  I was born to make use of it.  Schism.
         What is the reason of it?  Zeal.  An instance of our crime
         is blunder.  Object.  It may be a question.  Narration.
         Can there be a better pattern?  Weary.  What do we
         imagine?  Swearing.  If I had time and was not mortal.
         But he.  Scraps of predominance.  Answer.  So there is
         some grievance driven out of the way.  Objection.
         Relation to the speaker.  Speech to the wind.  Particulars.
            How shall I put on my coat?
            Distance beyond comparison.  Sleep between two.
                        *              *              *
                              His name and office sweetly did agree,
                         SHEPARD by name, and in his ministry.
                                                         (WI clxxix)
    
         _Thomas Shepard:_
              And I considered how unfit I was to go to such a good
              land with such an unmortified, hard, dark, formal,
              hypocritical heart.  (GP 61)
    
            Thomas Shepard was an evangelical preacher who comforted
         and converted many people.  "As great a Converter of
         Souls as has ordinarily been known in our Days" (MIII 84).
         Before he came to America, "although [he] were but a young
         Man, yet there was that Majesty and Energy in his
         preaching and that Holiness in his Life, which was not
         ordinary": said Cotton Mather (MIII 86).  Edward Johnson
         called him "that gracious sweet Heavenly minded Minister
         . . . in whose soul the Lord hath shed abroad his love so
         abundantly, that thousands of Souls have cause to bless God
         for him" (77).  Thomas Prince said he "scarce ever preached
         a sermon but someone or other of his congregation was struck
         in great distress and cried out in agony, What shall I do to
         be saved?" (GP 8).  Jonathan Mitchell remembered Shepard's
         Cambridge ministry: "Unless it had been four years living in 
         heaven, I know not how I could have more cause to bless God 
         with wonder" (C 13).  Mitchell also recalled a day
         when, "Mr. Shepard preached most profitably.  That night I
         was followed with serious thoughts of my inexpressible
         misery, wherein I go on, from Sabbath to Sabbath, without
         God and without redemption" (WI cxxxi).  Thomas Shepard
         called his longest spoken literary production, a series of
         sermons unpublished in his lifetime, The Parable of the Ten 
         Virgins, Opened and Applied.  He married three times.  Two
         wives died as a result of childbirth.  His three sons,
         Thomas, Samuel, and Jeremiah, became ministers.  The earnest
         persecutor of Anne Hutchinson and repudiator of "erroneous
         Antinomian doctrines," confided to his Journal: "I have
         seen a God by reason and never been amazed at God.  I have
         seen God himself and have been ravished to behold him"
         (GP 136).  The author of The Sound Believer also told his
         diary: "On lecture morning this came into my thoughts, that
         the greatest part of a Christian's grace lies in mourning
         for the want of it" (GP 198).
            Edward Johnson pictured the minister of the Cambridge
         First Church as a "poor, weak, pale-complexioned man" (GP
         8), whose physical powers were feeble, but spent to the
         full.  He wept while composing his sermons, and went up to
         the pulpit "as if he expected there to give up his account
         of his stewardship" (WL clxxix).
            When Thomas Shepard died after a short illness, 25 August
         1649, he was forty-three.  "Returning home from a Council at
         Rowly, he fell into a Quinsie, with a Symptomatical
         Fever, which suddenly stop'd a Silver Trumpet, from whence
         the People of God had often heard the joyful Sound" (M
         88).  Some of his last words were: "Lord, I am vile, but
         thou art righteous" (GP 237).
             Cotton Mather described the character of his
         conversation as "A Trembling Walk with God" (MIII 90).
                        *              *              *
    
          } S :
    
         _Thomas Shepard:_
              thou wert in the dangers of the sea in thy mothers
              woombe then & see how god hath miraculously preserued
              thee, that thou art still aliue, & thy mother's woombe
              & the terrible seas haue not been thy graue;
                                                 (S  side of MB)
    
            Probably sometime in 1646 Thomas Shepard wrote a brief
         autobiography entitled "T. { _My Birth & Life_: } S:" into
         one half of a small leatherbound pocket notebook.
         Theatrical pen strokes by the protagonist shelter and
         embellish the straightforward title that sunders his
         initials.  Conversion is an open subject.  Or is it a
         question of splitting the author's name from its frame of
         compositional expression.
            The narrative begins with an energetic account of the
         author's birth "upon the 5 day of Nouember, called the
         Powder Treason Day, & that very houre of the day wher in the
         Parlament should haue bin blown vp by Popish preists. . .
         which occasioned my father to giue me this name Thomas.
         Because he sayd I would hardly beleeue that euer any such
         wickednes could be attempted by men agaynst so religious &
         good Parlament" (MB 10).  74 pages later the autobiography
         breaks off abruptly, as it began, with calamity.  This time
         the death in childbed of the author's second wife, here
         referred to by her husband, as "the eldest daughter of Mr
         Hooker a blessed stock" (CS 391).  Shepard married this
         eldest daughter of one of the most powerful theocrats in New
         England in 1637, the same year Mrs. Hutchinson was first
         silenced.  Unlike Mrs. Hutchinson, Mrs. Shepard was a woman
         of "incomparable meeknes of spirit, toward my selfe
         especially . . . being neither too lauish nor sordid in any
         things so that I knew not what was under her hands" (CS
         392).  When she died nine years and four male children
         later, "after 3 weekes lying in," two of her sons had
         predeceased her.  On her deathbed this paragon of feminine
         piety and humility "continued praying vntil the last houre.
         . Ld tho I vnwoorthy Ld on woord one woord &c. & so gaue vp
         the ghost. thus______
         god hath visited me & scourged me for my sins & sought to
         weane me from this woorld, but I have ever found it a
         difficult thing to profit even but a little by sorest and
         sharpest afflictions;"
            "T. { _My Birth & Life_: } S:" is littered with the
         deaths of mothers.  The loss of his own mother when Shepard
         was a small child could never be settled.
            Creation implies separation.  The last word of "T. { _My
         Birth & Life_: } S:" is "afflictions."
            89 blank manuscript pages emphasize this rupture in the
         pious vocabulary of order.  The reader reads empty paper.
            The absence of a definitive conclusion to Shepard's story
         of his life and struggles is a deviation from the familiar
         Augustinian pattern of self-revelation used by other English
         nonconformist Reformers.
            Allegoria and historia should be united in "T {_My
         Birth & Life_:} S": Doubting Thomas should transcend the
         empirical events of his times to become the figura of the
         Good Shepard but the repetitive irruption of death into life
         is mightier than this notion of enclosure.
            "Woe to those that keep silent about God," warns St.
         Augustine, in the De Magistro, for where he is concerned,
         even the talkative are as though speechless" (RR 53).
         "Silence reveals speech--unless it is speech that reveals
         silence" (TP 86), Pierre Macherey has written in A Theory 
         of Literary Production.
             State of the manuscript. Leaves that stood.  Labor of
         elaboration.  he is the god.  A word is the beginning of
         every Conversion.
             The purpose of editing is to reach the truth.
             Mr. Shepard's manuscript is a draft.  Shortcomings and
         error.  The minister made no revisions in this unsettled
         account of his individual existence.  Rational corrections
         by editors lie in wait.  Leaf of the story.  Distortion
         will begin in the place of flight.
    
         _Thomas Shepard:_
              He is the god who tooke me vp when my own mother dyed
              who loued me, & wn my stepmother cared not for me, & wn
              lastly my father also dyed & foorsooke me wn I was yong
              & little & could take no care for my selfe.  (T  side
              of MB)
                   *              *              *
    
         T  . {
                               Is it not hence@
                                        (T side of MB p19)
    
            There is no title on the binding of the notebook that
         contains the manuscript.  The paper is unlined.  There are
         no margins.  There is no front or back.  You can open and
         shut it either way.  Over time it has been used in multiple
         ways by Shepard and by others.  Thomas Shepard, its first
         owner, used both ends of the book to begin writing.
            Each side holds a personal history in reverse.  On the
         side I have here called S is the uninterrupted interrupted
         Autobiography.
            Then there is the empty center.
            But I can turn the book over, so side S is inverted,
         and begin to read another narrative by the same author.  Now
         the protagonist's more improvisational commentary decenters
         the premeditated literary production of "T. { _My Birth &
         Life_: } S:".  Subjects are chosen then dropped.  Messages
         are transmitted and hidden.  Whole pages have been left
         open.  Another revelation or problem begins with a different
         meaning or purpose.  Although dates occur on either side, it
         is unclear which side was written first.
            We might call the creation on this side an understudy.  I
         will call this T side An Inside Narrative.
            Then there is the empty center.
                        *              *              *
    
         with honey within, with oil in public : /
    
            God's Plot : The Paradoxes of Puritan Piety Being the 
         Autobiography & Journal of Thomas Shepard (1972) edited
         with an introduction by Michael McGiffert is the fourth
         published edition of Shepard's Autobiography and the
         standard reference for reading this text.  McGiffert, who
         tells us he restored some of the blunt vocabulary that had
         been expunged by two genteel nineteenth century editors,
         overlooked the structural paradox of the material object
         whose handwritten pages he laboriously and faithfully
         transcribed.  McGiffert's is the fourth edition of Shepard's
         Autobiography.  An earlier verbatim text was edited by
         Allyn Bailey Forbes for The Colonial Society of
         Massachusetts, Publications, XXVII (Transactions,
         1927-1930).  Both editors included sections from the T
         side of the manuscript book in their editions.  Forbes
         called the sections "random notes" and placed them last,
         under the title "Appendix."  McGiffert also put them last,
         under the heading: "[The following material consists of
         notes written by Shepard in the manuscript of the
         Autobiography ]."  Neither editor saw fit to point out the
         fact that Shepard left two manuscripts in one book separated
         by many pages then positioned them so that to read one you
         must turn the other upside down.
            Both editors deleted something from each history.
         McGiffert decided the financial transactions on side S
         were of no autobiographical importance.  Forbes included
         them, but buried Shepard's hostile reference to John Cotton
         on side T in a footnote to side S.  Shepard placed this
         cryptic list of accusations against his fellow Saint alone
         on the recto side of leaf three.  Far from being a "random,"
         or a footnote, the list provides a vivid half-smothered
         articulation of New England's savage intersectine Genesis.
         Possibly the Colonial Society of Massachusetts balked at
         displaying this ambiguous sample of colonial ideology.
    
                        Mr. Cotton: repents not: but is hid only.
    
                        1.  Wn Mrs. Hutchinso- was conuented he
                        commeded her for all that shee did before her
                        confinement & so gaue her a light to escape
                        thorow the crowd wt honour,
    
                        3.  He doth stiffly hold the reuelatio- of
                        our good estate still, without any sign of
                        woord or work: /  (MB 3)
    
             Here is the correct order of the sections written by
         Shepard in side T, or An Inside Narrative.
    
                        1.  A Roman being asked .
                        2.  Mr. Cotton: repents not: but is hid only.
                        3.  Law. that the magistrate kisse the
                                       Churchs feet:
                        4.  My Life: Lord Jesu pdo-: /  euery day.
                        5.  April: 4  1639: prep: for a fast.
                        6.  Is it not hence@
                        7.   An: 1639/ The good things I have
                                       received of the Lord:
                                           (MB&GP&CS)
    
            Shepard's list of "The good things I haue receiued of the
         Lord" has fourteen sections and continues for eight pages.
         The nonconformist minister meant to give praise and
         thanksgiving to God, but images of panic, haste, and
         abandonment disunite the Visible and Spiritual.
            The Lord is the Word.  He scatters short fragments.
         Jonah cried out to the Word when floods encompassed him.
         A Sound Believer hears old Chaos as in a deep sea.  A
         narrative refuses to conform to its project.
            Side S ends abruptly with afflictions sent by God to
         "scourge" the author.  Side T also breaks off suddenly.
         The author is remembering his earlier ministry in Earles
         Colne, "a most prophane" English town.  "Here the Lord kept
         me fro troubles 3 yeares & a halfe vntill the Bishop Laud
         put me to silence & would not let me liue in the town & this
         he did wn I looked to be made a shame & confusio to all:"
         (CS 395).
            From confusion in old England to affliction in new
         England.  Problematical type and antitype.  Everything has
         its use.  "To tell them myself with my own mouth" (CS 352).
            Some of the eighty-nine blank manuscript pages separating
         T and S have been written on since, by various
         mediaries.  All of these men see a higher theme to side S.
         They follow its trajectory as if side T were an eccentric
         inversion.  Their additions form a third utterance of
         authority in the Sincere Convert's transitory division of T.
         from S: { life from birth: }
            On the second leaf (r) of side T, or An Inside Narrative, 
         Mr. Shepard wrote down a single citation of discord.
    
                        "A Roman, being asked how he lived
                          so long-- answered--intus melle, foris
                       oleo: /
    
                        Quid loquacius vanitate, ait Augustinus."
                                                 (MB T 1)
    
            Forbes had the discretion to stay away from translating
         the nonsensical Latin in his interpretation of the
         minister's script.  "A Roman being asked how he liud so
         long. answered intus melle, foris oleo: quid loquacior,
         vanitate, ait augustinus" (CS 397).  McGiffert agreed with
         Forbes transcription.  But in Latin, "quid" and "loquacior"
         cannot agree with each other.  This didn't stop McGiffert
         from offering the following: "On the inside, honey; on the
         outside, oil.  Which babbled more of Vanity? said Augustine"
         (GP 77).  The translation is grammatically incorrect.
            A more exact and enigmatic reading would be: "A Roman
         being asked how he lived so long--answered with honey within
         with oil in public:/ What is more garrulous than vanity,
         said Augustine."
            We will never know if this entry refers to John Cotton,
         Thomas Shepard, or the human condition.  It could be a
         questionable interpretation of any evangelical minister's
         profession.  It could be a self-accusation or a reference to
         John Cotton's preaching.  It could be a note for a sermon or
         merely a sign that the author knows St. Augustine.
    
             In the seventeenth century the word oil, used as a
         verb, often meant "to anoint."  The holy oil of religious
         rites.
            Five foolish virgins took their lamps but forgot the oil
         for trimming.  They went to meet the bridegroom.  The door
         was shut against them.  "I say unto you I know you not."
             To oil one's tongue meant, and still means, to adopt
         or use flattering speech.  "Error, oiled with
         obsequiousness, . . . has often the Advantage of
         Truth.--1776" (OUD).
            "Their throat is an open sepulcher.  One may apply this
         verse to greed, which is often the motive behind men's
         deceitful flattery. . . for greed is insatiably openmouthed,
         unlike sepulchres which are sealed up" (AP 57).  St.
         Augustine, Enarrationes.  "They that observe lying
         vanities forsake their own mercy."  Jonah, to the Lord.
            Alone on the second leaf the citation assumes its own
         mystery.
            Shepard's epigraph, if it is an epigraph to side T, or
         An Inside Narrative, is a dislocation and evocative
         contradiction in the structure of this two-sided book that
         may or may not be a literary work.
            In 1819, James Blake Howe turned the book upside down,
         probably to conform with the direction of the
         Autobiography, and inscribed his own name, place of
         residence, and the date on the same page.
                        *              *              *
    
         _Mr. Prince:_
           Though [Shepard's] voice was low, yet so searching was his
         preaching, so great a power attending, as a hypocrite could
         not easily bear it, & it seemed almost irresistable.  (S
         side of MB)
    
         Study in Logology
    
         _Noah Webster:_
                   Oil is "an unctious substance expressed or drawn
              from various animal and vegetable substances.  The
              distinctive characteristics of oil are inflammability,
              fluidity, and insolubility in water.  Oils are fixed
              and greasy, fixed and essential, volatile and
              essential."  (WD 770)
    
         _Kenneth Burke:_
                   Let us recall, for what it might be worth, that in
              his [St. Augustine's] treatise "On The Teacher" (De 
              Magistro), a discussion with his son on the subject of
              what would now popularly be called "semantics," he
              holds that the word verbum is derived from a verb
              meaning "to strike": (a verberando)--and the notion
              fits in well with the lash of God's discipline.  See,
              for instance, Confessions (xm vi), where he says he
              loves God because God had struck (percussisti) him
              with his Word.  (RR 50)
                        *              *              *
    
                                THOMAS SHEPARD
                           Anagram: More hath pass'd
                                  (WIII 515)
    
            Between 1637 and 1640, Thomas Shepard transcribed into
         another leatherbound pocket notebook, containing 190 pages,
         the testimonies of faith given in his church by 51 men and
         women who were applying for church membership.  30 pages of
         the little book are filled with sermon notes.  He said of
         1637 that God in that year alone "delivered the country from
         war with the Indians and Familists; who rose and fell
         together" (WI cxxvi).
            A canditate for membership in the congregation of the
         Church of Christ in Cambridge in New England had been
         carefully screened by the church elders before he or she
         presented a personal "confession and declaration of God's
         manner of working on the soul" in public.  Canditates had to
         settle private accusations against them and present private
         testimonies first.  Sometimes the preliminary screening
         process took months.  After a person had been cleared by the
         church authorities, he or she delivered the public
         confession, usually during the weekday meeting.  The
         congregation then voted by a show of hands and their
         decision was supposed to be unanimous.  During Sunday
         service an applicant was finally accepted into church
         fellowship.
            The applicants, during this tumultuous time when it
         seemed dangerous to speak at all, especially to express
         spiritual enthusiasm, were from a wide social spectrum.  A
         third of them could read or write.  Almost half of them were
         women.  The speakers included four servants, two Harvard
         graduates, traders, weavers, carpenters, coopers, glovers,
         and one sailor.  Most were concerned with farming and with
         acquisition of property.  Most applicants were in their
         twenties, some in their forties.  Most were starting to
         raise families.  Elizabeth Cutter and Widow Arrington were
         in their sixties.  Each person believed that reception into
         church fellowship was necessary in order to gain economic
         and social advantage in the community.  Some later became
         rich; some are untraceable now through geneological records.
         Both male servants who spoke gained financial and political
         freedom.
            Two women in Shepard's notebook were servants.
         Geneological trace of them has vanished with their surnames.
         Two applicants were widows who managed their own estates.
         The rest generally spent their days cleaning, sewing,
         marketing, cooking, farming, and giving birth to, then
         caring for, children.  Some later died in childbirth.  Mrs.
         Sparhawk died only a month after Shepard recorded her
         narrative.  Some survived their husbands by many years.
            Thomas Hooker, who became Shepard's father-in-law in
         1637, and was the previous minister of the Cambridge parish,
         moved to Connecticut partly because he felt the colony's
         admission procedures were too harsh.  Hooker insisted that
         confessions by women should be read aloud in public by men.
         Governor Winthrop in his History of New-England, citing
         feminine "feebleness," and "shamefac't modesty and
         melanchollick fearfulness," preferred that women's
         "relations" remain private; a male elder should read them
         before a select committee.  Shepard and one or two other
         ministers felt differently.  The Confessions of diverse 
         propounded to be received & were entertained as members,
         shows that although Shepard thought women should defer to
         their husbands in worldly matters, in his theology of
         conversion they were relatively independent.  These
         narratives reflect this autonomy.  Some are as long or
         longer than those spoken by men.
                        *              *              *
    
                             THOMAS SHEPARD
                             Anagram: Arm'd as the shop.
                                  (WIII 515)
    
         Notes written in the minister's hand on the flyleaf of the
         manuscript he called "The Confessions of diverse propounded 
         to be received & were entertayned as members."
    
         1.   You say some brethren cannot live comfortably with so
         little.
         2.   We put all the rest upon a temptation.  Lots being but
         little, and estates will increase or live in beggary.  For
         to lay land out far off is intolerable to men; nearby, you
         kill your cattle.
         3.   Because if another minister come, he will not have room
         for his company--Religion--.
         4.   Because now, if ever, is the most fit season; for the
         gate to be opened, many will come in among us, and fill all
         places, and no room in time to come at least, not such good
         room as now.  And now you may best sell.
         5.   Because Mr. Vane will be among our skirts.  (GP 90)
                        *              *              *
    
         MATT.xviii.11.  -- "I came to save that which was lost."
                                                      (WI 111)
    
               Each confession of faith is an eccentric concentrated
         improvisation and arrest.  Each narrator's proper name forms
         a chapter heading.  Wives and servants are property.  Their
         names are appropriated for masculine consistency.
                        Goodman Luxford His Wife
                        Brother Collins His Wife
                        Brother Moore His Wife
                        Brother Greene His Wife
                        Brother Parish's Wife
                        Brother Crackbone His Wife
                        The Confession of John Sill His Wife
                        John Stedman His Wife's Confession
                        Brother Jackson's Maid
    
            Written representation of the Spirit is sometimes
         ineffectual; words only images or symbols of the clear
         sunshine of the Gospel.  "Go to a painted sun, it gives you
         no heat, nor cherishith you not.  So it is here, etc."
         Often the minister surrounds a name with ink-scrawls and
         flourishes.
            Flights or freezes.  Proof and chaos.  Immanent sorrow of
         one, incomplete victory of another.  Use, oh my unbelief.
            Confessions are copied down quickly.  Translinguistic
         idiosyncracies infer but block consistency.  A sound block
         will not be led.  Mistaken biblical quotations are
         transcribed and abandoned.  As the sound is the sense is.
         Few revisions civilize verbal or visual hazards and webs of
         unsettled sanctification.  The minister's nearly microscopic
         handwriting is difficult to decipher.  He uses a form of
         shorthand in places.
            A wild heart at the word shatters scriptural figuration.
            Once again by correcting, deleting, translating, or
         interpreting the odd symbols and abbreviated signals, later
         well-meaning editors have effaced the disorderly velocity of
         Mr. Shepard's evangelical enthusiasm.
            For readability.
                        *              *              *
    
                  Matt
    
         In this setdown the ques
         tion of C's desiples
         why they asks him
    
         not men ought sometimes to
         askes questions pacificaly when
         they hear the word upon
         sum occasion    (written in another hand  inT  side of MB)
    
            Writing speed of thought moving through dominated
         darkness (the privation) toward an irresistible confine
         possibly becoming woman.
    
         The Soul's Immediate Closing with the Person  (WII 111)
    
         _Barbary Cutter:_
                   The Lord let me see my condition by nature out of
              16 of Ezekiel and by seeing the holiness of the
              carriage of others about, her friends, and the more she
              looked on them the more she thought ill of herself.
              She embraced the motion to New England.  Though she
              went through with many miseries and stumbling blocks at
              last removed and sad passages by sea.  And after I came
              hither I saw my condition more miserable than ever.  (C
              89)
    
            A Narrator-Scribe-Listener-Confessor-Interpreter-Judge-
         Reporter-Author quickly changes person, character, country,
         and gender.  Walk darkly here, This is to cross Scripture.
         These words are questions.  Compel them to come in when
         Jonah is cast out of sight.
              He singles them out.
              His spirit goes home to them quiet as an ark above
         waters; rest and provender being desire to lay under Lord.
         Praying for him and hearing.  Words drift together.  Washed
         from her heart.  Many foolish pray from the mouth.  Some are
         condemned.  Blossoms fly up as dust.  He will not leave.
         Death can not.  "In favor is life."  This outline is
         extracted.  Now you will have him.  She calls him so.
             Some are asleep.  Ten virgins trim their lamps.
             My house is a waste.  To doctrine to reason cry peace
         peace.  This is that which fills a man.  For this long ago
         Corinthians, Philippians, Thessalonians: motives differ.  We
         are his people we stumble.  What a wandering path
         confinement is when angels had not fallen.  Pale clarity of
         day.  Why no heart.  Iniquities are not all I might
            "Five were wise and five were foolish."
            These virgins once the doors were shut were surely kept
         out.  Glimpses.  Explication.  What is acceptable?  Toother.
         Miswritten he thoght.  He thought.  Other redundancies.
         Reduced to lower case these words are past.  To the supposed
         sepulcher.  Purest virgin churches and professors, they took
         their lamps.  What can we do?  Prevail again?  Against what
         do we watch?
            Fiery law and tabernacles I beat the air.
            Therefore as her and distancing.
                        *              *              *
    
         "Went forth to meet the Bridegroom."  (WII 111)
    
         _Old Goodwife Cutter:_
         I desired to come this way in sickness time
         and Lord brought us through many sad troubles by sea
         And when I was here the Lord rejoiced my heart.
         But when come I had lost all and no comfort
         and hearing from foolish virgins
         those that sprinkled with Christ's blood were unloved.
                                                      (C 145)
    
         _John Sill His Wife:_
         Oft troubled since she came hither,
         her heart went after the world and vanities
         and the Lord absented Himself from her
         so that she thought God had brought her hither on purpose
         to discover her.  (C 51)
    
         _Goodwife Willows:_
         And when husband gone, I thought all I had was but a form
         and I went to Mr. Morton
         and desired he would tell me how it was with me.
         He told me if I hated that form
         it was a sign I had more than a form.  (C 150)
    
         _Brother Winship's Wife:_
         Hearing 2 Jeremiah 14 -- two evils broken cisterns --
         I was often convinced by Mr. Hooker my condition was
         miserable
         and took all threatenings to myself. . .
         And I heard He that had smitten He could heal Hosea 6.
         Hearing -- say to them that be fearful in heart, behold He
         comes -
         Mr. Wells - pull off thy soles off thy feet for ground is
         holy.
         And hearing Exodus 34, forgiving iniquity,
         I thought Lord could will was He willing. . .
         Hearing whether ready for Christ at His appearing
         had fears, city of refuge. . .
         Hearing - oppressed undertake for me - eased.  (C 147-9)
    
         _Hannah Brewer:_
         And I heard that promise proclaimed - Lord, Lord merciful
         and gracious etc.-
         but could apply nothing.  (C 141)
    
         _Brother Winship's Wife:_
         Hearing of Thomas' unbelief,
         he showed trust in Lord forever
         for there is everlasting strength and stayed.  (C 149)
    
         _Goodwife Usher:_
         And I heard -- come to me you that be weary --
         and Lord turn me and I shall be turned -
         and so when I desired to come hither
         and found a discontented heart
         and mother dead and my heart overwhelmed.
         And I heard of a promise -- fear not I'll be with thee.
         And in this town I could not understand anything was said,
         I was so blind, and heart estranged from people of people.
         (C 183)
    
         _Mrs. Sparhawk:_
         And then that place fury is not in me,
         let Him take hold of my strength. . . .
         And she
         there was but two ways either to stand out
         or to take hold,
         and saw the promise
         and her
         own insufficiency so to do.
         and mentioning a Scripture,
         was asked whether she had assurance.
         She said no but some hope.  (C 68-9)
    
         _John Stedman His Wife:_
         Hearing Mr. Cotton out of Revelation --
         Christ with a rainbow on his head, Revelation 10--
         I thought there was nothing for me.
         I thought I was like the poor man at the pool.  (C 105)
    
         _Goodwife Grizzell:_
         Hearing Mr. Davenport on sea --
         he that hardened himself against the Lord could not
         prosper --
         and I thought I had done so.
         But then he showed it was continuing in it
         and I considered though I had a principle against faith
         yet a kingdom divided cannot stand.  (C 188-9)
    
         _Widow Arrington:_
         And in latter end that sermon
         there was obedience of sons and servants
         then I thought--would I know?
         And I thought Lord gave me a willing heart, etc.
         And they that have sons can cry--Abba--Father,
         and so have some stay
         and I wished I had a place in wilderness to mourn.
         (C 185-6)
    
         _Brother Jackson's Maid:_
         When Christ was to depart nothing broke their heart so much
         as then.  (C 121)
                        *              *              *
    
         Walking alone in the fields
    
            These first North American Inside Narratives cross the
         wide current of Scripture.  I meet them in the fields.  They
         show me what rigor.  I dare not pity.  When she went to meet
         the Bridegroom it was too early.  Then there is nothing to
         believe.  Scholars of the world, then there is no authority
         at all.
    
                        The iron face of filial systems.
                        The colonies of America break out.
    
            Consider the parable of these wise and foolish virgins.
         They went to work to trim their lamps.  What did the foolish
         say to the wise?  That there is no difference?  What a
         crossing.  All their thoughts and searching.  Is that what
         love is?  Bewildered by history did they see iniquity?  Did
         they spend whole days and nights trimming?  When was the
         filth wiped off?
    
                        People of His pasture, does this give peace?
                        Sheep of His hand, is this the temptation of
                          the place?
    
            Mountains are interrupted by mountains.  Planets are not
         fixed.  They run together.  Planets are globes of fire.
         Imagination is a lense.  Pastness.  We find by experience.
         A sentence tumbles into thought.  A disturbance calls itself
         free.

     

    Notes

     
    Patricia Caldwell’s study is concerned with how and when English voices begin to speak New-Englandly. The Puritan Conversion Narrative demonstrates how careful examination and interpretation of individual physical artifacts from a time and place can change our basic assumptions about the New England pattern and its influence on American literary expression.
     
    This essay is profoundly indebted to her work.
     
    I have followed each quoted source in spelling and punctuation. In the books I used as sources, revisions, deletions, and spelling differences, have been modernized, and then again “modernized”; I have tried to preserve those changes as part of the form and content of my essay. Someday I hope there will be facsimile versions of the “Confessions,” the “Journal,” and the “Autobiography,” with facing transcriptions in typeface.
     
    I have taken editorial liberties in places. It was my editorial decision to turn some sections of the narratives into poems.
     

    Key

     
    AC = The Antinomian Controversy: Patricia Caldwell.

    AH = Anne Hutchinson.

    C = Thomas Shepard’s Confessions.

    CS = The Colonial Society of Massachusetts. Thomas Shepard’s T. {My Birth and Life:} S:

    GP = God’s Plot: Thomas Shepard.

    L = The Letters of Emily Dickinson.

    M = Magnalia Christi Americana: Cotton Mather.

    MB = Manuscript Book: Thomas Shepard’s Autobiography.

    MBED = Emily Dickinson’s Manuscript Books.

    ML = The Master Letters of Emily Dickinson.

    OUD = The Oxford Universal Dictionary.

    RR = The Rhetoric of Religion: Kenneth Burke.

    VS = Visible Saints: Geoffrey Nuttal.

    W = The Works of Thomas Shepard.

    WD = An American Dictionary of the English Language: Noah Webster.
     
    ASCII text cannot reproduce certain marks used in this work. We have used a @ to represent mirror-imaged (backward) question marks. We have used o- to represent an o with a bar over it. –PMC Eds.
     

    Works Cited

     

    • Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. New York: George Braziller, 1955.
    • —. The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology. Boston: Beacon P, 1961.
    • Caldwell, Patricia. The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983.
    • Dickinson, Emily. The Letters of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1958.
    • —. The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Ralph Franklin. Harvard UP, 1981.
    • Girard, Rene. The Scapegoat. Trans. Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986.
    • Hall, David D., ed. The Antinomian Controversy, 1636-1638; A Documentary History. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1968.
    • Heimert, Alan. “Puritanism, the Wilderness and the Frontier.” New England Quarterly (Sep. 1953): 361-82.
    • Jakobson, Roman. Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time. Ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985.
    • Johnson, Edward. Wonder-Working Providence of Sion Saviour in New England. Ed. J. Franklin Jameson. (1912) 1969.
    • Macherey, Pierre. A Theory of Literary Production. Trans. Geoffrey Wall. London: Routledge, 1978.
    • Mather, Cotton. Magnalia Christi Americana or, the Ecclesiastical History of New England. (London, 1702) Hartford, 1820.
    • Melville, Herman. Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative). Ed. Harrison Hayford and Merton Sealts. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1962.
    • Nuttal, Geoffrey F. Visible Saints: The Congregational Way, 1640-1669. Oxford: Blackwell, 1957.
    • The Oxford Universal Dictionary. London: Amen House, 1933.
    • Shepard, Thomas. “Autobiography.” Ed. Allyn Bailey Forbes. The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Publications, XXVII. Boston: Transactions, 1927-1930.
    • —. God’s Plot: The Paradoxes of Puritan Piety, Being the Autobiography and Journal of Thomas Shepard. Ed. Michael McGiffert. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1972.
    • —. Manuscript Book. Unpublished ms. The Houghton Libray, Harvard U, Cambridge.
    • —. The Works of Thomas Shepard. Ed. John A. Albro. 3 vols. 1853. New York: AMS, 1967.
    • —. Thomas Shepard’s “Confessions.” Ed. George Selement and Bruce C. Woolley. Collections of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 58. Boston: The Society, 1981.
    • Stein, Gertrude. “Patriarchal Poetry.” The Yale Gertrude Stein. Ed. Richard Kostelanetz. New Haven: Yale UP, 1980.
    • Webster, Noah, ed. An American Dictionary of the English Language.

     

  • Grammatology Hypermedia

    Greg Ulmer

    University of Florida at Gainesville

     

    This article is about an experiment I conducted for publication in a volume collecting the papers read at the Sixteenth Annual Alabama Symposium on English and American Literature: “Literacy Online: the Promise (and Peril) of Reading and Writing with Computers,” October 26-28, 1989 (organized by Myron Tuman). My talk at the conference placed the current developments in Artificial Intelligence and hypermedia programs in the context of the concept of the “apparatus,” used in cinema studies to mount a critique of cinema as an institution, as a social “machine” that is as much ideological as it is technological. The same drive of realism that led in cinema to the “invisible style” of Hollywood narrative films, and to the occultation of the production process in favor of a consumption of the product as if it were “natural,” is at work again in computing. Articles published in computer magazines declare that “the ultimate goal of computer technology is to make the computer disappear, that the technology should be so transparent, so invisible to the user, that for practical purposes the computer does not exist. In its perfect form, the computer and its application stand outside data content so that the user may be completely absorbed in the subject matter–it allows a person to interact with the computer just as if the computer were itself human” (Macuser, March, 1989). It was clear that the efforts of critique to expose the oppressive effects of “the suture” in cinema (the effect binding the spectator to the illusion of a complete reality) had made no impression on the computer industry, whose professionals (including many academics) are in the process of designing “seamless” information environments for hypermedia applications. The “twin peaks” of American ideology–realism and individualism–are built into the computing machine (the computer as institution).

     

    The very concept of the “apparatus” indicates that ideology is a necessary, irreducible component of any “machine.” Left critique and cognitive science agree on this point, as may be seen in Jeremy Campbell’s summary of the current state of research in artificial intelligence: A curious feature of a mind that uses Baker Street [Holmes] reasoning to create elaborate scenarios out of incomplete data is that its most deplorable biases often arise in a natural way out of the very same processes that produce the workmanlike, all-purpose, commonsense intelligence that is the Holy Grail of computer scientists who try to model human rationality. A completely open mind would be unintelligent. It could be argued that stereotypes are not ignorance structures at all, but knowledge structures. From this point of view, stereotypes cannot be understood chiefly in terms of attitudes and motives, or emotions like fear and jealousy. They are devices for predicting other people’s behavior. One result of the revival of the connectionist models in the new class of artificial intelligence machines is to downgrade the importance of logic and upgrade the role of knowledge, and of memory, which is the vehicle of knowledge (Campbell, The Improbable Machine. New York, 1989: 35, 151, 158).

     

    Critique and cognitive science hold different attitudes to the inherence of stereotypes in knowledge, of course. Critique is right to condemn the acceptance of or reconciliation with the given assumptions implicit in cognitive science, but its own response to the problem, relying on the enlightenment model of absolute separation between episteme and doxa, knowledge and opinion, is too limited. This split is replicated in the institutionalization of critique in academic print publication resulting in a specialized commentary separated from practice. Postmodern Culture could play a role in exploring alternatives to the current state of the apparatus. Grammatology provides one possible theoretical frame for this research, being free of the absolute commitment to the book apparatus (ideology of the humanist subject and writing practices, as well as print technology) that constrains research conducted within the frame of critique. The challenge of grammatology, against all technological determinism, is to accept responsibility for inventing the practices for institutionalizing electronic technologies. We may accept the values of critique (critical analysis motivated by the grand metanarrative of emancipation) without reifying one particular model of “critical thinking.” But what are the alternatives? The experiment I contributed to the volume differed from the paper delivered at the conference, being not so much an explanation of the problem–the inability of critique to expose the disappearing apparatus–as an attempt to write with the stereotypes of Western thought, using them and showing them at work at the same time. The essay is entitled “Grammatology (In The Stacks) of Hypermedia: A Simulation.”

     

    My research has been concerned with exploring various modes of “immanent critique,” a reasoning capable of operating within the machines of television and computing, in which the old categories (produced in the book apparatus) separating fiction and truth are breaking down. Rhetoric has always been concerned with sorting out the true from the false, and it will continue to function in these terms in the electronic apparatus, as it did in oral and alphabetic cultures. The terms of this sorting will be transformed, however, to treat an electronic culture that will be as different from the culture of the book as the latter is different from an oral culture. It is important to remember, at the same time, that all three dimensions of discourse exist together interactively. I am particularly interested in the figure of the mise en abyme, as elaborated in Jacques Derrida’s theories, in this context. The mise an abyme is a reflexive structuration, by means of which a text shows what it is telling, does what it says, displays its own making, reflects its own action. My hypothesis is that a discourse of immanent critique may be constructed for an electronic rhetoric (for use in video, computer, and interactive practice) by combining the mise en abyme with the two compositional modes that have dominated audio-visual texts–montage and mise en scene. The result would be a deconstructive writing, deconstruction as an inventio (rather than as a style of book criticism).

     

    “Grammatology (In The Stacks) of Hypermedia” is an experiment in immanent critique, attempting to use the mise en abyme figure to organize an “analysis” of the current thinking about hypermedia. The strategy was to imitate in alphabetic style the experience of hypermedia practice–“navigating” through a database, producing a trail of linked items of information. I adopted the “stack” format of hypercard, confining myself largely to citations from a diverse bibliography of materials relevant to hypermedia. These materials were extended to include not only texts about hypermedia from academic as well as journalistic sources, but also texts representing the domains used as metaphors for hypermedia design in these sources. Two basic semantic domains, then, provided most of the materials for the database: the index cards, organized in “stacks,” to be linked up in both logical and associative ways, and the figure of travel used to characterize the retrieval of the informations thus stored. The critical point I wanted to make had to do with a further metaphor that emerged from juxtaposing the other two–an analogy between the mastery of a database and the colonization of a foreign land. The idea was to expose the ideological quality of the research drive, the will to power in knowledge, by calling attention to the implications of designing hypermedia programs in terms of the “frontiers” of knowledge, knowledge as a “territory” to be established. The goal is not to suppress this metaphorical element in design and research, but to include it more explicitly, to unpack it within the research and teaching activities. In this way stereotypes may become self-conscious, used and mentioned at once in the learning process.

     

    The design of the experiment was influenced not only by the principle of the mise en abyme (imitating in my form the form of the object of study), but also by several other compositional strategies available in current critical theory. One of these is Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, for which hypermedia seems to be the ideal technological format. Indeed, one might hope, following her superb alphabetic (re) construction of Benjamin’s project in The dialectics of seeing (MIT, 1989) that Susan Buck-Morss would direct a hypermedia version of the Arcades. A point of departure (but only that) for this version might be the “Cicero” project, in which students of Classical civilization and Latin explore Rome (a representation on videodisc, composed using microphotography of a giant museum model of the city at its height in 315 A.D.) assisted by a “friendly tour guide” (Cicero). It is worth recalling, in this context, that Cicero was an advocate of artificial memory as part of rhetoric, and that Giulio Camillo’s Memory Theater (designed during the Venetian Renaissance) was “intended to be used for memorising every notion to be found in Cicero’s works” (Frances Yates, The Art of Memory. Chicago, 1966: 166). In fact, the design of hypermedia software in general, and not just the Cicero project, has much in common with the hypomnemic theaters of the Renaissance Hermetic-Caballist tradition. The unfinished Arcades project exists in the form of a “massive collection of notes on nineteenth-century industrial culture as it took form in Paris–and formed that city in turn. These notes consist of citations from a vast array of historical sources, which Benjamin filed with the barest minimum of commentary, and only the most general indications of how the fragments were eventually to have been arranged” (Buck-Morss, ix). In the hypermedia Arcades, an interactive Benjamin would guide students through a Paris whose history could flash up in the present moment with the touch of a key. Meanwhile, I was interested in the resonance of the card file metaphor for hypermedia and Benjamin’s views on the obsolescence of the academic book:

     

    And today the book is already, as the present mode of scholarly production demonstrates, an outdated mediation between two different filing systems. For everything that matters is to be found in the card box of the researcher who wrote it, and the scholar studying it assimilates it into his own card index. (Benjamin, Reflections, New York, 1978: 78.)

     

    The other strategy that is relevant to the experiment is the postmodernist fondness for allegory. Thus any item of fact reported in the database could also function as a sign, signifying or figuring another meaning. The specifics of this meaning are to be inferred in the reading, leaving the construction of the critical argument to the reader. These strategies constitute an outline for a potent pedagogy in which research functions as the inventio for an expressive text (thus producing a hybrid drawing upon both scholarship and art). This possibility suggests another role for electronic publications–to explore productive exchanges between the electronic and alphabetic apparatuses, emphasizing the usefulness of computer hardware and software as figurative models for written exercises. It is perfectly possible to compose an essayistic equivalent of a hypermedia program, and to think electronically with paper and pencil.

     

    My version of a hypermedia essay consists of some 29 cards simulating one trail blazed through a domain of information about hypermedia–concerned, that is, with a sub-domain holding data on the semantic fields of the terminology of program design for hypermedia environments. The entries are drawn from the categories listed below in random order (the entries evoke these categories). In hypermedia, the cards could be accessed in any order, but in the alphabetic simulation, which is an enunciation or utterance within the system, the sequence does develop according to an associative logic (it is precisely an experiment with the capacity of association for creating learning effects). In hypermedia, the scholar does not provide a specific line of argument, an enunciation, but constructs the whole paradigm of possibilities, the set of statements, leaving the act of utterance, specific selections and combinations, to the reader/user. Or rather, the scholar’s “argument” exists at the level of the ideology/theory directing the system of the paradigm, determining the boundaries of inclusion/exclusion.

     

    –hypermedia design
    –methods and logic of composition
    –the computer conference at the University of Alabama
    –computers in general
    –critique of cinema (apparatus theory)
    –grammatology
    –Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
    –colonial exploration of America (Columbus, the overland trails).
    –stereotypes
    –“Place” in rhetoric, memory
    –Situationism
    –mis en abyme.

     

    The fundamental idea organizing the grammatological approach to hypermedia (theorizing the institutionalization of computer technology into education in terms of the history of writing) emerges out of a comparison of three textbooks, introducing students to the operations of the three memory systems dominating schooling within three different apparatuses: the Ad Herenium, main source of the classical art of memory, in the pre-print era when oratory was the predominant practice (cf. Camillo’s Memory Theater); the St. Martin’s Handbook, representing (as typical among a host of competitors) the codification of school writing; and a textbook yet to come, doing for electronic composition what the other two examples do for their respective apparatuses. It is certainly too soon for a “codification” of electronic rhetoric, considering that the technology is still evolving at an unnerving pace. The position of Postmodern Culture in this situation should not be conservative or cautious (that slot in the intellectual ecology being already crowded with representatives). Rather, it should serve as a free zone for conceptualization, formulating an open, continually evolving simulacrum of that electronic handbook. Some of the elements of that handbook (but a new word is needed for this program) might be glimpsed in the citations collected and linked in my hypermedia essay. In the remaining sections I will reproduce, in somewhat abbreviated form, one of the series included in the original article (but with the addition of a few selections not used previously). In this recreation I will omit the sources, noting only the name of the author. My principal concern is with the transformation of the rhetorical concept of “place” that is underway in the electronic environment. A review of the history of rhetoric reveals that “place” is perhaps the least stable notion in this history, the one most sensitive to changes in the apparatus.

     

    “What seems necessary to me is the development of a completely new discipline that embraces the whole augmentation system. What are the practical strategies that will allow our society to pursue high-performance augmentation? My strategy is to begin with small groups, which give greater ‘cultural mobility.’ Small groups are preferable to individuals because exploring augmented collaboration is at the center of opportunity. These small groups would be the scouting parties sent ahead to map the pathways for the organizational groups to follow. You also need outposts for these teams” (Douglas Engelbart).

     

    “Between 1840 and the California gold rush, fewer than 20,000 men, women, and children followed those roads westward–the Santa Fe Trail, the Oregon Trail, the Bozeman Trail. Yet the story of the overland trails was told a thousand times for every one telling of the peopling of the Midwest. Why? Excitement was there, of course: Indian attacks and desert hardship and even cannibalism. But I suspected that the greatest appeal of the trails lay in the role they played as avenues for progress of the enterprising. The roads that the pioneers followed symbolized the spirit of enterprise that sustained the American dream” (Ray Allen Billington).

     

    Originally, theoria meant seeing the sights, seeing for yourself, and getting a worldview. The first theorists were “tourists”–the wise men who traveled to inspect the obvious world. Theoria did not mean the kind of vision that is restricted to the sense of sight, but implied a complex but organic mode of active observation–a perceptual system that included asking questions, listening to stories and local myths, and feeling as well as hearing and seeing. The world theorists who traveled around 600 B.C. were spectators who responded to the expressive energies of places, stopping to contemplate what the guides called “the things worth seeing.” Local guides–the men who knew the stories of a place–helped visiting theorists to “see” (Eugene Victor Walter).

     

    “Information would be accessible through association as well as through indexing. The user could join any two items, including the user’s own materials and notes. Chains of these associations would form a ‘trail,’ with many possible side trails. Trails could be named and shared with other information explorers. ‘There is a new profession of trailblazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.’ We need fundamentally new organizing principles for knowledge, and we need new navigation and manipulation tools for the learner. Instead of regarding an intelligent system as a human replacement, we can consider the system as a helpful assistant or partner” (Stephen A. Weyer).

     

    “The two recognized, contemporary authorities on Columbus are his son Ferdinand and the traveling monk Bertolome de las Casas. Both cite the reasons why Columbus believed he could discover the Indies as threefold: ‘natural reasons, the authority of writers, and the testimony of sailors.’ As to the ancient authorities, Columbus’ son cites Aristotle, Seneca, Strabo, Pliny, and Capilonius. None of these ancient writers gave a route plan– it had to come from another source. The source for that plan had to be St. Brendan, the Navigator. Brendan lived in the 6th century, A.D. The Irish clergy were a devout group and practiced a form of wandering in the wilderness. Not having a desert nearby, they did their wandering at sea. In the Navigatio Sancti Brendani the style and manner of navigational reports are as excerpts relating the interesting events, taken from a diary or logbook. The subsequent versions of the Navigatio were penned by monks in monasteries. These contain religious matter of a mythical nature which has obviously been added to the original” (Paul H. Chapman).

     

    “For the Aboriginal nomad, the land is a king of palimpsest. On its worn and rugged countenance he is able to write down the great stories of Creation, his creation, in such a way as to insure their renewal. Walking from one sacred spot to another, performing rituals that have changed little over the millennia, are in themselves important aspects of a metaphysical dialogue. Since Aboriginal society is pre-literate, this dialogue relies on intellectual and imaginative contact with sacred constructs within the landscape that have been invested with miwi or power, according to tradition or the Law. The language is one of symbolic expression, of mythic reportage. We begin to see at this point the seeds of conflict between two opposing cultures existing in the same landscape. On the one hand we have an Aboriginal culture that regards the landscape as an existential partner to which it is lovingly enjoined; on the other, we find a European culture dissatisfied with the landscape’s perceived vacuity and spiritual aridity, thus wanting to change it in accordance with facile economic imperatives so that it reflects a materialistic world- view” (James Cowan).

     

    “Can the hypermedia author realize the enormous potential of the medium to change our relation to language and texts simply by linking one passage or image to others? One begins any discussion of the new rhetoric needed for hypermedia with the recognition that authors of hypertext and hypermedia materials confront three related problems: First, what must they do to orient readers and help them read efficiently and with pleasure? Second, how can they inform those reading a document where the links in that document lead? Third, how can they assist readers who have just entered a new document to feel at home there? Drawing upon the analogy of travel, we can say that the first problem concerns navigation information necessary for making one’s way through the materials. The second concerns exit or departure information, and the third arrival or entrance information” (George Landow).

     

    “Removed from the tangible environment of their culture, travelers came to rely on this most portable and most personal of cultural orders as a means of symbolic linkage with their homes. More than any other emblem of identity, language seemed capable of domesticating the strangeness of America. It could do so both by the spreading of Old World names over New World place, people, and objects, and by the less literal act of domestication which the telling of an American tale involved. This ability to ‘plot’ New World experience in advance was, in fact, the single most important attribute of European language. Francis Bacon, primary theorist of a new epistemology and staunch opponent of medieval scholasticism, extrapolated Columbus himself into a symbol of bold modernity. His voyager was decidedly not the man of terminal doubt and despair whom we encounter in the Jamaica letter of 1503. He was instead a figure of hopeful departures, a man whose discovery of a ‘new world’ suggested the possibility that the ‘remoter and more hidden parts of nature’ also might be explored with success. The function of Bacon’s Novum Organum was to provide for the scientific investigator the kind of encouragement which the arguments of Columbus prior to 1492 had provided for a Europe too closely bound to traditional assumptions” (Wayne Franklin).

     

    “Perhaps the most fragile component of the future lies in the immediate vicinity of the terminal screen. We must recognize the fundamental incapacity of capitalism ever to rationalize the circuit between body and computer keyboard, and realize that this circuit is the site of a latent but potentially volatile disequilibrium. The disciplinary apparatus of digital culture poses as a self-sufficient, self-enclosed structure without avenues of escape, with no outside. Its myths of necessity, ubiquity, efficiency, of instantaneity require dismantling: in part by disrupting the separation of cellularity, by refusing productivist injunctions by inducing slow speeds and inhabiting silences” (Jonathan Crary).

     

    One more suggestion of a function of electronic publishing: To experiment with other metaphors for the research process in the electronic apparatus, as alternatives to the metaphor of colonial imperialism.

     

  • His Master’s Voice: On William Gaddis’sJR

    Patrick J. O’Donnell

    University of West Virginia

     

    In William Gaddis’sJR, voice partakes of the “postmodern condition” where, as Jean Baudrillard says, everything is constituted by “the force which rules market value: capital must circulate; gravity and any fixed point must disappear; the chain of investments and reinvestments must never stop; value must radiate endlessly and in every direction.”1 Gaddis’s unwieldy parody of American capitalism is a 700-plus page palimpsest of vocal exchanges where the agency of transmission–telephones, televisions, tape recorders–has, in a sense, taken over the discourse, so that human commerce and conversation reflect the nearly total instrumentality of human life and the “capitalization” of identity in the late twentieth century. “Voice,” in Gaddis’s novel, has become the cipher for human exchange, and like surplus capital, inflationary and without content.

     

    In this context, it is appropriate to recall an image produced by the advertising agencies that Gaddis lampoons in JR while striking at the wastefulness of their “product” in the piles of junk mail that the pre-adolescent JR ceaselessly sorts through on his way to the foundation of a financial empire. One of the more memorable icons of American culture is the logo of the Recording Company of America, perhaps most familiar to the generation which listened to ’78’s which bore the image of Victor, that patient canine listening to the speaker of a Victorola phonograph. The trademark suggests that the quality of the recording is so faithful to the original that Victor thinks he is hearing “his master’s voice”–an idea so compelling that RCA protected the phrase “His Master’s Voice” by registering it as a trademark.

     

    Images like this one, born within the publicity departments of corporations that make substantial profits from the reproduction of sound, reveal much about commonly held cultural assumptions regarding voice and its relation to the projection of identity. The faithful reproduction of voice is associated with the assertion of mastery. The “master recording,” presumably, connects us directly with the origin of an individual voice. This concept is revised and repeated in the television advertisements of a cassette tape manufacturer who employed Ella Fitzgerald to break a glass with the magnified projections of her real voice; these, recorded and played back, were used to break another glass, attesting, again, to the faithfulness of the sound recording. Yet, we easily see the contradictions inherent in the attempt to represent the mastery, originality, and integrity of voice. As Edward Said suggests, all forms of originality imply “loss, or else it would be repetition; or we can say that, insofar as it is apprehended as such, originality is the difference between primordial vacancy and temporary, sustained repetition” (133). To hear a recording of the master’s voice–to hear the voice of mastery–is to hear the same track again as a repetition that fragments the singularity of the original; indeed, following Walter Benjamin, in modern technocratic society, the more faithful the recording, the more the original is, paradoxically, re-presented or copied as it is transformed from original into simulation.2 Recorded and transcribed, the strikingly unique voice of Ella Fitzgerald is converted into a commodity that everyone can own and replay at will.

     

    These remarks on the replication of voice (and in a technocratic society “voice” inevitably comes to us in the form of replication) suggest the conflicted position of the so-called “speaking subject” in postmodern culture and in Gaddis’s novel where the “parent” organization of a fading financial empire is the “General Roll” corporation– originally, manufacturers of piano rolls for player pianos. There are several ways in which this contradictory position might be described. Translated from corporeal to legible terms, it is, for example, a commonplace of American creative writing programs to encourage neophytes to discover a unique, personal voice, yet it is easily perceivable that this illusory voice, even if it is found, can only be transmitted through the vehicle of the reproduction of the text–a text which, in “successful” creative writing programs, can be eminently transformed into a commodity. Adorno’s commentary on the speaking subject is pertinent to the contradictions implicit in the notion of “voice in the marketplace”:

     

    In an all-embracing system [such as, for Adorno, that of late capitalist economies], dialogue becomes ventriloquism. Everyone is his own Charlie McCarthy; hence his popularity. Words in their entirety come to resemble the formulae which formerly were reserved for greeting and leave-taking . . . Such determination of speech through adaptation, however, is its end: the relation between matter and expression is severed, and just as the concepts of the positivists are supposed to be mere counters, so those of positivistic humanity have become literally coins. (Pecora 27)

     

    For Adorno, form and content of language in contemporary society have become so thoroughly severed (in that “content” has virtually disappeared), and yet so fused together (in that “medium” and “message” of contemporary speech acts are one) that all forms of expression are telegraphic ciphers, or traces of some “matter” that has been debased into coin, commodity. Hence, the source of this language–the individual speaker–becomes merely a mouthpiece, a “talking head,” a transmitter of messages already overheard and delivered; the repetition of these messages might be thought of as the capitalized surplus of sheer message, or information for its own sake, in contemporary culture. This is the view articulated by Gibbs inJR, who serves as the novel’s heretical voice in continually questioning and parodying the prevailing discursive orders. To his class (Gibbs teaches at an “experimental” elementary school which is attempting to redefine its curriculum for the purposes of conducting all classes over “closed-circuit” television), Gibbs says, “Since you’re not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be organized do you follow that?” (20). But to this “truth” about information Gibbs adds the kind of heretical remark (he is clearly veering away from the predetermined class syllabus at this point) that will lead to his being fired from the school and his self-willed expulsion from America: “In other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of the knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from outside. In fact it’s exactly the opposite. Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos . . . ” (20).

     

    Readers ofJR will recognize in these illustrations the dilemma of the subject in this novel. Any attempt to describe or summarizeJR will necessarily fail, partly because the “plot” of the novel is so minimal as to provide little help with whatJR is “all about,” and partly because the novel’s complexity resides not in theme, or character, or symbol, or event but in the twinned questions of “who is speaking?” and “what is s/he talking about?” at any of a number of points. Identity and reference may thus be seen as poles between which the story of an eleven-year-old child’s rise to financial wealth and power is negotiated. JR Vansant, the titular protagonist, manages to assimilate a financial empire by sorting through junk mail and taking advantage of numerous “offers,” and by employing the offices of his former teacher, Edward Bast, who unwillingly acts as JR’s adult stand-in at various meetings and business functions. Largely through a series of contingencies and accidents that serve to parody any reliance upon Wall Street “securities,” JR succeeds in building a ghost mega-corporation that exists solely on paper, and then just as easily loses his empire in a “crash” that only makes him desire to start a new one. JR’s Horatio Alger story stands in ironic contrast to that of his “dummy,” Bast, a would-be artist unwillingly entangled in the momentum of JR’s rise and fall, and heir to the small remains of the declining General Roll fortune; in the novel, the Basts are embroiled in a Chancery-like dispute over their estate, and Edward Bast’s uncertainty as to the identity of his father and, thus, the origins of his own identity, serves as a foil to JR’s parodic embodiment of “the self-made man.” Bast is also Gaddis’s portrait of the artist whose art is foiled by the consumerism, noise, and entropy of the contemporary environment: his horizons increasingly diminished (in the beginning of the novel, Bast plans to write a full-scale opera; by its end, he is planning a short piece for the unaccompanied cello), Bast is forced to earn his living by listening to pop radio stations in order to detect if songs not registered with ASCAP are being played on the air while, headphones in place, he attempts to write his own music. In such noisy circumstances, and in the comic and disturbing parallels he forges between the machinations of Wall Street and the modern educational methods in the United States, Gaddis insists on portraying the “self” as a cipher or medium in an endless and monotonous conversation the subject of which– despite the number of speakers or characters inJR–always focuses around matters of exchange of money, stocks, notes (musical and otherwise), wills, bodies, or information.3

     

    JR consists of dozens of fragmented conversations, usually joined in progress, between individual speakers upon a variety of ostensible “topics,” yet the speakers, for the most part, are located within institutional and communicative confines–the principal’s office, the boardroom of the corporate headquarters, a telephone booth– which constrain and define them as the instruments of vast and intersecting bureaucracies. Through vocal tics or characteristic expressions, one may come to “know” the conversationalists ofJR, though they are not usually identified by name, separate speakers and speech acts being marked in the novel not even by the usual quotation marks, but by dashes. But, as Marc Chenetier has suggested, so “interrupted” are these conversations by “[verbal] hiccups, hesitations, digressions . . . [textual] tears never mended, open parenthesis . . . syntactical ruptures,” so replete are they with “interjections” from the voices of overheard radio announcements to citations from its barrage of advertisements, that any individual voice gradually disappears into the novel’s overwhelming noise: “Gaddis unhesitatingly plunges us into a ‘universe of discourse’ that does not even bear his name.”4 In this way,JR obscures the source or agency of any given voice in the novel, and makes it seem that all the novel’s speakers participate in a wholly instrumental “discourse” managed by corporations and institutions lacking any single “boss,” but, in the telephonic terms the novel insists upon, comprised of a series of crossed lines and connections going everywhere and coming from nowhere or no one. HenceJR might be viewed as the nightmare version of Bakhtinian heteroglossia.5 While Bakhtin argues that the disparate and conflicting voices to be found historically in the novel signified the overturning of the official discourses of the day and the pluralization of identity–a pluralization that, as we have seen, troubles the modernist desire to master the carnivalization of identity, or in Thomas Mann’s phrase, to act as the “theatre-manager[s] of our own dreams so [that] . . . our fate may be the product of our inmost selves, of our wills”–Gaddis’s multi-voiced epic of the corporate world and American education, in a sundering of “the illusion of unmediated speech,” displays the incorporation of all voice and language into the paranoid meta-discourse of “doing business.”6 This discursive game is one in which even an eleven-year old child–perhaps, especially an eleven-year old child raised in the positivist environment of the American education system–can become a major player. Yet it is a discourse which no one really masters, both because it lacks visible source or origin (just as paternal origins are troubled in the novel for Edward Bast) and because it threatens to consume any individual who comes into contact with it.

     

    Though widely-varied in their particulars, the vocal exchanges ofJR fall roughly into three categories: monologues that serve to parody the “specialized” languages of legalese or businessese, phatic conversations where we hear a speaker on one end of and must imagine what the other speaker is saying, and fragmented conversations between several speakers such as those in which an assortment of teachers, administrators, politicians, and bureaucrats gather periodically in the principal’s office of the Long Island elementary school JR attends to discuss the latest developments in education by television. In the first of these–monologues that unwittingly (as far as the speaker is concerned) parody discursive systems–signs and codes are arranged in a self-referential language where words circulate as money does in the economy, endlessly flowing where they will, merely ciphers of exchange without matter (or gold) to back them. Coen, the Bast family lawyer, provides an example of this semiosis when he discusses the late Thomas Bast’s estate with Anne and Julia near the beginning of the novel:

     

    –Possibly your testimony and that of your brother James regarding the period of his cohabitation with the said Nellie before Edward’s birth, here, yes, that a child born in wedlock is legitimate where husband and wife had separated and the period of gestation required, in order that the husband may be the father, while a possible one, is exceptionally long and contrary to the usual course of nature, you see? Now in bringing a proceeding to establish the right to the property of a deceased, the burden is on the claimant to show his kinship with the decedent, where alleged fact that claimant is decedent’s child, and . . . yes, that while in the first instance, where is it yes, proof of filiation from which a presumption of legitimacy arises will sustain the burden and will establish the status of legitimacy and heirship if no evidence tending to show illegitimacy is introduced, the burden to establish legitimacy does not shift and claimant must establish his legitimacy where direct evidence, as well as evidence of potent . . . is the word potent? potent, yes potent circumstances, tending to disprove his claim of heirship, is introduced. Now, regarding competent evidence to prove filiation . . .

     

    –Mister Cohen, I assure you there is no need to go on like this, if . . .

     

    –Ladies, I have no choice. In settling an estate of these proportions and this complexity it is my duty to make every point which may bear upon your nephew’s legal rights absolutely crystal clear to you and to him. (10)

     

    Coen’s comically inappropriate, yet legally “correct” rhetoric is tonally offensive. Not only is it incomprehensible to the ancient sisters as it is to us in its circularity, it also embodies a contradictory attempt to establish filiation and Edward Bast’s origins through a discourse replete with repetition and tautology: the language clearly lacks the “potent circumstances” it is attempting to generate through the sheer imposition of scattered and reiterated legal jargon.

     

    Coen’s “monologue” is typical of many inJR. It represents a discursive movement where–whether the topic is stocks and bonds, or wills, or pedagogy–the subject or point of reference is brought into being and “legitimated,” but only as a simulation issuing from a nominalist discourse that “names” its content, whose content is what it names. The linguistic nominalism ofJR reaches its absurd limit in the directions Mr. Davidoff, a corporate public relations executive, gives to his secretary regarding the travel plans of one of his representatives aboard military transport: “TC two hundred Indiv placed on TDY as indic RPSCTDY Eigen, Thomas, GS twelve cerned he won’t need all those, give CG AMC, Attn: AMCAD-AO, Washington,” etc. (256). Gaddis is concerned to show in this “acronymic” parody, as he is throughout the novel, the relation between such instrumentation of language and the “miltary-industrial complex.” The identity of “Bast,” in essence, is what can be traced on paper or what can be read out of a will, just as the identity of JR is what it is purported to be in contracts, stock issues, business negotiations. There is no word-magic inJR, no fleshing out of the language, and Bast, in Coen’s verbiage, is but a blank counter to move amongst the various acquired accretions of legal language.7

     

    When we turn to Gaddis’s conversations, we might expect to encounter some form of exchange which transcends or alters these hegemonic circumstances, but indeed we discover that the Gaddisian dialogic is a contradiction in terms. At every turn in the novel, we are confronted with telephone conversations which ostensibly involve two or more speakers, and thus, a dialogue, but we always hear only one end of the conversation (and have to imagine both who is speaking and what they are saying at the other end). We are compelled to hear the voice over the phone as both singular (it is the only voice we hear) and fragmented, dissolute (interrupted by the unheard voice of the other); the voice of the “other” is entirely spectral in these exchanges. Its material importance in the novel causes us to focus on the instrument which carries these phatic conversations–the telephone. As Avital Ronnell has argued, the telephone “destabilizes the identity of self and other, subject and thing. . . . It is unsure of its identity as object, thing, piece of equipment, perlocutionary intensity or artwork (the beginnings of telephony argue for its place as artwork); it offers itself as instrument of destinal alarm” (Ronell 9). InJR, the significance of this “destinal alarm” is highlighted in a number of contexts: “Diamond Cable,” the mega-corporation with which JR competes (and in whose offices he is introduced to the world of the stock market on a school field trip) is a manufacturer of telephone cables; the Bast sisters decide to divest their portfolio of telephone stocks because they are having their home phone removed; JR manages to convince the local phone company to install a pay phone booth at his school so that he can have easy access to his “office.” This latter instance provides a comic example of how the telephone severs “voice” from “signature” or identity. JR remarks to his friend Hyde, who suggests that JR will get caught for forging the papers which authorize the installation of the booth: “What do you mean forgery I just scribbled this here name which it’s nobody’s down at the bottom where it says arthurized by, I mean you think the telephone company’s goes around asking everybody is this here your signature? All they care it says requisition order right here across the top so they come stick in this here telephone booth” (185). For fear that he might be recognized as a child in his business dealings, JR disguises his voice when he talks over the phone by muffling it with the unfailingly filthy handkerchief that is one of his trademarks. His creation of an empire via the proxies of the telephone and Bast is an act of ventriloquy that reveals the wholly instrumental nature of his language and being. As an extension of the telephonic instrument–as a form of human prothesis–JR is merely the garbled voice over the phone making connections between the disparate elements of his empire, thus acting as a kind of talking “switchboard”; this radical destabilizing of human agency via the telephone is perfectly complicit with “doing business” inJR, a form of labor comprised solely of managing contacts and contracts through the manipulation of what might be termed discursive “bites” or received linguistic formulations.

     

    In the following passage, we overhear JR at the height of his empire, conversing with Bast about various business deals on a public telephone:

     

    –Hello Bast? Boy I almost didn’t…no I’m out of breath, I had to stay in at…No but first hey how come you didn’t call Piscator about this here whole Wonder . . . what? No but where are you at then, you . . . What? What do you . . . No but how come you’re at this here hospital . . . Holy . . . no but holy . . . no but you mean right at that there gala banquet you and him were . . . No but how was I supposed to know that? I mean I knew the both of them were old, but holy . . . No but if he had his arm around you singing how come you . . . You mean right in the middle of the movie? Holy . . . No but like if, like I mean he’s not going to die or something is he? Because if he and his brother don’t sign that stuff Piscator was supposed to get read we’re really up the . . . What his brother’s there right now you mean? Can you . . . What, they already did? Why didn’t you tell me, I mean if they both signed it everything’s okay we don’t have anything to . . . No hey I didn’t just mean that Bast, I mean sure I hope he gets better real soon tell him but . . . No but wait tell him he can’t do that hey, it’s . . . No but if he sold the company it isn’t even a trade secret any more it’s our hey, I’ll . . . No I’ll bet you a quarter hey, ask Piscator, he . . . that cobalt in the water puts such a great head on their beer? did he tell . . . No but see even if this here nurse he’s whispering it to doesn’t get it see she might just tell somebody which . . . No but tell him to quit it anyway okay? So where else did . . . No but see a second, who . . .? Did he say that, he’s coming there . . .? No but see he’s been calling me and Piscator because he’s scared this here bunch of Wonder stock this other brother gave him this loan of to use it like for collateral when this company of his was getting in this trouble because they used to both play football at some collage, see so now Mooneyham’s scared that if we gave him a hard time over this here stock this whole X-L Lithography Comp . . . No but how was I supposed to know this here other brother had . . . No but what do you expect me to . . . No okay, okay but. . . . (343)

     

    The signature of JR’s voice in this and other “conversations” are the words “no,” “hey,” and “holy [shit],” which identify and stabilize an otherwise chaotic speech. JR’s speech is literally full of holes, and the identity he projects through these voice signatures is that of denial (“no” to everything Bast says) and ignorance (he knows nothing), yet this is the boss speaking.8 In the clutch of “deals” that this conversation embraces, JR is attempting to culminate the takeover of a brewery owned by the brothers he mentions–one of whom suffers a heart attack at a meeting with JR’s representative, Bast–by diverting the pension funds of another company he has bought, Eagle Mills; part of the takeover involves taking advantage of a selloff of debentures which would give the JR Corporation access to cobalt mineral rights, the lethal ingredient that will give the beer produced by the brewery a “great head.” Other aspects of this venture depend upon equally far-flung negotiations which, together, suggest that the JR Corporation is like a gigantic machine whose myriad gears accidentally mesh at certain points in time as JR stumbles upon connections and potential deals. Though he “makes” the connection between one strand of enterprise and another (i.e., using the pension funds from Eagle Mills to buy out the Wonder Brewery), no one sees or controls the totality of his corporation, which exists, in fragments, only in his head and in his speech. Nor is JR capable of assimilating the “content” of what he negotiates, or its social and political effects: that he gambles with the pensions of hundreds of workers, that some one has suffered a heart attack, that the cobalt which goes in the beer may be poisonous to its drinkers does not enter JR’s consciousness. JR, then, speaks with the master’s voice, but his overheard speech is made up of the collected fragments of an atrocious banality, wholly lacking in integrity and originality. In this, JR, like his older double, Governor Cates, embodies the corporate subject that acts as a conduit for the exchange of information while (as the novel goes on) increasingly losing control over that exchange. While this loss of control may portend some resistance to the novel’s overbearing and interlocking language systems, the infinite replaceability of the novel’s speakers, whatever their location in the discourse, suggests otherwise.

     

    Finally, in regarding the types of speech one encounters inJR, we can consider briefly the so-called conversations that take place between several speakers: in these instances, the parallels one hears between discussions in the corporation board rooms and those between teachers and administrators in the principal’s office suggest the thoroughgoing instrumentality of language that Gaddis fears pervades every level of human existence. What follows is a fragment of a discussion in the office of Whiteback, the president of a local bank and the principal at JR’s Long Island elementary school; part of what one hears in the background is the sound track from a television set tuned to various classes taking place at this school which is gradually “converting” to instruction by television:

     

    –My wife’s taping something this morning, Mister diCephalis got in abruptly. A resource program . . . . [O]n silkworms, she has her own Kashmiri records…–If your Ring isn’t ready, your Wagner, what is there?

     

    –My Mozart. She hung up the telephone and dialed again.

     

    –No answer, I’ll call and see if my visuals are ready . . . .

     

    —-gross profit on a business was sixty

     

    -five hundred dollars a year. He finds his expenses were twenty

     

    -two and one half percent of this profit. First, can you find the net profit?

     

    –What’s that? demanded Hyde, transfixed by unseeing eyes challenging the vacant confine just over his head.

     

    –Sixth grade math. That’s Glancy . . .

     

    –Try switching to thirty

     

    -eight.

     

    —-original cost of the…combustion in these thousands of little cylinders in our muscle engines. Like all engines, these tiny combustion engines need a constant supply of fuel, and we call the fuel that this machine uses, food. We measure its value…

     

    –Even if the Rhinegold is ready it’s Wagner, isn’t it? But if the Mozart is scheduled the classroom teachers, they’re ready with the followup material from their study guides on Mozart. They can’t just switch to Wagner.

     

    —-the value of the fuel for this engine the same way, by measuring how much heat we get when it’s burned . . .

     

    –That’s a cute model, it gets the right idea across. Whose voice?

     

    –Vogel. He made it himself out of old parts.

     

    –Whose?

     

    –Parts?

     

    –Some of them might never even have heard of Wagner yet.

     

    –No, the voice.

     

    –That’s Vogel, the coach.

     

    —-that we call energy. Doing a regular day’s work, this human machine needs enough fuel equal to about two pounds of sugar…

     

    –If they thought it was Mozart’s Rhinegold and get them all mixed up, so you can’t really switch.

     

    –He put it together himself out of used parts. (28-29)

     

    The “model” of discourse we are offered here is one made of fragments and ellipses that–given over to instrumentality–simultaneously defy totalization. Gaddis’s discursive enjambments project an entropic world of “noise” in which its parts or subjects–whether it is Wagner’s opera, mathematics, the workings of the human body, or silkworms–are eminently interchangeable, just as someone suggests that “it doesn’t matter” if it’s Wagner’s Ring or Mozart’s.

     

    As Vogel’s model suggests, the novel insists upon the connection to be made between speech and corporeal identity as being a collection of fragments comprised of replaceable parts: near the end of the novel, Cates, who is in the hospital “just . . . to have a plug changed” (688), is described by a longtime companion as

     

    a lot of old parts stuck together he doesn’t even exist he started losing things eighty years ago he lost a thumbnail on the Albany nightboat and that idiot classmate of his Handler’s been dismantling him ever since, started an appendectomy punctured the spleen took it out then came the gall bladder that made it look like appendicitis in the first place now look at him, he’s listening through somebody else’s inner ears those corneal transplants God knows whose eyes he’s looking through . . . . (708)

     

    Revealingly, Cates suffers this tirade while attempting to have a phone installed in his hospital room so he can conduct business even while undergoing an inner ear transplant, a conduct which involves speaking in a more adult version of JR’s discourse and forging deals to the detriment of everyone from Native Americans to the inhabitants of a third-word nation ruled by the tyrannical Doctor De. And, the political argument of the novel runs, it is precisely because there is such a severing of speech from agency in what Baudrillard would refer to as the contemporary “hyperreal” that business can, in Cates’ and JR’s domain, continue as usual, regardless of its “contents” and affects. As is indicated by the lack of syntactical markers in the description of Cates’ body, the novel’s ongoing, discontinuous language is without origin or end (one feels that Gaddis could have made the novel twice as long or half as short), and flows through the characters and instruments ofJR, allowing them positions of authority along discursive chains. But no one is in charge of this system. Here the link that Gaddis wishes to forge between language and capital is most strong: both flow through the world as inheritances and mediums of exchange in what appear to be systems of mastery, but–in the paradox the novel enforces–systems, like runaway inflation, gone out of control.9

     

    In many of these senses, JR might be seen as Gaddis’s Gatsby, a parody of the self-making impulses played out in the arena of the American marketplace that made Gatsby “great” in Nick Carraway’s mind; one essential difference between the two novels resides in the status of the vocal subject as a kind of cipher or medium inJR, hardly available to the backfill mythologizing employed in the constructions of Gatsby or Daisy (whose voice is “full of money,” but who can also stand as the romanticized object of desire). InJR the illusion of voice as the vehicle or medium of interiority is thoroughly dissolved; rather, voice, like everything in the novel, becomes a commodity. In a conversation between Bast and Gibbs, who, after being fired as a teacher, attempts to take up his long languishing book-in-progress on the social history of the mechanization of the arts, there emerges a figure representing the nature of voice in the novel:

     

    –Problem writing an opera Bast you’re up against the worst God damned instrument ever invented [i.e., the human throat] . . . .

     

    –Asked me to tell you about Johannes Muller didn’t you? Told you you’re not listening I’m talking about Johannes Muller, nineteenth

     

    -century German anatomist Johannes Muller took a human larynx fitted it up with strings and weights to replace the muscles tried to get a melody by blowing through it how’s that. Bast?

     

    –Yes it sounds quite…

     

    –Thought opera companies could buy dead singers’ larynxes fit them up to sing arias save fees that way get the God damned artist out of the arts all at once, long as he’s there destroying everything in their God damned path what the arts are all about, Bast? (288)

     

    Like Vogel’s model of human muscular action, Muller’s experiment attempts to transform the instrument of human voice into a machine that (like the phonograph) will reproduce the same voice through the ages, thereby fulfilling the aesthetic dream of permanence but eliminating the need for the human agent in the process. On the one hand, Muller’s preposterous experiment, if successful, would fulfill the modernist dream of authorial distancing in ways that Joyce had never thought possible, but the paradox of that desire (detachment accompanied by increased, totalizing control over the elements and relations of the created “world”) is sundered inJR by its complicity with the commodification of art. If the source or origin of the singer’s voice could be removed, so Gibbs’ parodic argument runs, and a way could be found to reproduce that voice on command for the listening audience, then money could be made since it is less expensive to own or display a reproduction than an original. In fact, Muller’s zany idea has come to pass in the “age of mechanical reproduction,” where the detachment of the art from the artist and its mass replication–its sheer reproducibility–determines its nature. “Voice” fulfills these conditions inJR.

     

    In one of the novel’s more fantastic sequences, Muller’s Frankensteinian experiment is renewed by Vogel himself in the invention of the “Frigicom” process which is described in one of Davidoff’s press releases (read over the phone to a secretary):

     

    Dateline New York, Frigicom, comma, a process now being developed to solve the noise pollution problem comma may one day take the place of records comma books comma even personal letters in our daily lives comma, according to a report released jointly today by the Department of Defense and Ray hyphen X Corporation comma member of the caps J R Family of Companies period new paragraph. The still secret Frigicom process is attracting the attention of our major cities as the latest scientific breakthrough promising noise elimination by the placement of absorbent screens at what are called quote shard intervals unquote in noise polluted areas period operating at faster hyphen than hyphen sound speeds a complex process employing liquid nitrogen will be used to convert the noise shards comma as they are known comma at temperatures so low they may be handled with comparative ease by trained personnel immediately upon emission before the noise element is released into the atmosphere period the shards will then be collected and disposed of in remote areas or at see comma where the disturbance caused by their thawing will be make that where no one will be disturbed by their impact upon thawing period new paragraph. While development of the Frigicom process is going forward under contract to the cap Defense cap Department comma the colorful new head of research and development at the recently revitalized Ray hyphen X Corp Mister make that Doctor Vogel declined to discuss the project exclusively in terms of its military ramifications comma comparing it instead to a two hyphen edged sword forged by the alliance of free enterprise and modern technology which promises to sever both military and artistic barriers at one fell swoop in the cause of human betterment period. (527)

     
    This literalization of Pater’s “frozen music” (as Davidoff notes)–the spatialization of Venetian beauty–is but the most extreme example of the novel’s pervasive utilitarianism, where everything is made available to commodification in Gaddis’s terms: dislocated, unoriginal (that is, separated from the point or source of origin), infinitely repeatable. The Frigicom process promises a kind of vocal dystopia characteristic of the “hi-tech” excesses of postmodern culture that Gaddis satirizes in this absurd invention. If it could work, the “noise pollution” of busy freeways, office buildings, shopping malls can be frozen and carted off to sea, but like so many contemporary technological “advances,” it creates more problems than it solves: how will the noise affect the ecology in those remote areas where it is dumped? Will the reduction in noise pollution serve to convey the illusion that “progress” is being made with the more serious problem of air pollution? Since the military is, inevitably, involved, how will this “two-edged sword” which promises to homogenize culture to the extent that “military and artistic barriers” can be severed (a process already under way, in Gaddis’s mind, as art becomes increasingly commodified and, thus, increasingly a subset of the “miltary-industrial complex”) be used for destructive purposes? A “non-polluting” noise bomb? Perhaps the idea is not so fictive in a society that can seriously pursue the manufacture of a neutron bomb that will kill people but preserve architecture–“frozen music,” indeed. The figure of voice generated by Davidoff’s summary of the Frigicom process suggests that contemporary technocracies are “closed loops,” circular and tautological in nature. Davidoff reads a press release into the phone while a secretary transcribes his remarks on the other end of the line: writing is thus converted by voice into writing again in a complex and circular series of exchanges wherein “voice” becomes, merely, the ventriloquizing of the already-written, just as Davidoff is merely the mouthpiece for organizational propaganda. If “voice,” this last illusory vestige of singularity or alterity, can be figured so, then what, if anything, does Gaddis leave us with? Is there any “escape” from the novel’s closed systems of commodification and exchange?

     

    Interestingly, in aParis Review interview, Gaddis suggests, in response to readers like John Gardner who see the novel as a chronicle of “the dedicated artist crushed by commerce,” thatJR does contain “a note of hope”:

     

    Bast starts with great confidence. He’s going to write a grand opera. And gradually, if you noticed his ambitions shrink. The grand opera becomes a cantata where we have the orchestra and the voices. Then it becomes a piece for orchestra, then a piece for small orchestra, and finally at the end he’s writing a piece for unaccompanied cello, his own that is to say, one small voice trying to rescue it all and say, “Yes, there is hope.” Again, like Wyatt, living it through, and in his adventure with JR having lived through all the nonsense he will rescue this one small hard gem-like flame, if you like. (Di-Nagy 71-72)

     

    Gaddis clearly intends Bast inJR, like Wyatt inThe Recognitions, to be a portrait of the artist as one who achieves a minimalist redemption by withstanding the pressures of utilitarianism and capitalism in order to produce, in a post-romantic, post-modern gesture, not a self-generated cosmos to place over against the material universe, but merely a “small piece.” It is curious that the author casts this redemption in terms of “a small voice,” a “hard gem-like flame” not so different, imagistically at least, from the “noise shards” of the Frigicom process: like the Frigicom process, in the writing ofJR Gaddis takes noise and voice from the welter of everyday life, “freezes” it into inscription, then “dumps” it into the separated confines of the book where it dispersed to the reader. Writing and voice are thus often conflated in Gaddis’s fiction, so that the figures of voice that appear there may be also taken for figurations of writing. For Gaddis to insist that Bast has a voice of his own–however small–is a contradiction in a novel where voice has been so thoroughly transmuted and dispossessed. This irony is compounded by the fact that Bast’s “small voice” is preserved (if it is preserved) within–or transmitted by–such a noisy, massive novel which itself, in its bulk and (to use LeClair’s phrase again) excessiveness, stands as a production of and within late capitalist culture. In essence, Gaddis’s medium confutes the intended message: it articulates the small voice of artistic individualism promised for Bast in a figure at least once remove from the novel itself.

     

    There are, of course, those instances–particularly in the more manic moments of Bast’s or Gibbs’s speech–where it appears that there is a rupture in the overarching, interloc[ked]utory discursive orders of the novel. The novel as a whole may be taken as “commentary” on these orders, as most of the language issuing from them bears clearly parodic intonations; yet it may be argued that the parody of, for example, legalese in Coen’s speeches both undercuts the authenticity of his circular discourse as well as it is born of it. Gaddis’s parody is so systematic in its encyclopedic anatomization of capitalist society inJR that it becomes a discursive, parasitic “order” that replicates, in part, what it parodies: as Michel Serres has argued, “the strategy of criticism is located in the object of criticism,” or, to revise this slightly for Gaddis, the strategies of parody are located in and reproduce the object of parody (Serres 38). The parody of “voice” in Gaddis takes place in a kind of “hermeneutic circle” where parodic intonation occurs not as a deconstruction or transcension of a given discursive arrangement, but as a fractured repetition (an echoing) of that arrangement.

     

    Thus, even in those moments of “madness” entertained variously by Bast and Gibbs–moments in which we might expect some note of alterity to emerge from the welter of words–we hear, in a sense, “the same.” Emerging from his musician’s workroom after making love to his cousin Stella, Edward Bast, angry at the discovery that Stella is trying to use him and that the workroom has been vandalized, launches into a high-pitched diatribe:

     

    –Kids…the policeman nodded past his elbow,–who else would shit in your piano.

     

    –You, you never can tell…he stared for an instant [. . . then] turned with one step, and another as vague, to reach and tap a high C, and then far enough to fit his hand to an octave and falter a dissonant chord, again, and again, before he corrected it and looked up, –right? Believing and shitting are two very different things?

     

    –Edward…

     

    –Never have to clean your toilet bowl again…he recovered the dissonant chord, –right? [. . . Kids that’s all! a generation in heat that’s all…he pounded two chords against each other’s unrest –no subject is taboo, no act is forbidden that’s all…! and he struck into the sailor’s chorus from Dido and Aeneas, –you’ll never, no never, have to clean your [. . .] Rift the hills and roll the waters! flash the lightnings…he pounded chords,–the pulsating moment of climax playing teedle leedle leedle right inside your head…he found a tremolo far up the keyboard. [ . . . ] he hunched over the keys to echo the Ring motif in sinister pianissimo, –he will hold the something better than his dog, a little dearer than [ . . . ] –Rain or hail! or fire…he slammed another chord, stood there, and tapped C. –Master tunesmith wait…he dug in his pocket, –make a clean breast of the whole…. (141-42)

     

    Edward’s is a patchwork of “motifs” and received linguistic fragments, from popular advertising slogans (“You’ll never have to clean your bowl again”) to phrases from the libretto of Wagner’s Ring. The shattering of context and compression that occurs in such a passage takes place as a reorchestration of the already-said. Similarly, when Gibbs, who at one moment suggests to his lover, Amy Joubert, that one needs to “change contexts” in order to break down the homogenous nature of reality, but at the same time tells her that “all I’ve ever done my whole God damned life spent it preparing, time comes all I’ve got is seven kinds of fine God damned handwriting only God damned thing they’re good for is misquoting other people’s . . .” (487), we are led to question the effectiveness of shifting context, fragmentation, and parodic quotation (those postmodern standbys) as “responses” toJR‘s monolithic discursive orders. Rather, these instances suggest that such responses are all too easily reincorporated into the systems of vocal and monetary exchange that make up the “work” of the novel. The problem, for Gaddis, may be that “voice” itself is “phallocentric,” that is partaking of a discursive arrangement that Irigaray defines as the reigning linguistic and philosophical paradigm of Western culture, in which systematicity, logic, linearity, and dichotomizing join with systems of economic exchange (actually serving, as inJR, as the language of those systems) to produce a “male” order that is both epistemological and social in its hierarchies (see Irigaray 68-85). Gaddis comically hints at such a deterministic (and gendered) possibility when he portrays diCephalis’ daughter, who has been secretly reading her mother’s books on sexual practices in India, eating tongue for dinner and commenting that it “looks like lingham” (312), that is, a Hindu phallus worshipped in Shiva cults. If the tongue, the instrument of voice, is thus connected to the phallus, then it would seem that all “voicings” inJR may be seen as falling within the closed circle of phallocentric discourse.

     

    Yet there is, finally, something else–something “other” than the unheard “small voice” of Bast or parodic vocal collage–that exceeds voice inJR, even if it does not exceed the processes of representation that legitimate the novel’s pernicious economies. I refer to those brief respites from all the novel’s talk, those small descriptive passages that serve as segues between one conversation and another. Many of these contain lyrical descriptions of nature in contrast to the entropic remnants of the American junkyard landscape, thus reflecting one of Gaddis’s familiar themes: the destruction of “the primitive” in modern technocratic culture. These passages come as intermissions between conversations, and while they serve to conduct the reader from one noisy venue to another, they also act, in some sense, as “silences” or diegetic gaps in the narrative. Among the most important of these gaps are those containing descriptions of bodies merging and in collision, for in such descriptions we may see in the body–though always through the construction of figure and representation which, as “writing,” is a form of disembodiment–an “alternative” to voice.

     

    Gaddis describes one of Gibbs’s and Amy Joubert’s marathon lovemaking sessions in this way:

     

    From his her own hand came, measuring down firmness of bone brushed past its prey to stroke at distances, to climb back still more slowly, fingertips gone in hollows, fingers paused weighing shapes that slipped from their inquiry before they rose confirming where already they could not envelop but simply cling there fleshing end to end, until their reach was gone with him coming up to a knee, to his knees over her back, hands running to the spill of hair over her face in the pillow and down to declivities and down, cleaving where his breath came suddenly close enough to find its warmth reflected, tongue to pierce puckered heat lingering on to depths coming wide to its promise, rising wide to the streak of its touch, gorging its stabs of entrance aswim to its passage rising still further to threats of its loss suddenly real, left high agape to the mere onslaught of his gaze knees locked to knees thrust deep in that full symmetry surged back against all her eloquent blood spoke in her cheeks till he came down full weight upon her, face gone over her shoulder seeking hers in the pillow’s muffling sounds of wonder until they both went still, until a slow turn to her side she gave him up and ran raised lips on the wet surface of his mouth. (490)

     

    This passage portrays a simultaneous mingling and separation of bodies–both lyrical and violent–that at once infers and sunders what I would term the “originary,” in the sense of the references to the Empedoclean myths of origin that Gaddis scatters throughout the novel. According to Gibbs, in a fragment from the second generation of Empedocles’ cosmogony, “limbs and parts of bodies were wandering around everywhere separately heads without necks, arms without shoulders, unmatched eyes looking for foreheads . . . these parts are joining up by chance, form creatures with countless heads, faces looking in different directions” (45). This second generation of chance assemblage and multiple body parts, I would argue, represents an (as yet) voiceless, embodied response to the commodified generation of which Gaddis writes; it is either regressive or futurist, and Gibbs and Amy’s lovemaking is but a momentary enactment of it. These are bodies not yet formed into identities voicing commodified desires; they are pre-subjectival in the Kristevan sense–neither the mass subject of late capitalist economy, nor the nostalgically romanticized “individual.”10 These bodies are, at once, hetereogeneous and in conflict, and at the same time, in a characteristic pun, they are mutually incorporative, participating in communion: Amy’s (what? the specific body part is indeterminate in the clutter of limbs) is “left high agape to the mere onslaught of his gaze.” The play on the word “agape” reveals the contradictions of these bodily entanglements, for it suggests both “a gap” or a vacancy, a form of separation (just as it suggests that Amy is detached and objectified through Gibbs’s male gaze), and “agape,” or communion, a rite of bodily incorporation; perhaps it is revealing of the paradox of this bodily state inJR that Gibbs’s treatise on the social history of the mechanization of the arts bears the word “agape” in its title. These may be united bodies that represent a “corporate” condition beyond or before “voice,” or they may be bodies in pieces in a double-edged sense, both “before” capitalized subjectivity and “after” it, that is, after the nostalgic, humanistic subject has disappeared into the mass, technologized subject of postmodern culture–save that Gaddis makes it clear that these are bodies, flesh and blood, in conflict or communion.

     

    Collectively, the bodies ofJR may be perceived as the “body without organs” described by Deleuze and Guattari as that which exists beyond or before writing, voice, the formation of the body proper and organization of identity, the negotiating of all our economies. InA Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari write that the body without organs

     

    is made in such a way that it can be occupied, populated only by intensities. Only intensities pass and circulate. Still the BwO [the body without organs] is not a scene, a place, or even a support upon which something comes to pass. It has nothing to do with phantasy, there is nothing to interpret. The BwO causes intensities to pass; it produces and distributes them in a spatium that is itself intensive, lacking extension. It is not space, nor is it in space; it is matter that occupies space to a given degree–to the degree corresponding to the intensities produced. It is nonstratified, unformed, intense matter, the matrix of intensity, intensity = 0; but there is nothing negative about that zero, there are no negative or opposite intensities. Matter equals energy. Production of the real as an intensive magnitude starting at zero. That is why we treat the BwO as the full egg before the extension of the organism and the organization of the organs, before the formation of the strata; as the intense egg defined by axes and vectors, gradients and thresholds, by dynamic tendencies involving energy transformation and kinematic movements involving group displacement, by migrations: all independent of accessory forms because the organs appear and function here only as pure intensities.11

     

    For Guattari and Deleuze, the “body without organs” is a condition of being that follows after the dissolution of identity that the progression from modernism to postmodernism portends, where the foundations of “selfhood” in a singular or integral consiousness somehow separated from the “lines of force” which signify the conflation of historical and corporeal energies are questioned and sundered. The body without organs is “deterritorialized,” in that it represents a (non)-identity where the “self” is an intersection of energies and intensities not distinguishable from each other in terms of coming from within or coming from without, as belonging either to the body or to the world.

     

    The “body without organs” is, of course, yet another figure, a prosopopoeia that provides us with “face” (the body) to peer through to that which has neither shape nor substance–what Deleuze and Guattari term “intensity”–but which provides the energy for life proper: in a novel where all systems are unfailingly entropic, such bodily intensities matter. This “source matter” or intensity is non-hierarchical, ungendered, non-dichotomous, and always in motion, yet, because the body without organs is both unformed and allows this intensity to pass through it, “lead you to your death,” in the sense that this “version” of the body (a version enacted in Amy’s and Gibbs’s intercourse) lacks the systems and structures (the organs) that direct and sustain “intensities.” Hence, this figure of the body is both a figure of life and death, both the unoriginary catalyst of “life” and its entropic de-organization; in JR, it is a paradox set over against “voice,” which issues from the organ of the larynx, and signifies the insertion of the speaking subject into the discursive orders of Gaddis’s technocracy.12 Yet as a “figure of speech,” that is, as a figure that appears in and through writing (both Guattari and Deleuze’s theoretical fiction, and Gaddis’s portrayal of Amy and Gibbs’s bodies), it inevitably partakes of those orders, as much as it speaks outside of them.

     

    InJR, Gaddis delineates the plight of the commodified postmodern identity trapped, as it were, in the American marketplace: his novel is clearly political in its concerns, in that it suggests an inevitable complicity with thanatopic, bureaucratic systems–orders that the novel both mocks and projects. Yet in the novel’s contradictory figures of voice and the body, its labyrinthine assemblage of “connections,” and its distended and fractured conversations, there is the presence of “Gaddis,” who has orchestrated the novel’s many voices, languages, and discourses into the monolithic commodity that bears the titleJR. In this, we confront a final paradox that Gaddis neither resolves nor avoids. This paradox can be stated as a skepticism regarding the foundational nature of identity matched by corresponding desire to locate the “origins” of identity, if not in voice, then in the body. Here, the crucial task of figuring or disfiguring voice–of representing the vocal projection of identity (or its discontents) as a figure of speech–is carried out. It is a task, or project, paradoxical in its own nature, for this figuring and projection of voice generates a recognition of its own figurality, its masking of the non-existent or pre-subjectival, even as it involves the formation of an authorial “purpose” (the construction of this figure), and, thus, an authorial identity. InJR identity is founded upon its own deformation, and nowhere is this contradiction more apparent than in the up-surgings of the “semiotic,” in those pressure points where the language breaks down, where voice breaks up, and where coporeality intrudes; it is at those points that the figurations of both are simultaneously made and unmade. InJR, Gaddis makes it clear, what follows after words or voice can only be expressed as a sporadic and temporary intensification of life in the face of language.

     

    Notes

     

    1. Jean Baudrillard, 25, says that this “compulsion toward liquidity” marks the capitalization of the human body, thus setting him at odds with Irigaray, for whom “fluidity” is a mark of the radical otherness of the feminine. This is a “debate” carried on, to some extent, within the terms of Gaddis’s novel.

     

    2. See Walter Benjamin, 217-52. Benjamin alternates between nostalgia for the lost authenticity of the truly original work before the onset of technocratic era, and recognition of the power of mechanical processes of reproduction to break through certain barriers separating art from history and the public. The contradictions of Benjamin’s position are replicated, I would argue, in Gaddis’s fiction, particularly in The Recognitions and JR, where “originality” is both parodied and made the subject of nostalgic longing.

     

    3. Tom LeClair notes the crucial connections between education and the business world in JR: “They [JR and Governor Cates, the latter the head of a huge conglomerate which subsumes the JR Corporation at the end of the novel] are the Horatio Alger story at its two extremes–ragged youth and old age–and the book moves to this rhythm. JR shifts from the school, where J.R. is trained to profit, to the adult corporate world, and concludes in a hospital [where Cates is a patient] where the aged and the prematurely wasted have their end” (97).

     

    4. Marc Chenetier, 357; my translation. Chenetier’s wide-ranging discussion of “voice” in contemporary American fiction contained in his chapter, “La bouche et l’oreille” (321-64) is an invaluable resource, and has been essential to my understanding of voice in Gaddis and in postmodern literature.

     

    5. Alan Singer has suggested how Gaddis’s Carpenter’s Gothic can serve as a critique of Bakhtin’s notions of subject and agency, as well as participating in Bakhtinian “heteroglossia.” See Singer’s “The Ventriloquism of History: Voice, Parody, Dialogue.”

     

    6. Mann’s phrase occurs in “Psychoanalysis, the Lived Myth, and Fiction,” in The Modern Tradition: Backgrounds of Modern Literature, 672; LeClair’s comments on Gaddis’s deconstructions of vocal immediacy appear in The Art of Excess, 90.

     

    7. For important discussions of the “paper empires” of JR and their homologous relation to acts of writing and the exchanging of signs see Steven Weisenburger and Joel Dana Black in In Recognition of William Gaddis, 147-61 and 162-73 respectively.

     

    8. For a discussion of the connections between language and excrement in JR, see Stephen Moore, 76-80.

     

    9. LeClair, in The Art of Excess, provides important commentary on mastery in JR; cf. 87-105. LeClair’s sense of “mastery” in the novel is somewhat different from that in which I am using the term here: for LeClair, “mastery” resides in Gaddis’s ability to provide an encyclopedic encompassing of the excessive, noisy, interlocking discourses of contemporary reality. My approach focuses on the lack of mastery at the “micropolitical” or “microlinguistic” level, where individual speakers in the novel give voice to a connective semiosis whose totality (if it exists) is only partially available to them; more precisely, I would argue, they speak as if a non-existent totality were theirs to impose or deploy; therein lies the delusion of mastery in the novel.

     

    10. Stephen Matanle discusses the fragmentation of bodies in JR in light of the Empedoclean themes of “love” and “strife,” the novel representing the contentions extreme of competition, dissociation, discord. Our readings vary significantly in my viewing Matanle’s (or Empedocles’) “strife” as the upsurging of the “semiotic.”

     

    11. Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, 153. I am indebted here to John Johnston’s Carnival of Repetition: Gaddis’s The Recognitions and Postmodern Theory for his compelling discussions of Deleuze and Guattari in relation to Gaddis’s first novel.

     

    12. In Versions of Pygmalion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), J. Hillis Miller writes evocatively of the “work” of prosopopoeia and its paradoxical masking and projection of death. See especially his chapter, “Death Mask: Blanchot’s L’arret de mort,” 179-210.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Baudrillard, Jean. Forget Foucault. Trans. Nicole Dufresne. New York: Semiotext(e), 1987.
    • Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Shocken, 1969. 217-52.
    • Black, Joel Dana. “The Paper Empires and Empirical Fictions of William Gaddis.” In Recognition of William Gaddis. Ed. John Kuehl and Steven Moore. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1984. 162-73.
    • Chenetier, Marc. Au-dela du soupcon: La nouvelle fiction americaine de 1960 a nos jours. Paris: Seuil, 1989.
    • Deleuze, Giles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
    • Di-Nagy, Zolt n Ab. “The Art of Fiction CI: William Gaddis.” Paris Review (1988): 71-2.
    • Gaddis, William. JR. 1975. New York: Penguin, 1985.
    • Irigaray, Luce. “The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine.” This Sex Which is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell UP,1985. 68-85.
    • Johnston, John. Carnival of Repetition: Gaddis’s The Recognitions and Postmodern Theory. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1990.
    • LeClair, Tom. The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1989.
    • Matanle, Stephen. “Love and Strife in William Gaddis’s JR.” In Recognition of William Gaddis. 106-18.
    • Moore, Stephen. William Gaddis. Boston: Twayne, 1989.
    • Pecora, Vincent. Self and Form in Modern Narrative. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989.
    • Ronell, Avital. The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989.
    • Said, Edward W. “On Originality.” The World, The Text, and the Critic. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983. 133.
    • Serres, Michel. “Michelet: The Soup.” Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy. Ed. Josue V. Harari and David F. Bell. Johns Hopkins UP, 1982. 38.
    • Singer, Alan. “The Ventriloquism of History: Voice, Parody, Dialogue.” Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction. Ed. Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson, Jr. New York: Oxford UP, 1965.
    • Weisenburger, Steven. “Paper Currencies: Reading William Gaddis.” In Recognition of William Gaddis. 147-61.