Volume 10, Number 3
May, 2000 Every issue of Postmodern Culturecarries notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcements, free of charge. Advertisements will also be published on an exchange basis. If you respond to one of the ads or announcements below, please mention that you saw the notice in PMC.

 

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Publication Announcements

• Complex Systems Publications
• Narralogues: Truth In Fiction
• a-r-c: journal of art research and critical curating
• M/C Reviews Feature Issue
• Riding the Meridian: Women and Technology
• Conspire–A Journal of Literary Art
• Fibonacci’s Daughter–Hypermedia Fiction
• The Silicon Valley Diet

• The Wards of St. Dymphna

Conferences, Calls for Papers, Invitations to Participate

• M/C – A Journal of Media and Culture
• *spark-online
• Visual Anthropology: “Travelogues and Travel Films”
• World Festival–Art on Paper

• Media-Culture List

General Announcements

• Ropes Lectures–University of Cincinnati
• AFIRMA–An Electronic Magazine on Black Culture, Life, and Politics in Brazil

• Felisa Gradowczyk: UN/KNOT-NODE-NUDE

 

David Pagano

English Department
Old Dominion University
dpagano@vwc.edu

 

E. A. Grosz, ed. Becomings: Explorations of Time, Memory, and Futures. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999.

 

Elizabeth Grosz is one of our most able theoretical writers, combining clarity of articulation with originality, perspicacity, and sophistication of thought. Those who follow the sometimes mind-wrenching discourse on time and temporality should be pleased that she has lent her acumen to the topic. Having focused primarily on the question of space in her 1995 Space, Time, and Perversion, she turns her full attention to time in her 1999 collection, Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures. Happily, her skills as editor in the recent volume prove equal to her skills as a writer and thinker in general. She has put together a fascinating and insightful collection of essays, written in a style largely as lucid as Grosz’s own, and constituting an important contribution to current thinking about the philosophy and cultural experience of time. Each of the essays pursues the question of becoming–the way in which our experience of time is an experience of perpetual opening toward an indeterminate and indeterminable future, toward change, surprise, the event, the unpredictable, the incalculable, and the new. As Grosz puts it in the fine essay that opens the collection, “Thinking the New: Of Futures Yet Unthought,” she means to explore “the ‘nature’ of time, the precedence of the future over the present and past, and the strange vectors of becoming that a concept of the new provokes” (15). Or again: “This is what time is if it is anything at all: not simply mechanical repetition, the causal ripple of objects on others, but the indeterminate, the unfolding, and the continual eruption of the new” (28). It is vital that we think time in these terms today. As was already clear in Fredric Jameson’s well-known 1984 assessment of postmodernity as “dominated by the categories of space rather than by the categories of time” (Jameson 16), and as has been further suggested by such rhetoric of totalization as that surrounding the Human Genome Project or the establishing of a “global village,” we live in a time when the possibility of the surprising or of the wholly other seems less and less tenable. As Grosz and her writers are well aware, it is not a question of denying the accretion of knowledge or the fact of our increasing interconnectedness (still less of depending on the touch of an angel to provide the culture a renewed sense of the Beyond), but of rejecting System in favor of a materially and discursively situated immanence that nevertheless allows for the unfolding of alterity.

 

The essays deal with a variety of different topics and thinkers, but Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson are the foundations here, along with some of Deleuze’s actual or virtual interlocutors: Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Klossowski, and, especially, Michel Foucault (Grosz herself had dealt with Deleuze’s version of becoming in “Architecture from the Outside” in Space, Time, and Perversion, and “Intensities and Flows” in Volatile Bodies). There is, of course, a danger in such an interdisciplinary collection. Demarcated by an abstraction such as “becoming” and embracing topics as varied as the post-human “techno-body,” the postcolonial nation, the nature of the human glance, the Peruvian Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, and French literary pornography, the volume risks being vaguely compelling to many but fully interesting to no one. To what humanistic or post-humanistic endeavor could the idea of becoming not be applied? Yet this danger becomes a virtue in Becomings, for the question of the future is also the question of interdisciplinarity and hybridity in general: how does one maintain an openness to alterity or novelty without sacrificing the intelligibility that comes with boundaries, context, discipline, familiarity, and a shared language? How does one move ahead without that move having been forecast in advance by the rules of the game? In part, one listens to many voices and experiences many degrees of unfamiliarity. Following Bergson, several of the essays explore the ways in which durée can be seen as both unified and fragmented, both forming context and allowing difference. It is in this same sense that the volume should be read in its whole-but-multiple entirety if the full effect of its exploration, its posing of the very question of exploration, is to be experienced.

 

Given the influence of Deleuze on the collection, as well as Grosz’s perennial concern with bodies, it is not surprising that perhaps the central concern of Becomings is with time as immanence and that its central assumption is that we need to think of the new or the future in a way that goes beyond the twin dichotomies of possible/real and idea/matter. We are called to think the future in terms of a certain kind of empiricism, to think it neither as pure idea nor as a noumenal realm in opposition to the phenomenal one of the present; the future is not what gets incorporated into and limited by the already-material and thus determined present. Rather, the future, as the becoming of the present, is the very trace of what both de-materializes the present and de-idealizes the yet-to-come. In Deleuze’s terms, we must think of becoming not as realizing the possible, but as a mode of actualizing the virtual–where both the actual and virtual are equally “real.” It is a question of, as Grosz writes, “resist[ing] both a logic of identity and a logic of resemblance and substitut[ing] differentiation, divergence, and innovation” (27).

 

Many of the essays that most directly confront this issue are those that focus specifically on the writings of Deleuze. Manuel De Landa, in “Deleuze, Diagrams, and the Open-Ended Becoming,” situates Deleuze as a “nonessentialist realis[t]” (33) whose sense of time is in line with contemporary thinking about self-organization in the physical sciences. For De Landa, Deleuze maintains the openness of the future via “divergent actualization, combinatorial productivity, and the synthesis of novel structures out of heterogeneous components” (41). In “Diagram and Diagnosis,” John Rajchman reflects on the “‘time of politics’” (42) in terms of Deleuze’s idea of “the time to come.” He argues that Deleuze does not imagine a messianic future (as in the thought of Gershom Scholem), but rather an empiricist becoming of our actions in the present: “The problem of the time ‘to come,’ then, becomes a ‘pragmatic’ problem of how to act to make repetition a feature of the future–a worldly matter of action and friendship requiring no ‘mystical authorization’” (45-46).

 

Dorothea Olkowski and Claire Colebrook, both of whom focus on Deleuze’s collaborations with Felix Guattari, present the two densest pieces in the collection. Olkowski, in “Flows of Desire and the Body-Becoming,” provides an entryway into Capitalism and Schizophrenia by emphasizing, against certain of its readers, the text’s open-endedness, its emphasis on “nonrestrictive desiring-productions” (106). According to Olkowski, it is in the very breakdown of desiring machines that they become “destabilizing, deterritorializing, releasing flows which otherwise would be channeled into a (social) organism, a stabilized, territorialized order” (107). Colebrook, in “A Grammar of Becoming: Strategy, Subjectivism, and Style,” reads Deleuze’s geology-project against Foucault’s genealogy-project. She concludes that, taken together, they outline the possibilities for thinking of becoming in terms of strategy rather than in terms of identity. Colebrook grounds both thinkers’ projects in a wonderful reading of Nietzsche’s idea of repetition in On the Genealogy of Morals: “Genealogy takes place as a positive repetition of becoming human; and it is through this repetition that human reactivism will activate itself as an effect. The effect of the human will be seen as an effect” (121). That is, repetition affirms the human as active rather than as reactive, which is to say as an effect of its strategies rather than the fantasized ground prior to any strategy. Eleanor Kaufman’s “Klossowski or Thoughts-Becoming” compares Deleuze to Klossowski’s Laws of Hospitality, reading both writers as performing “‘corporealizing thought’” (Klossowski’s description of Nietzsche’s writing as partially constituted by his illness) (154). In Klossowski and Deleuze, “[p]rovoked by the body, thought ascends to a space where it can revoke the body, but not without being energized by the body’s very materiality” (154). This “positive and joyous” (153) process of the body leaving its trace in thought breaks down identity, and therefore opens the way to unprecedented identities.

 

Despite their celebration and/or advocation of durée as the privileged mode of temporality, these provocative articles are, on the whole, to be commended for not indulging in Bergson’s excoriation of spatiality. For example, although Edward Soja is nowhere cited, I sense the presence of the spirit of his Postmodern Geographies, which follows a certain thread in Foucault in criticizing the Bergsonian tendency to equate space with death and determination, and time with life and freedom. Clearly Deleuze himself, with his interest in geographies, lines of flight, and territories, would not be beholden to such a dichotomy.

 

Perhaps because grappling with Deleuze tends toward a deepening of questions rather than an establishment of positive answers, the essays that do not specifically take the writings of Deleuze as their subject develop some of the collection’s sharpest arguments, as opposed to reflections. In “Becoming an Epistemologist,” Linda Martín Alcoff argues eloquently for an epistemology and an authorization for truth-claims that would not be opposed to becoming–that would not, in other words, be beholden to a neo-Kantian noumena/phenomenon dichotomy, such that epistemic claims are merely more or less accurate representations of what is permanent, true, and Beyond. She grounds her argument in a reading of Foucault in which truth is not “collapsible to power” (57), not merely a mask that power puts on, but in which “knowledge has no autonomous existence apart from power” (62). In this sense, the becoming of power relations and of knowledge can be seen as mutually constitutive for “an immanent rather than a transcendental metaphysics” (70): it is not that we must abandon the possibility of truth, but that truth in no way dwells in some noumenal realm apart from the materialities of power. Even the idea of representation, Alcoff argues, can be maintained, as long as it conveys “a productive, always partial and temporally indexed, description of a virtual reality, that is, a composite of temporary constellations” (72). For Edward S. Casey, in “The Time of the Glance: Toward Becoming Otherwise,” the glance explains the tension in Bergson’s description of durée as a whole that nevertheless cannot be totalized (Grosz and Gail Weiss in their pieces also deal with this aspect of Bergson). The glance involves a “double leakage,” in which its “penetrative particularity” detotalizes the exterior world even as the durational subject is penetrated by what the glance takes in (95). Because the glance is thus always located “on the agitated edge of the restless subject” (96), it is of a single duration but is also that which attends to a constant stream of difference; it therefore constitutes a whole but perpetually-differentiating becoming.

 

Weiss, in “The Durée of the Techno-Body,” offers a compelling critique of feminists whom she regards as too pessimistic about the political stakes of current biotechnologies such as organ transplants and reproductive medicine. In particular, she takes issue with Rosi Braidotti, who sees such technologies as inevitably death-bringing and time-freezing, insofar as they impose a mechanical time onto people’s–especially women’s–living durée. While admitting that Bergson might be sympathetic to such a temporal opposition, Weiss argues that he also insisted that “durées are never isolated but always interconnected” (170), which means that other times–including natural rhythms and clock time–are inseparable from our own becomings today. In other words, there is no pure subjective durée to which technological time would be a baleful other. Moreover, frozen time cannot be the same as death-time because death is not beyond durée but “inhabits time as a virtuality which is continually embodied or actualized” (171). Rather than rejecting new biotechnologies per se, then, we need to carefully examine the “corporeal effects” and “discursive practices” (175) in which any given deployment of technology is situated. She ends the essay with a cogent coda on the dangers and the vitiation through overuse of the metaphor of the “monster.” Alphonso Lingis gets the last word with the lyrical, moving narrative, “Innocence,” which explores the becoming of two Peruvians from children into guerilla fighters for the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, and the impossible future they imagine in their (virtually) hopeless fight for justice. It is entirely appropriate that a (second-person) narrative should end the collection: somewhere between the demarcations of philosophy and the unfoldings of literature, the volume ends with a call for a becoming-future unbound by what has come before it.

 

My arguments with these pieces are minor. For example, in Alcoff’s argument that “ontological contours are partially constituted through discourses and other practices” (72), she might have said more about how the epistemologist determines the extent of that partiality, or how one decides how far truth claims are constituted by power (though no doubt this would in part depend upon the particular case in point). In Casey’s attempt to distinguish his discourse on the glance from other philosophers, I think he goes too far in claiming that Derrida misses the fact that Edmund Husserl’s Augenblick does not just disrupt presence but also “affirms the subjectivity of the subject: an abyssal subjectivity but a subjectivity nonetheless” (81). It seems to me that Derrida does not deny the possibility of subjectivity, provided it is thought in a certain way. Finally, Weiss probably moves too quickly from Bergson’s inter-subjective durée to the conclusion that clock time can be part of durée.

 

In any case, as fine as these essays are, for me one of the most brilliant pieces in the collection is Pheng Cheah’s “Spectral Nationality: The Living-On [sur-vie] of the Postcolonial Nation in Neocolonial Globalization.” Cheah uses Derrida’s speculation on the ghost in Specters of Marx to argue that in postcolonialism, the bourgeois concept of “nation” inevitably haunts the concepts of “culture” or “the people.” The essay is important in part because Cheah reads Derrida carefully enough–it is in no sense another tired academic “application” of deconstructive thought–to show that, if “monster” is losing its metaphorical force, “ghost” still has analytical use for us. Cheah argues, first, that several of the most influential thinkers of postcolonialism (Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Partha Chatterjee, Benedict Anderson) depend upon an idealized “ontology of life” (178), in which the post-colonial condition equals the living, moving, spontaneous, vital force of a resisting people being threatened by the static, oppressive, ideological Thanatos of nationalism. His analysis on this score is absolutely convincing, along with his conclusion that “the fundamental opposition is always between popular spontaneity and its ideological manipulation [via nationalism]” (182). He then follows with a reading of the ghost-logic of Specters of Marx that is less fully developed than, but equally insightful to, recent work on the book by Fredric Jameson, Simon Critchley, and Werner Hamacher. Following the language of “wears and tears” in Specters, Cheah clearly puts the idea that spectrality for Derrida “disjoins even as it renews the present in one and the same movement. The revenant or returning spectral other tears time conceived as a continuous succession of ‘nows.’ But it is precisely the rending of time that allows the entirely new to emerge” (193). However, argues Cheah, Derrida himself wrongly attempts to exorcize the ghost of the nation in his too-simple representation of globalization today–a globalization that, for several reasons, retains and must retain the idea of nation. Thus, the death-like specter of nationalism is precisely what must be “interminably negotiated” (188) by postcolonial peoples as they build a living present and future. The emphasis on Deleuze in Becomings is well-taken and necessary, but I admire Cheah for showing that Derrida’s thought, too, can be important for a philosophy of becoming, one situated beyond the division between matter and spirit, that would speak to contemporary political concerns.

 

Kevin Marzahl

English and Cultural Studies
Indiana University
kmarzahl@indiana.edu

 

Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain, eds. The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics.Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1999.

 

Two sets of affinities underlie most contemporary American poetic practices. On the one hand, there is a surrealist genealogy which would include the New York School as well as the vatic or “deep” imagism of the sixties popularized by Robert Bly and James Wright and devolving into the much decried scenic mode. More recently, a more properly Bretonian neo-surrealism has been embraced by writers like Dean Young. On the other hand, there is what Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain call the “studied affinities” (10) of a tradition now freed from the cautionary quotation marks given it by Louis Zukofsky on the occasion of the now famous 1931 “Objectivist” issue of Poetry. The tradition encompasses by way of precedent Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams and by way of descent the New American Poetry, Language writing, and a range of as yet under-theorized practices. The Objectivist tradition has arguably been more successful in staking a claim to avant-garde status in North America than surrealism (to which it has been hostile since Zukofsky’s programmatic essay “Sincerity and Objectification”). It is about time, then, that an anthology emerges that takes advantage of the considerable scholarship produced on Objectivist poets over the last two decades. DuPlessis and Quartermain have compiled just such an anthology. Theirs is an excellent collection of essays on the six core poets of what they call, quite deliberately, not a movement, a school, a generation, or even a group, but a “nexus.” Yet the book aspires to be more than a resource for studying or teaching the diverse work of Basil Bunting, Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff, and Louis Zukofsky. For in addition to arguing for “a central place in twentieth century poetry and poetics” for these poets (2), the editors also aim to invigorate the criticism of poetry by promoting what they call “cultural poetics,” or “readings inflected with sociopolitical concerns” (20). The editors contend that “in attempting culturalist readings of poetry, critics are struggling with and against accepted institutionalized paradigms for the analysis of that genre” (21), but the banner of “cultural poetics” risks allowing that struggle to resolve itself into a critical pluralism constrained by liberal humanist pieties and a narrowly discursive model of materiality.

 

DuPlessis and Quartermain distinguish three phases in the Objectivist tradition. The first or properly “Objectivist” phase runs from 1927-1935; a second “underground” or “dormant” period lasts through the late fifties; and what Ron Silliman has called a third or “renaissance” phase gives rise in the sixties to both renewed reception and production. The editors find this history more complex than is usually acknowledged, suggesting that “the linear, ideal literary historical narrative from production to reception gets disturbed, torqued, or folded upon itself” (5).¹ Rather than organize the anthology chronologically, then, they arrange it thematically in four sections to emphasize the complexity and breadth of both the object of study and the methodological principles of the project. The editors describe the organization best themselves:

 

Discussing poetics and form, the essays in the first section insist on poetry as a mode of thought; those in the second analyze and evaluate a generally left-wing Objectivist politics of the thirties…. The third section focuses on the ethical, spiritual, and religious issues raised, mainly in the post-Holocaust fifties and sixties, by Objectivists’ affiliations with Judaism…. The final section explores the sense of nexus directly…. Running through all four sections are two related threads: Objectivist writing as aware of its own historical contingency and situatedness, and Objectivist poetics as a site of complexity, contestation, interrogation, and disagreement. (6)

 

These two constant “threads” that bind the collection are implicit in the titular figure of the nexus. DuPlessis and Quartermain charge this carefully chosen figure with two tasks: to characterize links between writers in a manner that resists standard narratives of literary development and descriptions of literary formations, and to maintain a multifaceted critical endeavor around those writers. In a sense, the figure is a prophylactic against reification. What the editors want to promote above all is “a continued interest in the groundsfor debate” (22, emphasis added). But protecting the Objectivist’s studied affinities from calcifying leads to the nexus becoming a figure for tolerance:

 

Thinking about writers in a nexus allows one to appreciate difference and disparity among them, to pinpoint perhaps radical disagreements, to attend to rupture as well as continuity, and to dispersion as well as origin. The term ‘nexus’ is useful because it describes a relationship among writers based on their shared meditations, but not necessarily shared conclusions or even practices, about the particulars of their writing life and their historical position. It engages the actual material, social, psychological, and aesthetic circumstances of literary production and transmission. (22)

 

The nexus, in short, allows even the most serious disagreements to be diffused in the name of “appreciat[ing] difference.” Whatever one may think of this liberal piety, DuPlessis and Quartermain at least recognize the potential for conflict between the critical practices subsumed under their rubric of “cultural poetics,” a rubric with an unusually restricted provenance given their commitment to linking diverse practices.

 

DuPlessis and Quartermain deploy “poetics” in a narrow sense which relegates to the periphery the kind of metacommentary about the nature of literary discourse that, however unpopular that project, many readers may associate with the term.² By “poetics” they mean “discussions of the vocation of the poet, the functions ascribed to poetry, the explicit or implicit reading list of worthwhile practitioners, the motivated defenses of poetic technique, form, and diction, the constitution of an audience, and the puncturing or harrying of an opponent poetics…” (21). By “cultural poetics” they mean to inflect this writerly³ sense with a consideration of “the working assumptions, the premises, the ideologies of practice of any discursive system that gives rise to texts….” (21). In this they follow Stephen Greenblatt, from whose Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980) they have adapted the rubric. The sense of a “discursive system” does bring a more rigorous sense of “poetics” into play, but, as the editors must know, Greenblatt derives that rigor from an anthropological tradition, which, largely under the influence of Clifford Geertz, models cultures as texts (Greenblatt 4).⁴ Buried in the term “cultural,” then, is a merely discursive model of culture that, because it does not take into account sociological or even biological models of matter and mind, is seriously constrained in any attempt to “engag[e] the actual material, social, psychological, and aesthetic circumstances” of writing (22, emphasis added).⁵

 

I have thus far had to neglect the essays in The Objectivist Nexus themselves in order to show how DuPlessis and Quartermain’s Introduction overreaches the more modest goal of synthesizing much needed scholarship. Let me now make amends for this unfortunate necessity. The concept of a critical nexus makes it difficult to cite any particular nodule as representative; nonetheless, I will take Ming-Qian Ma’s excellent remarks on Carl Rakosi as exemplary of the typical strategy of grounding the value of the Objectivists in the critique of epistemology implicit in so much of their poetry. To counterbalance this attempt at representativeness, I will then turn to essays by Peter Middleton and Stephen Fredman, which most test the tolerance of the nexus.

 

Ming-Qian Ma’s “Be Aware of ‘the Medusa’s Glance’: The Objectivist Lens and Carl Rakosi’s Poetics of Strabismal Seeing,” relies on familiar critiques of Occidental ocular privilege to argue that Rakosi’s “critique of phenomenology as epistemology… finds its philosophical counterpart in Adorno’s ‘metacritique’ of Husserl” (81). To call this procedure typical is by no means to denigrate it; the series of readings produced are meticulous. The strongest arguments for the value of the Objectivists seem to me precisely those that show, as Ma does, how the discrete images characteristic of the poetry guard against aggrandizement, allowing objects to retain their integrity rather than serving as vehicles for Romantic mirages. Thus a poem like “Objectivist Lamp” “frustrat[es] any attempt to see beyond the appearance” (69), while the syntax and grammar of “Cenozoic Time” refuses “a hierarchical, military control based on subjection and subordination” (71). Of course, as this last example suggests, such arguments are open to charges of overstating the power of linguistic phenomena; that is, there is a frequent slippage between grammatical subordination and social control in much theorizing about and within the Objectivist tradition, one which tends to reduce mind to language, much as culture is reduced to textuality. But if one looks to cognitive science rather than philosophy for critiques of epistemology, much of the rhetoric of violence and militarism begins to appear unnecessary.⁶

 

If the value of their poetry is generally grounded in its philosophical acumen, the status of the Objectivists as an advance guard in the revolution of the word tends to be tied to urban experience. It is most refreshing, then, to find Peter Middleton, in “Lorine Niedecker’s ‘Folk Base’ and Her Challenge to the American Avant-Garde,” showing how the deliberate isolation of this most marginal Objectivist highlights the male authority with which radical poetics has usurped the experiences of the working class, as well as how such poetics can remain bound to the intertwined assumptions that “the poet is engaged in some transhistoric poetry competition” and “that poetry is a transferable utterance” (163). Middleton persuasively argues that Niedecker’s experience as a folklorist for the WPA during the thirties sharpened her “self-conscious… folksiness” (173). Her dedication to the local points up the readiness with which the avant-garde has accepted “alienation” as “the necessary predisposition for innovative art” (180). Niedecker’s marginality has always been more than geographical, of course; aside from her gender, her affinity with surrealism–accented by Middleton’s occasional recourse to psychoanalytic concepts–distances her from the otherwise metropolitan Objectivists.

 

Finally, Stephen Fredman’s “‘And All Now Is War’: George Oppen, Charles Olson, and the Problem of Literary Generations” is, although rather short, probably the contribution that most fully seeks to challenge accepted categories. As he puts it, “I would like to throw a wrench into the narrative of succession that posits an Objectivist generation, launched in 1931, followed by a Projectivist one, launched in 1950” (287). That wrench is nothing less than the claim that both Oppen and Olson can just as easily be understood as existentialist as either Objectivist or Projectivist, owing to a shared “resistance which extends from the political to the epistemological and is grounded in the inexplicable actuality of people and things” (290). Fredman is quite clear that this need not lead to the abandonment of familiar terminology, however; his point is that even radical poetics has its shibboleths which can obstruct the most well-intentioned revision of literary history.

 

The most pernicious of these shibboleths is also the one most threatened by the fullest implications of the concept of a nexus. I can think of no better way to demonstrate this final point than to close with a few brief remarks on the work of Charles Altieri, who is accorded the privilege of an Afterword in which he reflects on his 1978 touchstone essay, “The Objectivist Tradition,” reprinted at the beginning of the book. In that essay he draws a distinction between what he calls two “modes of relatedness,” symbolist and objectivist. These “modes” designate, in Altieri’s usage, “the ways in which the basic elements of poetic form… offer models for the mind’s means of adjusting its dynamic properties to features of experience” (25-26). In other words, poems model cognition, where “model” most likely means “offer an exemplar,” although the word is not entirely free from the dual senses of “represent.” Altieri’s Afterword, however, does not revise this foundational claim; in fact, it plays as central a role as ever in his argument for the political efficacy of poetry, which depends for him upon “establish[ing] provisional exemplars for imaginative emotional economies” (312). From the point of view of contemporary cognitive science, however, the main problem with this representationalist scheme is that the “features of experience” are implicitly given and static, while dynamism remains the exclusive property of mind.⁷ And while Altieri clearly values “observing observation” (307) and “second-order self-consciousness” (308), such reflexivity remains for him precisely grounded in a self. But if poems are produced in a nexus, is it too much to suggest that they are produced by that nexus?

 

There is perhaps no area of North American literary study so in need of vitalizing as twentieth-century poetry, which seems to have waned in academic popularity with the New Criticism, as if the object had been discredited along with the method. DuPlessis and Quartermain’s is a welcome contribution to the attempt to inject the field with theoretical sophistication, but while it may prod a complacent institution, it is ultimately more successful in securing a continued hearing for the Objectivist nexus (freed once and for all from its orthodox quotation marks, just as, in one of the last significant critical anthologies on poetry, Language writing was “lower-cased” by Jed Rasula⁸). It is doubtful whether all of the volume’s contributors subscribe to the loosely Foucauldian framework that the editors sketch out in their Introduction under the heading of “cultural poetics,” which, unlike the figure of the nexus, may not prove very useful, or, put differently, is constrained by a textual culturalism. Even the strongest arguments for the centrality of Objectivist poetry can only benefit from exploring avenues of epistemological critique outside the domain of philosophy, to which literary study can no longer afford to automatically defer.

 

Notes

 

1. Without disagreeing with the editors about the complexity of Objectivist development, it should be said that the “dormant” second phase would not seem so if, embracing such “torquing” or “folding” more fully, one linked William Carlos Williams to the Objectivist tradition as more than simply their precursor. Williams learned from Zukofsky, after all, and it could be argued that his transitional lyrics of the Forties–not to mention Paterson itself–have a place in the Objectivist tradition.

 

2. Tzvetan Todorov’s is a convenient definition of this sense of the word: “Poetics breaks down the symmetry… between interpretation and science in the field of literary studies. In contradistinction to the interpretation of particular works, it does not seek to name meaning, but aims at a knowledge of the general laws that preside over the birth of each work” (6). Neither Bakhtin nor Jakobson nor Todorov are cited in the collection.

 

3. DuPlessis herself, of course, as well as half of the contributors, are poets.

 

4. Interestingly, the nexus already contains a powerful poetic critique of Geertz’s culturalism; in Coming to Jakarta, IV.viii, Peter Dale Scott takes Geertz to task for understating, if not misrepresenting, the Indonesian military’s role in the Balinese massacres (118-122).

 

5. The field of literature and science is fast making such narrowly textual models outmoded. For an analogous critique of treating materiality in discursive terms, see Hayles; her discussion in Ch. 8 of “discursive analyses within the humanities, especially the archaeology of knowledge pioneered by Michel Foucault” (192) is particularly salient.

 

6. I am thinking here of the work of Varela, Thompson, and Rosch. They argue that the self, or what Ma calls the “eye/I” (81), is the product of a habitual “grasping” which can, through what they call “mindfulness/awareness,” be interrupted, much as Rakosi hinders the occidental predatory gaze. My point is simply that the rhetoric of their semi-Buddhist cognitive science might forestall exaggerated claims about the role of grammar in social control, while simultaneously bringing biology into play to counteract the construction of self as mind and mind as language.

 

7. See Varela, Thompson, and Rosch.

 

8. See von Hallberg 317n6.

Works Cited

 

• Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980.
• Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.
• Scott, Peter Dale. Coming to Jakarta: A Poem About Terror. New York: New Directions, 1989.
• Todorov, Tzvetan. Introduction to Poetics. Trans. Richard Howard. Theory and History of Lit. 1. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1981.
• Varela, Francisco, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1991.
• von Hallberg, Robert, ed. Politics and Poetic Value. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.

 

Timothy Gray

English Department
College of Staten Island, CUNY
gray@postbox.csi.cuny.edu

 

Patricia Juliana Smith, ed. The Queer Sixties. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Stephen Miller. The Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance.Durham: Duke UP, 1999.

 

When Fredric Jameson tried his hand at periodizing the sixties some years ago, he was engaging in an exercise millions of Americans have undertaken, in their minds if not on paper. “When did the sixties start?” “When did they end?” Whether one answers “Port Huron and the JFK assassination” to the first question, or “Altamont, Kent State, and the release of Led Zeppelin II” to the second, one will no doubt find oneself coming to terms with the strange dialectics that develop when we halt continuity every ten years or so to take a look at our postmodern condition. Even so, many would agree that during the sixties and seventies we had fundamentally different notions of what it meant to be postmodern. Two recent books, taken in tandem, help us rethink the early days of postmodernity, especially since they work against the prevailing zeitgeist of their respective decades. The Queer Sixties takes a decade remembered primarily for its political imbroglios and concentrates on a sexual revolution percolating at its edges. The Seventies Now takes a decade known for its hedonism and plunges headlong into the equally seamy world of politics. To talk of sex and politics in this way is to highlight a false divide, of course. But there is no question that our increasingly nostalgic news outlets, run by baby boomers who think that showing “Time and Again” several times a week is a good idea, tend to emphasize some parts of the equation more forcefully than they do others. Thankfully, a new generation of scholars has decided it is time for some revision.

 

The Queer Sixties, a collection of essays edited by Patricia Juliana Smith, includes close readings of queer texts and applications of queer theory. Although Smith’s introduction suggests that much of the volume will be given over to discussions of homosexuality’s role in cold war politics, none of her contributors takes up this theme with any enthusiasm. Instead, we receive a series of articles on icons and iconoclasts, those larger-than-life figures who embodied the pain and joy that gays and lesbians felt during this turbulent decade. The essayists are most serious when they discuss the status of camp, which itself tends to be rather serious about the trivial and trivial about the serious. Pulp fiction and rock music have a place here, as do “serious” fiction (Baldwin, Capote, Vidal), drama (Orton) and film (The Boys in the Band). Some texts are lauded for being outwardly queer and some for being subversively queer. Some artists and writers are “out” and others are more repressed. Overall, Smith does an effective job organizing the essays so as to bring divergent groups closer together.

 

Especially strong are the paired essays on Andy Warhol and Valerie Solanas that are authored by Kelly Cresap and Laura Winkiel. In his art and writings, Warhol has always seemed the perfect avatar of postmodernism. It was he, more than anyone, who replaced late modernist depth and personal gesture with surface and cool façade. But his art only tells part of the story. According to Cresap, Warhol “not only advocated an anti-contemplative, anti-angst position but acted it out on a daily basis” (46). With his “naïf-trickster” persona, this “dumb blonde” lived out a “cartoon idyll of happy solitary play” (to cite Michael Moon), confounding those who would take strict meaning from his actions, misleading those who believed he did not know the score. By “playing dumb about being gay,” Warhol perfected what D.A. Miller has labeled a “homosexuality of no importance.” Curiously, this brand of homosexuality was practiced with such panache as to become tremendously important in an expanding media culture. Warhol did not mug for the camera so much as he stared back blankly, in imitation of the camera eye, effectively reversing the gaze and questioning the desire of all who looked at him. At the same time, his gay persona was so pronounced (so “swish”) that hardly anyone bothered to inquire about his sexual preference(s). An excess of signification occluded whatever it was that Warhol signified on a personal level. This was all part of his anti-political agenda, his way of keeping his desires to himself. The fact that he resisted the more militant Stonewall/Gay Liberation movement comes as no surprise to Cresap, for the critic finds it “hard to imagine someone of Warhol’s temperament being able to thrive without a constantly maintained and revisited locus of inward retreat” (55). I myself sometimes think Warhol was the inner child so many self-help devotees sought to contact by other means in the seventies and eighties. Like most children, Warhol walked the fine line separating “acceptable” and disruptive behavior, and he did so with an unremitting charm neither his admirers nor his detractors could fully figure out. In his sixties heyday, he was the chimerical figure who compellingly fused America’s competing desires for innocence and prurience, fame and anonymity, purity and danger.

 

In “The ‘Sweet Assassin’ and the Performative Politics of the SCUM Manifesto,” Laura Winkiel gives her due to the woman who shot this naïf-trickster down. Over the course of her argument, Winkiel asserts that Valerie Solanas belongs in the satiric tradition of Jonathan Swift (think “A Modest Proposal”) as well as in the company of Judith Butler, Sue-Ellen Case, and other postmodern performance theorists for whom the play is always the thing. Solanas’s sloganeering may have appeared radical on the surface, Winkiel posits, but she was rather dismayed when the feminist movement appropriated the tenets of SCUM (an acronym for “Society for Cutting Up Men”) for its agenda. Similarly, Solanas was chagrined when her 1968 shooting of Warhol was taken as a sign of insanity and not as an artistic “event” (or the “true vengeance of Dada,” as the Up-Against-the-Wall-Motherfuckers Collective suggested at the time). In an ensuing episode that appears to be equal parts insanity and vengeance, Solanas visited the New York Public Library while out of jail on bond. In the staid atmosphere of the library’s main reading room, she proceeded to deface the Olympia Press edition of the SCUM Manifesto, maintaining that its marketable framing and its sensational blurbs by prominent feminists radically altered the original context of her fifty-page mimeographed pamphlet. She was especially perturbed when she noticed that the Olympia editors had added periods to her acronym (so that it now read “S.C.U.M.”), thereby cutting up the word that, when taken whole, threatened to cut up men (presumably the slimy substance to which the unpunctuated acronym also refers). Talk about “The Violence of the Letter”!

 

The articles on queerness in sixties rock are equally intriguing, and speak to a wider collective memory of the decade, even if they are somewhat more uneven in their assertions. To imply that the Beatles and Jim Morrison were closeted gays (as Ann Shillinglaw and Ricardo Ortiz do) is slightly more daring than calling attention to an “out” singer like Dusty Springfield (whose career Smith discusses in her own contribution), and evidence does not always support these claims. True, in news clips and in their movies the Beatles were constantly shown fleeing hordes of screaming women. True, they used lingo from the gay underground to advance and disrupt the plots of Help! and A Hard Day’s Night. But these and other tales of “feminized manhood” fail to convince me that the Beatles were disinterested in or distrustful of women (138). The assessment seems too speculative. Perhaps this is why Shillinglaw feels the need to cite Alexander Doty, who once defended his writings by saying, “Queer readings aren’t ‘alternative’ readings, wishful or willful misreadings, or ‘reading too much into things’ readings. They result from the recognition and articulation of the complex range of queerness that has been in popular culture texts and their audiences all along” (133). What Doty says may be true, but queer readings suffer the same fate as other methodological readings when partial evidence fails to support broad claims: their arguments ring hollow.

 

Ricardo Ortiz does a much more effective job in “L.A. Women: Jim Morrison with John Rechy” when he reads the self-fashioning of the Doors’s frontman alongside the stylized portraits of male hustlers in Rechy’s 1963 novel, City of Night. With his black leather outfits, his “alabaster neck,” and his feminized preening, Morrison emerged from the L.A. rock underground in 1966 to attract a diverse cross-section of desiring devotees. Reading the rock star’s body as a text, Ortiz wants to explore “how exactly the signifying surface bulge of Morrison’s leather pants, the object of such intense fascination on the part of the mass of Doors fans, ultimately compelled the divulging of what it signified” (171). Fast forward to the singer’s drunken cock-exposing incident at a Miami concert in March 1969, an unsolved case of “did he or didn’t he?” To hear Ortiz tell it, Morrison’s quasi-shamanistic, quasi-obscene gesture was either a spontaneous game of fort/da or the appearance of a phallic transcendental signifier. In either case it was a mysterious (no-)show that went far beyond the semiotic limits of sixties rock culture. The short and long of it is that Morrison’s virtual cock masked an artificial lack, and that this very disjunction allowed a wide variety of fans to identify and locate their fantasmatic desires. Rarely has Lacanian theory sounded so sexy, so hip, so relevant to the era out of which it sprang.

 

Because Morrison was as over-the-top with his stud rock posturing as Warhol was with his swish, because “the real Jim” could not possibly be present in all that flamboyant performativity, a large portion of the Doors audience found it hard to explain their attraction or repulsion. Amidst all the excess, something seemed to be missing. Take, for instance, the bewilderment of Joan Didion, who in The White Album recalls having seen Morrison light a match and lower it to the crotch of his black vinyl pants while killing time in an L.A. recording studio. For the ever-ironic Didion this fly-lighting incident was a pathetic gesture of Dionysian sublimity in an atmosphere otherwise marked by languor, deflation, and ennui. Like poetry, Morrison “makes nothing happen,” and herein lies a strange combination of allure and disappointment (Ortiz 174-75). Similarly, when Rolling Stone put Morrison on its cover in the early eighties with a caption that read “He’s Hot, He’s Sexy, and He’s Dead,” it was mocking a new generation of listeners and gazers that had the hots for a vanished anti-hero, “another lost angel.” But we must remember that absence has always been at the heart of desire. Morrison may or may not have persuaded Didion or Rolling Stone (or himself) that he had fire in the loins, but like any successful performer he knew that leaving his audience begging for more was the key to his staying power, both musically and sexually. Ortiz says as much in these pages. Like a patron in Rechy’s novel I approached this essay warily but left feeling convinced.

 

Stephen Paul Miller’s thesis in The Seventies Now–that the good times Americans professed to enjoy in the seventies were but a thin covering for the surveillance, deconstruction, and other forms of deceit lurking beneath the surface and hiding around corners–is not nearly as controversial. In the seventies, most would agree, Americans lived life to the hilt yet constantly suffered the pangs of emptiness. It was as though the open secrets of the sixties wilted under the artificial light of sunlamps and before the reflected glare of mirrored disco balls. But Miller would have us see that these feelings of emptiness were themselves based on a lack of evidence. As a cultural historian, he is thus obliged to look for a trace of what had already vanished from view, namely the sixties. If the sixties were a “dream state”–an escape or break from reality–the seventies were a codification and commodification of that dream (not for nothing did two suspiciously linked words, “lifestyle” and “affordable,” enter our vocabulary during this decade, as if on cue). In a very real sense, the seventies lived the fantasy of the sixties after the fact, slowing them down for purposes of evaluation and belated appreciation. If it “seemed like nothing happened,” as Paul Carroll once complained (qtd. in Miller 50), it was because our tropological reality was marked by a referential absence (143). We were all trying desperately to enjoy the symptoms of a previous decade while chasing an elusive Lacanian Real.

 

In order to come to terms with the “undecade,” Miller engages in an “uncanny criticism.” Traditional historical means, like cause and effect, are of little use to a critic who “walks a tightrope over a void, a void that does not exist until it is recognized” (21). Throughout his study Miller foregrounds “the production of an interpretation based upon seemingly absent links” (368n). And in the seventies, as never before, absent links became the rule rather than the exception. The over-hyped Kahoutek comet never arrived in the skies in 1973, but Skylab fell unexpectedly from the sky six years later. Richard Nixon dismissed a special prosecutor and two high ranking members of his administration on a Saturday night, the so-called “black hole” of the weekly news cycle, in order to escape detection. Not long afterward, a long gap in a White House tape said with silence what reams of documents could only begin to articulate. After considering these events in poststructural context, Miller claims that deconstruction should in truth be regarded as “America’s gift to Derrida” (343).

 

At certain junctures Miller attempts to periodize the seventies by “micro-periodizing” them (by year, by month, and even by day), even though he admits that micro-periods are never uniform, and that they tend to overlap (243). At one point he seizes upon the headlines in the October 10, 1973 issue of the New York Post: “Mets Win Pennant”; “Syria Invades Israel”; “Agnew Resigns.” What follows is a rather uneasy yoking together of three unrelated stories, awkwardly privileged here as “associative devices to indicate the changes the nation was undergoing” (125). I find Miller to be far more effective when his logic runs in the opposite direction, when (following Foucault) he “de-periodizes” the seventies by “zoning” or spatializing its events. This particular method shows that “an instantaneousness of field and an apparent totalization,” of the kind we see in the micro-periodizing sections, can be deconstructed at any given moment (367n). In his primary effort to “zone” his thesis, Miller explains that he has organized his book as a triptych, a triangulated “historian’s bow,” so that one phenomenon “pulls back the bow” of the other two and gives us some depth of field (107). So it is that John Ashbery, Jasper Johns, and Richard Nixon are given the most space. Unfortunately, Miller’s massive project feels at times like a seventies variety show, with minor characters seen scurrying across the stage to compete with the three main stars, in this case a poet, a painter, and a politician. The wealth of knowledge Miller brings to his survey is formidable, but some of his material (especially on film) seems tangential to his thesis.

 

Because Miller is a poet-critic as well as a cultural critic, it is not surprising that he shines when he discusses Ashbery. More than any other literary work, Ashbery’s “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror” signifies for Miller the nostalgia for reality and unity that characterized the mid-seventies, even as he assures us that the poet himself tried to undermine such “truths.” This long poem, which takes its title and some of its content from a Parmagianino painting of 1524, appeared in Poetry in August 1974, the same month Nixon resigned the presidency. The poem also resembles the Watergate fiasco in that its sovereign subject is trapped by his own surveillance (be it in the mirror or on tape) (109). Miller offers fuller explanation of this self-surveillance paradox in “Mystery Tain,” a section whose title employs a word Derrida used to signify the delimitation of semiotic play. The “tain,” or the backing of a mirror, guarantees unity and predetermines possibilities of surface phenomena, since a mirror with no backing would throw forth an image so limitless and formless as to escape detection (146). Thus, according to Derrida, whatever we think we see in the mirror is always already limited by some infrastructural agency written on the mirror’s invisible side, in secret code (111). In his new version of a Romantic crisis poem, Ashbery reinforces Derrida’s thesis on speculation-as-mirror-play. When he sat down to paint, Parmagianino found that he was unable to locate a coherent subjectivity in the convex mirror, even though (and especially since) he was unable to escape himself (with a convex mirror there is no angle oblique enough for a subject to escape reflection and detection). Nor could the painter see beyond the surface to regard the tain that ordered his existence from afar, though he was aware that there was some bottom somewhere. As a postmodern poet, Ashbery felt the same anxiety when he sat down at the typewriter. How does one get beyond the reflective nature of language to see the backing that makes our communication possible, and yet so strangely limited? Answers are not immediately forthcoming, for the simple reason that we continue to communicate largely through language and images. As Derrida and Miller note, it is “the specular nature of philosophic reflection” not to be able to explain “what is outside it,” no matter how wildly the philosopher (or painter, or poet) may summon external phenomena (112).

 

Miller spends less time discussing Jasper Johns, and when he does his argument continues along the same lines. In the early seventies, Miller writes, Johns dedicated most of his energies to a series of “cross-hatch” paintings. These paintings, with their “busy layering of the seen upon the hidden,” can be regarded on one level as a parody of abstract expressionism and its “all over” techniques. But Miller goes further to suggest that Johns’s innovative works are really the opposite of expressionism, since they seal off free signification and gesture with their seamless webs of closure (225). The cross-hatched lines draw out the surface of the painting only to show that not everything is surface, and to indicate that there is an organizing principle that lurks just beyond (or below) our ability to perceive (or fathom) it. Adapting himself to the critical theory of his times, Johns faces the void at the center of human consciousness by covering it up and sneaking a peek (235).

 

Miller’s argument really catches fire when he discusses Nixon, the anti-star of a negative decade. For Miller, Nixon’s career is “a thread through which post-World War II America intertwines” (36). He is “our secret self” (39). In fact, after reading Miller’s book I have come to believe that it was Nixon who was America’s gift to Derrida. No one was more practiced than “Tricky Dick” at the art of deconstruction. After all, the “plumbers” Nixon sent to bug Democratic offices at the Watergate Hotel deliberately left “traces” of their break-in, as though they were writing their signature at the crime scene. In the meantime, Nixon’s elaborate taping system in the Oval Office was working around the clock, leaving documentation of his presidency unarranged, unhierarchicized, and indiscriminate: in short, “postmodern.” In a way, Nixon’s plan for eight straight years of taping White House conversation does not sound so different from the Andy Warhol movie that trained a camera on its slumbering subject for eight straight hours (putting many a viewer to sleep). Nor does it sound so different from Ashbery’s “Self Portrait.” During the Nixon years the Oval Office resembled a convex mirror insofar as its geometric design and extensive recording system accommodated pure circulation and obscured a fundamental point of origin. Come to think of it, so much about Nixon’s long career seems circular in its logic. The young politician who made his name exposing espionage and cover-ups in the Hiss case became the older politician who destroyed himself with espionage and cover-ups. As president he ordered henchmen like John Ehrlichman to expose unflattering secrets about the reporters who had exposed unflattering national secrets like the My Lai massacre and the Cambodia bombings (the latter of which Nixon carried out while watching Patton). The same man who in 1962 scolded a hostile press by saying “you won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore” would later tell a reporter, “one of my strengths is that I try to be my own severest critic” (285). If I may paraphrase Santayana, it is as though he who failed to recognize his own irony was condemned to repeat it.

 

But for a pure dose of Nixonian deconstruction, nothing compares with the eighteen minute, twenty-eight second gap in the subpoenaed White House tapes. Like two landmarks of American postmodernism–John Cage’s Four Minutes, Thirty-three Seconds and Robert Rauschenberg’s De Kooning Erased–the tape in question “framed and dispensed” silence and absence, and by so doing divulged everything Americans had feared. As Derrida might say, all three of these postmodern texts acknowledged their status as trace, and asked us to fill in the gaps (294). In a bizarre and curiously pleasurable sequence, Miller proceeds to do just that, as he reads the white noise and “percussive interruptions” of Nixon’s mysterious tape (295-96). This white noise should stand as the last word on Nixon. I find it somewhat bizarre that a politician hell-bent on secrecy and surveillance came to represent a decade in which many people thought themselves footloose and fancy-free. But no one symbolized better than Nixon (who first dreamed of becoming president as he listened to a lonesome train whistle, only to be carried away from the White House on a heavily guarded helicopter) the strange emptiness and bitter irony at the heart of the American dream.

 

The post-Nixon seventies, which Miller treats briefly, are usually regarded as a period of “malaise.” For many Americans the word “malaise” will forever be associated with Jimmy Carter, who as it happened never actually uttered the word in his disastrous 1979 television address, contrary to the assumptions of the media and most of his viewing audience. When the chief spokesperson for our country has words put into his mouth, we know we are dealing with a truly postmodern moment. In the sixties we survived the death of a president and the “death of the author,” but Carter’s predicament heralded something altogether new: the death of communicative efficacy. Enter, stage right, Ronald Reagan, the actor reborn as the “Great Communicator.” As so often happens, our nation was all too willing to embrace an indefatigable optimist when reality got too ugly. So it was that “Morning in America” replaced mourning in America at the dawn of a new decade.

 

From the spectral photograph of a South Vietnamese pilot ditching his helicopter in the South China Sea during the last days of the Vietnam War, to the extended final chapter on Watergate, The Seventies Now surveys the failures and disjunctions that plagued America in the middle of its global moment. One would be hard pressed to find a more detailed or nuanced appraisal of the uneasiness and paranoia that reigned during the “undecade.” I admit that I would have liked to have seen more thinking about the role of sexuality in the seventies, just as I would have liked to have seen a fuller account of political activism in the Smith collection. But these are gaps we should probably fill in ourselves, on our own time. Indeed, I can imagine a rather high-octane seminar being organized around the themes of secrecy, surveillance, self-fashioning and sexuality that are discussed with brio and intelligence in these volumes. Now, if students would just line up for this seminar the way motorists did around gas pumps in 1973.

 

Brian Baker

School of Education and the Humanities
North East Wales Institute of Higher Education
BakerB@newi.ac.uk

 

Review of: Heaven, an exhibition of postmodern art curated by Dorit Le Vitte Harten. The Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf, Germany, 30 July 1999-17 October 1999, and the Tate Gallery to the North, Liverpool, U.K., 9 December 1999-27 February 2000.

 

Are we still living in the “post”? Post-war, postfeminist, postmodern: the discourses of the “post” are the issues of the “West” or “North,” the colonizers, the “developed world.” The “post” in post-war is used to refer to post-World War II, but this ignores the global ubiquity of armed conflict in the last fifty years of “peace.” The “post” in postmodern (and postmodern culture) signals a negotiation with the Modern and its concerns, but also attests to a crisis in periodization. It is a crisis which has concerned North American, French, Australian, and British academe for the last thirty years. The “post” is a mark that implies failure, particularly in self-definition, and the collapse of the “New”; a collapse, as J.G. Ballard once suggested, of the future onto the present. The proliferation of “postmodernisms”–death of the master narratives, schizophrenia, simulation, problems with space and mapping–is an attempt to define a loss, a lack. The “post” is a presence signifying an absence, a foil stopper clapped over the abyss.

 

This is why I ask, “Are we still living in the post?”. How do we know that we have left the world of absence-in-presence/presence-in-absence and have rejoined the presence or absence? In other words, are we still in the Matrix, the Desert of the Real, the Well of Simulation?

 

Jean Baudrillard’s universe of simulation has itself been pronounced dead (a proclamation enunciated in Baudrillard’s own cry, “The Gulf War did not exist”). Simulacra did not litter the road to Basra. 1991, however, did not signal the end of Baudrillard or of the era of simulation. It merely represented his translation from interesting, if esoteric, academic beloved of Francophile cultural theorists, to the presiding eminence of the new “global village,” the world of information technology, or perhaps technologies of information. Even Hollywood now quotes Baudrillard. When Morpheus reveals the post-apocalyptic state of machine-ravaged America to Neo in The Matrix, he says: “Welcome to the Desert of the Real.” Forget Baudrillard? That is the problem. In forgetting, his theory has become the way “postmodern culture” imagines itself.

 

The concept of simulation has become part of the cultural matrix. It has become part of the “‘representation’ of the imaginary relationships of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (Althusser 153). Althusser’s formulation of Ideology was made before the universe of simulation, of course, and so he could make the distinction between “real” and “imaginary.” It is the first of Baudrillard’s “orders of simulation,” wherein representation masks reality. Such a distinction has been problematized in the age of the “post,” but here I want to insist on the economic processes of production and consumption which still negotiate our involvement with “postmodern culture.”

 

Heaven, an exhibition first shown at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, curated by Dorit Le Vitte Harten, and then relocated to the Tate Gallery in the North in Liverpool, UK, promoted itself by suggesting that the exhibited artworks show “how the religious impulse towards perfection… has become a secular impulse.” The artworks therefore offer icons for the contemporary world, examinations of the processes of iconicity, and representations of where “our” (read Western/Postmodern) “faith” has gone. These works respond to the crisis in representation of the last twenty years, a crisis which seems particularly bound up with the 1980s: Baudrillard’s Simulations was published by Semiotext(e) in 1983; Jameson’s key essay “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” in 1984.

 

Both texts seem particularly appropriate to Heaven, perhaps because of the cultural belatedness which afflicts many of the works. Both theoretical models use a spatial metaphor to suggest a collapse of distance: Baudrillard’s fourth order of simulation famously proposes a copy for which there is no known original (sign-system without referent); Jameson suggests that parody has been supplanted by “blank parody,” pastiche, a reproduction without critical distance.

 

Heaven is dominated by two modes: kitsch and virtuality, analogous to the theoretical positions of Jameson and Baudrillard. The prominence of kitsch in Heaven is instructive, and exposes the critical aporia at the heart of the exhibition. Kitsch was identified by Clement Greenberg as “vicarious experience and faked sensations” as long ago as 1939. Kitsch is, in a sense, a style of art in the age of mechanical reproduction: it is inextricably bound up with popular culture and consumption. Kitsch is “bad taste,” art objects which are manifestations of “aesthetic inadequacy” (Calinescu 236). While we need not adhere to a Frankfurt School analysis of kitsch as the product of the “culture industries,” and juxtapose it with a sentimentalized or nostalgia-imbued “folk culture,” it is clear that kitsch is a modern (industrial) cultural phenomenon. Heaven illustrates the centrality of kitsch to contemporary popular culture, but, ironically, then turns kitsch objects back into art objects.

 

Truly kitsch objects are, paradoxically, original and inauthentic, product and reproduction. Matei Calinescu suggests that kitsch objects “are intended to look both genuine and skillfully fake” (252). He suggests that kitsch has a deliberate semiotic ambiguity: the signs of reproduction signify availability for consumption, while the signs of authenticity signify pleasurable qualities of imitative skill and technical proficiency. Calinescu suggests that the consumption of kitsch relies on “ironic connoisseurship,” a cultivation of “bad taste” in the name of refinement. The enjoyment of kitsch is a celebration of ostentation, vulgarity, and redundant ornamentation: the correlatives of conspicuous consumption. To “get” kitsch, one must be a self-conscious consumer, ready to enter the play of consumption, willing to participate in its conspicuousness. However, this consumption also maintains a distance between production and ironic reception, and reimposes the boundaries of “taste” while ostensibly transgressing them.

 

The artworks in Heaven signify a different relationship to popular forms and popular culture. They are works of art, in a gallery space, not mass-produced reproductions. They are not aesthetically inadequate, but refer to objects that are. Art objects which refer to kitsch cannot themselves be kitsch. Kitsch cannot be pastiched because it is already pastiche. Jeff Koons’s Michael and Bubbles is not, as Heaven‘s catalogue suggests, somewhere between kitsch and art. It is in fact simulated kitsch, but it is still an art object, because its mode of reception is determined by its context, the gallery. The Koons work, in white ceramic with gilded flowers, does imply a critique of kitsch. While suggesting Madonna and child, the ostentation of the work comments upon the processes of conspicuous consumption itself. Possessing a chimpanzee is a sure sign of conspicuous consumption. Bubbles the chimp is kitsch: his ceramic image is not, but is presented in the style of kitsch. Michael and Bubbles is also a commodity, bought in an art market, and so is implicated in the same processes of consumption. Perversely, the work is too self-conscious to be consumed as kitsch, but requires the same sense of “ironic connoisseurship” to be viewed with pleasure.

 

Elvis Presley has ascended to the pantheon of kitsch icons, largely through the pop-cult recycling of the 1970s, and the tragic/ludicrous status of his Las Vegas period. Koons’s Michael Jackson sports a white ensemble not unlike Elvis’s stage-suit of those years. Three works use the figure of Elvis to suggest some kind of secular icon: Olga Tobreluts’s Elvis Presley (from Sacred Figures, 1999) reworks a youthful King as a renaissance knight, encased in armor; Jeffrey Vallance’s fake Elvis sweatcloths simulate religious relics. Ralph Burns’s How Great Thou Art, a series of 16 photographs of visitors to Graceland from 1978 to 1998, takes the emphasis from Elvis as kitsch icon to his ongoing impact on fans worldwide.

 

Why Elvis, and particularly why Vegas-era Elvis? If Calinescu is right in suggesting that “kitsch is a response to the widespread modern sense of spiritual vacuum” (251), worship of kitsch-Elvis does indeed elevate him to the status of a religious icon. Conspiracy theories suggesting that Elvis lives (parodied even on The X-Files) imply a profane, burger-fixated Christ, an innocent sacrificed to American excess. Elvis, however, was an integral, even an essential, part of that excess. The Vegas he inhabited and embodied no longer exists. Like fins on automobiles, it has itself become a glamorized, nostalgia-imbued image of wealth, power, and unreconstructed pleasure. That earlier Vegas was undermined by the crisis in American business and American economic confidence brought on by Vietnam-inflation and the oil-shocks of the early 1970s; Elvis only outlived it by a handful of years.

 

The other dominating icon, the one to which glamour truly accrues (and the word “GLAMOUR” is painted ceiling-high behind Thierry Mugler’s couture creations), is Diana Spencer. The death of Diana, as a media event, even had a special edition of the British film journal Screen dedicated to it. In British popular culture, only Diana assumed (and largely, through the legacy of her sons, still does assume) the position of a “secular saint,” a sign of all that Heaven attempts to represent and dissect. Like Elvis, she is regarded as a sacrifice to the ideological-cultural dominant; like Elvis, she has become the locus of conspiracy theories surrounding her death; and like Elvis, she signifies (in the popular imagination) an innocence, in this case one oppressed and destroyed by the twin agencies of Royal household intrigue and tabloid press intrusion. Most importantly, she was also a willing and skilled participant in both “games,” her “innocence” a staging of innocence, a simulation. Diana Spencer is now only accessible as a media representation, but “Diana” was virtual from the beginning, a fairy-tale princess conjured by a British Royal house in trouble. It is now received wisdom that Diana Spencer became “trapped” by her own image, which preserves the imaginary/real distinction intact; in truth, a media representation is all she ever was to the millions who bought her images in their daily newspapers.

 

Media representations are “virtual” in the sense that they have become a free-floating sign-system, Baudrillard’s fourth order of simulation. This condition becomes a noun and an expression of self-identity in the phrase “I am a virtual,” which is proclaimed by the digitized mask of Kirsten Geisler’s Dream of Beauty 2.0. The face looks like Persis Khambatta from Star Trek: the Motion Picture, who was, ironically enough, an irresistible “Deltan” assimilated by one of humanity’s own machines made go(o)d, the prodigal V-Ger. Is this a coincidence? A microphone dangles from the ceiling, and spectators are invited to speak into it to elicit a response: “ask me a short question and I will respond with a gesture.” This gesture may be a pout, a wink, a smile. In this case, what does “virtual” signify? There is simulated interaction, but the participant must play the game, decode one of a finite set of pre-programmed facial movements as “communication.”

 

Virtual women also appear in Eddo Stern’s RUNNERS. The trace of iconicity is found in its triptych structure. In each panel, three “avatars” (“computer controlled automatons”) run or jog through the computer-generated landscapes of Sony’s EverQuest internet game. Again, the artwork simulates interaction, because the spectator (rather than gamer) can only witness the progress of each avatar through the virtual world, and cannot control it. It is illuminating that the virtual scenario is itself produced by Sony, one of the most recognized brand names in the world, and a player in the global communications game. The installation stages spectatorial frustration (particularly acute if the spectator has a history of gaming): points of interest in the virtual world–other figures, buildings, zombies–are reduced to the margins. The avatars themselves do not interact with their surroundings, repeating the isolation of the spectator: they run past, and force the gaze of the viewer to the periphery. RUNNERS is an art-work which challenges the boundaries of the frame, the boundaries of the work, because of this displacement of the gaze. Ironically, it is that which is not bounded by the frame which is of most interest.

 

Heaven seems to stage the disappearance of the human into the realm of the virtual or the mechanical. In Gilbert and George’s video installation Bend It, the pair caper stiffly to the 1960s hit like escapees from Woody’s Round-Up. Images of the human body transformed into the mannequin, robot, or marionette have a science-fiction provenance which precedes the (virtual)(simulated) time of Woody’s heyday, but which had a particular urgency in the 1950s. Mechanization was a common metaphor for conformity and control, linked with the processes of Fordist industrial production, the dominance of corporate capitalism, and consumerism. Thierry Mugler’s Robot Couture refers to this tradition. Mugler’s stainless suit reveals the mannequin beneath through perspex holes: face, breasts, buttocks. Where Robot Maria in Lang’s Metropolis (1929) becomes indistinguishable from the original, Robot Couture preserves the distinction between flesh and metal by a visual depth-metaphor: the human is revealed beneath the steel. Does Mugler’s work comment on the processes of spectacle, and the fragmentation of the female body under the spectator’s gaze, or is it part of the spectacle itself? Ironically, Robot Couture reifies and commodifies the image of the cyborg in the service of “couture,” “glamour,” or “fashion.”

 

The discourse of the cyborg was particularly insistent in the 1980s, and Donna Haraway’s much-cited “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1985) contributed to what was called, in the pages of Science Fiction Studies, “the SF of theory.” For Haraway, the cyborg was a “postmodern collective self,” an inhabitant of the boundaries between self and other, human and animal, human and machine; a rhetorical device to begin thinking about the constructions of subjectivity and those “violent hierarchies.” Mugler’s robot is a suit of armor which reinstates the boundaries between metal and flesh, culture and nature, spectator and tits ‘n’ ass. It is also a prophylactic, or a chastity suit: you can look but you cannot touch. This indicates another discourse of the cyborg in the 1980s, that of the Terminator. The suit signifies the panic discourses of penetration in the 1980s: invasion of the body (virus), invasion of the body-politic (Evil Empire).

 

The 1980s was also the time of cyberpunk science fiction. The traces of William Gibson can be found in many of the works in Heaven, particularly the conflation of transcendence with an escape of the world of the flesh into the world of the virtual. Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), the last of Gibson’s original cyberpunk trilogy, ends with some of its protagonists “lighting out” into a virtual Elysium. Should we accept this desire to escape the “prison of [our] own flesh”? Are these fantasies, of downloaded personalities and virtual immortality, those of a “postmodern culture” which has lost sight of the insistence of the daily anxieties of life, the anxieties that trouble the majority of the Earth’s population?

 

Heaven acknowledges non-Western experience. Majida Khattari’s hanging textiles refer to Islamic sacral robes (though one looks like a giant Harlem Globetrotters uniform); Shirin Neshat’s video installation, Turbulent, projects a male singer and a female singer on opposite walls. The male, dressed in the same white shirt as his audience, sings; the female, who gives a more expressive and physical performance, forces the singer and his audience to spectate across the room to her screen. The viewer switches between her performance and the reaction of the men, staging the processes of othering (the woman is largely swathed in black cloth). Of course, the Islamic world is the Other to the Western Self, and in the Other the postmodern world finds a presence of the faith that is absent in “our” own. The othering of Islam means that “faith” equates to “excess of faith”; the Islamic world is totalized and demonized, all Moslems being represented as fundamentalists, and what is more, fundamentalists who are determined to launch a holy war on “our” way of life. While the inclusion of Islamic artists in Heaven is laudable (Turbulent is one of the most fascinating works in the exhibition), their presence is surely problematic in relation to the other artworks. If Heaven is supposed to illustrate how the sacred has become the secular in the postmodern world, the Islamic artists indicate where “faith” has “gone”: it has become part of the non-Western Other.

 

The overall thesis of the exhibition is flawed: the iconicity of media representations, or simulations of media representations, or simulations of simulations, does not equate with the iconicity of religious images. There is no investment of faith in these postmodern spectacles. In fact, they represent not the transformation of religious faith into secular “transcendence,” but another postmodern lack: the inability to render transcendence without recourse to the iconography of religion. They neither signify the possibility of a celebratory vulgarity which is always present in kitsch, nor do they critique the processes which (re)produce it; they simulate kitsch, with the collapse of critical distance that implies.

 

The Disasters of War (1993), Jake and Dinos Chapman’s dioramas of atrocity, were, in Liverpool, exhibited on the ground floor, as a free “taster” to the main exhibition. On my second visit to the exhibition, during a school vacation, this introductory room was visited by families with children of 10 years old or under. The Chapmans’ notorious mannequins of children of this age, with anuses for mouths and penis-like appendages for noses, were represented by a series of etchings on the wall. Neither exhibit seemed to cause either the children or their parents any concern. The Disasters of War, versions of Goya’s images of the violence and atrocity of the Napoleonic wars, reduce the images to a table-top size. Clearly, the impact of images which would, if broadcast on television, cause the chattering classes to write letters of complaint, is lessened almost to zero by the reduction in scale. The work plays with this sense of shock, or revulsion, staging atrocity in miniature to suggest that it is not the imagery but the context, not the representation but the staging which regulates the spectator’s reaction. These are the inverse of the mannequins of children: here, atrocity is staged to demonstrate that shock can only be produced by context. Conversely, the mannequins are not shocking in their bodily substitutions (though they do suggest a disruption of somatic order); rather, they stage the ability to be shocked by placing these transgressive mannequins in an art-space. It is not shock, but simulated shock, which is perhaps all, in the “Post,” we can achieve.

 

The visitor comes away from Heaven with a curious sense of belatedness. Any science fiction reader would have come across these themes fifteen, thirty, even fifty years ago. Cyborgism, or virtuality, as metaphors of transcendence or manifestations of a utopian desire for a “more perfect” life, have lost the sense of radicalism they had in the 1980s. They have become part of the “Matrix.” Toy Story 2, with Woody and Buzz Lightyear achieving similar cinematic iconicity to “human” stars, depicts “virtual” protagonists operating in a wonderfully rendered “virtual” world, one in which they themselves play computer games. The ranks of Buzz Lightyears that the (original)(mass product) Buzz encounters in the toy store are the true icons of virtuality: the nexus of massive economic forces, computing power, and consumerism.

 

So, what is the status of the work of art in the age of digital simulation? A world without originals and a world without originality? Heaven‘s postmodern concerns are anticipated by Andy Warhol’s screenprints and boxes of Brillo, which implicate the art object both in the processes of production and reproduction, and in the system of consumption (art=money). Before Warhol, Marcel Duchamp, in signing a urinal and placing it in an art space, deliberately and scandalously compromised the “aura” of the art object. The urinal was shocking because it compromised and reaffirmed the boundaries between art space and quotidian space, between art-object and mass-produced commodity, between the imaginary and the real. Dada is Modern in this sense, and so is its avant-gardist desire to confront, to shock. The discourse of the “post,” however, has slackened the strings of these barriers, and made them permeable. High culture/mass culture, human/machine, object/model, territory/map, original/copy: these violent hierarchies have been identified and the distinctions blurred. The work of the Chapmans suggests a way for the postmodern work of art to connect with, even to shock, its viewers: by staging “shock” and allowing spectators to reproduce or simulate the feelings that this creates. Matei Calinescu argues that “kitsch suggests (sometimes with more accuracy than we would like to believe) the way toward the originals” (262). In staging the possibility of sensation, perhaps we may be resensitized.

 

Works Cited

 

• Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: NLB, 1971. 123-73.
• Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.
• Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Fontana, 1992. 211-44.
• Calinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism. Durham: Duke UP, 1987.
• Gibson, William. Mona Lisa Overdrive. 1988. London: Grafton, 1989.
• Haraway, Donna. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics. Ed. Elizabeth Weed. New York and London: Routledge, 1989. 173-204.
• Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1991.

 

David Anshen

Department of Comparative Literature
SUNY Stony Brook
Danshen@ic.sunysb.edu

 

Michael Sprinker, ed. Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s “Specters of Marx. “New York: Verso, 1999.

 

The whole point, however is that Marx… did not confine himself to ‘economic theory’ in the ordinary sense of the term, that, while explaining the structure and the development of the given formation of society exclusively through production relations… [he] clothed the skeleton in flesh and blood.

 

–Henri Lefebvre, quoting Lenin

It is high time that communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the specter of communism with a manifesto of the party itself.

 

–Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto

The time is out of ioynt: Oh cursed spight,/ That ever I was born to set it right./ Nay, come, lets goe together.[Exeunt]

 

–Jacques Derrida, quoting Hamlet

 

Ghostly Demarcations, a collection of essays edited by Michael Sprinker, is the first book-length response to the four ruminations that comprise Jacques Derrida’s beautifully written and brilliantly considered treatment of Marx’s thought and Marxism, Specters of Marx. This anthology, made up mostly of responses by theorists on the Marxist side of the Marxist/Derridian (dis)juncture, takes the reader into either a haunted house of thrills and chills, or a fun-house of mirrors that distort and alter but also allow views from many angles. The nature of the reading experience is determined by what the reader brings to this carnival of mediations, incantations, and speculations. Those who prefer the certainties of traditional thought may find themselves surrounded by unfamiliar apparitions, images that seem intangible and difficult to grasp. After all, the intellectual movement required by these works (Specters of Marx and Ghostly Demarcations), back and forth between deconstruction and Marxism, necessarily exposes one to radical and unconventional ways of thinking. But the effort pays off. Although at times confusing, out of this work real insight can develop.

 

The task of my essay will be to promote the need for a reading of Ghostly Demarcations along with Derrida’s exegesis of Marx’s texts, at a time when many readers may question the value of another treatment of the Marxist-deconstruction divide. There have been many polemics by Marxists against deconstruction, and the related but distinct formations of postmodernism and poststructuralism.¹ There have also been numerous moments when attacks on “metaphysics,” “ontology,” “teleology,” “presence,” or even more directly, “metanarratives,” “totality,” and “representation,” have become attacks on Marxism, or at least, as Derrida says, certain “spirits” of Marxism.

 

This long and often heated argument reverberating through the halls of the academy is reopened in these works at a very high level. Even Derrida’s sharpest opponents in the anthology acknowledge his critical acumen. The volume also includes an essay in which Derrida responds to, and at times fiercely polemicizes against, his critics, who include Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, Pierre Macherey, Aijaz Ahmad, and Antonio Negri. Although the essays are uneven, all of them offer rewards commensurate with the time and effort required to read them.

 

The stakes at issue in these essays are high. Derrida’s Specters was also a consciously timed political intervention. It was a response to what he terms “dogmatics attempting to install its worldwide hegemony in paradoxical and suspect conditions” (51). What are these “conditions”? Derrida “cries out” in a particularly lucid manner that we live in “a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelize in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy… [despite the fact that] never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity” (85). Derrida forcefully explains that the so-called end of Marxism, the death of Marx, and the attempts to exorcise Marx’s spirit(s) and specter(s), are all forms of political dogma that he rejects. He also maintains, in his exchange with his critics, that he has never been engaged in such a project. This is met with skepticism by some, such as Terry Eagleton, who labels this “a handy piece of retrospective revisionism which hardly tallies with the historical phenomena known in Cornell and California as deconstruction, however much it may reflect the (current) intentions of its founder” (84). Be this as it may, the various responses collected in Ghostly Demarcations open up a set of real questions that must be posed to Derrida and his readers.

 

In his introduction, Michael Sprinker, who is no stranger to Derrida, deconstruction, or Marxism, suggests three problems that are central to thinking through Ghostly Demarcations, and by extension Derrida’s work². The first problem concerns understanding our present moment in history. This becomes an object of debate because of the different views the various contributors have towards, as Sprinker puts it in his introduction, “the nature of capitalism as it has mutated since Marx’s day”; the second concerns politics, and arises from Derrida’s “insistent questioning” of the fundamental project of Marxist politics, namely the “mass organization of the working class”; and the third concerns ideology, and arises from Derrida’s steadfast refusal “to concede what Marx asserted (most directly in The German Ideology)… that ideology can be banished by the science of historical materialism” (2-3). These central, recurring issues as outlined by Sprinker provide a useful way to map the various contributors and their essays. Certain other questions recur throughout the collection as well: how to interpret the figures of the ghost and the specter in Marx; whether Marx, or Derrida, or both, should be understood as practicing philosophy; whether Derrida’s understanding of the problems of our historical moment is informed by a Marxist conception of social class; and whether Marxism can and should transcend what Derrida calls “Ontology.” None of these problems or questions is solved here, of course. But each of them is addressed and worked on from a variety of perspectives.

 

Why is this so important? Fredric Jameson offers an explanation that might be accepted by all the contributors and Derrida himself, namely that “Derrida’s ghosts are these moments in which the present–and above all our current present, the wealthy, sunny, gleaming world of the postmodern and the end of history, of the new world system of late capitalism–unexpectedly betrays us” (39). The point is, to put it bluntly, we are at a historical conjuncture when there is a general crisis of critical thought of a systematic nature. Sprinker describes this as “a moment (April 1993) when the future of Marxism seemed bleaker than any time since the defeat of the Second German Revolution in 1923” (1). Pessimism about Marxism’s capacity to describe and challenge capitalism takes place ironically at the very moment when Derrida makes a compelling argument that the contradictions of capitalism have not withered away, but rather intensified. This explains Antonio Negri’s convincing assertion that, “Here, the question ‘whither Marxism?’ is inextricable from the question ‘whither deconstruction?’ and both presuppose a ‘whither capitalism?’” (6).

 

Negri, the influential Italian post-Marxist who is most known for his work Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, has long argued for an updating of Marx. He is the contributor to the anthology who most clearly believes that the “mutations” of capitalism have made the classical Marxist analysis of industrial capitalism obsolete. Negri reads Derrida’s conception of the “spectral” as a confirmation of his own view that “all traits of the Marxian critiques of value–more precisely, that theory of specters–stop short” due to what he terms a “new phase of relations in production… [and a] mutation of labor” (8). He solidly puts himself forward as a “postmodernist” and joins contributors such as Rastko Mocnik or Werner Hamacher, who argue, along various lines but always by extension from Derrida’s insights, that classical Marxism must be revised. At the other extreme of contemporary thinking on Marxism, we find such contributors as Tom Lewis, Aijaz Ahmad, and Terry Eagleton, who make forceful arguments about the continuing relevance of orthodox Marxism and question the real significance of Derrida’s intervention. Fredric Jameson, eloquently and in his usual fashion, avoids either extreme of partisanship or opposition but instead offers a reading that seems determined to avoid simple judgments. In effect, Jameson subsumes Derrida into his ongoing project of making Marxism “a wandering signifier capable of keeping any number of conspiratorial futures alive” (65). In a strange twist, both Warren Montag and Derrida himself, in his response to his commentators, seem to turn this dispute on its head by suggesting that those who place Derrida as a postmodernist, poststructuralist, or believer in the end of metanarratives, have misunderstood him all along, and that he has never been interested in furthering any simplistic or fashionable attacks on Marxism. And indeed, Derrida’s account of capitalism at the present moment is a far cry from the kind of “end of history” narratives we get from the U.S. State Department and from a good many postmodernists. A substantial portion of Specters of Marx is concerned with debunking the claims of Francis Fukuyama, and others, that “liberal democracy” represents the culmination of human history. Indeed, Derrida reminds us that similar arguments for “the end of ideology,” etc., were commonplace in the late 1950s. He even describes them in Specters of Marx as producing, today, “a troubling sense of déjà vu” (14).

 

The second of the key problems highlighted by Sprinker is that of Marxism’s politics of working-class organization. Again, the sides line up pretty much as expected with the more traditional Marxists (Ahmad, Eagleton, Lewis) in opposition to Derrida, and with the others largely ignoring this question. Mocnik is the exception, the non-orthodox Marxist, who most explicitly refers to the historical tragedies that have transpired in the name of Marxism, and ties his essay to the need to think through these questions in order to “redesign [Marx’s] early critique of human rights so as to articulate it to his critique of political economy” (120). His answer to this dilemma is a somewhat puzzling mixture of Althusser and Lukács, combined with an attempt to integrate Lacan’s theory of the symbolic with Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism. A more historically grounded attempt to think through the failures of Marxist politics is offered by Lewis. He offers a theory of Stalinism based on the writings of a relatively obscure Marxist, Tony Cliff. Cliff’s theory that the former socialist camp should be understood as “state capitalist” is loosely influenced by the ideas of Leon Trotsky. While I applaud Lewis’s attempt–unique in this anthology–to ground his assessment of Marxism in concrete historical events, readers might be better served by returning directly to the neglected work of Trotsky himself and others in the Left Opposition.³ It is a sad legacy of history that Trotsky’s contributions to Marxism have been largely ignored in contemporary Marxist debate.

 

The third central issue that links the essays is the fascinating and contested question of ideology. Each essay treats this in some way. Throughout, it is linked to Derrida’s use of the concept of the “spectral” in Marx. Derrida is the first reader of Marx to emphasize so thoroughly the imagery of ghosts and haunting in Marx’s writing. This recurrent field of metaphors, which Derrida traces from The German Ideology through The Communist Manifesto into Volume One of Capital, is, in his account, no accident. It is the chain that binds together Marx’s explicit theory of ideology with his implicit theory of being, his ontology. If Marx’s project vis-à-vis ideology is concerned with exorcising ghosts, with freeing the world from unreal apparitions which produce real effects, then that project can seem, from a Derridean perspective, to be fatally reliant on the kind of ontological presuppositions that Derrida has so unrelentingly challenged. But this still leaves, indeed intensifies, the problem of how to theorize ideology and of how to conduct any form of ideology critique.

 

This is where this varied and at times quite exhilarating volume disappoints. The contributors either focus on the real affinities between Derrida and Marx, or criticize Derrida for his supposed political weaknesses. But in my view the most important issue is barely touched upon. The central problem in any proposed merger between deconstruction and Marxism lies in what are, perhaps, the ultimate philosophic differences between the two approaches. Any Marxism worthy of the name does affirm a “presence,” an “ontology,” a material reality that cannot be ignored in any ideology critique. For Marxism this is the premise of historical materialism, which unlike Derrida’s deconstruction, clings to the distinctions between different kinds of “ghosts.” It situates different specters or ideologies as historical products, not as categories of thought. When Derrida openly questions the possibility or desirability of exorcising ghosts we are left to wonder exactly what ghosts are. He wants to deploy the category of the specter within his broad critique of “presence,” a critique which extends to the effects of language as such, of the principles of presence and identity that language posits. For Marxism, the problem of ideology always remains narrower or more local than this, not a matter of a false metaphysics of being or of inherent features of language, but rather of specific inadequacies of thinking that are produced at a given moment in history. When Marx, in Volume One of Capital, offers his famous metaphor of commodity fetishism–the table that dances–he is suggesting something different from Derrida’s notion of spectrality. Marx is trying to bring to light a particular kind of spectrality, the ghostly presence of social relations within the sensuous object, which lends it an enigmatic and mysterious effect. To remove this effect of commodity-fetishism from its precise historical context is to miss the heart of Marx’s critique. To be sure, Derrida would distinguish commodity fetishism from the eternal play of language. But on his reading, the spectrality of Marx’s table would seem to be permanent. Derrida insists that the world cries out for better responses to intensifying economic and social horrors, but we must ask: does he offer a stable enough foundation for “changing the world”? His answer in Specters of Marx is to claim that “what remains irreducible to any deconstruction… [is] an idea of justice” (59). One wonders if this solution provides any advantage over the claims of classical Marxism. Hamacher points out that for Marx, “a language other than commodity-language is possible… something other than categorical language will be invented”–whereas, presumably, no such promise can be extracted from Derrida (180). This disjuncture seems to mark the ineradicable difference between Derrida and Marx. If capitalist spectrality cannot be overcome, the spirit of Marx is truly dead. Ironically, this is the very death that Ghostly Demarcations is most determined to reject.

 

Notes

 

1. See, for example, Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (London: Verso, 1983); Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991); Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996); and E. Ann Kaplan, ed., Postmodernism and its Discontents: Theories, Practices (New York: Verso, 1989).

 

2. See, for example, Michael Sprinker, “Politics and Friendship: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in The Althusserian Legacy, eds. E. Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1993).

 

3. See, for example, Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1996) and Trotsky In Defense of Marxism (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1995), both of which directly contest the “state-capitalist” view put forward by Cliff and revived by Lewis.

 

Works Cited

 

• Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994.
• Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life. Trans. John Moore. New York: Verso, 1991.
• Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels. The Communist Manifesto. New York: Pathfinder, 1998.
• Negri, Antonio. Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse. Trans. Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan, and Maurizio Viano. Ed. Jim Fleming. South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1984.

 

Genevieve Abravanel

English Department
Duke University
ga3@duke.edu

 

John Carlos Rowe, ed. “Culture” and the Problem of the Disciplines. New York: Columbia UP, 1998.

 

This collection of essays emerged out of four years of discussion and dispute among humanities scholars at the Critical Theory Institute of UC Irvine. What the contributors, including David Lloyd, James Boon, and J. Hillis Miller, have produced is not so much a theory of interdisciplinarity as a map of the ruptures and problems attendant when disciplines contest understandings of “culture.” The collection’s unproblematized decision to place “culture” in quotes highlights its distance from that moment in the eighties when the quotes in Henry Louis Gates’s title “Race,” Writing, and Difference, required much deliberation and were capable of provoking well-mounted attacks. Here “culture” is in quotes not only because, as with Gates’s reading of “race,” it is understood to be socially constituted, but also, more pointedly, because it is seen as an object of disciplinary knowledge, subject to institutional constraints and to a genealogy of practice. This collection thus participates in a general reorientation which takes cultural studies to be less a specialized field with its own canon than a redescription of the current state of the humanities.

 

Part of the compromise of exploring culture from within an institutional framework such as the Critical Theory Institute is its position as the site of its own culture, albeit not one with a disciplinary structure. The affiliation of the group around the topic of critical theory allows for a significant degree of intellectual space, but is nonetheless grounded in work that has harbored attachments to the linguistic or to the literary. Sacvan Bercovitch’s essay “The Function of the Literary in a Time of Cultural Studies” evinces the strongest desire in the collection to preserve an attachment to literary studies as the arbiter of certain forms of cultural knowledge. For Bercovitch, “to recognize that disciplines are artificial is not to transcend them” (69), and their constructed aspects can occasionally be a source of their value. To distinguish the discipline of literary studies from others, Bercovitch stages an unlikely chess match between Wittgenstein and Faulkner, or between Wittgenstein’s well-known allusions to chess in Philosophical Investigations, and a scene of chess in Light in August. The import of this chess match is that it cannot really be played, because Wittgenstein and Faulkner do not share a set of rules. (Wittgenstein has rules, while Faulkner does without them.) The translation of Wittgenstein’s observations on language into a rhetorical parlor game with a literary text could seem parochial, but it enables Bercovitch to gloss the value of the literary as the site of the particular over and against what he deems a set of philosophical abstractions. Although his case against the abstract is perhaps itself an abstraction of the discipline of philosophy (he highlights Descartes, along with late and early Wittgenstein), it is one that follows from the mobilization of the individual disciplinary position. Faulkner’s culturally-specific, racially-motivated chess match bears with it the textual coding which is the provenance of the literary critic. For Bercovitch, a location in the discipline of literary studies brings with it privileged access to socially-nuanced varieties of meaning.

 

The place of literary studies in an academic context also shapes J. Hillis Miller’s thoughts on present change in the university, and particularly in the humanities. “Something drastic is happening in the university. Something drastic is happening to the university” (45), Miller incants in his essay’s opening. Phrasing the change in Platonic terms, “the university is losing its idea” (45), Miller suggests that since the end of the cold war, the humanities have no longer been driven by nationalistic imperatives “to be best” (52). Funding has fallen off for the humanities much as it has for the non-applied and even the applied sciences, where fields of research once dominated by the universities have shifted over to the corporate sector. The university is still to a certain extent the nostalgic protectorate of old forms of knowledge that do not concede the changing global environment. For Miller, the PhD itself is an outmoded form, at least semantically, since so many “doctors of philosophy” are not in fact trained in those areas of logic that once explained the degree. Moreover, global flows of capital and information–and capital as information, in ways that resurrect Stevens’s aphorism “money is poetry”–erode the status of the university as the disseminator of culture and knowledge.

 

Literary studies in particular, Miller insists, can no longer be understood as a vehicle for disseminating dominant ideology in its “high” cultural form. “With the study of the English language goes the study of its literature as one of the most potent instruments to spread capitalist ideologies. Or at least we used to be confident that this was the case: it is not quite clear, when you think of it, how the study of Shakespeare or Hardy will aid the economic imperialism of the United States” (54). Miller’s dismissal of the hegemonic potential of English literature seems strange, especially since he cites Crawford’s work on English literature in Scotland, and Viswanathan’s consideration of the British canon in nineteenth-century India. But Miller wants to differentiate between the English canon and US-based bodies of knowledge; while he marks English literature as constitutive of US identity in the earlier years of the university, he cites the emergence of new disciplines of American studies, and the increasing canonization of American literature, as attempts to regulate the production of national identity. This performative gesture toward nation building might seem extraneous in the era of transnationalism, but it is an index of the university’s retrogressive tendency to remain invested in the set of nationalistic assumptions that Derrida terms the “ontopolitologique” (62). The proliferation of the culturally-based micro-disciplines, like “women’s studies, gay and lesbian studies, Native American studies, African American studies, Chicano/Chicana studies,” is for Miller a form of conservative resistance to the increasing transnationalism of the university (62). In strong terms, he insists, “Though nothing could be more different from ethnic cleansing in Rwanda or Bosnia than a program in cultural studies, the development of such studies may be another very different reaction to the threat new communications technologies pose. Cultural studies can function as a way to contain and tame the threat of that invasive otherness the new technologies bring across the thresholds of our homes and workplaces” (62). Because global flows of information and new transnational alliances are undermining the performative nation-building impulses of the university, multiculturalism can be taken as a vestige of the nationalistic model in the name of the political left. Only the acknowledgment of radical alterity can protect against the theoretical equivalence of identity groups. “We need to establish a new university of dissensus, of the copresence of irreconcilable and to some degree mutually opaque goods” (64), Miller insists. For while Miller might differ from some aspects of Bercovitch’s claims, he too seems to wish to acknowledge the incommensurability of the disciplines, in particular of the micro-disciplines that comprise multiculturalism.

 

It is not surprising that a volume suspicious of the nationalizing impulses of some forms of multiculturalism would devote two chapters to explicitly postcolonial issues. The rise of postcolonial studies as a disciplinary formation in US academics is a more recent phenomenon than some multicultural fields, in particular African-American studies and feminism, which had begun institutionalization by the late seventies. Moreover, postcoloniality holds a necessarily more vexed relationship toward what Miller calls the multicultural project of “giving a voice to the heretofore voiceless, to women and minorities…” (61). Because postcolonial studies is a globally oriented field of inquiry, its representatives are not so easily voiced from within the American university. The access of the metropolitan postcolonial intellectual to the human subjects of its disciplinary knowledge has been an early and persistent problem in the theory, one which can be traced through such events as Gayatri Spivak’s periodic reworking of her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” The global aspects of the postcolonial field, as well as its internal challenges to its own authority, could present it as an alternative model to what Miller sees as the multicultural tendency to repolarize the US disciplines through ethnically discrete bodies of knowledge. It is true that globalism has been charged recently by Lisa Lowe and others with promulgating a new form of universalism in its attempts to posit, and thus to generalize, a postcolonial subject. While such a charge holds weight, postcolonial studies nonetheless has the potential to unsettle the organization of disciplinary knowledge around strictly ethnic lines and provide an antidote to some of the rigid identitarian positions associated with multiculturalism.

 

In her essay “Colonialism, Psychoanalysis, and Cultural Criticism: The Problem of Interiorization in the Work of Albert Memmi,” Suzanne Gearhart traces the renewal of academic interest in culture to postcolonial inquiry. Her terms are emphatic: “It would not be difficult to show that the ‘new culturalism’ that has come into increasing prominence derives much of its impetus from the centrality of the problem of culture in the critique of and resistance to colonial domination” (171). She centers this claim on revisionary readings of culture as no longer “a reflection of deeper historical, economic, or sociopolitical forces” (171) but rather an autonomous system that can break with specific economic or political programs. Such cultural autonomy can take forms such as Aimé Césaire’s decision to break with the Communist Party in favor of cultural solidarity with other West Indian and African groups, and it translates easily into nationalism. In those moments when culture is perceived as synonymous with national identity, Gearhart becomes cautionary. Her reading of Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism touches on the ways in which Said, despite his various investments in the nation, sees the “potential dangers” (172) of the nationalist position. For Gearhart, nationalism carries with it “the risk of creating or presupposing a new collective and individual identity based on national culture, one that would ultimately be as abstract, limited, metaphysical, and thus potentially as repressive in nature as the humanisms unmasked and criticized from the perspective of a critical concept of culture” (172). The value of the particular as against the abstract, which has threaded its way through Bercovitch’s defense of literary criticism and Miller’s critique of multiculturalism, here returns as a warning against certain deployments of nation in the postcolonial context. It might seem odd, then, that Gearhart’s interest in culture for the postcolonial relies on psychoanalysis, a methodology that along with Marxism has been criticized for investing in a generalized subject. She attempts to resist such a tendency by drawing on the work of Albert Memmi, especially his 1957 The Colonizer and The Colonized. Memmi’s theory of “le vécu” or “lived experience” acknowledges the material difference in individual lives even as it attempts to elaborate the psychic effects of colonization on colonizer and colonized. Memmi’s argument for the interiorization or psychic absorption of the colonial experience is explicitly presented as contra Fanon, whom Memmi reads to focus on the sociopolitical and external facts of domination to the occasional exclusion of the psychological. While Henry Louis Gates claims that there is no need to choose definitively between Fanon and Memmi, a psychoanalytic modeling of colonialism tends to follow one or the other. For Gearhart, Memmi’s interrogation of the psychic through the cultural, and vice versa, is a paradigm of contemporary interdisciplinarity, one that reveals the imbrications of seemingly distinct bodies of knowledge.

 

Another version of redisciplining the postcolonial comes from James Boon, who brings his position as an anthropologist self-consciously to bear on theorists like Fredric Jameson, Homi Bhabha, and Aijaz Ahmad, as well as historian Arif Dirlik. As a point of departure, Boon briefly restages the now-famous critique Ahmad posed to Jameson’s “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capital.” While Boon sides for the most part with Ahmad, he takes care to note the moments when he feels that Ahmad has overlooked certain subtleties in his defense of third world literature. What Boon finds troubling is Ahmad’s attention to “Nation-Narration” at the expense of Boon’s own category of “region/religion” (144). Suggesting that certain aspects of cultural studies have become myopically invested in the nation, Boon asserts that “it is assumed that the nation, narrated, is the privileged venue for generating obfuscations of Realpolitik (or réelle-power-knowledge)” (144-45). In particular, Ahmad’s claim that “the kind of circuits that bind the cultural complexes of advanced capitalist countries simply do not exist among countries of backward capitalism” (Ahmad, qtd. 145) neglects religious connections such as those enabled by Islam. Boon adds, almost as an aside, that Ahmad not only fails to weight religious difference but “makes little of languages overall” (145). Here is the crux of Boon’s interest. He has titled his piece “Accenting Hybridity,” and his reworking of the Bhabhian hybrid to include linguistic variation allows him to cite Edward Sapir’s work on language. Sapir, best known for his contributions to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic constructivism, is useful to Boon’s interventions in more traditional postcolonial thought. What Boon calls “plus-que-post-colonialist hybridities” (153) are the linguistic affiliations across races and cultures that he traces from Sapir’s work on language. While the problematic of linguistic identification, for example with English or with French in Africa, is not new to postcolonial thought, the angle of Boon’s critique of Ahmad follows from a perspective that should be understood as disciplinary. Boon’s interests have historically been crucial to postcolonial studies, but they have also often been reinscribed within the problematic of the nation. The value of disciplinarily marginalized critiques like Boon’s is to unsettle what Boon emphatically terms “NOW-MAINSTREAM POSTCOLONIAL CULTURAL STUDIES” (162).

 

The two essays on the postcolonial, while materially disparate, nonetheless occupy a certain sequential space near the end of the volume. Such a grouping is perhaps prefigured in the seemingly well-disciplined decision to collect the two pieces with explicit gender commentary together at the volume’s center. These two essays, Linda Williams’s discussion of Psycho and Leslie Rabine’s consideration of African-American women’s fashion magazines, seem somewhat less self-reflexive with regard to the disciplines than several of the other pieces, perhaps because they are most recognizably located in the new interdisciplinarity of cultural studies. Yet Williams’s observation that “film studies achieved its first academic legitimacy through appropriations of linguistic models of textuality” (87) suggests the originary pressures on the “new” disciplines. In similar terms, Rabine’s assertion that fashion as a field of inquiry has been slighted due to its emphasis on pleasure relates a more recent struggle for legitimacy of new bodies of knowledge. Considering Psycho, Williams notes how its installment at the heart of the film studies canon eroded the thrill of enjoyment that must be accounted for in gendered or cultural readings of the audience. She quotes Hitchcock on the film: “To me it’s a fun picture” (97). Williams aligns the emotional trajectory of viewing Psycho with a roller-coaster ride and notes that one of Disney’s contributions to contemporary culture has been to bring the affective rhythms of the horror film and the thrill ride closer together. Williams’s interest in Psycho‘s original audiences leads her to Hitchcock’s claim of universal horror: “If you designed a picture correctly, in terms of its emotional impact, the Japanese audience would scream at the same time as the Indian audience” (109-10). While Williams casts doubt on such an assertion, she nonetheless generalizes on the basis of gender: female audience members’ identification with the victim may make them more prone to shock, but it may also increase their enjoyment. Although Williams does not exactly unravel the relationship of gender to culture in the viewing process, she is invested in the networks of identification that make the film psychically meaningful. Impact on the audience is also the focus of Rabine’s contrast between black and white fashion magazines like Essence and Mirabella. Rabine, who is not African-American, does not invoke the “we” (111) that Williams prizes when discussing female audience members. Rather, she suggests that “a postmodern, fluid, white, feminine identity depends for its production upon the image of a fixed black feminine identity” (124). In particular, she looks at the ways racialized meaning was produced through the late-80s fashion of “lingerie dressing,” in which underwear became outerwear. For both Williams and Rabine, objects of study, such as film and magazines, are useful insofar as they permit speculation on their audiences. While specifically reception-oriented approaches are by now well established in cultural studies, this volume makes apparent the desire within virtually all contemporary considerations of culture–multicultural, postcolonial, feminist–to locate and connect with the kinds of identity groups or interpretive communities that are posited in reception theory. What Williams and Rabine contribute, by approaching such identity groups historically and in racial terms, is a recognition of just how difficult this kind of access to an ostensible group’s feelings or dispositions can be.

 

Opening and closing the collection, David Lloyd’s meditations on the university and Mark Poster’s rewriting of the end of history display some of the primary tensions that inquiry into the disciplines can generate. Like Miller, Lloyd wants to rework the Habermasian ideal of the university into a space more amenable to the new global environment. He does not see multiculturalism as a polarizing enemy but rather as a potential corrective to Western forms of knowledge. Not only do the disciplines correspond “to a postenlightenment (that is, Western and modern) division of a universal human reason into ‘faculties,’” they also serve as models for the “larger differentiation of spheres of practice within Western society: the technological/economic, the political, and the cultural” (20). Such a disinclination to maintain current disciplinary formation is even more emphatically pursued by Poster in his peregrinations around “the end” (215). Following from a critique of Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, Poster explains that the end of history he envisions is not the triumph of liberal democracy, but rather the end of history as a discipline in its current, ideological formation. As Poster puts it, “arguments are being raised more and more frequently that the kind of writing done by historians does not address the concerns of the day, that it is being done better by individuals trained in other disciplines, or that it supports an outmoded and dangerous institution: the nation-state” (215). As a kind of metanarrative of the problem of the disciplines, Poster considers the historicity of the current study of history, including the electronic retrieval of information, the reinvention of the archive, and the consequent pressures on the psyche and working habits of the historian. For Poster, the “linearity of modernity” with its progression from past to future is eclipsed by a “postmodern temporality, nonlinear and simultaneous” (222). Poster’s redescription of historical time corresponds in important ways to Lloyd’s movement away from the “modern” disciplinary structure founded on hierarchy and modeled after the “longer history of state-formations” (20). For Lloyd, the tension here is between idealisms of the university and what he calls “the particular” as understood by multiculturalism (25).

 

The problem of the particular and the universal, when reframed as the problem of the particular and the university, is in a certain sense the overriding contemporary concern of the disciplines. If a collection like this one is at all representative, and it appears to be, the origin of new disciplines of knowledge tends to occur in resistance to totalizing epistemologies or generalizations. If multiculturalism is valuable when it resists homogenization (as for Lloyd) but undesirable when it commodifies difference as interchangeable and therefore really the same (as for Miller), then it seems that the epistemological high ground is the provenance of the particular. Not only is the study of popular film and fashion magazines theoretically energized by its inquiry into particular groups, but even Faulkner’s final checkmate against Wittgenstein, whether or not one wishes to accept it, is enabled by his ability to attend the subtle nuances of the social. The transformation of the disciplines reveals an extreme discomfort with varieties of universalism, from a representative canon of humanism to the ideology of the nation. Both multiculturalism and postcolonial studies are motivated by impulses to rethink canon and nation, and disciplinary reformation derives much impetus from their lead. It therefore seems justifiable to venture that the object “culture” is also in need of further particularization in inquiries such as these, even as it is necessarily abstracted as the disruptive force around which new disciplinary knowledges can converge.

 

Jim Rosenberg

jr@amanue.com

Part I: Background: Linear Prosody¹

Dimensions of Inequality Among Syllables

 

Prosody in the English language proceeds from the axiom that not all syllables are created equal; many effects in prosody derive from the time-plot of these inequalities along various dimensions. The most well known of these is the familiar stress-degree, but I will quickly review others.

 

Pitch-Degrees

 

The usual approach to pitch in prosody is to consider it a “curve”: the intonation curve. However, there is a manner of recitation at work in many American communities, most notably in a style of reading in the black community, in which tight-knit patterns of time of various pitches are articulated, in much the same way that stress occurs in more traditional prosodies. This is a very rich prosody that deserves to be studied in its own right. A predominantly pitch-degree prosody will have very different characteristics than a predominantly stress-degree prosody. Pitch is a purely acoustical property, as opposed to stress, which is a linguistic property that is quite difficult to define acoustically. Thus a pitch-degree prosody is much closer to music (in the literal sense of the term); a pitch-degree prosody is freer to use an absolute musical sense of time, whereas a stress-degree prosody is more likely to be based on “linguistic time,” which works differently (see footnote 8 below). Not all phonemes carry pitch; a pitch-degree prosody may thus change the sound structure balance for how phonemes relate to one another. Where both pitch degree and stress-degree prosodies occur simultaneously, incredibly subtle effects are possible.

 

Vowel Position Degrees

 

In explaining the meaning of the term “Tone Leading Vowels” as it pertained to the prosody of Ezra Pound, Robert Duncan explained the term as meaning two things: (1) Where a diphthong (a glide between one “pure vowel” and another) occurs, the leading pure vowel of the glide plays a special role. (2) A sound is reinforced when you hear it again, but can also be reinforced when you don’t hear it again. A similar concept to this second point is the idea that vowels form clusters according to the position of the mouth when they are articulated; the tight-knit pattern in time that delineates which of these clusters is active can form a prosody, much like the stress-degree or pitch-degree prosody.

 

Stress-Degrees: Classical Prosody

 

The most familiar basis for metrics in English is the tight-knit pattern in time formed by stress-degrees. Stress has been extensively studied in linguistics (see for example Chomsky and Halle). Before introducing an alternate methodology for how metrical studies of contemporary poetry might be conducted, I will review briefly the traditional account of how the stress-degree metric is supposed to operate. This account has become a significant obstacle in pursuing prosody of contemporary poetry, so it would be well to understand it before considering a different approach. Classical prosody starts with an a priori inventory of templates of stress-degree patterns (e.g. iamb, trochee, anapest, etc.). “Scanning” is the process of matching these templates to the poem; where repeated instances of a single template match, end-to-end, the line or poem is said to “scan.” It is important to note that the word “foot” is profoundly ambiguous in this process, having at least the following two meanings: (1) We speak of a foot as meaning one of the templates. In this usage, “foot” is an abstract concept which exists in advance of any particular poem. (2) We may refer to the actual syllables in a poem matched by a template as being a foot. In this usage, “foot” is a part of a living, breathing poem–and as such is a unit of rhythm intermediate between the syllable and the metric line. Much of the poetics that has been influential since the fifties and sixties has focused away from the a priori (Olson, Ginsberg) and many contemporary poets are uncomfortable with the idea of a template-based metrics. Most poets and many theorists have turned away from the study of metrics, rather than explore the second usage of “foot” in which the unit of metrics is not thought to exist prior to the poem, but is rather part of the poem itself, intermediate between the syllable and the metric line.

 

Thus I turn now to consider this concept of an intermediate unit of meter, one that de-emphasizes the a priori and does not use any concept of template. To avoid confusion, I will abandon the use of the word “foot” and instead use the term “measure.”

 

Bonding Strength

 

Another dimension of inequality among syllables (really of syllable boundaries) is “bonding strength”: the degree of attraction of a syllable to the one ahead of it or behind it. Bonding strength may be defined as the extent to which an artificially injected pause at a particular syllable boundary seems natural or not when compared to the way the poet would typically recite the line. Syllable boundaries will differ in their degree of bonding strength; by collecting together into a single unit those syllables where the bonding strength is high, one obtains a “measure.” It cannot be emphasized strongly enough that the assessment of where the measure boundaries are located must take place with respect to a particular recitation–presumably the poet’s. A printed text of the poem on the page may not give sufficient information without a sound recording. In this methodology, scanning consists of identifying where the measure boundaries are, where the rhythmic line boundaries are (a rhythmic line is a cluster of measures connected by somewhat higher bonding strength, just as a measure is a cluster of syllables connected by the highest degree of bonding strength), and then attempting to discern whether there may (or may not) be any regularity to how measures are constructed. Thus rather than speaking of a poem as being “written in” a meter, meaning a conscious a priori choice of template, one examines the poem empirically to determine whether there simply happens to be some regularity to the way the measures are constructed.

 

The “Standard Measure”

 

This methodology need not be restricted to poetry: any recitation can be scanned. The statement is often made that English is iambic. Using the method sketched above to determine measure boundaries, we can reformulate the tendency of English toward the iambic, without exempting the many counterexamples. Measure boundaries in English prose tend to be constructed as follows: (1) a measure has only one major stress; (2) the measure tends to end on a major stress, but: (3) if there are unstressed syllables following the major stress out to the end of a major grammatical unit, those unstressed syllables will also be incorporated into the measure. Measures constructed in this way may be called “standard measures.” Of course not all measure boundaries in poetry will be standard measure boundaries: Robert Creeley, for instance, is well known for having many non-standard measure boundaries in his poems. Interestingly, when Creeley’s poems are actually scanned, the results show that while there may be non-standard measure boundaries at the end of the rhythmic line, many lines contain two measures, and in these lines the internal measure boundary is a standard one: the celebrated Creeley line-break really is a line-break and not a measure break. The non-standard measure boundaries are very easy to hear, but the internal standard measure boundaries are much more subtle. Of course if they were missing, we would certainly hear the result as a flat, lifelessly too regular, much less interesting rhythm. The structure of Creeley’s lines may be described as an “offset structure”: the sound structure of the line endings is clearly articulated, but the grammatical structure proceeds from the middle of one line to the middle of the next. The offset structure is an extremely venerable structure in prosody, going back at least to Anglo-Saxon times.

 

Part II: Non-linear Prosody

 

Bonding Strength is Spatial

 

I have described bonding strength as the attraction of a syllable to the syllable ahead of it or behind it. Although prosody is normally interpreted as how the sound structure works in time, clearly the concept “adjacent” is a spatial concept; thus bonding strength may also be interpreted as a spatial concept, and as such can work in any topology, including a non-linear one. Where above I defined bonding strength as the tendency of a syllable boundary to resist injection of an artificial pause (a time concept), we could as easily have described it as the tendency of a syllable boundary to resist injection of space. It should be noted that in one dimension, space and time are nearly the same thing; however, in the more complex topologies of non-linear writing, as we shall see, space and time operate very differently.

 

A Review of Hypertext Structure Terminology

 

I have introduced a framework for structuring hypertext activity elsewhere and will review it only briefly here. By hypertext I mean a text that contains embedded interactive operations when considered from the reader’s point of view: the text contains interactive devices that trigger activities. The most familiar of these is the hypertext link, but many other types are possible.² For instance, my work often contains devices called “simultaneities,” in which groups of words are layered on top of one another; by moving the mouse among no-click hot spots, the different layers are revealed. Research hypertext software has been built based on both set models and relation models, and spatial hypertexts have been constructed using such concepts as piles and lists. In all of these cases, the hypertext is operated by performing activities; these activities consist of such actions as following a link, opening up a pile or simultaneity, etc. I have called these small-scale activities “acteme” (Rosenberg, “Structure”). In the node-link model of hypertext, the acteme of following a link may be described as “disjunctive,” from the logical term disjunction, meaning “or.” A disjunctive acteme presents a reader in a given position in the hypertext with a choice: she may follow link A or link B or link C. Other forms of acteme may be described as “conjunctive.” A conjunctive acteme such as a simultaneity with layers A, B, and C consists of A and B and C.³ A given hypertext can use both kinds of actemes together and a hypertext poem could even blur the distinction between them.

 

In most cases, the text in a hypertext appears in units called “lexia,” a term of analysis George Landow borrows from Roland Barthes to apply to hypertext. In a typical node-link hypertext, the lexia is the unit of text at either end of a link; often (though not inevitably) the lexia has an internal structure which is simply linear. As we will see, particularly in the context of poetry, the concept of lexia is extremely problematic.

 

As the reader navigates a hypertext, activities will (hopefully) cohere together into units called “episodes.” For a node-link hypertext, the episode will tend to be all or part of a path. It must be noted that not all activities will necessarily resolve into an episode. Some activities might be performed by accident, as when a reader pulls down a menu of link names and chooses the wrong one unintentionally. A reader may backtrack, having decided that performing an activity got nowhere. (Backtracking is complex; it may or may not revoke membership of an acteme in the episode.) Thus, episode is not the same thing as history. At a certain point the reader may not have constructed an episode at all, and might indeed be best described as foraging for an episode. The episode is an emergent concept; it emerges retroactively. Ideally, the structure of episodes emerges through the use of a “gathering interface.” Unfortunately, available gathering interfaces are still quite primitive: they construct something more akin to the bookmarks of a web browser than a full picture of hypertext activity.

 

Prosody Within the Lexia

 

In many cases–perhaps most cases–the lexia is structured linearly. Under these conditions, within-lexia prosody includes traditional linear prosody. Not much need be said here; indeed one would be hard put to make the case that there is any difference between within-lexia prosody for a linearly structured lexia and the prosody of the printed page. However, there is no reason at all to suppose the lexia must be linear (on the linearity of lexia see Moulthrop; Rosenberg, “Navigating”). In this section I move to consider within-lexia prosody for a non-linearly structured lexia.

 

Consider Figure 1, which shows a single screen from a simultaneity taken from one of my works (Rosenberg, Diffractions). This screen can be read in at least two different ways: (1) It can be read polylinearly so that the words with the same font are read as a linear skein, beginning with the word that is capitalized. (2) Alternatively, the graphically clustered fragments of these phrases can be read in snatches as the eye wanders about the surface of the screen picking up groups of words and associating them in whatever way seems to work. Even a simple polylinear reading poses difficult questions for the concept of lexia: is the lexia the entire screen, or one of the skeins? A computer-oriented view of the lexia would tend to regard the lexia as whatever is visible on the screen when there is no input to the computer, when the mouse is not moved, and no key is pressed. In this case the entire screen should count as one lexia. But what happens, in terms of prosody, as the eye moves from one phrase to another? Is this time which “doesn’t count”–a kind of time out, in which there is no prosody?⁴ If indeed the time between phrases doesn’t count, we may describe the time units within the skeins as disengaged from one another. Or perhaps the prosody of the individual skein, together with the layout of the screen, helps determine when the next phrase begins, in which case the time between skeins definitely is part of the prosody.⁵ A lexia with this type of polylinear structure is inherently ambiguous concerning the prosody of what happens between phrases. Still another possibility is simply to say the time relationship between phrases is in the reader’s hands completely. Of course something will happen when the poet recites such a lexia: a choice will in fact be made. In this case, the poet may experience a contradiction between her desire to present the work in a context where oral experience is expected and her desire to leave open as many options as possible for the reader.

 

Figure 1.

 

These issues become even more difficult if we use method 2 to read this screen. What is the prosodic relationship between these clusters of words, read by a kind of “visual wandering”? In this case linearity is so seriously fragmented that the reader may have an impression of the words disengaging from time altogether, such that prosody relationships become entirely spatial.

 

Prosody Through the Episode

 

There is no reason to assume that prosody should be confined within the lexia. In this section I explore issues of prosody within the episode as a whole that go beyond the boundaries of the lexia. “Text” occurs in many places in a hypertext besides the obvious text in the lexia. There is also text in the devices of the hypertext mechanism itself. For instance, many hypertext systems allow the user to bring up a menu of possible outgoing links. Such a menu is inarguably textual. But what role does such a menu play in prosody?⁶ One approach is to consider the menu of link names as a text object in its own right. Hypertext poet Deena Larsen constructs poems from assembled link names. This approach, while interesting, simply reconstitutes the menu of link names as a different form of lexia, though one that has a complex structural relationship to the lexia from which it was popped up. Another approach is to consider a link name as a “prosody channel” connecting the text at either end of the link. It is typical in hypertext to assume that the reader will choose a link based on semantic or logical criteria, but in poetry there is no reason to assume prosody is any less valid as a means of choosing a link. To use the terminology we’ve been using throughout: bonding strength can operate through the link; bonding strength may even be the basis for choosing a link in the first place. It makes sense to speak of a “two-dimensional” prosody in assessing the relationship of prosody within the lexia to prosody through the link. Indeed, if the lexia is spatial, one may speak of a three-dimensional prosody. One point worth noting here is that the concept of bonding strength–the attraction of two text elements across a real or imagined boundary–sounds quite symmetrical, whereas most hypertext links are one-directional.⁷ But the directionality of the hypertext link is not really different from the directionality of time in conventional prosody. It may be true that considering bonding strength through the link reverses the direction of attention compared to the direction of the link, but we do the same for the direction of time in assessing linear prosody.

 

At its most conservative, a hypertext treats the lexia as a full-fledged document in its own right; the interactive devices, such as links, may be seen merely as devices for visiting traditional documents. A more radical approach treats the episode as a virtual document. In this approach the text’s center of gravity, as it were, is no longer within the lexia, but in what emerges through the use of interactive devices. At its most extreme, meaning–and syntax–are more properly a function of the episode than the lexia (Rosenberg, “Structure”). What are the implications for prosody if the episode is treated as a virtual document? This is related to a second question: What is the structure of the episode? One answer to this second question is that the episode is structured linearly by time. If we accept this idea, then prosody within the episode seems little different from prosody within the lexia, except that the reader has chosen the interactions. In the disjunctive case the reader has chosen which route to follow in operating a given acteme, and in the conjunctive case the reader has chosen the order of visiting various elements. In both cases, the reader controls how much time she spends in any given place in the hypertext. The sense that many alternatives are possible at a given hinge point in the prosody may create the sense of that spot as a slot into which different continuations can be plugged; this very multiplicity may create a sense that some combination of some or all of the continuations is what in fact actually connects to the hinge point, which would subvert the concept of disjunctive hypertext.

 

But is the episode necessarily linear? I have argued elsewhere that the structure of the episode is what we make of it given the gathering interface that is available (Rosenberg, “Structure”). Alas, in most commercially available hypertext software, there is either no gathering interface at all, or it is at best extremely primitive. A gathering interface is in effect a hypertext the reader constructs of gatherings from the hypertext being read. This interface may use spatial or conjunctive methods, even if the hypertext being read uses a pure node-link model. (For an example of a commercial gathering interface operating on the World Wide Web, see Bernstein.)

 

How Does Time Run in a Non-linear Poem?

 

Much of this paper has been concerned with a spatial approach to prosody. Yet one can hardly leave time out of the picture. The study of hypertextual time is still in its infancy. Lusebrink has produced a taxonomy of time types based on narration; Calvi and Walker present a hypertextual treatment of analepsis and prolepsis. These discussions, while useful, don’t provide much insight for prosody. It is important to note at the outset that there are multiple concepts of time operating at once. At the most obvious level is what may be described as “usage-time,” a temporality that functions like an unedited recording of what the reader actually does. In fact, such a concept of time can be misleading even in the case of very linear text. Many authors have studied “isochrony,” the tendency of stressed syllables to form a regular musical beat. Even when stressed syllables do not fall according to a regular beat, the stresses themselves may so heavily influence our perception of time that our sense of time may be said to be based on linguistic features like stress rather than on the purely acoustical features that would be captured by a tape recorder. Thus the stresses become our measure of time, even when their acoustical correlates do not seem to be evenly spaced.⁸ Do interactive devices become the measure of time in an interactive poem? As hypertext is extended further into the fine structure of language, this may happen. Does usage-time include all the unintentional paths taken, as when one accidentally releases the mouse, or over-shoots a scroll bar?

 

A second concept of time is “gather-time”: the time one spends constructing and reading the results in a gathering interface. As I have mentioned, most often the only gathering interface at hand is the reader’s memory. Gather-time may start and stop: when a reader is foraging for an episode one may speak of gather-time as having stopped. This is no different really from the concept that the syllable-time of the poem is not running during the time it takes to find one’s place in the poem on the page when momentarily interrupted. In a spatial gathering interface, is gather-time running while one changes the spatial relationship of gathered elements? Some type of time is running of course. As one manipulates gathered phrases on a screen one exists in a relationship to them that has temporal dimension. But how does that relationship map onto syllables? Is the time spent moving a phrase mapped onto all the syllables at once? Can usage-time work in this same way, given the right interface? Clearly it is possible to arrange words using graphical methods so that the eye associates all of the words together as a single object all at once, even though there may be an underlying linear structure. How does time work for such an object? There is an initial exposure time, which is arguably linear, but what about time spent contemplating the word object as a whole? What kind of time is that? Is it suspended time? Is it autonomous time, in which the word object becomes in effect an object with its own temporality, not necessarily reconcilable with the concept of time of other objects present, much in the way two people present in the same event may not be able precisely to reconcile their individual concepts of time? Perhaps time can seem to proceed like a kind of loop, where words, having been initially examined, are treated as though they keep on playing.

 

Conjunctive structures bring their own set of questions to the issue of how time works. A conjunctive structure consists of all of its components resolved into a single whole. What is the time relationship among these components? It makes sense–at least metaphorically–to think of the usage-time for each component as being “equivalenced” with that of the other components. In the structures I call simultaneities, groups of words are placed in the same space, physically and logically–on top of one another. Usage history will clearly reveal the order in which the elements in the simultaneity were encountered (an order which is under some control by the user). These are different units of time; they aren’t literally simultaneous, in the sense of simultaneous voices, but the term “simultaneity” is meant to convey the idea that these units of time are meant to be treated as equivalent. This concept of equivalenced time as experienced by a single user is admittedly an abstraction. Equivalenced time is a correlate of the concept of autonomous word objects–words endowed with behavior–which are so eminently possible with the use of software.

 

At the opposite extreme from equivalenced time are units that are completely disengaged in time, units whose time relationship to one another is completely null. Juxtaposition–bringing together elements with no structural relation between them–may be thought of as the null structure, or “structural zero,” and may be considered as the most elemental maneuver at the heart of abstraction (Rosenberg, “Openings”). Clearly juxtaposition has been an important element in all of the arts for many decades. What is the null structure in the dimension(s) of time? In a hypertext, separate episodes may be time-disengaged even though the usage-time for one episode may have a clear relationship to the usage-time of another. Consider two memories, each of an incident whose time and date one cannot place, and in fact whose relative time and date one cannot place. Does it really matter in which order the memories were recalled? The true time relationship of the memories is that they are unresolved with respect to time.

 

In a hypertext, time itself may become spatialized. This may occur in any number of ways. In a multimedia piece, an interactive device may permit playing a sound or movie. Such an object will have its own timeline; it is common for interactive time-based media devices to represent this timeline on the screen as a control, that the user can directly manipulate. But there is not likely to be such a timeline for the hypertext as a whole; rather the timeline for the particular media object is–in its entirety–anchored at a particular location in the hypertext. One may speak of the entire timeline as being spatialized at a particular location. Even for text, where there is no formal player object, the entirety of the text object may be anchored at a specific location. There is an important point here: for linear text, travel through the text is accomplished by reading in a linear fashion–though to be sure there are many other ways of navigating in a printed text and most acts of reading involve a mixture of linear travel along the word stream, and directly accessing various parts of the text, whether through bookmarks, tables of contents, indices, footnotes, or the like. In a hypertext, even given a linear lexia, this linearity is not likely to be used for travel. Instead, the specific interactive devices are likely to be used for travel, leaving the lexia as an anchored spot which “doesn’t go anywhere.” Thus to the extent there is a linear lexia, it is an anchored linearity.

 

Multiuser Time

 

Throughout this whole discussion I have taken a perspective that would be called in computer jargon “single-user.” We tend to view “a reading” as a single reader reading a work which has a single (even if collective) author. In the computer world, multiuser games are quite common and I feel certain that we will see an increasing number of multiuser literary works in the future. Multiuser time involves stretches of time that are not necessarily resolvable from one user to another. The events of prosody are typically passages over particular points in a poem–syllables or line breaks, etc. Where there are multiple readers in the same textual space at the same time, it may not be possible to construct any form of synchronization that would resolve the various users’ interactions with the text over time. In this sense, the concept of disengaged time is not metaphorical, but a literal description of what takes place.⁹

 

The questions that hypertext raises for prosody have only begun to be asked. As I’ve tried to show, much of our understanding of prosody has concerned the way sound events cluster when encountered in a linear sequence, and thus prosody will have to be re-thought in the context of hypertext. The central questions will include: how are we to understand prosody when clustering occurs in space instead of time? How do sound events relate across disengaged units of time? What happens to these time disengagements when the poet recites–and how indeed is a poet to perform a hypertext work?

 

Notes

 

1. This section is a revised version of the first part of my “Notes Toward a Non-Linear Prosody of Space” (1995). A version of this paper was presented at the Assembling Alternatives conference at the University of New Hampshire in September, 1996. My thanks to Romana Huk for that opportunity.

 

2. The advent of the World Wide Web has benefited hypertext immeasurably, by vastly increasing exposure of hypertext to a truly mass audience; however it is regrettable that the limited forms of hypertext activity currently available in HTML limit understanding of the variety of hypertext activities that are possible. Some of these limitations can be overcome by extensive use of richer Web languages such as JavaScript and Java.

 

3. At its most extreme, hypertext structure may be used to represent the structure of syntax itself. In this case one clearly has conjunctive structure: a sentence consists of all of its parts; e.g. if we describe a sentence as consisting of a noun phrase and a verb phrase, the noun and verb phrases are hardly alternatives.

 

4. Gerard Manley Hopkins defined an outrider as a syllable that “doesn’t count” in the prosody. I must confess to not understanding the idea of a syllable that doesn’t count. The idea of an emptiness that doesn’t count is easier to understand, but that, too, seems problematic.

 

5. In “A Note on the Methods Used in Composing the 22 Light Poems,” Jackson Mac Low instructs: “The empty spaces in ‘Asymmetries’ are notations for silences lasting at least as long as it would take the reader to say the words printed directly above or below them.” A similar approach might leave a silence between units equal to the length of the last measure encountered, or the last rhythmic line. A directive “leave whatever silence between units seems natural” might tend to resolve to one of these possibilities.

 

6. A more troublesome issue is text imposed by the computer system itself, such as the words visible on a menu bar. Is such text like the invisible stage hands of the Japanese theater–there but you don’t see it? And what about text visible from another window? Should this be treated the way John Cage treated ambient sound?

 

7. Ted Nelson, who coined the term “hypertext,” has consistently advocated that all links should be bidirectional.

 

8. On a similar note, permit a personal anecdote. In the early seventies I made several pieces on magnetic tape using simultaneous overlays of my own voice. For one of these pieces I realized I could control these overlays very precisely by building up each fragment through making a tape loop of what was already laid down, making a tape loop of the voice to be added, then by controlling the offset of these tape loops I could get the desired effect. In one case the composition scheme called for a simultaneous attack (to use the electronic music term) of all of the voices. On one pass round the loop I felt I had nailed it exactly. But for some reason I decided to analyze the result at slow speed. Doing this it became clear that the attacks–in acoustical terms–were not simultaneous at all. What did line up simultaneously were the stressed syllables in each voice. I heard the attacks as being simultaneous–retroactive from the vantage point of having heard the stressed syllables. Linguistically the words sounded like they all started at the same time, even though acoustically this was not the case.

 

9. It is known that the brain is a massively parallel system. A simple act of seeing involves substantial processing by each retina, even before the signals reach the brain. Is it possible that even for a single reader, the “single-user” model may not be correct? Is the brain itself perhaps “multiuser”? This is the question posed by Daniel Dennett who devised a theory of consciousness based on the concept of a parallel “gang of demons.” In technical computer usage, a “daemon” is an asynchronous process–typically invisible to the user–that performs a particular type of work periodically or on request in the background. In most multiuser systems there is typically a daemon for delivering electronic mail. Another type of daemon responds to requests to view World Wide Web pages, and so on. Dennett suggests that there are centers in the brain that act as “time disengaged actors” even for a single mind. Whether or not this model of brain function prevails, hypertext is already beginning to render tangible this concept of multiple temporalities of reading and thinking.

 

Works Cited

 

• Bernstein, Mark. Web Squirrel. Computer Software. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1996.
• Calvi, Licia. “‘Lector in Rebus’: The Role of the Reader and the Characteristics of Hyperreading.” Hypertext ’99. New York: ACM, 1999.
• Chomsky, Noam, and Morris Halle. The Sound Pattern of English. New York: Harper and Row, 1968.
• Dennett, Daniel C. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1991.
• Duncan, Robert. Personal conversation. 1973.
• Ginsberg, Allen. Improvised Poetics. San Francisco: Anonym, 1971.
• Landow, G. P. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992.
• Larsen, Deena. Samplers. Computer Software. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1996.
• Lusebrink, Marjorie C. “The Moment in Hypertext: A Brief Lexicon of Time.” Hypertext ’98. New York: ACM, 1998.
• Mac Low, Jackson. 22 Light Poems. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1968.
• Moulthrop, Stuart. “Shadow of the Informand: A Rhetorical Experiment in Hypertext.” Perforations 3. Atlanta, GA: Public Domain, 1992.
• Nelson, Theodore H. Literary Machines. Swarthmore, PA: T.H. Nelson, 1981.
• Olson, Charles. “Projective Verse.” Human Universe and Other Essays. New York: Grove Press, 1967.
• Rosenberg, Jim. “Navigating Nowhere / Hypertext Infrawhere.” SIGLINK Newsletter 3.3 (December 1994). <http://www.well.com/user/jer/NNHI.html>.
• —. “Notes Toward a Non-linear Prosody of Space.” ht_lit Mailing List. 26 March 1995. <http://www.well.com/user/jer/nonlin_prosody.html>.
• —. “The Structure of Hypertext Activity.” Hypertext ’96. New York: ACM, 1996. <http://www.cs.unc.edu/~barman/HT96/P17/SHA_out.html>.
• —. Diffractions through: Thirst weep ransack (frailty) veer tide elegy. Computer Software. Watertown MA: Eastgate Systems, 1996.
• —. “Openings: The Connection Direct.” Poetics Journal 10 (June 1998). <http://www.well.com/user/jer/openings.html>. Also published as liner notes included in Intergrams. Computer Software. Watertown MA: Eastgate Systems, 1993.
• Walker, Jill. “Piecing together and tearing apart: finding the story in afternoon.” Hypertext ’99. New York: ACM, 1999.

 

Lawrence Johnson

University of Queensland
lojoj@bigpond.com

 

To calculate the loss–is this the challenge that Nicolas Abraham has given to Jacques Derrida? Between 1959 and 1975, the year of Abraham’s unexpected death, they were close friends, sharing what Elisabeth Roudinesco describes as “a marginal position in relation to the dominant philosophical discourse of the day, and an almost identical syntax” (599). Yet it can hardly be said that they participated together in an intellectual movement in the same way that Abraham and his wife Maria Torok–and, latterly, Nicholas Rand–had done. Texts such as De la grammatologie, L’ecriture et la différence, and La voix et le phénomène (1967) elevated Derrida to a position of eminence among French theorists; Abraham, however, remained virtually unknown outside French psychoanalysis until after his death. Only a fraction of his work was published during his lifetime and that was primarily in essay form. It was not until 1976, the year after his death, with the publication of Cryptonymie: Le Verbier de l’Homme aux Loups, that Abraham’s work became more widely known. Interestingly, Derrida himself may have contributed to the marked disparity between the levels of recognition that Abraham’s work received before and after his death. He refers rarely, if at all, to Abraham in his own work before 1975. Then, in two interviews at the end of the same year, he refers directly to Abraham’s work; he writes the foreword to Cryptonymie the following year; within four years he writes another essay, “Me–Psychoanalysis,” to introduce the English translation of Abraham’s “The Shell and the Kernel”; and, in the last two decades, references to the ideas of a crypt within the ego and the anasemic character of psychoanalytic language are made usually, though not always, in connection with Abraham’s name–in La carte postale, Psyché, The Ear of the Other, Donner la mort, Donner le temps, and elsewhere. What Roudinesco describes as an “identical syntax” might seem to us, when laid out in this way, more like a compensation or a reaction-formation in the direction of Derrida’s own project.

 

Yet nothing is gained by asking whether Derrida’s interventions contributed to Abraham’s belated recognition. Since his death, immediately prior to the publication of his most famous account of failed mourning, it has been almost impossible for the responses to Abraham’s work to divorce the theory of the crypt from his name and, therefore, from the life for which this name purports to have signed. Remarkably, of the many occasions on which Derrida refers to Abraham and his work, after his death, none refer directly to this death. As Peggy Kamuf noted soon after the publication of Abraham and Torok’s collection of essays in 1978 (L’ecorce et le noyau), Derrida’s foreword to Cryptonymie bears down so heavily upon the term which Abraham and Torok take as the title of this work, and upon the names of the analysts, that Derrida’s words “cut through to the stone so that we can read them as epitaph” (33). “Writing on Abraham’s crypt,” Derrida thus casts himself in the role of Abraham’s “eulogist” (34). The role of the eulogist is, of course, not to refer directly to the death, but to give praise and recall the life. Like the eulogia from which the eulogy takes its name–the bread of the Eucharist that is distributed among those who do not participate in communion–it keeps the body of the dead alive. The “fantasy of incorporation,” as Abraham and Torok described it, is just such a refusal to mourn–a refusal by the ego, that is, to introject loss:

 

Incorporation is the refusal to reclaim as our own the part of ourselves that we placed in what we lost; incorporation is the refusal to acknowledge the full import of the loss, a loss that, if recognized as such, would effectively transform us. (Shell 127)

 

Incorporation produces the gap in the psyche which Abraham and Torok have called the crypt, a place where the lost object is to be kept alive within the ego. We gain nothing, then, by asking whether Derrida contributes to Abraham’s recognition precisely because his interventions have performed the fantasy of incorporation as Abraham had described it in his own work.

 

To rephrase the question with which we are concerned here, is it possible under the spell of an incorporation to calculate loss? We have already seen that the question is complicated in the first instance by having as the particular object of loss the person who gave us the terms with which we have attempted to frame the question. As Kamuf asks, “was Abraham’s text dictated already from that ‘beyond-the-Self’ and beyond a grave, the unspecified circumstance which is finally his own death? What has Nicolas Abraham left us in his will?” (38). What Abraham has left us–the gift of his death–is, in short, loss. To incorporate “Abraham,” along with the work that carries this name as a signature, is to incorporate the theory of incorporation and expose the incorporation as a fantasy. Yet we recall that incorporation is, in Abraham’s words, a “refusal to reclaim as our own the part of ourselves that we placed in what we lost”–it is, in other words, a denial of the fundamental relation of the Self to the other. With the fantasy of incorporation exposed to the ego as a fantasy, it should dissolve, were it not that the ego believing itself to be replenished by incorporation would then have to recognize its own fundamental emptiness in the face of the other. The ego confronts a false choice: loss of the (indispensable) other or loss of the Self. As Derrida notes in his foreword to Cryptonymie, the crypt is a “monument” to this impossible choice between two “catastrophes,” since it is erected upon the contradiction that has forced the ego into this choice yet the crypt continually holds the choice over for deferral:

 

it remains that the otherness of the other installs within any process of appropriation (even before any opposition between introjecting and incorporating) a “contradiction,” or… an undecidable irresolution that forever prevents the two from closing over their rightful, ideal, proper coherence, in other words and at any rate, over their death. (xxii)¹

 

We note here that when Derrida translates Abraham’s theory of the crypt, the relation to the object of loss is grounded in a notion of property. He states the case concisely in Given Time, when he refers to his own comments on Cryptonymie: “Here again, it is a matter of the limits of a problematic of appropriation and the question of the gift will never be separated from that of mourning” (n.13, 129). Similarly, in Aporias, he lists the impossible work of mourning–the impossible choice between incorporation and introjection–as he explains it in the foreword to Cryptonymie, and the question of the “gift as the impossible” as it is raised in Given Time, among the aporetic non-concepts which put to the test the “passage” and the “partitioning” (partage) between opposite sides of a border or limit, in such a way that the multiple figure of the aporia “installs the haunting of the one in the other” (15-20).

 

Later, in The Gift of Death, Derrida will fold the question of this haunting into the question of the responsibility haunting implies. The “gift” and “mourning” may be of a kind–both impossible, aporetic, vaulting over two sides of a border–and so on–but the “gift of death,” or the “act of giving death” when understood as sacrifice (as in the sacrifice demanded by God of Abraham) can suspend “both the work of negation and work itself, perhaps even the work of mourning” (65). For Derrida, the key ideas here are “secrecy and exclusivity [non-partage]” (73). Abraham is no tragic hero, for tragic heroes can bemoan their lot. Instead, Abraham’s silence, that is, his inability to speak of his duty is the true measure of this duty, his “singular relation with the unique God” (74). In making this observation, Derrida interrogates Søren Kierkegaard’s claim that “ethical exigency is regulated by generality” (60).

 

Yet what interests me most here is the way in which Derrida approaches the “gift of death” as a (non-)concept. While the impossibility of the gift and death (in the work of mourning) are spelled out elsewhere in advance, they are brought together here in such a way that the boundary between these two non-concepts is subjected to scrutiny: aporia of aporias. This “boundary” is of course merely a mark of contingency, or of having to impose the limit to what one can write about anything within any single moment of writing. Yet here, in The Gift of Death, this boundary is problematized not only by what Derrida writes about the singularity of the ethical relation in each and every case–“Every other (one) is every (bit) other [tout autre est tout autre], every one else is completely or wholly other” (68)–but also by this writing itself. David Wills notes in the translator’s preface to The Gift of Death that this text is not “intended, as it might seem, to be the second volume of Given Time; it is instead a different reflection within a series on the question of the gift” (vii). Should we assume for a moment that the translator can ever know what is intended of a text (although we shall return to this question soon enough), then we must be struck by the assertion that this text is not, “as it might seem,” a continuation of Given Time. If this text is altogether “different,” then the interrogation of the “gift” and “mourning” through the “gift of death” must therefore seem more appropriation than continuation–the aporias of the gift and of mourning may be thought to “haunt” this later text.

 

In translating Abraham’s theory of the crypt, Derrida had already confronted just such a haunting across the limits of appropriation, as this problematic is itself one of the things he appropriates. When he performs the formation of the crypt by keeping the body of Abraham alive, at least in the figure of the “corpus” of his written work, he raises the question of the gift not only as it applies generally to the ego’s refusal to reclaim that part of itself that was invested in the lost object, but also in the specific sense that his performance appropriates Abraham’s corpus itself. Since it is a function of such appropriation that an undecidable irresolution prevents the closure of either introjection or incorporation over death, Derrida’s performance might also be seen as a deferral of that death through a calculation of the loss in advance. Here I am thinking not only of the numerous references to Abraham’s work after his death, but also of the calculated mourning and the work of translation performed in the last major work completed by Derrida before Abraham’s death: Glas (1974). In this paper, I shall identify fragments of an appropriation that underline–or undermine–the calculations in Glas, as they hide themselves within these very terms, “calculation,” “glas,” and others. Although I will not go so far as to say that these calculations anticipate Abraham’s death, we shall see that they establish a particular relation to his theories of translation and mourning: a relation that carries across the threshold or limit of his death in such a way that in Derrida’s subsequent performance, even as recently as The Gift of Death, the loss that this performance is calculated to incorporate is obscured by a loss that has already insinuated itself into the structure of calculation.

 

The crossing of this threshold leaves its mark in the two interviews that Derrida gave at the end of 1975, which are reproduced in Points as “Between Brackets I” and “Ja, or the faux-bond II.” While these interviews deal in the most part with Glas, it is also possible, I suggest, to read them as eulogia to Derrida’s recently deceased friend, in anticipation of the foreword to Cryptonymie. In them we find Derrida articulating the ways in which the mourning-work in Glas has not only been a work on mourning, as the “practical, effective analysis of mourning,” but has also been worked upon by mourning (48). Then, in a noticeable change of tense, he shifts into the present with the following passage which seems to refer to something other than this Glas that has already been completed and whose calculations are over:

 

Without them, beyond the philosophemes and post-philosophemes (so refined, polished, recombined, infinitely crafty) that treat all the states (which have worked themselves into a great state) of death, nothingness, denegation, idealization, interiorization, and so forth (I am thinking here of a place and a moment of my self in which I know them too well, in which they know me too well), I am trying to experience in my body an altogether other relation to the unbelievable “thing which is not.” (48-9)

 

From having-been worked upon by mourning to experiencing in the present (in one’s presence) another relation to the “thing which is not” (the absent remainder of death), Derrida shifts into a mode of non-response to the milieu of the interview that he calls “improvisation” (49). However much the finite machinery of the interview may limit or reign in the impromptu, the same machines “always end up forming a place that is exposed, vulnerable, and invisible to whoever tries out all the clever ruses” (49). He describes the way in which the interviewee cannot help but “betray his defenses” by allowing himself to be “restricted by the situation” into an appropriate selection from the mass of possible discourses (50). In this way, Derrida betrays his defenses, and it is by the end of the paragraph describing how “the speaker defends, confesses, betrays himself only by exposing his system of defense” that he also exposes a part of himself in a passage that in the context of the current discussion may sound rather like regret: “whoever decided that all of this deserved to be published or that anything deserved to be published, or rather that between a secret and its publication there has ever been any possibility of a code or a common rate in this place?” (51) Immediately as he does this, however, Derrida snaps his defenses back: “How did we get here? Ah, yes, the mourning for mourning, to the point of exhaustion” (51). This “ah, yes” is nothing, of course, like the “vast and boundless yes” that is cited at the end of Glas, and to which he turns in the interview at this moment, and yet it has everything to do with the ends or the limits of Glas. This “ah, yes” is not the movement of a response or of a responsibility to an other; insofar as it diverts the trajectory of a discourse that may have revealed the trace of the secret that is concealed by one’s defenses, this “ah, yes” amounts instead to a calculation.

 

Yet Derrida has already alerted us to the limits of calculation when he describes the “principal themes” of Glas in terms that sound remarkably like those with which he would describe the problematic of appropriation in his foreword to Cryptonymie:

 

reception (assimilation, digestion, absorption, introjection, incorporation), or non-reception (exclusion, foreclosure, rejection, and once again, but this time as internal expulsion, incorporation), thus the theme of internal or external vomiting, of mourning-work and everything that gets around to or comes down to throwing up. But Glas does not only treat these themes; in a certain way, it offers itself up to all these operations. (41-2)

 

In order to offer itself up to these operations, however, Glas will have been calculated to fail in its calculations or to offer itself up as non-receivable or unreadable; which is another way of saying that it will have been necessary for it to take in the other, since the possible modes of readership, or the possible “reading effects,” must be factored into the calculations of a text that seeks to become inaccessible to them. In order for the reading of Glasto be “taken in” (duped), in other words, it must have been “taken in” (incorporated) by the text, in advance:

 

The neither-swallowed-nor-rejected, that which remains stuck in the throat as other, neither-received-nor-expulsed (the two finally coming down to the same thing); that is perhaps the desire of what has been (more or less) calculated in Glas. Naturally, the important thing (for me in any case) is not to succeed with this calculation. (43)

 

The other of Glas is in every sense of the word beyond its calculations, which is why these calculations manifest desire–always the fantastic wish to include what they can never include. Since his language here anticipates the foreword to Cryptonymie, there can be no doubt that Derrida has Abraham and Torok’s work on his mind throughout the interview. Yet we might also suppose that his description of Glas in terms that are to be articulated in more detail in Cryptonymie is not entirely a reworking of an earlier text in terms of a later one. We know that Abraham and Torok had been working on their book for about five years–the introduction to Cryptonymie gives us this figure as its first words (lxx)–so what Derrida may be hinting at here is that his calculations in Glas also include (or at least desire) the theory of the crypt.

 

Yet the “important thing (for me in any case),” as Derrida admits, is that these calculations do not succeed, or rather, “the calculation only succeeds in/by failing” (43). We are brought here to the edge of a precipice, when confronted with a calculation attempting to be unreadable by incorporating its possible reading-effects, yet which also includes a crypt–the very condition of unreadability–among its possible reading-effects. However, the theory of the crypt, including what Nicholas Rand in his translator’s introduction to The Wolf Man’s Magic Word calls the method for making “the unreadable readable,” guarantees that the crypt will not close out reading altogether (lx). Importantly, at around the time that Derrida hints at the importance for Glas of the theory of the crypt, he is also preparing to write in the foreword to Cryptonymie that this theory and the method that it names can be found operating under different names in Abraham’s work from as early as 1961. The “hieroglyphic model,” as he calls it, is at work “everywhere (it is often evoked in The Magic Word),” but it is something more, and something other, than an “analogical” model, since the text to be deciphered, even as a “proper” name or body, is treated as something that is “not essentially verbal or phonetic” (xxix). Out of Abraham’s earlier work on translation, and from his early work on the “broken symbol,” Derrida extracts the lineaments of a model that is already equipped to receive the crypt as a harbinger of words as “word-things.” The desire of Glas to include the theory of the crypt is thus also a desire to incorporate this theory–and the body of concepts through which Abraham arrives at this theory–in the form of “word-things.” ²

 

From the beginning of the interviews that he gives in 1975, Derrida provides an example of a word that Glas omits even as it seems to have been necessary. The word is “crampon” (hook), which refers to what Imre Hermann calls the “clinging instinct” (cramponnement) and specifically to what Abraham, in his introduction to L’instinct filial, calls “de-clinging” (dé-cramponnement), the initial traumatic separation (6). In Glas, as Derrida points out, the word should have been impossible to ignore when, in an insert to the Genet column, he brings everything “down to living in the hook of the cripple; the cluster, the grapnel are a kind of hooked matrix” (Glas 216bi).³ The hook in the original is given throughout as “crochet,” even when Derrida lists the numerous grap- or crap-words which tie the word “hook” to the concept of clustering. He notes in the interview that the “crampon” should have imposed itself in Glas on everything that ties or holds together: on the relation “between the two columns or colossi,” for example; or on every reference to the fleece, since a key component of de-clinging is the reluctant release from one’s grip on the bodily hair of the mother; or especially, he adds, “in the passage from gl, to gr, and to cr that moves all throughout the last pages and the last scenes, and so on” (7-8). Yet he also freely admits in the interview that in writing Glas, he will have been unable to extricate the written text from the embraces, the brackets or parentheses, or what Abraham calls “parenthemes,” of the mother that it clings to with its written hooks, its emphatic marks and punctuations (9). Gregory Ulmer takes up this point in “Sounding the Unconscious,” suggesting that Glas may be “read as an anasemic scene performing certain aspects of, and relationships to, the drive of research as clinging to or detachment from the mother” (99). What Ulmer adds to Derrida’s improvised reflections on the relation of Glas to the mother is that, for Abraham, the drive of research is chief among the substitutive acts by which the mature individual carries on the desire for the mother, “a quest for an object that is not proper to him” (qtd. 99). His point is of course that a theory of the clinging instinct, a theory of the crampon, is arrived at by just such an educative activity, in the search for that which cannot be grasped: the unconscious.

 

Abraham calls “anasemic” those words or concepts which direct us away from what they would usually mean, pointing us instead toward the source of meaning, the formation of the unconscious, and so on. Such words, like the crampon in this case, thus refer to themselves not in the sense of a one-to-one correspondence with a here-and-now–Derrida spends much of the first interview in 1975 problematizing the idea of a “here-and-now”–but, in a sense, in no sense at all, or, as Ulmer states the matter, in “a certain pre-sense, as opposed to the focus of phenomenology on presence” (99). What these words describe, then, is the degree to which the source of meaning treats words more like things than words in their relation to the unconscious. Importantly, in his “Introduction to Hermann,” Abraham uses a term to describe the pre-originary status of the relation of such words to meaning that resonates sharply with echoes of the Derridean arche-trace: he calls them “arche-models” (qtd. 99). In Hermann’s use of the crampon, Abraham finds the exemplary arche-model, as it is a concept that underwrites all other anasemic-psychoanalytic terms. It is, as Derrida has stated the case, “archi-psychoanalytic.” Yet, as Derrida confesses in the interview, this arche-model has been subjected to the process it describes–substitutive clinging–in such a way that the word itself becomes the word-thing that will not be made a word. The crampon, this arche-model, in its absence from Glas, remains as what Abraham and Torok call an “archeonym” in their own introduction to Cryptonymie (lxxi).

 

The cat, then, would seem to have been let out of the bag: the Glas-secret would appear to have been revealed. Or has it? In closing, I want to suggest that crampon also functions in the mode of the defensive “ah, yes” that I discussed earlier. And I want to consider another unspeakable word that has been glossed over in Glas, one Derrida reveals when this defensiveness momentarily eases. The cat, indeed, is still very much something to which Derrida clings. Gayatri Spivak notes in “Glas-Piece: A Compte Rendu” that the Genet column allows itself to be “dis-integrated” by virtue of the “sleight of hand” with which it connects its numerous fragments, and we observe that among the first of its “monstrations” is the chain of words beginning with “cata”: Catachresis, catafalque, cataglottism.

 

They seem linked, but the accompanying lexical entries show that they are not really. Cata- in the first is “against,” in the second “cat” (name of a war-machine by catachresis) or “to see,” in the third “research.”… Here the very language is kept catachrestic, and this chain of words might be its signal. Indeed Derrida quotes the dictionary entry that points out that the French name of language–langue or tongue–is a catachresis. (39)

 

This “cata” is what is known in linguistic parlance as a bound morpheme, since it can not stand free-floatingly as a word. Such binding is of course one of the Glas-themes which leads us to assume that the text clings to the idea of clinging. Yet we also note that the cat that clings in the form of a bound morpheme does not become so bound without introducing into the word it forms a deceptive uncertainty with regard to what Abraham and Torok call the word’s “allosemes” (Cryptonymie passim). We must not forget however that this deception is staged for us by Glas, floating the “cata” free as a word-thing that opens a gap within binding, or that performs for our benefit the de-clinging at the source of the meanings of words. When Derrida reflects upon Glas in the interview and observes the necessary absence of the word-thing crampon from its pages, he does so in the knowledge that the calculation of a certain de-clinging has been performed within the uncertainty of Glas from the outset. This crampon, then, is a calculation that Derrida adds in the interview to the possible reading-effects that will have been included already in the calculations made in Glas. We will not be surprised to see that at a point in the interview when his defenses have been momentarily eased, Derrida recovers himself and his calculations with the following: “Where were we? Oh yes, the cramp” (24).

 

So what has he said that requires a recovery from him in the interview? We are probably no longer surprised to find that at this point, Derrida has sidetracked himself with what Abraham has said about “mourning as concerns the loss of clinging” (24). De-clinging lends itself to anxiety precisely because of the “whirlpool-like character” that belongs to the instincts, since their effects are constitutive of the topical structure that is also threatened by their desiring drive. He notes that this push-me-pull-you is what Abraham terms the “doubly cited movement” of anxiety in Hermann’s theory (qtd. 24). Derrida’s anxiety becomes apparent as he is drawn into the whirlpool-like contours of a text which cites one text in order to cite another–he performs, in this sense, his own doubly cited movement:

 

But, once again, read Nicolas Abraham’s “glossary.” This is how it ends: “‘Oh! But that is something I’ve always known…. How could I have forgotten it?’ If we have our way, this is what the reader will now refer to with a single word: to hermannize.” (24)

 

The next words we read from Derrida are the calculated recovery: “Where were we?”

 

I want to focus here upon a word to which Derrida resorts as he feels himself drawn into this doubly cited movement of anxiety: he refers to Abraham’s “Introduction to Hermann” for the only time that I am aware of, anywhere in all of his writings, with Abraham’s own word for his mode of reading Hermann, as a “glossary.” Using this cue, I want also to consider another glossary, written by Abraham between 1950 and 1951. This glossary, A Glossary of Paradigmatics, was written, though not finished, while he was still very much under the sway of Husserl, and the project was obviously abandoned as he began to be more interested with psychoanalysis and the sources of meaning overlooked by the phenomenological attitude. It is thanks to Torok and Rand, who have written an essay on this Glossary as a postscript to Abraham’s early essays on poetry published in Rhythms: On the Work, Translation, and Psychoanalysis, that we know of the existence of this unfinished work. Importantly, they also claim that Abraham “had no intention of having the Glossary published without an accompanying text to breathe life into its terms” (134). Again, we confront this question of whether a translator can know “intention,” a question that returns with particular force, as we shall see, because the structure of translation is precisely what the Glossary analyses. Before exploring this question more closely, I want to consider whether Derrida could have known of this unpublished document, given his close friendship with Abraham over a substantial period of time.

 

Recall now the two moments in the interviews in 1975 when, as I have pointed out, Derrida’s defenses are eased and his anxieties exposed. There was a momentary concern over who decides that anything deserves to be published, or “that between a secret and its publication there has ever been any possibility of a code or a common rate in this place?” (51); and there was this perhaps unintentional dropping of a name of an unfinished, unpublished document, apparently intended by its author to remain a secret. As we have seen, Derrida would later record in The Gift of Death that secrecy, as in “Abraham’s silence,” is essential in understanding the ethical singularity of responsible relations. Of course, this Abraham cannot be mistaken for the author of the Glossary, but it should also not be mistaken for the father of Isaac. After all, this Abraham is a far different character from the father castrator who is the subject of the Hegel column from pages forty to forty-five in Glas. The difference between the Abraham discussed in Glas and the Abraham discussed in The Gift of Death may be identified as the difference between the Abraham of Hegel and that of Kierkegaard: the former the castrating primal founder of a people; the latter a pathetic figure incapable of making himself understood. Yet we should not lose sight of the degree to which this difference is measurable here because the two are presented to us by Derrida in texts that I identify as crucial markers in his relationship with a friend whose name is also Abraham. Given this context, when we hear Derrida discuss Abraham’s silence, are we not struck by what must seem a rueful gesture: to be able to continue to speak, to write, to publish, or more precisely, to be able to speak of his friend’s secrecy, and just perhaps to publish his secret?

 

Thus, we arrive at my key point: Derrida’s anxiety in these interviews in 1975, soon after the death of his good friend, centers not on whether he may have been in any way complicit in his friend’s relative anonymity, but on whether he may have told the world more than he should have. We know of course that the existence of the Glossary would remain a secret until the publication of Rhythms by Rand and Torok in 1985. Surely, ten years earlier, Derrida had no cause for concern. Yet his subsequent meditations on the gift of death seem now to suggest to us that the issue of Abraham’s secret is crucial in understanding Derrida’s own singular relation to his deceased friend. As I have argued elsewhere, much of the rest of The Gift of Death uses the discussion of the Czech philosopher Jan Patocka, in part, as a refusal to mourn for another recently departed friend, Emmanuel Levinas.⁴ Yet I also note that the third section, entitled “Whom To Give To,” is something of the odd chapter out, since it suspends the discussion of Patocka’s work to focus on Kierkegaard’s Abraham. My point is that Derrida will momentarily suspend his refusal to mourn Levinas in order to re-assert an ongoing performance of incorporation (a prior refusal to mourn), but the temptation to combine the two is forcefully resisted, by imposing the limit of chapter breaks between them: the singularity of each relation is maintained.

 

Now, let us turn our attention for a moment to what Torok and Rand reveal about the Glossary. We are told that the project was intended to provide “an analysis of the various structures of translation as well as a new technique of translation” (134). This analysis identified the work to be translated as “paradigmatic” and the work that turns toward this other work as “paradeictic,” though, as Torok and Rand point out, both of these works could be described as paradeictic since even the supposedly paradigmatic work was turned toward another work within translation, a chimeric other work or an ideal model (136). This ideal model may well be read as the prototype for what was to become the “arche-model” or “anasemia” of Abraham’s later work, and might thus be described as the arche-model of the theory of the arche-model, the arche-model par excellence. Little wonder, then, that in the closing sections of Cryptonymie, Abraham quips, “We have basically always done paradigmatics” (qtd. 135). There is nothing in this that should be a cause of Derrida’s anxiety, since he seems to have gone out of his way in the interviews to avoid direct reference to the term “arche-model,” and even when he later draws connections between Abraham’s last projects and earlier material, this chronology is traced back no further than 1961. Yet let us look closely at what Torok and Rand call the “centrepiece” of the Glossary, its entry on the ideal model of translation, which Abraham calls calque:

 

An essentially alloglottic paradeictic work displaying references to all the elements of a complete model. Calque presupposes a reflexive experience of the original poetic universe. In principle, it accomplishes the isotopia and homeo-syntopia of all poetic levels while producing the equivalent of all the horizontal and vertical elements. (qtd. 143)

 

Symptomatic of its phenomenological attitude, this arche-model of arche-models is, it is true, directed toward an original universe rather than a pre-originary one, yet as the condition for the possibility of what has traditionally been conceived in poetics as the original of a translation, calque creates the initial movement toward the pre-originary that characterizes Abraham’s later work.

 

Reading the centrepiece, though, are we not struck immediately by what Derrida would call its glas-effects, and by the degree to which it voices so many concerns that Glas thematizes or takes as its object? Isolating the inserts in the Genet column from pages 149 to 160 would be enough to demonstrate Derrida’s suspicion of translations that are deaf to the “+L effect (consonant +L),” to the extent that what he looks for in a translation is not only the carry-over of the form of words from one text to another, but also the remains of this division. As the entry calque suggests, such a remainder is inscribed in the process of translation itself, as the a priori of the division, and that what translation does is leave the trace of this a priori in the separation of the original from its copy. The word calque is French for a tracing, though it is inflected here in a way that would suggest an anasemic dimension, pointing instead toward the source of the tracing. In Glas, of course, the word is never used, but the other French word for a tracing–tracé–appears as the homonym for the verb “to trace” (tracer), indicating, like Abraham’s calque, both the tracing itself and its source within a single word and its allosemes (68b, 79b). Furthermore, the word tracé is the object of one of the text’s key calculations, when it is inverted to form the deviation or gap (écart) whose traces (trace d’écart) are left as a remainder of the glas-effect (passim).

 

Yet this calque is not only thematized by Glas as an absent term whose presence is hinted at in the same way as the crampon. The term itself has, I suggest, been very carefully included within Derrida’s calculations–indeed, we hear its echo within the word “calculation” itself, in calcul, and in calculer. If we return to the opening pages for a moment, to the clinging and de-clinging “cata-,” we note carefully what Derrida points out to us from these passages: not that the cat is itself errant–he will return to that point later–but that the “ALCs sound, clack, explode, reflect, and (re)turn them-selves in every sense and direction, count and discount themselves” and so on (2bi). I emphasize now something that he states in the interview in 1975 as an aside, between brackets as it were: “and since you ask me about Glas, I put in brackets the fact that ‘claque,’ the word and the thing, as one says, is one of the objects of the book” (40). If this object of Glas, the “claque,” reflects and (re)turns itself in every direction, we see not only the movement from the ALC to the CLA of the clack (and, indeed, of the “clamor” whose German form Klammer is one of the forms of the crampon) but we also see the (re)turn to the ALC of the calque. Taking this another step further, we can see the many turns and soundings of the glas-effect: “class” is a key word in the sounding of glas; and ça (“it/id,” “savoir absolu,” and just about everything to which Glas “comes down”) especially with the “hook” turned, as Derrida suggests in 1975, is the CA; to this we can add that “Glas” thus sounds the (re)turn of the “calque.”

 

Derrida’s anxiety in the interviews in 1975 may well be attributable, then, to his knowledge that with the publication of Glas, a part of Abraham’s secret Glossary had also been published (albeit cryptically) not long before his death. After this death, in 1975, Derrida will have been acutely aware that Abraham’s legacy and his will may already have been compromised. Of course, the question of his will has already been traversed by the issue of “intention” which Abraham’s own unpublished, untranslated material interrogates. This may well be the reason why Derrida so abruptly raises the question in 1975 of who gets to decide, “between a secret and its publication,” what code is to be brought into play. In his own singular relation to Abraham, a specific responsibility inheres, which cannot be reduced to the simple question of what a dead author intended. We must remember that, for Derrida at least, Abraham’s death is not, in the end, really about his “death,” even (or, especially) when this death is inseparable from his name and the works his name signs. Derrida has always been certain that one of the things that remains most uncertain is our relation to death, since the question of this relation is a limit that attempts to close the threshold. He writes in Aporias: “The relevance of the question of knowing whether it is from one’s own proper death or from the other’s death that the relation to death or the certitude of death is instituted is limited from the start” (61). The loss that Abraham asks Derrida to calculate is not his death per se, but is a loss in the body of his work that Abraham seemed to want to impose upon this corpus. In the end–or, rather, vaulting across the threshold of this end–Derrida’s calculations in Glas, as in the glas-effects of calculation as such, already incorporate this loss insofar as they have incorporated the whole of the body of work that contains the secret of its pre-origins (its incomplete arche-model: the Glossary and its centrepiece, calque). In the end, all later calculations, and the calculation of loss, answer to these glas-effects.

 

Notes

 

1. All references to Cryptonymie are from the English translation, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word, by Nicholas Rand. Where I refer to Cryptonymie by the French title, I will be discussing the original text although I cite the translation here for convenience. Where I later refer to The Wolf Man’s Magic Word by its English title, I will be discussing Rand’s preface to the translation, which does not of course appear in the original.

 

2. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has read Glas on the model of the crypt’s “counter-fiction: to analyse the cryptonym, to spell the author’s signature. The debris of d-words is scattered all over the pages” (24). In “Glas-Piece: A Compte Rendu,” Spivak reads Glas as a site not unlike the crypt within the ego, in which Derrida’s name is held and is repeatedly writing itself as a thing. Yet she notes that this rewriting of the name expresses a desire: “his own autobiographical desire” to write one’s own name everywhere in the folds of the text and not just on its surface (24).

 

3. Page numbers from Glas follow the system employed by John P. Leavey, Jr., in Glassary, whereby the letter or letters after each page number indicate the column from which each quotation is taken (a or b), and whether the source is included in Glas as an insert (i).

 

4. “R.S.V.P.,” forthcoming in Paragraph (July 2000).

Works Cited

 

• Abraham, Nicolas and Maria Torok. The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Nicholas T. Rand. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994.
• —. The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy. Trans. Nicholas Rand. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.
• Derrida, Jacques. Aporias. Trans. Thomas Dutoit. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993.
• —. “Foreword: Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok.” Trans. Barbara Johnson. The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy. By Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. Trans. Nicholas Rand. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. xi-xlviii.
• —. The Gift of Death. Trans. David Wills. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.
• —. Glas. Trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., and Richard Rand. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1986.
• —. “Me–Psychoanalysis: An Introduction to the Translation of ‘The Shell and the Kernel’ by Nicolas Abraham.” Trans. Richard Klein. Diacritics 9.1 (1979): 4-12.
• —. Points… Interviews, 1974-1994. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Ed. Elisabeth Weber. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995.
• Kamuf, Peggy. “Abraham’s Wake.” Diacritics 9.1 (1979): 32-43.
• Leavey, John P., Jr. Glassary. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1986.
• Roudinesco, Elisabeth. Jacques Lacan & Co. A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925-1985. Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990.
• Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Glas-Piece: A Compte Rendu.” Diacritics 7.3 (1977): 22-43.
• Torok, Maria and Nicholas T. Rand. “Paradeictic: Translation, Psychoanalysis, and the Work of Art in the Writings of Nicolas Abraham.” Rhythms: On the Work, Translation, and Psychoanalysis. By Nicolas Abraham. Trans. Benjamin Thigpen and Nicholas T. Rand. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995.
• Ulmer, Gregory L. “Sounding the Unconscious.” Glassary. By John P. Leavey, Jr. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1986. 23-129.

 

Steven Helmling

Department of English
University of Delaware
helmling@udel.edu

 

“History is what hurts,” writes Fredric Jameson in an oft-quoted phrase that many readers seem to take as a motto for his work as a whole. If Jameson matters, it is to the presumably minority audience for whom the anodyne declaration of the “end of history” only exacerbates the abrasions it so officiously promised to soothe. For Marxists and other Left intellectuals still alive to the hurt of history (as well, of course, for many triumphalist conservative detractors), Jameson is a standard-bearer, “representative” of critical (unhappy) consciousness in a period that has seen the fortunes of the Left decline precipitously. “Representativeness” involves a by-now familiar problematic, but from at least Marxism and Form (1971) on, Jameson has prescribed for cultural critique a “dialectical writing” that should enact, perform, indeed, suffer the contradictions and predicaments of its subject matter–for only thus can critique participate in the dialectic of history itself.

 

Which raises the problem, how should critique be written, or, more pointedly, in what sense can critique be said to succeed, in a period when revolution itself is failing? This anxiety, a kind of “self consciousness,” agitates Jameson’s writing continuously, and his resourcefulness as a writer–the allusiveness and inventiveness of his “dialectical writing”–helps make his work “representative” in the sense of registering not merely the intellectual dilemmas of socialism in our period, but something of the experiential texture, the vécu of these disappointments and failures as well. The adviso that “History is what hurts,” for example, comes in the peroration to the opening chapter of The Political Unconscious–a passage that treats the difficulties of the revolutionary tradition as continuous with those of the critical and theoretical labor that would guide, critique, or even merely narrate it:

 

the most powerful realizations of a Marxist historiography… remain visions of historical Necessity… [and] of the inexorable logic involved in the determinate failure of all the revolutions that have taken place in human history: the ultimate Marxian presupposition… is the perspective in which the failure or the blockage, the contradictory reversal or functional inversion of this or that local revolutionary process is grasped as “inevitable”…. Necessity is not… a type of content, but rather the inexorable form of events; it is therefore a narrative category… a retextualization of History… as the formal effects of what Althusser, following Spinoza, calls an “absent cause.” (PU 101-2)

 

Recall that the topic is not History, but rather “dialectical” critique of the type Jameson here both theorizes andattempts to write. The “vision” of “inevitable failure” here prescribed for critique is a “textual effect,” to be achieved in the writing, but also a motivation of critique generically–and to inscribe “failure” as the motivation of an enormously ambitious project, and the measure of its success, is to incur a peculiar difficulty: what Jameson calls, in “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology” (1985), a certain “textual determinism”:

 

the purpose of the theorist is to build as powerful a model of capital as possible, and as all-embracing, systemic, seamless, and self-perpetuating. Thus, if the theorist succeeds, he fails: since the more powerful the model constructed, the less possibility will be foreseen in it for any form of human resistance, any chance of structural transformation. (IT2 48)

 

How to manage this predicament–exploit it? suffer it? dramatize it? but dramatizing also somehow (how?) the persistence of “human resistance”?–these are questions to which Jameson’s 1984 essay, “Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” offers a suggestive set of mediations–less an “answer” to these questions than an enactment of them.

 

The “Postmodernism” essay has too often been taken as a series of theses on, and even on behalf of, “the postmodern”–a reading that involves, most simply, an exultation over the grave of bad old modernism and a triumph (however qualified) of the generational revolts of the 1960s. Jameson, needless to say, has much sympathy with these values, but neither his repudiation of modernism, nor his embrace of the postmodern are so simple as many of his more excited readers have wanted to believe. He is at pains in the essay itself to warn against taking the modern/postmodern binary as an occasion for a “moralizing” choice between them; such either/or thinking, he cautions, invoking both Hegel and Marx, would be un-dialectical (P 46-7). So when Jameson speaks of the (postmodern) “euphoria” and “joyous intensities” displacing “the older affects of anxiety and alienation” (P 29) or, even more rapturously, later (in the 1991 book that reprints and draws its title from the 1984 essay), of “the relief of the postmodern generally, a thunderous unblocking of logjams and a release of new productivity that was somehow tensed up and frozen, locked like cramped muscles, at the latter end of the modern period” (P 313), he is ventilating an anxious hope, not announcing an achieved victory. The essay’s title, after all, retained in full for the book, identifies “postmodernism” with “the cultural logic of late capitalism.”

 

Nevertheless, the enthusiasm over “the postmodern” has its “truth,” and attests something real, some genuine “[textual] effect,” in or of Jameson’s “dialectical sentences,” the excitements of the Jamesonian scriptible qualifying (perhaps, overriding?) the announced presupposition(s) or “vision” of “inevitable failure.” We will shortly consider how this happens, but we must begin with the presupposition itself. The “Postmodernism” essay, like the virtually contemporaneous “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology” (1985), foregrounds the problem of “textual determinism”:

 

there is a strange quasi-Sartrean irony–a “winner loses” logic–which tends to surround any effort to describe a “system,” a totalizing dynamic, as these are detected in the movement of contemporary society. What happens is that the more powerful the vision of some increasingly total system or logic–the Foucault of the prisons book is the obvious example–the more powerless the reader comes to feel. Insofar as the theorist wins, therefore, by constructing an increasingly closed and terrifying machine, to that very degree he loses, since the critical capacity of his work is thereby paralyzed, and the impulses of negation and revolt, not to speak of those of social transformation, are increasingly perceived as vain and trivial in the face of the model itself. (P 5-6)

 

To this problem, the essay’s characterizations of “postmodernism” may be taken as agitating variously anxious or hopeful responses.

 

And also, I want to argue, quite self-conscious responses: more than in The Political Unconscious or earlier works, Jameson’s writings of the ’80s make explicit what had earlier been left implicit, namely the import of problems arising from the determining force of “the vast text of the social” upon critique itself, or as Jameson’s ’80s usage increasingly calls it, “theoretical discourse”–a term seemingly value-neutral, in contrast with such terms as “dialectical history” (or “historiography”) with which Jameson more readily identifies his project. “Theoretical discourse” usually encodes Jameson’s reservations about “the ideology of the text,” i.e., theory’s reduction of History to (mere) textuality or representation, its self-congratulatory connoisseurship (another apolitical aestheticism) of highbrow “jouissance” and “the pleasures of the text.” But the same logic that entails upon “Marxist historiography” a particular “vision” or “textual effect” means that Jameson’s reservations about the “ideology of the text” enumerate pitfalls or failures threatening any practice (including his own) of “dialectical history” or “Marxist historiography” themselves. The term “theoretical discourse” signals the dangers inherent in the scriptible, whereby the utopian energies of the writing may devolve into a mere aesthetic or “ideology,” “an imaginary solution to a real problem.”

 

To such inexorable “logic(s)” generally, and the self-reinforcing or -fulfilling impasse of the “winner loses logic” in particular, the whole drift of the “Postmodernism” essay seems to suggest a loosening or relaxation (even a “thunderous unblocking”?)–as if these problems themselves are part and parcel of that very “logjam” of the modern that (the essay dares hope) may now be breaking up and passing away. A pregnant contradiction insinuates itself at the essay’s opening, in that the problem of “textual determinism” is prompted by that of “periodization”: periodization implies narrative, and narrative implies a circumscribed field (an “ideological closure”) of possibilities of character and event. How to project “postmodernism” as something really new, when the advent of “the new” is perhaps the oldest story (even “ideology”) of all? Jameson’s essay elaborates the potentialities of the postmodern novum largely in libidinal terms–“intensities,” “the delirious” and “euphoria,” and their inverse, the “waning of affect” (both “joyous” and “boring”), the Deleuzian-Guattarian and Lacanian rhetoric of “the schizo.” The function of these novelties in “Postmodernism,” to loosen or unblock the coils of what had previously been an ever-tightening “logic,” is one his earlier writing had assigned to the operations of “the dialectic,” or to “dialectical thinking.” Indeed, in the “Postmodernism” essay itself, Jameson insists again that Hegel’s and Marx’s renewal of dialectic has for some time now provided us with the necessary, the sufficient, and the only antidote to the prison-house of antinomic “logic” (ideology, metaphysics, History, language, representation).

 

But if the libidinal novelties celebrated in “Postmodernism” merely repeat a Hegelian/Marxist dialectical gesture, how “new” can they really be? Moreover, to the extent that their claim of newness seems to relegate the dialectic itself to a now superceded past, they approach what Jameson himself reprehends (IT2 133) as naively “ideological” kinds of “post-Marxism.” To the extent that to “renew” the dialectical gesture is merely to “repeat” it, they make the dialectic itself merely another instance of the problematic of repetition, another “old story” rather than the very principle of “the new” itself that, in the Hegel-and-Marx tradition, is the dialectic’s raison d’être.

 

I make these points not to hoist Jameson on the petard of contradiction, but to indicate the scope of contradiction and conflictedness, of critical desire and anxiety, that his writing here (and elsewhere) both manages to summon and appoints itself to negotiate. For even as he deplores the “winner loses logic” that continually enforces, even exaggerates the “closures” against which it protests, Jameson is obeying (or exploiting) it in his own writing, and in this very essay most particularly. Which is to say the “Postmodernism” essay needs a theme, a problematic, a motif or “motivation,” sufficiently supercharged to answer to the extremity–or accomplish the extremification–of these tangles.

 

Hence the role the essay assigns, or the use to which it puts, the rhetoric of “the sublime,” a discursive formation with a long and rich history, a term–Freud would call it an “antithetical word”–that maximizes both extremity (an absolute affective or aesthetic limit [or limitlessness] of physio-psychological experience) and ambivalence (conflating polar extremes of feeling: pleasure and pain, joy and terror, grandiosity and annihilation, transport and entrapment, enlargement and contraction, omnipotence and powerlessness…). Vocabularies of affect tend to connotations either of narrowed, focused force, or of a conflicted and thereby diffused ambivalence; “the sublime,” uniquely (sublimely?), delivers both, seeming to make these usually opposed tendencies collaborate to reinforce and strengthen each other (rather than balance or cancel each other out)–and to that degree, “the sublime” might be said to “perform” something of what it “constates.” (Wittgenstein warned against the fallacy of supposing that the concept of sugar is sweet; but “the sublime” approaches being an exception that proves–i.e., probes–Wittgenstein’s rule.) In any case, Jameson’s scriptible involves a constant pathos of the relationship of thetic to themic: neither their (critical) differentiation nor their (hermeneutic) “fusion” ever turns out to be more than provisionally or limitedly possible–and hence the instabilities and reversals that enable “the sublime” to stand in for “the dialectic” itself.

 

Such are the agitations with which Jameson’s “Postmodernism” essay will manage to inflect “the sublime.” But Jameson’s first substantial invocation of “the sublime,” slightly precedes, and makes a surprising contrast with, its projection in “Postmodernism.” In “Pleasure: A Political Issue” (1983), among Jameson’s primary concerns is to rebut apolitical, even depoliticizing, ’70s readings of the Barthesian binary of “plaisir” and “jouissance” in order to rescue Barthes both from enthusiasts, who valorize this view of him, and from (politically oriented) detractors who revile it. So far from celebrating a privatistic hedonism (writes Jameson), Barthes’s Pleasure of the Text “restore[s] a certain politically symbolic value to the experience of jouissance, making it impossible to read the latter except as a response to a political and historical dilemma” (IT2 69). Jameson concedes “plaisir” to the enemy, the better to recuperate “jouissance” for political (or at least “politically symbolic”) purposes; and to that end he assimilates the Barthesian binary to Edmund Burke’s “beautiful” and “sublime,” a move justified in the first place by the latter term’s connotations of an “intensity” that marks a transport beyond the manageable domain of simple “pleasure” or the merely “beautiful,” but with more explicit reference in Jameson’s text to Barthes’s evocations of “fear.” Thus Jameson works on “jouissance” an astonishing reversal, finding in the experience of ecstasy an affinity with the Burkean sublime of terror, an effect that “threatens, diminishes, rebukes individual human life” (IT2 72). ¹

 

This chastening continues the motivation of the “vision” of “inevitable failure”; in the “Pleasure” essay, it manifests in the “capital-logic” metanarrative according to which “the subject of History” turns out to be not the proletariat but that “unfigurable and unimaginable thing,” Capitalism itself (IT2 73). Which is to say that in “Pleasure,” “the sublime” enforces that very “textual determinism” or “winner loses logic” that Jameson protests in “Postmodernism”–hence the surprising contrast between the two essays, a contrast less of the ways they diagnose than in the ways they mobilize these problematics. In “Pleasure: A Political Issue,” “the sublime” functions to augment the sense of powerlessness before not merely the “winner loses logic” Jameson identifies as generic to his project, but before that much larger and more grasping “Capital-logic” or “ideological closure” of what the later essay will call “the cultural logic of late capitalism.” But in the later essay, as if in some unforeseen dialectical reversal, this very “logic” generates varieties of “lawless” libidinalisms incompatible with Capitalism’s program to rationalize, routinize, instrumentalize, commodify, reify, or colonize them. In “Pleasure,” “the sublime” functions to bring apparently divergent and conflicting motifs–“fear” and “jouissance,” preeminently–to a concentrated focus; it disciplines a variety of impulses or affects to a single effect. In “Postmodernism,” by contrast, it functions to loosen or even reverse this inexorable “winner loses logic.” If the earlier essay inflects “jouissance” with historical terror, the later enables the transformation of “fear” or “shock” back into “joyous intensities.”

 

Put it that among the “motivations” of the “Postmodernism” essay is a certain dis-motivation or de-motivating, a de-linking of terms that would elsewhere in Jameson’s discourse have entrained an inexorable (antinomic) “logic,” “Necessity,” “History,” “closure.” Probably the best-circulated example is that encoded in Jameson’s contrast of (modern) “parody” with (postmodern) “pastiche”: the former motivated by a critical attitude toward its original; the latter, more anomically, simply aping received cultural styles in a “neutral practice of mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse… blank parody” (P 17). Here the general theme of the “waning of affect” reprises an earlier incertitude about why Warhol’s Coke bottles, etc., “ought to be powerful and critical political statements” but seem not to be, thus raising doubt “about the possibilities of political or critical art in the postmodern period of late capital” (P 9). And indeed, of political critique, or critical “theory”: in the “Introduction” to Postmodernism, Jameson declares that “I would not want to have to decide whether the following chapters are inquiries into the nature of… ‘postmodernism theory’ or mere examples of it” (P x)–a gesture cognate with the “Postmodernism” essay’s brooding, alternately sanguine and anxious, over the disappearance of “critical distance” itself. (It was in the ’80s that Jameson advanced “homeopathy” as a figure for his critical project: “To undo postmodernism homeopathically by the methods of postmodernism: to work at dissolving the pastiche by using all the instruments of pastiche itself…” [Kellner 59]).

 

“Postmodernism” thus dis-motivates, or re-motivates, “the sublime” itself, by a sort of performative fiat, as much in the actual (libidinal) effects of the way it is written as in its deployment–the most consequential in Jameson’s oeuvre to date–of Lacanian, Lyotardian, Deleuze-Guattarian “schizophrenia,” “libidinal skin,” and “delirium,” terms suggesting (especially with the writing practice of either Libidinal Economy or Anti-Oedipus in mind, whose sheer nutsiness makes Lacan’s calculated impenetrability seem sedate) a willful, Luddite vandalizing of the (over-) functioning circuitries of sense and discussion “as usual.” The “schizo” motif is aligned with such phenomena as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry in a way to exploit both the liberatory connotations (“the subversion of the subject” [IT1 61]) as well as the more oppressive inflections of a psychologized or libidinalized sublime.

 

I have staged the “Postmodernism” essay’s mobilization of “the sublime” as the sign of a “new” effect in Jameson’s writing, indeed, as the specific vehicle for reversing what had become the increasingly, even terminally comprehensive effect of “closure” motivated by the “winner loses logic” of the “inevitable failure” imperative. But besides the thematic of “delirium” and “intensity,” the “Postmodernism” essay’s projection of “the sublime” renews many other long-standing preoccupations of Jameson’s as well. In “Pleasure: A Political Issue,” as we have seen, “the sublime” figured as an effect that “threatens, diminishes, rebukes individual human life” (IT2 72)–but the valorization of cultural production (whether art or critique) that realizes a “critical” effectivity by way of such an effect is a long-standing theme in Jameson, whether associated with “the sublime” or not. In Marxism and Form, Jameson lays it down as a self-evident proposition that in an increasingly reified world,

 

the serious writer is obliged to reawaken the reader’s numbed sense of the concrete through the administration of linguistic shocks, by restructuring the overfamiliar or by appealing to those deeper layers of the physiological which alone retain a kind of fitful unnamed intensity. (M&F 20-1)

 

The “serious writer” here is Adorno, whose “dialectical sentences” Jameson praises for precisely their ability to administer such “shocks” (this theme of “shock” recurs thoughout the Adorno and Benjamin chapters of Marxism and Form).

 

And given the emphasis in the passage just quoted on “the physiological,” we might propose that the “shock” potential specific to, or uniquely operable under the sign of, that “antithetical” word “the sublime” in effect libidinalizes “dialectical” effects, enacting their motions and reversals in the somatic domain of affects. Thus, in “Postmodernism,” does a scriptible of “the sublime” newly synthesize “dialectical thinking” with what “Pleasure: A Political Issue” idealizes as Barthes’s “writing with the body,” in a passage aiming to redescribe Barthes’s supposed hedonistic aestheticizing as something akin to the Lacanian ethos of “L’écoute,” of listening (to desire), of the “discourse of the analyst”:

 

[Barthes] taught us to read with our bodies–and often to write with them as well. Whence, if one likes, the unavoidable sense of self-indulgence and corruption that Barthes’ work can project when viewed from certain limited angles. The libidinal body, as a field and instrument of perception all at once, cannot but be self-indulgent in that sense. To discipline it, to give it the proper tasks and ask it to repress its other random impulses, is at once to limit its effectiveness, or, even worse, to damage it irretrievably. Lazy, shot through with fits of boredom or enthusiasm, reading the world and its texts with nausea or jouissance, listening for the fainter vibrations of a sensorium largely numbed by civilization and rationalization, sensitive to the messages of throbs too immediate, too recognizable as pain or pleasure–maybe all this bodily disposition is not to be described as self-indulgence after all. Maybe it requires a discipline and a responsiveness of a rare yet different sort…. Maybe indeed the deeper subject is here: not pleasure (against whose comfort and banalities everyone from Barthes to Edmund Burke is united in warning us), but the libidinal body itself, and its peculiar politics, which may well move in a realm largely beyond the pleasureable in that narrow, culinary, bourgeois sense. (IT2 69)

 

“The sublime” might be said to name that “realm beyond the pleasureable” in which “the libidinal body” and its “peculiar politics” less “move” (to qualify that last sentence) than desire (anxiously, vainly) to move; “the sublime” also answers to the longing for stimuli, even in the form of “shock,” that might reawaken responses that have been “numbed” by overhabituation–“too recognizable as pain or pleasure”: a formula that again agitates the desire for the (sublime) “antithetical,” in which all the domesticating binaries suffer (or enjoy) a reversal or sublation for which perhaps even the term Aufhebung might suddenly seem apposite.

 

The desire for release from (what we might call the “prison-house” of) the “too familiar” is itself, of course, rather too familiar a theme, both in the problematic of the modern generally (from at least Romanticism to now) and in Jameson himself, whose scriptible encodes the desire to escape “thematization”–a problematic bearing a strong family resemblance with Lacan’s characterization of “the Real” as “what resists symbolization absolutely.” The latter formula, indeed, invites us to read Jameson’s “sublime” as yet another figure of “the [Lacanian] Real.” To recall that Jameson characterizes the latter as “History itself” (IT1 104) is to rejoin the impulse that prompts Jameson to cathect Barthesian “jouissance” with political force, and thus to assimilate it, as “the sublime,” to a nightmare-of-history experience of fear and terror. If above we evoked a Hegelian sublime of “dialectical” reversal or fusion of polar alternatives whose contradiction had hitherto seemed to impose absolute discontinuity between them, the present point–the sublime as the unrepresentable–resonates with the Kantian noumenon, the Ding an sich, forever inaccessible to the categories of reason.

 

But the dialectical or “antithetical” oscillation between the libidinal and the historical valences of “the sublime,” between its utopian hope and its ideological terror, underwrites the rescript of this desire to escape representation as, instead, anxiety about an inability to achieve it, in what I take to be the “Postmodernism” essay’s most consequential inflection of “the sublime”: the Burkean experience of terror as

 

refined by Kant to include the question of representation itself, so that the object of the sublime becomes not only a matter of sheer power… but also of the limits of figuration and the incapacity of the human mind to give representation to such enormous forces. (P 34)

 

Burke and Kant could conceive “the sublime” as an incommensurability between Nature and the human; but today, “in full postmodernism” (Jameson writes), Nature has been too effectively tamed to play such a role in our imaginations; on the contrary it is the world system of technology and finance that now exceeds our power to grasp, to represent to ourselves. In “Postmodernism,” what uniquely defeats our understanding is, Vico and Marx notwithstanding, precisely what “we” have made. This “postmodern or technological sublime” breeds “high-tech paranoia” or “conspiracy theory” as the mind’s “degraded attempt[s]” to figure what cannot be figured, to represent what cannot be represented, “to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system” (P 37-8). Here, “the sublime” reprises the chronic Jamesonian theme of “society” as the “absent, invisible” determinant (Marxism and Form) or (adapting Althusser, in The Political Unconscious), the “absent cause,” operative upon all cultural production and lived experience, and which it is the task definitive of “Marxist hermeneutic” to infer or extrapolate from the social text at large.

 

The “vast text of the social,” and our abjection to it, as “sublime”: to pursue this theme through the vast text of Postmodernism is a task I am grateful to have to renounce here. Suffice it to say that simply as a “read,” even just as an object to be hefted in the hand, Postmodernism makes many telling contrasts with The Political Unconscious, contrasts for which “the sublime” must here be the summarizing term. Dense and compact(ed), The Political Unconscious tells a (Hegelian) story–there is nothing “secretly narrative” about its diachronic trajectory from pre-realism, through realism to modernism. By contrast, the vast and sprawling Postmodernism, renouncing temporality, narrative, and hermeneutic itself in favor of themes of “mapping,” “the visual,” and “space,” arrays itself in large chapters both thematically and procedurally disjunct. To belabor the book’s own frequent recourse to figures of the geo-“spatial,” we might say that Postmodernism suggests, estrangingly, a satellite probe of some distant planet, the encyclopedically bulky tome itself a hangar-sized bunker housing data as diverse as high-altitude photographs (in, e.g., the “Postmodernism” essay itself) on the one hand to spectrographic analyses of soil samples (in the minutely argued subchapters on de Man and Walter Benn Michaels) on the other.

 

My point here is that in Postmodernism “the sublime” is not merely announced as program, but enacted in Jameson’s writing practice. We need not argue that Jameson altogether calculated these “textual effects” to assert their impact on the experience of reading Postmodernism, and on that book’s renunciation or evasion of some of the predicaments elaborated in The Political Unconscious, most crucially that of the “vision” of “inevitable failure” itself. The Jamesonian “sublime” of impossible imperatives recurs throughout Postmodernism, in tension with antithetical themes of release, dissolution, “intensities,” to lend its discursive expansions and contractions a systolic/diastolic rhythm, working to heighten the impasse of the “winner loses logic” and/or “textual determinism” here, to loosen and “relieve” it there. Both stylistically and thematically indeed, this may be the most consequential of Jameson’s exploitations of the “antithetical” resources of “the sublime”: beyond terror/joy, boredom/intensity, and the like, “the sublime” also operates and signals the (“untranscendable”?) binary of Necessity/Freedom itself, figured here as the tightening and loosening of Jameson’s own “winner loses” rhetoric.

 

Space forbids more than a word here on Jameson’s 1990 book on Adorno, a book apparently overshadowed by Postmodernism, even though the titles (Late Marxism, “Late Capitalism”) invite us to read them as companion volumes. For Jameson, Adorno has raised the Freedom/Necessity dialectic with special force ever since Marxism and Form, in which Adorno’s “dialectical sentences” needed defense, as it were, against the liability of their own aesthetic brilliance: Adorno’s “historical trope” could look uncomfortably like a merely imagist device, that is, a contingency of Adorno’s own merely individual creative wit rather than a “working through” of some “objective,” i.e., “necessary” reality of the determinate world. In Late Marxism, Jameson means to celebrate Adorno again as a writer of “dialectical prose,” but also to guard against a too-easy assimilation of Adorno’s scriptible to a mere écriture or “textual productivity.” Thus Jameson valorizes the “resistance to thematization” in Adorno’s writing practice (and program, in such essays as “The Essay as Form”) even as he wants to claim that Adorno’s ostensibly “essayistic” or “aphoristic” oeuvre ultimately achieves a coherence and scope that deserves, indeed demands the name of “system.” And Adorno’s own prose as “sublime” is a leitmotif throughout: as scriptible, his long (and headlong) sentences and unbroken paragraphs confront the reader with (note the sublimity of this image) “a towering wall of water of a text” (LM 51); as program, or “system,” Adorno’s resourcefulness as a writer answers to (achieves a “mimesis” of) a sense of history, or the “administered universe” as (“sublime”) nightmare (LM 215-6), as in (again) Jameson’s adaptation of the “Capital-logic” Marxists (whom, indeed, he figures as Adorno’s rightful intellectual heirs [LM 239]). And throughout, the problem of the (un)representability of the “totality” looms.

 

It is worth attempting to “historicize,” however sketchily, Jameson’s “sublime” in the context of Jameson’s period. Its career could be said to begin in the era of “classic” modernism, with (for example) Ortega’s “dehumanization of art,” Worringer’s “abstraction and empathy” (another modernizing homeomorph of the sublime/beautiful), not to mention the Freudian “uncanny.” By the 1950’s, when Jameson (b. 1934) was coming of age intellectually, existentialism in general and Sartre in particular held for literary-intellectual culture something of the interest that “theory” and Derrida have held for the academic-intellectual subculture more recently. Salient among existentialist motifs was “the absurd,” which meant, first of all, the meaningless: the search for (or the making of) meaning defined the existential task or problem–and often its impossibility, or “inevitable failure.”

 

More recently, “meaning” has appeared not as idealized goal, the hoped-for end or reward of heroic quest or Promethean acte, but rather (along with its constituents, language and representation) as “prison-house,” a “closure” from which escape is vainly sought, an all-inclusive text coextensive with and complicit in (variously) an ever more mystifying “aesthetic ideology,” an unwitting “logocentric” metaphysics, or (Jameson’s focus) an increasingly oppressive world political and economic system. The transit of the un-meaning–what cannot be represented, signified, symbolized, or otherwise expressed, registered, assimilated or co-opted by or in any semiotic system or language–between these two positions could hardly be better graphed than by conceiving it as the passage from “the absurd” to “the sublime.” Nor, in my view, does any competing version of it–from “absurd” to (variously) post-Lacanian/Barthesian “jouissance,” Derrida’s “athetic,” Baudrillard’s “sleep” and/or “death,” Lyotard’s “inhuman,” the “impermeability” of Charles Bernstein, Paul Mann’s mock-apotheosis of “the stupid”–stretch the transit itself as far, nor generate within it so many “antithetical” or dialectical possibilities, as Jameson’s.

 

It also seems to me worth saying that of all Jameson’s successes, among the most startling, because it is, on its face, the most implausible, is to have credibly and sustainably predicated “sublimity” of the postmodern in the first place. This globally oppressive atmosphere of muzak and of bar-codes, of transnational designer logos as legible “fashion statement” or willing self-commodification, of smiley-faces and franchiser’s manual courtesies, where shopping is the only leisure activity there is, and for increasingly large numbers of people, the only leisure activity they are “good at”–how to make the narcosis of such a commodity-scape interesting at all, let alone juice it up with the excitements of “the sublime”? I intend no derogation of “excitement” here; it appears to be a fundamental need of the human creature, and I am sure its scarcity in contemporary American life has much to do with our juvenile crime problem. Nor do I think it sugarcoats the ravages of “late capitalism” to say that its brutalities look, at least in our own first-world environment, more like the banality than the sublimity of evil; and I regret that these remarks might seem to reduce Jameson’s achievement to a mere species of horror fiction for “cultural intellectuals.” Granted, “anxiety” is by now a soothingly conventional motif; still, as anxieties go, multinational capitalism need not solicit the willing suspension of my disbelief as is the case with metaphysics or logocentrism (whether onto-, theo-, or phallo-), let alone commies (or FBI agents) under the bed, illegal aliens (or skinheads) at the 7-11, homosexual (or fundamentalist) “agendas” at the school board, or whatever bogeyman/scapegoat du jour (Marxist professors?) the corporate-foundation think-tanks and Capitol Hill press releases work so hard to scare me with. Alas, “boredom” and “waning of affect” seem rubrics all too adequate to the postmodern vécu–and as I have written in these pages before (Helmling, “Jameson’s Postmodernism: Version 2.0”), Jameson post-Postmodernism will increasingly revert to this more jaundiced view, drastically revising his early-’80s account of the interrelations of postmodernism and “the sublime.”

 

But “the sublime” as (at this moment) a culminating theme is an index of something else characteristic of Jameson’s career, his general penchant for expansion rather than contraction, for problems (even problematizations) rather than solutions, for seeing how far a notion or a vocabulary can be pushed rather than setting out to curtail its range in the name of clarity or certainty. Hence, for example, the contrast between Jameson’s stratospheric Hegel-, Heidegger-, Adorno- (etc.) effects and, say, the pugilistically deflationary wit of Terry Eagleton, whose bare-knuckle style is in the mainstream of English polemical and satirical traditions, in which the game is to bludgeon the other fellow with barrages of caricatural mock-syllogisms delivered in an exasperated baby-talk, as if explaining the ABC’s to an unusually dimwitted child (“we are not politically conflicting if you hold that patriarchy is an objectionable social system and I hold that it is a small town in upper New York state” [Ideology 13]). Jameson is good at polemic and satire when, for local effect, he wants to be–e.g., in the “Introduction” to Postmodernism, in which “the cultural logic of late capitalism” is jeered as effectively as anywhere in Eagleton (on “the ‘aestheticization’ of reality”: Benjamin “thought it meant fascism, but we know it’s only fun” [P x]). But Jameson’s larger ambitions are for degrees of subtlety and nuance to which the hurly-burly of polemic and satire are inimical. “The sublime” is especially incompatible with polemic and satire, for these depend on belittling, on banalizing, on stripping away anything complex, let alone uncanny from the target. Think here of the contrast between Jameson and Eagleton on “postmodernism”: in Eagleton’s hands, it is a sheerly satiric object, an ideological wetdream;² whereas Jameson, more gravely, makes of it an access to the central problems of the age.

 

The “antithetical” power of “the sublime” draws, again, from both a desire for the unrepresentable–for escape from “thematization”–and an anxiety about an inability to represent, to “give representation to such enormous forces” (P 34). This ominous sense of emptiness in the postmodern vécu itself, an inability to make sense of things, besets individuals in their lived experience of the increasingly unintelligible life-world of late capitalism–a theme that revives, as I have suggested, the existentialist “absurd” of a generation ago (when “alienation” was a buzzword only bores and spoilsports linked with Marx); more pertinent for Jameson’s own project is its consequences for critique: for how can we critique what we cannot represent?–or (if our program is hermeneutic) interpret what is not represented or representable? If “the sublime” is the unfigurable, it must necessarily defeat any project of “Marxist [or indeed any other kind of] hermeneutic.” Yet in central chapters of Marxism and Form, in The Prison-House of Language, in the 1971 essay “Metacommentary,” through the opening chapter, “On Interpretation,” of The Political Unconscious (1981), Jameson characterizes his project as nothing if not hermeneutic, programmatically opposed to “anti-hermeneuts” from Susan Sontag to Foucault, Barthes and Derrida. Not that the imperative of interpretation is a “desire” to interpret: “we are condemned to interpret at the same time that we feel an increasing repugnance to do so,” Jameson advises in “Metacommentary”–though even in this early (1971) essay, Jameson anticipates the desire of the sublime when he acknowledges, in figures like Mallarmé, a “will to be uninterpretable” (IT1 6, 5; cf. P 91-2, 391-3). But if “History” is unrepresentable and uninterpretable, any project of Marxist hermeneutic would seem to be at a non plus.

 

Hence the full-throated plangency of Jameson’s writing in the ’80s, with respect to critique’s “impossible imperatives” and “inevitable failures,” a note that lifts the career-long gesture into a different–indeed, a “sublime”–register quite unlike the austerer, more “stoic,” sound of the earlier work. (“Stoic” is a term of praise in Jameson’s account of Lacan [IT1 112].) “The postmodern” here seems to mark a period of revolutionary failures and capitalist successes so demoralizing as to bring “interpretation” itself under the full force of the devaluation expressed in the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach–as if our impotence to “change” the world can now be adequately expressed only as an impotence, also, even to “understand” it.

 

This attenuation of the hermeneutic can also be read as a swerve away from a certain set of dangers or possible failures that Jameson wants to avoid. Call these dangers “hermeneutic determinism”–for there is a “logic” to interpretive explanation that can inexorably entrain characteristic “textual effects” (or “generic closures”) as surely as any other too-exclusive “motivation.” The hermeneut can seem a village explainer, a caricatural sujet “supposed [by himself] to know,” laying out with knowing aplomb the hidden designs and purposes that render what looks to uninitiates like a chaotic situation on the contrary a lucid scenario, minutely scripted down to the last detail by an invisible, all-powerful cabal. At its worst, I am describing the sort of paranoid explanatory grandiosity one used to find as laughable in the Daily Worker as in the John Birch Society Newsletter. (Cf. Freud’s assimilation of art to hysteria, religion to obsessional neurosis, and systematic philosophy to paranoia [Totem and Taboo 73].) Such excesses of hermeneutic “success” risk failures of a too familiar, even “vulgar Marxist” sort.

 

This could be one reason why Jameson attends mostly to cultural texts, rather than to “politics” per se: there is less risk of your commentary lapsing into prefab paranoia with E. L. Doctorow or Claude Simon than with, say, Jesse Helms (one of Jameson’s home-state Senators). Jameson’s essay “Periodizing the ’60s” could stand as a cautionary example of what I mean, the narrativization of that turbulent decade as a scenario sufficiently obvious to those with the correct interpretive tools. This pose has its satisfactions, for reader and writer alike, but they are quite the reverse of “the sublime,” and indeed represent a choice that Jameson’s “sublime,” however deliberately, refuses–a point the more acute for the contemporaneity of “Periodizing the ’60s” with the “Postmodernism” essay: both appeared in 1984. (Jameson elsewhere accesses this problem of the “paranoiac-critical” in the contrast of Foucault with Baudrillard [P 202-3].)

 

Hence, too, perhaps, the special use of popular culture, especially film studies, to Jameson’s project: a body of cultural production whose “ideological closure” might be more accessible, no less “absent” than in high culture, but more naively so, and thus perhaps more readily re-“present”-ed–and offering analysis, to that extent, a domain of cultural production somewhere between high culture and Jesse Helms. The 1977 essay on “Dog Day Afternoon,” for example (SV 35-54), anticipates many of the themes of the “Postmodernism” essay’s “sublime”–the problem of representability, in this case of the class system under multinational capitalism (projected here, too–nightmarishly–as “the subject of present-day world history” [SV 50]), but the essay betrays no reservation about Jameson’s own hermeneutic power to represent or interpret these phenomena, however (ideologically) unfigurable they are in or by the (popular) culture at large. And the essay’s indignation at the social changes of the ’70s at least approaches the slippery slope that begins in moralizing and ends in the paranoia of the over-certain (“not merely part of the on-going logic of the system… but also, and above all, the consequences of the decisions of powerful and strategically placed individuals and groups” [SV 45]). Of course, just because it’s over-certain doesn’t mean it isn’t true; to cite the Delmore Schwartz truism one more time, even paranoids have enemies.

 

I have spoken of “the [unrepresentable] sublime” as both a desire (escape from representation) and an anxiety (impotence to represent); and of over-certain hermeneutic representation as entailing a danger Jameson wishes to avoid. There remains one further permutation I want to work through, in which desire and the anxiety of its possible failure generate a psychology of apotropaism and taboo, the mood of the Bilderverbot, the ban on graven images, that is so pervasive a theme in Benjamin and Adorno (see Jameson’s treatment in LM 118-20; cf. 192 and P 392 on “taboo”). An impulse under ban: we have to do here with something Jameson does not say, an inference or possibility he does not draw or acknowledge, namely the representation of utopia. If utopia is to be imagined as something utterly other than, different from, the ideological present, a novum and not a mere “repetition,” it follows that any imaginative projection or representation of it we attempt with the expressive means available to us will necessarily profane that unimaginable end of “History” as we know it, “History” whose Necessity, ideological closure, and inevitable failure have so ineradicably tainted the very veins and capillaries of our subjectivities. Jameson’s “sublime,” for all its avowal of “euphoria” and “joyous intensities,” remains, in Jameson’s writing practice, overwhelmingly anxious, and scrupulously wary of the ruses of (“ideological”) hope, and thus programmatically backward-looking, oriented to the nightmare past rather than any utopian future, an experience of “shock,” of “fear,” of a “therapeutic humiliation of the pretensions of the human mind to understanding” (IT1 40). Like Orpheus leading Eurydice up from Hades, or Benjamin’s Angel of the New surveying the ruin of History avalanching at its feet with its back turned firmly on the future, Jameson’s imagination must avert its eyes from what it desires, gazing instead upon a “sublime” identified with the unrepresentable guilt and violence of the past rather than with that equally, indeed more unrepresentable future possibility (impossibility?) called Utopia. (“Pleasure: A Political Issue” enacts precisely this transit.) I make this point for the sake of accounting for an effect, illuminating a motivation, of Jameson’s prose–an illumination which may be assisted by a contrast with another passage from Eagleton, for whom it is the revolution, not the prevailing “capital-logic,” that is sublime:

 

socialist revolution… is excessive of all form, out in advance of its own rhetoric. It is unrepresentable by anything but itself, signified only in its ‘absolute movement of becoming,’ and thus a kind of sublimity. (Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic 214-5)

 

Eagleton might never have written this passage (dating from 1990), or thus linked the “unrepresentable” and “the sublime,” without Jameson’s “Postmodernism” essay; but just as surely, Eagleton’s repredication of sublimity from capitalism to “socialist revolution” implies a difference from, even a kind of critique of, the “vision” adumbrated in Jameson’s failure-haunted prose. ³

 

Desire and anxiety, humiliation, shock, proscription–Jameson articulates these terms with sufficient “dialectical” ingenuity and passion as to more than motivate the extraordinary “difficulty” of his prose. But my own experience is that in Jameson the “difficulties” make a basis for fellowship between reader and writer–they are shared difficulties, however differently difficult they are for the reader than for Jameson–in contrast to some other “theory” prose styles whose “sublime humiliation” of the reader can feel quite differently motivated (for the writer, more enjoyable; for the reader–ça dépend). When Jameson sounds the “unrepresentability” theme in terms of “a complexity often beyond the capacity of the normal reading mind” (P 38), he means “reading” figuratively; but the word inevitably also brings the reader right back to the experience of the book (Jameson’s Postmodernism) presently in hand, the prose uncoiling, ramifying, exfoliating in so many “dialectically” conflicting directions, through such stupefyingly superimposed problematics, keeping aloft so daunting and yet relevant a weight of allusion to the most challenging thought of our period. Quite frequently the reader can feel engulfed by the onset of an ideational congestion, a cerebral meltdown or synaptic overload, a sense of argumentative threads and suggestions, themes and variations, multiplying beyond any hope of keeping track of them, an intellectual levitation at once exhilarating and daunting, dazzling and befuddling, an experience of thought and speculative possibility that might fairly be called (in the words of Thomas Weiskel), “the hermeneutic or ‘reader’s’ sublime.” ⁴

 

But this augment of “difficulty” or “shock” in Jameson’s writing of the ’80s also engenders its own “dialectical reversal,” insofar as the prose remains as allusive and inward as ever, but with an affective charge much larger and more accessible, more immediate (in the colloquial sense) than before–as I hope to show by way of an example. Although “close reading” is out of fashion, I will risk a lengthy quotation in order to put on view how “the sublime” and “unfigurability,” the condition of postmodern reification, and the consequent predicaments of a project or a writing like Jameson’s own, can, in Jameson’s diffuse verbal medium, in the heat of affective investments nominally under ban, fuse into an amalgam, ideationally complex but libidinally quite direct, in which “theme” becomes inseparable from “effect.” The following passage is from one of the previously unpublished, presumably recent, meditations gathered in the “Conclusion” to Postmodernism: Jameson is discussing the inferiority ordinary people feel before the intellectual, and complains that an analogous demoralization, what Jameson calls (citing Gunther Anders) a “Promethean shame, a Promethean inferiority complex… is what we [ordinary people? intellectuals?] now feel for culture more generally”–an abjection that “happens to people when their relations to production are blocked, when they no longer have power over productive activity”:

 

Impotence is first and foremost that, the pall on the psyche, the gradual loss of interest in the self and the outside world, very much in formal analogy to Freud’s description of mourning; the difference being that one recovers from mourning (Freud shows how), but that the condition of non-productivity, since it is an index of an objective situation that does not change, must be dealt with in another way, a way that, acknowledging its persistence and inevitability, disguises, represses, displaces, and sublimates a persistent and fundamental powerlessness. That other way is, of course, consumerism itself, as a compensation for an economic impotence which is also an utter lack of any political power…. I want to add that the way in which (objectively, if you like) this analysis takes on the appearance of anthropology or social psychology… is itself to be reckoned back into the phenomenon we are describing: not merely is this anthropological or psychological appearance a function of a basic representational dilemma about late capitalism…; it is also the result of the failure of our societies to achieve any kind of transparency; indeed, it is virtually the same as that failure. In a transparent society in which our various positions in social production were clear to us and to everybody else–so that, like Malinowski’s savages, we could take a stick and draw a diagram of the socioeconomic cosmology on the sand of the beach–it would not sound either psychological or anthropological to refer to what happens to people who have no say in their work: no Utopian or Nowhereon [sic] would think you were mobilizing hypotheses about the Unconscious or the libido, or foundationally presupposing a human essence or a human nature; perhaps it would sound more medical, as though you were talking about a broken leg or paralysis of the whole right side. At any rate, it is thus, as a fact, that I would like to talk about reification: in this sense of the way in which a product somehow shuts us out even from a sympathetic participation, by imagination, in its production. It comes before us, no questions asked, as something we could not begin to imagine doing for ourselves.

 

But this in no way means that we cannot consume the product in question, “derive enjoyment” from it, become addicted to it, etc. Indeed, consumption in the social sense is very specifically the word for what we in fact do to reified products of this kind, that occupy our minds and float above that deeper nihilistic void left in our being by the inability to control our own destiny. (P 316-7)

 

I quote at such length to make accessible the energy beyond or exceeding the mere “points” the passage makes. Indeed, the motives discernible here might rather be thought of as the unmaking of points, the evacuation or discard of all thought-instruments, as though Jameson’s critical ambition, the undoing of alienation and reification, could after all be an affair of nullifying conceptual obstacles by fiat, not merely solving but abolishing “representational dilemmas about late capitalism” and breaking through into “transparency,” realizing the “socioeconomic cosmology” as a radiant Ding an-sich, available not merely as phenomenon but as noumenon to a mentalité in whose operations language once again functions as windowpane. Note that “transparency” here is a more than merely hermeneutic aim, as if “understanding the world” and “changing it” could, or must, or can only (the intellectual’s most grandiosely Promethean desire, or hubris) happen in one fell apocalyptic swoop, delivering (or restoring) us to a pristine naturalness like that of Malinowski’s savages on the beach. (Is this the same beach on which, Foucault prophesied, “Man” would disappear like a [cosmological?] sand-drawing under the wave? Even Lévi-Strauss did not idealize pensée sauvage as “transparent” to its subjects.)

 

Notably, the animus against all “thought-instruments” extends not just to the mystifications of capitalism but also to the theoretical constructs of critique that would challenge them–the “anthropology or social psychology,” the would-be solutions that must themselves be counted as part of the problem, the “hypotheses about the Unconscious or the libido, or… [“foundational” assumptions of] a human essence or a human nature.” (Here Jameson names a central preoccupation of his own work in the same breath with one of the principal bourgeois mystifications he opposes.) Also audible is impatience under the burden of the taboos, the moralistically cathected left shibboleths under which a critic like Jameson must operate, what he elsewhere calls the “rigorous, quasi-religious examen de conscience… [or] Ideological New Year’s Resolution” (Diacritics 78) taken against naive, “ideological” fantasies like the one risked in this passage, of “achieving transparency” (a fantasy Jameson elsewhere is as quick as anyone to expose as ideological)–all the stratospheric intellectual speculation that to the plain-thinking of ordinary folks (Malinowskian savages, ethnic blue-collars, suburban Republicans), sounds like something for which “mystification” would be a typically evasive (and “classy”) euphemism. (“Plain thinking”: Brecht’s plumpes Denken is invoked often in Jameson’s work as leitmotif for the gap between high theory and proletarian consciousness–but figured nostalgically, as a sentimentalism the intellectual must, however regretfully, renounce.)

 

Hence what we might call the dialectic of the grandiosity of intellectual hopes or desire(s), and their abjection in anxiety and failure: “Promethean shame” indeed. “Shame” because of the intellectual’s “impotence” before the reified world, “Promethean” because the intellectual is chained to the ideological rock, with the ideological eagles pecking his or her liver, in a predicament from which there is no escape: “it is thus, as a fact, that I would like to talk about reification,” Jameson writes, but in what follows he does not, can not, do so. He comes closest to talking about it “as a fact,” indeed, here, stating the wish that attests the failure to accomplish the deed. But what prevents Prometheus from talking of reification as a fact? Why must Jameson wave away any suggestion that he has, in this very passage, talked, eloquently, powerfully, of reification “as a fact”? The chains holding him (this is his own complaint in the passage) are those mind-forged manacles, the very thought-instruments whose uses no intellectual commands so masterfully, indeed, as Jameson. A pragmatist might blow the whistle on this as melodrama, since Jameson has been able to talk in any style and about any topic he chooses not from a pinnacle of exposure on a rockface but from a series of comfortable positions at distinguished universities–that his position, his career, has been a privilege, not a doom. Jameson might reply that to find satisfaction in such facile ironies is to acquiesce altogether too complacently in the reifications of a system that, in other precincts of its operation, daily inflicts, on a mass scale, violences for which Prometheus’s torment is if anything too soothing a figure.

 

My purpose here is not to force a choice, or cast a vote, for one position over the other, but rather to illuminate the motives of contrasting rhetorics. The pragmatist’s hope, however modest, that critique can make change, is liable to the charge of being not merely complacent, but “ideological”–an “imaginary solution to a real contradiction.” Jameson’s Promethean rhetoric attempts to forestall that accusation by inscribing failure as its very premise: since Prometheus never gets off the rock, he cannot be charged with offering our desperation a false hope, an “imaginary solution,” a merely “aesthetic” consolation. “The sublime” expresses with new force this long-standing Jamesonian predicament, including the predicament’s more-than-aesthetic character; and it aspires as well to offer that predicament some more-than-aesthetic “relief.” And in Jameson’s dialectical alembification of thetic “logic of content” with “textual effect,” it can seem, however provisionally, to do so. How provisionally is not merely a question, but also a qualification–and one not to be postponed in the follow-through inevitably to arrive after the moment of sublimity has passed. As I have suggested already, Jameson post-Postmodernism will revert, in his confrontation with the predicaments of “ideological closure,” to more “stoic” accents. But in his writing of the ’80s, “the sublime” inflects the “vision” of “inevitable failure” with maximum force, both to evoke and to contest it–as if to make of its own failure the most trenchant possible critique of culture.

 

(This essay is excerpted from Steven Helmling’s book, The Success and Failure of Fredric Jameson: Writing, the Sublime, and the Dialectic of Critique, forthcoming in November 2000 from State University of New York Press.)

 

Notes

 

1. For a fuller discussion of “the sublime” in “Pleasure: A Political Issue,” see Helmling, “Marxist Pleasure: Jameson and Eagleton.”

 

2. For Eagleton on postmodernism, see the last chapter (“From the Polis to Postmodernism”) of The Ideology of the Aesthetic and The Illusions of Postmodernism. Ponder, as symptom, that Jameson is not mentioned in either of these texts–though he does appear in Eagleton’s doggerel “Ballad of Marxist Criticism (to the tune of ‘Say Something Stupid Like I Love You’).”

 

3. See, for example, Eagleton’s reservations about Jameson in “The Idealism of American Criticism” (Against the Grain 49-64, especially 57-64); see also Eagleton’s “Fredric Jameson: The Politics of Style” (ibid., 65-78).

 

4. Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime 28-31. In view of Jameson’s (sublime) image of postmodernism’s “thunderous unblocking” of long frozen energies (P 313), as well as the registration of the “inevitable failure” as “failure or blockage” in the “History is what hurts” passage (PU 102), I recommend here as well Neil Hertz’s reading of Longinus, “The Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime.” On another of the “Postmodernism” essay’s inflections of “blockage,” as a defense mechanism against intolerable realities, see David S. Gross, “Marxism and Resistance: Fredric Jameson and the Moment of Postmodernism,” in Kellner 97-116.

Works Cited

 

A. Works by Fredric Jameson

• Diacritics: “Interview” with Jameson. Diacritics 12.3 (1982): 72-91.
• IT1: The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986, Volume 1: Situations of Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.
• IT2: The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986, Volume 2: The Syntax of History. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.
• LM: Late Marxism: Adorno, Or, The Persistence of the Dialectic. New York: Verso, 1990.
• M&F: Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971.
• P: Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991.
• PU: The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1981.
• ST: The Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia UP, 1994
• SV: Signatures of the Visible. New York: Routledge, 1992.

 

B. Works by Others

• Eagleton, Terry. Against the Grain. New York: Verso, 1986.
• —. Ideology: An Introduction. London: Verso, 1991.
• —. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.
• Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo. 1913. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1950.
• Helmling, Steven. “The Desire Called Jameson.” Review of Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time. Postmodern Culture 5.2 (January 1995) <http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.195/review-4.195>.
• —. “Jameson’s Postmodernism: Version 2.0.” Review of Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn and Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity. Postmodern Culture 9.2 (January 1999) <http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.199/9.2.r_helmling.txt>.
• —. “Marxist Pleasure: Jameson and Eagleton,” Postmodern Culture 3.3 (May 1993) <http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.593/helmling.593>. An expanded version, contrasting Jameson and Eagleton on postmodernism, appears in Essays in Postmodern Culture. Eyal Amiran and John Unsworth, eds. New York: Oxford UP, 1993. 239-63.
• Hertz, Neil. “The Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime.” The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime. New York: Columbia UP, 1985. 40-60.
• Kellner, Douglas, ed. Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique. Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press, 1989.
• Weiskel, Thomas. The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.
• Yeghiayan, Eddie. A Fredric Jameson Bibliography. Online <http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~eyeghiay>.

 

James D. Faubion

Department of Anthropology
Rice University
jdf@rice.edu

 

Are we simply who we choose to be? We know well enough the poles between which answers to this question have tended to oscillate for at least the past century. Determinists of various stripes–biological, psychological, sociological–have insisted that we are not. Decisionists (of whom Sartre, in his more stridently existentialist moments, still occupies the extreme) have insisted that we are. We might review Judith Butler’s peregrinations from Gender Trouble to The Psychic Life of Power in order to remind ourselves just how vexed even the most subtle of efforts to hold something of a middle ground continues to prove to be. Or we might instead ask another question: Do we choose to love? The two questions might even collapse into one another if, as Niklas Luhmann has argued, we most modern of moderns have come to feel love, and to find it, in feeling and finding ourselves validated in the eyes and through the body of another. Both questions direct us to the review of lines of flight and force which, in hindsight, verge on the asymptotic. On the one hand, they direct us to the actuality of our urges and passions, and so to a peculiarly active passivity to which we must recurrently respond. On the other, they direct us to information–to our becoming informed and our coming to be formed–and so to that peculiarly active passivity through which we gradually transform our urges into accountable interests, our passions into discernable sentiments.

 

Aristotle rendered the primal scene of information as a Scene of Instruction in its literal sense: the classroom or gymnasium; the pedagogue, with his repertoire of primers and principles; a student, whose absorption of his lessons would one day be realized in his capacity to exercise what might properly be called self-determination, and so might properly be called choice. Not nearly so anti-Aristotelian as it might seem, Freud’s Primal Scene recasts the pedagogue as father, and the student as lustful, devouring, guilty son. Jacques Derrida has projected the Freudian scene into what Harold Bloom has appropriately deemed the agonistic dynamics of an always already written transcendental Text. Drawing upon Wheeler Robinson’s Inspiration and Revelation in the Old Testament, Bloom’s emendation of Derrida serves as my own point of departure:

 

[I]n his study of Old Testament inspiration, [Robinson] moves towards the trope of a Scene of Instruction when he sees that while oral tradition rose to interpret written Torah, written Torah itself as authority replaced cultic acts. The ultimate cultic act is one in which the worshipper receives God’s condescension, his accommodating gift of his Election-love. Election-love, God’s love for Israel, is the Primal start of a Primal Scene of Instruction, a Scene early displaced from Jewish or Christian into secular and poetic contexts. (51)

 

Bloom points here to two processes, both of which are central to the story of being and love to which I shall shortly turn. The first is that process of reception through which the self comes to acknowledge its being, to inscribe itself as itself, in the light of an “election” which cannot be grasped apart from its interpretation, its reading, of the incorrigible particularity of the experience, and the relation, of love. The second is that process, somewhat too sanguinely deemed “displacement,” through which gnosis–of which the luminous experience of being-in-love is only one example–has come to occupy the epistemic fringes of a tradition increasingly guarded in its acknowledgment of either experiential transcendence or experiential truth.

*Amo Apps, born Amo Bishop, met George Roden first in 1987:

 

I was given a house, 20′ by 20′. Leroy S. gave it to me. I had purchased a hired man’s house from him that had burned out. And I cleaned up the site so beautifully there wasn’t a scrap of tissue paper left. O.K., I figure he gave me a good price so I figured I’d treat him well…. So we went from this burned-out ruin of a house to absolute bare ground. And so he came over to my farm and gave me the companion house, which was sitting next to it, O.K., if I would move it. So I moved the first one by cutting it in half and moving it on a [flatbed]. This was not suitable for a 20′ by 20′ house because the underpinnings required support on the [flatbed], O.K., so meanwhile I knew [a man] who set me up to talk to George Roden, O.K., and as a result of our conversation, I became a Branch Davidian and he moved the house….

 

Somewhere in the middle of moving the house, I realized that we were becoming very emotionally close, and I asked him about his family and discovered that he had a wife, at which point I started backing off. Yeah, it was about the second day of moving the house….

 

So we agreed to study the Bible together, and he suggested that I come up and get water from his well because I require quite a pure drinking water… we were seeing each other a couple of times a week and talking about religion. Eventually, he came up at the farm one afternoon and asked me to marry him. He said he’d divorce his wife. His wife had moved to Israel a year before. He came and he said that he’d called her up and asked her to come home for their thirtieth wedding anniversary, and she refused. And so he came and asked me to marry him. (Interview)¹

 

The Branch Davidians, a millenarian sect established at Mount Carmel, a tract of some seventy-seven acres lying on the outskirts of Waco, Texas, identify the first of their prophets as William Miller, a lay preacher of the Second Great Awakening who became the figurehead of the Adventist movement. After Miller, they point to Ellen White, whose revelatory adjustments of Miller’s predictions of Christ’s return became the doctrinal foundation of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.² After White, they point to Victor Houteff, who brought a band of followers to Texas in the early 1930s after the Seventh-day Adventist Church to which he belonged rejected his vision of the imminent restoration of the kingdom of the Biblical David. After Houteff, they point to Ben and Lois Roden. Ben, who died in 1978, pronounced the name of the awaited Christ to be “Branch,” and decreed the reinstatement of the Davidian ceremonial calendar. Lois had been informed in a vision the year before her husband’s death that the Holy Spirit was a feminine aspect of the Godhead due soon to infuse the earthly orders with the genius of the Final Days. George was Ben and Lois’s son.³

 

His union with Amo proved tumultuous. Well before it was consecrated, George had fallen out with his mother over the issue of succession in the church. After her husband’s death, Lois assumed sole leadership of the church, but George was widely regarded as her heir apparent. By 1983, however, he had become entangled in a battle over authority with a certain Vernon Howell, a sometime rock guitarist and gifted homilist who had arrived at Mount Carmel in 1981 and whom Lois Roden had come to regard as inspired. Indeed, she seems to have found the young man’s appeal more than merely spiritual. George, afflicted with Tourette’s syndrome, apparently expressed his fury in terms that left many other members of the church decidedly chilled. Most would follow Howell, who would rename himself David Koresh, when George drove him from Mount Carmel in 1985. Koresh and his loyalists settled in nearby Palestine. In late 1987, or so the court records have it, George challenged his rival to an ultimate test. He disinterred a corpse from the Mount Carmel graveyard; which one of the two of them was able to revivify it would have the Branch Davidian presidency all to himself. Refusing the gage, Koresh instead approached the sheriff, charging George with corpse abuse. The sheriff demanded proof. Koresh and an armed cohort went to Mount Carmel to procure it. Amo, newlywed, was there when they arrived:

 

George was pig-headed, arrogant and bossy. I was merely stubborn. We had settled down to some fine marital wrangling when David Koresh… fired the first real shot.

 

It was a copy of the claim on church leadership [Howell had] filed in Deed Records.

 

“It doesn’t mean anything,” George dismissed it lightly, “the church law says an executive council can’t appoint a president.” He tossed it onto his desk; I didn’t bother to read it.

 

When I heard the first three audible shots a few days later, I dismissed that lightly, too. I walked to the door of the trailer which was used for community cooking… and looked out. George, definitely a man built for comfort rather than speed, was sprinting. He ran from the front of the Roden house toward a storage shed behind the trailer I was in. I was amazed at how high his knees were pumping.

 

“War games with the visiting Israelites,” I decided, and I went back to cooking dinner. From where I was, I could hear the bullets whine by, about two hundred feet behind me. “Men never grow up,” I reflected. (Cracking the Coverup 1)

 

George was wounded in the exchange. Amo nursed him for three weeks: “So much for the honeymoon” (Cracking the Coverup 1). It was barely a month later that Amo moved away from Mount Carmel and back to her farm. In January, she realized that she was pregnant. For the next several months, she would visit George in jail; responding too vividly to charges resulting from the gunfight, he had been confined for contempt of court. In his absence, the Koreshites returned to the Mount Carmel property, on which they had recently paid some $68,000.00 in overdue taxes. Once freed, George would himself have to live the life of an exile. In September of 1988, at the age of forty-five, Amo gave birth to her second child, a daughter, Zella. In October, George was accused of the murder of a man with whom he had been sharing a room in Odessa, Texas. A court found him innocent by reason of insanity, and relegated him to a psychiatric prison. A brief escape ended with his transfer to a facility of more meticulous security. In the fall of 1998, he seems to have succeeded in breaching even the latter’s walls, but succumbed to an apparent heart attack after only a few moments of recovered freedom.

*At the end of February 1993, agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms arrived en masse at Mount Carmel with a warrant to search for a suspected cache of illegal firearms and explosives. The debacle that unfolded is too well known–still too iconic of governmental intrusiveness and ineptitude–to need recounting. Though she deemed David Koresh an apostate, Amo wept for the innocents who died in the April fire that consumed the Mount Carmel compound. She had been suffering other tribulations as well: homelessness, and the loss of the custody of Zella, who was sent to live with one of her maternal aunts. Believing polygamy Biblically ordained, Amo had contracted other marriages in a disastrous string, but had never rejected George’s surname. In the autumn of 1993, she moved back to Mount Carmel and, though often alone, busied herself with the building of a church office, an informational display, and finally a small museum for the tourists, curiosity-seekers and pilgrims who arrived in a daily stream. On the second anniversary of the fire, a regional militia financed the installation of a memorial to the Mount Carmel dead, the grounds of which Amo would subsequently take it upon herself to tend.

 

At Mount Carmel, in the summer of 1994, we met. For my part, I was the anthropologist that I still am, curious about the look and feel of a place that had–in one of those odd coincidences– first burst into the news when I happened to be putting the final touches on a lecture on millenarianism. I had no idea that I would find so forthcoming and provocative an interlocutor there, much less that I would be at the threshold of a project of research that I have yet to complete. The scene was not quite primal, perhaps, if only because my own hermeneutical consciousness was already too stiff with intellectual condescension to be able to yield fully even to the most gracious condescension of another. Yet, I have learned much from Amo, and not least, much about myself. If neither her chosen one nor her dévoté, I have indeed become her student, and one of her most avid readers, in the larger but also in the stricter sense of the term. For her part, Amo is among other things a writer, and throughout her stay at Mount Carmel, has written voluminously–church history, Biblical exegesis, sermons, autobiography.

 

Neither her writing nor her other activities have, however, proven uniformly compelling, even tolerable, to other members of the church. In the first days of 1997, there was another fire at Mount Carmel; Amo watched all that she had erected burn unceremoniously to the ground. She retreated to her parents’ home in Florida for the duration of the winter, but returned once she heard of the scheduling of a court hearing set to determine the ownership of those prairie acres to which she continued to urge George’s rightful title. The hearing was delayed. In the interim, two schismatic factions of the church have put up their own edifices, one of them where Amo’s once stood. When I last saw her, in June 1998, Amo herself was living in a tiny pup tent at the edge of the road leading into Mount Carmel. She had begun a new assemblage of informational signs, one of them denouncing both of the parties of the schism as impostors. In the aftermath of George’s death, the battle over the property has only grown more heated and the parties even more diverse.

*“Crisis”: from the ancient Greek  (krisis), separating or distinguishing, a decision or judgment, an interpretation, a trial or suit, a dispute, an issue, a turning or sudden change for better or worse. Crisis did not afflict Amo with George. It rather attracted her to him. Her father “an atheist,” her mother “a lukewarm Christian,” she had been raised “a miscellaneous Protestant,” moving seasonally up and down the East Coast from Maine to Florida. After completing a degree at the University of Maine, she fled the tensions of Vietnam-era America for Toronto. She married, gave birth to a son, divorced. In the winter of 1980, seeking refuge from the pace and pollution of the city, she moved with her son to a small farm some ten miles from Waco. In the spring of 1981, she first sensed an invitation to surrender to a purpose beyond her. “It just came over me as I was here in all this beautiful, peaceful country place that I owed God a lot, and I said ‘O.K., God, take the rest of my life.’ Now I didn’t act on that immediately; I just continued kind of doing what I was doing, O.K., and then I felt–you’d have to call it a call to prophecy in the fall of ’83 and the summer of ’84” (Interview).

 

She was not initially prepared for the summons:

 

A systems analyst by profession, I had a dream which caused me to study whether it was in Russia’s best interests to launch a surprise nuclear attack on the United States. The study I prepared showed it to be overwhelmingly in their best interest. Alarmed, I began circulating the study. I suspect that I was reported to the government by my landlord, but that’s just a hunch. The day after I gave him a copy I was under surveillance. My food was poisoned, my house was sprayed with chemicals, people who hid their faces from me started fishing in my landlord’s pond. Alarmed, I told my family. I was ignorant of the Bible; so was my family. In the end-time, God will pour out his Spirit on many people. I know that now, but I didn’t then. I gave my life to God in 1981, but in October 1983, I was still a Sunday Christian, and a backslider. Between the visions and the concern that someone was trying to kill me and my reputation for honesty, I was an easy prey.

 

The deputy sheriff arrived within minutes after my sister and took me to the mental health ward of Providence Hospital. In the morning I was grilled by a psychiatrist…. I spent forty-five minutes denying what I could and explaining the rest. The doctor advised further treatment and I signed an agreement to attend twelve therapy sessions. I was strong-armed by two people to sign a consent to court order, but I wasn’t about to sign. As a result, no court record of this warrantless arrest exists….

 

The persecution started again in June 1984. This time, I didn’t tell anyone. Again my food was poisoned and my house sprayed, and this time, intimidation was added. One of my carving knives was left in the dishwater with its blade broken in half…. It was fine summer weather, but there was little shelter, and the persecutors had a great day…. Airplanes flew over, and when [my son and I] hid under a wet sheet from the hot stuff the water got hot. [My son] saw a man through the sheet throwing something in the water. Mostly I was busy scooping water from the bottom of the pond up around my son…. After awhile the airplane went away and the water cooled down, and I got out and fed [my son] and put him to bed. When I lay down, the sheet under me made my back burn, and I realized that they might come after me to kill me and kill [my son], too. I wasn’t thinking too clearly, but I felt keeping him with me was endangering him, and I was afraid that the hot stuff was radiation. I got him up, sent him into the pond to wash, and went in myself. I didn’t dare put his clothes back on; I didn’t know what was on them. I sent him naked to a neighbor’s house. I didn’t bother with my clothes, either. I sat down on the bridge and waited for the government to finish the job. (Cracking the Coverup 17-19)

 

The sheriff’s deputies would soon pay Amo another visit. They would transport her again to a mental hospital. “I was examined by two people who harassed me to sign forms. When I arrived at [the hospital] I snapped and stated my opinion of the Texas mental health industry in a very loud voice. I was prepared to die rather than spend more time with these fools. One hypodermic wasn’t enough to shut me up once I started; it took two” (Cracking the Coverup 19). In the end, she was accused of child abuse and neglect, and compelled to sign over custody of her son to his father. Without his company, she grew lonely. “I attended six group therapy sessions, said I had a nervous breakdown (true enough, if not the whole truth; I was physically exhausted and suffer from chronic anemia even now as a result of the chemical warfare) and helped other patients with their problems. I suppose the therapists were glad to get rid of me. They released me after the six sessions” (Cracking the Coverup 20).

 

Even a mere two centuries ago, the functionaries of an official regime might still have been able to ask, in all seriousness, whether a woman such as Amo might indeed have been touched by the divine. At present, they have little other alternative but to declare such a woman mad, little other alternative but to place her experiences and her claims under the erasure of a symptomatology. Perhaps we “scholars”–functionaries one and all, at least in our professional capacities–have no other alternative but to join them. Yet it would plainly be wrong to conclude that the idea of God-election has itself uniformly been relegated to the realm of the pathological. It remains an idea central not simply to Orthodox Judaism but also to the ritualism of those pietistic and “charismatic” churches which have proliferated so vigorously in the course of the twentieth century, in the United States and elsewhere, most of whose millions of members even we good functionaries would hesitate to diagnose as insane. Though perhaps revealing a lapsed Weberianism, I am disinclined to conclude even that the gnosis of God-election has been banished to the relatively more benign realms of the “irrational.”⁴ I think that the processes at issue are rather processes of discursive colonization, of the sequestration of those discourses and discursive positions which have lost or surrendered the battle for free circulation and general legitimacy within semiological game preserves where they might continue to gambol in all their exotic splendor. The ghetto might be an even more precise metaphor, an even more precise counter-signature of our modern liberalism. In any case, Weber had already noted by the turn of this century that some part of the “uniqueness of the West” lay in its having subjected religious discourses and their spiritualist carriers to an ever more strict epistemic confinement (“Religious Rejections”). Michel Foucault’s more recent research, and the research of many others as well, has demonstrated that religion was far from dwelling alone in its chambers. Its companions eventually came to include a wide if motley array of other discursive systems, all of which seem to bear the stigma of a common operator, a common function: one that licenses the more or less immediate inference from “internal experience” to one or another determinate state of external affairs.⁵ So, for example, we used to be able to declare ourselves sick when we felt sick, well when we felt well. Physicians no longer permit us such license. (Para’noia) or (paranoi’a) denoted derangement or the losing of one’s wits even in ancient Greek, but seems to have acquired its modern medical profile only in the 1890s.

 

* 

Amo resisted her forced inscription into one of our familiar colonies, but had nowhere else to go but to another, and did go, though her wandering in the wilderness would unfold over several years. The first of her pedagogues–her Virgil–was not George but a woman after whom she would eventually name the daughter she had yet to bear:

 

I went to a Pentecostal church out on Robinson Road–I’m not sure I can remember the name of it; I think it’s called Calvary Assembly of God–and I met a woman there called Zella A., and basically, I was so ignorant. It was in ’81, I guess….

 

She taught me about the Bible some, and she, she just, she took my hand that first day and talked me into going right down and being saved, taking communion there. So she was an influence on me. And then I studied the Bible…. I hadn’t ever read it, and I started heavily studying it. Hard-core Bible study for four years when I met George Roden, and he made a Branch Davidian out of me in an hour, just talking about Houteff’s message. He was preaching Houteff’s message of the Davidian Kingdom, and certainly from everything he said I knew it was Biblically true, Biblically correct. And so I started reading Branch Davidian literature, and studying that. (Interview)

 

With her entry into this secondary Scene of Instruction, Amo was introduced to an illumination of the primacy of the visions with which she had been endowed. She was also introduced to a method, a hermeneutics of reading both text and world, both symbol and self, in which she would, with time and practice, attain the fluency of a virtuoso.

 

The Branch Davidians are not “fundamentalists,” if fundamentalists are those who presume that every proposition in the Bible must be literally true. Their hermeneutics is rather a complex mixture of two distinct proceduralisms, each a complement to the other. One of them, at least as venerable as Philo of Alexandria, is (allêgoria), allegory–a way, as Gerald Bruns has it, of “squaring… an alien conceptual scheme with one’s own on the charitable assumption that there is a sense (which it is the task of interpretation to determine) in which they are coherent with one another” (85). Its mode is consistently figural. In the writings of Victor Houteff and Lois Roden (who was more than a little acquainted with the Talmudic tradition, and a frequent visitor to Israel), as in Amo’s own writings, allegory often unfolds as a gnostic or cabalistic decryption of the hidden significance of the Bible’s roster of personal names and place names. It unfolds further as the translation of stories that seem to be about literal women and men into stories of spiritual forces and spiritual events; of stories that seem to be set on earth into stories set in heaven; of stories that seem to be about the corporal into stories of the regression or progress of the soul.

 

The other proceduralism, perhaps derived from the ancient notion of the (tupôtikos logos), the copy of something once seen, is typology. Already central to the New Testament authors’ approach to the Torah that preceded them, typology proceeds from the axiom of the unity of the Scriptures. It mandates the construal of the men, the women, the places, the individual and collective histories recorded in the Bible as models or exempla of the men, the women, the places, the individual and collective histories of later times.⁶ The former, as types, await their singular or multiple realizations in the antitypes they foreshadow. The relationship that typology posits between the prior and the posterior is thus not precisely one of mimesis, even if Eric Auerbach would have it be so. It is rather one of completion or fulfillment. Rhetorically or poetically, the relationship is metaleptic. The typologist, for his or her part, must discover the present and the future in the past, the world in the text. As rhetor or poet, he or she must execute a synthesis which is also a substitution, and a reduction (Bloom 100-103). The Branch Davidians understand such an act, if well and truly wrought, to require much more than human powers. They understand it to require the inflowing of the Holy Spirit herself.

 

*

 

If Amo has become a vessel of that Spirit, an (aggelos) or messenger of the final truth, she had first to recognize herself as worthy clay, then to reshape herself into a worthier cast than she was. Throughout the exercise, a hermeneutics of text and world also served her as a “hermeneutics of self,” and very much in Foucault’s sense of the term (“Hermeneutics,” “Technologies”). Among many other things, she learned to trace her spiritual potential ultimately to her descent:

 

If you study Abraham and the lineage of Jacob, also known as Israel, you’ll see that God intermarried the same family for three generations. O.K., because Abraham married his half-sister and Isaac married his cousin, and then Jacob married his cousin, O.K.–I’m not quite sure about the degrees of cousinship, but generally they were married into Abraham’s brother’s family, O.K. So that, I think, set the genes for extrasensory perception which certainly is found on my mother’s side of the family, and I believe my mother is descended from the tribe of Dan through her mother’s mother, who was from Denmark. Her mother’s father was also from Denmark; they were immigrants here from Denmark. So, Dan–Lois Roden’s work traces Dan across Europe to Denmark, Scandinavia, Sweden, by their habit of putting “dan,” “den” and “don” in the place names where they stayed, and so there came into England place names like Edinburgh and London. My father’s family, of course, is English. At any rate, I believe that if you read your Bible you see that God spoke directly to Abraham; He spoke directly to Isaac, I think, yep, and He spoke directly to Jacob–Israel. The gift of the ability to hear God, I think, many, many people have, O.K. Abraham’s descendants through Jacob, certainly: they are the people the prophets came from. God simply picks the people, I guess perhaps for attitude. (Interview)

 

George Roden could claim similar descent, but it was not George’s own inspiration to which Amo was drawn:

 

A.R. George’s is a generation that has been bypassed [of] prophetic gifts. I think, in all truth, it’s because he’s not humble enough for God to use him. His parents both heard God. But, if anything, it’s an aggravation to him.
W.R.D. That he doesn’t hear God?
A.R. That he doesn’t hear God and I do. (Interview)

 

Behind the apparent contingency of her desire, behind the seemingly absurd brevity of her bridehood, behind the ostensible excesses of all that she had endured before she had met George, behind all that she would endure after their separation, the allegorist and typologist has come ever more clearly to see a necessary union, a necessary recoupling of a fragmented blessedness. Yet the love story that she has at last been able to tell is itself fragmented, its shreds and patches scattered throughout the several volumes of her prose, as if she were not even yet prepared to confront its full lesson. Once pieced together, it becomes the story of a (hieros gamos), a sacred and permanent marriage of unique generative effect. It is a tragedy embedded within a transcendent comedy, a failed but necessary step toward the ultimate marriage of heaven and earth. It is a revelation of fate, of destiny, and of the cunning of destiny, which is, and can only be, the cunning of God. My editorial compilation of it would go something like this:1 The founding of Zion is prophesied in Isa. 14:29-32. Verse 29: “Rejoice thou not, whole Palestina, because the rod of him that smote thee is broken, for out of the serpent’s root shall come forth a cockatrice, and his fruit shall be a fiery flying serpent.”

 

2 When Moses’ shepherd rod touched the ground, it became a serpent; it was in fact not only a shepherd’s rod, but also a serpent’s rod, because it protected the flock as well as led them.

 

3 As the dove which rested on Christ at his baptism was a symbol of the Holy Spirit at peace, so the serpent raised on a pole by Moses (Num. 21:6-9) to heal snake-bitten sinners, a symbol fulfilled by Christ on the cross (John 3:14), is the symbol of the Holy Spirit at war.

 

4 The serpent’s root must be identified as something basic to the concept of the Holy Spirit, the serpent’s rod.

 

5 This is Lois Roden’s message that the Holy Spirit is in form a woman. The femininity of the Holy Spirit is consistent with the Hebrew texts, but is new to Christian thought.⁷

 

6 David Koresh’s group is represented in this verse as whole Palestina. They left the Branch Davidian property in 1984 and moved to Palestine, Texas because of a conflict with George Roden.

 

7 George is represented twice in this verse: first as the rod that smote Koresh and was broken; then as the cockatrice, the offspring of the serpent’s root.

 

8 George ran off Koresh’s group in 1984. They oppressed him in the courts, shot him in 1987, took the church property in 1988, and probably were involved in sending Dale Adair to kill him in 1989, an incident which resulted in George’s continuing psychiatric confinement (“Seven Seals” 14-15).

 

9 George is not only Lois Roden’s son. This verse also promises (based on the work of Lois Roden) that his daughter is the Holy Daughter, the fourth member of the Holy Family (Rom. 1:20).⁸

 

10 The Holy Daughter, Abimelech, is depicted as a bramble (pomegranate thicket) in the Scriptures that symbolize God as an olive tree, the Holy Spirit as a fig tree, and Christ as a vine (Jud. 9:8- 15) (“Book of Zechariah” 126).

 

11 Jud. 9:14-15 Then said all the trees unto the bramble, Come thou and reign over us. And the bramble said unto the trees, If in truth ye anoint me king over you, then come and put your trust in my shadow: and if not, let fire come out of the bramble and destroy the cedars of Lebanon.

 

12 The Holy Daughter is Zella Amo Bishop Roden, George’s daughter by his contract wife (concubine) from Shechem (U.S.A.; see Jud. 8:31).

 

13 She is God’s judgment on the great men of Shechem, who sent poisoners to persecute her in her yard when she was three years old, in a vain attempt to drive her mother into a psychiatric facility.

 

14 Jud. 9:22-23 When Abimelech [My Father the King] had reigned three years over Israel, then God sent an evil spirit [David Koresh] between Abimelech and the men of Shechem; and the men of Shechem dealt treacherously with Abimelech.

 

15 Zella Amo, who first heard God just before her fourth birthday, is to be the Rod, although intercessors will stand for her while she is a child.

 

16 The Rod is the judge, while the Branch is both king and judge.

 

17 Zech. 11:2 Howl, fir tree; for the cedar is fallen; because the mighty are spoiled: howl, ye oaks of Bashan; for the forest of the vintage has come down.

 

18 The judgment falls on the great men of the earth; they are as vines in the winepress of God’s wrath (Rev. 14:18-20).

 

19 The fir tree is Ephraim, George Roden.

 

20 Jer. 31:18-20 I have surely heard Ephraim bemoaning himself thus: thou hast chastised me, and I was chastised, as a bullock unaccustomed to the yoke: turn thou me, and I shall be turned; for thou art the Lord my God. Surely after that I was turned, I repented, and after that I was instructed, I smote upon my thigh: I was ashamed, yea even confounded, because I did bear the reproach of my youth. Is Ephraim my dear son? For since I spake against him I do earnestly remember him still: therefore my bowels are troubled for him: I will surely have mercy upon him, saith the Lord.

 

21 Eventually, George assumes the role of Jacob (Israel).

 

22 Jud. 17:1-2 And there was a man of Mount Ephraim, whose name was Micah. And he said unto his mother, the eleven hundred shekels of silver that were taken from thee, about which thou cursedest, and spakest of also in mine ears, behold, the silver is with me; I took it. And his mother said, Blessed be thou of the Lord, my son (Babylon is Fallen 92).

 

23 George Roden is Micah. His father was of the tribe of Judah, his mother of Ephraim. He is the literal joining of the two sticks, Judah and Ephraim.

 

24 The eleven hundred shekels of silver represents the eleventh-hour church of V.T. Houteff and Ben Roden.

 

25 Micah’s mother is Lois Roden, who had the spiritual message of the church after Ben Roden died.

 

26 Jud. 17:3-4 And when he had restored the eleven hundred shekels of silver to his mother, his mother said, I had wholly dedicated the silver unto the Lord from my hand for my son, to make a graven image and a molten image: now therefore I will restore it unto thee. Yet he restored the money unto his mother; and his mother took two hundred shekels of silver, and gave them to the founder, who made thereof a graven image and a molten image; and they were in the house of Micah.

 

27 On Ben Roden’s death, George took control of the church from his mother, who had the spiritual message and therefore should have led the church.

 

28 As a result of the struggles over the church, Lois leaves the church with two leaders, both of whom are idols to themselves and their supporters.

 

29 George Roden is the graven image, and David Koresh is the molten image.

 

30 The two hundred shekels is the part of the church that accepted one or the other of them. Most of the church would have neither.

 

31 Hab. 2:9-11 Woe to him that covet an evil covetousness to his house, that he may set his nest on high, that he may be delivered from the power of evil! Thou hast consulted shame to thy house by cutting off many people, and hast sinned against thy soul (“Habakkuk” 3).

 

32 George Roden coveted the leadership of the end-time church which founds the Kingdom of God without rendering obedience to God’s law. In doing so, he set himself both above God and above God’s law.

 

33 He cut off many righteous people from the church, and shamed his parents’ memory, and placed his soul in jeopardy.

 

34 The structural members of God’s temple, the stones and the beams, are symbolic of those who found the Kingdom of God. The stone, the woman God chooses to hold the door of the newborn Kingdom open, shall utter the loud cry. The righteous are called lively stones. The beam of the timbers is a great man or woman; this is the other witness who stands up in judgment.

 

35 The establishment of the witnesses is God’s judgment on George Roden.

 

36 Hab. 2:12-14 Woe to him that buildeth a town with blood, and establisheth a city by iniquity. Behold, is it not of the Lord of hosts that the people shall labour in the very fire, and the people shall weary themself for very vanity? For the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.

 

37 David Koresh built Jerusalem, the city that stands for the Kingdom of God, by theft and lies and bloodshed. God’s judgment burns all of the work of the Koreshites, and after, causes them to weary themselves proclaiming a silly thing, that David Koresh was the second coming of Christ.

 

38 All this so God can show his power once again in fulfilling prophecy, and restore His Bible to an exalted place as a revelation of Himself.

 

39 All the earth is to come to worship God (Isa. 66:23).

 

40 Jud. 17:5-6 And the man Micah had an house of gods, and made an ephos, and teraphim, and consecrated one of his sons, who became his priest. In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes (Babylon is Fallen 92).

 

41 After Lois’ death, the church remained George’s. He chose his son, Joshua, as his successor. Although George behaved as a king, the Kingdom was yet to be established.

 

42 Jer. 6:27 I have set thee for a tower and a fortress among my people, that thou mayest know and try their way.

 

43 Mich. 4:8 And thou, O tower of the flock, the strong hold of the daughter of Zion, unto thee shall it come, even the first dominion; the kingdom shall come to the daughter of Jerusalem.

 

44 The first dominion is the Garden of Eden. My farm, even though choked with briars and thorn trees, is like unto the Garden of Eden in its thirty fruit trees and twenty nut trees, grapes, and berries.

 

45 The fortress is my stronghold on Mount Carmel, where God has founded Zion, the Kingdom of God.

 

46 Jer. 8:6-7 I hearkened and heard, but they spake not aright: no man repented him of his wickedness, saying, What have I done? Every one turned to his course, as the horse rusheth into battle. Yea, the stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed times; and the turtle and the swallow and the crane observe the time of their coming; but my people know not the judgment of the Lord (“The Judgment of the Church” 28).

 

47 In the Mount Carmel tragedy, God founded Zion. Should his church be blind to it?

 

48 Jer. 8:8-9 How do ye say, We are wise, and the law of the Lord is with us? Lo, certainly in vain made he it; the pen of the scribes is in vain. The wise men are ashamed, they are dismayed and taken: lo, they have rejected the word of the Lord; and what wisdom is in them?

 

49 The whole church has rejected Bible truth; all their work is in vain.

 

50 Jer. 8:10-12 Therefore will I give their wives unto others, and their fields to them that shall inherit them: for every one from the least even unto the greatest is given unto covetousness, from the prophet even unto the priest every one dealeth falsely. For they have healed the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there was no peace. Were they ashamed when they had committed abomination? Nay, they were not at all ashamed, neither could they blush: therefore shall they fall down among them that fall; in the time of their visitation they shall be cast down, saith the Lord.

 

51 God threatens the lives of the whole apostate church; everyone would take a blessing that is not his.

 

52 The death decree has fallen on the prominent women of the church because Lois Roden’s work strongly suggests that a woman Holy Spirit messenger will follow her.

 

53 This woman has been persecuted by the government since November, 1991. Meanwhile, the men of the church, who claim to represent the Holy Spirit, publish peace because only the women are persecuted.

 

54 This is an abomination in God’s eyes.

 

55 Jer. 8:13 I will surely consume them, saith the Lord: there shall be no grapes on the vine, nor figs on the fig tree, and the leaf shall fade; and the things that I have given them shall pass away from them (“The Judgment” 29).

 

56 The end-time church will be stripped clean of members because they refused the Kingdom of God.

 

57 Jer. 8:14-15 Why do we sit still? Assemble yourselves and let us enter the defenced cities, and let us be silent there: for the Lord God hath put us to silence, and given us water of gall to drink, because we have sinned against the Lord. We looked for peace, but no good came; and for a time of health, and behold trouble.

 

58 God has rebuked you: How can you expect peace and health in the time of Jacob’s trouble?

 

59 Jer. 8:16 The snorting of his horses was heard from Dan; the whole land trembled at the sound of the neighing of his strong ones; for they are come, and have devoured the land, and all that is in it; the city and those that dwell therein.

 

60 The viper from Dan has frightened the horses to unseat the riders.⁹

 

61 Gen. 49:16-18 Dan shall judge his people as one of the tribes of Israel. Dan shall be a serpent by the way, an adder in the path, that biteth the horses’ heels, so that his rider shall fall backward. I have waited for thy salvation, O Lord.

 

62 These horsemen are they that devoured David Koresh’s church.

 

63 Jer. 8:17 For behold, I will send serpents, cockatrices, among you, which will not be charmed…

 

65 Lois Roden was the serpent’s root; Amo Paul Bishop Roden is the serpent’s branch; Zella Amo Bishop Roden, the fruit of the cockatrice George Roden, is also the serpent’s fruit.

 

66 …and they shall bite you, saith the Lord.

 

67 And we did.

 

* 

Do we choose to be who we are? Do we choose to love? Amo Roden has answered these questions, in her way:

 

Rev. 14:12-13 Here is the patience of the saints: here are they that keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus. And I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, write, blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth: yea, saith the spirit, that they may rest from their labours; and their works do follow them.

 

These verses mark the transition from the judgment of the dead to the judgment of the living. Those who die during the judgment of the living, if they die in God, are written in the Book of Life with all their sins blotted out. They are to be born anew in the Kingdom of God without seeing the time of trouble. The rest, like me, have hard work before us. The Kingdom is earned. (Babylon is Fallen 12)

 

Between the blessed, to whom all things will simply be given, and the damned, from whom everything will simply be taken away–there we must locate ourselves, and our inescapable summons to discipline, of the body and of the imagination. The curtains of the Scene of Instruction never altogether close. They open wide in our childhoods; they open again with every new crisis we face. We never really cease being in need of our pedagogues, never really cease being in need of our tools. We are never really complete; and what must be said of ourselves might also be said of all our loves.

 

The Scene of Instruction is thus a scene of irony, and its irony is tragic in tenor. Yet not even Amo Roden seems to have felt it claustrophobic, perhaps because she knows, like Foucault, that the discipline demanded even of her is not an asceticism but rather an ethical (askêsis)–an exercise, a training, a performance, if you will. She knows, too–again, with Foucault, though too many of his readers have failed to notice–that the logic of (askêsis) is plural. It is not merely Austinian, not merely the logic of citation and illocution, which in spite of its many convolutions remains an assertoric logic, in the indicative mood. The Scene of Instruction, after all, is a scene of (poiêsis)–of “creating” or “making.” So, among other things, it is a scene of narration, of composition and recounting, of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, of stories that others tell us about ourselves, of stories intransitively told.¹⁰ With the increasingly dense diffusion of mass media (among them those media which allow for the placing of the Bible in every American hotel and motel room), it has come to be a scene cluttered with narrative “ready-mades.” Yet it is still a scene of reception, and the logic of a reception itself considerably more plural, and more “creative,” than contemporary determinists are inclined to admit, whether their favored mechanism of determination be that of cathexis or of seduction or of indoctrination.

 

Yet in both Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer and Butler’s Psychic Life of Power, Foucault himself has recently reappeared as a determinist in his own right, and the Foucauldean Scene of Instruction rendered either as concentration camp (Agamben 166-180) or as “loss” (Butler 92 and 184-198). Rather bafflingly, Butler fashions her Foucault only from those of his writings preceding the long and momentous interruption between the first and the second volumes of The History of Sexuality. Before that interruption, Foucault labors with, and labors within, the constrictive dynamics of subjection and resistance. After it, he turns to the more expansive dynamics of subjectivation and reflection. Butler turns instead to Althusser and Lacan, and never once either refers or alludes to any of Foucault’s work on ethics and governmentality. Her about-face seems hasty, to say the least. Agamben aspires to be more comprehensive:

 

One of the most persistent features of Foucault’s work is its decisive abandonment of the traditional approach to the problem of power, which is based on juridico-institutional models… in favor of an unprejudiced analysis of the concrete ways in which power penetrates subjects’ very bodies and forms of life…. [I]n his final years Foucault seemed to orient this analysis according to two distinct directives for research: on the one hand, the study of the political techniques (such as the science of the police) with which the State assumes and integrates the care of the natural life of individuals into its very center; on the other hand, the examination of the technologies of the self by which processes of subjectivation bring the individual to bind himself to his own identity and consciousness and, at the same time, to an external power. (5; translation slightly modified)

 

Yet even this summation casts the later Foucault too much in the mold of his earlier incarnation. Indeed, were Agamben’s terminology accepted as an entirely general, an unexceptionable construal of Foucault’s analytics of governmentality, ethics would effectively be under erasure; as the “considered [réfléchie] practice of freedom,” (Foucault, “Ethics” 284) it would effectively dissolve, under an oddly Hegelian compression of self-formation into transcendent surrender.¹¹ Not that such an outcome should be regarded as a historical impossibility: one of the most compelling aspects of Foucault’s treatment of political techniques and technologies of the self is that it never takes the ethical for granted. It acknowledges the considered practice of freedom as a human possibility. It does not, however, perpetrate the error of presuming that the actualization of such a possibility is always historically given. For Foucault, ethical practice requires not simply a repertoire of technologies but also an “open territory,” a social terrain in which a considered freedom might actually be exercised. In ancient Greece, that terrain was largely the province of citizen males; women and slaves had little if any access to it. In the panoptic apparatus, it retracts to a virtual vanishing point. Even in our modern “liberal” polities, the most prominent Foucauldean locales of the contemporary possibility of ethical practice, it is far from being a true commons. It is by no means “post-colonial.”

 

What is at stake here is in any case far more than the best, the most accurate, the most just reading of Foucault. Nor is the matter simply one of conflicting interpretations–Butler’s vs. Agamben’s vs. Foucault’s–of the condition of the (Western) subject at (its Western) present. It is rather one of method, and warrant, and perhaps of interpretive self-inscription as well. Both Butler and Agamben are proud speculators, and they seek a speculative, a theoretical Foucault, a dictator of universal pronouncements. For the former, the Foucault of Discipline and Punish and “The Will to Know” is not merely a diagnostician of particular disciplinary and biopolitical regimes, but a theoretician of subjectivation as such, a theoretician in need of a Freudian concept of ambivalence in order to render his thought complete.¹² For the latter, Foucault is the revelator of the universality of biopolitics, but a revelator who has failed to make plain enough that the biopolitical executor’s “power over life” is the universal correlate of sovereignty itself (46-52 and 121-153). Both Butler and Agamben may be right (one can at least speculate). Yet both appropriate Foucault’s authority in asserting one or another “anthropological unity”–the ambivalent subject, the “bare life” of sovereignty¹³–for which Foucault’s method has no place. For Foucault, the human as an anthropological unity, if it is a unity, can only be a historical unity; and as a historical unity, can only be defined or known at history’s end–which is to say, not yet, and perhaps not ever.¹⁴

 

What Foucault would say of the human he would also say of power. So we must not follow Agamben or Butler in reducing Foucault’s conception of power either to political management or to psychosocial bondage. We must settle for a few “systematic” connections: exploitation, domination, and subjection (which is precisely subjectivation at its ethical vanishing point) are the Foucauldean limits of the ethical; power relations–these mobile, malleable, and fluid asymmetries of force and influence which charge even the most egalitarian of interactions–are its proper social matrix, and there is nothing to indicate a priori what structure even they might assume (“Ethics” 296). Nor should we reduce even subjectivation to a final, much less, an efficient cause of any ethical project. Foucault identifies four parameters of the ethical field (neither necessarily universal nor necessarily exhaustive): the substance to which ethical concern attends; the mode of subjectivation within which, or oriented to which, ethical judgment takes shape; the work required to become an ethical subject of a particular sort; and the end which such a subject, fully formed, would constitute (History of Sexuality 26-28). On the one hand, no ethical project is altogether free. Or as Foucault puts it:

 

if I am… interested in how the subject actively constitutes itself in an active fashion through practices of the self, these practices are nevertheless not something invented by the individual himself. They are models which he finds in his culture and which are proposed, suggested, imposed upon him by his culture, his society, and his social group. (“Ethics” 291; translation slightly modified)

 

On the other hand, here as elsewhere, Foucault alludes to multiple hiatus: between proposal and commitment, between suggestion and intention. Neither culture nor society nor the social group thus stands, always and everywhere, as an insuperable boundary, either to the ethical imagination or to ethical practice. Here, I think, is where the analytical provocation of Foucault’s analytics of ethics lie. It forsakes subjectivism, but also forsakes that easy relativism which has grown so familiar, and so long in the tooth. The alternative it offers begins to emerge clearly only in the second volume of The History of Sexuality,under the regulative idea of “problematization,” a process through which and in which thought reveals its specific difference:

 

What distinguishes thought is that it is something quite different from the set of representations that underlies a certain behavior; it is also something quite different from the domain of attitudes that can determine this behavior. Thought is not what inhabits a certain conduct and gives it its meaning; rather, it is what allows one to step back from this way of acting or reacting, to present it to oneself as an object of thought and to question it as to its meaning, its conditions, and its goals. Thought is freedom in relation to what does, the motion by which one detaches oneself from it, establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a problem. (“Polemics” 117)

 

Problematization is not only an ethical process, not a possibility for ethical thought alone; it is as broad as thought itself. Yet it is problematization that provides the thematic bridge between a historically specific genealogy of ethics and the general ethical status of what I have been deeming “crisis.” Problematization also provides the bridge between the passionate imagination of a millenarian prophetess and Foucault’s rearticulation and expansion of what Aristotle had delimited as the scope of ethical activity as such.

 

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle aims at codifying the abstract guidelines of that “master-craft” () (arkhitektonikê) which is “politics” ( ) (hê politikê) (Ii4), and which has as its end that unique object which is sought always for its own sake, and never for the sake of anything else (Ivii1). The object of politics must thus be an “activity” () (energeia), since it is evident that only among the class of activities, rather than the class of latent capacities or that of passive states, that one might locate an object perfect or complete enough to be sufficient for us, in and of itself. It is not until the sixth book of the Ethics that Aristotle argues explicitly that such an object must also be a “practice” () (praxis), and never a “creating” or “making” () (poiêsis). At issue in that book are the intellectual virtues, and especially the cardinal intellectual virtue of the ethical actor–“practical wisdom” () (phronêsis), skill at deliberation. Assessing its genus, Aristotle concludes that practical wisdom cannot be a science, for it deals with the variable, not the fixed and determinate. “Nor,” he continues, “can it be the same as ‘art’ () (tekhnê)… [and] not art, because practicing and making are different in kind. The end of making is distinct from it; the end of practice is not: practicing well is itself the end” ( … … ) (ouk an eiê hê phronêsis… tekhnê… d’hoti allo to genos praxeôs kai poiêseôs; tês men gar poiêseôs heteron to telos; tês de praxeôs ouk an eiê; esti gar autê hê eupraxia telos) (VIv3-4). Shortly before this, he will have declared that “all art deals with bringing something into existence; and to pursue an art means to study how to bring into existence a thing which may either exist or not exist, and the efficient cause ( ) (hê arkhê) of which lies in the maker and not the thing made (VIiv4; translation modified, emphasis added).

 

These distinctions have a number of striking implications. One of them amounts to a rejection of the Socratic analogy between ethical and “technical” virtuosity. Another, more startling (if no less trenchant), is that politics–qua politics, in any case–is itself not yet an ethical but rather a technical enterprise, though one that aims at bringing ethical practice into existence. The same must be said of those various activities to which Foucault refers as “practices of the self” or “techniques of the self” or “technologies of the self.” Hence, they fall into a realm of activity that Aristotle conceives as prior to, or as not yet involving, “choice” () (proairesis). Or perhaps not even that much can be said. Aristotle may instead have no room, ethical or “pre-ethical,” for Foucault’s practices and techniques and technologies of the self. Taking him strictly at his word, he at least has no room for them in the realm of “art,” for all that is art manifests a causal fissure between maker and things made. It would perhaps be too hasty thus to accuse The Philosopher of being paradoxical, but not, I think, too hasty to accuse him of being neglectful. For Aristotle, the “middle voice” of reflexive activity, of an agency in which the self is at once subject and object, doer and that to which something is done, has no poetic pitch.¹⁵

 

Foucault restores its pitch, and restores much of the genuine complexity of ethical pedagogy in doing so. He is not the first: one might look back to Nietzsche, or to Rousseau, or to Montaigne. Matters of originality aside, though, such moderns (and near-moderns) must, I think, be deemed to have won at least this stage or moment of their debate with the ancients; the middle should not indeed be excluded from ethics. Or more fairly, we might judge the whole matter something of a red herring. Foucault has himself shown, after all, that practices and technologies of the self were altogether as integral to the ethical life of the ancient world as they were to its Christian successor. Yet we must still give Aristotle his due. If he did not adequately discern the importance, or even the possibility, of ethical self-reflexion, he must still be given credit for discerning, or reiterating (see NEVIiv2: once again, matters of originality are irrelevant), the depth of the divide between making and doing, between creation and choice. It is regrettable that so few moderns have preserved this bit of his broader wisdom. Having discarded it, too many modern philosophers of the self find themselves oscillating uncomfortably between two equally unacceptable poles: one which would place both creation and choice under the transcendental influence of a quasi-demonic psyche (or culture, or society); and another, which would release both into the Elysian expanses of sheer contingency. Hence, I would suggest, the decidedly modern quarrel between “primordialists” and “constructivists” with which such theorists as Butler continue to engage themselves. That antagonists on both sides of this quarrel have claimed Foucault as an ally is, I think, indicative less of his ambiguity than of his belonging no more to one side than to the other. With Aristotle, he sees in choice or (poiêsis) an activity neither passively determined nor deliberately willed. Or to put it more positively: for Aristotle as for Foucault, (poiêsis) is an activity in which the peculiar dynamics of thought interposes itself between reaction and action. For Foucault, the indeterminate house of mirrors, and words, and sticks, and stones that thus permits of access is the house of the self in ethical formation.

 

* 

The house in which Amo Roden is living is perhaps cramped, and its neighbors largely unfriendly. Yet it still stands, however much it might now be in danger of toppling. Within it, choice continues, and with it, a discipline at least potentially liberated from the drudgeries of either repetition or parody. The logic of poetic discipline is the logic of trope, a logic that Aristotle once again was the first to elucidate, even if he did not fully recognize its practical import. The poet does not cite: she alludes and refigures. The poet does not yet “do” anything. Her logic is modal, and its mood is not indicative, but subjunctive. As Amo Roden might well agree, it concerns not the actual, but the possible. Choice is not its point of departure, but instead its horizon.

 

Notes

 

1. My regular companion during my visits to Mount Carmel, William R. Dull, has compiled an extensive photographic documentary as a complement to my own research. A small sample of his work appears in my “Deus Absconditus: Conspiracy (Theory), Millennialism, and (the End of) the Twentieth Century.” On one occasion, in October 1995, he conducted an interview with Ms. Roden on my behalf. I cite that interview here, and throughout. I hold the text of the interview, as of the other interviews and texts from which I have derived Ms. Roden’s thought, in a personal archive. Ms. Roden has insisted that I use her actual name when writing about her. I have also used the actual names of those in her circle (her husband, for example) who have become public figures over the past several years. Otherwise, I have sought to preserve at least a modicum of anonymity.

 

2. On Ellen White, see e.g. Ronald L. Numbers, Prophetess of Health. On Miller and Adventism, see e.g. Ruth Alden Doan, The Miller Heresy, Millennialism, and American Culture; Edwin S. Gaustad, ed., The Rise of Adventism; and Gary Land, ed., Adventism in America: A History.

 

3. On Houteff and the Rodens, see James D. Tabor and Eugene V. Gallagher, Why Waco? (33-43).

 

4. Weber’s most mature commentaries on the relegation of transcendental commitments to the “irrational” realm emerge in “Science as a Vocation.”

 

5. The theme is already present in Foucault’s earliest monographs. See Madness and Civilization and The Birth of the Clinic.

 

6. On the typological hermeneutics of the New Testament authors, see Leonhard Goppelt, Typos, and G.H.W. Lampe, “The Reasonableness of Typology” (18-22).

 

7. New, perhaps, only in its letter. The feminization of aspects of the Godhead in fact has long-standing precedents, Gnostic and Protestant alike. It is a notable aspect of the Shakerite theology of Mother Ann Lee. See Lawrence Foster’s “Had Prophecy Failed?” (176-177).

 

8. “The Seven Seals” (15). The citation of Romans 1:20 may be unintended; its relevance to Ms. Roden’s claim here is unclear.

 

9. “The Judgment” 29. Ms. Roden appends a footnote: “That which is crushed breaketh out into a viper (Isa. 59:5).”

 

10. This is an anthropological point, which Clifford Geertz has made with particular eloquence in “Deep Play.” It is also much of the point of Foucault’s enduring interest in autobiographical, diaristic, and epistolary writing, from the “confessions” of Pierre Rivière and Herculine Barbin to the intimate exchanges between Marcus Aurelius and Cornelius Fronto.

 

11. It would indeed seem that there is no room left for the ethical in Agamben’s version of modernity.

 

12. Of the argument of Discipline and Punish, Butler writes: “Although Foucault is specifying the subjectivation of the prisoner here, he appears also to be privileging the metaphor of the prisoner to theorize the subjectivation of the body” (Psychic Life 85; emphasis added). On ambivalence, the metaphor she herself favors, see the same work (173-75 and 193-98). It should further be noted that Butler appears to see no distinction between discipline and biopower.

 

13. “Bare life” glosses the Greek (zôê), “life” as distinct from the distinctly human capacity to construct and pursue a (bios) or “way of life.” Agamben (2-8) borrows the dichotomy from Aristotle’s Politics.

 

14. On Foucault’s method and its epistemological implications, see my “Introduction” (xxv-xxix).

 

15. On the middle voice, cf. Stephen Tyler, “Them Others–Voices Without Mirrors.”

 

Works Cited

 

• Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998.
• Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. H. Rackham. Loeb Classical Library. Rev. ed. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1934.
• Auerbach, Eric. Mimesis: The Represenatation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. W. R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1953.
• Bloom, Harold. A Map of Misreading. New York: Oxford UP, 1975.
• Bruns, Gerald L. Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern. New Haven: Yale UP, 1992.
• Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.
• —. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997.
• Doan, Ruth Alden. The Miller Heresy, Millennialism, and American Culture. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1987.
• Faubion, James D. “Deus Absconditus: Conspiracy (Theory), Millennialism, and (the End of) the Twentieth Century.” Paranoia Within Reason: A Casebook on Conspiracy as Explanation. Late Editions 6. Ed. George E. Marcus. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. 375-404.
• —. Introduction. Essential Works of Michel Foucault Vol. 2: Aesthetics, Method, Epistemology. By Michel Foucault. Ed. James D. Faubion. Series ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: The New Press, 1998. xiii-xliii.
• Foster, Lawrence. “Had Prophecy Failed? Contrasting Perspectives of the Millerites and Shakers.” The Disappointed: Millerism and Millenarianism in the Nineteenth Century. Eds. Ronald L. Numbers and Jonathon M. Butler. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987. 173-88.
• Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon, 1973.
• —. “The Ethics of Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom.” Rabinow 281-301.
• —. “The Hermeneutic of the Subject.” Rabinow 93-106.
• —. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1985.
• —. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Pantheon, 1965.
• —. “Polemics, Politics, Problematizations: An Interview with Michel Foucault.” Rabinow 109-19.
• —. “Technologies of the Self.” Rabinow 223-51.
• Gaustad, Edwin S., ed. The Rise of Adventism: Religion and Society in Mid-Nineteenth Century America. New York: Harper and Row, 1974.
• Geertz, Clifford. “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.” The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973. 412-53.
• Gerth, Hans, and C. Wright Mills, eds. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New York: Oxford UP, 1946.
• Goppelt, Leonhard. Typos: The Typological Interpretation of the Old Testament in the New. Trans. Donald H. Madvig. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1982.
• Lampe, G. H. W. “The Reasonableness of Typology.” Essays on Typology. Comp. G. H. W. Lampe and K. J. Woollcombe. Chatham. Studies in Biblical Theology 22. London: SCM Press, 1957. 9-38.
• Land, Gary, ed. Adventism in America: A History. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1986.
• Numbers, Ronald L. Prophetess of Health: Ellen G. White and the Origins of Seventh-day Adventist Health Reform. Rev. ed. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1992.
• Rabinow, Paul, ed. Essential Works of Michel Foucault. Vol. 1: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. New York: The New Press, 1997.
• Robinson, H. Wheeler. Inspiration and Revelation in The Old Testament. Oxford: Clarendon, 1946.
• Roden, Amo Paul Bishop. Babylon is Fallen. Ms. JDF’s archive.
• —. “The Book of Zechariah.” Ms. JDF’s archive.
• —. Cracking the Coverup. Ms. JDF’s archive.
• —. “Habakkuk: Judgment.” Ms. JDF’s archive.
• —. “The Judgment of the Church.” Ms. JDF’s archive.
• —. Interview with William R. Dull. JDF’s archive. October 1995.
• —. “The Seven Seals.” Ms. JDF’s archive.
• Tabor, James D., and Eugene V. Gallagher. Why Waco? Cults and the Battle for Religious Freedom in America. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995.
• Tyler, Stephen. “Them Others–Voices Without Mirrors.” Paideuma 44 (1998): 31-50.
• Weber, Max. “Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions.” Gerth and Mills 323-59.
• —. “Science as a Vocation.” From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Gerth and Mills 129-56.

 

 

Evans Chan

evanschan@aol.com

 

As Hong Kong’s anti-climactic 1997 decolonization came and went, the British (post)colony experienced a tumultuous decade–it was discovered by the international media, by Hollywood, and finally by the post-modernists. Maybe the question put by a contemporary academic Sepulveda to a latter-day Bartholomew de Las Casas should be: “Are they True post-modernists?” or “Are they True post-colonialists?” If there is any doubt that the project of Enlightenment, or secular Rationalism, is still very much with us, the burgeoning publications of postmodern studies of developing countries and “Third-World” cultures testifies to the universalizing Western intellect’s mandate to name and classify. As we enter the new century, the knowledge-power regimes in which Hong Kong and China seem already to be enmeshed are apparently as inescapable and indispensable as the cyberculture.

 

The modernist zeitgeist, according to Jurgen Habermas, is marked by the passage of utopian thought into historical consciousness. Since the French Revolution, Western utopian thinking is no longer mere pie-in-the-sky, but is armed with methodology and aligned with history. “Utopia” has become “a legitimate medium for depicting alternative life possibilities that are seen as inherent in the historical process…. [A] utopian perspective is inscribed within politically active historical consciousness itself” (Habermas 50). In a succinct formulation, Immanuel Wallerstein described the Enlightenment as “constitut[ing] a belief in the identity of the modernity of technology and the modernity of liberation” (129).

 

We can see how Enlightenment beliefs, through the imperialist expansion of the West, get translated into the parlance of the May Fourth Movement that erupted in China in 1919. Apparently the pursuit of the first generation of Chinese intellectuals in the last century is still haunting China at the beginning of the present one. The May Fourth crowd was looking for guidance from Mr. D (democracy–the modernity of liberation) and Mr. S (science–the modernity of technology). However, even at the time of the French Revolution, the parting of ways between Mr. D and Mr. S became inevitable in terms of realpolitik. The ruling class quickly noticed that Mr. D and Mr. S don’t really share an agenda. Those who embraced Mr. S were often appalled by Mr. D and had the means to restrain him. The inevitably mixed results of this venture as regards Chinese civilizations can be charted today in Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, and Singapore.

 

Whatever merits a theory of postmodernism may have, to declare the total bankruptcy of the Enlightenment project, of which the idea of universal human emancipation is a key component, seems a bit of a joke for Hong Kong and China. We have seen powerful arguments developed by the Frankfurt School and then by Foucault that unmask the unfreedom of men in the post-Enlightenment West. We can certainly appreciate the inadequacy of formal freedom when economic inequalities and other tricky micropolitics are built into the everyday life of civil society. However, Hong Kong is a place where the promise of democracy has been deferred again and again–from its colonial era to the post-colonial present, where the persistent official myth is that Hongkongers are simply moneymaking machines who are antipathetic to politics. Yet, in May of 1989, a quarter of its 6.5 million-person population took to the streets in support of the demonstrating students in Tiananmen Square; and in May of 1998, about the same number of people showed up at the first post-colonial polls to cast their votes for the window-dressing seats (twenty out of sixty) that are open to direct elections. It is hard not to agree with Habermas that modernity–as a set of emancipatory premises–remains an unfinished project here!

 

The past decade also witnessed a periodic bruising battle over the US renewal of China’s Most Favoured Nation status. Undoubtedly there are racist undertones in the American Right’s pounding of the human rights situation in China, given their silence on, say, Israel. Still it would be easier for the two-thousand-plus prisoners of conscience in China to accept US foreign policy as pragmatic and calculating than to swallow the theory that universal human rights are a mere Western prejudice. An unwitting intellectual irony has been spawned by the existential-structuralist debate since the rhetoric of cultural relativism–of respect for “differences” as expounded by Levi-Strauss–has been co-opted by Third World authoritarian governments themselves. The lobby for American business in China has begun attacking the imposition of alien values on this country out of supposed respect for its specific customs and traditions.

 

Meanwhile, Confucianism, which was once furiously condemned as an impediment to China’s modernization, has recaptured some of its lost lustre. It has been articulated, along with the growth of the Far East dragons, into the narrative of capitalist development under the rubrics of “Asian Values” (Dirlik 341). A chief advocate of this concept is none other than Singaporean strongman Lee Kuan Yew, an acknowledged idol of decolonized Hong Kong’s Beijing-appointed executive chief Tung Chee-hwa. In my recent documentary film, Journey to Beijing, Hong Kong’s democratic leader Martin Lee and political commentator Philip Bowring both call the bluff of “Asian Values,” a convenient new Confucianism in which political apathy and submissiveness are urged upon the populace as the means to economic success. Lately the downside of Asian Values–nepotism and corruption–is supposed to be at the heart of the region’s economic crisis. What this setback will mean to the neo-Confucian revival remains to be seen.

 

Figure 1. Production still from Journey to Beijing

 

Despite postmodernism’s growing currency, one can still find wholesale dismissal of its conceptualization. Ellen Meiksins Wood recently described the condition of postmodernity as “not so much a historical condition corresponding to a period of capitalism but as a psychological condition corresponding to a period in the biography of the Western left intelligentsia” (40). But the odds are stacked against her. Terry Eagleton, who harbours a deep revulsion against postmodernism, laments that “part of postmodernism’s power is the fact that it exists” (ix). Wallerstein castigates postmodernism as a confusing explanatory concept but considers it a prescient “annunciatory doctrine.” “For we are indeed moving in the direction of another historical system,” says he, “The modern world-system is coming to an end” (144).

 

Via Taiwan auteur Edward Yang’s The Terrorizer, Frederic Jameson notices that both modernism and postmodernism arrive “in the field of production of [Third World cinema] with a certain chronological simultaneity in full post-war modernization” because Third World films emerge from “traditions in which neither modernist nor postmodern impulses are internally generated” (Geopolitical 151). I think Jameson’s observation can be extended to the realms of culture and politics in much of the Third World in general. One can sense the wound caused by the incompleteness of the utopian Modernist project while the post-modern present seems inalienably here–if by postmodern, we refer to the meshing of high and low cultures as well as to the multicultural character of lived experience in the contemporary metropolis.

 

Recently, I took an Italian TV producer up the Central Escalator (reputedly the longest escalator in the world) on Hong Kong island in order to show him the dizzying mix of HK’s urban semiotics–a Chinese temple next to a blues club, a mosque at a stone’s throw from the Jewish Community Center. We find Nepalese, Vietnamese, Scandinavian and Portuguese restaurants on a street where Indian immigrants and Tibetan monks saunter past a cluster of Chinese paper offerings to be burnt for the imminent Ghost Festival. That moment is, well, postmodern, as distinctive and recognizable as the (modernist) experience at a passport control point that Auden described as “Kafkaesque.”

 

This Baudrillardean eclecticism may just be an icing on the drab cake of a Chinese city. The escalator area has been considered a mere hangout for the elites of international expatriates and Hong Kong yuppies. Incidentally, Jameson has no qualm in dubbing yuppies the agents of postmodernism (Cultural Turn 45). It makes sense. Who is more perfectly and compliticitiously with the cultural ideology of transnational capitalism than the urban boomers and Gen-X professionals? While one can still polemicize endlessly against postmodernism, Jameson seems right when he argues that “ideological judgment on postmodernism today necessarily implies… a judgment on ourselves…” (Postmodernism 62). Or in our context, what manner of judgment can the Hong Kong intellectual pass on postmodern Hong Kong?

 

An apartment right by the Central Escalator is, as a matter of fact, one of the main sets for Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express, Hong Kong’s breakthrough movie in the international art houses. One can’t overlook Chungking‘s postmodern pastiche stylistics, which are part MTV affectation and part retro fantasy. Quite a number of people I know dismiss the first half of the movie as little more than HK action flick with a chic twist. Yet it is in this segment (starring Brigitte Lin as a gun moll) that I saw something both indicative and symptomatic of Hong Kong’s visibility!

 

In a new essay, Gina Marchetti describes Lin’s outlandish imaging in Chungking: “blond tresses framing an Asian face, dark glasses and raincoat… ‘disguised’ as a Marilyn Monroe ‘look alike,’ this drug dealer… forms the visual foundation for the film’s bricolage of American pop culture, British colonialism, and Asian commerce.” For Marchetti and other critics, the Chinese gun moll is fighting–150 years later–an opium war of her own.

 

Whatever the categorical significance of the story–in my opinion, the 1997 subtext in most Hong Kong films is more often an afterthought than an integral part of the creative intent–the Chungking gun moll arrives in intrepid playfulness and self-assurance. She proclaims the moment of Asian/Chinese/Hong Kong ascendancy. The re-presentation of a white pop icon is no longer an exclusive white prerogative–Brigitte Lin has as much a right to vampirize the Monroe image as Madonna. The semiotic significance of Lin in Chungking Express, to my mind, forges a powerful link to that of Bruce Willis in Pulp Fiction, made by Quentin Tarantino, Chungking‘s hip sponsor in America.

 

In Chungking, Lin finally guns down her enemies, who include a Caucasian heroin supplier and an array of brown-skinned South Asian runners. In Pulp Fiction, Willis saves a black gangster boss from being raped and murdered by wielding a Japanese sword–a stylish weapon of choice among seemingly more deadly gear–against the boss’s sicko attackers. The axis formed by Lin (the white Asian woman) and Willis (the Asianized straight white male) may signal a new, and not exactly innocent, alliance in this postmodern hour of global (image) politics.

 

So Hong Kong films–an awkward subset within Chinese-language films–have arrived! And my pairing of Lin/Willis may have pointed to an unconscious Orientalist logic, i.e., feminizing the ethnic Other, still at work in this stage of cultural encounters. I am struck by the high percentage of works with a homosexual theme among the notable award-winning Chinese-language films of the past decade: Farewell My Concubine (China), The Wedding Banquet (Taiwan), The River (Taiwan), and Happy Together (Hong Kong). And the first historic documentary about Chinese cinema with any international visibility is by another Hong Kong auteur–Stanley Kwan’s Yin + Yang: Gender in Chinese Cinema, the Chinese entry in a series commissioned by the British Film Institute to celebrate the centennial of cinema. While extremely interesting, Yin + Yang favors a gay reading of Chinese cinema that tends to edge out other equally valid interpretations. For example, the famous butterfly lovers legend, which tells of a Chinese Yentl who cross-dresses as a man to attend school and falls in love with a schoolmate, is viewed exclusively as a repressed gay romance, at the expense of its profoundly feminist implications.

 

Hence, to some extent Hong Kong/Taiwan/Chinese cinema gains respectability through the back door of postmodern culture’s sexuality agenda. While Eagleton’s complaint about sophisticates who know “little about the bourgeoisie but a good deal about buggery” seems cantankerous and homophobic, his observation isn’t entirely off-base (Eagleton 4). The advancement of the sexuality agenda in our times may be a result of the postmodern triumphalist pleasure principle backed by a maturing market of gay consumers as well as by urbanites fascinated with playfulness, artificiality, and alternative lifestyles. The point is not to deny the urgency of the politics of gay rights, but to recognize that the need for a workable class politics, which remains as great as ever, has seemed to get short shrift since the rise of the new social movements in the 1960s and 1970s.

 

The gay minority is not the only group that postmodernism promotes. Its celebration of popular culture in a multi-racial context has given HK cinema, for a while, a global niche. In a recent article, David Chute said:

 

The current high profile enjoyed by Hong Kong cinema in the West is almost entirely a grassroots phenomenon. The critics and festival programmers who embraced these movies in the mid-Eighties weren’t the ones who created the current hot market for them in rep houses and videostores. The fans did that, by passing muddy bootleg tapes from hand to hand, by launching ‘zines and web sites devoted to the new religion…. And embracing the high-octane Hong Kong films of the mid-Eighties as purveyors of pure sensation did give us a way to respond to them unselfconsciously. No mediating cultural analysis was required to enjoy them, at least on this superficial level. (85)

 

Chute’s description is a telling indication of the gut-level appeal of Hong Kong cinema to Western in-the-know postmod audiences. For much of the past two decades, the Hong Kong film industry, never encumbered by a high modernist tradition, has borrowed right and left from Hollywood movies to keep up its frenzied output. In that respect, the postmodern pastiche aesthetic was practised from the very beginning. However, an Eastern visual sensibility and martial arts-fed action pyrotechnics have given Hong Kong cinema its unique edge. Movies that have achieved cult status in the West include Naked Killer, a copycat Basic Instinct that focuses on a group of lesbian warriors, and the gorgeously lyrical A Chinese Ghost Story, which incorporates special effects reminiscent of Poltergeist.

 

Yet, in the early 90s, the nostalgia mode, a key feature of postmodernism highlighted by Jameson (Cultural Turn 7), arrived in Hong Kong cinema in the form of mostly postmodern farces. Hong Kong cinema discovered its own tradition–by plagiarizing and satirizing it. A film like 92: The Legendary La Rose Noir, putatively remaking an old movie about a Cat-woman Robin Hood, is a freewheeling spoof of Cantonese genre films from the 60s. At the lower end of this aesthetics, we find Stephen Chiau, the biggest-grossing star of the 90s, cranking out dumb-and-dumber comedies that can, in the case of From Beijing with Love, spoof Cantonese melodramas, Bond movies, and Barton Fink at one stroke. At the higher end we encounter Stanley Kwan’s Rouge, juxtaposing Hong Kong’s past and present sexual mores; and Wong Kar-wai, who freely borrows the Chinese titles of Rebel without a Cause and Blow Up for his Days of Being Wild and Happy Together, respectively.

 

In accordance with a familiar logic of consumption, Hong Kong cinema’s exciting burst onto the international film scene, fueled by its grass routes enthusiasts, is already starting to fizzle like a shooting star. Almost before one has made a wish, the moment is gone. I still remember how in the late 80s, Hong Kong was celebrated by some Western film cognoscenti as a model of ethnic cinematic culture that stood its ground against the onslaught of Hollywood, the very motor of our postmod cultural industry. Maybe HK cinema has flown too close to its burning sun. Ellen Wood took the postmodernists to task for their retreat from examining the logic of the EuroAmerican capitalist system which finally became “mature,” viz globalized, from the 70s on. Postmodernism does signal the maturing of the capitalist logic–its relentless ability to absorb different native cultures. The film products of HK, from the epochal Bruce Lee onward, have bequeathed Hollywood with a tremendous file of software: remake possibilities like Stephen Chiau’s The God of Cookery, which 20th-Century Fox is planning to turn into a Jim Carrey vehicle after the success of The Truman Show.

 

Hong Kong, known as the Hollywood of the East, does seem in some ways to be ready for this transplantation. (Interestingly enough, HK cinema’s final fireworks were kindled by Brigitte Lin’s stunning portrayal of The Invincible East–a postmod sex-changed villain in a series of martial art films by Tsui Hark.) The “takeover/merger” finally happened, with HK directors, led by John Woo, trooping to L.A. I sincerely hope that Hong Kong screen idols like Jackie Chan, Jet Li, and Chow Yun-fat can travel far. However, the Orientalist scheme doesn’t bode well for them–a case in point is Stephen Chiau being asked to direct but not to star in the Hollywood remake of The God of Cookery–and maybe it’ll bode well for Michelle Yeoh, the postmodern Bond-girl-cum-ethnic-Charlie’s-Angel.

 

The postmodern concomitant phenomenon of the privatization of culture has favored blockbusters like Titanic and Jurassic Park, which are big enough to draw tons of teenagers and adults from their home-cocooning. Hollywood films are less and less dependent on the US markets. (A Titanic ticket costs US$4.00 in China–an exorbitant sum considering the wage level there!) The East Asian markets beckon. The twin faces of postmodernity–art in the age of digital reproduction known as piracy, and a penalizing, Hollywoodized global setup of sourcing, financing, producing and marketing–are the primary forces that deliver the coup de grace to ethnic film industries, including Hong Kong’s. Already three Christmases ago, the Disney cartoon, Mulan, based on a Chinese folk tale, was opening in traditional Cantonese cinema chains in Hong Kong. The decline of the HK film industry has been stupendous–from a few hundred made every year during its heyday to just dozens being made now. And the industry may decline further. In the past, the Chinese New Year slot in HK was reserved for high-profile local productions with big stars to fight it out at the box office. The Chinese New Year of 1998 saw two post-local stars in their Hollywood debut vying at the box office: Chow Yun-fat and Michelle Yeoh, the former in Replacement Killers, and the latter in Tomorrow Never Dies. Hong Kong pastiche is no match for its upscale Hollywood version. And the star-snatching, mind-tapping, bone-crunching digestion of the HK film industry by Hollywood could be the biggest real-life sci-fi horror co-production of the decade.

 

Hong Kong’s postmodern visibility, while a confluence of several narratives, was catalysed by the 1997 colonization cutoff date as if by a magic wand. But today Hong Kong looks like the Cinderella that never made it. After midnight of June 30, 1997, a ferocious economic downturn–symbolized by the debacle of the world’s most expensive airport construction project–transformed the Rolls Royces back into pumpkins. Repressive censorship measures of the British colonial rule were resurrected by the Special Autonomous Regional administration, at least on the books. And the Hong Kong film industry was cannibalized by Hollywood. Probably the very fact that the British handover of Hong Kong to China now seems so anti-climactic should be viewed through the postmod grid of global capitalism. The doomsday scenario–heavy-handed intervention by China–hasn’t really happened. China’s more or less hands-off approach should probably be interpreted as an index of its entrenchment in the forward march of developmentalism, to which a threat to Hong Kong might be too serious a disruption to contemplate, yet. And after all the pomp and circumstance, one wakes up to the revelation that the age of imperialism ended long ago. Hong Kong’s colonial status was a distracting anomaly in a world arranged according to the logic of globalism.

 

There is a paradox in talking about Hong Kong’s new visibility, since this has not prevented it from remaining in crucial ways as invisible as ever. Rarely is Hong Kong seen as a social-political entity with any semblance of a collective will. Always trapped between the vise of superpower politics or macro-cultural discourse, Hong Kong is perpetually a character in somebody else’s movie. At times, even with sympathetic commentators, Hong Kong itself is still curiously absent from discussions supposed to be about it. Take a look at Rey Chow’s paper “King Kong in Hong Kong: Watching the ‘Handover’ from the U.S.A.,” which is in the main a very useful analysis of the dynamic behind US-British political discourse, as well as the Western media’s coverage of the Handover. Castigating the double standard of the US and the UK when both countries fail to meet the democratic ideals that they applied to China themselves, Chow said:

 

All the [Anglo-American] criticisms of the P.R.C. are made from the vantage point of an inherited, well-seasoned, condescending perspective that exempts itself from judgment and which, moreover, refuses to acknowledge China’s sovereignty even when it has been officially reestablished over Chinese soil. Instead, sovereignty… continues to be imagined and handled as exclusively Western. Sovereignty and proprietorship here are not only about the ownership of land or rule but also about ideological self-ownership, that is, about the legitimating terms that allow a people to be. (98)

 

Make no mistake about the “people” that Chow is referring to. She means the people of China, not the people of Hong Kong. In a sweeping formulation, she declares that “[For] Chinese people all over the world… regardless of differences in political loyalties… the symbolic closure of the historic British aggression against China… accounted for the unprecedentedly overwhelming expression of jubilation… at the lowering of the British flag in Hong Kong” (97). As she describes it, Chinese response to the Handover was like Muslim response to Iran’s victory over the US in the ’98 World Cup: the event provided a perfect rallying point. The problem, though, is that Chow overlooks the reaction of Hong Kong itself. If Hong Kong was born out of the ignominious Opium Wars, its post-war growth has been fueled by an immigrant population fleeing the communist regime. The Handover itself, exacerbated by the ’89 Tiananmen horror, has triggered some of the most astounding waves of Chinese diaspora of recent times. Presently, close to half of Hong Kong’s population have foreign residence–what the locals call their “fire exit”–a fact that should be taken into account when one talks about “the overwhelming expression of jubilation throughout the Chinese-speaking world.”

 

In a polemical spirit, Chow draws a parallel between democracy, as pushed by Britain and America on China, and the opium trade of the last century, “with implications that recall… Westerners’ demands for trading rights, missionary privileges, and extraterritoriality” (101). Few would mistake Britain’s 11th-hour endeavour to introduce democracy in Hong Kong as anything more than a face-saving, hypocritical and cynical measure. However, Chow sees it as part of a consistent British decolonizing strategy intended to destabilize the decolonized state. After bashing Western-imposed democracy and speaking up for China, Chow suddenly finds herself “in anguish,” because after all she is “whole-heartedly supportive” of the Chinese democratic movement in Hong Kong (101). What about China’s “ideological… ownership,” “the legitimating terms that allow a people to be” that Chow is so convinced of? Doesn’t she consider China’s ideological hostility toward democracy part of those “legitimating terms”? Apparently, Chow’s reading of Chinese history is selective and reactive. The search for Mr. D(emocracy) began long before the Communist takeover and wasn’t planted by colonizers. What is the source of Chow’s anguish, if not “the wound caused by the incompleteness of the utopian Modernist project” I mentioned earlier? It is a lot easier to hate gunboat diplomacy than the ideals of the Enlightenment.

 

Chow can never come comfortably to terms with Hong Kong because Hong Kong has no real place in her discursive scheme, no active role in her narrative about the contest of nations and the struggles for cultural hegemony. The irony is that, though she studiously elides China’s authoritarianism and repressiveness, rejecting the standard Western representation of China as King Kong–“the spectacularly primitive monster” (94)–she ends up casting it in the role of “hysteric,” an irrational figure of “autocratic reaction” toward the West (101). This corrective, such as it is, will not likely persuade any of the overseas Chinese who share Chow’s jubilation at the Handover that China is a place they might wish to return to and live in as ordinary citizens.

 

If Hong Kong is at best a ghostly presence in Rey Chow’s discursive space, it is a kind of embarrassing inconvenience in Wayne Wang’s The Chinese Box, which purports to be a mainstream epic film about the 1997 changeover. Wang, like Chow, is an American of Hong Kong origin. With its corny plot device and heavy-handed symbolism, The Chinese Box is a far cry from Life is Cheap, Wang’s smart, macabre film about the colony struggling to re-emerge from the shadow of the Tiananmen Massacre. The Anglo-American prejudice at which Chow lashes out is palpable in The Chinese Box, which represents the transition itself not only by the descent of the British flag, but by the ominous-looking stationing of the People’s Liberation Army in Hong Kong–an entirely legal move on the part of the Chinese government that appears here as an “armed occupation” of its own territory.

 

The film has two fictional scenes of student suicide in protest of the imminent Chinese rule. One shoots himself in front of a roomful of merry ’97 New Year’s Eve party-goers; another sets himself on fire, presented as a TV news item in the movie. Because of the film’s use of authentic news footage and docu-dramatic trappings, the two suicide scenes are problematic, if not outright exploitive, because nothing remotely resembling them ever took place. (The real altercation occurring at the Handover night was more tragicomic: protesters were ushered into a corner far removed from the ceremonial venue, their cries for democracy and the release of Chinese dissidents drowned out by the police’s amplified broadcast of Beethoven’s Fifth in the rain-drenched streets.) And China, instead of being King Kong-like, takes the form of another familiar Hollywood phantom: a Chinese whore, a latter-day Suzie Wong (played by the fabulous Gong Li of Raise the Red Lantern) who wants to become the respectable housewife of a boring Chinese businessman. She is finally saved, at least psychologically, by the love of a white man (Jeremy Irons). He is a British journalist with a heart of gold, a huge designer’s wardrobe, and a terminal illness; and he also dies on July 1 or shortly after that, in the true fashion of Empire.

 

Squeezed uncomfortably between the marquee value of the British leading man and the superstar from PRC is Maggie Cheung, a remarkable Hong Kong actress who delivers a truly captivating performance in a thankless role in an otherwise undistinguished film. That she has to play a scarface with an unrequited love for a Briton who doesn’t even remember her is the best joke that Wang plays on Hong Kong, or on his own film. Hong Kong, a mutilated presence, glimpsed only through a subplot, appears to Wang as an extremely inconvenient political subject, to be surmounted by sensationalistic melodrama, paranoiac agitprop, and British and Chinese star power. (Wang’s token Hong Kong actress totally disappears in the film’s poster shot, which has Irons wrapping her in an intimate embrace.) Hong Kong, traditionally known as a “borrowed place” living on “borrowed time,” finally slipped briefly through the radar screen of international media on the “borrowed fame” of 1997. Such is Hong Kong’s dubious visibility.

 

Hong Kong as a distinct place and history has not passed entirely unnoticed. Its 1997 (borrowed) fame has suddenly triggered a growing scholarship about its predicament, past and future. In some mechanical readings, Hong Kong identity has its origin in the 1984 Joint Sino-British Declaration that inaugurated the decolonization schema, or was precipitated by the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre. But in more recent studies, the kind of urban, cosmopolitan Hong Kong identity that one encounters today has been more convincingly traced back to the riots of 1967, during which labor disputes and colonial repression resulted in the arrest of more than 1,300 unionists, strikers, and protesters, and in police killings of seven civilians. With the Cultural Revolution raging in China, red guards assaulted the British Embassy in Beijing in retaliation, and enraged Chinese soldiers marched across the border to kill five HK cops. But the defining moment of the ’67 experience occurred when pro-China leftists murdered a popular pro-Kuomingtang radio personality in a terrorist ambush, against the backdrop of Hong Kong streets lined with their random homemade bombs. This traumatic phase nurtured strong anti-Communist/China sentiments, as well as more sharply separatist lines of identity formation, among Hongkongers. The post-1967 city of Hong Kong marched forward, with governmental campaigns like the Hong Kong Festival to create “a sense of belonging” for the local populace. Industrialization kicked in, and the colonial rulers responded by implementing basic, but still benign, public education, housing, and health-care policies–in its way, the HK health care system can be considered one of the most generous in the world–which paved the way for Hong Kong’s advancement in the tracks of global capitalism.¹

 

One important law-enforcement office that the colonial government instituted in the 70s has become the envy of mainland Chinese. It is the Independent Commission against Corruption (ICAC), with which the HK government was able to clean up the police force and the social body by using a crucial provision–discrepancy between personal wealth and income–as a basis for investigation. The legend of the ICAC survives, for example, in a pioneering TV mini-series in the late 70s, Family: A Metamorphosis, penned by the gifted TV and screenwriter Joyce Chan, who wrote the scripts for Ann Hui’s first two films. This hugely successful soap opera tells of the afterquake of a bigamous patriarch’s flight from Hong Kong following an ICAC indictment. His family business is to be taken over either by the dandyish gay son of his first wife–the rightful heir–or the enterprising daughter of the second wife/mistress. The daughter’s bold attempt to step into her father’s shoes and her search for professional and romantic fulfillment riveted the whole community. Half of Hong Kong stayed home to follow one episode after another for weeks. A tremendous chord had been struck–probably by the story’s feminist outlook and its affirming message of the birth of meritocracy out of Hong Kong’s corrupt, patriarchal past. Almost a decade later, when I was traveling through the Chinese mainland in the spring of 1989, completely unaware of the catastrophe to come, many of the Chinese citizens I encountered named two things outside of China that they were most impressed by: Watergate and ICAC. To them, both stood for a rule of law impossible in China, where capitalist reform had meant deepening corruption within the party.

 

The ’89 Tiananmen crackdown was, of course, a shattering experience. It meant for Hong Kong a nightmarish chronicle of bloody disaster foretold. I, for one, was driven to filmmaking after that watershed event–when Hong Kong, which I had taken for granted for years while living both there and abroad, seemed mortally threatened. However, I remember my excitement as a film critic to witness the birth of the short-lived Hong Kong New Wave cinema in the early 80s. A whole generation of HK-born, -raised, and in some cases foreign-educated, filmmakers like Ann Hui, Tsui Hark, and Yim Ho were tackling the various facets of Hong Kong reality–from anarchistic fury at the colonial past in Tsui’s Dangerous Encounter of the First Kind to either cheeky celebration or pessimistic rumination on a (Chinese) tradition-bound society in Hui’s The Spooky Bunch and The Secret. I think Hong Kong woke to itself then, as a distinct place with its hopes, dreams, and memories. That happened before the 1984 Joint Declaration, and unquestionably the June 4th bloodbath of ’89 made Hong Kong take stock of its achievement as a “successful” colony more intensely than ever.

 

I said earlier that “the 1997 subtext in most Hong Kong films is more often an afterthought than an integral part of their creative intent.” Wong Kar Wai, for example, titled his 1997 film about a tormented gay romance Happy Together, suggesting obliquely and not very convincingly that his romance narrative had something to say about the mood of Hong Kong after its return to the fold of China. (Such relationship-based symbolism seems a favorite sport among Chinese directors. Ang Lee proclaimed that a gay Taiwan man bedding, even impregnating, a girl from mainland China in The Wedding Banquet symbolizes that acts of communication between the two political entities are achievable overseas, i.e., in America.) But the tenuousness of such political allegories doesn’t mean that 1997 cast little shadow across pre-Handover Hong Kong cinema. Snippets of current events inevitably found their way into many movies. Even a shoddy film like Underground Express is about the gangster conduit to help dissidents out of China in the aftermath of the ’89 clampdown. But direct emotional experiences are often couched in coded signals. I remember a scene from John Woo’s break-out movie A Better Tomorrow (1986), in which Mark, a Hong Kong folk hero role that propelled Chow Yun-fat to superstardom, stands on a hilltop to survey the glittering shards of Hong Kong’s nighttime neons. He exclaims: “How beautiful! And we’re going to lose all that. How unfair!” No doubt 1997, as much as Hollywood’s summoning, finally pulled John Woo out of Hong Kong. But Woo’s exit path is still a bumpy ride for Tsui Hark, the producer of A Better Tomorrow. Though regarded as less “serious” than such artsy colleagues as Ann Hui, Stanley Kwan, and Wong Kar Wai, Tsui is probably the Hong Kong filmmaker who has most effectively woven the 1997 angst into his movies.

 

If Tsui is known mainly as a filmmaker of high camp, genre action flicks, Hong Kong is always the hidden Signified in his movies. At the end of his early romantic period comedy Shanghai Blues, made in 1984 but before the Joint Declaration, we see the protagonist trying to catch a train to Hong Kong–obviously the new land of opportunity, the rightful successor to Shanghai as the next modern Chinese metropolis. When Tsui directed A Better Tomorrow III in 1989, again the protagonist flees to Hong Kong, but from the last days of the South Vietnamese regime. The allegorical foreshadowing of Hong Kong’s worst-case scenario makes this film yet another prequel to the disappearing colony. As a postmodern pop auteur, a hyperkinetic producer-director, and a Vietnamese Chinese who spent some time in the US before hitting his stride in Hong Kong, Tsui seems desperately conscious of, and probably grateful for, his unexpected luck, hence his sense of urgency to race against time–in Dragon Inn (1992), a pair of warrior lovers ponder the life-and-death impasse lying ahead of them. As a sci-fi film, a postquel about a decolonized Hong Kong being invaded by half human demons, The Wicked City (1992) features a gigantic clock (Time) furiously chasing the hero.

 

Critic Stephen Teo described Tsui’s celebrated series Once Upon a Time in China as his “vision of a mythical China, where heroic citizens possess extraordinary powers and self sufficiency. [It] is based on the realisation that it is a country the potential strength of which remains curbed by tradition and the refusal of talented individuals to come to terms with a new world” (169). I would say that this series presents Tsui’s imaginative fashioning of a “mythical Hongkonger” in the person of Huang Fei Hung (played by Jet Li). Assisted by his disciples and a savvy Westernized girlfriend in Victorian frilly dress, Huang is a wise, open-minded healer-cum-warrior who smartly negotiates his way to save the community from both rapacious white adventurers and obnoxious officials of China’s ancien regime. This Cantonese-speaking Southern corner of a “mythical China” is essentially an idealized Hong Kong, a de facto city-state with “extraordinary powers and self sufficiency,” which could revitalize China if the mother country would adopt it as a model of success.

 

But even this mythical haven is not immune to the 1997 angst. In the series’s sixth installment, Once Upon a Time in China and America (1997), Huang Fei Hung becomes a nineteenth-century Chinese immigrant in Texas, allying himself with native Indians to fight white scum. A year after the film’s release, Jet Li landed a role in Lethal Weapon 4 and kicked off his Hollywood career. Tsui’s angst-ridden take on Hong Kong may be right after all, though for the wrong reason. His momentous output was possible only in that golden era of pre-Handover cinema before it got ruined not by mainland politics but by Hollywood as well as by an irrepressible mainland-manufactured-Hong Kong-distributed piracy system. His first Hollywood film, Double Team, was both a critical and commercial flop and his second outing, Knock Off, beside being a box office kangaroo, has generated an avalanche of stinky reviews. So far, Tsui’s path to Hollywood seems both checkered and extremely uncertain.

 

At the end of Hong Kong Cinema, Stephen Teo reaches the conclusion that “Hong Kong cinema… is now set to return to the fold of the industry in the Mainland and perhaps be brought back to the cradle of Shanghai, the original Hollywood of the East” (254). Some vague political alarmism underlies this observation. It would be very good news if Shanghai could rebuild itself to counteract Hollywood. But the difficulty one has in envisioning that possibility may indicate the paralyzing, homogenizing effect of global capitalism. What seems shocking is the fact that Teo’s doomsday speech appears in the first comprehensive treatment of the subject in the English language. Indeed, while trying to decipher the cryptic codes of some Tsui Hark films, I already have the feeling that I’m an archaeologist going through the fractured mosaics of a lost monumental edifice. Once upon a time in pre-Handover Hong Kong….

 

Around the time of the first anniversary of the Handover, Chief Secretary of Hong Kong Anson Chan (a colonial-groomed bureaucrat who was able to keep her job as the top civil servant through the changeover) said in a speech while visiting Washington that “the real transition is about identity and not sovereignty.” Then she described how touched she had been by the hoisting of the PRC red flag for the first national day (October 1) celebration in Hong Kong (qtd. in Richburg). Her remarks have provoked much joking, cynicism, and disdain in the ex-colony. Understandably, identity remains a touchy, tickly issue in Hong Kong. And I must say a unitary, totalized identity doesn’t interest me as a filmmaker. I was a bit taken aback by some of the criticisms of To Liv(e), which appeared to be based in idealizations of a fixed Hong Kong identity. One critic said the imaginary letters in the film–sent by Rubie, the film’s protagonist, to Liv Ullmann–shouldn’t be in English because Hong Kong is a Chinese city–despite the presence of high-profile English media and the fact that speeches in the pre-1997 legislative chambers were routinely made in English by Chinese law-makers. Another critic decided that it’s Okay for the post-colonial subject to speak English, but Rubie has to speak with an accent to prove her Hongkongness.

 

In the flux of life and history, one naturally looks for constants and certainties. However, unexamined certainties of and about the self, subjectivity, and identity often create a hotbed for smugness and intolerance. It is true that the Hong Kong subject(s) of my three films are fairly mobile, if not wholly diasporic. They are either poised for flight (To Liv(e)), in New York already (Crossings), or journeying through China (Journey to Beijing). In Crossings, my second feature, a Hong Kong woman is threatened in the New York subway first by a deranged white man, then by a black man who insists that she’s Japanese. And looking at the range of possible identities at her disposal: Hongkonger, Chinese, British colonial subject, and American new immigrant, this woman sadly realizes that none of them offer her any solace or security. In Journey, my documentary about the Handover, I followed a group of philanthropic walkers from Hong Kong to Beijing on the eve of the historic transition. Their four-month walk passed through a number of meaning-heavy locales: Yellow River (supposedly the cradle of Chinese civilization), Mao’s birthplace, Tiananmen Square, and the Great Wall. By juxtaposing the walkers’ perspective with mini-essays about Hong Kong’s dilemma, one of my aims was to acknowledge, reflect on, and question the pull of (Chinese) identity for the people of Hong Kong, whose lives have been such a cultural and political hybrid.

 

Figure 2. Production still from Journey to Beijing

 

On the global level, identity politics appears to be a disconcerting outcome of postmodernity, as Terry Eagleton so eloquently summarized:

 

As the capitalist system evolves, however–as it colonizes new peoples, imports new ethnic groups into its labour markets, spurs on the division of labour, finds itself constrained to extend its freedoms to new constituencies–it begins inevitably to undermine its own universalist rationality. For it is hard not to recognize that there are now a whole range of competing cultures, idioms and ways of doing things, which the hybridizing, transgressive, promiscuous nature of capitalism has itself helped to bring into being…. The system is accordingly confronted with a choice: either to continue insisting on the universal nature of its rationality, in the teeth of the mounting evidence, or to throw in the towel and go relativist…. If the former strategy is increasingly implausible, the latter is certainly perilous…. (39)

 

No wonder ethnic strife has become one of the predominant features of post-Cold War existence. Our era is probably akin to that of Late Antiquity in the Western world. After Alexander the Great’s victory in the Persian Wars and the Roman conquest, Hellenism dissolved borders between the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Syrians, and the Persians. Competing cultures collided in a stretch of polyglot world, and as a result “Late Antiquity was generally characterized by religious doubts, cultural dissolution, and pessimism. It was said that ‘the world has grown old’” (Gaarder 100).

 

Well, moving from the old century into the new one, postmodernism seems still fairly young and post-colonial Hong Kong is a mere infant. But this age does induce profound pessimism. Thoughts, politics, and history are all being commodified and processed by the all-embracing media in the periodic artificial excitement of fashion and consumerism. Jameson, the leading theorist of postmodernism, announced that “there has never been a moment in the history of capitalism when this last enjoyed greater elbow-room and space for manoeuvre: all the threatening forces it generated against itself in the past–labor movements and insurgencies, mass socialist parties, even socialist states themselves–seem today in full disarray when not in one way or another effectively neutralized” (Cultural 48).

 

Probably, that’s why identity politics is the only concrete, manageable politics available at the moment. In that sense, I think Eagleton has belittled the gains of postmodernism, which have firmly placed the issues of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity on the map of cultural discourse. He labels such identity “nothing more than a substitute for more classical forms of radical politics, which dealt in class, state, ideology, revolution, material modes of production” (22). It will be a substitute only if it is allowed to be so. After the stunning collapse of the Second World, time–we don’t know how much–is needed for new strategies to emerge and new political consciousness to push back the dominion of the numbing force of transnational capital.

 

Had Hong Kong been given a choice, it would probably have chosen independence. Racial and cultural affiliation are not sufficient ground for territorial annexation, or else we might see Quebec and Austria part of France and Germany today. Taiwan is a case in point. The rhetoric of reunification with China (recovery of the mainland) has essentially been drained of its content. If there hadn’t been threats of military invasion from PRC, Taiwan’s nativist government might have declared independence already. With independence a lost dream, will Hong Kong–now a rectified accident of history–survive its marginalization and absorption into China under the “one country, two systems” arrangement on the one hand, and the ruthless class domination intensified by global capital with the acquiescence of the Chinese Communist bureaucracy on the other? An important fact has emerged since the Handover: No matter how much Beijing had watered down the first post-1997 legislative election, the Hong Kong democrats formed the first legalized minority opposition on China’s political soil. This piece of seemingly “good” news has to be weighed against the deflanking of the ICAC and the gangsterization of Hong Kong public life. An outspoken radio broadcaster was seriously wounded by two assailants wielding carving knives in August 1998, bringing back ugly memories of the leftist convulsion of 1967. Hong Kong’s future is now completely tied up with China’s, their mutual influences too subtle and dialectical to be summarized in broad strokes.

 

I’ve made three movies about Hong Kong and its people. They’re considered somewhat political, even interventionist, but neither mainstreamist nor quite avant-gardish, straddled between Hong Kong and some vague Western cultural space, and not quite relevant to either. As an independent filmmaker fluctuating between Hong Kong and New York, I would hope, at the risk of sounding pretentious here, that the horizon of my films touches upon what Foucault called, “the process of subjectification.” One should try, beyond the rules of border, knowledge, and power, to become the subject of one’s own invention, rather than a conforming item in a collective, pre-scripted identity–whether it is Hong Kong, Chinese, post-colonial Hong Kong Chinese, or transnational Chinese. We’re talking about a unique, at times unbearable, kind of freedom that is available to postmodern men and women who have become dwellers in a virtual global village, or a veritable Cybertower of Babel where consumption seems to be the only form of communication. Terry Eagleton has remarked, in a burst of irritation, that this is the sort of “freedom” enjoyed by “particle[s] of dust dancing in the sunlight” (42). For some of us, it is a troubling but genuine freedom.

 

Figure 3. Production still from Journey to Beijing

 

(My special thanks for the support, comments, and encouragement of John Charles, Arif Dirlik, Russell Freedman, Marina Heung, Linda Lai, Law Kwai-Cheung, Eva Man, Gina Marchetti, Pang Lai-Kwan, Tony Rayns, and Hector Rodriguez. This essay will appear in a somewhat different form in Arif Dirlik and Zhang Xudong, eds., Postmodernism and China, forthcoming from Duke University Press.)

 

Note

 

1. See various papers in Whose City: Civic Culture and Political Discourse in Post-war Hong Kong. Ed. Lo Wing-sang. Hong Kong: Oxford UP (China) 1997. The 1967 data is compiled by Hung Ho Fung in his paper “Discourse on 1967,” included in the volume.

Works Cited

 

• Chow, Rey. “King Kong in Hong Kong: Watching the ‘Handover’ from the U.S.A.” Social Text 55 (Summer 1998): 93-108.
• Chute, David. Rev. of Silver Light: A Pictorial History of Hong Kong Cinema, 1920-1970, by Paul Fonoroff, and of Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions, by Stephen Teo. Film Comment 34.3 (May-June 1998): 85-88.
• Dirlik, Arif. “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism.” Critical Inquiry 20 (Winter 1994): 328-356.
• Eagleton, Terry. The Illusions of Postmodernism. Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 1996.
• Gaarder, Jostein. Sophie’s World. Trans. Paulette Moller. London: Phoenix House, 1995.
• Habermas, Jurgen. The New Conservatism. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1989.
• Jameson, Frederic. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern. New York: Verso, 1998.
• —. The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995.
• —. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.
• Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: The U of Minnesota P, 1984.
• Marchetti, Gina. “Buying America, Consuming Hong Kong: Cultural Commerce, Fantasies of Identity, and the Cinema.” Unpublished paper. Presented at the Asian Cinema Studies Society, April 1998.
• Richburg, Keith B. “Residents of Hong Kong Searching for Identity.” The Washington Post. 30 June 1998: A12.
• Teo, Stephen. Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions. London: British Film Institute, 1997.
• Wallerstein, Immanuel. After Liberalism. New York: The New Press, 1995.
• Wood, Ellen Meiksins. “Modernity, Postmodernity or Capitalism?” in Robert W. McChesney, Ellen Meiksins Wood and John Bellamy Foster, eds., Capitalism and the Information Age. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998. 27-49.