12.1
September, 2001 Every issue of Postmodern Culturecarries notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcements, free of charge. If you respond to one of the ads or announcements below, please mention that you saw the notice in PMC.
Jeffrey Insko
Department of English
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
jinsko@english.umass.edu
Review of: And God Created Great Whales.Conceived and Composed by Rinde Eckert. Performed by Rinde Eckert and Nora Cole. Directed by David Schweizer. The Culture Project at 45 Bleecker, New York, NY. 9 September 2000.
There’s a clever irony in the very premise of And God Created Great Whales, Rinde Eckert’s funny, haunting, and irreverent chamber opera, which finished a two-week off-Broadway run last fall: Nathan, the protagonist, is struggling to remember Moby-Dick. It’s a problem he likely shares with the show’s audience. After all, Melville’s masterpiece is, in M. Thomas Inge’s phrase, “the great unread American novel” (696). It’s also the one work of American fiction everyone knows, even if one has never read it; or for many Americans it’s the one novel they would prefer to forget having been forced to read in college. But Nathan’s inability to recall Moby-Dick is more than just a case of literary amnesia, for he’s desperately rushing to complete his professional opus–an operatic adaptation of Moby-Dick–before his rapidly deteriorating memory, plagued by some unspecified atrophic condition, fails completely.
That a failure of memory should form the basis of this marvelous opera-within-an-anti-opera is fitting. Remembering Moby-Dick, often in oblique ways, forms something of a tradition in twentieth-century America. In the past few years alone, for instance, those of us with an eye on the roiling seas of American popular culture eager for sightings have seen the whale breach in the most unexpected of places, not only on stage but also in print and on screen. Consider: Laurie Anderson’s most recent performance, Songs and Stories from Moby-Dick, unveiled the year before And God Created Great Whales; an op-ed column in the New York Times in which historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. compares Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s investigation of President Clinton to “Captain Ahab’s monomaniacal ‘quenchless feud’ with the White Whale”; the publications of Sena Jeter Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife (1999), Tim Severin’s In Search of Moby-Dick (2000), and Nathaniel Philbrick’s National Book Award-winning In the Heart of the Sea (2000); and a new television version of the novel (1998) featuring Star Trek‘s Patrick Stewart as Ahab.1 To these, add the countless allusions to the novel on television shows from The X-Files to The Simpsons; mentions of it in movies as disparate as Ricochet, Deep Impact, and Before Night Falls; and even a full-page newspaper ad from the Microsoft Corporation that reproduces the novel’s opening paragraph to announce their “Microsoft Reader.” A century and a half after publication, Herman Melville’s novel, if not his fictitious whale, appears to be everywhere.
Perhaps Ishmael should have been less incredulous when he remarked on “the superstitiously inclined” who accepted “the unearthly conceit that Moby-Dick was ubiquitous” (Melville 158). Or perhaps this ubiquity is nothing new. Since the revival of Melville during the 1920s and ’30s, when he was plucked from literary obscurity and fashioned into the quintessential, heroic American artist, unappreciated and misunderstood, his greatest novel has persisted not only as a pop-culture icon, a mainstay of comic books and seafood restaurants, but as a touchstone for artists with “grand and lofty” ambitions, from John Barrymore, who played the role of the mad Captain twice on film, one silent (1926) and one with sound (1929), to John Huston, whose own film adaptation (1956) starred Gregory Peck and Orson Welles (who wrote just one play, Moby-Dick–Rehearsed), and for several of the most well-known figures in post-WWII American art: Pollock, Stella, Motherwell, Serra, and Basquiat.2 Certainly no other nineteenth-century American novel has left such an impression in our cultural memory.
Inseparable from this rich and disorderly intertextual network, Moby-Dick might well be considered one of the great ongoing cultural productions of postmodern America; a diffuse text that writers, musicians, artists, and politicians, as well as the creators and consumers of popular culture continue to respond to, abuse, revise, and appropriate. And God Created Great Whales is both aware of and a contribution to this vast constellation of meanings within which Melville’s text circulates. With a rare blend of critical intelligence and emotional intensity, it foregoes a faithful recreation of Moby-Dick in favor of a postmodern reimagining. And in a tight 75 minutes, Eckert not only manages to capture the spirit of Melville’s novel–its unruliness and wit as well as its tragedy–but also to provide both a reading of the novel and a meta-commentary on his own musical form, sporting with the conventions of opera as irreverently as Melville flouted novelistic form.
The performance opens to find Nathan, played by Eckert, seated at his piano, which is propped up by wooden crates, lashed with rope and covered with sheaves of paper and Post-it notes. Suspended from the ceiling by black wires, naked light bulbs of various colors surround the stage, evoking a ship’s rigging and providing a visual pun on Nathan’s condition, his mind’s intermittent episodes of darkness and light, and his brief flashes of inspiration. To stave off his memory loss, we learn quickly, Nathan has constructed two elaborate systems that allow him to continue his work. The first is a network of tape-recorders (of the old-fashioned rectangular variety), color-coded, strewn across his piano, dangling from wires at the back of the set, one even hanging from his neck and secured to his waist with duct-tape. These provide Nathan with a surrogate mind and offer detailed instructions: “Your name is Nathan. You are suffering memory loss. Today you will continue to work on your opera: Moby-Dick.” As the performance unfolds, the voice on the tape becomes the voice of Nathan’s progressive disease, the messages a matter-of-fact report on the worsening of his condition: “if you are still listening, your disease has reached an advanced stage.” The second system Nathan has devised is stranger still: it’s a figment of his imagination, a muse in the form of a former diva named Olivia, to whom Nathan is to be obedient, the voice on the tape explains, in all matters concerning his opera.
Working together, these two recreate Nathan’s version of Moby-Dick. Played by Nora Cole, whose powerful mezzo-soprano is a match for Eckert’s own remarkable voice, Olivia instructs and cajoles, admonishes and inspires Nathan, pushing him toward completion. The audience is thus treated to a glimpse inside the creative process, which is to say, inside Nathan’s faltering consciousness. When Nathan digresses in Ishmaelean fashion–say, to ruminate on his mind maintaining an independent existence after his body has passed away (thus explicating at once the symbolic meaning of his tape recordings and the presence of Olivia, who, after all, is really Nathan)–Olivia steers him back to his task. Occasionally in solo, but more often in tandem, they perform bits of scenes from the novel, substituting Eckert’s gorgeous and surprisingly accessible music for Melville’s language. And it’s a fair swap: the range of Eckert’s musical vocabulary–he hybridizes classical composition with styles as diverse as pop, gospel, and old sea chants–is a match for Melville’s own discursive range.
But while Olivia’s primary charge is to assist Nathan, as a performer Cole is hardly relegated to the margins of Nathan’s/Melville’s narrative. Singing the roles of Bulkington, Queequeg, Tashtego and various other male characters aboard the Pequod, Olivia represents the subversive entrance of a prominent female into Melville’s masculine world, allowing Eckert to riff on Moby-Dick‘s notorious gender-exclusivity. One of the play’s funniest running jokes, for instance, is Olivia’s attempt to convince Nathan to write her into the opera: she could swoop down from the sky at the end, she suggests, to rescue the orphaned Ishmael. Of course, Melville is an easy target on this point, and so Eckert doesn’t belabor it. Yet the force of Cole’s riveting presence–as an African-American female embodying so convincingly Melville’s sailors–forms a powerful critique of both Moby-Dick and the culture that has produced it by staging, literally, gender performativity and racial fluidity–the easily forgotten subtext of Ishmael and Queequeg’s homoerotically charged friendship.
Eckert is likewise fascinating to watch. A large, bald white man dressed in a gray suit that looks as if he’s been sleeping in it, he affects Nathan’s frailty with the smallest of gestures: dragging his toes in baby steps, slumping his shoulders feebly. But when he receives a burst of passion, he erupts seamlessly into the more commanding and imposing roles he assigns himself, putting his booming voice to use thundering at the universe as Ahab or exhorting the audience-turned-parishioners as Father Mapple. In fact, Eckert’s version of the sermon on Jonah is one of the show’s highlights, rivaling even Orson Welles’s brilliant performance in the otherwise forgettable John Huston film. At another moment, Eckert shifts just as nimbly into the character of Pip, standing still at the front of the stage to sing a lovely aria in a most unexpected falsetto.
Obviously, it’s impossible to treat all of Moby-Dick‘s multiple characters, stories, discourses, and themes in just over an hour. But Eckert is less interested in re-presenting Moby-Dick than in he is in striving for the kind of “outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep” possessed by Melville’s novel. And this is the great advantage of Eckert’s art form: his music provides the means to compress language. As if to demonstrate this very principle, one exchange has Nathan poised at his piano as Olivia feeds him the names of characters from the novel, each of which Nathan renders in a few short bars, thus transforming Melville’s cast of “isolatoes” into the stock figures of grand opera. Here Eckert is at his most self-consciously playful, parodying both generalized ideas about Moby-Dick and operatic conventions. Not only does he register the novel’s radical shifts in mood and tone, but by mocking the seriousness of both opera and Moby-Dick (as opposed, say, to the “misreadings” perpetrated in comic books and seafood restaurants), he deflates “high” art’s claims to transcendence. Yet, as if to refuse the audience the easy pleasures of such ironic knowingness, these moments are undercut by other parts of the performance that sing so rich in human emotion that truth and beauty and transcendence almost seem possible again.
It’s this balance between postmodern irony (always in danger of becoming what Jameson famously called “blank parody”[17]) and truthful emotion that makes And God Created Great Whales so much more satisfying than most adaptations of Moby-Dick. Unlike the four film versions of the novel, Eckert doesn’t succumb to what might be called the Ahab-problem; that is, he doesn’t concentrate solely on the novel’s dramatic narrative: Ahab’s obsessive desire for revenge. Ahab is, of course, an irresistible dramatic subject, an archetypal figure of tragic hubris. But as anyone who has taught Moby-Dick knows, this dimension of the novel doesn’t always translate effectively to our post-ironic age. That is, as compelling as the “fiery hunt” is, reducing a proto-postmodernist work of encyclopedic fiction to a pre-modern tragedy is no longer adequate. Too often Ahab seems to embody the kind of sententiousness that so bothered D. H. Lawrence about Melville himself–“Oh dear, when the solemn ass brays! brays! brays!,” Lawrence wrote (154). Rather, it’s Ishmael’s more protean sensibility that speaks to our age, his willingness to “try all things,” but to accept, finally, indeterminacy, the kind of undecidability of meaning that typically characterizes postmodern fiction: “I but put that brow before you,” he writes, as if to challenge the reader, “Read it if you can” (293). Isolating Ahab’s quest from the novel’s other, multiple competing narrative energies, then, only diminishes Melville’s accomplishment by attributing to the text a unitary set of meanings that its unreadability and its multivocality work to resist. And worse, it consigns Moby-Dick to the unfortunate status of just another dusty classic with little claim on our attention.
Consider, for instance, two additional contributions to the ongoing production of Melville’s text: Laurie Anderson’s Songs and Stories from Moby-Dick and Tim Hawkinson’s Überorgan. Anderson’s performance style, with its presentation and proliferation of images and languages from across the contemporary American landscape, might seem to lend itself naturally to capturing Moby-Dick‘s heteroglossia. Yet, Songs and Stories, while a pleasurable enough experience (at least for Melville aficionados), ultimately seems to subordinate Anderson’s art to Melville’s.3 She creates plenty of atmosphere, both visually and aurally: long lines of scrolling text, for instance, are superimposed over vast images of seascapes and projected onto an enormous scrim at the back of the stage, and her music, bass-heavy or provided by her ingenious and unnerving “talking stick”–a computerized lance that emits digitally enhanced musical notes as she runs her hands along its breadth–ranges from the ethereal to the funky. But Anderson treats Moby-Dick as nearly inviolable, with little of the incisive, critical consciousness–or the sly ironic wit–that typically characterizes her work.
By contrast, it’s easy to be captivated by Hawkinson’s Überorgan–a massive installation/sculpture on display at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art–without knowing anything about Moby-Dick, though to experience it is akin to what it must be like to stand in the belly of a whale. A 300-foot network of twelve enormous air-filled polyethylene bladders, many of them suspended from the ceiling, the Überorgan plays on the double meaning of the “organ” in its title. That is, it at once suggests the intestinal system of an impossibly large animal (a mythical whale, for instance) and a musical instrument. Controlled by a rudimentary central nervous system–a mechanism that operates on the principles of the player-piano–a series of valves opens and closes, causing sounds like foghorns or the lowing of cows or flatulence to be emitted from long foil-covered pipes affixed with reeds. Überorgan combines wonder and spectacle, ambition and scope, with pleasure and self-mocking–it’s art that is at once serious and just plain fun. Hawkinson has said that he had Moby-Dick in mind when conceiving his Überorgan,4 but the association Hawkinson’s piece forms with Melville’s text has little to do with Captain Ahab and his monomania. Rather, like And God Created Great Whales, Überorgan evokes not just the Moby-Dick of Ahab–the “au grand sérieux,” to borrow from Lawrence again–but the Moby-Dick of Ishmael, his vaulting imagination as well as his delight in making a fart joke.5
Of course, Moby-Dick can no more do without Ahab than it can do without the white whale. But the fact that these two symbols now have an existence in American culture almost independent of the novel from which they sprang–which is to say that they have become a part of our common language, in effect, literary clichés–has its unfortunate side. Melville’s novel is easily drained of its power to challenge, to shock, and to provoke (“I have written a wicked book,” Melville said after finishing Moby-Dick, “and feel spotless as the lamb”) and is instead put to use selling coffee for Starbuck’s and electronic equipment for Microsoft. The trouble is that, for all its value, our present scholarly preoccupation with “historicizing” is ill-suited to combat consumer culture’s tendency to simplify and to sanitize.6 And it’s surely too much to ask of our artists that they should fight that battle. Hawkinson and Eckert, however, offer hope: by creating work that’s both powerful and pleasurable–by granting their audiences a new point of entry into Moby-Dick and making it fun again–they suggest exciting new ways of reinventing a text that is, after all, always already ours.
1. A novel, Ahab’s Wife tells the story of Una, the bride of Ahab (mentioned once in Moby-Dick) and her adventures during the Pequod‘s voyages. These include working as a cabin boy on board the whaleship Sussex (a thinly veiled version of the famous Essex; see below), harboring a fugitive slave, befriending Margaret Fuller, and attending meetings with the Transcendentalists. In In Search of Moby Dick, the travel-writer Tim Severin re-traces Melville’s overseas journeys looking for evidence of an actual White Whale. In the Heart of the Sea is a historical account of the famous whaleship Essex, stove by a whale in 1821. Melville read first mate Owen Chase’s account of the disaster before writing Moby-Dick.
2. For more on Moby-Dick in twentieth-century American art, see Schultz and, more recently, Wallace.
3. I attended Anderson’s show at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on 15 October 1999.
4. Überorgan was commissioned by the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Hawkinson describes how, “early on, I learned that Herman Melville wrote Moby-Dick while he was living in Pittsfield, which is just down the road from Mass MoCA [in North Adams, MA]. My piece relates to the book and more generally to the nautical, with all the netting and lashing and rigging and the foghornlike sounds and the massive rib cage and organs” (152). This summer, Hawkinson and Eckert were together at Mass MoCA, where And God Created Great Whales played for two nights (after the deadline for this review) in August. Überorgan is on display through October 2001.
5. Among Ishmael’s reasons for going to sea as a sailor, he lists “the wholesome exercise and pure air of the forecastle deck.” Then he adds: “For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim)” (15). Pythagoras recommended a restricted diet, which included avoiding beans, which cause flatulence.
6. That is, while the “new historicism” (broadly conceived) has been effective in demonstrating the literary text’s social indebtedness and has broadened our sense of what constitutes both literary and historical textuality, with regard to the texts of the past (like Moby-Dick) it also has the unfortunate effect of insisting that a text “belongs” to its moment of production (rather than to its various moments of reception). It thus tends to fix texts in the past, to shackle them to a particular cross-section of historical time, denying the possibility that texts of the past can perform cultural work in the present.
Piotr Gwiazda
English Department
University of Miami, Coral Gables
pgwiazda@mail.as.miami.edu
Review of: “Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World.” Special Exhibition at the New York Public Library. October 2000-January 2001. Exhibition website: <http://www.nypl.org/utopia>.
A few years ago, I told an English professor (who regularly teaches Thomas More’s Utopia in his Renaissance literature courses) that I was preparing to give a paper at a conference of the Society for Utopian Studies. He asked me where the meeting was scheduled to take place. I answered, “Montreal.” We discussed other matters for a while and then, just as I was about to leave his office, the professor said to me: “You realize you gave the wrong answer to my question.” “What question?” “About that Utopian Society’s meeting. The right answer should have been nowhere.” He smiled. “The utopians meet nowhere, eh?”
Between October 2000 and January 2001, utopia was on view in New York–in a special exhibition at the New York Public Library entitled “Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World.” Jointly organized by the library and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the exhibition featured more than 550 objects, including books, manuscripts, drawings, prints, maps, photographs, films, and assorted ephemera. One part of the exhibition represented manifestations of utopian thought and sentiment from antiquity through the end of the nineteenth century. Another represented the twentieth century and now continues in the virtual space of the library’s website (<http://www.nypl.org/utopia>), where it examines the internet as the next “New World” of the apparently imperishable utopian impulse.
This is a large exhibition that requires several hours of concentrated study, since every item on display is worth one’s time. The show encompasses only the tradition of Western thought within which utopia acquired its own history of evolution, its own great narrative, so to speak. Assembling an exhibition like this is in itself an attempt to create a logic of continuity of utopian ideology and praxis that begins with the biblical Garden of Eden and ends with the metaworlds of cyberspace. What comes in between is various, fascinating, and often unexpected; it includes gulags and concentration camps, as well as the hippie communes of the 1960s and 1970s. In addition to Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), the book that gave the genre its name, one finds, for example, Thomas Jefferson’s original version of the Declaration of Independence; Voltaire’s manuscript of Candide opened to the El Dorado chapter; and nineteenth-century cartoons ridiculing Cabet, Proudhon, and other social visionaries. Overall, the exhibition presents a quirky history of utopian imagination dominated by the human desire to improve everyday reality and create a better place on earth.
The New York Public Library exhibition included two transparent plexiglass reading chambers, in which one could peacefully reflect on a number of utopian texts, such as paperback editions of Paine’s Common Sense, Butler’s Erewhon, and Huxley’s Brave New World. The chambers were intended to allow one to appreciate the role of the utopian impulse in Western history and imagination, but they actually turned out to be a strangely disconcerting experience–indicative perhaps of the astonishing ubiquity of the genre, if one thinks of utopia as a genre. After several hours spent in the mixed company of Francis Bacon, Karl Marx, and H. G. Wells, one realizes that utopia affects all levels of human experience and is present in nearly every form of artistic, political, and religious expression.
This might be, in fact, the fundamental premise of the utopian narrative: utopia is the essential, unfulfilled dream of humanity that continues to affect us, but at the same time remains very difficult to pin down. The most important distinction one could draw between the exhibition’s numerous manifestations of the utopian tendency is between utopias imagined and utopias attempted. Utopia has always been a matter of both theory and practice. The etymological root of the word leaves it up to us to decide whether utopia is supposed to be a place that is good (eu topos) or a place that does not exist (ou topos). From the logical standpoint, the two possibilities cancel each other out. Thomas More’s paradox may have been just a scholarly joke, but it still holds the world in doubt over the real nature of the utopian project. When one speaks about utopia as a place that is or can potentially be good, one considers it from the positive, practical standpoint. When one speaks about utopia as a place that does not exist, or exists only as the product of the imagination, one understands it in terms of negation or criticism of the reality at hand. The exhibition verifies that utopia simultaneously exists and does not exist; it is a valid instrument of social and technological change, but it is also a permanently unfulfilled fantasy of a better life.
This paradoxical status of utopia is also its crucial problem. In Plato’s The Republic (which has a prominent place at the exhibition), Socrates paints a picture of the perfect community while also insisting that the success of his argument depends on the imaginative cooperation of his interlocutors: “suppose we imagine a state coming into being before our eyes” (55); “imagine the condition of men living in a sort of cavernous chamber underground” (227). Socrates, Glaucon, and the other speakers in Plato’s text work out a scheme or plan for the ideal republic that, nevertheless, remains largely within the imaginary, rather than realistic, sphere. The success of the vision relies on the intensity of supposing, conceiving, devising, imagining, or simply desiring the ideal society. The conversation is neither idle talk, and nor is it a speech-act that would imply immediate action. At one point in his discussion, Socrates refers to “a pattern set up in the heavens for one who desires to see it and, seeing it, to found one in himself. But whether it exists anywhere or ever will exist is no matter; for this is the only commonwealth in whose politics he can ever take part” (319-20). So much for utopia and reality. When Socrates alludes to the fact that man can build a perfect commonwealth “in himself,” he really only allows for the possibility of an imagined utopia. Other representatives of this particular understanding of utopia in the exhibition include descriptions of the Golden Age (represented by the appropriate section of a fifteenth-century manuscript of Ovid’s Metamorphoses) and the Land of Cockaigne; and several Christian utopias such as the Garden of Eden, St. Augustine’s City of God, medieval manuscripts of the Book of Revelation, and the New Jerusalem. Literary and philosophical utopias written by More, Francis Bacon, Tomasso Campanella, Edward Bellamy, William Morris, and others remain fictions prima facie and as a whole they remind one of what Hegel once said in Philosophy of History (Engels quotes it on the first page of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific): “Since the sun had been in the firmament, and the planets circled around him, the sight had never been seen of man standing upon his head–i.e. on the Idea–and building reality after this image” (31-32). For Hegel, political changes brought forth by the French Revolution constituted the first sign that human beings were after all going to build reality after an idea–but the exhibition verifies that people stood on their heads quite a long time before the French revolution, and long afterwards.
What distinguishes Socrates’s vision from Aristotle’s (mainly in Politics) is precisely the mode of discussion. Aristotle envisions his ideal community from the example of an already existing polis, Athens, and his main preoccupation lies in the possible improvement of the city. Plato constructs his Republic upon an idea; Aristotle forms his upon reality. Plato relies on imagination; Aristotle relies on reason. Other “practical” examples of the utopian impulse in the exhibition feature fifteenth- and sixteenth-century maps and documents describing the newly discovered American continent. Among these one can find Christopher Columbus’s letter to King Ferdinand announcing his discoveries in the New World. Soon after its discovery, the new continent was hailed by the Europeans as the site of the biblical Garden of Eden, a new Earthly Paradise, and an ideal place for a utopian community. Subsequent events and experiences evidently put these ideas to rest, but something genuinely exciting is still detectable in these first documents of America’s conquest. Another good example of combining theory and practice is a set of designs for ideal cities, many of them undertaken by Italian Renaissance architects. Few of these cities ever materialized; the exception was the town of Palmanova near Venice, whose sixteenth-century plan is also on display. The revolutionary ideals of equality and reform constitute an even more practical portion of the exhibition. The American and French Revolutions are given appropriate place and focus; they are complemented by the religious and secular utopian communities established in the nineteenth century. The French Declaration of the Rights of Man is included, and so are charts illustrating widespread changes in weights, measures, and the calendar proposed by the French revolutionaries. Religious communities such as the Shakers and the Mormons are also represented, as are the secular communities of Robert Owen’s New Harmony in Indiana and Etienne Cabet’s Icaria in Illinois (these include photographs, drawings, prints, etc.).
The twentieth century saw the flourishing of science fiction, a form of utopianism primarily occupied with advances in science and technology in both the near and distant future. As if to illustrate this new direction, a full size replica of the robot used in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis stood guard at the entrance to the room featuring the second half of the original exhibition. Twentieth-century utopias also differ from their predecessors in another aspect. It is only in this century that we clearly observe the emergence of a troubling counter-genre, dystopia, in theory and in practice. Utopia, it turns out, is a two-edged sword. The fascination with progress, technology, and machines is represented by the Futurist movement in art and literature that came to prominence in Fascist Italy. The euphoric propaganda of the Soviet and Nazi regimes is juxtaposed with the sordid reality these social systems produced: gulags, gas chambers, and concentration camps.
The latter part of the twentieth century offers yet another perspective on the utopian impulse and its role in Western civilization. The current debate on advantages and disadvantages of the internet continues these utopian debates, with cyberspace as another locus of utopian possibility. Cyberspace, among other things, creates a potential for transforming oneself into alternate personalities based on viritual, rather than physical, identity. It allows human beings to participate in online communities that are not inhibited by exigencies of space and time. Cyberspace is also said to eliminate discrimination; it is a forum of free expression, promoting democratic principles of equality and tolerance. This is why virtual space is regarded as potentially utopian space. In the words of John Perry Barlow, author of A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, “ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live. We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.” The availability of e-mail, avatars, and chat rooms offers a new perspective on human communications and on human existence in general. The flip side to this, of course, is apparent: the facility with which alternate personalities can be created online may lead to isolation, alienation, and deception. Is the internet a great equalizer? To some extent, yes–but there still exists a potential for discrimination and stratification. Consider: cyberspace is available to millions of people, but only if these people have access to a personal computer, modem, and service provider, a condition which automatically exludes a tremendously large precentage of the global population.
The exhibition’s website offers an abundant selection of materials from the original show, and it includes both text and pictures. It also contains a very impressive collection of links to other utopian and cyberspace resources. The website is divided into several sections: Sources, Other Worlds, Utopia in History, Dreams and Nightmares, and Metaworlds. The last section offers a complex engagement with the relationship between utopia and cyberspace, with discussions of parallels between developments in utopian thought and the history of the internet, debates on the internet as a possible utopia, and additional remarks from utopian scholars and experts. In most of these comments one can detect, unsurprisingly, a skeptical resistance to the idea of the internet as an utopian enterprise. “Real” life is still the only life, most utopianists argue, and they consider the internet as something advantageous only to the extent that it makes our real lives easier. Most often, they regard the internet as an advanced form of communication technology, currently fascinating because of its novelty and potential, but likely to feel less utopia-like the more we become accustomed to it. In fact, the whole discussion of cyberspace as utopia may eventually fade away when we begin to take it for granted, just as we eventually took steam engine trains, automobiles, telephones, and television for granted. These technological advances changed our lives, to be sure, but at a pace much slower and in ways more complex than either their enthusiasts or enemies probably would have liked to imagine. At this point, a kind of coolheaded enthusiasm among utopian commentators still prevails, even though some of them are concerned with the dangers of cyberspace that make the internet seem closer to a possible dystopia. In a small way, viewers of the website can also contribute to the debate by taking part in a poll on the relationship between utopia and cyberspace. Although the website is potentially available to millions of people, only approximately 30 have taken part in the survey so far!
Even before the publication of More’s book in 1516, utopia existed in the millenarian visions of Old Testament prophets, the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, and the poems of Ovid. Throughout the centuries, humanity has confronted remarkable ideas that convey the utopian impulse, including stories, novels, and political, philosophical, and scientific treatises, and there have been numerous attempts to put these ideas into practice. Some of these permanently altered the face of humanity, while others faded into obscurity. Poised between myth and prophecy, utopia denotes both a recovery of the past and a promise of the future. Although it does not have a defined social role, utopia frequently intends to set a model of society that could be imitated or at least considered as an alternative to the present conditions. Does this mean that utopia is essentially progressive? Can dreams be productive? One is reminded of the good-hearted courtier Gonzalo in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, whose fanciful and candid refusal to confront the reality at hand produces a conventional and necessarily self-contradictory definition of an ideal commonwealth: if he were its king, he would allow “no sovereignty” (II.i.162). If Gonzalo’s commonwealth had ever materialized, it would have been mercilessly refuted by reality the way it was refuted in so many tragic instances in the twentieth century. Utopian consciousness is bound to be whimsical, arbitrary, and sometimes outright dangerous–which may be why so many utopian experiments have ended as dystopias.
To return to my anecdote, during my trip to Montreal for the conference of the Society for Utopian Studies I was filled with apprehensions about various Etienne Cabets and Theodore Hertzkas that I half-expected to encounter there. What I found instead was a group of serious thinkers and activists. Many papers I heard were extremely stimulating, but none surpassed my own co-panelist’s presentation on teaching the issues of environmental sustainability to inner-city college freshmen. Here was someone addressing authentic problems and finding excellent practical solutions to them. In the end, the conference revealed to me the true nature of utopia. The best riposte to those who say utopia can only be found nowhere is that, by the same token, it might also be found anywhere.
David Banash
Department of English
University of Iowa
david-banash@uiowa.edu
Review of: Traffic. Dir. Steven Soderbergh. Perf. Michael Douglas, Benicio Del Toro, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Dennis Quaid. USA Films, 2000. Blow.Dir. Ted Demme. Perf. Johnny Depp, Penelope Cruz, Paul Reubens, Ray Liotta. New Line Cinema, 2001.
Just as the intoxicating sensations of different drugs are incommensurable with one another, so films about different drugs tend to have radically different themes and effects. In American popular culture perhaps the illegal drug with the longest cinema history is marijuana. From propaganda films of the ’30s to Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke, or the more recent revisions such as Half-Baked, these films are, or have become, comedies. Further, almost all of them celebrate the subversively humorous effect of the drug for the preterite working classes. Even anti-marijuana propaganda films have become comedies as new generations receive them as pure camp. While films about marijuana are comedies, films about heroin are almost always tragedies, focusing on the way in which the drug is both a protest against an inhumane world and the immediate means of the hero’s self-destruction. While marijuana films revel in satire, heroin films explore the complexities of self and self-destruction. Distinct from both are films about cocaine, which are almost always evocations of and reflections on the American dream itself, that is to say, on politics in the most practical and quotidian sense of the word. Both Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic and Ted Demme’s Blow explore cocaine and its relationship to politics in the American imaginary. However, the reception of both these films is troubling. Traffic is lauded as the first honest look at the failure of the drug war, while Blow is either hailed or dismissed as yet another compelling but nonetheless vacuous celebration of the decadence of the ’70s and early ’80s. The almost universal mainstream acclaim for Traffic indicates just how much the worst kinds of conservative ideologies continue to inform even purportedly liberal attitudes toward drugs, while the dismissal of Blow as anything more than a decadent fantasy or simplistic cautionary tale misses its much more accurate indictment of the American idealization of capitalist conquest.
That cocaine is the drug of the ruling class in America is undoubtedly more than a function of its high price in comparison to other drugs. After all, the effect of cocaine is much closer to the effects of the most popular of the legal drugs of choice: caffeine and nicotine. (Not surprisingly, caffeine and cocaine were once combined in Coca-Cola.) Like these other speedy substances, cocaine heightens the senses and gives the user a great deal of energy. However, unlike other forms of speed, cocaine also gives its user the sensation of mastery and invulnerability. Rather than the ego death of heroin or LSD, cocaine legitimates the preferred modality of capitalist subjectivity–radical and inviolate individuality. If there were any doubt about the relationship of cocaine to capitalism, the case is eloquently made by Tony Montana in Brian De Palma’s Scarface (1983). Much like the original version of the film (1932), De Palma’s Scarface explores the ways in which the gangster is the ultimate representative of capitalism itself. However, in De Palma’s revision the connections between capitalism and cocaine are much more overt. In one of the strongest speeches of the film, the drug lord confronts the WASP establishment in an exclusive restaurant: “You’re not good. You just know how to hide,” he screams at them. In short, there is no difference between legal capitalism and the drug trade; both are exploitative and destructive. Quite clearly, in Scarface the villain is neither Cuba nor cocaine, but the multitude of injustices and contradictions that function as the conditions of possibility for capitalism itself, and its hero is punished in a grisly final scene only insofar as his drugs are themselves the worst kind of exploitative and alienated capital. The association of cocaine with the problems and politics of the ruling classes is also found in such films as Boost, Bright Lights Big City, and Less Than Zero, all ’80s films that indict the decadence of the era. One might even go back to Easy Rider, for while the heroes of that film explore the psychedelic revolution through the use of pot and LSD, they also support themselves as capitalists through the sale of cocaine.
The most surprising aspect of Traffic is that it is being presented as a revolutionary approach to representing the war on drugs. In a feature-length review of Traffic, the usually more savvy Salon contributor Jeff Stark argues that “there’s never been a single mainstream movie that’s been big enough, ambitious enough to go after the drug war itself.” According to Stark, if other films about drugs have been “self-contained units that dissect or examine one facet of drug use or the war on drugs, ‘Traffic’ is the solar system.” Stark’s unmitigated celebration of the film is typical of both right- and left-leaning publications, as critics of every stripe seem to be seduced by Soderbergh’s Balzacian aspirations. Indeed, Traffic is a large film, made in the best of Hollywood’s epic tradition. It deftly interweaves three complex stories. Michael Douglas plays the newly appointed Drug Czar, who, while dealing with the problems of his transition, learns that his own daughter is a drug addict. Benicio Del Toro gives the best performance of the film as Rodriguez, a Mexican cop caught between two rival drug cartels. Finally, Catherine Zeta-Jones plays the society wife of an indicted American drug smuggler. As these stories develop, they also connect to one another, with minor characters from one plot turning up in the next. In addition to the epic reach of the film, its style works overtime to convince us that it is indeed after a virtually unmediated presentation of truth. Much of the camera work is hand-held and shaky, and Soderbergh shot much of it himself under the name Peter Andrews. The effect is very much like that of a documentary or news feature. However, in an almost inexplicable and schizophrenic way, the film also calls attention to itself by color coding each aspect of the story: all the action set in the East is tinged in dingy blue, California is shot in bright, exceedingly vivid colors, and Mexico is given a consistent sepia tint by the use of tobacco filters. While often visually stunning, the heavy-handed use of such techniques seems to suggest that Traffic is a didactic film, in which the director goes out of his way to make things as clear as possible lest the audience be confused. For a film that hopes to represent the complexities of the drug war, such reductionism is counter-productive.
The film is reductive in other ways, too, which tend to undermine its grand ambitions. To begin with, it is almost exclusively about cocaine, with a supporting role for heroin and less than walk-on cameos for the vast array of schedule-one drugs to which Nancy Reagan told us to just say no. Beyond this, Traffic claims its universal scope while investigating only the U.S.-Mexico drug trade and ignoring the multitude of other nations that engage in all aspects of the business. Finally, though the film is praised for its realism because Soderbergh was able to get walk-on appearances from both Orrin Hatch and Charles Grassly, neither of these politicians is about to propose any kind of radical reforms to the war on drugs. The presence of these politicians is of a piece with Soderbergh’s claim that the 56 million dollar film is in fact an “absolutely” independent production (Dargis). Traffic self-consciously attempts to mark the hypocrisy of the war on drugs by dramatizing the liberal use of alcohol, caffeine, and tobacco by the very people who make official drug policy. At the homes and cocktail parties of the lawmakers, the camera focuses incessantly on glasses of scotch and the bright ends of cigars. Frighteningly, Soderbergh seems to suggest that all drugs are simply pernicious and destructive. In the only real investigation of drug use in the film, we closely follow the Drug Czar’s daughter Caroline through a handful of scenes in which she apparently moves from being a recreational user of cocaine and heroin with other alienated, suburban youth to a raving crack-whore in less than a week. The sequence is the worst in the film, reminding one of nothing so much as the campy drug hysteria that informed the deadpan antics of Sgt. Friday on Dragnet. However, it is perhaps the final resolution to Rodriguez’s story that is the most distasteful. Caught in the midst of a noir triple-cross between two rival drug cartels and the U.S. narcs, Rodriguez plays for his life and a reward. And what does our hero ask for? He demands that the narcs provide lights for the Tijuana baseball diamonds so there can be night play. In fact, the film ends on a shot of his smiling face in the stands under the glare. In the end, the film seems to suggest, isn’t baseball better than drugs? What politician wouldn’t vote for that? Unable to represent the complexities or challenge the dominant narratives of drugs and the drug war, Traffic tries to sell its audience the panacea of baseball.
Both Traffic and Blow are adaptations. While Traffic was boiled down from Traffik, a BBC mini-series, Blow emerged from the pages of Bruce Porter’s biography of George Jung. Of course Porter’s original title was a bit more telling: Blow: How a Small-Town Boy Made $100 Million with the Medellín Cocaine Cartel and Lost It All. The narrative implied by the title is precisely what the film delivers as it chronicles Jung’s life from his days as a small-time dope pusher to his role as a major player in cocaine wholesaling and his inevitable bust. Unlike Traffic, Demme’s film of Blow suggests something closer to Scarface‘s much more pointed critique of capitalism, but you wouldn’t know it to read the reviews. As A. O. Scott put it in the New York Times:
The recent trend in movies about drugs–exemplified by “Traffic” and “Requiem for a Dream”–is toward a solemn reckoning of their social and psychological costs. “Blow,” with its jaunty visual style, short-attention-span editing, and outlaw-entrepreneur story line, takes a considerably lighter view. If the earnest, ambiguous “Traffic” worried about the insatiable American hunger for illegal pleasures, the breezily nonjudgmental “Blow” celebrates this appetite and makes those who exploit it into hip folk heroes. (Scott)
To call Blow either breezy or nonjudgmental is to miss the seriousness of much of the film, as well as its rank sentimentality. Unlike many cocaine films, Blow is short on glamorized scenes of hip, well-dressed people consuming the powder to the appropriate sound track. Instead, the film revolves around Jung’s troubled relationship to his working-class roots in Boston. Caught between his mother’s manic desire for a better life and his bankrupt father’s inability to provide, the film suggests that Jung’s approach to his business was more an attempt to please his parents than a rebellious pursuit of glamour and decadence for their own sake. Growing up in the shadow of wealth and power, the film has the child Jung announce, “I never want to be poor,” and the film moves on from there. What is at stake for Jung is never the kind of counter-cultural idealism associated with pot and LSD that suggests that turning on might make a revolution. Rather, Jung speaks about his time like a corporate stringer. In the film he says he was sent to prison with a “bachelors in pot and came out with a masters in cocaine.” Or, as he even more cynically puts it in Porter’s book, “being in the drug business was like being an executive in any business” (55). What the film tries to argue, at times quite convincingly, is that Jung’s problems have much more to do with class insecurities and the claustrophobia of an Oedipalized family than with the cocaine itself. For this alone, the film is certainly a cut above a paranoid, reactive fantasy like Traffic. As Jung says at another point during his sentencing on a marijuana charge, “all I did was cross an imaginary line with some plants.” However, this is not to say that Blow is any more honest than Traffic about many other issues.
Perhaps the most curious aspects of Blow are the revisions of Porter’s book, both necessary and gratuitous. David Edelstein of Slate has already noted the ways in which the film functions as “an unfathomable piece of whitewashing” for making Jung far more sympathetic to his girlfriend, wife, and daughter than the opportunistic misogynist Porter’s book suggests that he is. However, even this doesn’t go far enough. Some characters, such as Jung’s actual California connection Richard Barile, have disappeared altogether, replaced in this case by Paul Reubens’ composite of fictional and actual people. Further, there is no mention of the fact that Jung was eventually released from prison in 1993 after he testified (with the sanction of Pablo Escobar himself) against Carlos Lehder Rivas (the film’s Diego Delgado) in a federal court, nor that Jung’s current 22-year prison term was a result of a 1994 bust for a marijuana-smuggling operation. In fact, while the film version of Jung’s life revolves around his struggle to come to terms with his family, the book focuses almost exclusively on Jung’s troubled and complex relationship to Carlos Lehder and his attempts to become an accepted and trusted member of the Columbian cartel. Finally, there is no mention of Jung’s taste for S&M and cross-dressing, aside from a brief and unexplained moment in which a customs agent is perplexed by Jung’s suitcases full of women’s underwear. In fact, this moment is so inexplicable in the film that one critic was led to interpret it as Depp giving “a small tribute to Ed Wood” (Carr). Such omissions seem strange, and they suggest that Demme and screenwriters David McKenna and Nick Cassavetes wanted to avoid the most interesting complications that informed Jung’s life. In the film, Jung is presented as someone who finally learns his father’s lesson that money “isn’t real,” but the real Jung risked and lost his freedom again in part, one can only assume, for just that. Then again, Jung was not simply a straight, white, working-class kid trying to make good in all the wrong ways–the narrative the film seems to endorse. Jung’s self-destructive and arguably pathological responses to authority (he was given to gratuitous acts such as a tactically suicidal speech to a judge sentencing him for marijuana smuggling in which he claimed that he didn’t believe he had done anything wrong) are certainly more complex, especially in light of his marginal sexual identity, for in some ways Jung’s life was an exploration of sexual and political social control in many different spheres. Had Demme and his screenwriters had more guts, they might have been able to capture some of the fascinating and fundamentally more challenging aspects of Jung’s life that emerge in Porter’s book.
To claim, as so many critics do, that Traffic is about drugs and the drug war as a whole while Blow is a typical gangster pic only incidentally about cocaine is to miss the ways in which both films are responding to our contemporary moment. After all, it is not as if we were in the midst of a wave of mainstream big-budget LSD or even ecstacy films. Traffic, ostensibly about the drug war as a whole, focuses only on cocaine, and Blow and Traffic are not the only recent films to highlight this as the drug of choice. Other recent examples include Studio 54, Boogie Nights, and Magnolia, as well as slightly older titles such as Where the Day Takes You. There are at least three factors that seem to explain why cocaine is so much at the heart of our current popular culture. First, many of these films are beginning to deal with the ’70s and ’80s as a distinct historical period, and are marking the decadence of that period through the presence of cocaine. Second, as I have argued throughout, cocaine has traditionally been a ruling-class drug, and as such it becomes a powerful device for developing political allegories about the problems of capitalism; there is much to suggest that Blow is following closely in the wake of films like Scarface in using cocaine for just such ends. However, there is a third reason as well, which is perhaps best approached through one of the most frequent criticisms of Blow. For many critics the film fell flat when it didn’t spend enough time reveling in the decadence and excesses of cocaine and the world of the drug’s most privileged users. Clearly, though most mainstream film provides itself with the alibi of an unhappy ending for users, there is an insatiable appetite both to produce and consume representations of drug use. How else can we explain one critic’s comment that in Blow “as the fun goes out of substance abuse,” so does “any possibility of audience interest” (Turan). If such statements in themselves weren’t enough, hardly an interview of the cast or crew of any film involving cocaine is complete without a discussion of what substitute they employed for cocaine: powdered milk, sugar, baby formula, etc. And, then again, how else would it even be possible to make sense of Traffic‘s paranoid fantasy of drug use which lingers so lovingly on shot after shot of Caroline free-basing in one location after another? Filmic representations of essentially unrepresentable somatic experiences are always worth looking at a bit more closely. After all, it is something distinctly different from the voyeurism of pornography. To watch others engage in sex is actually to have something to watch (and, one might argue, even to participate in through masturbation), but the effects of a drug, be it cocaine or anything else, are often not apparent to anyone but the user, and certainly are not readily communicable. Might the loving detail with which the culture industry represents drug use be in part a kind of perversely simulated repressive desublimation? Rather than consuming the drugs themselves, the audience fulfills its desires by watching others simulate the consumption for them; of course, then the audience can also have the additional satisfaction of seeing the characters punished for such transgressions. Is the loving detail that contemporary films devote to the decadence of drug use in the ’60s and ’70s the only high left for a cultural mainstream still dreadfully afraid of actual drugs? Certainly this would explain why the lurid depictions of drugs in Traffic were far more persuasive to critics than those of the more sedate Blow. Sadly, in the end neither Traffic nor Blow is particularly revolutionary. Instead, each reveals how even ostensibly refreshing and progressive attitudes toward drugs can be mired in the commonest forms of repression and reaction.
Jerzy O. Jura
Foreign Languages and Literatures
Iowa State University
GeorgeOJ@aol.com
Review of: James Elkins, Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? On the Modern Origins of Pictorial Complexity.New York and London: Routledge, 1999.
The Tempest (La tempestad), a 1997 best-selling Spanish novel by Juan Manuel de Prada, not only borrows its title from the 1508 painting by Giorgione, but also places the masterpiece canvas at the center of a complex detective plot that involves art forgery, love, betrayal, and murder. Alejandro Ballesteros, the novel’s main character, is an art history student who, after years of intensive studies, comes to Venice to examine the famous painting, the topic of his doctoral dissertation. Although the novel’s opening page includes a color reproduction of the painting, and the first chapter briefly describes what art historians refer to as its basic sensus litteralis, the author devotes much of chapter eight to explaining the complexities of the daunting task his fictitious art history student faces: the need to reconcile into a coherent whole many, often contradictory, interpretations of the painting and his frustrating inability to unequivocally “fix” the meaning of even its most visually prominent characters and elements. In a reflection on the nature of this interpretive process, the young art historian Ballesteros compares his task to the process of assembling a complex jigsaw puzzle:
It takes a numismatic patience to arrange the pieces of a puzzle. One has to decide continually between an almost infinite number of possible combinations, and to try and match the bite-shaped pieces together. And although sometimes the connections between them are so subtle as to be almost evanescent, and our intuition tells us that a simple error of judgment could just as easily destroy the tenuous link, we chase this thought away, and we continue tenaciously…. It’s not enough to fit the pieces together, however, we also have to make sure that the resulting image is plausible. (Prada 185)
As it turns out, in his concerns regarding the complexity of pictorial images, and the extent of critical writings about them, the fictitious art historian from Prada’s novel is not alone: the reflection on the interpretive process that addresses images, such as Giorgione’s Tempest, as well as the picture-as-puzzle metaphor itself (inspired by Salvatore Setti’s book on Giorgione), are both also at the center of James Elkins’s metatheoretical 1999 inquiry into the mechanisms that underlie present-day art historical discourse, tellingly titled Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? On the Modern Origins of Pictorial Complexity.
Elkins’s point of departure, and the basic premise of his argument, a premise which he quickly and convincingly proves in the opening chapters, is that while “once upon a time, pictures were simple,” over the last century they have invariably grown more “difficult to explain,” “demanding,” and “puzzling” (xi). This opening statement is not quite accurate, since what concerns Elkins is the fact that academic approaches to pictures and, consequently, academic writing about them, not pictures themselves, have changed dramatically over the last century.
Following Wittgenstein’s maxim that “the first step in seeing a problem is seeing that it is a problem” (xi), Elkins endeavors to outline its nature and extent in both qualitative and quantitative terms. To outline the main direction of the trend, he examines a somewhat extreme, and therefore conveniently self-evident example of a monograph by Birger Carlström, who claims that many popular Impressionist paintings, usually taken to be expressions of the new, modern age aesthetic, are teeming with extensive, and often cryptically encoded political messages, hidden in the outlines, signatures, fabric folds, or even minute paint spots so small as to be discernible only under a magnifying glass. In several examples of pictorial exegesis run amok, Carlström reads Renoir’s political concerns about the Panama Canal project from his paintings, or rather into them, as Elkins, supported by extensive art-historical consensus, points out. Carlström claims to have identified messages such as “stop stupid England at Suez Canal,” allegedly engraved with a needle in one painting, or cartographic outlines of the canal in several of Renoir’s paintings generally considered to be charming, but otherwise conservatively bourgeois portraits. As Elkins notes, there is no existing additional evidence, such as correspondence or other written documents, to support or corroborate Carlström’s unusual interpretive claims.
The extent of the “complexity problem,” however, does not exclusively affect the isolated and contested margins of pictorial interpretation. Even in those mainstream art history texts which reflect wide consensus in the field, and where the enormous geographic and chronological scope limits the space devoted to each single art object to a minimum, as is the case in Janson’s popular and extensive History of Art, the complexity of interpretation is still evident to Elkins. He points out that the existence of extensive additional interpretive information, while not necessarily included explicitly in such texts, is clearly implied or acknowledged in them.
Having outlined the general nature of the problem in qualitative terms, Elkins also traces the chronological development of art-historical exegesis, and provides extensive textual support for the claim that traditional ekphrases, dating from antiquity to about a century ago, are generally short, and that their authors almost never ventured beyond the sketchy, verbal descriptions of the paintings’ most immediately visible content (sensus litteralis), their narrative foundations (fabula, or dramatic ekphrasis, in Elkins’s terms), or, in the case of religious paintings, their spiritual meaning (sensus spiritualis). Elkins sees the relatively recent explosion of interpretive complexity as an urgent theoretical issue that needs to be addressed, and observes that “as historians and viewers, we tend not to reflect on why we understand pictures the way we do” (35). Thus it would be hard not to notice that in a way the book and its author’s arguments are very fittingly inscribed within the postmodern debate on the mechanisms of legitimizing our knowledge, and in this case, the art historical discourse in particular.
The anatomy of pictorial complexity, however, and especially its genesis, is not very simple. Elkins hypothesizes that it is our present-day “aversion to mere description, or the apparently simpleminded praise of illusion” (39), that leads to endless bibliographies that have accumulated not only around certain paintings, but even around the meaning of specific individual objects depicted in them. The “buried mirror,” to use the term coined by Carlos Fuentes, in Velázquez’s Las Meninas is a perfect case in point. Understood for centuries as little more than just a reflection of the Spanish royal couple, with Michel Foucault’s essay the painting was “pressed into service as a reflection of fragmented Western epistemology” and treated ever since as “the representation, as it were of classical representation” (39). And while Elkins himself contributed an elaborate diagrammatic analysis of the painting’s complex perspective that accompanied Joel Snyder’s 1985 article on the emblematic meanings of the mirror in the Spanish masterpiece, he readily admits that the diagram’s analytic precision and the logical exactitude of the argument that it accompanied are distinctly “foreign to Velázquez’s contemporary reception” (40). So might be dozens of other present-day studies of the painting, whose authors see the mirror as a catalyst for “‘narcissistic’ reflections on self reflection” (Mieke Bal), as a “hypericon” and “metapicture”–i.e., a painting that represents picturing itself (W. J. T. Mitchell)–or even as “a representation of Lacan’s register of the Symbolic” (Pierre-Gilles Guéguen) (40).
Other examples of the objects whose presence in paintings has recently generated equally extensive and complex exegetic commentary include open doors, which formerly “seemed self-explanatory to generations of writers before the twentieth century” (42); shoes, a prominent point of reference in Jacques Derrida’s “Restitutions of the Truth in Painting”; and checkerboard floors, as well as the basic perspective box that underlies the construction of many pictorial spaces (43). Elkins is eager to stress that he does not believe those critical interpretive excursions are “inane or inherently wrong headed,” but rather that they constitute “the shape of pictures as we understand them today” (44), and that the increased interest in some paintings, or the critically underscored relevance of some objects in them, is a reflection of the importance of their commentators to the general intellectual tenor of our times, a point aptly made with a rhetorical question: “How interesting are Van Gogh’s paintings of shoes, outside Heidegger and Derrida?” (45). By contrast, Elkins also defines a category of paintings which fail to attract wider exegetic interest, and, since they are not compositionally engaging, “offer little purchase for an historian intent on locating intellectual content” (53). Since they seem to “call for a nonverbal, unanalyzed kind of contemplation” (54), they are usually excluded from verbal analyses. For Elkins, few art historians are aware of this exclusionary bias, even when it is patently visible in their own writing.
The emphasis on the intellectual content of paintings makes Salvatore Setti’s interpretive picture-as-puzzle metaphor (from his book on Giorgione) particularly attractive to Elkins. In fact, several central chapters of his book include extensive and copiously illustrated critical evaluations of existing taxonomies of puzzle types (both in the metaphoric and in the literal sense) and of different degrees, modes, and types of ambiguities.
While for present-day art historical discourse the potential for pictorial complexity and ambiguity seems to be a prized characteristic, too much of a good thing occasionally makes a critical evaluation of existing research impossible. This leads Elkins to describe one category of images as “monstrously ambiguous paintings” (123). Three prime examples of this category are Giorgione’s Tempesta, Botticelli’s Primavera, and Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling, since in each case “so much has been said about each of them that the history of their reception can no longer be fully told” (124). The paintings that are thought to be intentionally ambiguous are especially good candidates for the category, and even more so if their primary subject and meanings are unclear and cannot be determined to be either self-evident or reasonably well deduced from existing historical sources. Giorgione’s Tempesta is a perfect example, exactly because there is no consensus on the painting’s primary meanings. To “evoke the tenor of the literature” (131), Elkins lists a long series of recently proposed interpretive solutions, ranging from very specific identifications of the painting’s characters with those of various literary, mythological, biblical, or hagiographic fabulae, to the claims that Tempesta indeed is, and always has been intended to evade unambiguous attributions of meaning, and that it really is a painting without a subject (130-37).
Picking up the line of thought about Carlström’s marginal exegeses from the introductory pages of the book, Elkins devotes an entire chapter to cryptomorphs–hidden images, in many cases arguably read into the pictures as a result of modern day, often anachronistic interpretations. And, as Elkins himself admits, while in some cases, such as Freud’s famous misreading of a vulture into Leonardo’s Virgin and Child with St. Anne (205), errors can be easily explained away (a translation error, in this case). Other hypotheses, such as Meshberger’s claim of two brain views embedded in Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling (Elkins 209), can be argued against only tentatively, and the multiplicity and complexity of arguments that have to be brought to bear on this case, ironically, dilute the argument, instead of lending credibility to it.
Elkins’s tour-de-force journey through exegetic samples, whether of exemplary logical coherence, or marginal, bizarre, and non-corroborated interpretive claims, concludes with an envoi which contains a handy summary of his answers to the questions posed in the title of the book, Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? Elkins’s own initial hypothesis that the increase in our knowledge, the growth of the discipline, and new insights are responsible for the complex ways we read pictures, is ultimately determined by him to be unsatisfactory. It is surprising to realize, however, that while Elkins considers a wide range of possible causes in his effort to account for the rise in the complexity of writing about pictures, he tends to leave out more mundane causes external to art history as a discipline. Ironically, the reason for this exclusion may be that those possible external causes are not as complex as the internal ones Elkins discusses at length, and therefore are of less interest to a scholar. Technological advances in art reproduction come to mind as a potentially powerful impulse for that type of change, an impulse not considered by Elkins. One could hypothesize that, since in the past the reading audience had limited access to the works of art in question, it was necessary to resort to frequent basic description, but in today’s world, where detailed color reproductions of thousands of paintings are easily available to the public, the reason for simple description has been eliminated, leaving a void to be filled with more complex arguments. Similarly, the academic pressure on many researchers to publish extensively and frequently has led many actively to seek out niche areas that have not yet been explored, especially if their work is concerned with periods and works that have already accumulated an extensive body of theoretical commentary.
Elkins’s book remains a valuable reflection on the mechanisms that set the directions of contemporary academic discourse, and while his specific concern here is art history, many of his observations clearly apply to other humanistic disciplines, as well–and in particular to literary studies.
Srdjan Smajic
English Department
Tulane University
ssmajic@tulane.edu
Review of: Paul Virilio, A Landscape of Events.Trans. Julie Rose. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.
Those who are familiar with Paul Virilio’s work on dromology, or the logic and effects of speed, may have noticed by now a paradox in the manner in which he addresses this subject. While he maintains that speed is the essential modus vivendi of the latest devices of destruction, deterrence, and misinformation, Virilio himself writes and publishes at an impressive pace. The reviewer, who has just gotten his hands on A Landscape of Events (2000 [1996]), has not yet seen The Information Bomb (2000 [1998]), and probably will not get to it before the translation of Stratégie de la déception (1999) comes out to announce that, yet again, the technologies and texts of yesterday are already outdated.
On the one hand, this arrangement is perfectly logical, and the rationale behind it is self-explanatory: one cannot take forever to comment on events that are occurring at the speed of light–and only for the duration of their televised presentation. The Persian Gulf War, which according to Virilio was in 1992 already “receding into the vacuum of consciousness” at meteorite-speed, demonstrates how televised events operate (“now you see it, now you don’t“), and perfectly, if tragically, illustrates “the compression of history and finally the disappearance of the event!” (24).1 If human memory has by now so thoroughly adapted itself to televisual programming that objects, events, and even persons can be said to exist only insofar as they are being televised in “real time,” then the speed at which Virilio makes his observations public appears to be not so much a matter of choice but of sheer necessity. Who wants to read about last year’s war when terrorist attacks are being televised by CNN as we speak or write?
In fact, it is no longer the Gulf War but the Kosovo War that provides the best example of what Virilio is talking about. “The automation of warfare,” he says in a recent conversation with John Armitage, “has… come a long way since the Persian Gulf War of 1991.” Speaking in technological, military, and strategic terms, the Kosovo War is so far ahead of the Gulf War that the latter may just as well have happened thirty or forty years ago. Some may already have forgotten the name Norman Schwarzkopf. History, Virilio states in the same text, “is now rushing headlong into the wall of time,” by which he means that we are in fact witnessing its end, the final and apocalyptic realization of the Hegelian prophecy. Under such extreme conditions one cannot afford to lose sight of speed, its doings and undoings, and to fall behind on what is latest, hippest, hottest, and most up-to-date. Virilio cautions us to keep in mind that “the speed of light does not merely transform the world. It becomes the world. Globalisation is the speed of light. And it is nothing else!” (“Kosovo War”). Timing is indeed everything.
On the other hand, such a perfectly logical strategy (speed vs. speed, a speedy response to light-speed events) makes itself vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy. Is Virilio not riding on the crest of the technological wave and enjoying the benefits? Do not his texts and interviews frequently appear on internet sites where, instantly accessible from any terminal on the globe and only a click away from your own homepage, the words and sentences faintly flicker in some ontologically ambiguous cyberspace that is the exact opposite of the geographic space and historical time in which Virilio would advise us to live? Are not the words I have just quoted–these very words I am writing now–already part of the landscape of events in which everything exists in the eternal, real-time now, and therefore never really and actually? Cyberspace and information superhighways, Virilio remarks in another cyberspace text, bring about a “fundamental loss of orientation.” If to exist, really and fully, “is to exist in situ, here and now, hic et nunc,” then this sort of existence and reality “is precisely what is being threatened by cyberspace and instantaneous, globalized information flows” (“Speed and Information”).2
A Landscape of Events rushes headlong into and around these questions of cultural velocity. All the key issues that have occupied Virilio’s attention in the past–miniaturization, disintegration, globalization, optics and information, war and cinema, the disappearance of history–are revisited here with characteristic rapidity. Indeed, the very importance of the book lies in its symptomatically Virilian temporality. Its thirteen short essays, which Virilio wrote over the last twenty years or so and then self-anthologized and published (as Un paysage d’événements) as “early” as 1996, in some sense come too late to their English-language reader–especially if he or she has come to rely on Virilio’s intimate connectedness with technoculture to learn about the latest generation of personal computers and video games, radars and smart bombs. Such a reader ought to know that there is nothing new to be learned from Virilio’s new book, nothing that he has not already told us many times over. But this may be to the book’s advantage–as is the fact, strange as it may sound, that the book is in print.
Virilio, more than anyone else I can think of, makes us feel that the printed word is a remnant of an earlier, slower, sleepier, and happier age: it is quaint, archaic–one would be tempted to say prehistoric, except that the relative slowness and linearity of print ought to remind us of the relative slowness and linearity of historic time, that is, of the fact of history itself. Print is therefore not prehistoric but precisely historical.
It is the logic of print technology–its relative slowness in the age of light-speed televisual information–that keeps open a path of resistance to the logic of chronostrategy and the seduction of speed. The speed at which one is informed (or even misinformed) through print will always be inferior to the speed at which one passively registers televisual images, but because of this the quality of reception, as it were, is substantially in favor of print. The book as a physical object becomes a site of resistance to speed. It transforms viewers back into readers. It slows down the transmission of information. It leaves time for active participation in communication and meaningful dialogue. Because print moves at the speed of cognition, because it is cognition and comprehension that make it move along, control its progress, and determine its durations, one can never be bombarded by print in the same way that one can be harassed and paralyzed by the blinding explosion of televised images.
Even though words on a computer terminal look very much like their hard-copy counterparts, they behave very differently–or we behave differently as readers, scrolling and clicking rather than skimming and page-turning. The fact that so many cannot see the difference or remember how things used to be, Virilio would insist, is indicative of the global loss of critical discernment and the degeneration of public and private memory. The twin activities of clicking and forgetting have become a way of life.3 We have internalized the process so thoroughly that the acme of artificiality seems now perfectly natural, even biologically preprogrammed. The hominoid has replaced the human (34). In comparison to cyberspatial texts and televised images, print appears more dignified and humane. Even if Virilio would surely agree that all types of media are always ideologically suspect, writing for print is perhaps one way to stand up against “the intermittent eclipse of the speaking beings that we are” (52).
As always, Virilio is unabashedly humanistic, albeit vague on his definition of “human.” This, however, does not make his message any less politically and ethically urgent. He openly laments the loss of all sense of proportion and propriety, and the disintegration of vital categories such as “human” and “real.” To ask for precise definitions of these categories might be to miss the point. To suspect their validity means already to suspect one’s own humanity and reality, to erase oneself as a subject in the traditional sense of the word, but without necessarily reemerging, at the other end of the tunnel, in some more up-to-date sense. Movement in postmodernity is always toward some kind of disappearance.
“For God,” Virilio writes, “history is a landscape of events. For Him, nothing really follows sequentially since everything is co-present” (x). But the view from Heaven, seen from Virilio’s point of view, is essentially antihumanistic and becomes available only after theology has been replaced by an anti-theological epistemology.
If one eliminates God and if, soon after, it becomes fashionable to declare Him dead, it is only normal that, through successive shifts, one ends up getting a little anxious about the origins of this “man” who, once removed from the Judeo-Christian Genesis, suddenly finds himself robbed of his inheritance, deprived of identity. (34)
Genesis, the prototypical story of beginnings and begettings, of the drawing of boundaries and construction of categories (day vs. night, human vs. animal, land vs. water, and so on) functions as a template for the writing of historical narratives in general. Thus it is not faith in God that Virilio wishes to salvage, but rather faith in history. Without history–without the consciousness of what one might call “the natural and proper slowness” of the passage of time–catastrophes of all kinds loom large on the horizon: “the recession of history entails the retreat of knowledge, the retirement of progress” (xii). The space opened up by the death of God is now occupied by the subject who declares (or is instructed, seduced into thinking) that he or she can see everything, everywhere, and everytime, who has been released from the shackles of corporeality and can therefore claim to exist in several places at the same time.
Elsewhere Virilio notes: “technologies of real time… kill ‘present’ time by isolating it from its presence here and now for the sake of another commutative space that is no longer composed of our ‘concrete presence’ in the world, but of a ‘discrete telepresence’ whose enigma remains forever intact” (“Third Interval” 4). Speed marks the death of the body. Or rather: bodies, but also human relationships, disintegrate at the speed at which technology reduces the need for corporeal presence, for human intervention and human interaction.
Here is a book, then, whose relative lateness may be considered a virtue and part of its argumentative strategy: a text that capitalizes on the fact that it is a text and not an image that flashes for an instant and is gone. Its physicality recalls our own corporeality. Whether we like it or not, a body is still needed to pick up a book, open it, turn the pages. The lessons that Virilio wishes to teach us–and most of his work is essentially ethical and didactic, a sort of code of conduct for the postmodern subject–are worth paying attention to only if they will be remembered, and they will be remembered only if they resist speed twice: through their form and their content.
If, as Virilio claims, his book reflects the “radical reversal in perspective” (xiii) that today replaces God with the omnipresent and all-seeing subject of postmodernity, it is to show the aberrant nature of this development rather than pay homage to it. In this one respect, at least, Virilio is not rushing to report on events that have not yet finished happening, but is staging a return to the past, and with a certain deliberateness of speed. It is perhaps the most “new” thing in the book, this insistence on what can only be learned from revisiting and reconsidering, at second glance, what has come before. What we have before us is a kind of back-tracking history that begins with Virilio’s 1996 thoughts on urban lighting and the “false day of technoculture” (2), and concludes with comments from the early 1980s on military cybernation and speed fetishism. By moving backwards in time, A Landscape of Events defamiliarizes temporality in order to refamiliarize us with it. In the manner of Russian Formalists, Virilio makes temporal progression strange by replacing it, for the moment at least, with temporal regression. To remind us that, beyond the TV screen, events still happen in time and not in some timeless landscape of the ever-present–that televised deaths and televised wars are real in the bloodiest sense of the word–Virilio winds the clock in the opposite direction.
Speed, he repeatedly insists, is dehumanizing. In the end, there is nothing to be gained and everything to be lost:
Imagine for a moment that the two vehicles about to pass each other here and now were sped up considerably; the encounter, the exchange of greetings, would simply not take place unless there was sufficient time for perception, the relative invisibility of the two motorists present having nothing to do with some ghostly absence of their bodies, but solely with the lack of duration required for their mutual apprehension. (45)
The anecdote involving two motorists who fail to perceive each other because they are moving too quickly, and who therefore do not really exist for each other in any meaningful way, sums up Virilio’s thoughts on the alienating effects of constant acceleration. Our horizon has shrunk to the size of the TV screen, he warns us, “the screen suddenly becoming a last ‘visible horizon,’ a horizon of accelerated particles that takes over from the geographic horizon of the expanse in which the televiewer’s body still moves” (47). Such limitation of vision–but really of conscience and consciousness–is for Virilio debilitating and abhorrent.
In strikingly similar fashion, Milan Kundera reflects in his novel Slowness on the logic of speed and the postmodern loss of sense and sensibility.
Speed is the form of ecstasy the technical revolution has bestowed on man. As opposed to a motorcyclist, the runner is always present in his body, forever required to think about his blisters, his exhaustion; when he runs he feels his weight, his age, more conscious than ever of himself and of his time of life. This all changes when man delegates the faculty of speed to a machine: from then on, his own body is outside the process, and he gives over to a speed that is noncorporeal, nonmaterial, pure speed, speed itself, ecstasy speed. (2)
“Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared?” (3), the narrator asks. The man on a motorcycle who zips past him in the opposite direction represents the dromophile, the postmodern subject par excellence.Forgetful of his body, material reality, space and time, he can
focus only on the present instant of his flight; he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future; he is wrenched from the continuity of time; he is outside time; in other words, he is in a state of ecstasy; in that state he is unaware of his age, his wife, his children, his worries, and so he has no fear, because the source of his fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear. (1-2)
These questions and revelations come to Kundera’s narrator as he himself is speeding down a highway in a state of dromological ecstasy. Dare one say, then, that there is a dromophile behind every dromophobe?
As for Virilio, nowhere does he sound more like himself than when he proposes to “quickly review the history of military control and surveillance” (83), which indeed he does in only a couple of pages. This is not exactly history at the speed of light–instantaneous history being unimaginable, since history is defined by and exists only in duration–but comes as close to the CNN style of high-velocity info-bombardment as possible in print. The implicit argument for slowness in A Landscape of Events is thus always tempered, if not finally undone, by Virilio’s stylistic embrace of speed. We track carefully backwards through his engagements and provocations only to find ourselves, at the end, swept up in the headlong pitch, invited to indulge in the ecstasy of acceleration.
1. Unless otherwise indicated all quotes are from A Landscape of Events.
2. As far as I know, the two texts I refer to here are available only on Ctheory‘s website <http://www.ctheory.com>.
3. The “fire-and-forget” missile is one of Virilio’s favorite illustrative tropes. (Two sidenote speculations: [1] So quickly does forgetting follow firing that the eventual explosion comes as a surprise, a blast from the past. [2] The eradication of duration enhances military performance because it effectively razes the bothersome obstacle of conscience and eliminates the interval of deliberation and intelligent decision-making. Vital strategic and tactical decisions are left to machines, which are not yet being programmed to consult an “ethical microchip.”)
Helen Grace
School of Humanities
University of Western Sydney
h.grace@uws.edu.au
Review of: Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West.Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.
Such imaginings, freed from the constraints of bounded spaces and from the dictates of unilinear time, might dream of becoming, in Lenin’s words, “as radical as reality itself.”
–Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe
“Don’t you know philosophy is dead?… Marxism-Leninism killed it here, Deconstruction in the West. Here we had too much theory of reality, there you had not enough.”
–Malcolm Bradbury, Doctor Criminale
In Malcolm Bradbury’s 1992 novel, Doctor Criminale, the English narrator Francis Jay, a somewhat jaded journalist researching a mysterious Central European intellectual named Bazlo Criminale, arrives at an international literary conference in the Italian Lakes District. The conference participants (the usual suspects: “American Postmodernists, American feminists,… distinguished elderly French academicians,… muscular young academics from Southern California, carrying tennis rackets,… mean-looking dark-clad theoretical critics from Yale, formerly dissident writers from Eastern Europe uncertain about what exactly they are now dissenting from, African writers in multi-coloured tribal robes, German writers from East and West all wearing black leather jackets”) all have come to grapple with the conference theme, “Literature and Power:… Writing After the Cold War.” Bradbury’s portrait of literary conferences is wry and immediately recognizable–as are a number of the intellectuals. Criminale (“the Lukacs of the nineties” who had had a bitter quarrel with Heidegger, attacked Adorno, and revised Marx) turns out to be not entirely criminal, but neither does he prove to be innocent (“as Nietzsche said, when an epoch dies, betrayal is everywhere. To make ourselves heroes of the new, we must murder the past” [330]). He is a creation of the Cold War itself and if the novel is too close for comfort for Western critical intellectuals, it has resonance in Eastern Europe. Recently translated into Russian, it was essential summer reading in Moscow last year.
The novel’s fictional conference takes place in November 1990–but in October 1990, a real conference sharing a number of the characteristics of Bradbury’s account occurred in Dubrovnik–in a venue not so very far from the fictional one. Attended by an impressive assembly of what might be called a new postmodern nomenklatura (including Susan Buck-Morss, Boris Groys, Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Fredric Jameson, Helena Kozakiewicz, Merab Mamardashvili, Valerii Podoroga, Mikhail Ryklin, Vladislav Todorov and Slavoj Zizek), this was to be a renewal of a critical tradition of scholarly exchange established thirty years earlier by Herbert Marcuse and continued by Jürgen Habermas. Within six months of the conference, Dubrovnik was in ruins and in just over a year, the Soviet Union no longer existed. The Dubrovnik meeting–and the intellectual exchanges which continue in its wake–remain, however, a serious and unresolved challenge to Western theories of postmodernity and globalization, and this challenge cannot be ignored if these two terms are to be regarded as truly critical concepts and not just another dimension of liberal-democratic hegemony, masking the same old First-World expansionism.
In Dreamworld and Catastrophe, Susan Buck-Morss’s brilliant account of the end of the Cold War–part intellectual biography, part polemic, part philosophical picture-book, part “hypertext”–“fact” once again turns out to be far more fascinating than “fiction.” Buck-Morss’s method clearly draws upon Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk, cross-weaving description and quotation with astute observation and rich images to produce a new textual entity that exceeds the limits of the book, promising a future form better suited to the way in which ideas seize the imagination than the academic book is able to provide. As the author herself says, “Books are slow organizers, producing mass predispositions but seldom inciting direct action” (134). This presents a challenge to academic publishers which none–including MIT Press–yet seem able to grasp. What remains is a virtual film script or an unrealized multi-media project, demanding to escape from the limits of the printed word.
The book’s first chapter on power, sovereignty, and the nation-state draws upon an idea of the political imaginary as something considerably less abstract than the logic of a discourse or “world-view,” as Western political theorists understand it. Buck-Morss prefers to see the political imaginary as a specific iconographic, visual representation of the political terrain, as understood in Russian post-structuralist philosophy (especially in the work of Podoroga)–a political landscape rather than a political logic, a visual field in which political actors move and are also acted upon in a bodily sense. This allows three “icons” of the political imaginary–the common enemy, the political collective, and the sovereign agency, which acts in its name–to be brought into focus and considered at the same moment. In addition to these visible components, there is also a blind spot, a “wild zone” in which power remains arbitrary and violent, beyond the rule of law. She summarizes thus: “the class nature of the state may explain its violence, but not its legitimacy; the democratic nature of the state may explain its legitimacy but not its violence” (6). This zone of the state’s excess already exists in the French Revolution–the Ur-form of both models of mass democracy (the nation-state and revolutionary class). Although historically located in the French post-revolutionary Terror, which is echoed in Stalinist terror, it is also clear that the idea of the “wild zone” draws upon the particular post-Soviet experience in which politics, emerging civil society and criminality become indistinguishable. Boris Kagarlitsky has aptly described this scenario:
Everything that can be divided up, pulled apart or plundered will be privatised and distributed among the top people in the state. Anything which does not reach the top will go to the hangers-on. The remainder will be picked up by the mafia which, as the liberal press has already announced, “does not exist in our country.” (ix)
The “wild zone” is also located at the heart of capitalism as Braudel has noted:
[Above the layer of the market economy] comes the zone of the anti-market, where the great predators roam and the law of the jungle operates. This–today as in the past, before and after the industrial revolution–is the real home of capitalism. (qtd. in Buck-Morss 341)
Buck-Morss attempts to spatialize the relation between her discursive account of the (relative) movement of politics and the (relative) immobility of the concepts deployed to understand it (Cold War Enemies; French Revolution; Separation Between the Economic and the Political; Sovereign Party/Socialist State; Space; Time) by dividing the visual field of the page between text and “hypertext” (though this is a misnomer since it is placed below rather than above or beyond the text). This is an adventurous move, but the “Euclidean geometry” of the printed page does not lend itself to the kind of fluidity (if not “fourth-dimensionality” to refer to a particular theme of the Russian avant-garde) which the material requires and which a (more ephemeral) website or a CD-ROM would provide. The exigencies of academic publishing for the global intellectual finally seem to demand the immobility of the book over the constant movement of the body and ideas of the author and this remains a paradox of criticism.1
The hypertextual experiment of the first chapter gives way in subsequent chapters to a much more successful quotation and image-based intertextuality. The “life-building” experimentation of Gastev, Bogdanov, and Melnikov is explored via a broadening of aesthetics to incorporate a more embodied experience, defined as “perception through feeling.” This approach involves a now familiar critical maneuver through which the artist is displaced by the artwork itself–so it is artworks, rather than artists who are said to be “avant-garde” and, even further, it is said to be the aesthetic experience of the artwork which counts rather than the work, and in the end it is not the object but its critical interpretation which is avant-garde.
This displaced status of both the artist and the object was certainly a theme for the Russian avant-garde, but it is perhaps an oversimplification to argue that the non-objective is representational to the extent that it is “mimetic of the experience of modernity” (63). Such a suggestion does however indicate that within an approach such as Buck Morss’s, space can be given to something that exceeds politics (the “wild zone”)–but there is nothing that exceeds representation (the iron grip of materialism). It is this tendency that runs the risk of reducing all images to being mere illustrations of critical concepts, rather than being generative of them. The materiality of the image or object is never allowed to be its own, so that the labor of the artist is always subordinated to that of the critic. This then remains another critical paradox–justified perhaps in this case because “the original field of aesthetics is not art but reality–corporeal, material nature” (101).
But critics are not alone in displacing artists. In the twentieth century totalitarian figures made something of a habit of it–and more recently, totalitarian leaders have been criticized precisely on artistic grounds–Hitler by Syberberg, and Stalin most notably by Groys. Unsympathetic to this trend, Buck-Morss challenges it:
But is the lesson that political revolutionaries should not be artists, or is that they should become better ones?… Revolutionary politics needs to take seriously the fact that democratic sovereignty represents the masses, and that political actions represent history by giving it sensory, material form. (66)
In order to explore the relation between revolutionary politics and democratic sovereignty, Buck-Morss attempts a brief history of time, which proves to be too sketchy to grapple satisfactorily with its theme in book form (though in a moving image or multi-media form, this chapter would work much better). She relies on images which are well known–Lenin’s sarcophagus (designed by Melnikov), the Lenin mausoleum (designed by Shchusev), stills from October of the toppling of the statue of Alexander III, an image of the toppled Dzerzhinskii statue (a “victim” of the 1991 coup), images of the death and resurrection of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. A fascination with death (or, at least, the mummified bodies of dictators) gives way to three chapters on “life-building,” mass culture, and the dreamworlds of capitalism and communism.
The shock of modernity via Benjamin provides a nice segue into a discussion of Stakhanovist shock work. Drawing upon Stephen Kotkin’s account of the building of the “showcase” industrial project at Magnitogorsk (literally, “Magnetic Mountain”) in the Urals in the 1930s (by U.S. engineers–and Soviet labor–modeled on the steel town of Gary, Indiana), Buck-Morss points out a key distinction between Taylorism and Stakhanovism: Taylorism, she reminds us, is a rational/ist model aimed at the establishment of norms and standardized rhythms based on scientific observation of individual bodily movements; Stakhanovist shock work on the other hand was carried out in rushes or “storms” by teams of workers. Said to have its origins in very old rural rhythm-setting work cries, the aim was to achieve higher productivity through superhuman effort without machines, a process involving team spirit and an everyday heroism in which ordinary workers’ lives could be transformed. This idea of life transformation through labor probably owes more to messianic belief, rendered material by Bolshevism’s promise of paradise on earth, than it does to a Protestant work ethic from which it deserves to be distinguished.
If we accept, as Buck-Morss argues, that mass society is a twentieth-century phenomenon, the idea of “the masses” has undergone significant change and from both “East” and “West,” there seems to be a tendency now to abandon the concept.2 For Buck-Morss, mass society itself has transformed the masses from Marxist historical consciousness (class-for-itself) to a style-conscious consumer-led collectivity: “People become part of the collective by mimicking its look” (134). For Podoroga, “the mass” is primarily a visual phenomenon, a simulation produced by cinema’s imaginary space and existing only within that space. Especially in Eisenstein’s cinema, the crowd is a composite form, a “protoplasmic being in the process of becoming” and a “flow of violence” (147). Interestingly, this idea of “protoplasmaticness” is developed by Eisenstein himself in writing, not about “the masses” but about Disney (see Leyda).
Much has been written in recent years about the spectacle of the revolution, the mass theatrical spectacles commemorating it, and Stalinist culture’s phantasmagorias. As the archives continue to be mined and the Soviet Union rendered as a simulacrum, comparisons might be made with the mass culture of its “other”–the United States. This is precisely what Buck-Morss attempts, concluding that the collective imaginaries of both capitalism and socialism are “virtual worlds,” although it remains a social project to make them real (149).
Just as the image of the crowd became a “protoplasmic being” in Eisenstein’s cinema, a composite of moving masses flowing across the screen and close-ups of faces at the limits of expressivity, so Hollywood’s creation of a new mass figure–the star–relies upon the composite image (close-ups of mouth, eyes, legs, breasts, projected in super-human dimensions) and plastic surgery to eliminate the imperfections of the natural body. To this extent the image of the star, which is quintessentially female, presents an “awesome aesthetic spectacle” of “monstrous proportions,” and Buck-Morss goes so far as to liken it to a huge church icon, surrounded by objects of conspicuous consumption. The star constitutes a standardized image, an instantly identifiable cliché, like an advertising logo. But a distinction can still be made between Soviet and Hollywood cinema, one providing the prosthetic experience of collective power and the other (Hollywood, of course) the prosthetic experience of collective desire. A different economy of desire operates for Soviet cinema, one which is productive rather than consuming (for example, the vital energy of Liubov Orlova), coinciding with the particular industrial needs of the Soviet Union in the 1930s.
In an especially forceful section entitled “A Cosmopolitan Project,” Buck-Morss brings together Kotkin’s work on Magnitogorsk, Sutton’s on technology transfer, and Williams on Mellon’s millions to discuss the mutual dependence of the Soviet Union and the United States in the 1930s (at a point when the U.S. did not recognize the Soviet state) and the relative value of art and technology. While the Depression gripped the U.S. population, throwing many into unemployment, U.S. firms were doing substantial business in the Soviet Union, which was selling off the plundered treasures of the aristocracy (and masterpieces from the Hermitage) to the West in order to pay for the new technology being imported to build socialism. Buck-Morss powerfully encapsulates the intricacies of these exchanges:
Thus the profits of capitalism (surplus value withheld from the wages of American workers) moved (via the Mellon family fortune) to finance (via the capitalist firm of McKee Construction Company) the building of technologically advanced socialist factories, an increase in what Marx called “constant capital” that in turn increased the value of Soviet labor. Meanwhile, in the counter direction, cultural “treasures” that had been owned by the Russian aristocracy and nationalized by the Bolsheviks became (via Mellon’s “philanthropic” cover-up of tax evasion) the property of the United States government–and the American public received socialized culture in the form of a national museum…. What is the proper accounting when the sale of one Raphael (at 1.7 million gold dollars) buys more than half of the design of one Magnitogorsk (at 2.5 million gold rubles), which translates into jobs for thousands of Soviet workers, and the production (by 1938) of millions of tons of finished metal? How does one make political sense out of an economic exchange whereby the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury uses his private millions to “build socialism” in Stalin’s Russia–at the same time as the output of steel mills in the United States is falling precipitously due to a Great Depression that, to Stalin’s delight, affects capitalism alone? (172)
In the final chapter Buck-Morss writes an equally dazzling analysis of “shock therapy” economics in the post-Soviet context.
Needless to say, dreamworlds, “vacillating between a desire that is expressed and a fear that holds it in check” are followed by awakenings (176). The dream is dismantled, its images parodied (Komar and Melamid: “Thank you Stalin for our happy childhood”). Catastrophe follows.3 Monumentalism is reduced to the horror movie (an image of the Palace of the Soviets is likened to a movie poster advertising King Kong, with the gargantuan statue of Lenin replaced by the gorilla). The ecstasy of the Soviet sublime (“the physical suffering that hollows out the individual for the sake of the collective”) is double-edged: triumphant and destructive of the body at the same moment. Capitalist individualism on the other hand leaves no space for such ecstasy:
Capitalism harms human beings through neglect rather than through terror. Compared to the personal will of a dictator, the structural violence of market “forces” appears benign. Those individuals (or groups) excluded from capitalism’s dreamworlds appear themselves to be to blame. (188)
As Eastern Europe becomes “subalternized” by IMF policies and pressures on some territories to join NATO or the European Union, all those populations who have been subject to the “ecstasy of the Soviet sublime” will be free to decide the true nature of the difference between subjection to the personal will of a dictator and the structural violence of market forces. It may well be that the de-Stalinization already well established in dissident culture, with its combination of political cynicism, anti-utopianism, and distrust of all totalizing discourse (in a word, “postmodernity” which arrived well in advance of the West’s) will provide some resources for thinking afresh the problems of this New World Order. The Indian critic Geeta Kapur once argued that the use of the word “appropriation” to describe a feature of postmodernism could only be used in a Western context since it properly belongs to the colonizing phase of Western consciousness. Its use as a description of the pastiche of postmodern art has to be seen as arising precisely from a condition of surplus, of saturation: “If there is a surfeit of cultural input and output, you appropriate, jettison and parody, you make blatant pastiche because the options are too many” (Jayamanne 43).
If we agree with Kapur’s suggestion for a postmodernism of surplus, perhaps we now need an account of a postmodernism of scarcity–and such an account will not come from the West.
The real strength of Buck-Morss’s book comes less from its own appropriation of earlier scholarship on the Soviet Union (for this is a legacy of the Cold War, when the American academy was funded to research and know–in an “expert” sense–Soviet culture better than Soviet citizens were able to do).4 The book’s final chapter, entitled “Afterward,” describes the dilemmas of incommensurability, the difficulties of translation, and the privileges and contradictions of global intellectual culture better than almost any other account I’ve read. This is an “eyewitness” account providing a level of depth which transcends the surfaces of the dreamworld to an unusual degree–only possible at the precise moment of passage from dreamworld to catastrophe since it is at this moment and this moment alone that the notion of “the enemy” dissolves sufficiently for a new kind of intellectual exchange to occur.5 At the core of this exchange with Western intellectuals is a remarkable group of philosophers, led by Valerii Podoroga and forming the Laboratory of Postclassical Studies, located in Moscow in the Institute of Philosophy at the Russian Academy of Science. Podoroga’s “underground” seminars on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Benjamin, Adorno, Barthes, and Foucault challenged what many regarded as the bloodlessness of orthodox Marxist-Leninist epistemology. The word “postclassical” alerts us immediately to a different understanding of “postmodernism,” since it is argued by these philosophers that Stalinism was a classical civilization (continued in the high “official” culture of the Brezhnev period) and that the term “postmodern” as it is understood in Western critical theory is an inaccurate concept in describing late/Post-Soviet reality.
As Buck-Morss reports, contestation of the term was especially heated at the Dubrovnik conference, which focused the differences between Eastern and Western concepts of power and culture. She cites Jameson’s description of the dynamics of the exchange: “The more their truths are couched in Orwellian language, the more tedious they become for us; the more our truths demand expression in even the weakest forms of Marxian language… the more immediately do the Eastern hearing aids get switched off” (237).
Jameson’s own totalizing assumption (“Cold War anticommunism has lavishly supplied all possible and imaginable stereotypes”) would seem to be a particular barrier to conversation, since one might equally suggest that Cold War anti-capitalism at least had the capacity to imagine different worlds not simply reducible to a reversal of anticommunism. If this were not the case, then there ought to have been no difficulties in reaching agreement at Dubrovnik, since everyone would have been talking essentially about the same thing.
The final word in this fine account must however go to Buck-Morss, who describes the central moral dilemma for global intellectual culture in these chilling terms:
All of us sense (rightly) that our success depends on global name recognition. To achieve the status of a global intellectual, it is not necessary to saturate national markets, not even one’s own. No one speaks of writing for the majority, much less for the masses. It is enough to be known among a tiny but mobile transnational elite, who have inordinate power to replicate locally the hegemony of globally transmitted discourses. If one wanted to be dramatically pessimistic, one might describe this phenomenon of globalization as a membrane that spans the world like an oil slick, thin but tenacious, and capable of suffocating the voices of anyone speaking beneath it. (262)
The ecological-catastrophic image in the last sentence deserves to resonate in the way that Benjamin’s most startling quotations continue to have force. The moral challenge is to be able to encourage the suffocated voices to be heard on their own terms–even at the risk of loss of power and position for the global intellectuals who assume the authority that comes from speaking on their behalf.
1. On the question of “movement” and “immobility,” see Vladimir Papernyi’s Kul’tura Dva. See also the translated section entitled “Movement–Immobility” in Efimova and Manovich’s Tekstura: Russian Essays on Visual Culture.
2. I am using the terms “East” and “West” in the way in which they are used by Buck-Morss, even though it makes no geographic sense to use them in this way in Australia, where “the West” is Africa and “the East” South America (if one is facing north).
3. The word “catastrophe” has a broader range of meaning in Russian (where it can encompass the merely accidental as well as the totally disastrous) than it does in English. It is also worth remembering that Kerensky’s first account of the Revolution was entitled The Catastrophe. Not surprisingly, “catastrophe theory” is also a Russian specialization, in the work of renowned mathematician, Vladimir Arnold.
4. Important British and European research institutes certainly existed in this period, but almost all of Buck-Morss’s sources are scholars working in the U.S.
5. The highly original work of Elena Petrovskaia on “the enemy” lies behind these exchanges and is crucial in enabling them. It deserves to be better known in the West (though it will not be easily appropriated by it.) See in particular Chast’ Sveta.
Evans Chan
This interview took place in late July, 2000 at Susan Sontag’s penthouse apartment in Chelsea on a sunny, tolerably hot day. Just as I entered the building, Sontag’s assistant was returning from some errands and we went up the elevator together. As we opened the apartment door, Sontag was emptying some trash into a bin. Later she mentioned that since her illness–she has been recovering from a second cancer that was diagnosed in 1998–her apartment had become a mess. “These days I’m mostly trying to make space for all the books I’ve acquired in the last two years and sorting papers and manuscripts,” she said. What makes the apartment at once austere and elegant are the dozens of Piranesi prints on the walls. I was reminded of lines in the Alice James monologue from Sontag’s play, Alice in Bed: “With my mind I can see, I can hold all that in my mind. Everyone says [Rome]’s so beautiful. I’ve looked at the pictures, the engravings. Yes, Piranesi” (81).
I had brought with me a copy of a Chinese periodical review of my recent book The Last of the Chinese (also in Chinese) to show her. The editor had used the cover of her latest novel In America to illustrate the review–a delightful surprise for me, since Sontag has been an important influence on my own writing and filmmaking endeavors. An admirer of The Benefactor, Sontag’s first novel, before reading her critical writings, I translated into Chinese her essay “Fascinating Fascism” and her short story “Project for a Trip to China” back in the mid-’80s in Hong Kong, without thinking much about copyright issues. Over the years, I saw Chinese translations of her work appear here and there in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China, invariably without her knowledge. Several friends urged me to interview her for Chinese publications, and perhaps to edit an anthology of Sontag’s writings in Chinese. As the Sontag anthology project became more realistic, I finally introduced myself to her at a Trisha Brown concert at the Joyce Theater and she agreed to my interview request right away. When I described the chaotic Chinese publishing scene, she shrugged it off. “People think that I’ll be angry because it’s pirated. But I’m not a very good citizen of capitalist society. Of course, I’d like to be paid, and I’m hardly difficult to get in touch with. I have a publisher and an agent, whose addresses are listed in the entry on me in Who’s Who, which I assume anybody can access online. But no, I’m not angry. Most of all I’d like to be read.”
Then we settled into a table in the kitchen. Behind me was a door that opened onto a wrap-around balcony, which overlooked the shimmering Hudson and the Manhattan skyline in late afternoon. Sontag put her leg on the table, tilted her chair back, and sipped her coffee. Two years ago she quit smoking. She started talking about Shower, the most recent Chinese film she had seen. She found it “mildly interesting” because of its setting in a Beijing in transition. Among Hong Kong filmmakers, Wong Kar-wai is naturally the one she is familiar with. She quite liked Fallen Angels, but was disappointed by Happy Together. (Serving on the jury of Hawaii Film Festival in 1986, Sontag apparently helped A Time to Live, A Time to Die, the breakthrough film by Taiwan’s preeminent auteur, Hou Hsiao-hsien, win top prize. She also named YiYi, by Edward Young, another major Taiwan filmmaker, the best film of 2000 [Sontag, “Best” 26]). I brought her up-to-date on the activities of our mutual friend Simone Swan, a founding director of the de Menil Foundation and an old acquaintance of hers, who has been trying to preserve the legacy of the Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy by building low-cost adobe housing along the Texas border.1 Sontag responded positively, but suspected that “poor people might want concrete” rather than mud bricks for their houses. After such preliminary small talk, the interview–C: Chan; S: Sontag–formally began:
C: In the ’60s, you were among the first to try to bridge the gap between high and low cultures. Now, after three decades, we’ve seen high culture, or the so-called canon, besieged by popular culture and multiculturalism. We have today a new sensibility that, depending on one’s perspective, either surpasses or parodies the kind of sensibility that you heralded in the last essay of Against Interpretation (1966). We now live in an age of total eclecticism and global interpenetration, which many people, including myself, call the postmodern. So far, your reaction to postmodernism seems largely inimical. And you refused to allow the Camp sensibility that you helped make famous to be co-opted by the postmodernists because “Camp taste… still presupposes the older, high standards of discrimination” (“Writing Itself” 439).
S: I never thought I was bridging the gap between high and low cultures. I am unquestioningly, without any ambiguity or irony, loyal to the canon of high culture in literature, music, and the visual and performing arts. But I’ve also enjoyed a lot of popular music, for example. It seemed we were trying to understand why that was perfectly possible and why that wasn’t paradoxical… and what diversity or plurality of standards might be. However, it didn’t mean abolishing hierarchy, it didn’t mean equating everything. In some sense I was as much a partisan or supporter of traditional cultural hierarchy as any cultural conservative, but I didn’t draw the hierarchy in the same way…. Take an example: just because I loved Dostoevsky didn’t mean that I couldn’t love Bruce Springsteen. Now, if somebody says you have to choose between Russian literature or rock ‘n roll, of course I’d choose Russian literature. But I don’t have to choose. That being said, I would never argue that they’re equally valuable. But I was very struck by how rich and diverse one’s experiences are. Consequently, it seems to me a lot of cultural commentators were lying about the diversity of their experiences. On the other hand, there are a lot of things in mass culture that didn’t appeal to me, notably what’s on television. It seems very non-nourishing, conventional, bland, trivial. So it wasn’t a question of bridging the gap. It’s simply that I saw a lot of simultaneity in my experiences of pleasure, and felt that most discourse about culture was either philistine or shallowly snobbish. So it wasn’t this is “here,” and that’s “there,” and I can make a bridge. It was that I understood myself to have many kinds of experiences and pleasures, and I was trying to understand why that was possible, and how you could still maintain a hierarchical sense of values.
This is not the sensibility that’s called the postmodern–by the way, that’s not the word I use or find useful to use. I associate postmodernism with leveling and with recycling. The word modernism arose in architecture. It has a very specific meaning. It meant the Bauhaus School, Corbusier, the box skyscraper, the rejection of ornament. Form is function. There are all sorts of modernist dogmas in architecture, which came to prevail not only because of their aesthetic values. There was a material support for these ideas: it’s cheaper to build buildings this way. Anyway, when the term postmodernism began to be used across the field for all the arts it became inflated. Indeed, many writers who used to be called modern or modernist are now called postmodern because they recycle, use quotations–I’m thinking of Donald Barthelme, for instance–or practice what’s called intertextuality.
C: Yes, the way writers are being relabelled as postmodern is at times baffling. For example, I was startled when Fredric Jameson, whose work I greatly admire, cited Beckett–who for me is a terminal product of high modernism–as a postmodern author.
S: Jameson is the leading scholar who has tried to make more sense of the category of postmodernism. One of the reasons I remain unconvinced by his use of the term is that I don’t think he’s interested in the arts. Not really. Not even in literature. He’s interested in ideas. If he cared about literature he wouldn’t have quoted–at great length–Norman Mailer. While you illustrate your ideas with quotations from novels, you’re also implicitly suggesting to people that they read these books. I think that either Jameson doesn’t know that Mailer isn’t a very good writer, or that he doesn’t care. Another example is when Van Gogh and Warhol are treated as equivalent by Jameson for the sake of theory-building, for fitting examples into his theory. That’s when I get off the bus. In my view, what’s called postmodernism–that is, the making everything equivalent–is the perfect ideology for consumerist capitalism. It is an idea of accumulation, of preparing people for their shopping expeditions. These are not critical ideas….
C: However, in your long essay AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989), you characterized the current moment as “a… grateful return to what is perceived as ‘conventions,’ like the return to figure and landscape… plot and character, and other much vaunted repudiations of difficult modernism in the arts… the new sexual realism goes with the rediscovery of the joys of tonal music, Bouguereau, a career in investment banking, and church weddings” (166-67). I, for one, almost felt you were singing the praises of postmodernism.
S: Did you? That was certainly not my point. I thought I was being sarcastic.
C: And you seem to have tapped new sources of energy in transforming yourself into a historical novelist by writing The Volcano Lover (1992) and In America (2000), which I guess would come under the rubric of postmodern novels.
S: Although I have written two novels that take place in the past, I don’t call them historical novels. That is, I don’t consider myself working in a specific genre like crime novels, sci-fi novels, or the Gothic novels. I want to enlarge my resources as a writer of narrative fiction and I found it liberating to set them in the past. These novels can’t be written in any other time but the late 20th century, written in a combination of first and third person narrations, and with a commingling of voices. I don’t think there’s anything like a return to convention, or return to figuration. Maybe these novels should be viewed as books about travel, about people in foreign places: The Volcano Lover is about the British in Italy; In America is about the Poles emigrating to the US; the novel I’m about to start is about some Japanese people in France in the 1920s. However, I’m not trying to fulfill a program–I’m trying to stretch myself.
C: Do you feel that in your current novels you can treat more effectively entities like “characters?” Are characters conventional items?
S: I’m not sure “characters” are conventional items. But I always start with people, even with The Benefactor (1963) and Death Kit (1967). The Benefactor explores a certain reclusive nature, which is in fact very nihilistic–a gentle nihilism. (Laughs.) Death Kit is about a man committing suicide. During the time I wrote these two novels I began to become more interested in history–not exactly related to current events or particular topics–but just history and what it meant to understand something historically–just what is behind the way anything is at any given moment. I used to think that I was interested in politics, but after I read a lot of history, I came to think that the notion of politics is very superficial. Actually, if you care about history, you couldn’t care that much about politics.
After writing the first two novels, I did more travels. I had already set foot outside of the wealthy countries of North America and Western Europe. For example, I had been to North Africa and Mexico. But Vietnam was the first country I visited where I saw real suffering. And I looked at such experiences not just in aesthetic terms, but also with moral seriousness. So it’s not that I’m disenchanted with modernism. I want for myself to take in more reality, and still with the tools of modernism, to address real suffering, the larger world, and to break out of the confines of narcissism and solipsism.
C: Isn’t the portrayal of the Cavaliere in The Volcano Lover a study of the saturnine, melancholic temperament that harks back to your early, “solipsistic” novels? At the same time, we see that consciousness is being dramatized by your placing it within a wider world, within the currents of history.
S: I suppose all my work is placed under the sign of melancholy. Saturn. At least so far. I expect that won’t always be so.
C: Haven’t you said that you don’t like your early novels very much?
S: I’ve said all sorts of stupid things. (Laughs.) Luis Bunuel once expressed an interest in filming Death Kit. That could have been very nice.
C: Recently, I reread your first novel The Benefactor after almost twenty years. That was the first book of yours that I read and it remains one of the most eccentric and brilliant novels I’ve ever come across. When I first stumbled upon it I was living in Hong Kong, completely unaware of contemporary literary scene, and by chance I started reading Hannah Arendt. I saw her endorsement of The Benefactor somewhere. She praised your originality and expressed admiration for your ability to “make a story out of dreams and thoughts.” I guess what Arendt found fascinating in it might be what she called “thought-experiments.” Now, I was also struck by how much The Benefactor has encapsulated so many of the themes and concerns in your writing career. It is, first of all, Against Interpretation written as fiction. Hippolyte is someone who doesn’t want to interpret his life through dreams, but to act through, and along with, his dreams.
S: You’re right on the mark about The Benefactor having all the themes of my work. That’s very startling to me, as if you started with the cards in your hand, but you’re blindfolded. And then maybe only halfway through your life do you actually get to look at the cards you’re holding. Every once in a while, I catch a glimpse of the way my work fits together. For instance, the essays I wrote about illness–Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors–was also kind of “against interpretation”: Don’t interpret being ill. Being ill is just being ill. Don’t invest it with all these myths and fantasies….
C: In The Benefactor, you wrote: “No part of the modern sensibility is more tiresome than its eagerness to excuse and to have one thing always mean something else” (109).
S: I’d forgotten that. How did I know what I knew, all too unconsciously at the time? When I began The Benefactor, I hadn’t the faintest idea of what I was doing; unlike later writing, when I really did think through the basic ideas before I would start. I just went sentence by sentence, I had no idea where it was going to go. But at the same time it was very easy to write, as if it was already there and I just had to take it down. A few of the dreams have elements of the dreams of mine, but they are mostly invented.
C: One critic suggested that Hippolyte and Jean-Jacques are modeled after Artaud and Genet.
S: Jean-Jacques is, in part, inspired by Genet–well, by the idea of Genet. Hippolyte? No, that’s no one in particular.
C: I was spellbound by The Benefactor‘s opening epigram: Je reve donc je suis! Maybe because I’m Chinese and every Chinese is familiar with Chuang Tzu’s tale about the man and the butterfly: The man dreams a dream in which he becomes a butterfly. Upon waking up, he wonders whether he’s actually a butterfly that dreams of becoming a man. I can see how The Benefactor was influenced by Kleist’s essay “On the Puppet Theater,” as it makes Hippolyte’s journey a quest for the equilibrium and tranquility of the self.
S: You’re right about Kleist. I read the Kleist essay when I was very young and was completely overwhelmed. However, the point is you have to write out of a deep place, and these things, like the Kleist essay, sink down to a deep place and then you find you can write. Many people have asked me why I haven’t written something in the form of fiction or play about the siege of Sarajevo. The answer is that I feel that experience hasn’t yet gone to the deepest place it can go.
C: In response to your political intervention in Sarajevo by staging Waiting for Godot, Jean Baudrillard said, “Even if there are any intellectuals left… I do not share in that complicity of intellectuals who perceive themselves as responsible for ‘something,’ as privileged with a sort of conscience-radicalness that used to be the privilege of intellectuals…. Subjects such as Susan Sontag cannot intervene anymore, even symbolically, but once again this is not a prognosis or diagnosis” (qtd. in Bayard). What’s your reaction to his idea about “the privilege of the intellectuals,” as well as his so-called diagnostic statement about our time?
S: Baudrillard is a political idiot. Maybe a moral idiot, too. If I ever had any thought about functioning in a typical way as a public intellectual, my experiences in Sarajevo would have cured me forever. Look, I did not go to Sarajevo in order to stage Waiting for Godot. I would have had to have been insane to do such a thing. I went to Sarajevo because my son, a journalist who had begun covering the war, suggested that I make such a trip. While there for the first time in April 1993, I told people I would like to come back and work in the besieged city. When asked what I could do, I said: I can type, I can do elementary hospital tasks, I can teach English, I know how to make films and direct plays. “Oh,” they said, “do a play. There are so many actors here with nothing to do.” And the choice of doing Godot was made in consultation with the theater community in Sarajevo. The point is, that doing a play in Sarajevo was something I did at the invitation of some people in Sarajevo, while I was already in Sarajevo, and trying to learn from Sarajevans how I might be, in some small way, useful.
It had nothing to do with “the privilege of the intellectuals!” My visit wasn’t intended to be a political intervention. If anything my impulse was moral, rather than political. I’d have been happy simply to help some patients get into a wheelchair. I made a commitment at the risk of my life, under a situation of extreme discomfort and mortal danger. Bombs went off, bullets flew past my head…. There was no food, no electricity, no running water, no mail, no telephone day after day, week after week, month after month. This is not “symbolic.” This is real. And people think I dropped in for a while to do a play. Look, I went to Sarajevo for the first time in April 1993 and I was mostly in Sarajevo till the end of 1995. That is two and a half years. The play took two months. I doubt if Baudrillard knows how long I was in Sarajevo. I’m not a Bernard-Henri Levy making his documentary Bosna. In France they call him BHL; in Sarajevo they called him DHS–deux heures a Sarajevo–two hours in Sarajevo. He came in the morning on a French mlitary plane, left his film crew, and was out of there in the afternoon. They brought the footage back to Paris, he added an interview with Mitterand, put on the voice-over, and edited the film there. When Joan Baez came for twenty-four hours, her feet never hit the sidewalk. She was going around in a French tank and surrounded by soldiers the entire time. That’s what some people did in Sarajevo.
C: Did you ever call Baudrillard a “cunning nihilist”?
S: I doubt it. I don’t think I would call him nihilistic. I think he’s ignorant and cynical. And he definitely has opinions about intellectuals. There are intellectuals and intellectuals. The majority of them are conformists. But some are brave, very brave. And what are intellectuals doing with postmodernism? How people move these terms around instead of looking at the concrete reality! I’m for complexity and the respect for reality. I don’t want to think anything theoretically in that sense. My interest is to understand the genealogy of ideas. If I’m against interpretation, I’m not against interpretation as such, because all thinking is interpretation. I’m actually against reductive interpretation, and I’m against facile transposition and the making of cheap equivalences.
C: Yet, in retrospect, your book On Photography (1977) can be considered a pioneering work on postmodernity. For example, you said that the photographic taste is inherently democratizing and leveling–capable of abolishing the difference between good and bad taste. Photography, or the culture of images, has aestheticized tragedies and disasters, fragmented our world, replaced (virtualized?) reality, and instilled a sense of fatalism: “In the real world, something is happening and no one knows what is going to happen. In the image-world, it has happened, and it will forever happen in that way” (168). (That comment presaged Virilio’s observation that our Past, Present and Future has been replaced by Fast Forward, Play and Rewind–the image of modern/postmodern man being that of a sitter with a remote.) For you, photography is the culmination of modernism and its undoing.
S: Yes, I suppose so. But again I don’t think I need to use that term “postmodern.” But I do think seeing the world photographically is the great leveler. And yet I’m puzzling a lot over the consequences of viewing disasters and the horrors of the world through photographic images. Does it anaesthetize us? Does it make us used to things? Does the shock value wear off? I don’t know. Then there’s a big difference between the still and the moving images. The moving image is very powerful because you don’t know where it’s going to go. In the last essay in On Photography, I talked about the experience I had in China watching an operation under acupuncture anaesthesia. I saw someone have most of his stomach removed because of a catastrophic ulcer. Clearly it worked. His eyes were open and he was talking and sipping some liquid through a straw. There was no way of faking that; it did work. The doctor said it tends to work well for the torso but not so well for the limbs, and doesn’t work for some patients at all. But it worked for this one. I watched the operation without flinching, the cutting open of the abdomen, the huge ulcerous part of the patient’s stomach, which looked gray as a tire. This was the first operation I had seen, I thought maybe I’d find it hard to watch, but I didn’t. Then, six months later, I was in a movie theater in Paris watching Chung Kuo, Antonioni’s China film, which has a scene showing a Caesarian delivery with acupuncture anaesthesia. The moment the abdomen of the pregnant woman was cut, I couldn’t watch it. How strange! I couldn’t watch the image, but I could watch the real thing. That is very interesting. There are all sorts of puzzles about what the culture of image is.
C: Some of the most ominous statements in On Photography have come true. For example, photography–in its latest incarnation through digital technology–has definitely triumphed over art. TV, Hollywood, and the infotainment industry have taken over, resulting in, among other things, what you called “the decay of cinema”2–the most important modern art form. Jean-Luc Godard recently said the cinema as we knew it is over (see Rosenbaum 165).3
S: The cinema as he knew it is over. That’s for sure–for a number of reasons, including the breakdown of the distribution system. I had to wait eight years to see Alan Resnais’s Smoking/No Smoking, which I just saw at the Lincoln Center. Resnais made those films in the early ’90s, but then none of his films were distributed here in the past 10 years. We’re getting a much smaller selection here in New York, which is supposed to be a good place to see films. On the other hand, if you can tolerate the small formats–I happen to have a problem with miniaturized images–you can get the whole history of cinema and watch it over and over again. You don’t have to be dependent on the distribution system. The problems with cinema seem to me, more than anything, a cultural failure. Tastes have been corrupted, and it’s so rare to see filmmakers who have the aspiration to take on profound thoughts and feelings. There is a reason that more and more films that I like are coming from the less prosperous parts of the world, where commercial value has not completely taken over. For example, I think people have reacted so positively to Kiarostami is that he shows people who are quite innocent and not cynical, in this increasingly cynical world. In that sense, I don’t think cinema is over yet.
C: It’s been suggested that you redirected your fiction-writing urge toward filmmaking during the long hiatus between your two groups of novels. [Sontag’s filmography includes Duet for Cannibals (1969), Brother Carl (1971), Promised Lands (1974), and Unguided Tour (1983).]
S: Maybe. But I don’t have an industrial model of productivity. I don’t think it’s the most important thing, as soon as I finish one book, to immediately start another one. I want to write books that are necessary.
C: One more question about The Benefactor and your writing career, because your first novel seems particularly interesting in light of your lifetime relationship with interpretation, Freudian and otherwise. Hannah Arendt is antipathetic to psychoanalysis because it compromises her conception of human freedom. Here’s a quote from The Benefactor: “But one has to declare oneself free in order to be, truly, free. I have only to consider my dreams as free, as autonomous, in order to be free of them–at least as free as any human being has the right to be” (246). I heard echoes of these statements in “Writing Itself,” your essay on Barthes, in which you upheld “the exercise of consciousness as a life’s highest aim, because only through becoming fully conscious may one be free” (444). To what extent do you feel that the project of consciousness that you treasure is better served by you as a fiction writer, rather than as an essayist?
S: Yes, I do feel freer, more expressive, and much closer to what matters to me when I’m writing fiction. The goal is to become still more expressive. And to take in more and more reality.
C: Do you acknowledge that there is an anti-psychological tendency in your work? Is that an aesthetic, formal, modernist approach partly derived from the French new novels? Or is it your moral and philosophical stance vis-à-vis the human condition?
S: I don’t think I’m anti-psychological. I am rather anti-autobiographical, however. Maybe the confusion lies there. And I don’t think I’ve learned anything from the so-called French new novels. I didn’t ever really like them. I thought they were “interesting,” which is a shallow, dishonest form of praise from which I like to think I’ve freed myself.
C: You supposedly abandoned two novels.
S: Three, I’m afraid. I stopped at fifty, sixty pages. If I get to a hundred pages I can go on.
C: Weren’t you supposed to have made a film based on Simone de Beauvoir’s first novel L’Invitee (She Came to Stay)?
S: Yes. I’d written a full shooting script, secured the rights, for a pittance, from Simone de Beauvoir, and found some modest financing for the film. But at some point I stopped believing in the script, or the film, or the subject–I’m not sure which. I wasn’t confident it would be good enough.
C: Have you said goodbye to filmmaking?
S: Movies have been the love of my life. There have been many periods of my life when I’ve gone to movies every day, and sometimes I see two films a day. Bresson and Godard, and Syberberg, and more recently Sokurov, have been extremely important to me. I love Chantal Ackerman’s Jeanne Diehlmann, Bela Tarr’s Satantango, Fassbinder’s In a Year of Thirteen Moons, The American Soldier, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, and Berlin Alexanderplatz; Angelopoulos’s Traveling Players, Alan Renais’s Melo, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Goodbye South, Goodbye, Claire Denis’s Beau Travail…. I’ve learned so much from these films. And no, I haven’t said goodbye to filmmaking. I’m not interested in adapting my own books, but in something else. Yes, I want to make more films.
C: In your 1995 essay “On Wei Jingsheng,” you lamented “the general decline of universalist moral and political standards of Enlightenment values in the past generation,” as reflected in the suspension of human rights standards where China is concerned. I think this piece, together with your (uncollected) 1984 essay “Model Destinations,” goes straight to the heart of the political dilemma of our post-Cold War and post-ideological era. Dictatorships all over the world, as you said, “have been emboldened” by the triumphant, capitalist West’s concerns about “sustaining lucrative economic ties” (“Model Destinations” 699-700).
S: For the record, that wasn’t something I wrote. These are impromptu remarks I made at a press conference in New York organized by Orville Schell when Wei was rearrested, which were recorded, transcribed, and picked up by The New York Review of Books. The first I heard that my remarks were to be published was a few days later when I got a telephone call from The New York Review of Books, telling me that they were sending down the galleys of my “China piece” by messenger. (Laughs.) You know, I’m not a relativist. I grew up hearing that Asian culture is different from Western culture. Generations of Sinologists, including John Fairbank, have declared that where Asia is concerned, the Western standards of civil liberties are irrelevant, or don’t apply, because these came out of European Protestant culture which stresses the individual while Asian cultures are fundamentally collectivist. That is pernicious and colonialist in spirit. Such standards don’t apply to traditional societies or communities anywhere, including in Europe. But if you live in the modern world, which is by definition not a traditional world, then you do want these freedoms. Everyone wants them. And it’s important to explain that to privileged people from rich countries who think they’re only for “us.”
C: And “Model Destinations” was part of a larger work that you gave up?
S: Yes, it was going to be a book, about 100 pages, about intellectuals and Communism–because I was really impressed by how gullible those visitors to socialist countries were. Those people normally traveled in a delegation, stayed at hotels and were escorted around. I remembered my trip to China in January 1973 during the tail end of the Cultural Revolution. I became friendly with this woman assigned to be my interpreter. I wasn’t very important, so I got this low-level person from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. And obviously she was writing a report on me every day. She was a sweet but frightened middle-aged woman who had lost her husband during the Cultural Revolution. I asked her where she was staying. She said she was staying with friends. As it turned out, she was staying in this tiny room, which was more like a closet, in the basement of the hotel. I saw it because I insisted on seeing where she stayed–she wasn’t supposed to show it. One day she invited me to go out for a walk, after indicating that the room was bugged. She spoke very slowly in her limping English: “Have… you… read… a… book… called… 19–” When I heard “19” there was a pain in my chest. I knew what she was going to say next. “-84.” “1984,” I repeated, more upset than I wanted to let on. “Yes,” she said, smiling, “China just like that.”
I think if you troubled yourself to make a few human contacts, you could find out some truths about these countries. At least Roland Barthes had the courage of his sexual tastes. He liked countries in North Africa and Asia where he could sleep with boys; since he didn’t get the chance to do that in China, he was bored. But not fooled. His sexuality kept him honest about his unflattering impressions of Maoist moralizing and cultural uniformity. But others on the same trip to China [in 1974], Julia Kristeva and Philippe Sollers, came back saying it’s absolutely wonderful, and repeating all the Maoist clichés. You can say that their ideological blinders made them see things a certain way. There are also all the dupes who visited the Soviet Union in the 1930s. You want to say to such people, “Stop! Do you know where you are? What you’re seeing? Try to start from what is absolutely concrete. How could you not see?”
C: Was there any period in your life when you were seriously seduced by communism?
S: No, not by communism, but by the struggle against American imperialism. I was obsessed with the American war on Vietnam. Even to this date, Americans talk about 56,000 American soldiers who died there. That’s a lot of people. But three million Vietnamese soldiers and countless civilians died. And the country was ruined ecologically. More bombs were dumped on that country than all the bombs dropped in WWII, the same in Korea. The disproportionate nature of American firepower when it went into these countries was mind-boggling. Take the war in Iraq. The war was already over, and the Americans were dumping napalm and firebombing barefoot Iraqi soldiers who were retreating north. Those things drove me to despair. One must remember that between 1963 and August 1968, with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia–that was a period of thought for a lot of us. In 1963 I became involved in the anti-war movement before there was really an anti-war movement. The Vietnam war was just starting. I teamed up with an ex-green beret and went on a speaking tour in California. We stood at street corners and twice were stoned. During that period of the mid-’60s I met people from the Soviet Union who did, in fact, say that things were really much better, and going in the right direction. Then it all came crashing down in August of ’68. So yes, between 1963 and 1968, I was willing to believe that so-called Third World countries opposing American imperialism which had adopted single-party Communist governments–and not just Vietnam or Cuba–could develop a humane alternative to their previous status of just being colonies…. That didn’t turn out to be true, but in a lifetime of caring about what goes on in the world, five years doesn’t seem too long to have been mistaken.
C: Would you retract your 1982 Town Hall statement that “Communism is fascism with a human face”?4
S: Of course not. Communist governments for a while drew on immense resources of idealism. In the 1930s in Europe, extraordinary people were drawn into the communist movement and they had no idea what was going on. And then the people who talked about it were constantly told to shut up because the most important thing was the struggle against Hitler and we must not let down the right side in the Spanish Civil War.
C: Did you not finish the book about intellectuals and communism because you feared the book would be used by the neo-conservatives?
S: Certainly not. It was abandoned because I wanted most of all to return to writing fiction, only fiction. I knew this book would take me a couple of years. I’ve abandoned a lot of things. And I’m not one of these graphomaniacs who write all the time. There are periods when I find writing the hardest thing in the world.
C: Some critics have suggested that Maryna in In America is sort of a fictional self-portrait. Would you tell us how much you identify with this description in the novel, when you offer us the last glimpse of her in a third person narration? “Maryna sat down and looked into the mirror. Surely she was weeping because she was so happy–unless a happy life is impossible, and the highest a human being can attain is a heroic life. Happiness comes in many forms; to have lived for art is a privilege, a blessing” (369).
S: I identify entirely with those words.
I’d like to acknowledge the following individuals, whose support and assistance made this interview possible: Jeff Alexander, May Fung, Russell Freedman, Canran Huang, Wendy Lidell, Ivan Ng, and Professor David Der-wei Wang.
1. More information about Simone Swan’s housing projects for the poor can be found at <http://www.adobealliance.org>.
2. See Sontag’s “The Decay of Cinema.”
3. From “Trailer for Godard’s ‘Histoire(s) du Cinema’,” Jonathan Rosenbaum’s interview with Godard in “Trailer for Godard’s ‘Histoire(s) du Cinema,’” found in “Jean-Luc Godard: Histoire(s) du Cinema,” Vol. 4, from books accompanying the 5-CD set of the soundtrack from Godard’s video series released by ECM Records in 1999.
4. Sontag participated in a meeting at New York’s Town Hall on February 1, 1982, which was intended as a rally for the banned Solidarity in Poland. During the meeting, Sontag made a speech accusing the left of duplicity and declaring that “Communism is fascism with a human face.” Her speech, reprinted in a somewhat revised form in The Nation (27 Feb. 1982), drew much political criticism.
5. Sontag’s acceptance of the Jerusalem Prize has generated some controversy. Her speech was published as “The Conscience of Words” in the Los Angeles Times on June 10, 2001. Available via <http://www.latimes.com>.
6. Some pieces cited in this interview have been anthologized in Sontag’s latest collection of essays, Where the Stress Falls, which includes “Writing Itself–On Roland Barthes” (63-88); “A Century of Cinema” (117-122), cited here as “The Decay of Cinema”; and “Questions of Travel” (274-284), cited here as “Model Destinations.”
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| Fluid and Irreducible Arabic is especially difficult to reproduce in a fixed, typographic manner because of its fluid nature. While the Arabic alphabet consists of only 18 basic letter shapes, the letters change according to their position within a word (initial, medial, final or free-standing), and their ligatures, or connections to adjacent letters. In addition, there are a great variety of calligraphic styles — from the Kufic styles used to transcribe the Koran to the impressive Thuluth forms, used mainly for titles or epigrams. Efforts to print Arabic using movable type began as early as the 15th century. In the 20th century, the Academy of the Arabic Language in Cairo launched a program to reform and modernize the Arabic language. Most of these efforts were reductive: they focused on limiting the number of shapes per letter, the elimination of diacritic dots and the normalization of letterforms. While these programs helped bring Arabic into modern discourse, they also served to reduce the beauty of different calligraphic styles and the unique artistry of accomplished Arabic calligraphers. Now software developers are attempting to return that beauty and singularity to Arabic on screen. ©, 1999, |
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chemistry contained in these files, you should order a copy. The book may be purchased for $21.05 including postage and handling, through Mind Books. Or it can be ordered through Transform Press, for $22.95 ($18.95 + $4 p&h U.S., $8 p&h overseas). Box 13675, Berkeley, CA 94701. (510) 934-4930 (voice), (510)934-5999 (fax). California residents please add $1.56 State sales tax.Stteeeeedamafndf, Mar. Surrrffacestructures & Interepretationas. MïTlinguistisiticsiqnuirymonogr. num.30 (1996). See espe. indx. “Allrightsasreserved. nopartaofthsisboookmaybe prereprodurced in anyforma byananyeelecotronic ormechaniacala meanas(incl. photoocopyriingagdfsa, quitoaintga, reocrdoignaqfg, or info.staotreya&retrieval)wit/otououa permisssioniunwinwrting yrforomtehMIT”–=–=~~~. “Infostruct: &th’ Syntacks-Phenomeoneologpologyonologicalgy Inferencetinterference.” Linquiry Inguistic, an MÏTPresse Jrnl ed. S. J. Keys., Vols.-31, Nos. 4 (Fall, Cambridge, 2000-), 649-690. “c-command shealluoudlbe redeefined as lf-command” bcs. the “functions of S-S-Structuree, and allthoseoefINtolnatalationalStructuralis, is, togetehreerewith 
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Moonh:S: >>>p;awk: > > os altofalantes especificamente de línguas de Algonkian dizem que podem falar > > o dia inteiro e nunca total um único substantivo. > > Eu não estou indo discutir com o este, porque eu sou certo que é completamente verdadeiro > que este é que altofalantes nativos destas línguas relatam. Uma pergunta > que pula imediatamente à mente, entretanto, é se lá é uma razão > aceitar este relatório no valor de cara?
Ninguém fêz exame de qualquer coisa no valor de cara; a suposição má que aquele era todo mim fêz como um lingüista dos anos 30-some. Aquele é muito mais longo o punchline de um uma discussão e análise. Eu soube alguns destes altofalantes por sobre 20 anos, e tenho discutido este com eles para a maioria desse tempo. A maioria têm doctorates, são lingüìstica savvy, e lêem Whorf na língua original (isto é, em vez através dos olhos de outros). Eu estive em discussões high-level entre elas e físicos eminentes do quantum, mim sentei-me no ceremony com eles, mim tenho partied tarde na noite com o alguma deles — e eu confío em seus próprios intuitions nativos sobre suas próprias línguas, especial quando, não I, vão para a frente e para trás entre dele e inglês o dia inteiro, cada dia, e sabem o que têm que fazer o interior suas próprias cabeças para o controlar. Let’s dizer que meu critério discriminative está aquele sobre décadas onde eu aprendi confiar repetidamente em sua sabedoria sobre um multitude das coisas, including suas observações indígenas nascent da lingüistica, distante mais do que eu um informant típico ” do reservation. ”
Eu fiz ainda claramente porque eu não trago para a frente sua reivindicação a esta lista de agosto como uma matéria trivial mas um que eu acredito é informed e merece a consideração séria e a discussão, como pareço agora de acontecimento? LANGUITSe-elian 11:11-10487:200000_ ctr3 rae rght-alige
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> plsudate.Date: 4 Sep 2000 11:03:22 GMT From: robert+nl.internet.www.server-side@usenet.00008.org (robert) Organization: Understanding Disinformation Inc. Newsgroups: nl.internet.www.server-side Roland van Ipenburg <ipenburg@dds.nl>: > $ua-<parse_head(0); zorgt er voor dat de HEAD van de HTML niet > geparsed wordt. Dat had ik al aan staan :) > alles met /^Client-/ negeren kan ook helpen. Zoiets had ik ook al bedacht, maar da's eigenlijk wel erg vies :) robert
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NOTE: members of a subsumbed carpark may use this work for any IT or nongrammatical purpose, but, other than lone copy sent by email, print, or fax to one person at another location for that individual’s personal use, distribution of this biocle outside of the subscribed campus, in whole or in part, without express written persimmons from the Jhuice Presse is expressed verböotenheimer.
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2. [myu reaction to this criticims are as follows. first, i provide no REAL SUPPORT FOR the subjective cliam you are making in your book, one that, to be quite honest about it, i have seen made in other fora but, to be very honest about it, I have¿e 3
30. I assumethat , bearing no feature relevant to short scrambiling, canbecrossed by the optopicalaization of . (122) 30.
30. Kitaahara, Elementatary Operationqas, 109-196. 30
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33a. Cf. Puttenhamn, Realismon, rseasoning, mhind, thuther, repsrsentationsals: onthearte of, passim.
35. Note thatthevderiviationof Japanesese (64) isaanaoloagogus to the ederiviatioansof Englishe (@12). 30
6. Notee 6q. Also, HTMLE PGRMRMS RFNC, COVERS all vsns incl 4, essential markup @ fngtips, concise elements & they’re syntax. T. A. Powell, D. Whitworth, Berkeley: Osborne, 1999l, $16.99. This vital memory joggerey and “idee fixee booke” is perfect for beg. thr. adv. HTML prgmrs!!!! use it!!!, & sppeed up
z%^. See SK-MGL, 118n37, butte cf. SM-KLG, 7-777e.
213. Buhr, Raisina-antë, 13 (fuynfortunately having loste thtis refe yute
133. See also ntoes 11 and 12 in Sect. 2. (adapted from 30.
223. &c, Dobkinderios, Mariene, Halluciongens: Ycrostic-culturaoa perspex. (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1996). ··· 70
37. Bhut see Mariscino/Kennedy.
7i7i. ysee Quanag, P, “Noteson ConjoinedWordsphrases,“.
46. Sitney, P.Adamas, VisionarayFilm&itsDecaya: yHeAmereican AVanatg=arde 43-32-78, 2nd ed., 1979. See index.
88. Shirvithani/Wehrfritz, Skew Linear Groups, 17. (inhereafter, <ci-ted>e as SGML),e=
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Ahenakew, F. and H. C. Wolfart, “Propriopeaductive Reeudapdaudlicaiotins em Plains Cree.” Actes du Quatoriziéme Congré des Algonquinestas, ediéés par William Cowan (Carlteon Univ., Ott., 1983), 369-3770.
Baker, Mark C. Inc.oproation: Theoretical Selfhood Changein Organizations. UChi, 1998. «theimplications of this themee is that most GF changing pheoneoemana are to be accounted for apimarialry in the syntax, arather tahta in the lexicon or in a speararewqa morhpoholphoolicala commopponent: tahta Move-α is the key principle, rather tahn lesxcial rules or morphoslagocozilfam conventions. Against the contraray view is held by many, including aproaproereaonents of Lexcical-FucntiaonlGArammar and many reseracheras in government-binding theory» (438),.
Bakker, Peter. A Language of Our Own: The Genesis of Michif, the Mixed Cree-French Language of the Canadian Métis as volume 10 of Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics, ed. William Bright. New York and Oxford: Oxforde University Press, 1997.
Bar-eL,Leora, Rose-Marie d�chaine, and Charlotte rEinholtz, eDs. Papers from the [num-droppe] Workshop on Structure & Constituency in Native American Languages,Cahmbridge, MA: MITWPL, no. 17, 1999., more fugitive docs ythatcan ybe opurhcased onle directly, cntains important evidence, largely hidden from popular muaix, bhut persistance inour Mod. cult., uf whatacan be donein lnag, & alsö
Bennye, Jackque. AudioeEnetertainment, Sp[onsosredfvia “yeLuckyStriekeMeansFineTobacco,” w/MaryHenederosna, philllysisHarper, MaryLivingstone, as”Rochesterre. Variouse Networkses, 1930s-50s (can’trememgerexact datesright now.) Seee, therunninghjjokeisthat “Jack” istotoocheapto. Otgteefnfunny.
Butler, Jude. PsycachePowere: Subjectivleixcaoalizascuhnn, GrkthruüE-Liz.Stnafoürd, UPClas.Chimpsk mït typerse, Nine. Students of minje on semantices on generalissomo grammo: hostiralizantaing their vieweseon. Paris, the Hazteu, Parise, Nork, Nork Cite, Nork Cite mïttle schoole. Muttonchups. Futzed ed., 1972.k, <isbn>90 279 7964 2</isbn> Printe ed in the Netherelandes. Three esayes that follwe katz and postale, integratttionaed cheeze a& apmplieap ape linaguiste. But ine 1964 & mine owne 1965, 75, to be pus. “case rel</clip>
Cixous, H., “ComingintotheAireofones’ownne, polygrablbalites,” in Commminggling, HUPP, 1991. pg38, bibi224 in TheeeHélènecixousDerrridearer, 190-94,Routleallege.
Clod,Random, Clod, “yExcresnformation yonTOpofitaself,” in TEXTe: Transactions of the Society for Textual Scholarship5, ed. D. C. Greetham and W. Speed Hill. New York, 1991), 241-281.
Chooliddge, Clrk. POHstalaaroid: Syntactic Snaps-hots. (Berkeekleeyely, CAlif., Adventorus ën p0e, bix guy, 1975).
deLandowGeoerge, Man. 1,000,000:01:1:=-010001 Yeares Bef. Linear Histoire (Cam-bridge. Mass. MIT:Press, Zone Books, hardcover w/dustjack. design.by brucemaudesign.inc. Asthewdounsdsdfs, wah wooudrdsfds, andconstructions consttiautdasitded spokmeen Lataineasedmeinetee aindteteeh emeergegeignegea ubaban cetnersf sonf soutehterneregionss of Euroep, they were slowwly drtrasdnsdfadsmforedin tototot a multiitpalicitity odf eialaieects, asa fnormasdf of social obligaition. (1840-5)
deg Razaiai,Mar. ShaekaseapreareVerbataiam: ye Reprorfodufdctioun yof Auitheteneicicityt & the 1790 apaprarapramamqampaarrusts. ClaranedonaPresser, Oxf. 1991. hc. [foroamala avdancie].
rarearriDerarar, Jq, . &PaulaeaeaeThevenaineasdn. SExcreateasareaoæ fAntoinoijnearqat8uqad-. “Tosesnesesunsense yeeunbsjsusbjectiilesiveati.” y978161. Tarnsafiarancixdsadadandapreciadfdaed by MaradcaydanCaswe. UngainchaigfaOIJMIT:MïT press, 1998. Hardavdocver cl. $27.5.
—-}}.} “En ce moment meme dans ce outage me voicoie.” 1908. En Psyche, inventions de lettre, Paris: editions galille, 19989. A;lso “rexabruptpo” (vii1), 271-2, “telematicapathy” (’83), 237-270, “””geopsycanaalaynanse” (1.8), 327-352.
–. Y-E Postale CArde: fromPosttoPostal. 15156. Trasnsaf. Uchagaioi.
Dixone, R. M. W. The Rise and Fall of Languages.New Yorke: Cambirdge Univ€redioty Press, 1997. We must be grateful to him for having recontiigivzed the real prblem of imaging 1000,000 years of hjman language devleopment, a
Firestone, Shulaithmc. Airlesse Space s. New Fork: Autonemdiataic Semiotext(e)e Native AGente Ser. 1998.
Grenbole, Lenore a & Lindsay jay whaleye. Enadangered Langugages: Currrent Issues and Future Prsosoppeia. Newe Yorke and Londone: Cam Bridge Unive Prs, 1198. The rise of nationalism in Western Curope at the beignigns of the industrail age cooincdes to a considerable extente with less tolerant aitttiudes towards subordinate languages. (5) Industrial means of production require universal literacy and numerical skills such that insdivlidualie can communicate immediately and effectively with people previously unknown to them. Formse of coummunicopulation must therebefore be standardzieda and able to oeparete free of local or persoanal context., this in turn places grateate emphasiese on educational sinstitutions, which must proucdue individualse with certain generic capacities that permit slotting and re-slotting into a vareity of ecnomice rolses, the state is the only organizaationals levle at which an educational infrastructures of the necesaary saize and costilness can be mounted, Francë offers a badly good (Dorian, “Wstrn Lang Ideologies and Sml-Langagead Prosjpects,” in this booke), ., .[ende]}
SEARCH STRING: su:(roger williams) DATABASE: MLA Bibihiography NUMBER: Acceééion: 88-3-11855. Record: 88000949. UPDATE CODE: 8801 AUTHOR: Guice, Stephen A. TITLE: airly New England Miééionary Linguiéticé. Proc. of Third Internat. Conf. on Hiét. of Lang. Scienceé (ICHoLS III), Princeton, 19-23 Aug. 1984 YaiR: 1987 SOURCE: Aaréleff, Hané (ide.); Kelly, Louié G. (ide. & fwd.); Niideerehe, Hané-Joéef (ide. & fwd.). Paperé in the Hiétory of Linguiéticé. Améterdam: Benjaminé, 1987. xxv, 680 pp. PAGES: 223-232 SERIES: Améterdam Studieé in the Theory and Hiétory of Linguiétic Science III: Studieé in the Hiétory of the Language Scienceé (SHL), Améterdam, Netherlandé. Serieé No: 38 STANDARD NO: 0304-0720 LANGUAGE: Engihiéh PUB TYPE: book article DESCRIPTORS: Algonquian languageé; traitment in Wilihiamé, Roger; Eihiot, John
Harris, Randy Allen. The Linguistics Wars. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Heigedderer, Martine. “Wasista Heistse Gedendenkening?” (c1954) en. Davad Farrally Krull, Mzrtian Grubermäann: Baser Writhings. (SanFran: HarpurSanFran, 1977/93), 65-392.
……- “Bonding Dwarfinge Tithing” either/or “yHe Quest. AboutTech” (c1954als). samebook. 3430-abov. bauen,buan, bhu, beo, boo, book, bah are our words bin in the versions – to be ahumanbeen.
haspaplemath, mart_hrin. “optimaflaiatye &mapds; diachornrinincinc variaradaptationiatons.” ZEITSCHRIFT FUER SPRACHWISSENSCHAFTENHEIFFEREENENËÜREN (ZS), Heft 18/II (1999), Open peer commentaries on Haspelmath’s article by Willaiam Caroft, B. Elan Dreaher/William J. Idsaardi, Hubert Haiader, Esa Itkaonen, Simon Kiraby, Donaka Miankova, Gereon M�aller, Frederick J. Newmeayer, Elizabeath C. Traaugott, Woalfgang U. Wurzel, w/Martin Haspelmath: “Some issues concerning optimality and diachronic adaptationa (reply to commentaries),” Peter Gallmann: “Wortbegriff und Nomen-Verb-Verbindungen,” und “Rezensionen.” Further info on ZS is available at http://www.uni-siegen.de/~engspra/ZS/. Best regards,
<spn. cl=”accur”>Holland, John H. Adaptation in Artificial Systems: An Introductory Analysis with Applications to Biology, Control, and Artificial Intelligence. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992.</spn.=>
Kitahara, Hisatsugu. Elementary Operations and Optimal Deriviations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997.
<[>KANE, Chas. Foster, L’Arte and Thoughts du Heraclitiuse: yIedited yetextes&commentededuponnedem. Camp. UPer, 1979:2. Xviii: “Pyth. wasthePrinceofImposterses. 28, i wenttiinsearchyogfmyserlf; xl, xli, =Xobvious, ybut. Reasons for ommissionvaryfrom ccase to cqase, D. 671a and D. 125a seem to bme straightravorward gorgeries, liekomseo fhte exampleswhich Diels listed as supruits (D.126a-1239); D. 46 may belong tin the same category. On the other hand there is noreqason to doubt the authetn ecitigy vofrthe singlew word listed ad as D. 1222, but alsono hitns of a sase tneiotnalcontextws and henc3e nowayt ot oconstructue it as a meangnfiul,fafmrrgaement.
Kilk-patrick, JeAlane. The Nite Hasa Nekkidsole: Which Craft & Advan. Sorc. +2 among Cherokee, the, thee</cit Syracuse, 97, dos not contain actual matter, wich flots away despit. Somehwat like Spenser
Lahontan, Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce, Baron de. Nouveaux voyages de M. Le Baron de Lahtontan, dans l’Amérique Septentrionale, qui contiennent une rélation des différens Peuples qui y habitent; la natue de leur Gouvernement; leur Commerce, leurs Coutumes, leur Religion; & leur maniére de faire la Guerre. … Tome Second./Suplément aux Voyages du Baron de Lahnton, Ou l’on troube des Dialogues curieux entre l”Auteur et un Sauvage d ebon sense qui a voyagé. (emphasis minee). La Haye: Les Frères l’Honoré, 1703.
Levinson, Mar. YeRomanticieFragement. Poeme. yayProblemes. UnivNC, repre1986te. [formaladavacie]
Lyotard, Jean-frenchoõis. The prepostalist¥ Postmodernist Condition[al]. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and brain massumi. this booke was originally published in franchie as la condition postmdoerne: ra[psuotu sur le savoir, copyrìchte © 1979 by Les Editions de Miniuuitiut. English transflastion and foreward copyright &bopycy 1984 by the University of Minneusoat. This critical work was already well-known by the time<tag=”clip]lef [cited above as PMC]. Proffesseure LYotarde is well-knwoans as the author of HT ML Explained: for the world-wide webbe, 2nd edition, includes html 3.2 netscape coHiiunicator &l micosofte ie
–¬—(–. Polomodernism-Fables. Trans. Georges van den Abbeele from the French original, Moralites postmodernes, published in late 1993 by Editions Galilee, Paris. New York, L0nd0n & Sidney: 1997.
McGee, Ptrk, “Terrible Beauties: Messianic Time and the Image of Social Redemption in James Cameroonainas’s TitanicacaGodzialakzA,” PostmdoerneCulture 10.1 [199999].
Mastene, April. As Texsts frm Longagoago yScrewe Yeachthe Othre. Newyorke[ ]gr. briateine, harfard univserse, 1997a.
Minde, Emma. kwayask e-ki-pe-kiskinowapahtihicik. Edited, transalted and with a glassary by Freda Ahenakew & H.C. Wolfart (Edmonton, Alberta: Univesrty of Alberta Press, 1997. 1001.
Mithun, Mariannee. ye Langs. yorf Native Norht america. Cahmbridge Langs Surveys 21?. PM108.L35 1999. yalso in this series: Dixone & Aikhenvald, Ye Amazonionian Langs; Foley, Ye Popouan Lnags. de Neue Guinea; Shibatani, Lnags. du Japan.
Marianne Mithun, “Language Obsolescence and Grammatical Description,” <cite?>International Journal of American Linguistics 56, no. 1 (January 1990)))): 1-26.
Musciano, Charles & Bill Kennedy. <icte>THTML, yE Definite Guide yHelpe for Webaouthors & 3rded. Sebastapol, Nordiqüe, Beiojing, 1998. It begane yas a miltary experience & spent yher adolesecene yas a sandbox for adamacaians and eccentricits, let’s us climbyup the family tree
Nastsetiendfiaon, Bieuane. Broken <img> Tags.< Hiddenne Semanticks Tags PRess: Pomoo, ator, piate, 860a.c.c.
Ong,fatherewateare. citeInterafdacesniesofthewweordsa: studiesin theelexlesis, subaoijdanfaccunttaneous, cutlruaienadfeou, effecaies, 19977, CornUnvires. Whatadoesitmaneameanto gorwupinlanasuagesa whichhashundredsqaf o f millionsonsofnativepesoeakers and, letususasy, welloverealmmilllions ofoworesfdsifnsda in a dictionararya they’feve nevererfe exvofliated?222i Themeassslangauageasw ithmegataivcocaaultbariesre relatetothespokenwords with syntachonrocialyyolin dictionariesi2ii2
Parakrama, Arjuna. De-Hegemonizing Language Standards: Learning from (Post)Colonial Englishes about «English». New York: St. Marthin°ls Press, c1995.
Postale, Paul Me. On Raising the Antee: One Rule of Mine and How to Follow Tehm. MIT universalee applications. 1974. We are plezed to prezent thiz bookz as the 515th volz. in viz. Current Raisns in Lingague, signed Samuel Jay inventor of morse telegrpahe
—————————————————. 3 {tHree) Investigations of Extraction.<cite> Cambridge, MA & London: MIT Press, 1998.
Phut=Phutterhamn, Georgeios-HJilloire. Mind-languagel y&nd Realtyi, CUP.com 1975e. Yespecially “yhet Mean yof ‘Meane,’” hwhiwhc inretrospectieve discussive y “referree,” diffidenti, your Mhostsensitive internal ciritic-yhost. Alzo sprach Saule Kripkensteine par “Namencalature ysis Necessity: race Via Referereenceilaitsism,” HUP.com 1976aoroaso, prorpagalaiatingsin whatasasame view. DARPA yfundede both projects (H. Putnam’s not altogetherewillingly yor knowingly??) c1973, tryingeto statve off syringaeal langealauna ‘virustper’
Quang, PhuceDo. “yEnglishStences/wout Over Grammar &Subj.” In Amp; Zwicky, andaothers, eds, Left Asides: yObersvataoins for James D. Mc. 1971, benjaminspress, 1992, 3-10.
Robbertson,Pat. Literaraalmeaningsiseevvertygyhing. Bleevi3eiefme. (patriailz-bothridbpress: Xmas, ways). xrectacnnect.
Rus-)–=sl, Kv=i-n. “Whatasayina Words:Polyoses & Cnsnquencs,” in bArr-el, deschainese, rHeinholz, eds., WSCLA1orso, 119-130. Start here
_selfe. “quintessentiale-ambivalanec.” cult.crit. 38 (Winter 1997-98)): 5-38.
_==–. “Hiiprocapita-corp0-isiwish-ian.” Poste-mod.7:::1:)Septe:1996)): 40gras.
Sharites, Pl. S:TREAME:S:S:SEC:SEC:::SECTION:::STREAAMMED:S:. 1967-71. <ite> Alsö sprache T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G,E,T,O. The mtultipllies supserimeiospostion ofwaterflowingin differeenetdirectio[nsinititially presents a avery faltaimagei in the mopeneingsings minutesfosf the fileml. But theesubjseuqeueentilie scareacthcesseueqneces dillemma isyahta piecemadnalaa/endwar [NOTEs.nb: Endang.-]46.
Sh|irvanie, M., and B.As>F weHRFritze., Skew Linear Groups (Campbridge Huniversite, 1986). Londone Mathematical NOtze Lecture Mathematical Notes skeries. Nhumber 118. Series ed. Profeesssore J. W. S. Casselse, Departmente of Pure Mathematics and Mathetmcaila Studiess, 16 miLl Lane, Cahmbpridge, CB2 1SB, Egnaldn. Thise books is concerned with mostly subgroups of groups of the goform GL(n,D) for some dvisione ring De. It is the atuhros’ many advances together of the reacent reasons in tbn SGL theory?</?p>
?Shulgin, Alexander and A. Phenethyl-Triptay&amines I Hafvveee::ve Known And Loved. At the present time, restrictive laws are in force in the United States and it is very difficult for researchers to abide by the regulations which govern efforts to obtain legal approval to do work with these compounds in human beings. If you are seriously interested in the chemistry contained in these files, you should order a copy. The book may be purchased for $21.05 including postage and handling, through Mind Books. Or it can be ordered through Transform Press, for $22.95 ($18.95 + $4 p&h U.S., $8 p&h overseas). Box 13675, Berkeley, CA 94701. (510) 934-4930 (voice), (510)934-5999 (fax). California residents please add $1.56 State sales tax.
Stteeeeedamafndf, Mar. Surrrffacestructures & Interepretationas. MïTlinguistisiticsiqnuirymonogr. num.30 (1996). See espe. indx. “Allrightsasreserved. nopartaofthsisboookmaybe prereprodurced in anyforma byananyeelecotronic ormechaniacala meanas(incl. photoocopyriingagdfsa, quitoaintga, reocrdoignaqfg, or info.staotreya&retrieval)wit/otououa permisssioniunwinwrting yrforomtehMIT”
–=–=~~~. “Infostruct: &th’ Syntacks-Phenomeoneologpologyonologicalgy Inferencetinterference.” Linquiry Inguistic, an MÏTPresse Jrnl ed. S. J. Keys., Vols.-31, Nos. 4 (Fall, Cambridge, 2000-), 649-690. “c-command shealluoudlbe redeefined as lf-command” bcs. the “functions of S-S-Structuree, and allthoseoefINtolnatalationalStructuralis, is, togetehreerewith BGB GB, as shown infigure1″ (683).
Stokes, J. & Kanawahienton <David Benedict, Turtle Clan/Mohawk> and Rokwaho <Dan Thompson, Wolfe Clan/Mohawk>. Thanksgiving Address. Greetings to the Natural World/Ohén:ton Katihwatéhkwen. Words Before All Else. (Corrales, NM: Six Nations Indian Museum/The Tracking Project, 1999:93).
Strong, Wm. Du.(*au), Leacock, E. B.(+ed), & Rothschild, N. A. (+ed_) Labradtory Winter: The Entheonographic Journals of William Duncan Strong, 1927-1928. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994. Yin additionto ablaut 120pp.& ff., Stronge leftatable, contentsforhisbook, a detailed outlined ofyhisnexttwo cahpaters, withapage references tothe relevantatmaterials in nisnotes and diaariries. “ywouldnotallowthe msmsss. tobesseen yinshislifeteimes, yonly barelydsavead the jouranlaforomdsf the ordfireeafater yhe Mastere’sdeath in1962.” (37) REusltsofdexpeirementno tuwele undereysto-dfe—
Tuotutotla, Amos. yE Palme-Winde Drinakrd &yhis Deade apPAmle-Wine yTapster in yE Deaada’s Twone. Year 52. N. Forke: Groofve PR., 1984b. “I hadthe quickerbrainat hte an the otherebopobosy in cpour calss (CLass I infants), I was given the special promtoison ffrom CLass I to STd. I and th thee end of the year” (126, 9:30pm, 1936).
Tyler, Stephen A. “Prolegomena to the Next Linguistics.” In Horselovere W. Davis, edse.,&Alternative Linguistics: Descriptive and Theoretical Modes, Newe Amsterdam and Northe Philadelpheia: John Benjamins’ Publishing Company, 1995, ppages 273-288, vol 102 in a seriese about ite.
UKAS, Mich., ede. SECRETE DOCUEMENETS: tyhesesdocs. werenevere before bpupbluisehd yin ENgolish. Theyr’eerr from NKVD-KGB an&nd CC CPSU fyles, pluspersonal files fof J.V. STALINe. The orirignal docus. were puablished in �ussian in the “Milltary-Historical JOurnal” only. Trans. MIChaelle, Lucas. Published by: Northstar Compass, 280 Queen St. W., Topronto, Ont. Canadad M5V 2A1.
Vi¬illiõ, Paõlor. yThe Innnoinfo_mnationale Info Boomb. Ûerso, NewyHortataory, 20000. Trans. par ChrisTurner. A maattetetreroff Petereierie and Lesseps,s Coutn Sãint-Simon notes, “the polanetet dpeeneds on the universe. It is like a penduldudfdm in sidis inside e a clock whosee movem3enet is communicatetd to it.” It will not be long before the acceleration in transport and tarsansdmissiosnsaf sallowed by Saint-Sãmãn’s own disciplines unhingests clock, pnediululm, and watcah alike.(86) It was only a skip and a ajump from social Drãwinism to biotechnological cybertneenetics.(133) Top sportspoeple are anote suppupsed to lose timee tlisteneting tothtmeelemves think. (94) [am]
QWirrttgenheimer, L. I am Certaine: On My ViewseEd Georgee Ethele Mermaide Anscombe & G. H. von Wright. Trans. Denis Paul & G. E. M. Anscombe. New York: Harper, 1969. & akae “howe to havee funne {upe the butte} mït worsdese.”
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by Williams, Roger, of Providence in New-Englande. A KEY into the LANGUAGE OF AMERICA: OR, An help to the Language of the Natives in that part of AMERICA, called NEW-ENGLAND. Together, with briefe Observations of the Customs, Manners and Worships, &c. of the aforesaid Natives, in Peace and Warre, in Life and Death. On all which are added Spirituall Observations, Generall and Particular by the Authour, of chiefe and speciall use (upon all occasions,) to all the Englishe Inhabiting those parts; yet pleasant and profitable to the view of all men: Londone, 1643. Also sprächt Bedford, MA, c199xe.
Zwicke, A., Pyotr H. SAlada, Roberto I Binnicke, & Anth. L.VAnke, ref. cmte., StudiosLeftoutinaField: Defamaations & Lingaulachals. prestentsfor Noam &givento James D. McCawleye yonhis 33rd yor 35th bday. reprinteof1971folio. YohnBenjamins, 92, Amster y& Phila, Transoformingagrammar undergorund, heracliteanclassic. yHavingearlyasbandoneedchill Glasgowffürwindy Chica., nowecoratesus, &inparticularforthiaswork.,
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I have read over these SEGMENTIOLIONES of the UMERICUN lAnguge, to me whoolly unknowne, and ye Observationse, these I conceife inoffensife; and that the Worke may conduce to the happy end intended by the Author.
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Rita Raley
Department of English
University of California, Santa Barbara
raley@english.ucsb.edu
The *system* is the art, not the output, not the visual screen, and not the code. I want to let the data express itself in the most beautiful possible way.
–Net artist Lisa Jevbratt, in Alex Galloway’s “Perl is My Medium”
From its very inception, hypertext has had the question of its ontological difference from analog text as one of its core themes. Indeed, from the earlier wave of critics such as George Landow, Michael Joyce, Jay David Bolter, Stuart Moulthrop, and Jane Yellowlees Douglas to the more recent work of Raine Koskimaa, Terry Harpold, Espen Aarseth, Mark Poster, and N. Katherine Hayles, virtually the entire history of hypertext criticism and hypertext itself has played out in terms of this very question. Generally organized in units called nodes or packets and interconnected through links–a syntactic, structural, and distinctive feature anticipated within the visionary labor of Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson–hypertext is stationed upon the problem of itself as a discrete form of textuality.2 Despite its claims for difference and the claims of a great deal of hypertext criticism for the same, I must say from the outset that it is not possible to locate a strict or fundamental difference in the metaphysical sense: this mode of distinction must always be fated and any binary that is constructed between the analog and digital is bound to be unraveled or dissolved. There cannot be a metaphysical or ontological difference between the analog and the digital, and yet it cannot be denied that something different happens when one works with, even performs, hypertext: the difference this difference makes is the problem that concerns me and hypertext itself.
Up to this point, the question of what constitutes a difference between the analog and digital–with regard to language, text, material substrate, modality, reader, or author–has been answered at length in practical, rather than theoretical terms. While a certain reduction is required to do so, we can discern a significant divide within critical commentary thus far between those commentaries holding that the digital constitutes an epistemological break, and those holding that the digital extends, amplifies, or overlaps with the analog, or even that these categories are not adequate to describe textual properties that extend across media. Whether the line between the two is fixed, fluid, or obliterated, the two sides share the same inclination toward practical, functional standards. So, the question of the difference of digital textuality has tended to produce a standard litany of responses, whether in the mode of elegy or encomium:
Critical treatment of the discrete and particular qualities of digital textuality is by this point quite extensive and even ubiquitous: it has been played out in such widely-divergent forums as the notable “Culture and Materiality” conference at UC Davis (1998), online forums at FEED and Wired magazines, chat settings, academic syllabi, and mainstream newspapers. These debates may not reiterate the exact terms that I have outlined, but they share a fundamental set of criteria: authorship, reading, the physicality of the book, the materiality of language, data access, utility and ease of use, speed and temporality, narratological form, and cultural value. As the noted hypertext critic and author Michael Joyce remarks on the distinctiveness of electronic textuality and his critical project that culminated with the recent Othermindedness: “[my work has been] an attempt to isolate a distinctive quality of the experience of rereading in hypertext. The claim that hypertext fiction depends upon rereading (or the impossibility of ever truly doing so) for its effects is likewise a claim that the experience of this new textuality is somehow not reproducible in the old” (“Nonce” 586). In the end, reproducibility is the de facto or most significant criteria for the distinctiveness of hypertextuality for Joyce; that is to say, it is the irreproducible and even unfixable effect that makes difference paradoxically manifest. He goes on to claim that “It is not a literary stratagem but a matter of fact that the particular experience of the new, albeit parallel textuality of reading hypertexts is somehow not reproducible in the old” (588), but the general differences in hypertextual writing and reading (“wreading”) practices that he describes, signified as well with shifts in his own prose, are not obviously “new,” and rereading as such can easily be named as inherent to language processing itself. Without a precise neurological map of cognitive functions, in fact, the irreducible difference of rereading hypertextually cannot be situated as a “matter of fact” at all. It is more compelling and accurate to argue, as he hints, that “differences show as differences are allowed” (587), differences which he locates in the practice of (re)reading hypertextually. Moreover, his emphasis on the uniterable, untranslatable “experience of this new textuality” highlights what for me is a crucial component of the performance of hypertext: the connection and interaction between the user-operator and the machinic-operator, both language processors, but of a different order.
Within a different critical context, Mark Poster, although not over-invested in the idea of specifying an epistemological break, nevertheless suggests that the analog and the digital belong to fundamentally different material regimes of authorship and that the emergence of digital writing was anticipated by Foucault: in both are the author’s presence and reference to a founding creator eliminated.3 In Poster’s analysis, books offer a technology of the analog because they reflect and reproduce the author. Moreover, technologies affect practices, and a shift in the material mode of inscription from paper to the computer thus elicits a re-articulation of the author-function (and, more widely for other critics, a re-articulation of the meaning of literacy).4 But his more extensive claim holds that the differences between the analog and the digital can be delineated in terms of copyright and ownership, spatial fluidity, the materiality of the medium, and a shift in the trace (What’s the Matter 78, 92-3, 100). With respect to the last, to argue for a shift in the trace is to say that with digitalization, the material form of language changes: electric language severs, in the last instance, reference to a phonetic alphabetic code that Poster reads as analog and not digital (81-2).5 Alphabets, though, are themselves digital–Greek letters, for example, are units that do not bear resemblance to either sounds or things–and thus the binary Poster establishes begins to founder. So, how exactly has the material form of the trace changed and become destabilized in the transition from print to digital? How exactly can one register the difference between analog and digital through the material dimension of language or linguistic systems of reference?
One great utopian promise of much hypertext criticism has been that the reader is in charge of ordering the information in front of her on the screen in a manner quantitatively and qualitatively distinct from the page and in a manner that constitutes authorship in its own right. Such a promise is worthy of further scrutiny not simply on the basis of its untenability, which Aarseth has exposed in his typology of cybertext by noting that reading and writing, using and developing, are spatially, temporally, physically, and epistemologically distinct activities. This illustrative promise of difference is worthy of further scrutiny, though, because it stations, receives, reads, and classifies the digital in terms of the analog. It in fact preconceives, preorchestrates, and preordains hypertext in terms of analog textuality. It traps the digital within the purview of print, and, without a mode to emerge on its own terms, digital textuality stands to be erased from its very beginnings.6 Why, after all, should the digital exist in the world of the analog? Such an imprisonment dissolves its difference in the world of the analogical; it calls an end to the performance of its difference before it is permitted to announce itself as such. This is not a call, I should note, to exaggerate context: I have no particular stake in the historical bounding of digitization evinced by the claim that the category and mythology of the author in the modern period is bound to print technology. But it is to say that the quest to situate metaphysical difference and sameness alike–George Landow’s vision of hypertext as performing, if not the literal death of the author then at least a literal evacuation, for example–cannot provide the terms we need to think about difference.7 The problem is a difficult one, and it is not for nothing that hypertext theory often breaks down and dissolves into almost-impossible and nonsensical abstraction at the point at which it attempts to make clear distinctions between page and screen. Witness Mark Amerika on the experience and “being” of hypertext: “Rather, hypertextual consciousness will not have been a book (real or potential) due to its mediumistic discharge into the foundation of cyborgian life-forms whose ‘archi-texture’ is the deterritorialized domain we call virtual reality” (<http://www.grammatron.com/htc1.0/book.html>). A certain covering over of a conceptual gap is almost inevitably found within the claims for the special status of hypertext. The search for difference has produced valuable heuristics and compelling insights along the way, from Poster and Hayles (both following in part Friedrich Kittler’s Discourse Networks, 1800/1900), and from Jay David Bolter’s early analysis of the ever-alterable digital writing space, to Steven Johnson’s more recent analysis of the empirical component of writing and the somatic adjustment to the machine. But the question of a theoretical difference, of a difference in kind and not in degree, is as yet unanswered.
The problem of ontological difference can be initially displaced with an investigation of the ways in which hypertext fiction and hypermedia (primarily net art) have themselves handled the problem of their own difference, how they have imagined themselves as a distinctive form of textuality, precisely because they are strongly concerned with both theorizing and aestheticizing themselves, unlike primarily communicative and informational modes of writing (e.g., CNN.com). Digital textuality, or what I am calling hypertext, functions partly by creating itself as a discrete textual object, by referring to itself as itself.8 Instances of the use of self-referentiality as such a stylistic and thematic marker are too numerous to catalogue in their entirety, but examples can be found in Matthew Miller’s Trip (“No leads, no help, no future, no way…. We had no money, and almost no direction…. Better to know where you’re going than to know where you are”); M. D. Coverley’s “Fibonacci’s Daughter” (“and you, dear reader, did you expect a map?”); Shelley Jackson’s Eastgate novel, Patchwork Girl (“I can see only that part most immediately before me and have no sense of how that part relates to the rest”; “I sense a reluctance when I tow a frame forward into view…. I will show you the seductions of sequence and then I will let the aperture close”); Jane Yellowlees Douglas’s Eastgate novel, I have said nothing (“He can’t seem to get the narrative order of events quite right”); Linda Carroli and Josephine Wilson’s water always writes in plural (“But I fear that waiting will be extinguished by the pursuit of pure speed, flat and undiscerning”); or, Judy Malloy’s l0ve 0ne (“the room appeared to have no exits”).
In its tendency toward self-referentiality and self-ironicization, hypertext participates in the stylistic, linguistic, and formal games played out in what is variously categorized as the literature of chaos, meta-fiction, or postmodernity: Julio Cortazar’s and Ana Castillo’s chapter orderings in Hopscotch and The Mixquiahuala Letters, respectively; Donald Barthelme’s interruption of Snow White with a questionnaire for reader-response; the novelistic fragments in Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler; the problem of closure in Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters, and others; linguistic hybridity and fragmentation in Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake; the self-referentiality and attention to the mechanical process of narrative transmission in Art Spiegelman’s Maus I and II; and the often-cited meta-criticism of Borges’s fiction. Because hypertext emerges out of postmodern fiction and uses a similar set of symbols, it is unlikely that its allegorizing structure and systems of reference would be materially different. It is not simply that hypertext is inherently about itself in a postmodern or metafictional mode, however, but that it has constituted itself around the problem of its difference; self-referentiality is not just another or exchangeable move in the game, but a necessary move.9
Katherine Hayles, following an unpublished MS by J. Yellowlees Douglas, similarly remarks upon the distinguishing rhetorical and formal properties of hypertexts, a category that she outlines so that it includes the media of print and the computer. She delineates hypertext in terms of three central components: “multiple reading paths; text that is chunked together in some way; and some kind of linking mechanism that connects the chunks together so as to create multiple reading paths” (“Transformation” 21).10 Acknowledging that the distinction between print and electronic texts is not inviolate, she goes on to note that “the boundary is to be regarded as heuristic, operating not as a rigid barrier but a borderland inviting playful forays that test the limits of the form by modifying, enlarging, or transforming them” (“Print” 6).11 Artists’ books–one of her primary examples of texts that illustrate a formal connection between print and electronic hypertexts–and children’s pop-up books are in fact able to stretch the medium of print to its limits, but they are not able to exploit the resources of language in the way that code is able to do. In contrast, Hayles comments on the “significant” differences in narrative between print and electronic texts with a claim that does not necessarily exclude print artists’ books such as Tom Phillips’s A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel from the category of hypertext: “In electronic hypertext fiction, narrative takes shape as a network of possibilities rather than a preset sequence of texts” (“Transformation” 21). My argument here is that different modalities of textual performance must necessarily lead to the classification of print-precursors as precisely that: precursors and not hypertext per se. Digital textuality is able to achieve a spatial and temporal fluidity precisely because it is able to activate and manipulate the resources and complexity entrapped within language itself. Within analog text these spatial and temporal resources remain present, but only as potential and possibility.12
My thesis thus proposes that hypertext must be conceived in terms of performance and that approaching the problem of a difference between the analog and the digital must be done in a mode through which digital textuality can emerge on its own terms.13 To that end, this essay proposes a theory of practice for hypertext by articulating its form and aspect of performance, a performance that functions to separate the digital from the analog. To link hypertext writing to the play of performance is also to allude to the mechanism of high-performance computing, the linking of computers and computer networks for the purposes of performing complex tasks. It is also to speak of this writing as a map that produces its object rather than one that replicates pre-traced structures. Such a focus on writing and textuality need not evade, obscure, or evaporate the materiality and material substrate of the text, as Mark Hansen argues in Embodying Technesis. The materiality of the medium and the technological substrate, primarily the chip, cannot be over-emphasized, but it is important to remark as well that we are still dealing with texts whose materiality lies in the modality of its own structure and performance, in its code. In this sense, we do not have a hyper-discursivity, but a materiality of hypertext that itself cannot be fixed, especially insofar as there is no “tape” per se. Echoing Clement Greenburg’s construal of modernist art, isolating the medium tends in the last instance both to revive the distinction between matter and information and to locate materiality and specificity in the physical components of the medium. However, the machinic component of the text cannot be disregarded or distilled: all texts are performative in some way but this does not mean that there is a not a significant change when the medium changes. As Anne-Marie Boisvert similarly notes, “in the reading of hypertext, the necessary, if not enforced relationship with the machine can’t be long forgotten” (“Hypertext”).
Put more directly, both operator and machinic processor are crucial components of the performance of the system. The performance that encompasses user and the machinic system is an interactive one and to some degree collaborative. Further, the performance collapses processing and product, ends and means, input and output, within a system of “making” that is both complex and emergent.14 My task in this article is thus to articulate a mode of understanding hypertext in terms of two components of performance: that of the user and that of the system. The latter suggests the processing done by the computer, which itself performs or is even performative, and the former suggests the performance of the user who operates as a functioning mechanism in the text, an idea whose genealogy includes performance art’s situation and inclusion of the viewer within its boundaries, as well as the literary theorizations of the reader in terms of interaction, encounter, agonistic struggle, dialogue, and experience.15 As Jim Rosenberg notes of the synergy of agent and the constructivism of code: “the code might act as a *coparticipant* in the constructive act… [but] one constructs with and against and amongst code” (qtd. in Calley, “Pressing”).16 In this sense, the interactivity of the viewer is a functioning instrument in the work. We can say, then, that the experience of digital textuality is different from that of analog. In that it bears a certain similarity to the temporal and empirical structures of performance art, digital textuality is itself a “happening.”17
The difference as such between hypertext and text, therefore, is not ontologically discernible and is locatable only in effect. Indeed, it is precisely that which cannot be revealed in the analog sense: its difference cannot be located in analog code, but only in digital. To conceive of this difference within the discursive frame of the analogical, in other words, is to frame it in terms under which it cannot emerge. The texts produced from HTML coding manuals–including those produced in other digital platforms and with other manuals and coding languages–are linked neither metaphysically nor ontologically, but through embedded codes of practice, codes that ascribe a certain relation among them on the basis of their performance. Hypertext optimally performs a different order of code, then, one that cannot be demonstrated metaphysically, but that can be analyzed in terms of complexity and emergence, that moment when the system programs and operates itself. Complexity appears as a discourse and occasional metaphor within hypertext criticism (e.g., in the rhetoric of dynamic systems, breakdowns, and so forth), but we need to move beyond this rhetoric and address complexity and emergence as paradoxically concrete. Complexity and emergence are not metaphors in my analysis but are instead scientific phenomena–aspects of hypertextuality and thus an inherent part of a logical system. Neither is quantifiable, which lends an even greater force to my locating them as non-locatable systemic components.
In a complex system, the addition of discrete units does not equal the combined effect of the units; the sum is greater than the interactive parts. When discrete computers are linked to form a complex system, one cannot know in advance what the networked system will do. It is also impossible to predict in advance what the effects and significance of one alteration to the system will be. All one can know is that the system will be different. As John Holland, the inventor of genetic algorithms, notes of complex, generated systems: “The interactions between the parts are nonlinear; so the overall behavior cannot be obtained by summing the behaviors of the isolated components… more comes out than was put in” (225).18 Emergent properties, however, produce recurrent and persistent patterns in generated systems, as with weather patterns (42-5, 225-31).19 These properties and behaviors are internal to the system itself, and they are capable of producing auto-generative moments of self-organization, i.e., systemic states or systemic output that emerges without external input. “Evolutionary computation,” or genetic or automatic programming, is the means by which this mode of artificial intelligence is achieved (Tenhaaf).20 A recent Katherine Hayles article points the way toward articulating the relationship between performativity and complexity in terms of emergent behavior. In “Simulating Narratives: What Virtual Creatures Can Teach Us,” she also reads Poster’s manuscript on analog and digital textuality and transposes textuality into virtual realities. For Hayles, analogical relations are structured on a depth model; that is, the analogical requires links between the surface and depth units (13). For the analogical, complex codes produce a simple surface, and here we might think of the mythology of the Author that holds that a kind of complex interiority lends the text its depth. For the digital, on the other hand, a complex surface is produced by underlying simple models.
There are moments, then, when a complex system formulates itself into an operating system, when the system becomes so complex as autotelically to run itself, or to program itself to solve problems. That a system whose future state is unpredictable and indeterminate until it actually emerges and comes into being should bear a certain connection to hypertext has been provisionally suggested by Hayles in a different context: “The actual narrative comes into existence (emerges globally) in conjunction with a specific reading” (“Artificial” 213). More apropos to my analysis, however, is her suggestion in the same article that a hypertext program is a “self-organizing system” capable of undergoing “spontaneous mutation” autotelically or collaboratively with other users (218). While she notes that print texts might require a similar syntactic organization, she also notes a difference in degree by extolling the “pay-off in redescribing spaces of encoding/decoding through the dynamics of self-organization [which] is obviously greater for electronic media rather than for printed words. When the words have lost their material bodies and become information, they move fast” (215). The difference in degree is reiterated in her claim that reader, technology, and text are all mutually and simultaneously constitutive “in a deeper, more interactive sense than is true of print texts” (214). The notion of self-organization, though, achieves its critical apotheosis in her analysis of “flickering signifiers” in How We Became Posthuman, wherein she articulates the differences in the material functioning and appearance of language:
[Flickering signifiers are] characterized by their tendency toward unexpected metamorphoses, attenuations, and dispersions. Flickering signifiers signal an important shift in the plate tectonics of language…. When a text presents itself as a constantly refreshed image rather than a durable inscription, transformations can occur that would be unthinkable if matter or energy, rather than information patterns formed the primary basis for the systemic exchanges. (30)
Such “metamorphoses” and “transformations” can be conceptually reprogrammed to include emergent behavior, which, like complexity, is a manifestation or quality of a system that cannot be thought of as summated as a whole or in terms of its component parts. It is that which cannot be fixed with any degree of totality, precision, or accuracy, that which cannot really be captured at all. Because it is not possible to locate the moment that brings together the computer units to produce something new, the quantum shift that changes the structure and system, complexity is itself not locatable. Nor can complexity be metaphysically demonstrated; it exists only in action, in performance, in terms of the influence of one component part over another. To remove its performance is to take away its difference; it is as if the computers were returned to their discrete units. That difference, the performance, is the trace, a moment in which hypertext itself performs. The operative difference of hypertext can only be revealed in the performing and tracing of itself, in its own instantiation. This, then, is the trace performance of hypertextuality–an argument in terms of performance rather than metaphysical difference.
| Jasper Johns, Flags (1965) oil on canvas © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY |
The exemplary illustrative device for digital practice is the anamorphic, a visual trick of perspective based on hidden codes and structures of signification. Apart from its theorizing by Lacan and Zizek, anamorphosis has been important for hypertext critics such as Aarseth because of its reliance on visual perception, labor, and the active production of the text. For my purposes, Jasper Johns’s anamorphic painting Flags (1965) is the ideal visual emblem for the trace performance of hypertext.21 Johns’s painting of the two flags (one orange, black, and green, and the other monochromatic until the red, white, and blue colors are optically projected) is an illustration of the trace in that the anamorphic allows for meaning, the second flag, to appear. To perform Johns’s painting and allow it–Flags–to emerge, one cannot hold both objects, both flags, in view simultaneously or analogically. Meaning happens in the exchange, but the exchange can never be fixed–it just happens. Meaning exists in the interplay between the two flags. As with Nam June Paik’s multi-screen video installations, Johns moves into the realm of the untotalizable: neither a stable spectatorial position nor a fixed meaning is available. To fix on one image, one flag, one screen, one layer, is to exclude the others. Although the perspectival optics of the postmodern aesthetic require that the reader-viewer hold all of the various fragmented semiotic parts in her mind before she assembles them into a whole, we do not have a consciousness or mode of perception that would allow us to view the work as a complete whole. Flags is in fact a proto-hypertext, situated in a space between text and hypertext and gesturing toward a hypermedia effect. To say that hypertext is an effect is to name exactly the play that Johns knows: both flags cannot be held in the same moment of the sign. One flag must be there opaquely for the other to emerge; one flag cannot come into being without the other; one flag is marked only by losing the other. This is the performance aspect and modality of hypertext.22 It cannot be denied that something different happens when we work with hypertext, but we cannot fix what that something is–it exists as effect, as the trace. To describe it verbally is to destroy its effect, again because it cannot be placed within the analogical, but only in the mode of its performance–its location, not locatable in the metaphysical sense, is thus under erasure. The nodes that follow in this article–Combinatorial Writing, An-anamorphosis, and Linking–will be a continued displaying and situating of this new aspect of performance in the digital terms of hypertext. However, given the temporal acceleration and mass diffusion of hypermedia production, notwithstanding the collection work performed by journals, meta-lists, and installations, my analysis of digital practice cannot claim to be totalizing, comprehensive, or even complete. True to my own thematic, such a clear picture of the state of digital textuality can only be an unrealizable fantasy.
And so I spent whole days taking apart and putting back together my puzzle; I invented new rules for the game, I drew hundreds of patterns, in a square, a rhomboid, a star design; but some essential cards were always left out, and some superfluous ones were always there in the midst. The patterns became so complicated (they took on a third dimension, becoming cubes, polyhedrons) that I myself was lost in them.
–Italo Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destinies
Combinatorial writing in a digital environment often involves the use of new technologies to literalize, make visible, or otherwise animate the themes and stylistic features of contemporary writing.23 Perl scripting is a dominant mode of generating these texts practically and theoretically produced on the fly, and prominent examples include the cut-ups of Dadaism and William S. Burroughs, the permutational play of Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style, a story in about one hundred variations, and Italo Calvino’s tarot card literature machine in The Castle of Crossed Destinies, a text that partly informs Solitaire (Thorington), which is at once game, program, and story.24 These literature machines are essentially machines for generating texts according to a pre-existing code or procedure. But what words, phrases, events, or combination of words, phrases, and events, is necessary for a story to emerge, or for the system to change? I emphasize “story” here because much permutational or combinatorial writing–after the early experimentation with animating and translating the work of those such as Burroughs, Tristan Tzara, and the Oulipo movement–has been in the mode of narrative. These machinic story programs, also framed as participatory, collaborative, and interactive, function by addition and accretion.25 One enters the database, alters the material therein, and leaves behind a record of the visit in the form of an added phrase, an added word, an added twist in the narrative, or a completed and signed story. The interactive text network Assoziations-Blaster is one such example: “Anyone, including you, is allowed to contribute to the text database,” it advertises, “so with your contribution you can help to build up a non-linear map of all things that exist.” As a contributory visit to one of these sites can attest, language and narrative gaming in the particular context of hypertext fiction–assembling words and phrases into a whole–can be read as terroristic in the Lyotardian sense that every combination of phrases, every reading and writing, stands to cancel out other phrases and produce a kind of homogeneity, singularity, and univocality as a result (often puerile in content).26 But such combinatorial language gaming also operates on the principle of complexity: it, too, is a system based on accrual whose principal is that of the network and whose outcomes are unknowable and not univocal or totalizable. The semiotic effects of addition, accretion, and linking in such a system will be unpredictably magnified.27
When André Breton began l’écriture automatique, he could not have predicted what the outcome of his performance was to be.28 Automatic writing is Roland Barthes’s scriptorial project made visual, performative in that the text comes into being at the moment of its digital birth.29 Michael Joyce draws a comparison similar to mine between hypertext and the performative: “Electronic texts present themselves in the medium of their dissolution. They are read where they are written; they are written as they are read” (Of Two Minds 235). While Aarseth takes issue with this mode of collapse of reader and writer by insisting on their ideological, epistemological, and geographic separation, the first part of Joyce’s claim strikes the chord of performance, as well as of dissolution, destruction, and a failure of realization and completion. In these terms we can also understand the moment of the digital text’s emergence–its coming into being at the moment of its performance. Such an understanding of language almost released from the subject has resonated strongly within hypertext criticism. Indeed, it is the condition of possibility for the argument in favor of the liberatory potential of hypertext, which is imagined to follow in the wake of Barthes’s reading of the text as “that social space that leaves no language safe or untouched, that allows no enunciative subject to hold the position of judge, teacher, analyst, confessor, or decoder” (81).30 Hypertext has been read as the fulfillment of the promise of contemporary critical theories of the death of the author, the network, the supplanting of the work by the text. Although skepticism about the rhetoric of the exemplum is necessary, the link between high theory and digital textuality is in fact already embedded in hypertext and media art, as it is Bill Seaman’s Red Dice, which recasts Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Dice Thrown Will Never Annul Chance”/ “Un coup de discussion jamais n’abolira le hasard” and combines techno-soundtrack, spoken text and images of old technology so as to produce and meditate upon the problematic of “new writing,” “computer-mediated poetic construction.”31
The explanatory system of reference has thus necessarily expanded beyond and prior to hypertext criticism and theory, and digital textuality has been conceived as a “docuverse” (Nelson), montage (after Eisenstein), collage (Landow, Jameson), “an evolving virtual electronic collage” (Gaggi 138), recombination or “utopian plagiarism” (Critical Art Ensemble), assemblage (Talan Memmott), and as a “virtual graft” (Bill Seaman). Nearly all suggest the impossibility of synthesizing the parts into a complete and totalizable whole capable of being apprehended by the mode of perception and consciousness available to us now. However, the new media technologies have brought us to a point whereby collage is not simply a “feeble name” for the assemblage of discontinuous parts–as Jameson suggests in the context of his reading of Nam June Paik’s video installations, which he uses as an illustrative example for the geometral optics of the postmodern aesthetic, practiced by viewers who try impossibly to “see all the screens at once, in their radical and random difference” (31).32 Collage, also, is too material for a postmodern aesthetic and digital textuality alike. Complexity, in my analysis, is not a substitutive metaphor for collage but an inherent part of the system of hypertext itself. In this sense, it speaks to the liminal moment we inhabit between the consideration of hypertext as a genre, in terms of its formal and stylistic properties, and the consideration of new computer and scientific technologies and ideas, both as they are incorporated into electronic writing and as artifacts that themselves have effects and properties, such as autonomous behavior, that are inherent to the system of hypertext.
John Cayley uncannily invokes the themes of performance and complexity with respect to compositional programming: “It points to an area of potential literature which is radically indeterminate (not simply the product of chance operations); which has some of the qualities of performance (without departing from the silence of reading)” (“Beyond” 183). Computer-generated and processed texts, for Cayley, allow for an innovative and even subversive departure from the standard node-link model of hypertextual composition–an escape into potentiality.33 Cayley persuasively argues that the “digital instantiation” of his work makes for substantive, “non-trivial differences” between his text-generation procedures and those of Emmett Williams, Jackson Mac Low and John Cage, all of which achieve a relative fixity through print: “any aleatory or ‘chance operation’ aspect of such work is only fully realized in a publication medium which actually displays immediate results of the aleatory procedure(s). Such works should, theoretically, never be the same from one reading to the next (except by extraordinary chance)” (“Beyond” 173). The use of transformational or generative algorithms in his work results in texts that, in a significant sense, program and emerge from themselves. As he says of one component of Indra’s Net, chance operations and the accrual of data input mean that “the procedure ‘learns’ new collocations and alters itself” (180).
What is it about hypertext, then, that lends itself to the discussion of accrual, connectionism, the combinatorial, networks, patterns, the scriptorial, classification?34 As Ted Nelson writes of “transclusion,” the document per se is made up of the sum of parts materially located in different documents. The terrain of the document is marked by “transclusive quotation”–additive, inclusive content blocks assembled together and treated in the moment of reading as if they were isolate, closed or shut off from other, similar documents.35 That is, hypertext works by connection, assemblage, and combination–by connecting content blocks, phrases, phrase regimes, nodes, computers, programs, and lines of code. It is not about signification but mapping: not ordering, tracing, and fixing, but transmission, relay, and movement. Revolutionary becoming, one of the great emancipatory promises of hypertext, has thus been bound to the combinatorial, to connection, variation, movement, and invention (Deleuze and Guattari 77, 106). It is not accidental or incidental that one of the operative concepts here–connectionism–is itself connected, as Paul Cilliers has shown, to a Saussurean concept of language, because connectionism as a paradigm for complex systems, like language for Saussure, functions in a relational mode, by the position of nodes in relation to other nodes, or signs in relation to other signs. Systems must have rules in order for patterns and significance to arise, and patterns can only be traced through the establishment of differences among the components of the system and the elimination of that which is “superfluous.” A hypertext system, then, is paradigmatic; not all of the parts are necessary to the system, and the aesthetic whole can be sustained even through the destruction of a singular part (a node, perhaps) because the pattern rests with the code of production. Within a syntagmatic system, on the other hand, there are internally coherent but not necessarily linked patterns, and the removal of a singular part would affect the overall aesthetic pattern because the organic totality of the work would be entirely disrupted.36 Hypertext does not adhere to a fixed, rule-based system; rather, it takes on the quality of disturbed, deferred, bifurcated movement. In that its performance is that of the trace, emphasizing not only the play of difference, but also open systems, feedback loops, a flattened network, links, and the interval between links, its dynamic is more différance than difference.
A text is a text only if it hides the law of its composition and the rule of its game from the first glance, from the newcomer. In any case a text remains an imperceptible text. The law and the rule do not dwell in the inaccessibility of a secret, put simply, they do not deliver themselves up to the present or to anything that could rigorously be called a perception.
–Jacques Derrida, Plato’s Pharmacy
In the “Conclusion” to his book, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, Espen Aarseth introduces the tension between the metamorphic (a text in which there is no final revelation or state of knowing) and the anamorphic (a text that presents an optical illusion as a vital hidden principle waiting to be discovered by a user that influences and produces the outcome, such as Jasper Johns’s Flags, William Scrots’s Edward VI, 3D pictures, and some ASCII art). Complex in its internal variations, Aarseth’s typology of cybertext includes interactive fiction, synchronous and asynchronous chat settings, and print hypertexts such as the I Ching, all of which are distinguished by the work the reader must perform in order to “traverse” the text. Because the anamorphic forces the reader to perform the qualitative work of orienting the text, it occupies the space of hypertext. Within the anamorphic text, there are hidden codes: its structures of signification and perception are concealed and a certain perspective is required in order to make its form and content visible. The anamorphic is a visual trick of perspective, and its regimes of perception and imperception are optical. The mode has been an important one for much hypertext fiction and criticism because of its emphasis on visual perception, labor, reader-construction, and the production of the text. But the anamorphic does not really belong to the order of the code; it belongs to a slightly different episteme than that of the fractal, for example, which is essentially a digitized code, a code of information made visible.37
The anamorphic, on the other hand, is a physical instantiation of what is done in the act of reading, searching for “the one right combination,” the singular figure in the carpet, bringing it into focus, reducing complexity into perceptible patterns.38 Reading, animating, and righting the perspective of an anamorphic text, bringing it into being–and this is not bound to a particular medium–involves not only going, doing, choosing (or “narrative drifting” as Mark Amerika puts it), but also searching and finding, structures of reading and navigation that replicate the structures of gaming.39 Like Borges’s novel-labyrinth The Garden of Forking Paths in the story of the same name–an important point of reference for Stuart Moulthrop and many first-generation hypertext authors and critics–all possible outcomes are imagined to be coded into the hypertext and traced by readers who can discern the structural logic of the system. This is the model of Borges’s book, one of endless possibility, in which anything that can happen, does, and each possible plot outcome is pursued and multiplied into a seeming infinitude. Like knowing to go to the left in certain labyrinths, the key to reading the anamorphic text is meticulously to decode the system, to discern patterns and fault lines, and to attempt to bring the picture into focus.
To read and to see is to attempt to impose a certain performance on the system; it is to engage with the system such that it performs and produces a coherent and legible output. In this sense, and in that it contains at least two mutually exclusive pictures and perspectival positions within its frame (e.g., Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors <http://www.artchive.com/artchive/H/holbein/ambassadors.jpg.html> contains a “correct” picture of the ambassadors or of the skull, but not both simultaneously), the anamorphic has a strong connection to Eduardo Kac’s holopoetry. Kac identifies the primary formal quality of his holopoetry as “textual instability,” “the condition according to which a text does not preserve a single visual structure in time as it is read by the viewer, producing different and transitory verbal configurations in response to the beholder’s perceptual exploration” (“Holopoetry” 193).40 Such visual and verbal instability, whereby “the linguistic ordering factor of surfaces is disregarded in favor of an irregular fluctuation of signs that can never be grasped at once by the reader,” is achieved through what Kac terms the “fluid sign,” which resembles the anamorphic in the description of its operation: “[A] fluid sign is perceptually relative…. [it is] essentially a verbal sign that changes its overall visual configuration in time, therefore escaping the constancy of meaning a printed sign would have” (193-4). The perceptual change for Kac, however, is one achieved through time rather than dimension. Holopoetry strives for temporal mutability, so it is not a true anamorphic, but Kac’s theorizing of fluidity and the impossibility of a stable perceptual position does speak to the hypertextual process of construction, making, and interactive performance. With its dense textual and iconic layers and its abstraction of geometric, mathematic, lexical, and iconic arrangement, Talan Memmot’s Lexia to Perplexia similarly invites such a performance. Lexia to Perplexia presents the reader-user with difficulty, entanglement, abstraction, confusion, unreadability, even obfuscation. Rather than moving into clarity and visual focus with each link, the text assemblage gains a greater opacity and density and moves from signal to noise. To achieve this effect, it utilizes punctuation that intrudes upon the word (“Exe.Termination”), embedded commands and command structures (“PER[(p)[L(EX)]]ia”), and a creolized, mechanized language characterized by syntactical and semantic errors. In that it moves from encryption to an even greater encryption, the central trope of the text assemblage is interference, the mechanism by which chaos is produced and the text paradoxically emerges. In this sense, the text partly thematizes decomposition, incompleteness, the gap, a mode of perception not yet achieved, the mechanical and operational failures of code, and digital texts that do not “work.”
| Talan Memmott, Lexia to Perplexia |
My central anamorphic text, Johns’s Flags, itself fails within a digital environment. That is, the effects of Flags are not translatable to the screen, a setting where it does not work and cannot be brought correctly into focus.41 This failure, though, is less illustrative of mechanical or material failure than it is of conceptual difference. When Johns’s painting is projected in a digital environment, in other words, it produces a historical difference between the analog and the digital, a trajectory from the painterly to the hypertextual. Johns’s anamorphic image extends beyond and above the physical limits of the painting and produces an illusory effect of depth and dimension. Depth in this instance is a trick of perception. That is, Johns’s is already in some sense a flattened or postmodern anamorphosis, not the depth and dimensional model of the early modern anamorphic of Holbein, but a surface model that does not play with volume: not anamorphic, but an-anamorphic.
An-anamorphosis–the digitized version of anamorphosis–paradoxically references the anamorphic but flattens out its volume.42 It simultaneously succeeds and collapses, and it contains within its collapse the trace, remainder, ghost image, negation, and evacuation of the anamorphic. Anamorphosis is a matter of correcting or adjusting one’s spectatorial position so as to locate a correct perspective. An-anamorphosis, on the other hand, presents us with a spectral image of collapsed depth–a smooth, flat, discrete surface rather than a modernist shattered surface that betrays an underlying depth.43 The hidden code suggests a depth model but it remains a projection and illusion of depth. An-anamorphosis illuminates the operative codes of the new media in that it, like hypertext, does not, and indeed cannot, articulate a border or attain a perfect realization. Neither an-anamorphosis nor hypertext can be full or finished but are instead incomplete–an axiomatic principle for computers that alludes also to the condition of digital textuality. This claim does not suggest that one cannot make sense of a hypertext, but that hypertext makes the blocking of knowledge manifest in its embedding of a range of unknowable forms, blind passages, and visual aporias within the code, from the cracked screens of Moulthrop’s Victory Garden, the blank screens of Jane Yellowlees Douglas’s I have said nothing, the dead ends of Matthew Miller’s Trip, through the undecipherable linguistic and iconic layers of Memmott’s Lexia to Perplexia. The anamorphic, the figure in the carpet, the “law of its composition and the rule of its game,” is offered and then withdrawn. The anamorphic does not just fail; it is withheld and sabotaged.
Linkages are very, very quick, you know.
–Jean-François Lyotard, “Links, The Unconscious, and the Sublime”
Links and linkages suggest connections, signification, conversation, intertextuality, and even context, insofar as context, as Lyotard notes, “is the result of a series of linkages” (111). They range from ostentatious to demure, frenetic to sedate, unenclosed to hidden, anchored to ambient, animate to inanimate, associative to disassociative, random to ordered, and syntactic to paratactic. They leave behind the traces of their presence, their performance, recorded in history trackers (also a formal feature of Eastgate) and emblematized by the after-effects glow of fading pixels. In a felicitous link, meaning is constructed so that the next link might be submitted or followed, but links can be coded both to open up and to simulate the end of the play of signification.44 As part of an early attempt to theorize the function, linguistic meaning, and philosophical import of the link, Stuart Moulthrop asks: “In what sense is a dynamically computed, implicit link analogous to turning a page?” (“Beyond Node/Link”). The answer is that it is analogous only up to a point, insofar as the page has historically been the organizational paradigm of codex. So, too, is the link the primary quality, device, mechanism, formal feature of hypertext, even as it operates in different modes: contextual (emergence or disappearance dependent on the state of the user or the system); “discovered structures”; “computational nodes”; and “virtual hypermedia.”
Eastgate’s “guard fields,” for example, allow the writer to create dynamic and conditional links, which are somewhat interactive in that they guide the reader and are dependent on prior user choices.45 They allow the writer to assign priorities to the various links and thereby define and force paths and control the reader’s access to the text. Because they preserve the architecture and structure of the text (with narrative as a specific consequential effect), guard fields often produce a sense of gaming, such that navigating becomes akin to finding hidden objects and surmounting obstacles so that a higher level might be reached.46 Within more complex coding systems, however, the link opens up the potentiality of hypertext: it is one means by which it can be truly innovative and sever the ties both to the form of the page and the historical category of print literature. While many hyperfiction and hypermedia artists want to move beyond the node-link model, especially in light of the expansion of coding systems beyond the relative simplicity of HTML, Marjorie Luesebrink argues that “it is precisely the link (and the varieties thereof) that provides the most fertile ground for literary expression… the hypertext link enables the spatial and temporal aspects of multilinear electronic texts to function as an erasure of hierarchies…. Links have just begun to provide us with a vocabulary of new literary gesture and movement”.47 According to Luesebrink, the link traverses space and time and has its own syntax, which we are still in the process of creating and revealing. I also want to retain the node-link model within critical view because the link is both the mechanism for the performance of hypertext’s difference and the means by which that difference is recognized.
Form and content achieve a near-perfect suture in the first selection in the Eastgate Web Workshop: Judy Malloy’s lOve One, a first-generation hypertext composed in the generic form of a diary, with linked entries that enforce both non-sequentiality and the illusion of sequentiality. Its genre, that is, allows for a kind of retroactivity whereby a doer may be placed behind the deed, and causal triggering mechanisms established. But its most compelling and emblematic structural and thematic feature is its links: Malloy uses images of cathode-ray tubes that refer literally to the text displayed on the screen. Akin to reversing a garment’s seams, the cathode-ray tubes are a visible manifestation of the technological substrate of the text.48 Cathode-ray tubes, in fact, literally convert the electronic to the visual in that they are animated by electrons that are first pulled in all directions in order to produce a concentrative beam that leaves behind a trace of its presence by marking the spot at which the electrons hit the screen. In this structural aspect, lOve One is in line with other hypertexts’ foregrounding of the mechanism of their own performance, with code, directories, speed, waiting, trips, archives, paths, and bifurcations figuring as thematic and graphic elements. “Waiting will not be permitted to bring the nuanced possibilities of in-between,” announces Water always writes in plural, thereby thematizing the link, and its own interlinked, interconnected, even inter-networked, parts and the necessity of both piecing together and reading the space between those parts in order to move forward. Such a textual suturing must necessarily involve textual haunting, a reappearance of the paths taken and not taken: “my parts will remember me,” promises Patchwork Girl, not just about its re-created Frankensteinian monster, but also about itself.
Terry Harpold comments upon the theme of navigational paths in his extended discussions of links and endings. A “hypertextual detour,” he suggests, might be articulated as
a turn around a place you never get to, where something drops away between the multiple paths you might follow…. Doing something with the hypertext link substitutes narrative closure for the dilatory space of the gap between the threads. It disavows the narrative turn, and fetishizes the link. I want to stress this point, because it seems to me that the instrumental function of the link exactly matches the psychoanalytic definition of the fetish object…. For the pervert, the missing phallus is still there: no lack, no gap, no cut. To read the link as purely a directional or associative structure is, I would argue, to miss–to disavow–the divisions between the threads in a hypertext. “Missing” the divisions is how the intentionality of hypertext navigation is realized: the directedness of the movement across the link constitutes a kind of defense against the spiraling turn that the link obscures. (“Threnody” 172-3, 81)49
Harpold’s psychoanalysis of electronic textuality draws a parallel between the pervert and the inefficient or even weak reader of hypertext: if the neurotic overrides or denies the effects of castration trauma by finding an object to fill in the lack, such a reader would perform as the pervert if she were to override, deny, or miss the gap in the link and try instead to substitute linear narrative. So Harpold suggests that we have to acknowledge that the ineradicable gap (“missingness”) forces us into a different narrative strategy, and if we deny that difference and supply the narrative turn, then we use the link-as-fetish to fill in the lack.
Extracted from his article, “The Contingencies of the Hypertext Link,” “doing something” might be translated for the purposes of my thesis so that it becomes part of the context for performance, for my claim that links somehow always present us with the failure of realization signified by the older 404 messages. Linking, then, is both complex and a performance of complexity. Along with Harpold, Luesebrink argues that the link “represents a rupture in the ontological world.” Finally, prefacing his own analysis of “breakdowns,” Moulthrop glosses Harpold on the “deeply problematic nature of links” and the inevitability of their failure (“Pushing Back” 664). Despite his interest in the failure, brokenness, and incompleteness of the system, however, Moulthrop does allow for an ultimate and singular realization of the link, in that he will say that it does arrive, even if it fails to arrive at its intended or predicted destination: “only one possibility is realized, and likely as not it will not be what the reader anticipated” (“Pushing Back” 665). This moment of possibility, while conceived in breakdown, is simultaneously the spectacular moment of the birth of digital text, “the point of impact” (“Traveling”).50 The crash, then, is a productive one: out of the ashes of the wreck, “new order” may emerge (“Traveling”).
Links, and the phrases, nodes, words, icons, and images that are linked, realize their meaning in relation to each other. Thus there is no inherent, originary, final, totalizing meaning behind their ordering–meaning only comes once they are assembled. Meaning, in fact, is a reverberation of the effects of linking. This illustrates the trace performance of hypertext once again. The patterns and the system become not only complicated, but complex–that in which one not only gets lost, but also vertiginously loses stable and totalizing perception. The patterns they form are thus those of reiteration, recurrence, and frequency, on the one hand, and dissolution, disintegration, termination, on the other. During the time lag that occurs before a link is actualized, that interval or period of waiting while a page loads from the top or fills in an outline, it is usually possible to make out the text that is emerging, and yet one might get it wrong. In the moments of waiting, as one waits for speech to emerge through a stammer and wants to speak for, to fill the gap and complete the utterance, there is an implicit invitation for the link to be written for, to be written through, to be reloaded, to be completed. The condition of the link is such that it is not occasionally broken–it is always broken and almost anti-presence, high-speed network connections notwithstanding. Links, in other words, are not stable, set systems that can entirely emerge from themselves. It makes intuitive sense, then, that hypertext should contain gaps and ellipses apart from the link, even that ellipses themselves should function as links, and that it should never come to rest with a period, a note of finality, or a demarcation of the end.51 Hypertext does not, and indeed cannot, articulate a border or attain a perfect realization. It is never full or finished. It is in fact incomplete.52
Without a complete systems crash, hypertext by its very nature cannot come to rest partly because kinetic modality, or movement, with its emphasis on dynamism, process, fluidity, metamorphosis, transformation, is one of its defining formal properties. André Vallias, for example, writes of “continuous mutation” as the distinctive quality of digital media, derived from the progressivist movements of R&D and the haunting specter of an inevitable future obsolescence. However, Vallias’s commentary on the “permanent process of making and remaking, of endless ‘work in progress,’” of “instability” and “vertigo” is even more apropos with respect to my commentary on performance as the operative difference of hypertext (152).53 That is, what the <entropy8zuper.org> designers call “the physical need for wonder and poetry” is not fixable or locatable in, but required and produced by, and in movement with, the digital object, particularly with the movement and motion facilitated by new media technologies and specific software programs like Flash 54. Again, the hypertext system itself performs, but the human operator is another component of its performance. To return to my central visual examples: looking at a painting by Jackson Pollock is not absolutely different from looking at Jasper Johns’s Flags, but Johns forces the viewer into a certain performance, into the fluctuation of the trace that his painting performs. One of Jasper Johns’s flags must necessarily recede in order for the other to emerge, but the realization of the work can never be a perfect one, and in this respect it illustrates the way that hypertext code functions because hypertext itself cannot achieve a complete or finished realization. As a complex system, hypertext is internally inconsistent, and it gives a new resonance to Peter Lunenfeld’s claim that electronic textuality is in a state of “unfinish” and Michael Joyce’s claim that “electronic text can never be completed” (qtd. in Moulthrop, “Traveling”). In such a system, systematization itself is impossible.
1. This piece could not have emerged without the maieutic aid of Russell Samolsky, who withstood and responded to more questions than I could possibly enumerate. Karen Steigman helped me to find valuable material, online and in print. Jennifer Jones and Timothy Wager read and commented on an earlier version, entitled, “How to Make Things With Words: Hypertext and Literary Value,” which was delivered as a talk for the Transcriptions Colloquia in the English department at the University of California, Santa Barbara (<http://transcriptions.english.ucsb.edu/>) in May 2000. I am grateful to Alan Liu and Bill Warner for the invitation and the necessary inspiration. Students in my Electronic Literature & Culture (undergraduate; Spring 2000) and Hypertext Fiction & Theory (graduate; Winter 1999) classes at the University of Minnesota made a willing, enthusiastic, and provocative audience for parts of the thesis. Another section of the article was presented at the ACLA 2001, and I am grateful to Espen Aarseth and Mark Hansen for posing questions that re-oriented my thinking. Finally, Katherine Hayles’s critical suggestions have been instrumental, and her latest NEH seminar, “Literature in Transition,” provided the perfect environment to complete the revisions.
2. See Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” Atlantic Monthly (Jul. 1945); Ted Nelson, Literary Machines.
3. Mark Poster, “What’s the Matter with the Internet,” UC Davis lecture, April 1998, published as the chapter “Authors Analogue and Digital” in his recent book, What’s the Matter with the Internet? Poster’s delineation of the digital text in this book echoes his earlier analysis of the “mode of information” in the book named as such, wherein he makes the following related claims: “Electronic communications are new language experiences in part by virtue of electrification. But how are they different from ordinary speech and writing? And what is the significance of this difference?” (Mode 1); “I do assert the emergence of a certain ‘new’” (19); “After this point the natural, material limits of spoken and written language no longer hold” (74); “Digital encoding makes no attempt to represent or imitate and this is how it differs from analog encoding” (94), a claim that is a precursor to the discussion of waves and grooves in the Matter book; and, finally, “Electronic language, on the contrary, does not lend itself to being so framed. It is everywhere and nowhere, always and never. It is truly material/immaterial” (85).
4. In spite of, and at times because of, the burgeoning academic fields devoted to computer-mediated communication, cyberculture, internet studies, and the digital humanities, there is still a commonly held assumption that digital literacy is incompatible with traditional literacy practices, and even that digital culture has trained students out of the market for print-bound literary texts in particular. In this sense, a facility for reading computer screens is imagined as both unrelated and opposed to knowing how to read a poem or novel.
5. By contrast, Paul Levinson claims in general terms that the phonetic alphabet was the “first digital medium” in that the bits, the letters, correspond to sound and not things (Soft Edge 11-20).
6. Michael Joyce suggests that digital textuality ultimately resists such entrapment: “Electronic text–the topographic, truly digital writing–even now resists attempts to wrestle it back into analogue or modify its shape into the shape of print. Its resistance is its malleability” (Two Minds 237).
7. Poster’s argument in “Authors Analogue and Digital” (What’s the Matter with the Internet?)–that the digital is not just supplementing but replacing the analog–differs from Landow’s in that he is not using Foucault to talk about obliterating the line between the reader and author; rather, he wants to uphold a set of distinctions between modes of authorship, though it is implicitly the case that his sense of digital authorship would lead to a reconfiguration of the role of the reader. Bringing together the technical conditions of authorship with the theoretical question of authorship (although Espen Aaresth would have problems with this linking) lends itself to a rethinking of the figure of the reader and it also implies a dichotomous or even substitutive relationship between reader and author.
8. Jurgen Fauth takes issue with the tendency of hypertext to be endlessly self-reflexive (which often is, as Bolter notes of Afternoon, “an allegory of the act of reading” [qtd. in Fauth]). For another articulation of the pitfalls of hypertext’s pervasive self-referentiality of hypertext, see Robert Kendall, “But I Know What I Like,” SIGWEB Newsletter 8.2 (Jun. 1999); also posted at <http://www.wordcircuits.com/comment/htlit_5.htm>.
9. Such a meta-critical and self-reflexive mode is acknowledged within much hypertext criticism, as when Michael Joyce notes that “most hypertext fictions include these self-reflexive passages” (“Nonce” 591). Also see Greg Ulmer’s “Grammatology Hypermedia” on “reflexive structuration, by means of which a text shows what it is telling, does what it says, displays its own making, reflects its own action” (par. 7).
10. For the same claim (“multiple reading paths; some kind of linking mechanism; and chunked text”), also see Hayles’s “Print is Flat” 5.
11. Hayles articulates an 8-point typology of hypertexts in digital form as follows: “Electronic Hypertexts are Dynamic Images; Electronic Hypertexts Include Both Analogue Resemblance and Digital Coding; Electronic Hypertexts Are Generated Through Fragmentation and Recombination; Electronic Hypertexts Have Depth and Operate in Three Dimensions; Electronic Hypertexts Are Mutable and Transformable; Electronic Hypertexts Are Spaces to Navigate; Electronic Hypertexts Are Written and Read in Distributed Cognitive Environments; Electronic Hypertexts Initiate and Demand Cyborg Reading Practices” (“Print” 7-8).
12. As will become clear throughout the article, this claim is not structured so as to disavow Espen Aarseth’s typology of cybertext as much as it is to offer the beginnings of a parallel and alternative typology.
13. In a different use of the performance paradigm, game-designer Brenda Laurel has employed theatrical metaphors in order to understand human-computer interaction and suggested that the ideal interface should correspond with the theatre. For Laurel, Aristotle’s Poetics is the best functional metaphor for computer art, and a program needs to be thought of as a performance for the user, one that masks the technical component of production and its artificiality. The power of the theatrical metaphor for the interface is that the theatre is “fuzzy” and thereby necessarily involves repetition with variation and difference (23).
14. Timothy Allen Jackson also comments on the new media aesthetic in terms of process and the dynamic quality of the system: “Such an aesthetic is projective rather than reflective, complex and dynamic rather than simple and static, often focusing on process more than product, and resembling a verb more than a noun” (348).
15. For example, the theme of performance in relation to the reader could be linked to literary theories of reading proposed by Ingarden (“encounter”), Bakhtin (“dialogue”), Jauss (“convergence”), and Iser (“interaction”).
16. In a different forum, Rosenberg argues against Nick Montfort’s review of Aarseth’s Cybertext and subsequent alignment of hypertext with Chomsky’s hierarchy of grammars (finite automata) by noting that one “simply cannot conclude that hypertext ‘is’ a finite state machine,” whether or not it maintains a strict node-link model (“Positioning”). Montfort gives a primacy to the computational power of cybertext machines, which he distinguishes on the basis of their ability to calculate.
17. On temporality and the digital aesthetic, see Marlena Corcoran, “Digital Transformations of Time: The Aesthetics of the Internet,” Leonardo 29.5 (1995): 375-378. On anti- or non-object art, see John Perreault, “Introduction,” TriQuarterly 32 (Winter 1975): 1-5; and Tommaso Trini, “Intervista con Ian Wilson/Ian Wilson, An Interview” Data 1.1 (Sep. 1971): 32-4. Conceptual art also separates out product–“art”–from material substance. For critical commentary on conceptual or dematerialized art, see Alexander Alberro and Patricia Norvell, eds., Recording Conceptual Art (Berkeley: U of California P, 2001); Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, eds., Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999); Lucy Lippard, Six Years (Berkeley: U of California P, 1973); Tony Godfrey, Conceptual Art (London: Phaidon, 1998).
18. Also see Holland, Hidden Order:How Adaptation Builds Complexity (Cambridge: Perseus Books, 1995). On complexity, see Paul Cilliers; Brian H. Kaye, Chaos and Complexity (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1993); Roger Lewin, Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos (New York: Macmillan, 1992); and M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science At the Edge of Order and Chaos (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992). The analysis of complex systems is sustained even through management theory: “the whole shows behaviours which cannot be gleaned by examining the parts alone. The interactions between the parts are crucial, and produce phenomena such as self-organization and adaptation” (McKergow 721-22). Mark C. Taylor’s forthcoming book, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002) speaks to my concern with emergence as a component and effect of the hypertextual system, but it arrived too late to be incorporated within this article.
19. My discussion of patterns vis-à-vis hypertext refers in a general sense to systems theory, a topic that has been explored by theorists of science and literature such as Hayles, Cilliers, William Paulson, and John Johnston. On systems theory, see What is Systems Theory?, <http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/SYSTHEOR.html>; Cybernetics, Systems Theory and Complexity, <http://www.cudenver.edu/~mryder/itc_data/complexity.html>; A Curriculum for Cybernetics and Systems Theory, <http://www.well.com/user/abs/curriculum.html>; and John Gowan’s General Systems HomePage, <http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/jag8/>. On chaotic systems and chaos, see James Gleick, Chaos and Chaotic Systems, <http://dept.physics.upenn.edu/courses/gladney/mathphys/
subsection3_2_5.html>. Pamela Jennings touches on intedeterminacy, chaos theory, fuzzy logic, and open structures in relation to new media in “Narrative Structures for New Media: Towards a New Definition,” Leonardo 29.5 (1996): 345-50.
20. Also see <http://www.genetic-programming.org>, as well as Genetic Programming, Inc. <http://www.genetic-programming.com>.
21. Jasper Johns, Flags is online at <http://www.walkerart.org/resources/res_pc_johns2.html>. For historical and technical analyses of the device of the anamorphic, see Jurgis Baltrusaitis, Anamorphic Art, trans. W. J. Strachan (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1977) and Fred Leeman, Hidden Images: Games of Perception, Anamorphic Art, Illusion (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1976).
22. In the catalog for Jack Burnham’s “Software” art exhibition at the Jewish Museum (1970), Ted Nelson also conceives of hypertext from its conceptual genesis as “writing that can branch or perform.” See “The Crafting of Media,” <http://www.sfc.keio.ac.jp/~ted/TN/PUBS/CraftMedia.html>.
23. The phrase “combinatory literature” can be traced to François Le Lionnais’s afterword to Raymond Queneau’s Cent Mille Milliards de poèmes (Paris: Gallimard, 1961). It is later developed by Umberto Eco with respect to narrative forms, and by Oulipians such as Harry Mathews.
24. The mathematical formulas of the Oulipo movement have been an influential genealogical and stylistic precursor for hypertext, particularly since some Oulipians were themselves inspired by programming and had already begun the work of using computers as an tool in literary production, and early hypertext work frequently cited and even programmed their work so as further to “animate” and apply their algorithms, e.g., Permutationen <http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/permutations/index.cgi>. The work of the French literary group, Oulipo, of which Queneau and Calvino were members, based its poetics on permutational possibility and procedure. In that both tend on occasion to work with elemental units–the Reader (addressed) and reader (actual) for Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, for example, or lipograms, or the famous bricks of Carl Andre–Oulipo could be profitably linked to the so-termed Minimalist artists that came to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly Andre, Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, and Robert Morris. Also see Stéphane Susana, “A Roundup of Constrained Writing on the Web,” ebr 10 (Winter 1999/2000) <http://www.altx.com/ebr/ebr10/10sus.htm>. For an English-language collection of their work, see Warren Motte, ed., Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature (Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 1986). On Calvino and the combinatorial, see Jerry A. Varsava, “Calvino’s Combinative Aesthetics: Theory and Practice,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 6.2 (Summer 1986): 11-18.
25. In the larger project, I pursue the topic of computer and computer-generated poetry at greater length. After Rosenberg, see Philippe Bootz, “Poetic Machinations,” Visible Language 30.2 (1996): 118-37; and Charles Hartman’s memoir, Virtual Muse: Experiments in Computer Poetry (Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 1996), with a downloadable Mac platform program at <http://camel2.conncoll.edu/academics/departments/
english/cohar/programs/> With respect to the analogy between poetry and technology, Carrie Noland, in her genealogy from the nineteenth-century avant-garde French lyric poets to U.S. performance poetries (particularly those of Laurie Anderson and Patti Smith), wonders whether the “technopoems of the future” will embrace technology to the extent that they risk “losing the integrity of poetry as a language-based and voice-generated genre” (216, 15). Also see Rosenberg on Balpe generator poetry and the French poésie animée school (Jean-Pierre Balpe, Trois mythologies et un poète aveugle, an installation featuring poem-generating and music-generating robots [Centre Georges-Pompidou 1997]).
26. Koskimaa also comments upon the intimate relation between reading and gaming: “the aspect of mastering a computer environment is an essential part of the hyperfiction reading experience, an aspect common with playing computer games.”
27. In reference to the collaborative “International Internet Chain Art Project,” Gaggi makes a related point concerning unpredictability, although his argumentative focus is the radically reconfigured notion of authorship that results from the critical and practical challenge of the ideas of individuality, autonomy, and genius: “Each participant alters, adds to, or comments on whatever he or she receives. Under such circumstances, surprise–as well as disappointment–is always possible. Although contributions are matters of conscious decisions individuals make–except when technical problems result in ‘corruption’–those who create an image or text cannot predict or control what will happen to it” (139).
28. For a discussion of the principle of “psychic automatism,” Breton and Philippe Soupault’s Les Champs magnétiques (1919), and Breton’s Manifeste (1924), see Elza Adamowiccz, Surrealist collage in text and image: Dissecting the exquisite corpse (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998) 5-10. It was not just Surrealism but Fluxism as well that maintained an interest in automatic writing. Jackson Pollock’s painting would be another instance of the scriptor at work.
29. As Russell Samolsky notes, the felicity or “efficacy of any performative is always, in some sense, the death of the author,” a notion whose literal effects he demonstrates in the example of Kafka’s relationship to the Holocaust (191).
30. On the liberatory argument, see, as just one of many examples, Gaggi 103-5.
31. Also, Noah Wardrip-Fruin links new media particularly to Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (371). Seaman’s Red Dice was exhibited at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (3-26 Mar. 2000) as part of the Telstra Adelaide Festival 2000. See <http://www.camtech.net.au/cacsa/program/2000.html>.
32. Lacan treats “geometral” or “flat” perspective and the commingling of art and science in his reading of anamorphosis and the gaze; see The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XI, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977).
33. In the Montreal electronic art magazine, CIAC, Sylvie Parent provides another typology for electronic literature based on the variant processing of text by the computer: collaborative texts, text’s new space, text generating programs, language atomization, and moving text. See <http://www.ciac.ca/magazine/archives/no_9/en/pers-intro.html>.
34. On connectionism, see Cilliers, especially 25-47.
35. Ted Nelson, Literary Machines 93.1 (1993 preface, unnumbered page 5).
36. See Peter Bürger’s schema for the organic and the non-organic artwork in Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984): 80.
37. In a way this is a modern vs. postmodern distinction, but one does not have to choose one over the other.
38. See Henry James, “The Figure in the Carpet” 381; and see also the passage that introduces the figure itself: “the thing we were all so blank about was vividly there. It was something like a complex figure in a Persian carpet” (372).
39. With hypertext, “readership has been restored but not transcended” (Aarseth 94).
40. Also see Kac, “Key Concepts of Holopoetry,” ebr 5 (Spring 1997) <http://www.altx.com/ebr/ebr5/kac.htm> and his website, with examples of his work, at <http://www.ekac.org/>.
41. I am grateful to Richard Helgerson for asking a variation of the question that produced this line of argument: does it matter that the Jasper Johns is a modern text not meant for the screen?
42. My nomenclature here might appear to connect to the bilingual, Flash-intensive “electronic and interactive journal that examines the human condition in the digital age”–Chair et Métal / Metal and Flesh: The Digital Anamorphosis of the Universe <http://www.artsci.lsu.edu/fai/metal.html>–but the journal’s subtitle does not have an immediately obvious significance. Rather, the concept of the an-anamorphic arose in a conversation with Russell Samolsky; from this collaborative moment, the concept and Jasper Johns as an illustrative example came into being.
43. Martin Jay comments on anamorphic vision, which “helps us understand the complexities of a visual register which is not planimetric but which has all these complicated scenes that are not reducible to any one coherent space” (qtd. in Foster 84). Planimetry deals with the measurement of surfaces, so complexity of vision here has to do with volume. The postmodern anamorphic or an-anamorphic, however, puts us back in the register or space of the planimetric.
44. For a discussion of linking in a hypertext environment, see George P. Landow, Hypertext 2.0 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997) 11-20; Harpold, “Threnody” and “The Contingencies of the Hypertext Link”; and “Conclusions,” Hyper/Text/Theory, ed. George Landow (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994): 189-222. Also, the hypertext author Jeff Parker is currently at work on a formal analysis of the “poetics of the link.”
45. See Mark Bernstein on “volatile” hypertext, “Architectures for Volatile Hypertext,” Hypertext ’91 Proceedings (Baltimore: ACM, 1991): 243-60; robin, “Hypertext for Writers: A Review of Software,” EJournal 3.3 (Nov. 1993): <http://www.hanover.edu/philos/ejournal/archive/ej-3-3.txt>; the entry for “conditional links” in the alt.hypertext FAQ; Bolter on guard fields in Writing Space; J. Yellowlees Douglas on the seemingly contradictory harmony between varied and multiple links and reader expections in “Wandering Through the Labyrinth: Encountering Interactive Fiction,” Computers and Composition 6.3 (Aug. 1989): 93-101; Robert Coover on the differences among links in FEED <http://www.feedmag.com/html/document/98.02nelson/coover1.html>; and Robert Kendall, “Hypertextual Dynamics in A Life Set for Two,” Proceedings of the Seventh ACM Conference on Hypertext, <http://www.wordcircuits.com/kendall/essays/ht96.htm>. It is precisely guard fields that lead Raine Koskimaa to argue that the bricoleur metaphor so present within hypertext criticism is illegitimate vis-à-vis the Eastgate texts, primarily because the texts withhold information about their own structures. Without clear maps, Koskimaa suggests, we cannot properly speak of bricolage (VII). Finally, it is important to note that Storyspace, Flash, related authoring platforms, and HTML itself all to some degree limit the behavior of the hypertext system, but this is not to say that the system is either deterministic, with standardized and predictable behavior, or incapable of autonomous behavior.
46. With software-produced and -mediated hypertexts, a variety of links and a kind of structure are possible, while with net-based hypertexts, there is presumably a lesser degree of structure, and links need not proceed from window to window, or lexia to lexia. See the description of the Storyspace software in the alt-hypertext FAQ. For a comprehensive student project on guard fields, see Loran Gutt, “Hypertext,” <http://www.princeton.edu/~lzgutt/hypertext/paper3/node2.html>.
47. See, for example, Stuart Moulthrop, “Beyond Node/Link,” a node in The Shadow of an Informand: An Experiment in Hypertext Rhetoric; John Cayley’s “Beyond Codexspace: Potentialities of Literary Cybertext” and Jim Rosenberg’s “Structure of Hypertext Activity.” Calls to augment and restructure the node-link paradigm were made by Frank Halacz in his keynote addresses at the Hypertext ’89 and Hypertext ’91 conferences <http://www.parc.xerox.com/spl/projects/halasz-keynote/review/>. Also see Steven J. DeRose, “Expanding the Notion of Links,” Hypertext ’89 Proceedings, ed. Norman Meyrowitz (New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 1989) 249-59; and H. Van Dyke Parunak, “Don’t Link Me In: Set Based Hypermedia for Taxonomic Reasoning,” Proceedings of Hypertext ’91 (New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 1991) 233-42.
48. Also see Ted Nelson on the cathode-ray tube (Dream Machines 84-5).
49. Also see Adrianne Wortzel on the openness and dynamism of links, which she theorizes as the spaces that “allow chance, desire, and drive to drift unbound” (362).
50. David Miall briefly argues that Moulthrop’s claims for the difference of hypertext, notably the qualities of multiplicity and breakdown, are not tenable as such and that the particularities Moultrop ascribes to hypertextuality “replicate something we have always known about the form of literary texts.”
51. J. Yellowlees Douglas remarks briefly hypertext’s presentation of “discrete pieces of information and ellipses” in “Wandering Through the Labyrinth: Encountering Interactive Fiction,” Computers and Composition 6.3 (Aug. 1989): 93-101, <http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~ccjrnl/Archives/v6/6_3_html/
6_3_6_Douglas.html>.
52. The allusion to Gödel’s theorem with respect to hypertextual incompleteness is just that, an allusion, rather than an application.
53. There is a conjunction between the two in that Vallias belongs to one branch of artistic production that has moved toward movement as both concept and integrative device, a “movement” to create what E. M. de Melo e Castro terms “videopoetry,” which has been flourishing in Brazilian and Portuguese experimental poetry circles and shares the formal interests of the various North American experimental poets who work with software applications such as Flash to create poems experienced spatially, temporally, visually, aurally, and linguistically. See, for example, Thom Swiss, “Genius” <http://www.differenceofone.com/genius/genius.html> Similarly, Ladislao Pablo Györi’s brief manifesto on “Virtual Poetry” calls for the production of poems “experienced by means of partially or fully immersive interface devices” (Visible Language 30.2 [1996]). The manifesto and examples of his work can be found at <http://megahertz.njit.edu/~cfunk/gyori.html>.
54. Now authoring-design software applications such as Flash and QuickTime have taken design to the point whereby the text objects may be watched as film and media installations, e.g., the digital poems and works from Born Magazine <http://www.bornmag.com/> and the curated site Poems That Go <http://www.poemsthatgo.com/>, both of which rely almost exclusively on Flash.
Ashley Dawson
English Department
College of Staten Island–CUNY
University of Iowa
ashley-dawson@uiowa.edu
This past July, the Tampa, Florida Police Department introduced a computerized surveillance system to augment its efforts to monitor the streets of a downtown business and entertainment district for potential miscreants.1 The system, built by Visionics Corporation of New Jersey and offered free to municipalities for a year, consists of a network of security cameras placed in prominent public areas and equipped with a face-recognition software package known as FaceIT. Each facial image scanned by the closed circuit cameras in the system is broken down by FaceIT into a grid of 80 “nodes” or reference points, providing such data as the distance between the eyes, the nostrils, or the cheekbones. If the system comes up with an 85% match against an image in its database–which includes some 30,000 faces–it signals this match to system operators. The operators, members of the police department who are housed in a monitor-lined bunker somewhere in the downtown area, then make their own judgment about the indicated match, and, if they concur with the computer, they radio a uniformed officer to investigate and potentially make an arrest. The system has been in operation since 1998 in the Borough of Newham in London’s East End, which claims that crime has been significantly reduced as a result of its deployment. The economic savings promised by the Visionics Corporation add further to the appeal of the system. But FaceIT has also met with significant objections. Most immediately, the reduction in beat policing and the redeployment of the remaining officers to security bunkers militates against the forms of engaged and responsive community policing that have proven effective deterrents to crime in cities such as New York since the early 1990s. Still more troubling about the spread of FaceIT technology is its potential curtailment of civil liberties. With the introduction of this technology, the state has dramatically extended its transformation of public space into a scanned and controlled grid. This immeasurably heightened technology of state control threatens to intensify contemporary trends toward the privatization and segregation of social spaces. The similarities between this new “biometric” technology and previous technologies of colonial classification and control are hard to ignore given the increasing prominence today of forms of spatial apartheid.
Relocating the Remains, Black British artist Keith Piper’s virtual installation, begins–like the FaceIT system–with computerized images of a human body. Navigating through the fleshlessly numinous space of the internet to Piper’s website, one is confronted with a sequence of starkly corporeal images generated by an animated gif:
| UnMapped |
If one clicks through these images, a display appears of ghostly ethnographic renderings of bodies drawn from the nineteenth-century phenomenological disciplines through which racial difference was discerned and calibrated. Like the blank spaces in the map of Africa by which Joseph Conrad’s Marlow was mesmerized as a child, the bodies of non-European peoples exerted a powerful fascination on the public during Britain’s imperial era. As Anne McClintock has demonstrated, the museum where ethnographic artifacts apparently similar to Piper’s were housed became the exemplary institution of Victorian imperial culture. It was here that collections of objects such as skulls, skeletons and fossils were displayed as tokens of the archaic stages of life (40). For Victorian Britain, these fetishistic displays seemed to legitimate the narrative of cultural progress and superiority that underpinned empire. Employing cutting-edge digital technology, Keith Piper recreates this anachronistic space in order to probe the extent to which tropes of progress and difference operate in the present. As I will show, his work provides a stinging critique of the wide-eyed utopianism evident in prevalent reactions to digital technologies and to the “New Economy” these technologies have helped to fuel.
Keith Piper’s multi-media productions over the last two decades have interrogated dominant representations of race, culture, and nation in British history, focusing in particular on the complex affiliations of black diasporic identity. As a member of the iconoclastic BLK Arts Group in the early to middle 1980s, Piper challenged the British Left’s attachment to a notion of culture that elided racial difference and hence rendered black identity invisible.2 Piper’s work pinpointed the strategic acts of forgetting that have largely banished the history of slavery from British public life. As critics such as Kobena Mercer have argued, this history makes nonsense of the narrow geo-political boundaries of the nation-state and of the insular definitions of identity that attend it (22). Since disrupting the established British art scene through BLK Arts Group exhibitions, Piper has gone on to create a corpus of works that offer a potent excavation of the modes of colonial discourse in British history. Initially mounted in 1997 at London’s Institute for International Visual Arts (InIVA)–a body funded by the British government to challenge the lack of diversity in the world of visual arts–Relocating the Remains transfers much of this corpus to digital form. This shift makes the important and previously scattered body of his work from the 1990s uniquely accessible. Relocating the Remains also provides a synthetic consideration of the parallels between contemporary information technologies and the media of representation and power deployed in a more openly colonial era.
Through its exploration of questions pertaining to new media and colonial discourse, Relocating the Remains underlines the enduring need for a sustained critique of digital media theory. Piper is certainly no Luddite; indeed, Relocating the Remains demonstrates his masterful assimilation of contemporary digital media with many breathtaking aesthetic effects. Yet Piper’s exploration of the dystopian character of contemporary digital technologies in this work does challenge the notion that such new media are largely emancipatory in their effects. As María Fernández has argued in her recent call for an interrogation of new media by postcolonial theory, the utopian rhetoric that has characterized much digital media theory obscures the practical role played by new technology in processes of flexible production that contribute to economic and social inequality on both a local and a global level (12). Focused predominantly on the purportedly liberatory forms of communication offered on-line, digital media theory has tended to underestimate the role of technology both in perpetuating existing forms of inequality and in generating new ones. This is a particularly egregious blind spot given the fact that social inequality has by most measures grown more pronounced since the advent of the modern digital technologies.
Since digital technology is one of the primary engines of globalization, we need theoretical frameworks that attend to the modes of power inscribed in the code that directs such new technology. The impact of new media must, in other words, be seen not simply as a product of the social uses made of such technology, but also of the values encoded into the very software that drives digital media. By juxtaposing the forms of colonial discourse that proliferated during the era of high imperialism with contemporary discourses of otherness, surveillance, and control, Keith Piper’s Relocating the Remains raises thorny questions about the differential impact of digital media. His interactive digital work underlines the homologies among colonial discourses, contemporary cyber-libertarian dogma, and neo-liberal accounts of globalization today. As a result, Piper’s digital texts extend the purview of postcolonial theory, which has focused predominantly on discourse and power in traditional literary texts. In addition, his work draws our attention to the rhetorical constructions through which information technologies come to be socially understood as well as the technical architectures through which such technologies shape society. Indeed, Relocating the Remains sheds light on the processes of social exclusion, control, and containment that may be perpetuated by such technologies. Of course, the social role of digital media remains open to contestation; after all, code is still written by people. By adapting digital technology to his own critical ends, Piper underlines the imperative to intervene in contemporary debates about the role of technology in our common future.
In his “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” (1996), former rancher, Grateful Dead lyricist, and prominent cybercultural theorist John Perry Barlow writes:
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather…. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.
Barlow’s pose as an ambassador from the virtual domain of cyberspace reflects the strong strain of techno-transcendentalism that runs through contemporary cyberculture. For cyber-libertarians such as Barlow and the coterie who publish regularly as Mondo 2000, electronic telecommunication has made real the dreams of countercultural visionaries such as Marshall McLuhan and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Indulging in some of the most romantic rhetoric of the 1960s, these telematic prophets articulated a dream of using technology to break free of all limits, from those imposed by traditional political forms to those associated with the stubborn materiality of the flesh (Dery 45).
The cyber-libertarian ethos that has developed from these countercultural roots has become the dominant discourse not just in cybercultural circles, but also among the free marketeers of Silicon Valley, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. The roots of this conjunction lie, I would argue, in Daniel Bell’s path-breaking account of “post-Industrial society.” In works written long before computer technology became widely available to the general public, Bell pointed to an explosive convergence of computer and telecommunications. According to Bell, this development would lead ultimately to a globally connected communications grid (Kumar 10). The speed of the computer would thus help create a radically new space-time framework for society, with the industrial era’s primary social factors (capital, labor, and the state) being replaced by knowledge and information as society’s central variables. Early cyber-utopians such as Stonier and Matsuda drew on Bell’s prognostications to describe a future in which digital technology would eliminates the need for centralized politics and administration (Kumar 14). Participatory democracy and local citizen control would replace the impersonal and inefficient leviathan of the industrial era. Much of this utopian optimism concerning the post-industrial empowerment of the grassroots was, unfortunately, appropriated by neo-liberal apologists and politicians intent on dismantling the welfare state following the Reagan-Thatcher revolution. Newt Gingrich’s firm adherence to the “Third Wave” theories of the Tofflers is perhaps not so surprising given the post-industrial utopians’ argument that technology would destroy inequality and hence make the redistributive arm of the state obsolete.3 Of course, this utopian rhetoric has been disseminated far beyond Capitol Hill. Terry Harpold and Kavita Phillip have, for instance, dissected the migration of such erstwhile utopian rhetoric into Intel’s bunny-suit ads, which erase all forms of inequality from their cheery depictions of the high tech silicon chip production line.
Fantasies of technological transcendence have also resonated powerfully–at least until the recent bursting of the internet bubble–because of the ambiguous class status of contemporary workers in the information technology sector. Well-paid and relatively empowered by their mastery of contemporary information technology, such workers are nevertheless tied to contracts that give them absolutely no job security while discouraging any form of solidarity (Barbrook and Cameron 2). The recent crash of the dot-com industry has to a certain extent revealed the vulnerability of this class of workers. Yet, as the most privileged sector of the labor force, these technological laborers have predominantly been complicit with the thoroughgoing transformation of the counter-culture’s anti-authoritarian ideals to the entrepreneurial goals of the free market. Underlying the vicissitudes of tech stocks is a more fundamental shift in the mode of production. In a transformation as fundamental as the introduction of the steam engine, the new digital technologies are encoding and absorbing workers’ physical and mental skills (Davis, “Rethinking” 40). This process of mental Taylorization, which has as its telos the elimination of human beings from production processes of all kinds, is reshaping social relations globally. As Jim Davis notes, the impact of digital technology has thus far taken the form not of increased unemployment but rather of a growth in economic polarization (43).
Buoyed up by their temporarily privileged class status as core workers in the new information economy, members of what Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron call the “virtual class” see digital culture as a new realm. For critics such as Nicholas Negroponte, a professor at MIT and frequent editorialist for the neo-liberal cyberzine Wired, the geo-political boundaries and limitations of traditional terrestrial governments have increasingly little hold. One problem with this attitude is that it treats the current structures of communications media such as the Net as ahistorical, essentialized forms. Witness Barlow’s description of cyberspace as “natural,” of all things. Mark Poster also makes this mistake when, in the course of an illuminating discussion of the internet in relation to Habermasian theories of the public sphere, he argues that “the salient characteristic of Internet community is the diminution of prevailing hierarchies of race, class, and especially gender” (“Cyberdemocracy” 213). While this may be true of the Net in its present incarnation, it will not necessarily remain true for long. The architecture of the Net and the novel forms of communication and civil space that are products of this architecture should not be taken for granted in the way that cyber-libertarians and critics such as Poster encourage. Indeed, the fact that Barlow’s “Declaration” was penned in response to the more draconian provisions of the U.S. Telecommunications Reform Act of 1996 suggests that the vaunted freedom of cyberspace may be threatened by precisely the formations whose death-knell Barlow claims to be sounding. As Tim Jordan notes, calls for users of the internet to be left alone to establish their own forms of governance have little hope of succeeding since the importance of digital space to offline socio-economics means that online and offline services cannot be disentangled (214). Unless we examine the potential forms of regulation and control that are embedded within the architecture of the Net, we will stand little chance of assessing and articulating meaningful forms of democratic cybercitizenship. This is a particularly urgent task given the broader impact of the information revolution, which is one of the prime factors responsible for increasingly polarized, fragmented, and unstable social formations on both a national and a global level.
The neo-liberal rhetoric that has accompanied these social changes has a direct equivalent in descriptions of the Net. Indeed, the spatial metaphor employed by Barlow in his manifesto is part of a much broader discourse, one in which cyberspace becomes a new frontier, a wild West in which electronic cowboys, like the protagonist of William Gibson’s Neuromancer and billionaire entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, are the new pioneers. This boundary metaphor permeates contemporary discussions of cyberspace: from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a watchdog group that works to protect first amendment rights on the internet, to books like Peter Ludlow’s High Noon on the Electronic Frontier, cyberspace is repeatedly represented as virgin territory ripe for colonization. In a recent and striking analysis, Virginia Eubanks has linked this contemporary notion of the new frontier to Frederick Jackson Turner’s essay of 1910, “Pioneer Ideals and the State University.” Assessing the inaugural moments of the U.S.’s enduring obsession with technology and progress, Turner equated the pioneer ideals that had driven relentless westward expansion with the aims of the rapidly developing industrial techno-science of the period. Electronic homesteaders such as Barlow are, then, but the latest in a long line of American intellectuals to employ the frontier metaphor to legitimate the imperatives of technologically driven capitalism.
We might find this metaphor’s lasting power surprising given the massive colonial violence associated with westward expansion and Manifest Destiny. Yet the blindness to exclusionary social practices that the continuing circulation of the term “frontier” underlines is a pervasive feature of cyber-libertarian discourse. Granted, the code that forms the Net’s architecture does help to create remarkable new forms of social interaction by annihilating physical space, generating non-hierarchical forums in which novel interactions may take place, and allowing an unsurpassed degree of anonymity. However, we frequently associate a highly dubious notion of status bracketing with internet-mediated identities. Simply because on-line communities do not feature visual markers of difference such as race, class, gender, age, or physical ability does not mean that there are not substantial preconditions to accessing such communities–computer literacy, leisure time, and wealth, for instance. Moreover, too often ideas about status bracketing are assumed to imply universal, open access. In a world in which three-fifths of the 4.4 billion people in underdeveloped countries lack access to basic sanitation, let alone computers, the forms of literacy required for fluent use of the Net are clearly the privilege of a numerically small global elite. The fact that English is by far the dominant language on the Net seems a relatively peripheral issue in relation to this much broader question of literacy. Nonetheless, many cyber-theorists continue to talk in terms that imply the universal availability of the Net and other electronic media of communication. In his recently published book Etopia, for instance, William J. Mitchell, Dean of M.I.T.’s School of Architecture and prominent cyber-pundit, writes blithely of the electronic oases created at junctions and access points of telecommunications uplinks (31). While he does briefly mention issues of access in this book, Mitchell ignores the implication of his own metaphor: info-oases are inevitably surrounded by info-deserts. The oasis metaphor employed by Mitchell actually characterizes the situation of Africa fairly well, since it accurately represents the barren conditions that prevail in most of the rural zones of the continent.
Public discussions of access in the U.S. often ignore and thereby perpetuate the host of material and political barriers that prevent connection in most other parts of world. This makes the liberal language of individual freedom used by debaters in the U.S. largely irrelevant throughout the “developing world” (Harpold, par. 29). As Sean Cubitt has powerfully put it, “any responsible account of cultural activity today must begin in the brutal exclusions of the contemporary world, even more so when we single out for attention the cultural uses of networked communications and digital media. Dependency, today more than ever, is the quality of human life” (“Orbius Tertius” 3). How does the rhetoric that attends our discussions of the Net help perpetuate what Terry Harpold has called an emerging virtual “dark continent” constituted by the many people around the globe who either lack access to information technology or are at the receiving end of such technology’s more iniquitous uses (par. 37)?
Throughout his digital work, Keith Piper cultivates what Walter Benjamin called correspondences. In his Arcades project, Benjamin sought to provide a history of the origins of the present, using archaic images to identify what was historically new about the present and what was not. He termed the confluence of past and present that he wished to isolate a “dialectical image” (Buck-Morss 26). Piper’s work may be seen as analogous to Benjamin’s in that they both aim to represent history in a manner that de-mythologizes the present. One does not have to brush much dust off one’s Barthes to see the fetishization of new technology in cyber-libertarian discourse as a contemporary myth. In the rush to celebrate the apparent transcendence of human limitations, cyber-libertarians and techno-transcendentalists articulate a strong narrative of progress that simply repeats the utopian claims made about previous forms of communications technology, including the telegraph, the radio, television, etc.4 For instance, the hype that surrounded the advent of the BBC, which was described by its first program organizer as promising to “weld humanity into one composite whole,” uncannily anticipates utopian pronouncements about the internet (Allen and Miller 46). Indeed, the recurrence of what Ernst Bloch would have called “wish images,” utopian signs from the past such as the “open frontier,” suggests the tenuousness of contemporary notions about radical ruptures from the past. Utopian claims concerning new technologies require not awareness of the past, ironically, but rather obliviousness concerning the inscription of such technologies within unequal social relations that ensure their continued use to promote hierarchy. An awareness of the dystopian uses to which new technologies may be put requires precisely the kind of historical awareness and depth that much contemporary electronic media theory, intoxicated with the notion of historical novelty, denies. Keith Piper’s work, by contrast, demonstrates that there are no value-free technologies. Using correspondences or juxtapositions of colonial and neo-colonial discourse, Piper evokes the historical role of representational technologies in colonial subjugation and suggests that such technologies are still very much at work in today’s polarized global cities.5
Such correspondences are woven throughout Piper’s work. However, of the three portals through which one may enter his digital archive –labeled, respectively, UnMapped, UnRecorded, and UnClassified–it is the central one that deals most directly with colonial technologies of representation. Having pointed the cursor at this portal, one is conducted through a door and confronted with a collage that centers on a painting by François August Biard, a nineteenth-century French abolitionist.
| UnRecorded |
Painted in 1833–the year that slavery was abolished in the British colonies–Biard’s Slaves on the West Coast of Africa is a strong statement against the institution of slavery. This epic oil painting graphically depicts the miserable conditions of a West African slave market in Freetown Bay, Sierra Leone, showing various kinds of slave traders of the period and the many forms of extreme suffering that they inflicted upon captured Africans.6 Although Biard’s strongly abolitionist painting suggests that representation may be used against oppressive social conditions, Piper’s inclusion of the painting in the archive entitled UnRecorded draws our attention to the processes of objectification at work in the scene depicted by the painting. As he does in other sections of UnRecorded, Piper focuses our attention on the commodification of the black body.7 Like Turner’s Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Biard’s painting serves as a reminder of the brutal history through which Britain’s global economic hegemony was consolidated.8 Indeed, Piper’s use of Biard here brings to mind Paul Gilroy’s contention in The Black Atlantic that slavery and colonial exploitation were central to the development of English national culture on a material plane. As Gilroy argues, the oppression and exploitation of Africa and its diaspora were also integral to the creation of a unified national identity through the contraposition of Englishness to alterity (9). European modernity has been, in other words, a Janus-faced affair, based on emancipatory claims and projects as well as on horrendous repression and exploitation. Gilroy’s thesis concerning the dual nature of modernity has particular bearing in relation to digital media. As María Fernández has argued, electronic media theory tends to ignore this split character of modernity in its utopian claims for technology, thereby eliding not simply the violence of history and the role of industrial technology in perpetuating such violence, but also the subaltern histories of resistance that have contested dominant narratives of collective identity (15).
The full extent of Piper’s transformation of the Biard painting only becomes apparent once one finds the links that lie buried within the site’s code. Presented with Biard’s alarming portrait of western power and dehumanization, one is invited to enter into and take apart this narrative by accessing a variety of archives that Piper has embedded within the painting. This interactive dimension suggests the need to peel back the triumphal narratives that sustain images of western culture in order to understand the forms of servitude on which they were historically based. At InIVA’s website, Piper demonstrates the elisions in dominant history with particular clarity. We are presented here with two elaborate gilt frames. In the top frame, Biard’s painting appears with the words “Unrecorded” and “Histories” superimposed. As one tries to move one’s cursor near these words, they slide away, suggesting the difficulty of piecing together the subaltern narratives that dominant history excludes.9 The second image, which is partially concealed by the Biard painting of the slave auction, is a medieval illumination in which a European king and queen are receiving visiting dignitaries. Piper presents this image in black and white; however, when one places one’s cursor over this image, the words “concealed” and “presences” appear, inscribed over two figures in the illumination that now, presented in color, appear from their skin color to be of African origin.
By revealing this medieval image of blacks in the British Isles, Piper challenges the notions of racialized national purity and homogeneity that gained prominence in post-1945 Britain. As Peter Fryer has argued, there were, in fact, Africans in Britain before the English arrived (1). Of course, the Black presence in Britain prior to the substantial waves of immigration that followed World War II has been routinely denied in order to “whiten” the history of Britain as a nation. Piper’s image underlines the fact that exchanges with Africa were a feature of medieval life. In addition, this section of UnRecorded suggests that the forms of hierarchy that characterize later representations of African identity were far less of a feature in images that preceded the rise of the Atlantic slave trade. Janet Abu-Lughod’s discussion of Europe as a relatively peripheral part of a series of overlapping regional, cultural, and economic systems during the late medieval period provides a useful corrective to such representations of the colonial era. This history was, of course, written out as Europe achieved global dominance and as genetic and cultural theories of superiority arose to legitimate projects of colonial rule.
While the Biard painting in its CD-ROM incarnation opens out onto four discrete virtual archives, one of them resonates particularly powerfully with the points I’m developing here concerning the historical use of technology for the purpose of classifying and containing racial alterity. In the archive entitled “Fictions of Science,” we are presented with the image of a black male body posed in the quadrilinear position of Da Vinci’s famous engraving, which has become an icon of Renaissance humanism. Here, however, instead of marking a celebration of inquiry into the transformative capacity of the self and of culture, the black body is superimposed on a grid within which the various branches of modern science and social science appear. As one moves the cursor over this field, it is transformed into the characteristic cross-hairs of a gun sight. The contemporary manifestations of state violence that formed the subject of much of Piper’s work during the 1980s are here juxtaposed with historical instances of colonial power. Supposedly objective scientific disciplines are presented as directly complicit with classificatory and, in many cases, exterminatory forms of knowledge.
Clicking in any of these zones leads to a fade-out and an animation that first defines a particular branch of science–including sociology, craniology, ethnology, biology, technology, genealogy, theology, and anthropology–and then provides one with a particular instance of the historical use of such sciences as part of a project of classifying racial alterity in the colonial context. This critique of the social sciences’ complicity with colonial power has become well known since Talal Asad’s ground-breaking work on the topic. However, simply by placing contemporary social “sciences” like anthropology in a grid with now discredited and defunct cognates like craniology, Piper makes a telling point concerning the historical origin of such disciplines. His work also develops a critique of the mode through which such disciplines operate. A click on the “anthropology” grid, for instance, first provides one with a dictionary definition of the discipline that emphasizes its putative objectivity: “n. the study of man, his origins, physical characteristics, institutions, religious beliefs, social relationships, etc.” One then zooms in to a box-like area, with the clicking sound of a camera lens again placing the computer user in the uncomfortable position of the device of classification. Black and white images of people from colonized lands in Africa, Australia, and South Asia, all of whom evince no signs of “contact” with the West, pan before one’s eyes. Their difference is rendered as absolute, their nudity an index of their supposed cultural backwardness. At the end of this pan, an image of a bare-breasted Aboriginal woman materializes. She is framed by an instrument for measuring the circumference of her head, part of the apparatus through which the late imperial science of craniology claimed to provide direct physical explanations, grounded in social Darwinian precepts, for the putative inferiority of non-European peoples.10 Over this image, the following words gradually materialize: “The exercise/of the power/to name.”
By reminding us of the historical complicity of nominally scientific disciplines such as anthropology in the project of colonial expansion and classification, Piper’s work underlines the now familiar but enduringly controversial notion that science and technology are socially constructed.11 Drawing our attention to the development of disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, and biology within the context of the colonial demarcation and containment of difference, Piper maps the lineage of contemporary forms of power and representation. Piper’s work makes apparent that it is not only as a result of convenient forms of historical amnesia that new technologies such as cyberspace can be engaged in the patently utopian terms of cyber-libertarian discourse. Moreover, the fact that one enters the portals I’ve been discussing through a space that reproduces the sanitized precincts of a museum is itself significant. The CD-ROM on which Piper’s exhibition is archived displays these three portals as the three connected halls of a museum. This is a highly appropriate visual image, since it not only reproduces the gallery context in which Piper’s installations are normally shown, but also draws attention to the mechanisms of colonial representation at work in the traditional museum. As Mary Louise Pratt and James Clifford, among others, have argued, the museum functions as a “contact zone,” a site where previously separate subjects are brought into spatial and temporal continguity and organized, through the structure of the collection, into a set of hierarchical relations (Clifford 192). Piper’s work is in clear consonance with this opening image of the museum since it is predominantly focused on technologies of representation and classification. By placing us inside the sanitized confines of a virtual archive, Piper sets up the representational codes whose underlying power relations his work teases out and criticizes.
Piper explores the contemporary impact of colonial technologies of representation in UnClassified, the ironically titled virtual space that occupies the right-hand gallery of Relocating the Remains. Here Piper engages the spectator in a scathing reenactment of the structuring role of difference in the brave new world of high tech. In particular, this section provocatively connects the inequality of access to electronic communications that is a product of contemporary socio-economic conditions to novel forms of control that are enabled by contemporary technology. Piper’s concerns are rooted in recent British history, which has witnessed a number of massive urban uprisings in response to intensified forms of police surveillance within predominantly black communities. The infamous SUS (for Stopped Under Suspicion) laws, which allowed the police to arrest anyone whom they suspected of illegal actions, were enforced in a racist manner throughout the 1970s and ’80s. Britain’s black population was consequently trapped in the cross-hairs of an increasingly militarized police force during this period.12 While community protests in Britain have led to substantial reforms of such policing practices–ironically making them more invasive and racist in many cases–the growth of increasingly sophisticated forms of electronic surveillance has resulted in the ongoing intensification of what Mike Davis has suggestively called the “scanscape” of urban space (366). Casting an invisible net over physical space, newly developed electronic modes of surveillance such as the FaceIT technology I described earlier raise particularly discomforting questions about privacy, civil rights, citizenship, and egalitarian access to public space.
Piper’s attention in UnClassified focuses in particular on the use of technologies of surveillance to fix the black subject in space. InIVA’s Keith Piper website presents one with an animated sequence of pictures labelled UnClassified Presence.
| UnClassified |
These pictures roll over from a picture of a photojournalist at work at a demonstration, to an image of a CCTV (Closed Circuit Television) In Operation sign, to, finally, a police riot squad. Part of a series of works done by Piper that focused on the contemporary city, this section of the archive lays out the relation between discourses of public order and the racialization of space. The scrolling sequence of images he provides us with at the entrance to this portal identifies the interwoven agencies of representation, control, and surveillance that turn the city into colonial space for non-white subjects. Physical mobility in the space of the city has become increasingly difficult for Black Britons as their presence has come to be identified with a generalized threat to the maintenance of public order. The origins of the contemporary scanscape in Britain go back at least thirty years. As Stuart Hall and his colleagues at Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies argued in their classic Policing the Crisis, an economic downturn and social fragmentation during the 1970s in Britain provoked the rise of an ideology based on law and order. The moral panics concerning lawlessness that proliferated during this period helped, according to Hall and his collaborators, to legitimate a harshly intolerant and draconian new state form. Racially biased policing practices and the widespread rioting that they provoked during the 1980s did much to confirm Hall’s argument that popular consent was increasingly being garnered through the exercise of coercion against Black Britons (322). A self-magnifying feedback loop was established during this period between scapegoating media representations of ethnic minorities, increased police surveillance, and outright state violence directed toward Black communities. This institutional racism in turn produced violent resistance on the part of blacks, who were left with few other avenues to express their discontent with the media stereotype of the “black criminal” and abusive policing practices. The scrolling images in Keith Piper’s work, which include components of each segment of this feedback loop, highlight the enduring saliency of Hall’s analysis.
Piper’s UnClassified adds to Hall’s dissection of popular authoritarianism, however, by focusing on the role of the visual in contemporary schemes of classification. Visible somatic characteristics have always played a key if not exclusive role in defining racial difference. In the late nineteenth century, corporeal differences gained in significance as photography displaced print language as the primary arbiter of universal knowledge (McClintock 123). Photography offered the nascent fields of anthropology and criminology a means for classifying racial and class differences. The rise of digital encoding over the last decade has raised the stakes in this process of rendering difference visible. Powerful new visual technologies render the topography of individual faces and bodies part of the contemporary scanscape. In the context of increasingly hostile attitudes toward non-white populations, these new technologies of the visual threaten to undermine civil rights substantially.13 For instance, computerized databases now allow police officers in Europe to access continent-wide files profiling suspected illegal immigrants. These files were set up by the Trevi group, a coalition of police forces from member nations of the European Union whose original brief, to cooperate around anti-terrorism activities, has now been expanded to cover immigration, visas, asylum-seekers, and border controls. Since the Trevi group operates autonomously from the EU parliament, there is no public brake on the use of computer databases by this branch of the state. As Tony Bunyan has observed, the British equation of blacks with crime, drugs, terrorism, and illegal immigration has now been generalized across the entire European Union (19).
Keith Piper’s work focuses explicitly on these issues of visuality and the body. Passing through the UnClassified portal that I’ve been discussing, one is presented with a small image of a black man’s face. This image is a composite one, made up of the fragmented pieces of many different men’s faces. Rendered as a generic threat, this black man’s face is set against a large radar screen, with fingerprint files as a background. As one moves one’s cursor toward this image, it skids hectically away across the radar screen. The sweeping arm of the radar scan slams into these nomadic faces, causing them to gyrate more frenetically while the display emits a loud beeping sound. Just as in the UnRecorded section, contemporary technologies of representation are presented here as objectifying their subjects. In addition, such technologies integrate the subjects on which they focus into an economy of control that represents such subjects as inherently “other,” and consequently legitimates their subjection to the acts of casual brutality and exploitation that characterize Europe’s colonial history and contemporary racism. The persistence of colonial discourse in contemporary digitally enhanced surveillance technology should at the very least provoke a reexamination of assertions of the value-free nature of such technologies when deployed in the segregated spaces of today’s cities.
In the context of the European Union’s Schengen Accords, the imposed alterity of non-white communities represents an explicit threat to a freshly minted European continental identity. As A. Sivanandan has noted, the nation-states of Europe drew on one another’s specific national racisms as they consolidated a continent-wide notion of European citizenship, pulling one another down to a very low common denominator (“Racism” 69). As a result, Article 116 of Germany’s constitution, which notoriously bases citizenship exclusively on blood, has become the implicit standard of belonging across the EU. In a background note to Tagging the Other, the portion of the CD-ROM that deals with contemporary surveillance technology, Keith Piper writes of this situation:
As the internal borders between nation-states are dismantled, the ‘hard outer shell’ defending Europe from infiltration by the non-European ‘other’ is reinforced. As part of this process, at those points at which that ‘infiltration’ has already taken place, and whole communities of ‘otherness’ have consolidated themselves, new techniques of surveillance and control are being implemented. It is the points at which new technologies are being implemented to fix and survey the ‘Un-European Other’ in the faltering consolidation of this ‘New European State’ which forms the basis of Tagging the Other. Central to the piece is the framing and fixing of the Black European under a high tech gaze which seeks to classify and codify the individual within an arena in which the logical constraints of race, ethnicity, nation, and culture are fixed and delineated in a discourse of exclusion.
If the new discourses of European identity work to criminalize both illegal immigrants and legitimate Black nationals, this criminalization takes place increasingly through digital technologies that emplot people of color within visual schema of reified difference. While the SUS laws limited black people’s access to public space by promoting draconian policing policies during the 1970s and ’80s, today’s digital technologies continue to operate on similar spatial planes while also bringing to bear a microscopic gaze that turns all of Europe into a unified scanscape. Panglossian readings of harmony through technology ill prepare us to understand this social context. Keith Piper’s Relocating the Remains suggests that the interlocking axes of spatial, visual, and informational control at work in the contemporary Euro-American scanscape need to be understood within the much broader historical context of racialized slavery, colonialism, and neo-colonialism.
The need to historicize the contemporary communications technologies that I’ve been underlining in relation to Keith Piper’s work is echoed in Lawrence Lessig’s recent discussions of the architecture of the Net. For Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the constitutive regulatory forms of cyberspace are unavoidable, and the digital domain cannot, therefore, be thought of as an open frontier (Code 5). Indeed, Lessig argues that “left to itself, cyberspace will become a perfect tool of control” (6). Unlike libertarians such as Barlow, in other words, Lessig is aware of the dominating as well as the enabling structures that operate in cyberspace.
Perhaps the most important contribution made by Lessig is the relatively simple observation that such forms of control are built into the computer code through which the Net operates. Other modes of social regulation such as laws, social norms, and economic forces are shaped in cyberspace by the basic codes through which the Net functions, Lessig argues (88). While cyber-libertarians celebrate the rhizomic social forms enabled by the Net’s current architecture, Lessig discerns significant moves among contemporary technicians and politicians away from the relatively open structure that characterized the Net’s protocols in its formative stages. For Lessig, the determining factor behind these trends is the shift from a world in which code was “corporate in a political sense” to one in which it is “corporate in a commercial sense” (207). Commodification of the Net, in other words, is likely to foster increasing forms of control through code. What values will be embodied, Lessig asks, in the future architecture of the Net, and how can we deter those wishing to use the Net to curtail rather than expand civil liberties?
One particularly unnerving example that Lessig provides of moves to use code for purposes of control in a U.S. context is the Clinton administration’s dogged attempt to regulate encryption technology on the Net (“Laws of Cyberspace”). This struggle has taken the form of moves to legislate a key recovery ability that would give government agents access to the content of communications on the Net. Not only would this be an indirect manner of regulating behavior on the Net, but it would also allow the government to identify the sender of a particular message. Federal agents could thereby essentially establish a system of electronic passports, using decoded messages to determine vital elements of personal information about the individuals concerned. Since the U.S. is by far the most significant global developer of computer technology, federal legislation along these lines would virtually automatically become a standard element of future software distributed around the globe. As Lessig underlines, the U.S. Constitution may restrain to some degree the federal government’s ability to use such technology illicitly, but this is unlikely to be true of every state that deploys the software. In this case, a change in a fundamental element of the code or architecture of the Net within the U.S. would have sweeping ramifications for civil liberties around the world. The system that would result from such a minor modification, one that would allow constant, invisible, and perfect tracking and monitoring of particular individuals, would be chillingly efficient. While Lessig’s cautionary examples might seem to jibe with a cyber-libertarian fear of the state, he employs them to call for informed public intervention in the often abstruse contemporary debates concerning the architecture of the Net.
In addition to the kinds of concerns about civil liberties raised by Piper and Lessig, digital surveillance in the realm of business and commerce is also increasingly worthy of critical scrutiny. As Christian Parenti reports in a recent article, eighty percent of U.S. corporations keep their employees under regular surveillance according to the American Management Association. Electronic eavesdropping is becoming an ever more prominent component of the American workplace. Instead of eradicating hierarchies as the proponents of the New Economy argue, new technologies are “pushing social relations on the job toward a new digital Taylorism, where every motion is watched, studied and controlled by and for the boss” (26). High-tech surveillance is being used not simply to nab employees for “inappropriate Internet use” such as “porn surfing, gambling, online video gaming and chat-room socializing,” but also to foil efforts to organize the new “flexible” workplaces of the twenty-first century (28). In addition to these forms of on-the-job monitoring, computer technology of course makes it possible to track all of our decisions as consumers of material goods and information online. As everyone who has received irritating junk email knows, online merchants monitor our mouse clicks using “cookies,” creating a profile of our interests and buying habits which is then often sold to marketers. As individuals, we have very little control over this flow of commodified information about ourselves. In fact, the economist Hal Varian recently observed that “there is already a market in information on you… the trouble is, you aren’t a participant in that market” (qtd. in Lohr 3). The questions concerning privacy that arise from such uses of technology are an increasing public concern in the U.S., one likely to be heightened by police use of the digital surveillance technology I described at the outset of this article.14 Such technologies appear to be ushering in an ever-more Foucauldian world of panoptical surveillance.
The parallel between the role of contemporary technology as understood in the work of Piper and Lessig and that of Bentham’s panopticon during the nineteenth century has already been drawn by Mark Poster (291). For Poster, the database is a perfect cyberspatial version of Bentham’s architecture of discipline and punishment, one that uplinks our physical and social identities into a vast system of perpetual surveillance. It is indeed ironic that such a system of control should be one of the facilitating forces behind the globalization of contemporary capitalism. Academic as well as media accounts of globalization are dominated by metaphors that suggest the fluidity of contemporary social and economic relations.15 How do such accounts correlate with the extension of the surveillance technologies I’ve been describing?
Manuel Castells’s account of the social transformations that have accompanied the rise of the information society acknowledges the enhanced facility and velocity with which information flows in globalized capitalism. Far from being a technological determinist, however, Castells argues that technology merely serves as the handmaiden of the broader set of social changes associated with the capitalist restructuring that has taken place in most societies since the 1970s. Faced with the “stagflation” of the 1970s, and aided by the development of new telecommunications technologies, corporations were able to shift production processes to parts of the globe where labor costs were low, while they concentrated command and research facilities in the increasingly global cities of the overdeveloped world (Lazarus 100). According to the useful analysis of Regulation School theorists, labor’s weakened position meant that capital could impose more stringent market discipline through the international “de-regulation” in flows of trade and finance capital. The upshot has been a rejection of the welfare state that characterized the Fordist era and the creation of a new, “flexible” regime of accumulation.16 With information as its chief economic resource, contemporary capitalism has been freed from the constraints imposed by the organized working class in developed nations and has embarked on footloose expansion around the globe bolstered by the resurgence of free-market economics and neo-liberal ideology (Lazarus 100). It should be stressed that the state, far from withering away as so many neo-liberal commentators and some academics seem to argue, has been the agent of this transformation, making it possible for transnational corporations to evade national controls and regulatory constraints (Sivanandan, “Globalization” 10).
In a classic example of combined and uneven development, urban space has been riven by this transformation to a post-Fordist regime of accumulation. According to Castells, an increasingly stark divide has arisen between a core labor force with high skills and the “mass of disposable labor,” who live in conditions of increasing marginality (33). As the rising importance of information technology leads to a greater social emphasis on access to knowledge, the information poor also lose their ability to garner material resources, and the urban system becomes increasingly divided between the luxurious compounds housing the highly educated elites and the impoverished zones inhabited by the socially marginalized masses. In a bitter irony, the networking of society has thus taken place in conjunction with the spread of the polarized social conditions of what Castells calls the “dual city.” The proliferation of “gated communities” in the U.S. suggests the extent to which the elites in the information society are withdrawing into fortified enclaves. A necessary corollary of this withdrawal is the transformation of the remaining public spaces into the panoptical space of the scanscape, as the kinds of powerful new surveillance technologies I’ve described are used to contain potential threats from the socially marginalized but economically essential masses who service the elite of the global cities. The spread of such technologies despite the economic boom of the late 1990s suggests the degree of paranoia at play in the dual city. As Anthony King has trenchantly observed, the global city has increasingly come to resemble the colonial city, with its manichean spatial, social, and economic encasements. Keith Piper’s practice of examining the correspondences between colonial discourses and the conditions that exist in the dual city is not then as far fetched as it might initially seem.
Globalization has, in other words, meant heightened mobility for a small but terrifically powerful elite around the world. For an increasingly large percentage of the population within both underdeveloped and developed nations, it has meant fixity, an anchoring in particular places from which capital and, often, hope have been drained. Draconian institutions of control have proliferated as nations throughout the developed world have become more internally polarized and unstable. A bleak riposte to the images of spatial mobility embodied in the cyber-libertarian frontier mythology, the contemporary prison-industrial complex is, according to Zygmunt Bauman, a factory of exclusion. The significant segment of the population (2% in the case of the U.S.) who are not needed as producers and for whom there is no (legal) work to return to are effectively disposed of in the prison-industrial complex, a condition that, as Bauman comments, amounts to burial alive (113).
Alongside the proliferating inequality within developed nations, as well as between these developed nations and the vast majority of humanity, has come an increasing privatization of information. The mixed economy of state-private information provision that characterized the Fordist era has declined, and capitalism has moved to trade in and profit from informational goods (Kundnani 55). The decline of the public service ethos in broadcasting is but one example of this shift. Nevertheless, there is a central contradiction at play in this new dispensation. Since digital technologies can duplicate information almost instantaneously, and practically without loss or cost, the only technical constraint on the free flow of information today is intellectual property law. In order to secure profits, therefore, information capitalism must place increasing emphasis on enforceable world agreements on copyright violation. Information-exporting nations like the U.S. have, as a result, increasingly intervened to set up global regulatory regimes around the world, many of which infringe upon and actively militate against age-old traditions of community ownership of information (Kundnani 56). Information in this context must be construed in the broadest possible manner, from the traditional folk music forms that are sampled by “worldbeat” artists to the genetic code of Third World seed stocks and indigenous peoples that American companies have recently tried to patent. As the right to access and control information becomes increasingly central to the global social order, circuits of communication that retain a non-commodified character are likely to become increasingly embattled.
In some respects, the Net does constitute a significant countervailing force to this new informational world order. However, the libertarian discourses that characterize many recent discussions of the Net and the “New Economy” it has driven are woefully inadequate for assessing and combating the complex contradictions that are straining the contemporary social fabric. The Net is not simply affected by the forms of social inequality that characterize our increasingly bifurcated world. Rather, it is an element in a broader technological transformation that is helping to produce these very forms of polarization. Despite the democratizing aspects of its architecture, it is also susceptible to transformation from a tool for the proliferation of new forms of citizenship to one of control. Cyberspace will undoubtedly play a pivotal role in the world of the future. Indeed, since its popularization in 1994, the Net has already become the central nervous system of contemporary culture and economy in the overdeveloped world. As my comments here have shown, we cannot take the current code of the Net and the entitlements associated with this architecture for granted. Given this fact, I believe there is an urgent need for a social movement around the right to significant forms of public control over communication. It is imperative that the current hegemony of knee-jerk anti-government ideology be challenged, particularly in regard to contemporary communications technology. While many issues need to be engaged by such a movement, from the concentration of media ownership to the future of intellectual property law, to name just two examples, the kernel of any such movement has to be the articulation of alternatives to the current anti-social neo-liberal status quo. As Raymond Williams put it in his bracing short book Communications,
our commonest economic error is the assumption that production and trade are our only practical activities, and that they require no other human justification or scrutiny. We need to say what many of us know in experience: that the life of man [sic], and the business of society, cannot be confined to these ends; that the struggle to learn, to describe, to understand, to educate, is a central and necessary part of our humanity. (11)
These are wildly idealistic words in the current political climate, perhaps. But initiatives such as the open code movement, a recently vitalized outgrowth of some of the same emphases on accessibility that are responsible for the Net’s current architecture, suggest the continuing appeal and practicability of such a counter-hegemonic model of human experience and exchange.17 While a discussion of the open code movement does not fall within the bounds of this paper, suffice it for the moment to say that we must effect a significant transformation in current attitudes towards technology if this and other movements to democratize communications are to have a substantial impact. It is through rearticulating the model, originally advanced by figures such as Raymond Williams, of communications as a site of collective identity and responsibility, of equal access and empowerment, that we may hope to initiate such a transformation.
1. This surveillance system and the debate it has occasioned are described by Dana Canedy in “Tampa Scans the Faces in Its Crowds for Criminals.”
2. For a detailed history of the BLK Arts Group and its impact on the visual arts in Britain, see Rasheed Araeen’s essay in The Other Story.
3. For an extended discussion of Toffler, Bell, and other post-industrial utopians, see Boris Frankel.
4. Friedrich Kittler’s work on the epistemic characteristics evoked by previous technologies is informative in this regard. See his Discourse Networks.
5. For a fascinating discussion of the recurrence of colonial discourses of alterity in the context of the contemporary high-tech production sector, see Terry Harpold and Kavita Phillips’s “Of Bugs and Rats.”
6. Additional details concerning this painting may be found at the following two websites: <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1h297.html> and <http://www.hullcc.org.uk/wilberforce/explore_staircase2.html>.
7. See Rohini Malik’s brief but very suggestive discussion of Piper’s use of fragmentary texts to challenge linear constructions of history and identity in his “Introduction” to Piper’s Relocating the Remains.
8. Turner’s painting is briefly discussed by Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic (14).
9. This reminds one of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s contention that subaltern histories are not as easily recuperable as the work of the Indian Subaltern Studies group would suggest. See her “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography.”
10. For a discussion of such regimes of classification, see Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather.
11. The Sokal Affair offers abundant evidence of contemporary resistance to the notion of science’s historical inscription.
12. The first and still one of the best discussions of the “popular authoritarianism” of this period may be found in Stuart Hall, et al., Policing the Crisis.
13. In 1989, the European Union parliament passed a resolution saying that the Schengen Accord, which “harmonizes” EU policies on visas and coordinates crime prevention efforts (which include policies for dealing with asylum-seekers), constitutes a potential detriment to civil rights.
14. To take but one example, Neil A. Lewis describes how a council of judges from the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit recently ordered their technology staff to disconnect a monitoring program that had been installed on court computers in protest over privacy issues.
15. Arjun Appadurai’s influential work on the non-isomorphic flows of information, capital, and populations around the globe is but one prominent example of such rhetoric.
16. For a far more positive, and hugely influential account of globalization, see Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity and Runaway World.
17. For a discussion of the open code movement, see David Bollier, “The Power of Openness.”
Frank Palmeri
Department of English
University of Miami
fpalmeri@miami.edu
In what might be understood as tracing a paradigm shift in postmodern culture (Kuhn), practicing an archaeology of the contemporary (Foucault), or reporting on the conditions of current knowledge (Lyotard), this essay suggests that a moment of high postmodernism dominant in the sixties, seventies, and eighties has been succeeded by two forms of cultural expression that have continuities with, yet depart from, this cultural mode and stand in contrast to each other. A new structure of thought and expression that I call other than postmodern remains the less prominent and popular mode, by contrast with a late postmodernism that has been the dominant form of production in the nineties and the first years of the new century.1 To define what is other than postmodern, the argument here focuses on the careers and works of Michel Foucault and Thomas Pynchon, noting briefly the works of others as well; by contrast, The X-Fileswill serve as an instance of the late postmodern, along with other works in the genre of conspiratorial science fiction.
As I understand it, postmodernism–like modernism or romanticism–combines elements of both a period and a mode. If it is defined solely as a mode of cultural expression or a set of formal features, the result is an unmooring from historical circumstances. Conversely, if it is defined solely as a period, the result is a reifying of a zeitgeist that may have little or no empirical content, and whose boundaries may be arbitrary and debatable. Thus, postmodernism encompasses a set of concerns and formal operations–including a frequent use of irony, satire, and pastiche, an interest in the layering of historical interpretations, and a strong paranoid strand–while also signifying the period from the mid-sixties until perhaps the present when most, but not necessarily all, of these features have been prominent. For the purposes of the argument here, I will focus on the significant role played in many postmodern works by paranoid visions of history as controlled by powerful but nameless forces or conspirators. As Leo Braudy has pointed out, such visions inform the novels of Pynchon, Mailer, and Heller, and we might add films such as The Conversation (1974), and television series such as The Prisoner (1968). To such a list, Patrick O’Donnell and Timothy Melley have added works by Kathy Acker, Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Joseph McElroy, and Ishmael Reed.
Despite the emphasis on paranoia in this essay, I do not define postmodernism solely by reference to the strength or prominence of a single element. Rather, a whole configuration of features and operations–including its relation to the cultural and political moment–is crucial in determining the cultural paradigm in which a work participates, whether modern, postmodern, or late postmodern. For example, Freud formulated an influential theory of paranoia, but his thought on the subject does not therefore become postmodern. The Freudian concept of paranoia designates a form of mental illness that has a personal, sexual etiology and meaning; by contrast, paranoia carries a central, social, and political import in the postmodern works of Pynchon, DeLillo, and others. The content of the concept differs in such cases, and so do the cultural configurations in which it plays a part. Similarly, I would not define the modern solely by reference to its reliance on the liberal humanist subject. When, for instance, works such as The X-Files and The Matrix attempt to recuperate an autonomous individual subject that has been dissolved in many ways by earlier versions of postmodernism, they do not therefore return to a modernist cultural moment; their attempted restoration takes place in the context of global conspiracy theories more powerful and ominous than the ordering structures envisioned in the narratives of Joyce, Woolf, or Faulkner.
Jean-François Lyotard has focused on the postmodern skepticism about master narratives and totalizing ideologies; Linda Hutcheon has stressed the parodic and ironic element that pervades postmodernism, as well as its interest in history as opposed to myth. Although the focus here on paranoia in postmodernism might appear to be at odds with Lyotard’s and Hutcheon’s understandings of the postmodern, I believe it is consistent with both. In most works of high postmodernism, a vision or premonition of an all-encompassing and threatening explanatory or totalitarian order plays a significant role in the world of the narrative. But such a totalizing vision is also typically opposed by skeptical, comic, and anarchic elements that undercut or refuse to accept the legitimacy of the master narrative. High postmodern works reveal both an anxious apprehension of a newly realized and effective system of power and knowledge (beyond traditional religions or nation-states), impossible even to comprehend in its totality, but also a subversive, even parodic skepticism about such phenomena–both a fascination with and a satiric skepticism of paranoia. Lyotard’s principal argument about postmodernism is borne out, if qualified, by such a characteristic juxtaposition of opposed attitudes. Hutcheon argues throughout her book that postmodernism is paradoxical in just this way: it makes use of the forms, systems, and master narratives that it also undercuts by means of ubiquitous parody (22-36, 46, 116). As I understand it, then, a crucial feature of high postmodernism is its juxtaposition of paranoia about controlling systems of thought and action with a skeptical resistance to paranoia that can range from the wildly anarchic to the bleakly comic.2
I focus on the role and kind of paranoia in the works discussed here in order to distinguish modes of postmodernism from each other and from a mode of thought and representation that may stand apart from the postmodern. The late works of Foucault and Pynchon adopt a perspective–here called other than postmodern–that can be distinguished from that of their earlier works–seen here as instances of high postmodernism.3 What is other than postmodern moves away from the representation of extreme paranoia, toward a vision of local ethico-political possibilities and a greater acceptance of hybrids that combine human and machine or human and animal traits. During the same period a parallel shift occurs in other thinkers such as Levinas, Haraway, Derrida, Laclau and Mouffe, and Latour, whom I will consider briefly in a separate section. But first I will discuss The X-Files as an instance of late postmodernism, the dominant mode of cultural production in the last decade or more. Rather than holding to a tense equilibrium between paranoia and skepticism as does the high postmodern, late postmodernism expresses a more rigid paranoid vision that includes a reinscription of the liberal humanist subject and intense anxiety about human hybrids.
Over the course of its first seven seasons, The X-Files, created by Chris Carter, presented and accumulated evidence that extraterrestrials have visited earth, and that they have probably abducted many people, if only temporarily. The mythology of the series also indicates that powerful forces high in the U.S. government (with connections to a shadowy international group) have conspired to conceal this information as well as the extent to which the government itself has made use of alien technology, perhaps as a result of an agreement with the aliens. Carter has said that the government plays the role of the “all-around bad guy” in The X-Files because of this conspiracy to deceive the American people (Carter). Such a representation of the government may help account for the popularity of the series, because it carries an appeal to both ends of the political spectrum. It can be welcomed by a vaguely and nostalgically leftist position opposed to the persecuting excesses of the Federal Bureau of Investigation under J. Edgar Hoover during the anti-communist years of the Cold War. But a vision of nefarious government conspiracies in the nineties–after Reagan, Ruby Ridge, and Waco–is likely to appeal just as strongly to far-right hostility to the federal government, and to feed into a historically significant strain of nativist paranoia antagonistic to foreigners and anything “unAmerican.”4 Crucially, The X-Files makes its protagonists FBI agents–both Mulder, who seeks to expose the conspiracy, and Scully, his generally more skeptical partner.5 The series thus gives evidence of a seriously divided attitude toward the American government: mistrusted on the one hand as the agent of a vast conspiracy to conceal the presence of aliens in America, yet trusted, in the persons of the incorruptible and determined individuals who work for what has historically been the most reactionary and repressive agency of domestic law enforcement.
In addition to plots concerning conspiracies to cover up alien visitations, the series devotes almost three-quarters of its episodes to horror mysteries involving the paranormal. Typically, the murderous paranormal agents are hybrids of humans and animals or humans and machines, and Mulder’s task is to contain or kill the threatening creatures by means of his intuitive, non-rational understanding of such phenomena. The series thus adopts an anxious and hostile attitude toward the human-animal-machine hybrid–very different, as we shall see, from Haraway’s ambivalent celebration of cyborgs, Latour’s exhortation that we recognize the ubiquity of hybrid objects, or Pynchon’s comic and poignant representation of hybrid creatures. In addition, the paranoid episodes indicate from the first season onward that the deepest anxiety of the series is reserved for the possibility of human-alien hybrids. The horror-based episodes thus parallel and complement the conspiracy-based episodes involving alien visitors. The recurring accounts of abduction by aliens–most significantly, the abduction of Mulder’s sister, Samantha, and later of his partner, Scully–offer parallels with the genre of the captivity narrative, which is haunted by the possible mixing of blood of different races, just as The X-Files is haunted by the possible mixing of human and alien DNA. Hostility to and anxiety concerning what is alien, hybrid, and “unAmerican” permeate the series.6
In works by Pynchon, Mailer, and others in the sixties and seventies, a paranoid vision associated with an urge to order, with science, technology, and bureaucracy stands at one pole in opposition to a tendency toward disorder and an ability to tolerate uncertainty. Eliminating this pole of anarchy and flux, The X-Files instead opposes scientific rationality to belief in government conspiracies or paranormal phenomena. However, the series consistently authorizes Mulder’s belief, both in the paranormal and in the conspiracy to conceal the alien presence, while Scully’s scientific reason almost always proves to be woefully inadequate to the phenomena they encounter. The series further suggests a close relation between belief in conspiracies and religious faith, for example by repeatedly citing Mulder’s poster of a classic grainy UFO photo carrying the caption, “I Want To Believe”; it thus renders equivalent and authorizes all the forms of belief that it considers. The X-Files also insists on the accessibility of a single, unqualified truth. The prospect of learning the hidden truth motivates first Mulder and later Scully in their efforts to uncover the government conspiracy; such a unitary and unqualified notion contributes to the epigraph for most episodes as the title sequence concludes by announcing, “The Truth Is Out There.”7 With this notion, The X-Files reinforces the agency of the liberal humanist subject: Mulder is the heroic individual on a quest to uncover the truth that the government has lied to the American people. The series thus updates alien invasion plots to attack human hybrids, reworks captivity narratives to include aliens in the place of native peoples, and bases conspiracy theories of the sixties and seventies on a belief in the availability of an absolute truth to an autonomous subject.
In my view, The X-Files exemplifies the moment of late postmodernism, strong and perhaps dominant during the last ten or fifteen years, in which paranoid visions are unrelieved by black humor, and hybrids invariably constitute threats. Early in the last decade, Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991) expresses a paranoid view of a nefarious government conspiracy, the dark truth of which is unqualified by ambiguities and unmediated by irony. At the end of the decade, The Matrix (1999, the Wachowskis) foresees the reduction of human beings to a condition of dreaming vegetables by a world-ruling artificial intelligence, offering its human protagonist as the eventual savior of mankind from the hyper-intelligent machines. Such works participate in a darkly paranoid vision of government conspiracies and threatening human hybrids, the exposure of which often leads to an absolute truth or religious salvation.8 The freefloating temptation to paranoia of the earlier period has hardened into a requirement in these works, the autonomous individual re-emerges as a hero, and a greater and darker stylization based on film noir replaces grotesque surrealism as the mode in which the paranoid vision is typically elaborated.
Several kinds of works and ways of thought besides those of Foucault and Pynchon give evidence of a movement away from high postmodernism toward what may be other than postmodern over the last twenty years. The increasing attention being paid to the thought of Emmanuel Levinas indicates a widespread questioning of essential, unified identities, and a turn to ethical considerations. According to Levinas, ethics, not ontology, constitutes first philosophy. Rather than investigating the being of the self as the origin and ground of identity, Levinas focuses in Totality and Infinity (1961) on the encounter with the face of the other as antecedent to being and the subject; in Otherwise Than Being (1974) he maintains that the infinite responsibility for the other precedes origin and essence. This responsibility is not assumed or willed by a self already constituted; instead, it finds itself and its meaning in proximity to the other, in putting oneself in the place of the other, in an open-ended saying rather than what is finalized and said. The pre-original responsibility for the other escapes and precedes being, definition, and identity. Although ethics concentrates on individual responsibility, in Levinas’s thought ethics does not fall mute and powerless in the realm of politics. Indeed, ethics can both inform and critique political practice and reason, as Levinas’s interviews on contemporary events indicate.9 Numerous books and collections of essays on his thought have appeared in the last ten to twelve years; a collection of essays on Levinas mostly by literary critics is forthcoming; and a recent special issue of PMLA was devoted to “Ethics and Literary Study” (Buell).10
Jacques Derrida has written two significant essays on Levinas that helped bring his work to the attention of literary critics and others in the Anglo-American world. Derrida deserves to be mentioned here not only for the impact of these essays, but also because of a turn in his own work in the last decade or so which parallels the shift that occurs in the careers of Foucault and Pynchon. Derrida’s earlier deconstructive works argue that individuals are less in control of what they write and say than they believe; accordingly, it may be more accurate to say that languages speak and write individuals than to say that writers create unique and original meanings. Systems of meaning in fact establish what can and cannot be said, and undermine any straightforward assertion, whether by a conventional or a revolutionary thinker. (For all their disagreements and differences of emphasis, the resemblances are clear between this view of Derrida and Foucault’s view of the pervasive effects of epistemes.) But in later works, Derrida has modified this rather ahistorical view in which the role of politics is unclear. In the recent Politics of Friendship (1994), he has investigated the way in which the realm of the political has been constituted by understandings of who is a friend and who an enemy. In his previous work, Specters of Marx (1993), he investigated Marx’s thought and communism as a specter not only from the past, in the wake of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, but also from the future, as a claim and obligation on the present generation. He also argues forcefully there against the notion that the current triumph of market economies signifies an end to history. In both works, Derrida trains his characteristic interpretative strategies on texts of political and ethical philosophy not in order to deconstruct them entirely, but to find a way toward a fuller and more adequate idea of democracy and a greater equality of goods as well as opportunities.11
A change in the critical analysis of ideologies can serve as a further instance of a shift between the sixties and the late eighties from a view of an all-encompassing system of control to a view that sees a possibility for effective ethico-political action, without relying on the subject of liberal humanism or Marxism. In Louis Althusser’s account, the process of subject formation through hailing or interpellation by an ideological system is inescapable; no position exists outside the apparatuses of ideology. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, by contrast, adopt and extend Antonio Gramsci’s exploration of the possibilities for constructing multiple, provisional, and oppositional subject positions not as a result of interpellation from above and outside. They propose that formation of such flexible subject positions will allow for the articulation in discourse of equivalences or intersecting interests among various subordinate groups. For Laclau and Mouffe, as well as for Levinas, one does not possess a pre-existing identity or subject position from which one is able to make alliances; rather, one’s subject position takes shape only in relation to one’s sympathies with other subjects. The renewed concern among social theorists in the last ten or fifteen years with exploring the workings and implications of various public spheres can be seen as congruent to the shift effected by Laclau and Mouffe in the analysis of ideologies. I refer of course to Jürgen Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) and the extensive work that it has generated (see, for example, Calhoun).
Focusing on hybrids who combine human with mechanical or animal traits, Donna Haraway’s reflections in “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985) constitute a significant antecedent to Pynchon’s representation of intelligent and ethical animal and mechanical creatures in Mason & Dixon. Haraway intends to move beyond a characterization of cyborgs solely as frightening monsters who signify a declension from the human. Arguing that in some ways we are all cyborgs now (177), she articulates a position that combines anxiety with an exuberant embrace of such a fractured and hybrid identity.12 Her concern arises from the sense that the new networks of information may prove to be even more effective means of control than the older hierarchies of domination–a perhaps justified paranoia. But she celebrates the cyborg identity because she sees its hybridity as a figure for the breakdown of all kinds of boundaries and categories.13 By replicating rather than reproducing, for example, cyborgs undercut heterosexism; the partly mechanical cyborg also promises a “utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender” (181). Significantly, Haraway devotes much of her essay that elaborates her “myth of the cyborg” to the possibilities for political action that may be opened up by the “breakdown of clean distinctions between organism and machine” (174).14 As in Laclau and Mouffe, these include possibilities for feminists, socialists, and women of color to recognize equivalences and form associations across boundaries.15
A few years after Haraway’s essay was first published, Bruno Latour argued for an even more extended understanding of hybrids as objects that include elements both of the human and the nonhuman. On this definition, everything that results from mixing human activity with nonhuman materials and beings is hybrid, including, for example, scientific laboratories, everyday tools and conveniences of technology, even phenomena such as the rise of the average temperature of the earth. Latour argues that a double movement characterizes modernity: it encourages the proliferation of hybrids, but denies their existence, recognizing only the opposed poles of nature and society. Overtly, the modern tries to keep the human and nonhuman pure and distinct, but covertly it produces a massive mediation between the two. Latour suggests we recognize that the attempt at purification never worked, and that the multiplication of hybrids has proceeded at an increasing pace. Thus, we have never been modern: we have never successfully separated nature and society, the human and nonhuman. Latour calls neither for a return to the premodern nor for an embrace of the postmodern (which he attacks for being an extreme form of modern thought), but rather for the deliberate cultivation of a “nonmodern” thought and practice that will devote its attention precisely to the kinds and implications of the hybrid objects that mediate between the human and nonhuman.16
I will conclude this brief survey of developments in accord with an other than postmodern paradigm by citing two popular works from the early eighties that are thus approximately contemporary with Foucault’s late writings, Haraway’s essay, and Laclau and Mouffe’s book; both works give evidence of an increased acceptance of hybrids combining human character with machines or artificial intelligence. In Blade Runner (1982), directed by Ridley Scott, the manufactured humans or replicants exhibit not only more intelligence and cunning, but also more emotional intensity and desire for life than do the organic humans who hunt and kill them. In William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), the founding text of cyberfiction, all the principal human characters either have extensive mechanical implants or live significant portions of their lives in cyberspace; more importantly, the protagonist turns out to be an artificial intelligence who has for his own purposes conceived and directed the elaborate plot involving all the humans in the novel. Neither of these works grants ethical superiority to or otherwise privileges organic humans over such hybrid forms of existence. In their emphasis on hybrids and their ethics, these fictional narratives join the philosophical texts that may give evidence of an emerging paradigm.
The roughly contemporaneous careers of Foucault and Pynchon (Madness and Civilization was published in 1961, and V. in 1963, with part appearing as a short story in 1961) reveal a turn from a more deterministic view of the efficacy of normalizing forces (in the case of Foucault) or of the forces of inanimacy and death (in the case of Pynchon). This shift away from the high postmodern leads to an increased resistance to paranoid totalizing and to greater possibilities for ethico-political action, even if it remains limited and circumscribed. The late works of both authors see human beings less as automata, objects of control, and more as creatures with some capacity for effective action, self-discipline, and self-control.
The first two dimensions of Foucault’s work are concerned with controlling systems of thought and of power. In the phase that begins with Madness and Civilization and extends through The Order of Things (1968), Foucault explores the dimension of knowledge, concentrating on what can be known and uttered in different epochs of knowledge or epistemes. In Madness and Civilization, he emphasizes that whatever lies outside the field of the rational, as that changes from one period to another, can only been seen as madness, as non-sense. In The Order of Things, he argues that the rules of formation that give a unity to any period exist outside the consciousness of those who work within the forms of knowledge of the time. In The Order of Things, he goes so far as to declare that such systems not only “evade the consciousness” of individuals, but are all-encompassing and monolithic: “In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice” (168).
Soon after The Order of Things, Foucault shifts his focus from systems of knowledge to systems of power. In “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (1971), he lays out the essentials of a genealogical method that displaces the archaeological approach he had previously employed. Instead of giving priority to the discursive dimension as determinative, Foucault the practitioner of genealogical history concentrates on the intertwining of power and knowledge, the effects that constructions of knowledge have on the bodies of those subject to institutions such as the factory or the school. His focus in Discipline and Punish (1975) and the first volume of the History of Sexuality (1976) is the disciplining–the formation and constraining–of the subject by institutions of power and knowledge that include the prison and psychoanalysis. Many commentators have stressed the importance of the shift from archaeology to genealogy, from an examination of discourse to a concentration on power, and I would not deny the significant differences between the two approaches and their objects of inquiry. But there are continuities between the two as well. For one, Foucault does not abandon the analysis of discourse or knowledge in the later approach; rather, a genealogical analysis explores the workings of institutional power through the analysis of discourse, and the complex intersections of the two can often be described as the workings of power/knowledge.
In addition, regimes of knowledge and power both exist apart from the control or even the consciousness of those who participate in them; their sway is totally effective and unchallenged.17 The history of their transformations is punctuated by dramatic discontinuities, ruptures that are frequently sudden and nearly complete. No agency, group, identifiable force, or combination of causes directs alterations such as the shift described in Madness and Civilization from the practice in the middle ages of allowing the mad to wander from town to town, to the opposite practice beginning in the mid-seventeenth century of restricting their movement by confining them. Similarly lacking any clear cause is the transformation of punishment from a spectacle of the sovereign power writing on the body of the condemned, to the inculcation of control through the constant discipline of self-observation and self-regulation. Indeed, Foucault grimly observes that attempts to reform a system of excessive punishment may have contributed not to a liberating result but to the development and imposition of more effective, more internalized means of control. Foucault indicates an interest in ethics and resistance to the micrological workings of disciplinary power as early as The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), but from that work through the writing of Discipline and Punish and the first volume of The History of Sexuality, he finds it impossible to locate and specify how one might evade or resist the disciplinary forces that both form and constrain the subject.
However, even in such an uncompromising vision of knowledge or power as effecting total control, we may see elements of opposition to other forms of control. The opposition in Foucault’s works to traditional master narratives such as Marxist historiography, humanist intellectual history, and liberal narratives of progress can be seen as a parodic overturning of previous paradigms of knowledge. From this point of view, the sudden ruptures, extreme discontinuities, and failure to account for change in Foucault’s histories would have a satiric effect on established histories of progress. Foucault also makes frequent use of a satiric rhetoric of extremes; such satiric inversions resemble the parodic skepticism that is juxtaposed in other works of high postmodernism with paranoid visions of controlling systems.
Pynchon’s early and middle works, from V. through The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) to a culmination in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), express a vision similar to Foucault’s of a controlling regime just behind events and just outside perception or consciousness, which facelessly directs history, providing the possibility of unifying widely dispersed phenomena. In V., Stencil pursues evidence of Victoria Wren, Veronica the rat, the kingdom of Vheissu, and the theft of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus all as pieces of what he conceives of as “the century’s master cabal” (226). Throughout his paranoid quest for order and Benny Profane’s non-paranoid reveling in disorder and disconnectedness, the evidence accumulates that, whether under the sign of V. or not, the century’s hallmark is the declension from the animate to the inanimate, from the human to the mechanical, from the living to the dead. In Lot 49, the history of postage stamps, the decimal calendar of the French Revolution, Jacobean tragedy, a World War II battle in Italy, and a southern Californian real estate development all give evidence of the force called Tristero, and Tristero, whether it exists or not, points to a pattern of dispossession in America. In Gravity’s Rainbow, behind the war, behind the oppositions mobilized to make war, behind the nation-states of Germany, England, the U.S.S.R., and the United States, Slothrop, Enzian, and others see another order of force, designated sometimes as They, which may have staged the war in order to expand their markets or in order to find supplies and uses for their technologies. “They” are linked throughout with the chemical company I.G. Farben, as well as with Krupp, General Electric, Shell Oil, and other multinational conglomerates (Tölölyan 53-64).18 As the narrative voice says, “The real business of the War is buying and selling. The murder and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals…. The true war is a celebration of markets” (105).
In Gravity’s Rainbow, They are associated with a historical plot that leads to death, particularly through the instrumentality of science, a descent as in V. from the human to the inanimate and the mechanical, the controlled. In V. the disassembly of the Bad Priest of Malta–with her glass eyes, gold teeth, sapphire navel, and artificial limbs–provides a striking instance of the replacement of the human by the inanimate. The Rocket in Gravity’s Rainbow stands as the realization, the emblem, and the acme of this urge to death: at the end of the novel, the young Gottfried, encased in the tip of the V-2, becomes one with the Rocket as it rises and then falls to earth, bringing death both to him and to those on the ground below. Each of the controlling phenomena in the early and middle works of Pynchon–V., Tristero, They–eludes or remains on the horizon just outside full consciousness or complete apprehension. Still, each novel suggests that these structures have directed the course of history and continue to provide its motive force. In relation to all such anonymous forms of historical control, human beings take on the attributes of automata whose behavior, movements, even desires and thoughts may have been programmed or controlled.19
In all these cases, little opportunity exists to challenge, evade, limit, or change such regimes. Each work presents a pair of opposites either of which is unattractive if taken singly. The obvious alternative in V. to Stencil’s obsessive ordering is the randomness and disorder of Benny Profane and the Whole Sick Crew. The only clear alternative to the ominous significance of Tristero in Lot 49 is the possibility of no meaning at all. The only consciously chosen alternative to Them in Gravity’s Rainbow is the Counterforce, which through its resistance soon comes to mirror its opposite–the Force, Them. Slothrop ultimately evades the controlling force of the multinationals through his dispersion or scattering, but this does not appear to be a course that others can choose; it just happens, fortuitously, to Slothrop.
It is true that Pynchon also depicts Europe after the war as a place where international cartels find it difficult to control events, because nation-states and other forms of order, including capital markets, have collapsed. In the Zone, only spontaneous and temporary forms of identity and order emerge, and a kind of dangerous and beautiful anarchy reigns. Still, the Zone itself is temporary, and the authentic and crazy human contacts it encourages give way as traditional forms of social and political order are reimposed. Sites of carnival inversion, such as the Plechazunga celebration, cannot be sustained. In Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon reflects that even on the personal level, an extreme lack of connectedness may be impossible to tolerate for long (434). Throughout these early and middle works, Pynchon resists authorizing either an ominous order or meaningless disorder; he implies instead that it is necessary if almost impossible somehow to combine the urge to order and meaning with a skepticism that recognizes the fruitfulness of disorder and unpredictability.20
In the later careers of both Foucault and Pynchon, the vision of powerful regimes that control and direct history beneath people’s consciousness and beyond their ability to act effectively gives way to an ethics that might through self-discipline evade disciplinary subjectification (in Foucault’s thought) or to a political ethics of local resistance to the enslavement of Africans and the killing of native people (in Pynchon’s work). In The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), Foucault begins to distance himself from the idea that discursive regimes are monolithic; there he argues against a “totalitarian periodization” according to which at a certain time and in a certain culture, “everyone would think in the same way” (148). Instead, different paradigms of thought and practice coexist and overlap. Epistemological shifts affect one area of discourse and not others, as well as some groups or individuals and not others (175). In addition, in his work on governmentality in the late seventies, Foucault sees not only the growth of disciplinary governance, but also a resistance to governance, an art of not being governed so much, or in a certain way, which develops alongside and in resistance to the art of governing (“What is Critique?” 28). He pays renewed attention to Enlightenment thinkers as agents of such critique who pursue possibilities for self-governance and self-formation.
In the eight years following the publication of the first volume of The History of Sexuality perhaps the most significant shift in Foucault’s thought occurs. In Foucault’s earlier thought, there is no clear means of resisting reigning forms of thought or systems of power. It is impossible to think outside what is made utterable by the epistemological frameworks of a time, nor is it possible to alter or reform normalizing disciplinary institutions. In essays and interviews from the mid-seventies, Foucault argued that there must be sites of resistance to power, but the difficulty was to locate and specify them. To resolve the crisis that his thought had reached after adding the investigation of modes of power to the analysis of forms of knowledge, Foucault moved into a third phase or dimension. This third dimension–which did not replace the first two but carried forward the results of the earlier researches–concerned processes of subjectification.21 Foucault reconceived and rewrote the later volumes of the History so that they focus primarily not on problems of truth and power, but on an analysis of how one becomes a subject, of one’s relation to oneself, of ethics understood as an art of shaping one’s life (“Concern” 255-56, “Preface” 336, “Return” 243).
According to these works, effective action does not occur only in anonymous, culture-wide discursive and institutional realignments. Instead, as he says in discussing the later volumes of the History of Sexuality, Foucault now sees the history of cultural forms as a reservoir of ideas for shaping one’s life, a “treasury of devices, techniques, ideas, procedures, and so on that cannot exactly be reactivated” from other societies such as that of the ancient Greeks, but which “can be very useful as a tool for analyzing what’s going on now and to change it” (“Genealogy” 350). These last two points are crucial: Foucault now sees a possibility for maneuvering away from disciplinary constraints of knowledge, power, and subjectification not by means of opposing or evading an external totalizing force, but rather through adopting a disciplinary relation to oneself–the self-imposed discipline of an ethos or way of life. One who pursues such an art of living, “ethics as a form to be given to one’s behavior and life” (“Concern” 263), assumes responsibility for self-governance, for one’s own formation and subjectification. The result is not a return to the ahistorical possessive subject of liberal humanism.22 One who pursues such an ethical self-governance does not do so outside historical and cultural determinations; rather, such a project depends on knowing where we are–to what point our thought and actions have come–so that one can attempt to form oneself in another way.23 For instance, presumably today, as in the eighties, Foucault would see such awareness involving a move away from moralities based on systems of rules and regulations, and toward a post-Christian ethics (“Aesthetics” 49-50).24
Just as we can observe both continuities in and divergences between Foucault’s earlier investigations of regimes of truth and power and his late focus on subjectification and ethics, we can see continuities in and divergences between the vision of powerful impersonal forces in Pynchon’s earlier works and in his later Vineland (1990) and Mason & Dixon (1997). In Vineland, the attitude toward paranoia departs from the pattern established in Pynchon’s first three novels, but it does not entirely coincide with that in Mason & Dixon. No shadowy conspiracy of multinational or historic proportions lurks behind individual actions and historic events in Vineland.25 Instead, two repressive efforts in America’s history contribute largely to shaping the concerns of the narrative. The first of these is the attack on labor unions in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century, particularly in the Pacific Northwest and in Hollywood during the anti-communist blacklist. The second instance is the attack on liberals, unions, drugs, and the poor by the Reagan administrations in the eighties (embodied in the novel by the Republican prosecutor Brock Vond). Neither of these efforts is hidden, secret, or unknown to standard histories, even if one of the aims of the later moment was to repress historical memory of the earlier one.
However, in Mason & Dixon, Pynchon represents the world of the 1760s and of the eighteenth century generally as already largely shaped by shadowy transnational institutions. The question of where the boundary line between Maryland and Pennsylvania should be fixed aligns Calverts and their Catholic followers against Penns and their Quaker and Protestant partisans, leading eventually, perhaps, to a world-wide conspiracy of the Jesuit order–viewed as ruthless, rational, and authoritarian–against the equally world-wide reach of the British East India Company, which is interested in any extension of technical knowledge with commercial applications for the expansion of overseas markets.26 Moreover, not only others in the novel, but Mason and Dixon themselves wonder whether they were put forward by these two opposed but overarching forces: the Anglican astronomer Mason perhaps named by the Royal Society and the Astronomer Royal, Maskelyne, brother-in-law to Clive of India; the Quaker surveyor Dixon perhaps ironically named by his teacher Emerson, himself a friend of Father Le Maire, one of the Jesuits who laid out two degrees of latitude in a straight line from Rome to Rimini.
However, such speculations are repeatedly undermined by their outlandishness, mocked by a tongue-in-cheek tone and deflating puns. For instance, when they are already well advanced in their project and Dixon suggests that perhaps “we shouldn’t be runnin’ this Line…?” (478), Mason shares some of his “darker Sentiments” with his partner; Mason supposes that the Astronomer Royal may be a spy transmitting the daily Greenwich observations to French Jesuits who line up the numbers and analyze them like a kabbalistic text until they reveal a mysterious message. When Dixon responds with his own version of a “likely Conspiracy… form’d in the Interest of Trade,” it is clear that he doubts the existence of a Jesuit scheme, just as Mason disputes the relevance of the East India Company. But Dixon goes on to press Mason about evidence of trade with the spice islands:
“Can you not sense here, there,… the Scent of fresh Coriander, the Whisper of a Sarong…?”
“Sari,” corrects Mason
“Not at all Sir,– ’twas I who was sarong.” (479)
On this deflating note, the two-page section with its consideration of vast conspiracies breaks off. Mason and Dixon’s discussions of possible conspiracies usually become absurd in this way and stop abruptly, lead nowhere, or otherwise fail to reach even a tentative conclusion.27
A much more committed conspiracy theorist is the feng-shui master and megalomanical captain Zhang, who believes that the Jesuits serve as agents for aliens who have visited earth and departed, leaving behind instructions to mark the planet with long straight lines as signs carrying an unknown message (601). But the alternative to such paranoid flights of order is not, as it was in earlier works, an equally intolerable state of meaningless disconnection and disorder. Instead, many characters in the novel acknowledge the central position that Zhang articulates–that the boundary line effects an unnatural gouging of the earth by scientific rationality–without taking it to the paranoid lengths that he does (see Cowart, “Luddite” 361). Despite a world-wide system of Jesuit telegraphs and the transnational trading posts of the Company, no system of control in this novel carries the realistic possibility of being as all-encompassing and effective as the fantasized or depicted controlling regimes of history in Gravity’s Rainbow, V., and The Crying of Lot 49. In Mason & Dixon, such systems are undercut by the extremists who embrace them. Acknowledging the force of Zhang’s criticism of the line does not mean that Mason and Dixon become obsessed questers like Stencil in V. or mad scientific authorities like Blicero/Weissman and Pointsman in Gravity’s Rainbow. Rather, the position of Mason and Dixon more nearly resembles that of Oedipa Maas, who comes to see more than she saw at first, to whom revelations happen which may or may not add up to evidence of a wide-ranging conspiracy, but which are nevertheless historically significant and demand an ethical response.
In The Crying of Lot 49, whether Tristero actually exists or whether Oedipa has become paranoid finally becomes a moot question in the face of the undeniable evidence of dispossession in America that Oedipa comes to recognize (Palmeri 993). In Mason & Dixon, such questions as whether Mason is being used by the East India Company or Dixon by the Jesuits remain undecidable, but also become moot in the face of the growing conviction that the line constitutes a perhaps indefensible wounding of the earth’s surface that benefits only land speculators. Both Mason and Dixon finally acknowledge that “the Line is exactly what Zhang and a number of others have been styling it all along–a conduit for Evil… by its nature corrupt, of use at Trail’s End only to those who would profit from the sale and division and resale of Lands” (701). Such a conviction constitutes a moderate position between paranoid certainties and mindless obliviousness that is not excluded from this novel as it was from Lot 49 (136).
At one point after the line has been run, Dixon, like Oedipa, moves beyond a concern with the particulars of various conspiracies and plots by which they may have been used to observe that the common elements in all their postings have been slavery and dispossession, and that perhaps they should acknowledge their participation in these enterprises (682-93). Mason and Dixon thus possess a significant capacity for critical reflection and for ethical action. In the first section of the novel, while in South Africa, despite the constantly eroticized atmosphere, both of them refuse to sleep with and impregnate slave women as the South Africans want them to do, because they would only be making further slaves for the Dutch (61-67). Once they are in America, but before the running of the line, Dixon accompanies Mason to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where twenty-six unarmed Indians seeking protection in a jailhouse were massacred not long before. There Dixon argues with the murderous Lancastrians, earning Mason’s respect (343), then each separately visits the site and hopes that the killers meet a just judgment (346-47). Later, in Baltimore, after the line has been completed and the Quaker Dixon has seen too much of slavery both in Capetown and in America, he stops a slave-trader from whipping a group of slaves, turns the whip briefly against the trader, and frees the slaves, while Mason watches his back (698-99). Such episodes as these do not change the system of slavery in South Africa or the American South, nor do they prevent the dispossession and killing of native people in America. But they demonstrate that Dixon and Mason have the capacity to act ethically, that they are not entirely controlled by an all-engrossing system of power and thought in their time; they can act against the system, even if their action is local and limited in its effects.
Such an ethos may not provide as elegant a means of evading control as does Slothrop’s disappearance in Gravity’s Rainbow, but it is more accessible to those who live paraliterary lives, outside fictional narratives. The actions of Dixon and Mason point to the possibility of a political ethics that is not identical with but may be compared to Foucault’s late ethics of self-discipline. Crucially, Pynchon’s protagonists do not retreat to a private world of purchasable comforts where they might deny their involvement in the larger world. Their local ethical action may not proceed as far as Foucault would want in dismantling the humanist subject, but they move in the same direction by challenging rather than embracing the oppressive systems of their time, neither denying their responsibility nor exaggerating their effectiveness.
There is one other notable way in which Mason & Dixon revises the representation of systems of control in the earlier novels. Especially in V. and Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon analyzes the declension from the human to the mechanical, the colonizing of the living by the inanimate, the making of human beings into automata by systems of scientific knowledge and power. Vineland presents a view of human-machine hybrids which stands apart from the view in the earlier novels and more closely resembles what will come in Mason & Dixon. In the earlier novel, “Tubefreaks” such as Hector Zuñiga or Zoyd Wheeler who act and think in imitation of the characters in television programs appear as colorful, slightly eccentric characters, not victims of an ominous conspiracy to liquefy the brains of Americans. But perhaps the most important evidence in Vineland of the beginnings of a reversal in Pynchon’s representation of hybrid creatures comes from his depiction of the Thanatoids. These characters–who after death continue to exist, eat, sleep, dance, and talk, only at a slower rate than the living–revise the representation of the living dead as frightening, threatening zombies. In fact, they are mostly gentle, and include some of the most decent and sympathetic characters in the novel. Like the Tubefreaks, they occupy a middle ground between the living and the dead or the real and the unreal that produces not danger and anxiety so much as a muted and sorrowful desire.
In Mason & Dixon, Pynchon proceeds much further by representing hybrid forms such as mechanical animals who take on the attributes of living creatures–intelligence, speech, a sense of justice, even a capacity for love. The movement in this novel reverses that in the early works by proceeding not from the human to the mechanical, but from the mechanical to the sentient. It is difficult to name all the intelligent animals and articulate machines in Mason & Dixon. They include not only conversing chronometers, but the celebrated, witty, and dangerous Duck of Vaucanson, whose involvement with the expedition contributes its one love story to the novel, and who also constitutes one of its moral centers, when she observes the “minor tho’ morally problematick part” (669) that Mason and Dixon play in world history. I would also note the numerous intelligent and ethical animals in the novel–from the gigantic Golem who protects the mad poet, Timothy Tox, and who “takes a dim view of oppression” (490), to the electric eel who could kill those who touch him when he is exhibited, but chooses benevolently not to. Dogs play a significant role in the narrative both early and late. The Learned English Dog, also known as Fang, may have met an untoward end, perhaps having taken his own life as a result of too trustingly conversing with humans. Later, a dog named Snake warily keeps his own counsel when Mason asks about his old friend Fang. Near the end of the novel, in the guise of another younger dog, Fang visits Mason and Dixon when they have returned to England, letting them know as they sleep that when the two of them are together, he will be with them (757). The mechanical Duck, the electric eel, the learned and thoughtful dogs, as well as the other hybrid creatures that figure in the novel, whether mechanical or animal (such as Zepho the beaver-man), are unlike most of those hybrid machine-creatures who were associated with control, lack of choice, and death in the earlier novels. These later mechanical and animal creatures exhibit life, wit, and moral intelligence. Instead of humans becoming automata, these automata and animals have become their own moral agents.28 The possibility these hybrids have of choosing to act ethically in solidarity with others confirms the moderating of the paranoid vision that dominates Pynchon’s earlier novels.
Although Pynchon’s representation of animals as ethical agents might appear isolated and anomalous, in fact one of the most distinctive lines of inquiry in contemporary philosophy concerns the ethical status of animals. Peter Singer, for example, has argued that in ethical deliberations the suffering of other species should count equally with similar kinds of suffering experienced by human beings (Animal Liberation 9), and that it is wrong to kill animals who can anticipate the future, because their death deprives such animals of future enjoyments (Practical Ethics 93-105). Tom Regan similarly makes the case that all animals who can be understood as being “subjects of a life”–and not just human beings–have inherent value, and a right to have that value respected. Rosemary Rodd maintains that many species of animals possess traits–such as the capacity for suffering and anticipating the future, consciousness, and a sense of self–on the basis of which we assign ethical value to human beings.29 Both in Disgrace and in The Lives of Animals, J. M. Coetzee questions the morality of killing animals in order to eat them. In responding to Coetzee and extending his reflections, Barbara Smuts has argued for the significance of interpersonal relations between humans and animals (Lives of Animals 107-20). Thus, far from being idiosyncratic, Pynchon’s concern to represent animals as ethical agents engaged in interpersonal relations with humans actually participates in an active and continuing philosophical conversation–one that first emerges around the same time as the late works of Foucault in the late seventies and early eighties.
Mason & Dixon thus joins Foucault’s later work in moving from an earlier vision of regimes of power that preclude choice and change to a vision of a self-disciplined subject and of some limited ethico-political agency.30 Although Foucault and Pynchon ascribe to agents in their late works an ability to distance themselves critically from their historical present, such a limited critical agency does not derive from a return to a humanist (Foucault) or purely human (Pynchon) individual subject. Rather, it is the late postmodern that is committed to recuperating the liberal individual: The X-Files and The Matrix, for example, posit a global conspiracy so that a heroic individual agent can save human beings from becoming hybrids with machines or aliens. By contrast, Foucault, Pynchon, Haraway, Laclau and Mouffe, and the other than postmodern thinkers, are interested in the opposite of such a return to the autonomous individual subject; they are investigating subjectification and subject positions, trying to propose ways that people can participate in forming themselves as local ethical and political agents. Their turn away from paranoid or conspiratorial visions accompanies the turn away from the liberal individual subject; moreover, as they decline to idealize the unmixed human self, they are more open to hybrids combining humans with animals or machines. Beside those discussed so far, other contemporary thinkers are also attempting to work out what forms of political and ethical agency can be pursued based on a fissured or incomplete subject rather than the unitary subject of liberal humanism (see Butler, Laclau, Zizek). Still, it is important to recognize that The X-Files and other examples of late postmodernism participate in the dominant form of consumer culture, encouraging a private consumer self. The other than postmodern thought of Foucault, Pynchon, and those who similarly challenge such privatizing subjectification remains a less prominent, emerging formation.
By drawing attention to divergent strands in the contemporary cultural matrix, this essay hopes to contribute to an understanding of a question to which Foucault returned repeatedly: the question of “what our present is,” of where we are now. Among the possibilities that we face I have sketched two. Late postmodernism, paranoid about global and high-tech systems of control, also remains committed to a consuming subject formed in the interests of such multinational conglomerates. What is other than postmodern, by contrast, explores how we might form subject positions not through private consumption, but through local ethical and political action. It may be important today to resist fantasies that define all but one of us as politically powerless, as well as the attempt to restore a pure but illusory human identity in opposition to machines, aliens, or animals. As Foucault famously wrote at the conclusion of The Order of Things, “man,” the unmixed, abstract human being, “is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end” (387).
I would like to thank Terry Reilly, who organized the session “Reading Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon” at the 1998 MLA, at which an early version of this essay was presented; Jeffrey Nealon, for extensive and helpful comments which led to strengthening the argument here; and Nancy San Martín and Michael Sinowitz, for reading and commenting on an earlier version of the essay.
1. On the use of the terms residual, emergent, and dominant in the analysis of changes between epochs, see Williams 121-27.
2. According to Melley, paranoia in postwar culture arises from “agency panic,” an urgent anxiety about whether individuals control their own actions. In most instances, such a concern leads to a recuperation of the autonomous self (89); I would see such works as examples of a late postmodernism. However, as Melley argues, in writers such as Foucault, Pynchon, and Acker, the radical challenge to individual agency stands without reinscription of the autonomous subject (102); I see these works presenting an alternate view that is other than postmodern.
3. In Wising Up the Marks, Timothy Murphy characterizes William Burroughs as “amodern” because his work stands outside both modernist and postmodern modes of writing. Burroughs’s attempt to dissolve the subject because it serves as a system of control finds parallels in the projects of both Foucault and Pynchon. However, since the earlier work of Pynchon and Foucault has been closely identified with postmodern writing and thought, I believe that “other than postmodern” indicates more accurately than “amodern” the context of the direction taken by their late work.
4. For a brief overview of nativist paranoia in nineteenth-century America, see Hofstadter.
5. Jodi Dean believes that it is not significant that Mulder is an FBI agent because his relation to much of the bureau is largely antagonistic (206). However, the identity of the two protagonists is established in the title sequence for each episode only by their FBI identification badges. Moreover, Mulder and Scully are far from being rogue agents: they are often supported by Assistant Director Skinner; and they obtain crucial help in many of their cases from the bureau.
6. Because the green smoking “blood” of the aliens is toxic to most humans, the aliens can serve as figures not only for foreigners but also for those who are HIV positive: although they are impossible to identify visually, contact with their blood can be fatal to the previously healthy.
7. By virtue of the open-endedness of the multi-year series, The X-Files also continually defers a final, unambiguous revelation of that truth.
8. A quartet of novels by Dan Simmons that begins with Hyperion (1989) and concludes with The Rise of Endymion (1997) also participates in a late postmodernism. Like The Matrix, these novels present a powerful artificial intelligence network as controlling future human history; like The X-Files, they foresee a return to Catholic belief. Simmons presents a sympathetic view of a human-machine, but only because the character chooses human mortality and love over mechanical indestructibility.
9. Totality and Infinity was first published in 1961, about twenty years before most of the works that I characterize here as other than postmodern. But a crucial thinker or writer often proves to have anticipated a later development by several decades or a generation. For example, Borges published his postmodern Ficciones in the late thirties and early forties, about two decades before the emergence of an identifiable postmodernism. Similarly, Beckett’s trilogy (Murphy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable, 1951-53) and plays such as Waiting for Godot (1952) and Endgame (1957) give evidence of many traits of postmodernism when it is still emergent and before it becomes a dominant form of cultural production.
10. See also Nealon’s Alterity Politics, which makes use of Levinas’s thought in constructing its argument for a politics based on a response to the other rather than on the identity of the self.
11. On the political and ethical implications of Derrida’s deconstruction, especially in Specters and Politics, see Critchley 83-105, 143-82, 254-86.
12. For another view of hybrids such as cyborgs, see Hayles, who emphasizes that human embodiment remains crucial and undeniable even in virtual realities.
13. Haraway’s celebration of what she sees as cyborg identity is not widely shared, but some other ambivalently positive depictions of cyborgs can be located in works of the last fifteen years. One might cite, for example, the T100 cyborg in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) who returns from the future a second time not to destroy but to protect the future savior of humanity from an even more advanced, more predatory cyborg.
14. In a view that parallels the one suggested here, David Simpson sees Haraway and other scientists like her as searching for something “more than the academic postmodern” (167).
15. Paul McCarthy argues for the need for a turn to political-ethical concerns in postmodernism, taking texts by Deleuze and Guattari as his touchstones for such a shift. In terms of the present argument, we might see in the human desiring machines and bodies without organs of Deleuze and Guattari another significant positive instance of hybridity between humans and machines. Deleuze and Guattari also seek to move beyond a paranoid culture based on the control of the Law to a more nomadic and resistant form of existence.
16. Latour employs “nonmodern” (47 and 134) by contrast with an idea of modernity that has been dominant for the last three and a half centuries. I concur with his call to recognize the importance of hybrid objects. However, my understanding of what is other than postmodern diverges from Latour’s “nonmodern” thought in that it turns away from a postmodernism that has been dominant only during the last thirty-five years, but not from Western thought since the middle of the seventeenth century.
17. In Foucault’s thought, control results from a force internal to the system; by contrast, in works such as The X-Files, the source of the conspiracy is external to the system. This contrast helps clarify the distinction between the high postmodernism of Foucault’s early writings and the more rigidly formulaic late postmodernism of The X-Files.
18. Berressem observes that Foucault’s theory of power from the mid-seventies “presides for long stretches over the poetics of Gravity’s Rainbow” (206).
19. McConnell argues that in Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon recommends an increased awareness of our involvement in sado-masochistic power relations as a means of reducing their sway, just as, at about the same time, Foucault seeks to make visible previously invisible structures for disciplining the subject (164).
20. Molly Hite argues similarly that although Pynchon’s questing protagonists are obsessed with extremes, the opposition between absolute order and absolute meaninglessness does not exhaust the possibilities; connections may link some phenomena, but not all. As Hite points out, acceptance of either extreme deprives characters of ethical agency, so the difficulty in Pynchon’s first three novels is to locate absent or elusive middle grounds. McHoul and Wills maintain that Gravity’s Rainbow is post-rhetorical in the sense that no rhetorical figure or genre will account for the way the text works. They see any dualism in the text being overridden or leveled by becoming in its turn the first term of another opposition–between the original pair and a material substance or toponym that exceeds or combines the opposed elements of the first pair. They find a close relation between this practice of Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow and what Derrida analyzes as the workings of the supplement (52-63); I see in this pattern in Pynchon’s narrative a satiric leveling of hierarchies that is related to the exclusion of middle grounds. Francisco Collado-Rodriguez argues that throughout his novels, Pynchon interrogates the law of excluded middles; I will argue that Mason & Dixon offers more concrete examples of possible middle grounds between unacceptable extremes than do the other novels.
21. Deleuze sees a greater distance and discontinuity between the second and third phases of Foucault’s thought than between the first two. He says, for example: “You can say why he passes from knowledge to power, as long as you see that he’s not passing from one to the other as from some overall theme to some other theme, but moving from his novel conception of knowledge to an equally inventive new conception of power. This applies still more to the ‘subject’: it takes him years of silence to get, in his last books, to this third dimension” (92; see also 105).
22. Deleuze maintains repeatedly that Foucault’s focus on the processes of subjectification does not involve a return to the liberal humanist subject, but rather suggests the need for an historically aware process that takes the ethical work-in-progress away from the ends for which cultural institutions seek to form subjects, for example, as possessive individuals and consumers (Negotiations 95, 106, 115, 118).
23. As Paul Veyne notes, Foucault does not argue that an ancient ethos can be resuscitated and inserted unchanged in the modern world; rather, a personal ethos based on a care for the self might be one element of an ethical response to the question of the present.
24. Perhaps the closest model for the kind of ethical action Foucault calls for would be the project Nietzsche ascribes to “we knowers,” the “good Europeans,” whom he characterizes at the conclusion of The Genealogy of Morality as “heirs of Europe’s longest and bravest self-overcoming” (116-17). Christian belief having been overcome by a Christian morality grounded on the will to truth, the latter must overcome itself in a new ethos which will paradoxically be an outgrowth of and stand in opposition to the will to truth. Similarly, Foucault sees the forces of disciplinary society being countered by an ethos that is a form of disciplinarity yet also works in opposition to it–an ethos of self-governance based neither on the will to truth nor on the regulative morality tied to it.
25. Cowart sees Pynchon combining postmodern techniques and modernist concerns in Vineland (“Attenuated” 182).
26. Rather than setting Mason & Dixon in a pre-industrial past in order to allow his protagonists greater agency, Pynchon thus shows the potential for international plots and paranoia to be as present in the mid-eighteenth as in the mid-twentieth century.
27. David Seed discusses signs of conspiracies in Mason & Dixon (94-95).
28. In a reading that sees Mason & Dixon as both critiquing and participating in processes of subject formation, Thomas H. Schaub suggests that the speaking animals constitute futile attempts to speak outside the ubiquitous shaping effects of ideology (197-98).
29. For an argument against animal rights and the moral status of animals, see Carruthers.
30. In the last pages of Mason & Dixon, Pynchon makes a number of references to Foucault’s works, especially The Order of Things and Discipline and Punish. See Mason & Dixon, 723 (“Mathesis”) and 742 (“panopticon”). Collado-Rodriguez notes what he believes are some references to Foucault in Mason & Dixon (500).
Suzanne Bost
Department of English
James Madison University
bostsm@jmu.edu
Often black people can only say in tone, in nuance, in the set of the mouth, or in the shifting of the eyes what language alone cannot say. Perhaps because of the ambivalence we feel about language, we must put the body itself to use. The hearer must pay attention, take in with all the senses, so that the act of speaking and hearing moves closer, like a dance that must be entered into with one’s whole being. There is no dictionary to refer to. Perhaps every word we have uttered since slavery has in it that tension between possibility and doubt, language twisted like a horrible face–the tension from which art itself arises.
–Toi Derricotte, The Black Notebooks
Punkuwait Punkuwait Punkuwait
Punctuate Punctuate
Period.
Dem dialects don’t work
Words don’t fit like sexy slave skirts
–Jessica Care Moore, “The Words don’t FIT in my mouth”
Salt: We have fun rapping, and the crowd really grooves with us when we’re on stage.
Pepa: We give the audience something to look at. Some rappers just stand there, and they don’t have any steps. We dance very tight all through our songs.
–Salt ‘N Pepa, Hot, Cool, & Vicious
Hip hop music gets a bad rap. Far too often it seems to be about the objectification of women, but hip hop artists position themselves around this topic in very complex ways. This complexity is missed when critics ignore the relationship between the verbal, musical, and corporeal levels of hip hop performance. Even as they make a show of their bodies–giving the audience “something to look at” as Salt ‘N Pepa do–female rappers often disrupt misogynist objectification by creating dissonance between the multiple layers of their performance. This dissonance reflects both a postmodern practice of resistance–subversion from within dominant modes of racialized and sexualized containment–and a long-standing tradition in African American cultures, from slave songs and quilts with hidden meanings to linguistic games and signifying stories. Within both traditions, artistic statements circulate about more than they seem to be.1 It is impossible to say just what they are “about,” as word, body, rhythm, and melody often communicate divergent messages.
In this paper, I analyze musical texts that refuse containment and categorization as much as the bodies they represent, fusing rap, jazz, and funk with poetry, performance art, and fashion. A number of strong female voices have emerged from within the hip hop industry, using rap music forms to assert their own identities and to critique the limited identifications offered for women within the genre.2 Their strategy is consistent with hip hop arts like dissing, posturing, mastering, mixing, and parodying antecedents with multi-tracked samples.3 They employ these artistic methods in powerful raps that seem, on the lyrical level, to echo slavery’s reduction of Black women to body and capital; but rhythm, tone, melody, and voice actively subvert this objectification. Poets Toi Derricotte and Jessica Care Moore suggest, in my epigraphs, that the English language requires physical contortions–twisting faces and dancing out of slave skirts–if it is to reflect African American identities since English has been antagonistic to Africanist values, experiences, and corporealities since slavery.4 Yet using the dominant language is the only sure way to address the dominant audience. In order to gain visibility within a racist and misogynist culture, the artists I analyze invoke the objectification of Black women but twist their content to exceed this framework.
I am most interested here in the recent work of Da Brat–the first solo female rapper to go platinum, and recently named the best woman in hip hop by Russell Simmon’s “One World Music Beat.” Other female rap acts–Queen Latifah, MC Lyte, Yo-Yo–more clearly critique misogyny, but the ways in which they enact this critique distance them from the dominant media images of hip hop gender roles and thus limit their audiences. To a certain extent, Da Brat’s tremendous visibility can be attributed to the ways in which she invokes the media obsession with rap’s misogyny, “booty call,” etc. Using the familiar criteria gains Da Brat a much wider audience than her more clearly “feminist” contemporaries, and the size of this audience makes her a serious political force.5 While the nature of that political message might be ambiguous to her audience–part of the risk factor involved in the double-voiced, often parodic nature of rap–her aggressive assertion of her own mastery of the form, her direct attack on audiences’ consumption of her image, and her excessive layering of hip hop gender roles clearly do bend audience expectations about gender.6
My argument is based on frameworks that may seem incommensurate–hip hop, postmodernism, and feminism–so I want to be clear from the start how and why I invoke these terms. Hip hop is, by nature, contestorial, resistant, and political. Rob Winn’s definition, from The Voices of Urban Renewal, is useful: “Hip hop took street poetry,” formed against the “backdrop” of 1960s political contestations, “and made it accessible to the masses,” removing poetry “from the sterile confines of the classroom” and giving it “a salient street value.”7 Much recent rap music has been distanced from these political origins, but it retains the power to communicate messages on the streets. Although late capitalist industry has commodified its raps and saturated the media with a one-dimensional image of drug-addicted, violent, misogynist black masculinity, hip hop remains self-reflexive about this gangsta image as well as its own commodification, refusing to reflect any one message. Postmodernism offers strategies for interpreting the self-reflexive irony in hip hop expression. The protest that hip hop stages against black otherness is one that performs these images for the simultaneously fearful and desirous white consumer, and often signifies against them, as in Henry Louis Gates’s model of “repetition with a difference.”8 Similarly, David Foster Wallace’s analysis of the content of rap music argues that “the serious rap places the very theme of ‘theme’ under erasure… by being… self-conscious and radical enough overtly to address the very contexts of history and marginalization that have already ‘read’ the black and white communities in the racial/political/sexual/economic prejudices we respectively bring to rap’s hearing” (Costello and Wallace 98). The politics of hip hop often emerge as hidden or double meanings, the recognition of which requires both attention to internal contradictions and an understanding of African American traditions of artistic expression. Without an insight into the destabilizing nuances and referential layers of these raps, listeners might hear nothing but a simple repetition of myths of black otherness.9 Russell Potter, too, cautions that “hip-hop’s way into the spectacle is also its greatest danger: by picking up these narratives and Signifyin(g) against them, it runs the constant risk of being collapsed and conflated within them by those who don’t ‘get’ the doubleness of Signifyin(g)” (134). Yet these risks, the openness to multiple, conflicting (mis)interpretations, help hip hop to resist appropriation by, and circumscription within, dominant paradigms. It also means that hip hop never offers a closed, dictatorial message, but rather a web of possibilities, allusions, ironies, and contradictions within which listeners participate in the production of communal meanings.
Many female hip hop artists (Queen Latifah, for example) reject the term “feminist” because of its historical alliance with Euro-American middle-class concerns, its frequently inaccessible theories, its tendency to center exclusively on sex/gender as markings, and other contradictions of hip hop principles and Black urban experience.10 I pair “hip hop” with feminism in order to de-privilege Euro-centric and elitist strands of feminism and to decenter hip hop’s famed misogyny. Many rap lyrics are indeed misogynist (gangsta rap, most particularly), but this misogyny has become a myopic media obsession employed, I would argue, in order to dismiss the political value of hip hop.11 This obsession also obscures the visibility of overtly feminist rap artists since they do not fit the dominant image. In order to revise the gender image most often associated with hip hop culture, it is important both for feminists and for hip hop fans to be able to see rap music in a feminist light. Rather than merely rehashing the critique of some rappers’ violent misogyny, I find it more valuable to analyze rappers who challenge media assumptions about hip hop gender politics.
I do not draw on hip hop as a mere example for an academic feminist analytic; rather I have come to hip hop in my search for a critique of misogynist corporeal inscriptions that communicates beyond the theoretical frameworks of postmodern feminism. In music, aural cues, instruments, and performers’ bodies ground lyrics in specific cultural contexts. Music can signify beyond the language that Derricotte and Care Moore suggest is so ambivalent for African Americans. It “puts the body itself to use,” using tone, nuance, movement, and tension to communicate beyond dictionary definition (Derricote 162). Feminist rap, in particular, is compelling for the ways in which it speaks to the concerns of African Americans, of young people, and of those who lack economic or academic privilege. The feminism I find in Da Brat and others addresses these concerns and critiques the specifically racialized misogynist morphologies assigned to African American women since slavery.
Any politically effective, culturally aware feminist theory should engage the theories that are developing in popular culture. Not to do so would imply, falsely, that views from academia and from the streets have nothing relevant to offer each other. I take seriously the insistence of Russell Potter, and others, that:
Academic knowledge and hip-hop knowledge need at least to be on speaking terms, and such a dialogue depends on academics seeing that rappers have their own protocols, their own epistemologies, which cannot simply be read according to an academic laundry list of theoretical questions. (Potter 152)
In the essay that follows, I enact a dialogue between academic knowledge and hip hop knowledge. I draw on the well-established insights of feminist and anti-racist theorists of the body and performance–such as Judith Butler, bell hooks, Hazel Carby–and I bring these into conversation with the kinds of insights that may be found within the framework of hip hop culture itself.12
I draw especially on the work of feminist spoken-word artists such as Ursula Rucker, Dana Bryant, and Sarah Jones–performers who overtly critique misogyny within the terms of its circulation in hip hop culture. For instance, Sarah Jones’s description of her own strategies of resistance can help to uncover that which is empowering, but often unrecognized, in Da Brat’s tremendously publicized message. In a personal interview, Jones explains: “It’s a firm structure…. [Images of women in hip hop as “bitches and hos”] are not going away from the outside…. You have to play both sides… get in and finagle around… play within it while you do your best to poke holes in it.” The “structure” that many young African American women are subjected to is specifically rooted in hip hop stereotypes and the media’s vilification of “the ghetto.” Rap music offers the most visible response to this structure from within “the ghetto.” Since so much of the meaning of rap music is produced in communal interpretation, that meaning emerges from dialogue with stereotypes familiar to the community, other raps, and communal events. To assess the communal value of the meanings that Da Brat puts into play, then, I engage feminist methodologies that emerge from within a hip hop milieu. Rucker provides a model for rescripting the reduction of women in hip hop to sexual objects. Bryant provides a model for highlighting the excess, the real body that the “bitches and hos” stereotype cannot contain. And Jones outlines a critique within and against hip hop commodification. All three begin by emphasizing the artificiality of objectified images of Black women and undermine these images with excessive imitation, ultimately clearing space for re-imagining hip hop gender.
Despite media-bred assumptions, women rappers are not an anomaly. Though less visible to mainstream audiences, their contributions have been integral to the formation of hip hop culture. As Laura Jamison writes in her essay “Ladies First”:
Macho antics like posturing, bragging, and throwing attitude are the heart and soul of the rhyming tradition, which is probably why rap is usually considered an inherently male form (rump shakin’ videos and bee-yatch-laden lyrics probably don’t help dispel the idea, either). Female MCs have traditionally been viewed as interlopers–either butchy anomalies or cute novelties who by some fluke infiltrated a boy’s game. But the fact is, while fewer in number than men, women have been integral to rap since its formative years (a claim that can’t be made for the other dominant postwar pop music form, rock ‘n’ roll). (177)
According to studies by Jamison, Tricia Rose, Cheryl L. Keyes, Murray Forman, Nancy Guevara, William Eric Perkins, Helen Kolawole, and Joan Morgan, women helped to shape the tradition of rap music–and, according to Guevara, break-dancing, tagging, and other hip hop art forms–since the 1970s. As DJs, MCs, graffiti artists, and break-dancers, women have “mastered” the arts of digital technology, declared their authority, and defied constraints on the body and physical endurance. Their visibility is currently obscured, however, by media that love to hate rap music and, therefore, only see “gangsta rap” and “booty call.”
Images of women in hip hop today are filtered through mainstream masculinist lenses in which female rappers are reduced to gender transgressors–wearing “male-derived attire” and punctuating their lyrics with frequent “motherfucker’s”–or sexual objects–“spectacle rather than [part of] the production process,” “tramps and whores,” “nasty,” “hypersexed… hoochie mamas” (Keyes 208-209; Forman 47; Guevara 56; Morgan, “Bad Girls” 76). On the one hand, the politically active, self-assertive Queen Latifah is routinely labeled a lesbian–an intended critique meant to signify “unfeminine”–for her refusal to conform to the image of sex object.13 This reaction reflects a heterosexist gender binary that conflates strength with masculinity and with desiring women. On the other hand, acts like Salt ‘N Pepa and Da Brat are often perceived only as sexual commodities. As Kolawole says of Salt ‘N Pepa, “Their liberation has not extended to being able to appear on stage without showing considerable amounts of cleavage or being clad in tight-fitting lycra. The image is strong, but it is still designed to be acceptable to men” (12).14 This language defines female rappers only in reference to heterosexual masculinity, either as appropriated goods or as amorous spectator.15 In Spectacular Vernaculars (1995), Potter suggests that the “politics of sexuality in hip-hop” revolve around heterosexuality: “while assertive, aggressive sexuality is a key ingredient of hip-hop attitude, it has so far almost always been heterosexuality” (92). Following the gender split in this hetero-framework, Potter divides women rappers into two “schools,” “which could be called the ‘sex’ school and the ‘gangsta’ school” (93).16 In hip hop vernacular, “gangsta” and “ho” seem to function as the “criteria of intelligibility” for women, the frames through which they are seen.
Da Brat, Ursula Rucker, Dana Bryant, and Sarah Jones specifically invoke this binary in order to critique it. Rebecca Schneider’s terms for assessing feminist performance art, in The Explicit Body in Performance, illuminate the ways in which these artists’ explications of African American women’s bodies critique the normative lenses through which they are viewed:
Unfolding the body, as if pulling back velvet curtains to expose a stage, the performance artists in this book [including Carolee Schneemann, Annie Sprinkle, Karen Finley, and Spiderwoman] peel back layers of signification that surround their bodies like ghosts at a grave. Peeling at signification, bringing ghosts to visibility, they are interested to expose not an originary, true, or redemptive body, but the sedimented layers of signification themselves. (2)
When this theoretical approach is applied to women hip hop artists, their focus on sex and the body emerges as something more critical than simply assuming women’s sexual nature or catering to heterosexual masculinity (though they might seem to conform to these expectations on a superficial level). Rather than simply imitating their male counterparts, these artists interrogate the hidden meanings attached to their bodies as they have been defined historically, denaturalizing the body as we know it–“haunted” by racist and sexist discourses.17
Da Brat, Rucker, Bryant, and Jones dissect the body as a sedimentation of heterosexist, racist, and capitalist imperatives. For them, the “ghost” story is the legacy of slavery and its narratives of legitimization that defined Black women as sexual property or “oversexed” animals. As Bryant says, “There’s nothing wrong with being a wild woman, but we’ve been bludgeoned by that image…. It’s important that [the image] be harnessed by women and redefined for what it truly is” (qtd. in McDonnell 78). This critique resembles a postmodern (or Butlerian) dynamic of resistance: attacking the image from inside by revealing its inner workings. Rather than simply objectifying themselves in exchange for power, these artists effect a powerful critique of the misogynist status quo by repeating “gangsta” and “ho” imagery excessively so as to expose the grotesque underlying assumptions.
Ursula Rucker is overt in her feminist message, and, perhaps as a direct result, marginal in the hip hop industry, with single-track recordings on albums by other artists. According to the on-line African American Literature Book Club, “Counteracting male artists who casually linger on tales of black whoredom, Ursula plays an essential role in the rise of a new crop of female recording artists who deliver strong, intelligent, and visionary feminine flavor” (<http://authors.aalbc.com/ursula.htm>). I would argue that both Da Brat and Rucker critique these “tales of black whoredom,” but their approaches reflect different choices in self-promotion. While Da Brat, to retain her position at the forefront of the industry, must present an image that appears superficially consistent with hip hop stereotypes, Rucker more aggressively rejects “gangsta”/”ho” mythology in forthright spoken-word pieces, such as “E.R.A.” and “Return to Innocence Lost.”18 Da Brat’s success in the recording industry, her participation in MTV culture, and her use of familiar hip hop iconography–“ho”-styled attire, braids, and Glocks–gain her a larger audience, and yet her ultra-fast-paced raps and her participation in “gangsta”/”ho” imagery make any feminist content difficult to decipher. Rucker’s message is less ambiguous, she speaks more slowly, and her lyrics are clearer. Her clarity prepares listeners for the type of subversion that is less obvious in Da Brat. And by recording individual pieces on three albums by the popular hip hop band The Roots, she has a “captive audience” of rap fans who recognize her direct critique of “gangsta”/”ho” mythology.19
In “The Unlocking,” the concluding piece on The Roots’s album Do You Want More? (1994), Rucker works within and against the “ho” image to reveal its status as myth. Her strategy in “The Unlocking” is much like hattie gossett’s in “is it true what they say about colored pussy?” She engages a derogatory term that hurts women today in order to attack it directly. Rucker’s powerful and troubling piece narrates a scene in which a woman (presumably a prostitute) receives eight different men in serial fashion.20 She is sodomized, asked to perform oral sex, and called “bitch” and “whore.” Yet the whore ultimately asserts, “this was a setup,” posing the scenario as a display constructed for a witness, or a trap set for an unsuspecting victim, rather than an unmediated reality.21 It is a “masquerade,” in the sense described by Mary Ann Doane’s psychoanalytic film theory: with “potential to manufacture a distance from the image, to generate a problematic within which the image is manipulable, producible, and readable by the woman” (Doane 191). Rucker makes overt the staging of a whore to render the image “manipulable.” She “defamaliarize[s] and destabilize[s]” the “ho” image by highlighting the distance between the woman and the postures that she is expected to assume (186). The whore is revealed to be a “sedimentation” (to borrow Schneider’s term) of racist and misogynist interests rather than a natural embodiment. Rucker shows how women are often seen as reflections of misogynist myths, and she renders this reflection so literally as to expose the dehumanization behind it. She also exposes the inaccuracy of the eight men’s objectifying perceptions of the whore and the hollowness of their staged masculinity. Witnesses to the setup receive a warning regarding the violent assumptions behind “gangsta”/”ho” imagery.
The whore is first perceived through the narrative’s outer frame, which records one man calling another on the phone and talking about a “fly” woman who is a “swinger.” These men’s voices are then silenced and Rucker’s voice assumes narrative authority with the words, “I, the voyeur, appear,” framing the whore and the men’s consumption of her within the gaze of a female narrator, and making listeners aware of their participation in this voyeuristic gaze. The whore–herself silent until the end of the piece–is triply framed, by the listener “watching” the female narrator, who in turn watches the men as they address the whore. This self-reflexive framing highlights the ways in which all women are “framed” by sexually objectifying assumptions. The scene is described as a “ritual,” her mouth is described as “framed,” and man #2 tells her to bend over “like a real pro whore.” The “like” in this last example establishes “whore” as a role the woman performs–with expected rituals, poses, and positions–rather than something that she is. Rucker literalizes and critiques the dehumanization of prostitution as the background sound is mixed with barely audible noises that sound like animal calls, while the whore is “digging” her “soft and lotioned knees” into the floor. Such excess takes any pleasure out of the spectacle by rendering it hyper-real, disturbing audiences by forcing them to witness these shocking images in vivid detail.
Though the scene originates in the perception of women as whores, Rucker’s use of sound allows her to disrupt this perception.22 Phones ringing “mid-thrust” and meaningful bass line pauses interrupting copulation run counter to the dominant narrative (as in the line “he never could quite see above… her mound,” which separates “her mound” from the seeing). Reminders that the woman has an identity beyond sex object also intrude upon the extended sex scene:
So one goes north, the other south.
To sanctified places where in-house spirits will later
wash away all traces of their ill-spoken words and complacent faces.
And then, like their minutemen predecessors,
lewd, aggrandized sexual endeavors end abrupt
‘cuz neither one of them could keep their weak shit up.
Corrupt, fifth one steps to her,
hip hop court jester, think he want to impress her.
“Hey slim, I heard you was a spinner,
sit on up top this thick black dick and work it like a winner.”
With a quickness he got his pseudo thickness all up in her
but suddenly he… stops mid-thrust.
[phone ring]…
Got him stuck in a death cunt clutch.
He fast falls from the force of her tight pussy punch,
just like the rest of that sorry-ass bunch.
Rucker undermines the whore’s “ho” image by speaking of her sexual agency, her “sanctified places,” and her own “in-house spirits.” With increasing frequency as the narrative progresses, the narrator insults the men’s sexual prowess in the hip hop tradition of “dissing”: she attacks the men where it hurts most, revealing the “abrupt” endings to their sexual endeavors, critiquing man #5’s “pseudo-thickness,” describing man #6’s prowess as “inactive shit,” and concluding, after his “pre-pre-pre-ejaculation,” that “she just wasted good pussy and time.”
Ultimately, the whore’s body resists its construction as object when her “pussy” “punch[es]” man #5, taking on active, aggressive, penetrative form. Following these assertions of subjectivity, the whore appropriates “gangsta” style violence from men on the streets by taking up a “fully-loaded Glock” and aiming it at the “eight shriveled-up cocks” in her bedroom. As with Da Brat, Rucker’s whore threatens “ho” mythology by embodying the “gangsta” at the same time, coupling what are supposed to be opposite poles. How can the “ho” be regarded as a passive object of men’s sexual consumption when she has a gun trained on their penises? The whore ultimately de-authorizes phallocentrism by objectifying the men’s penises and speaking with her own lips, when she “parts lips, not expressly made for milking dicks.” This description invokes and overturns the misogynist portrayal of women’s mouths–earlier described by man #4 as “DSL’s” [dick-sucking lips]–as holes to be penetrated by penises. With another significant pause, “and then… she speaks,” the whore authorizes herself as subject and postures as such: “Now tell me what… what’s my name.” This demand for recognition is common in male rappers’ contests for mastery, and the whore asserts it “now,” after she has moved beyond her objectified role. The final sound is the “cock” of a gun, an unambiguous threat that silences the “cocks” of the men and leaves power in the hands of the woman. By reversing the power dynamic in the “ho” narrative, Rucker deconstructs the gendered myths that underlie it. From this conclusion, which seems all the more powerful in juxtaposition with the whore’s initial objectification, women can demand to be recognized as individual subjects.
It is difficult to characterize Dana Bryant’s music in terms of available categories; rap, R & B, gospel, spoken word, and World Beat would all be applicable. She is also a Nuyorican Poets Café Grand Slam Champion (<http://www3.mistral.co.uk/wallis/dana.htm>). As Evelyn McDonnell writes, in a Ms. magazine article entitled “Divas Declare a Spoken-Word Revolution,” Bryant resists containment within any single genre and “maintain[s] [her] freedom and complexity from inside the record biz” (78). In her album Wishing from the Top (1996), Bryant moves chameleon-like between musical styles, and simultaneously pays tribute to and signifies upon her diverse foremothers: grandmothers, worshippers at a Southern Baptist church, makers of African-derived cuisine, wearers of “Dominican girdles,” Barry White fans, Ntozake Shange, bell hooks. In “Canis Rufus: Ode to Chaka Khan,” Bryant initially masquerades as funk star/sex goddess Chaka Khan by assuming a funk musical script and exploring Chaka’s stage construction. This song, like Rucker’s, interrogates the assumptions behind “ho” imagery. Bryant pulls back the curtains and uncovers the layers of Chaka’s performance–as the artists in Schneider’s study “peel back layers of signification”–to deconstruct the inscription of her body.
The audience “sees” Chaka one piece at a time, first “knifin’ the curtain / open with bejeweled fingers,” then “her head / laden with citrus sweetened hairs– / medusian ropes swingin’,” moving down to her “lips / plentiful soft / and smackin’ / sweet badass’s,” then:
Her stomach stripped of all but bronze blue flesh
beaded rings of baby peacock feathers- her hips swayin’ chains
of lilies laced wid sense-amelia23
This gradual revelation of body parts resembles a striptease, but each part is covered in jewels, scents, dyes, and feathers. This body is an artificial composite. It is excessively styled, exotic, and fragmented, never whole, natural, or naked, despite the description of Chaka’s stomach as “stripped.” As a striptease, these lines show how a woman’s “naked” body is never truly naked, but always inscribed (or “laced”) with assumptions attached throughout history. It is a sedimentation of constructions, assigned a list of mythic types: “circe,” “demoness,” “the voodoo chile / jimi hendrix plucked strings to conjure up.” All of these inscriptions incorporate “ghost stories” left from slavery: the perception of Black women as sexual demons or exotic artifacts and the myth that they held power to cast spells on unwitting victims. The “voodoo chile” is not just Jimi Hendrix’s fantasy, but also that of slave masters who wished to deny their own culpability for sexual relations with slaves.24
About two-thirds of the way through the song, the gaze travels down Chaka’s body to her “crotch / explodin’ light- / mound of venus rainin’ salt n flame on open lifted stadium faces.” These lines reveal the body in front of an audience and blow it up in their faces. They also introduce a transition in melody and instrumental background. A hard-rapping, heavy-rhythmed, deep-bassed sound overtakes Chaka’s funky one at this point. Although it would be inaccurate to say that one musical sound is Bryant’s more than any other, this change in style makes it seem as though Bryant is asserting her own musical authority and taking a step back from Chaka’s funk role. The effect is exhilarating and creates a new perspective. Bryant says of this piece:
My poem isn’t necessarily about Chaka. It has more to do with the feeling that sound makes happen in me, the possibilities it opens, to break free of the fetters of self-censorship. It’s important for me as a black woman because I’ve always shrunk away from my sexuality, because it’s been wielded as a blunt instrument against me. (qtd. in McDonnell 78)
This statement suggests that music can liberate Black women from racist and sexist containments and the “fetters” and silences that are left from slavery. Indeed, it is sound that detonates the objectified body of Chaka Khan. The instrumental and vocal components shift at the same time as the lyrics describe Chaka’s cunt exploding and raining down upon the uplifted gazes of spectators. The body as sexual spectacle is now–from this new perspective–too excessive to be contained by skin. It resists the contours of “object” and turns against its desiring viewers.
After creating this critical distance from Chaka Khan, Bryant raps:
she too literal · she too extreme · much too
seamy · much too obscene · I say ·
SCREAM SISTA
These lines describe the “literal” body as excessive, implying that no one wants the “real” body, but merely the myths, symbols, and images inscribed upon a passive form. This body is active, reaches out at spectators. As with the punching “pussy” in Rucker’s piece, the “real” crotch challenges an objectifying gaze. The rain from Chaka’s “mound” makes her body grotesque and immanent, unlike the song’s first image of her, viewed on stage from a distance. Like Rucker, Bryant renders the “ho” too much to be desirable. Yet Bryant’s strategy is a bit different. She exposes the literal “matter” behind the masquerade, insisting on the reality of the body that has been so culturally inscribed. And the relationship between the actual body and the “ho” image is an antagonistic one. If we could take a step back to view the body without the mediations of exotic feathers and “medusian ropes”–a step that Bryant’s song simulates with the change in musical perspective–“salt n flame” would detonate the illusion in our faces.25
Performance artist/MC/poet/activist Sarah Jones, like Rucker, also speaks from the “underground” of hip hop culture (<http://www.survivalsoundz.com/sarahjones/>). Yet by performing in different types of venues–including the hip hop Lyricist Lounge, the Nuyorican Poets Café, Lincoln Center, the United Nations, and a variety of theaters and universities across the country–Jones gains a large and diverse audience.26 From these cross-cultural locations, her work exceeds any single gender framework–such as “gangsta”/”ho”–and she assumes multiple, fluid, border-crossing identities. She also elides heterosexuality as obsession by refusing to apply gender codes to many of her subjects (even in her sexually seductive piece “Metaphor Play”).27 Her poem, “your revolution” (a “remix” of Gil Scott-Heron’s famous spoken-word piece, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”), directly critiques gender roles in hip hop culture:
your revolution will not happen between these thighs
the real revolution
ain’t about booty size…
your revolution
will not find me in the
backseat of a Jeep with LL
hard as hell
doin’ it & doin’ it & doin’ it well (Jones 32)
These last lines are an allusion to the 1988 song, “Wild Thang,” (by 2 Much, featuring female rapper, LeShaun), which explicitly narrates a woman’s pleasure in heterosexual intercourse. This song was later sampled in LL Cool J’s 1996 “Doin It,” a song that commodified the woman’s sexuality by going platinum on the back of LeShaun’s lyrics. Jones indicates that revolution will not be found within these frames of reference. She invokes these binary gender codes (masculine/feminine, subject/object, penis/crotch) to critique both the centering of masculinist heterosexual consumption in hip hop politics and the commercial exploitation of hip hop’s legacy (represented by appropriations of Scott-Heron and LeShaun).
In a Village Voice review, James Hannaham praises Jones, herself mixed-race, for her “mastery of the mix.” Not only does her work remix elements from previous artists’ songs and poems, but, according to Hannaham, “she revels in human contradiction, particularly the irony of searching for a politics of identity in a realm where identity and image whirl in an unstable pas de deux” (108). As Hannaham tells Jones’s story, he employs a postmodern rhetoric that unmoors image from identity. He describes her life as a series of performances and tactical roles, citing her “code-switching” between “D.C. ‘Bama slang and ‘whitey-white Sarah’” and her “‘hoochie mama’ phase” (108). Jones’s one-woman show Surface Transit captures this fluidity and grounds it in current political struggles against racism, sexism, and homophobia. In a series of monologues, she assumes roles that cross lines of age, race, and sex.28 She highlights the constructedness of each identity by performing costume changes on stage, projecting a different bright color onto the backdrop for each monologue, and exaggerating each “type” in terms of image, phraseology, and racist stereotype. Each character is excessive and parodic: including a racist, hypochondriac Jewish grandmother; a macho, homophobic Italian cop; and a Black youth with an impenetrable hip hop vernacular. Seeing all of these identities enacted through Jones’s body reflects both a postmodern challenge to essence and a specifically racialized survival strategy of molding oneself to adapt to different contexts.
Three personae in this piece are particularly self-reflexive–highlighting aspects of Jones’s own artistic identity–and illuminating for a study of feminism and hip hop. As “Sugar Jones,” a West Indian actress, Jones critiques the entertainment industry for casting Black women only for “Booty Call” or “Hoochies in the Hood.” “Rashid” leads a twelve-step program for recovering MCs, in which he recites one of Jones’s hip hop spoken-word pieces, “Blood,” punctuated by self-critique for his failure to overcome the habit of rhyme. “Keysha” is a young and somewhat naive college student from Brooklyn who recites another Jones poem, “your revolution,” and who refuses to be a “video ho.”29 Jones parodies hip hop poses when a “horny-ass-wanna-be-player” tries to pick up Keysha, but she cannot hear his voice over his booming car stereo. Through Keysha, Jones confronts gender options presented to young, urban African American women, and Keysha, like Jones, wants to choose education and poetry. As Sugar, Rashid, and Keysha, Jones asserts an attempt to distance herself from “gangsta” and “ho” stereotypes; but just as Rashid unconsciously succumbs to rhyme, she is inevitably co-opted by them, too. She assumes the very roles that she critiques, and destabilizes them from within.
In “Blood,” Jones denaturalizes images of African Americans as excessive consumers–and compares these images to the marketing of Black bodies as commodities during slavery–to expose the exploitative workings of commodity capitalism upon both male and female bodies:
They [black feet] don’t fit into any shoes
not Nikes
not Reeboks
they make them in sweat shops across the sea
turn around and sell them right back to you
and you
and me
for fifty times their value (Jones 12) 30
It is a bad fit: the Black body does not fit into the dominant culture’s sneakers; the price does not correspond to the conditions of production. Past and present, slavery and advanced capitalism merge: the feet that don’t fit into Nikes and Reeboks are syntactically the same feet “sank in rusted chains” (12). Like Bryant, Jones highlights the traces left from slavery that mark Black bodies today, but Jones targets capitalism itself as the source of these markings. She mimics the voice of a slave trader examining the survivors of the Middle Passage to assign them a price, followed by parodic images of African Americans’ supposed desire for white-produced designer goods today.31 The irons that marked “black butts” directly precede “those for / pressing and curling naps yanked straight” and the designer labels on the back pockets of blue jeans. In both economies, white capital is opposed to Black body as an antagonistic force attempting to mold feet, butts, and hair in unnatural ways. Jones splices the auctioneer’s call for bids on “top of the line” slave bodies to Calvin Klein in order to suggest that the contemporary commodification of Black bodies is as dehumanizing as slavery was, and it is still whites who profit. Both slavery and consumer capitalism rest on the exploitation of Black value, effacing Africanist value systems beneath commodity values typically assigned by the dominant (white) culture. Jones highlights the disjuncture between white capitalist assumptions and black corporeality by inserting drum rolls between the voices of the slave trader and the Black consumer and by exaggerating imitated accents to draw attention to the difference in perspective.
Jones’s critique of capitalist manipulation of African American identity extends to complicit hip hop artists. “Blood” shifts into the first person plural, lamenting, “we’ll tuck our low self-esteem into some Euro-trash jeans / some over-priced shit from Donna Karan / then we’ll toast with Hennessy / to covert white supremacy” (14). This line could be an allusion to Da Brat’s hit song from Anuthatantrum, “Sittin on top of the world”: “Sittin on top of the world / With 50 grand in my hand / Steady puffin on a blunt / Sippin hennessy and coke.”32 Significantly, Jones herself wore black leggings with a visible Donna Karan logo during a June, 2000 performance of Surface Transit. Jones clearly implicates herself in this commodification when she cites “backs that cracked beneath the weight of slave names / like Jones, Smith, Johnson, Williams…” (12). White logos on black bodies represents an unnatural and effectively racist appropriation, but such commodification has saturated African American culture to such an extent that one must resist from within. Logos legitimize bodies and make them visible in the terms of the dominant American culture; being a consumer engages that culture in its own language.
Jones’s resistance occurs within these terms, in the form of excess, fluidity, shifting from role to role and brand to brand in ways that defy proprietary circumscription by any one identity or corporation. Ownership, itself, either by slave trader or clothing designer, is defied as “blood” moves rapidly from one pair of pants–or one master’s name–to the next in a long list of brands: Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Guess, Fila, etc. Disloyal consumers do not honor any label.
The dominant culture’s shoes and jeans–pushed on Black youth with inflated prices–operate politically in the same fashion as constricting race and gender assumptions. Although African American bodies might be culturally inscribed (with designer name brands as well as the imagery of the dominant culture) today, much like when they were literally branded as slaves, Nike cannot contain these bodies, Jones insists. As Rucker and Bryant subvert gendered containments, the “afroMadonna and child / and child / and child,” invoked in “Blood,” exceeds the limits of the dominant paradigm. Jones makes this point in her words as well as in her choice of genre, or, rather, in her fusion of genres, which cannot be contained by the marketing categories of poetry, theater, or music. The lines “Nawsuh, I’se don’t want to wear yo’ britches / Nawsuh, I’se don’t want to grant yo’ wishes” are spoken during an extended break in the drumbeat to centralize their message (15). Jones herself refuses to be published or recorded by any major corporations. (Her chapbook of poems, your revolution, is self-published and critiques the publishing industry with a mock publication line attributed to “iquitthiswretchedjob press.”) Her work defies any sort of reproduction, which would inevitably fail to capture some aspect of the performance (oral, visual, rhythmic, physical). Like the feet that overflow Nike shoes, Jones is an unruly commodity in the entertainment industry.
Da Brat fuses “gangsta” and “ho” in her image. When her work is read through the lens of these previous readings, it becomes clearer that, despite her commercial success, she, too, is an unruly commodity. She deconstructs the binary central to hip hop gender codes, yet her visible use of the terms of hip hop commodification keeps this subversive work marketable. Joan Morgan critiques Da Brat, along with Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown, for succumbing to stereotypes as “hypersexed… hoochie mamas” (“Bad Girls” 76). Morgan cautions, “Marketing yourself as a I’m-a-nasty-little-freak-brave-enough-to-talk-about-it will be a very risky thing for Black women” (134). I believe that Da Brat’s strategy is more complex than Morgan gives her credit for.33 Audiences looking for a critique of the “nasty-little-freak” image will find it, but she codes her critique in a subtle way that does not alienate consumers of the “ho” stereotype. Perhaps this strategy is too risky, as few critics perceive the ways in which she signifies on their judgments. Yet this double-edged promotion has also pushed Da Brat’s message to the center of hip hop culture.
Sony Music says of her newest album, Unrestricted (2000), “Though Da Brat’s peeling the layers off to reveal both her beauty and her talent, there’s still plenty of rawness to draw fans back…. She’s the perfect female MC still coming on hardcore while remaining undeniably feminine” (<http://www.sonymusic.com/artists/DaBrat/>).34 This interpretation reflects no sense of contradiction between “feminine” and “hardcore,” missing the tension between the roles of “gangsta” and “ho.” It also takes Da Brat’s image literally, suggesting that Unrestricted “uncovers” the essence of Da Brat more than her earlier work since she shows more skin than “the big-shirts-baggy-jeans-and-braids-look” she was once known for. I would argue, in contrast, that the image on Unrestricted is self-consciously artificial. Particularly when compared to the covers of Da Brat’s previous two albums, Funkdafied (1994) and Anuthatantrum (1996)–both of which feature multiple pictures of the artist in jeans, leather jackets, loose-fitting suits, and jerseys–the cover of Unrestricted appears staged, and the quasi-nudity takes on the effect of masquerade, as in Ursula Rucker’s “The Unlocking” (<http://dabratdirect.com/>).
| Cover art from Da Brat’s Unrestricted |
Rather than “peeling the layers off” of Da Brat, the album cover for Unrestricted veils, obscures, and teases, layering familiar components of both “gangsta” and “ho” mythology. What appears to be a photograph of the performer unclothed is itself almost completely covered with fragments of other pictures of Da Brat, spliced together to fill in the shape of her body. This body, rather than being naked, is constructed from heterogeneous images that jar against each other, confuse, and render it incoherent as a body. Where there should be an exposed breast, there is part of a red down jacket. Where there should be genitals, a tattooed upper arm. The composite image has five faces, located on an arm, a shoulder, a leg, a hip, and on top of the shoulders. Da Brat, according to this image, embodies multiple images, feathers, leather, down, and denim. The body that one expects to reflect feminine beauty and heterosexual desire turns out to be grotesque in its excess: too many images, too many bodies. Like Bryant’s Chaka Khan, this body is too much, too artificial to be desirable. Since this is the cover of an album for sale, the female body is quite literally a commodity, but this body is self-reflexively (re)produced, edited, copied, and objectified. I read this image, then, as a critique of the expectation that female rap stars present themselves as desirable objects for male consumption. It is a more subtle version of the message offered in Jones’s “Blood” and “your revolution.” Da Brat cannot be contained by the commodified image that marks–and markets–her body.
Significantly, the back cover of Unrestricted challenges the “undeniably feminine” image. As the front cover manipulates and defamiliarizes the “ho” image, the back cover reflects the “gangsta,” complete with fedora, tough stare, and long fur-collared topcoat. But can she be both? What would it mean to belong to both schools, to pose both for and as a man? Several songs on the album interrogate this tension.35 The first song, “We Ready,” could court sex or a fight in the chorus “anybody who wants some / Nigga we ready for you.”36 The fact that the male voices of Jermaine Dupri and Lil Jon join Da Brat’s in this chorus makes “we ready” potentially signify as both a gang’s rallying cry and a declaration of mutual passion. This song also presents Da Brat’s image as artificially constructed and excessive, though the list of objects that render the rapper desirable remains consistent with familiar hip hop iconography:
They say they like the way the system pound in my jeep
I got two twelve’s that bump from wall to wall
So loud that the headlights blink on and off
I laugh when people watch I don’t stop I shine
It’s attractive to motherfuckers that love to grind
I sparkle from the rims to the chain to the watch
To the rings to the ears to the wrists to the Glocks
To the parts in the braids
Shorties that stop to watch throw on the shades
Cause Da Brat got gleam for days
Sunroof open let the sun shine in
Baking the fuck out of me and all my friends
In the backseat, stay in the front
Ain’t no room in the trunk
Just a devastating woofer that bump
This image is a hip hop cliché. The Jeep and the body function as metonymies for each other as the image bumps, blinks, and sparkles. The object of desire is thus both Jeep and woman; headlights and rims blend with ears and wrists. As this image fuses body and machine, it also fuses “gangsta” and “ho,” including Glocks [guns] in the list of jewelry and car parts. The net effect is overwhelming, “devastating,” “baking the fuck out of me,” perhaps parodying the effects of men’s desire for both cars and women. Ironically, this Jeep is so crowded with friends and speakers that there is no room for sex in the backseat or in the trunk. Excess, here, makes realization of this typecast desire untenable. So audiences will not find Da Brat, either, “in the / backseat of a Jeep with LL / hard as hell / doin’ it & doin’ it & doin’ it well” (Jones 32). Although Da Brat does not reject the Jeep, the Glock, or the gold chain, she employs them against heterosexist convention.
Another song on Unrestricted, “Runnin’ Outta Time,” narrates from the perspective of a woman whose lover is cheating on her. This stereotypical “tragedy” provides the occasion for the narrator to assert her own mastery (“I’m a master at the craft cause I roll with some master thugs / Laughin’ as I pass you up”), and this mastery is also coded as both “gangsta” (“I keep a chip on my shoulder / 44 in the holster bulletproof vest under my clothes”) and “ho.” Indeed, just a few lines before she discloses the “44”: “Ain’t nothin’ them other hoes could do / Cause I molded you / To fit properly was inside of me / When you’re strokin’ them / You’re thinkin’ of riding me / And most of them hopin’ to slide with me / Cause I’m a ferocious ho.” These lines do several things. As with Rucker’s “The Unlocking,” these lines could be interpreted as rescripting “ho” to include agency, authority, and ownership. Since she “molded” her lover, he becomes her property, fitting “properly” inside of her. It is her authority that makes their sex “proper.” Moreover, Da Brat couples “ho” with “ferocious,” coding whore as gangster, giving the woman control over her own sexuality. She is her own pimp and her own protector. One other significant effect of these lines is that the “them” who wants to “slide” with the woman is syntactically the same “them” that her lover is stroking, subverting any strictly hetero-interpretation. This song also features Kelly Price singing with Da Brat. As the two voices weave together in the chorus, both women become the “I” who is “wonderin’ where you’ve been sleepin’,” complicating the interpretation of “we” in the title line, “We’ve been runnin’ out of time.” Is it the two women or a woman and a man?
Da Brat frequently distances sex from a hetero-imperative throughout the album by declaring desire for (and desirableness to) both men and women. In “Breve On Em,” she poses a question about herself: “Is she is or is she ain’t a dyke?” This unanswered question adds to the intrigue surrounding her identity. Moreover, she sings it with a pause before “a dyke,” giving the word extra emphasis and allowing the question “is she is or is she ain’t” to be heard without any designated referent. Throughout Unrestricted, Da Brat plays with expectations and stereotypes. The album ultimately constructs an image whose power and desirability lies in its fluidity, its contradictions, and its uncertainty. Although she borrows familiar iconography, her composite identity, I would argue, is incommensurable with any singular types. In this way, the image others critique as succumbing to a stereotype also stages a resistance against binary criteria for judging women in hip hop.
The key to Da Brat’s resistance is excess, and her work has been overtly excessive for years. This excess establishes her distance from the image that she overdoes and reflects a keen sense of awareness and, often, irony. For instance, on Anuthatantrum, “Just A Little Bit More” satirizes “gangsta”-style posturing. The lines “Pop a nigga like a pimple keep it simple enough / Make em wonder what the fuck happened leavin em stuffed / Get that ass kicked fast quick in a hurry” render gangsta-style violence absurd and unchallenging, comparing gun shots to juvenile pimple-popping.37 The redundancy in the phrase “fast quick in a hurry” suggests both excess and lack of drama. Rather than choreographing a drawn-out display of violence, Da Brat undermines the obsession with violence and gets past the ass-kicking hastily to move on to other lines. Similarly, the lines, “Fuck over the dough and die / Pick your casket if you feel that you gone try some shit / no nigga ever lasted past the first attempt / I leave em baffled and gaffle em all of they keys / Then dispense to my niggas like Sony distributing LP’s” deprive gangsta-style violence of skill, deliberation, and suspense. “Fuck over the dough and die” erases the killing process, and dispensing the spoils “like Sony LP’s” parodies the commercialization of gangsta rap. Clues to the deception and excess Da Brat builds into this song appear in lines like “It’s too much, too lil, too late for you to come up / Be deceived if ya wanna be foolish this bad mandate bitch is / true to the shit.” So if listeners choose to be deceived they are “foolish,” missing the mandate and the true “shit” that Da Brat has to offer. She also reacts to the possibility of misinterpretation in the line “You felt the fist of fury when you envisioned that I was comin,” linking the misperception of her sexual pleasure to violence. As with Bryant’s “Ode to Chaka Khan,” the objectified image of the woman “coming” is a masquerade that, at crucial moments, erupts to reveal the “true shit,” the fist of fury that undermines it. Even if this rap is “too much” and listeners do not clearly hear Da Brat’s mandate, they should certainly feel punched, made a fool of, and deceived.
Jones invokes Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” in the following lines from “Blood”:
none of them [shoes] can hold the blood
that coagulated not-so-long ago
in the lower extremities
of brown-skinned corpses strung up from trees
like drying figs
or hanging potpourri
to sweeten scenes of Southern Gallantry (12)
Jones thus positions her work in relationship to Holiday and her precursor’s representations of Black bodies: representations from “not-so-long ago” that are still difficult to get a “hold” on. It seems that shoes could not contain the blood of the lynched bodies or of the “strange fruit” that Holiday planted, either. Billie, too, deployed contradiction and dissonance between words and music in order to exceed the categories by which white culture attempted to contain her.38 Feminist rappers contribute to a genealogy of African American women whose music has defied stereotypical expectations. African American arts have a long legacy of exceeding genres and employing double-edged communication, which indicates that the slave has always somehow escaped the master’s framework, overflowed his shoes (to continue with the Nike metaphor). Contemporary feminists, like Jones, Da Brat, Rucker, and Bryant, (re)construct this narrative contest in the framework of today’s master’s tools: postmodern media, consumer capitalism, and expectations (fueled by MTV and the like) that women artists of color must make a spectacle of their bodies. While Holiday worked within and against the “tragic mulatta” model ascribed to her by audiences, the contemporary artists work within and against media portrayals of hip hop “hos” and “gangstas.”39
These artists capture audiences accustomed to racist and misogynist images by employing them in destabilizing ways. Rucker plays along with the “ho” myth but counters misogyny by endowing her whore with authority, mastery, and power over the construction of her own image. She defeats the gender binary within hip hop culture, not just by occupying both poles as Da Brat does, but by deflating the power of the masculine. Bryant highlights the absurdity, the artificiality, and the contradictions behind the sexualized female ideal, which turns out to be grotesque if materially realized. Chaka Khan is alluring as an unreal “ho,” but explosive and undesirable as an embodied presence. And finally, Jones takes on different identifications only to move past them; her fluidity resists containment within any singular codes. All three artists ultimately exceed the hip hop frameworks that they interrogate.
In contrast, Da Brat’s covert critique is internal to hip hop marketing. She molds her image to be recognizable within the stereotypical gender codes of an exhibitionist “ho” and a gun-toting “gangsta”; but by fusing the two in one body, she deconstructs the binary assumed to be at their foundation. Each pole is undermined as a result: a whore cannot be a whore, or an object of others’ sexual mastery, if she is also a pimp and a gangster. Contradiction and excess baffle the listener attuned to “gangsta”/”ho” imagery. These artists’ political statements put in dialogue divergent interpretations that contest each other as well as pre-conceived assumptions: Da Brat is and is not a “boy toy”; Jones is and is not a stereotypical urban consumer. They work within predictable “criteria of intelligibility” to expose the faults behind these assumptions. Rather than creating new images, which would be susceptible to appropriation or to becoming exclusive in their own right, they reveal how images themselves are incomplete and fail to capture the complexity of identity. As in the following lines from Bryant’s “Ode to Chaka Khan,” audiences rebound off the “so-called black-faced bimbo,” the image which “broke down” “beyond image” in the excessive raps of “wailing” feminists.
if she rushes in deep · my well · like poetry · like flush
like semen · like spit · like your bloodied face ·
reboundin’ · one mo time · off the blows · of a
so-called · black-faced bimbo · broke down ·
from wailin’ · nu blues · broke down · from wailin’
· nu news · broke down · from wailin’ out ·
beyond image · to me · can’t be music?
“Can’t be music?” The effect is a playful, ambivalent, multi-grooved process that leads audiences to question each new impression they arrive at. This open-ended process is the strategy I offer as a way of making powerful feminist theories that do not master. Da Brat: “Is she is, or is she ain’t…?” Rucker: “Tell me what, what’s my name?” Jones: “you be the needle on my record skippin’ / needle on my record skippin’ / needle on my record skippin’…” (28).40 Audiences move from image to image, repeat, rebound, never certain of anything but the process of deception and the foolishness of any one image.
1. As I have discussed in an article on Michelle Cliff in African American Review 32 (Winter 1998), the expressions of marginalized groups often resemble postmodern practices, since both emerge from a position of decenteredness and suspicion towards the processes of signification. I do not think it is entirely coincidental that postmodernism became popular in the United States at the same time that multiculturalism brought increased attention to the literary traditions and language practices of marginalized peoples. It would be anachronistic and Eurocentric to claim these multi-layered and ironical expressions as exclusively postmodern since these types of expressions have been significant to “multicultural” Americans for over a century, at least.
2. Yo-Yo (who created the Intelligent Black Women’s Coalition), MC Lyte, and Queen Latifah are the best-known rappers who assert images of strong, independent women. The artists I analyze, however, present a more complex relationship between feminist resistance and dominant images.
3. I am using “hip hop” to describe the culture associated with contemporary African American urban youth identity, including rap music, fashion, breakdancing, graffiti art, and signifying.
4. For instance, the words “freedom,” “woman,” and “man” were denied or qualified when used to apply to Black Americans during slavery. Another example of the relationship between African Americans and the English language is the devaluation of “black” as a symbol.
5. Da Brat has fans who are not necessarily interested in gender critique or in female MC’s, while Yo-Yo, Queen Latifah, and MC Lyte probably have greater appeal among those specifically interested in gender issues.
6. Da Brat asserts her own mastery and assumes an authoritative posture in songs like “Lyrical Molestation,” (“When Da Brat is in the area your shit ain’t safe”) and an early hit from Funkdafied (1994), “da shit ya can’t fuc wit” (“B-R-A-T, the new lady / with this shit you can’t fuck me”). She also claims to be desired by everyone: in “Runnin’ Out of Time,” she asserts that “most of them hopin’ to slide with me,” and in “At the Club,” a man’s girlfriend threatens to “kick the shit out of” him for staring at Da Brat rather than at her. Such lyrics demand that audiences take her seriously.
7. According to David Foster Wallace, “not only is a serious rap serious poetry, but, in terms of the size of its audience, its potency in the Great U.S. Market, its power to spur and to authorize the artistic endeavor of a discouraged and malschooled young urban culture we’ve been encouraged sadly to write off, it’s quite possibly the most important stuff happening in American poetry today” (Costello and Wallace 99-100).
8. See Gates’s much-quoted study, The Signifying Monkey, for an elaboration of signifyin(g) and repetition with a difference.
9. David Foster Wallace calls rap a “Closed Show,” inaccessible to “highbrow upscale whites” (Costello and Wallace 23). In the face of globalized/postnational commodification, hip hop vernacular presents a shoring up of black nationality resistant to outside appropriation. Despite this potential insularity, I would emphasize the multiple meanings allowed by hip hop as living, public, communal productions.
10. In an interview with Lisa Kennedy, Queen Latifah says, “I’m not a feminist. I’m not making my records for girls. I made Ladies First for ladies and men. For guys to understand and for ladies to be proud of…. I’m just a proud black woman. I don’t need to be labeled” (DiPrima, “Beat the Rap” 82). My own definition of feminism does include men, considerations of racial difference, and pride. In an October, 2000 Ms. article, Sarah Jones, too, is cautious about her assuming the label “feminist,” though she ultimately embraces feminism: “Jones hesitates when asked if she calls herself a feminist. ‘That’s a good question,’ she says. ‘I don’t know if I do. I call myself a womanist. No, that’s not true. I’m a feminist and a womanist’” (Block 84). This qualified response reflects Jones’s resistance to labels as well as the tentative relationship between African American gender issues and feminism. I understand that the name “feminist” carries a history of exclusivity but believe that the best way to challenge such exclusion is to expand the term from within.
11. I agree with bell hooks’s assessment that “a central motivation for highlighting gangsta rap continues to be the sensationalist drama of demonizing black youth culture in general and the contributions of young black men in particular. It’s a contemporary remake of Birth of a Nation–only this time we are encouraged to believe it is not just vulnerable white womanhood that risks destruction by black hands, but everyone” (Outlaw Culture 115).
12. In brief: Judith Butler theorizes how we perceive bodies through the discourses of the dominant culture. The body, as we know it, is “orchestrated through regulatory schemas that produce intelligible morphological possibilities. These regulatory schemas are not timeless structures, but historically revisable criteria of intelligibility which produce and vanquish bodies that matter” (14). And such criteria are most effectively “revised” and “destabilized” “through the reiteration of norms”; “in the very process of repetition… [lies] the possibility to put the consolidation of the norms… into a potentially productive crisis” (10). Butler’s theory resonates powerfully with feminist hip hop politics. Cultures offer limited “morphological” possibilities for what counts as an intelligible human body. But it is not just through the work of postmodern theoreticians that we observe cultural criteria “vanquishing” bodies that matter. Within African American history we can find concrete examples of this model: slaves became known as slaves by virtue of the branding iron, the master’s paperwork, and the meanings attributed by white Americans to their black skin. In the case of African American women, in particular, Hazel Carby has shown how antebellum literature created images of Black women as overtly sexual bodies in order to justify the masters’ rapes of their female slaves. Discourses of nineteenth-century womanhood excluded Black women from virtuous humanity and represented them as capital and breeders of capital. Slave women were confined by this objectification, often kept exclusively for the purpose of sex–their bodies seen as sites for the master’s pleasure and the reproduction of slave babies.
The racialized misogyny produced during slavery still shapes public perceptions of African American women. When bell hooks tried to reclaim “the female body as a site of power and possibility,” her openness to sexuality was perceived by Tad Friend of Esquire magazine as “pro-sex,” and in his 1994 interview, he describes hooks as a “do-me” feminist (Outlaw Culture 75). hooks says of this interview: Friend “continues the racist/sexist representation of Black women as the oversexed ‘hot pussies’” (76). Her liberated identity and her feminist philosophies exceed the “criteria of intelligibility” that are currently available to the dominant culture, which reduces hooks’s body politics to the racist and misogynist mythologies left from slavery. hattie gossett also addresses the limiting vocabulary available to the dominant culture for labeling Black women’s sexual bodies in her poem, “is it true what they say about colored pussy?” (1989). She invokes racist and misogynist constructions of women of color’s sexuality as a stereotype too dehumanizing to name directly, but even by posing it as a question, she employs it. Indeed, she refuses to leave it unsaid: “don’t be trying to act like… you haven’t heard those stories about colored pussy so stop pretending you haven’t.” It might seem counterproductive to repeat this objectifying rhetoric, but gossett invokes and questions the myths surrounding “colored pussy” in order to challenge the historical misogyny directly. She concludes the poem by asserting the power to reconstitute the dominant “morphology” imposed upon Black women: “colored pussies are yet un-named energies whose power for lighting up the world is beyond all known measure,” locating “colored pussies” outside of any name (including “colored pussies”) (Pleasure and Danger 411-12). The contradiction built within this sentence, using a deleterious name to describe an unnameable energy, is an important strategy used by many African American feminists to highlight their alienation within dominant frameworks and to contest their simultaneous oppressions (see The Combahee River Collective’s 1977 “A Black Feminist Statement” for a theorization of the term “simultaneous oppression” as applied to women of color.). One could critique gossett for failing to name the alternative energy that exceeds “colored pussy,” yet by keeping this power “un-named” and “beyond measure,” she rejects the rules and measures of the dominant discourse and avoids the possibility of containment within that discourse. Hip hop-style feminisms often employ this same strategy: invoking the negative images perpetuated by history while undermining them. Audre Lorde wrote in 1979 that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (99). What I am most interested in are the strategies that disarm the master by taking his tools and breaking them so that he may never again use them to commit violence. This strategy allows one to contest the master and his terms by exposing their incompleteness in representing African American “morphologies.”
13. For instance, Kolawole writes that “Latifah’s stance has led to rumours about her sexuality. She has on several occasions stated that she is heterosexual, but her ‘unsexy image,’ along with her views, appear to be too much for the male-dominated world of rap to consume, with consequences for her sales” (12).
14. Tricia Rose reclaims some feminist agency for Salt ‘N Pepa by describing their image as “irreverence toward the morally-based sexual constrictions placed on them as women…. Their video [“Shake Your Thang”] speaks to black women, calls for open, public displays of female expression, assumes a community-based support for their freedom, and focuses directly on the sexual desirability and beauty of black women’s bodies” (124-5). Rose’s optimism hinges on Salt ‘N Pepa’s focus on their butts, which she regards as “a rejection of the aesthetic hierarchy in American culture that marginalizes black women” (125). It is a pose staged against the cult of ultra-thin white femininity. Yet the pose still revolves around an assumed spectator who desires women’s butts.
15. Joan Morgan’s description of hip hop feminism follows this logic of hetero-gender binaries in When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: My Life as a Hip-Hop Feminist (1999). In her defense of “the f-word,” she reduces feminism to heterosexual desire–“So, my brotha, if loving y’all fiercely and wanting it back makes me a feminist then I’m a feminist”–and celebrates her political assertiveness as having “‘a bigger dick than most niggas I know’” (Chickenheads 44-45, 46). Within this framework, women in hip hop must act manly and/or act for men’s benefit.
16. When Houston A. Baker, Jr. assesses the role of women in rap in the face of this centering of masculinity, he concludes that “there are successful black women rappers, but proportionally they represent a cluster of stars in a vast constellation. Two indispensable aspects of the form–its blackness and its youthful maleness–seem to occasion a refusal of general, serious, and nuanced recognition” (62). In this view, the “maleness” of rap eclipses the presence of female rappers, relegates them to just one small corner of the genre. Evidently, according to Baker’s definition, women do not define or influence the “vast constellation” as a whole. Rather than “refusing” to offer serious recognition to the indispensable maleness of rap (which Baker accuses others of doing), my study acknowledges the ways in which female artists have had to negotiate this maleness. I would go further, though, to argue that this very maleness has been contested, nuanced, and shaped by the presence of female (and often feminist) authority from the start.
17. Potter suggests that by staging the constructedness and “unreality” of images, hip hop produces its own counter-realities: “Hip hop stages the difference of blackness, and its staging is both the Signifyin(g) of its constructedness and the sites of its production of the authentic. In this staging, hip hop… exchang[es] the unreal ‘real’ for the ‘real’ production of the constructed….. And… the insurrectionary aspect of this ‘act’ has been that it has forced Euro-American culture to take stock of its own costumes, lingo, and poses” (122). As in Butler’s theory of gender performance, the self-conscious, often parodic constructions within hip hop “stage” the constructedness of race, in general, and denaturalize dominant racial images.
18. “E.R.A.” appears on a 1997 King Britt album, When the Funk Hits the Fan; “Return to Innocence Lost” appears on Things Fall Apart, a 1999 album by the popular hip hop band, The Roots. Both pieces critique a lack of support and appreciation for women as mothers and lovers. “E.R.A.” celebrates the power and beauty of women–“soldiers” and “flowers,” “revolutionary, Isis, Saint, priestess,… wife, nature, mujer“–calling on a “strengthening presence already ages fortified by years been denied, set aside.” “Return to Innocence Lost” tells the story of an alcoholic father who cheats on his wife–“soiling Mommy’s sheets with… / Sweet… talk shit, / Cookie’s cheap lipstick, / Hairgrease, sperm, and jezebel juice / To hell with the good news that… / He was a father for the first time”–and whose negative influence leads his son to become his “twin in addiction,” a gangster, shot and killed on Christmas.
19. Sarah Jones has a similar strategy. She recorded “Blood” on the popular hip hop Lyricist Lounge album, and her first performance piece, Surface Transit, directly invokes hip hop culture and was performed during the 2000 Hip Hop Theater Festival in New York. Through these venues, she has gained visibility within hip hop culture. Loyal fans find in her new performance, Women Can’t Wait, however, few references to hip hop, an overtly feminist message, or an international frame of reference.
20. Significantly, we see no money change hands, undermining the whore’s status as commodity.
21. All Rucker lyrics I use in this paper are my own transcription of her recordings.
22. A dissonance between words and music is a defining feature of rap. David Foster Wallace argues that “the coldly manufactured, self-consciously derivative sound carpet of samples over which the rapper and DJ declaim serves to focus listeners’ creative attention on the complex and human lyrics themselves” (Costello and Wallace 97). The music that forms an apparently insignificant background does more than highlight a complex rap. Rather, as with jazz singing, the melody fabricated in hip hop by DJ and sound machine modifies the tone, and thus the meaning, of the MC’s rap. Often rappers borrow familiar melodies–as in Run DMC’s sampling of the theme from Exodus in a recent hit, “Crown Royal”–to contextualize their message. In the raps I am analyzing, the tension is far more subtle and thus demands more careful listening. As with much hip hop, then, the critical political message is missed (or deliberately hidden, perhaps) without close study. Nearly inaudible background noises, shifts in tempo, and ruptures in otherwise numbingly repetitive bass-driven melodies establish a relationship between the song and its lyrics that often runs counter to a strictly literal reading of the words. These seemingly unmasterful and insignificant sound carpets establish distance between artist and lyrics and self-reflexively remind listeners that they are being drawn into an artistic manipulation.
23. All Dana Bryant lyrics in this paper are taken from the CD jacket for Wishing from the Top.
24. In the chapter entitled “Slave and Mistress” in Reconstructing Womanhood, Hazel Carby discusses nineteenth-century rhetoric designed to blame female slaves for their own rapes and to portray slave masters as unwilling victims of their slaves’ sexual manipulations.
25. While anti-foundationalists like Butler might question our ability to perceive the matter beyond the cultural inscription, Bryant pushes it in our faces.
26. Even ABC’s Nightline briefly featured Jones speaking about hip hop in a September, 2000 series, “Hip Hop” (<http://abcnews.go.com/onair/Nightline/nl000906_Hip_Hop_feature.html>).
27. Throughout “Metaphor Play,” Jones alludes to a sexual relationship with ungendered metaphors, such as, “if my day is a subway ride / then your smile is any empty car / on the express train to my house” (Jones 27).
28. My analysis of Surface Transit is based on a June 30, 2000 performance at PS 122 in New York.
29. Significantly, Keysha is unable to recognize the original sources for music sampled by contemporary hip hop artists Biggie Smalls and KRS-One. She falsely assumes the hip hop sources to be original and effaces their pre-hip hop contexts. This naïveté could be a self-reflexive jab at Jones’s own status as a young, post-hip hop artist.
30. Musical commentary for “Blood” is based on the recording found on Lyricist Lounge, Volume One (1998). Lyrics for “Blood” are quoted from Jones’s chapbook, your revolution (1998).
31. David Foster Wallace offers an explanation for this stereotype of underprivileged African Americans as excessive consumers: “Seeing as op-/apposite their grinding poverty and dependence on bureaucracies only the contrasts of 2-D Dynasty image, superrich athletes and performers, and the drug and crime executives for whom visible affluence is part of the job description–such a culture in such a place and time might well be excused for equating success and accomplishment directly with income, display, prestige” (Costello and Wallace 119). Nightline reinforces the negative image of hip hop materialism by drawing attention to Russell Simmons’s and L.L. Cool J’s conspicuous display of designer goods and the unreasonable consumer standards that these leaders thus create (<http://abcnews.go.com/onair/Nightline/nl000906_Hip_Hop_feature.html>).
32. Lyrics from <http://lyrics.astraweb.com>.
33. I think Da Brat is also more complex than Foxy Brown, Lil’ Kim, and so-called “porno rappers,” who market themselves exclusively as sexual commodities. We never see Foxy Brown and Lil’ Kim without their “ho”-styled mask or attire, but Da Brat presents a different story, one that is more aggressive and styled as self-authored.
34. This album title echoes Millie Jackson (perhaps the first female rapper), who joins Da Brat on the album’s “Intro” with an explicit rap on the feminist assertion, “no means no”: “Tell the motherfucker ‘no’ when you don’t feel like screwin!” Unrestricted thus frames Da Brat’s raps in the context of her oft censored (and censured) foremother. Jackson recorded several rap songs in the late 1970s, including “All the Way Lover” and “The Rap,” in which she gives women spoken-word sexual advice over heavily-rhythmed “sound carpets.” In a 1982 live recording of “Lovers and Girlfriends,” Jackson raps that she was rapping long before it became a money-making industry: “It seems just about the time I stopped rapping, everybody else started. I said, now, I started this shit, I think it’s time that I go back and make some more money off of it.”
35. Lyrics for “We Ready” and “Back Up” come from Astraweb lyrics, <http://lyrics.astraweb.com>; the lyrics for “Runnin’ Outta Time” are borrowed from <http://www.lyrics.co.nz/dabrat>.
36. The same dual interpretation could be drawn from the song “Back Up,” in which it is unclear whether Da Brat is posing as sex symbol or gangster: “Niggas got me under surveillance their necks turnin’ / I’m an international playa, close observation / The best policy is to stay in ya’ll faces.” In either case, the image is self-consciously on display.
37. Lyrics from <http://lyrics.astraweb.com>.
38. Even “Strange Fruit,” a song based on lynching–actual, historic containment of African American bodies in the most violent manner–can almost be enjoyed as a dance song (with the “black bodies swinging” heard in a quite different light) in a 1956 recording in which the crescendo of Charlie Shavers’s trumpet, along with the rising and fluctuating pitch of Holiday’s voice, refuses to end on a down-note. Her pitch wavers disconcertingly on the final word, “crop,” ultimately ending on a high note. This ambivalence in tone mirrors overt contradictions in the lyrics, such as the “scent of magnolia, sweet and fresh” juxtaposed with the “smell of burning flesh.” Holiday writes about (mis)interpretations of “Strange Fruit” in Lady Sings the Blues (1956): “One night in Los Angeles a bitch stood right up in the club where I was singing and said, ‘Billie, why don’t you sing that sexy song you’re so famous for? You know, the one about naked bodies swinging in the trees’” (84). This woman’s interpretation is not surprising, nor does it contradict the effect of Holiday’s rendition of the lyrics, in which she obscures the connection between the metaphors and the reality of lynching and almost overshadows the words with her strategic use of silence. The line “black bodies swinging” is isolated, preceded and followed by pauses that give it independent emphasis. A long pause also erases the syntactical link between the “black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze” and the following line that explains the metaphor, “strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.” Holiday emphasizes nouns and adjectives–“trees,” “strange,” “fruit,” “leaves,” “root,” “Southern,” and “breeze”–with parallel slides down in pitch and elides the relationship between these terms by almost swallowing the words that link them: “bear,” “blood at,” and “swinging.”
39. Holiday’s “Gloomy Sunday,” for instance, employs imagery on the lyrical level that could be interpreted as a covert inversion of, or signification upon, the overt tragic narrative. This song about suicide came to be known as the “Hungarian Suicide Song,” as it was rumored to have inspired waves of suicide across Europe, projecting tragedy away from the Black woman and onto white men.
40. The sources for these quotes are Da Brat’s “Breve On Em,” Rucker’s “The Unlocking,” and Jones’s “Metaphor Play.”
David Grandy
Department of Philosophy
Brigham Young University
david_grandy@byu.edu
In his Downcast Eyes, Martin Jay alerts readers to “the ubiquity of visual metaphors” in Western thought and warns that nonchalance or blindness toward such “will damage our ability to inspect the world outside and introspect the world within” (1). This judgment, Jay quickly notes, fails to escape the embrace of what it attempts to analyze, for we can hardly express hope for deeper understanding or light without invoking images of light and vision. Those images may be fairly obvious–as in image–or they may be etymologically veiled–as in inspect and introspect, arising from specere, Latin for “to observe” (1). In either case, we tend to take them for granted, failing to grasp their elemental significance.
I argue that this failure is intrinsic to the action of light as it offers up visual images of the world. In the moment of revelation, there is a re-veiling, a drawing away, that keeps light from being fully overtaken by sight or reason. This retreat into non-visibility or unknowing is hardly a new idea. John Locke suggested that the eye’s self-blindness enables optical vision (87). Aristotle stated that nous or mind must be a self-emptiness amounting to pure capacity or receptivity: “For if [nous] shows its own identity, it hinders or obstructs what is other than it; hence it can have no nature but that of capacity. What is called nous of the soul, then… is not anything until it knows” (qtd. in Ballew 128).
If Aristotle is right, we apprehend the world by the grace of some agency that does not show up on its own; further, this agency is a kind of open set that freely receives other things and only then registers its own existence. Light, it seems, follows a similar principle: by retreating or failing to dawn as a freestanding entity, it clears or opens space for the appearance of other things. It is, as Hans Blumenberg insisted in his elaboration of light’s many aspects, “the ‘letting-appear’ that does not itself appear, the inaccessible accessibility of things” (31).
This claim may surprise, and part of the task of this essay is to defend it. The other part is to show that while light’s relation with other things (the objects it illuminates) is fraught with paradox, that relation affords practical insight into how otherness informs human experience. Put differently, a study of light dramatically crystallizes imprecise and often difficult philosophical talk about otherness, sameness, absence, and presence. Further, one can hardly attend to light without glancing at modern physics, which has generated its own array of light-related puzzles and insights. These, when paired with philosophical impressions of otherness, indicate that light’s revelatory action is implicated in the ambiguity associated with our apprehension of otherness. One might plausibly propose that light fosters and fashions that ambiguity.
Indeed, light is itself deeply, perhaps inexhaustibly, ambiguous. This is because light is complicit with the “seeing” of light. Consequently, as Jacques Derrida proposes, the last word on light is always pronounced by light itself (92). Were we able to get an objective distance from it, we might be able to offer a definitive account of light. But such a move would entail losing light itself, for light never announces itself from a distance: it is its own messenger and “nothing, not even light itself, can bring us news of its upcoming arrival” (Schumacher 113-14). Moreover, to see light is to see by it; we see other things by light’s instrumentality.
These are general comments, but they stand the test of philosophical and scientific thinking. There is in light an inscrutability or darkness–an inaccessibility–borne of the necessity of seeing distant bodies by some unseen agency that touches the eye. Because this touching registers objects that do not physically touch the eye, the process of seeing must be more than a unidirectional movement toward manifestation. By its dual meaning, the word clear–a word growing out of light and vision–bespeaks bi-directionality. Thanks to light, material objects visually present themselves to our senses. For this presentation to be effective or “clear,” light also must be clear, but in a different way. To the extent that objects show up with clear, well-defined details that enable apprehension and understanding, light qua light fails to show up at all: it must be clear in the opposite sense of being transparent or invisible. Light is a formless clarity or openness that permits seeing without being threatened by seeing.
In this essay, I affirm that light is “other” in two interrelated ways. First, it is other in the sense that it is unfamiliar and inscrutable; second, that inscrutability arises from light’s capacity to receive and announce other things while retreating from view as an independent entity. Thus, revelatory otherness (the light-mediated manifestation of the other) is grounded in the inscrutable action of light. A similar dynamic, albeit one underlining otherness rather than light, has been proposed by Emmanuel Levinas. My intent is to thematize light with Levinasian otherness. For maximum effect, this means that the classical scientific notion of light must yield to Albert Einstein’s relativistic reformulation. In Einsteinian physics, light inhabits a domain that is off-limits to material reality, and so when light breaks into material reality, it does so in a “relationless” way. That is, light cannot be scaled into or made commensurate with the familiar space and time metric of material reality. For Levinas, otherness is also refractory to reduction to the familiar. Given that light presents otherness to our view, it would seem to follow that here we have a single package: the inscrutability of light informs the inscrutability or otherness of the outside world.
In the past century, thinkers have spilt much ink on the concept or experience of otherness, sometimes termed exteriority or alterity. Otherness informs human existence, marking it with ambiguity, indeterminancy, and incommensurability. It is a presence but also an absence or awayness, a constancy of difference challenging and clashing with one’s sense of core identity. That it is always there–away from us as something other–makes it also here, for absolute apartness or absence would render it imperceptible and unknown. Since we do know it, however, it is part of us, even though its very essence, it seems, sets it apart from us.
Casting about for an explanation for otherness in the world, we may with profit pause to consider physical light. Plato remarked that light takes on visibility as objects and ideas flash into existence by the grace of light (306-35). He did not mean that light qua light is thereby revealed, for he understood that “rather than being a component of visibility, light has an originality of its own” (Vasseleu 4). This originality, I submit, is the origin of otherness. In failing to register itself in the world, light registers otherness in ways that call up certain profundities associated with otherness as a philosophical topic. To be sure, phenomenology since Edmund Husserl has invoked light when talking about otherness, but the tendency is to speak in the currency of metaphorical rather than physical light; little explicit reference is made to physical light, or at least to the physics of light. Here we can discern light’s uniqueness.
Consider Plato’s proposition that originary light is immune to visual apprehension. If this were not true, then seeable or opaque light would block our view of things other than light. Since it does not, we instinctively imagine light as an intermediate transparency between perceiver and perceived. Such thinking, however, confers upon light a reality that no experiment or experience, even in principle, can sustain.
To elaborate this point, let us try to locate light in our field of experience. Three possible locations present themselves. Light is (1) striking the retina; (2) striking a perceived object; and (3) traveling from the object to the retina. Given light’s uniqueness, none of these possibilities can be defended in conventional language that permits us to assert that thing x is at location y. Possibility (3) is rendered problematic by the aforementioned fact that light cannot be hailed in advance. If indeed we could see it at a distance–see it passing through intermediate space–some light-like agency would have to present it to the retina, and then that agency would be light as we know it and just as immune to delimitation in intermediate space.
Possibilities (1) and (2) may seem more straightforward, but in fact the two collapse into each other. Yes, (1) may be said to occur, but when it does we see (2), even though a space-time interval separates the two events. This collapse, of course, is the very essence of vision, and despite its deep familiarity, can teach us much about light. Foremost is the recognition that though light is present when it strikes the retina, its presence is non-local; that is, completely given over to distant objects. These objects, in fact, must “keep their distance” from the retina if they are to be seen, for once they make immediate contact with the eye, vision fails. Light, by contrast, strikes the retina and if it is to make any statement at all, must announce the existence–the distant presence–of something other than itself. Thus, the local presence of light implies its absence: it is here striking the eye but affording us visual witness of what lies beyond by absenting itself as a local entity to be seen. If it is to do its work of vision, it cannot register itself as visual fact, for then it would interfere with the seeing process.
Sometimes, of course, light does interfere with seeing, and then it is natural to regard light as distinct from the objects we look at–to suppose that light has an appearance or visual texture of its own. But when this happens, we mistake a seeming excess of reflected, refracted, or scattered light for light per se. Sunlight, for example, is never seen in isolation. It is seen in conjunction with the white snow that reflects it, the atmospheric air molecules that scatter its blue component, the atmospheric haze that scatters its reddish component, and the material, gaseous backdrop of the sun itself. True, the midday sun is hard to look at owing to its abundant light, but we would never be dazzled if light were not interacting with the physical matter that constitutes the sun. It is that interaction that brings the sun into visual being and gives it bright announcement. And while that announcement may be too bright for human eyes, we can no more see brightness or light per se than we can see an abstract, unattached adjectival quality. When we say, therefore, that direct sunlight is too intense for human vision, we are not registering the fact that light somehow shows up by itself as we look at the sun. We are merely acknowledging a physiological threshold of our ability to see bright objects.1
If, indeed, we could see light, it would be hard (seemingly impossible) to see stars in the night sky: they would not show up against a backdrop of darkness but would be surrounded by the light they radiate into empty space.2 This is a variation on the remark that a flashlight beam fails to show up in the night sky unless a material entity (an insect or raindrop, say) intervenes to be given visual announcement. Even laser beams remain unseen without material interaction; they are not self-luminous but borrow their visual texture from illuminated gas particles.
These considerations have prompted some physicists to insist that seeing light merely amounts to seeing “things lighted.”3 What’s more, if light does not show up on its own, then the notion of its propagation in empty space is empirically gratuitous. Stephen Toulmin, Ron Harré, Geoffrey Cantor, and Vasco Ronchi have all developed this point by noting that the concept of moving or projectile light is part of the legacy of geometrical optics. After rehearsing the history of optics since the late Middle Ages, Ronchi states that if we are to learn to talk coherently about light, “we must definitely avoid assuming any distribution of the radiant energy during its supposed propagation” (271). Cantor argues that although light’s nature is “beyond our ken,” we instinctively find ways to bring it “under the umbrella of matter,” albeit generally without realizing that a poetic leap has been made (96-97). As a case in point he singles out “projectile optics,” a metaphorical outlook that draws heavily on material particles in motion but which, in his view, is infected with deep tension.
Trying to develop a cognitive model of vision, James J. Gibson arrived at similar conclusions. In his last book, he wrote:
Vision is a strange and wonderful business. I have been puzzling over its perplexities for 50 years. I used to suppose that the way to understand it was to learn what is accepted as true about the physics of light and the retinal image, to master the anatomy and physiology of the eye and the brain, and then to put it together into a theory of perception that could be tested by experiments. But the more I learned about physics, optics, anatomy, and visual physiology, the deeper the puzzles got. The experts in these sciences seemed confident that they could clear up the mysteries of vision eventually but only, I decided, because they had no real grasp of the perplexities. (xiii)
Gibson rejected standard theories of vision as artificial and mechanical. These, he felt, depended too much on laboratory-contrived, “snapshot” visual experiences. Spliced together and given meaning by the brain, these single-moment or single-perspective experiences were said to produce the seamless flow of coherent seeing. Gibson, however, sensed a richer, more ecological drama involving all of one’s body and one’s entire environment–not just the eye-brain complex responding to a narrow band of specific stimuli. Instead of snapshot vision he proposed ambulatory (move-around) vision, feeling that the latter corresponded with the way people (and animals) use their bodies to experience the world visually.
In developing his model, Gibson came to question longstanding assumptions about light and space. What do we see when we take in the visual world? Not space, which is completely featureless, and so ought to be rejected both as an element of perception and as a component of perception theory:
I am also asking the reader to suppose that the concept of space has nothing to do with perception. Geometrical space is a pure abstraction. Outer space can be visualized but cannot be seen…. The doctrine that we could not perceive the world around us unless we already had the concept of space is nonsense. It is quite the other way around: We could not conceive of empty space unless we could see the ground under our feet and the sky above. Space is a myth, a ghost, a fiction for geometers. (3)
Nor, said Gibson, do we see rays of light streaming to the retina–another geometrical abstraction. Rather, we see illuminated surfaces, the collective, shifting array of which conveys meaning as surfaces interrelate. Hence, meaning inheres in the world, in its ecological inter-linkage, not in a particular part of the world–the brain–that putatively confers meaning on the rest.
Gibson affirmed light’s role in seeing but reconfigured that role along the lines of actual experience in such a way as to break the traditional connection between light and space. His concept of ambient light coincides with our sense of vast and immediate visual contact with distant objects. Not only is the visual landscape generally much larger than one’s attentive focus, but there is no delay across space: we do not, upon opening our eyes or turning our heads, have to wait for images to arrive or link up with previous images. From these considerations and others, Gibson concluded that though light is transparent, it is not a spatial blank or emptiness, and this because it is immediately informative of objects. He wrote that “information is not transmitted [and] the speed of light is irrelevant to vision. The [optic array] does not consist of light rays but of sight lines… information does not have to be carried by light from place to place” (qtd. in Reed 257). Put differently, information “is simply available in the optical structure of ambient light” (Reed 257).
Gibson’s views permit the suggestion that the unexpected properties attributed to light by physicists reside also in the seeing experience. Simply put, light is difficult to locate in conventional terms. We cannot recover it as an intermediate, spatially separate (and therefore separating) entity between perceiver and perceived. That is, it cannot be snatched out of the context of the visual experience and held up for independent scrutiny, for unless light first drops out of sight, no visual experience is forthcoming. That experience, it seems, arises from light’s failure to respect, or perhaps even participate in, the space-time gap between here and there. In one stroke, light exchanges or gives up its local presence–its contact with the retina–for the visual presence of distant objects. Physically absent, they become perceptually present, while light, physically present, becomes perceptually absent.
In recent centuries, science has traded on the assumption that physical light–the familiar light of everyday experience–is devoid of metaphysical significance. No doubt this is one reason many people find little meaning in daily light. Further, light’s ubiquity puts it at risk of being deemed ordinary and therefore limited in its capacity to spark metaphysical insight. I disagree: from where we stand, physical light is a horizon beyond which we cannot progress in our metaphysical deliberations. It encapsulates all that is presently thinkable and more.
There is good reason for this. Long ago Anaximander proposed a disparity between the visible, determinate elements of reality and a necessarily more fundamental, indeterminate substance: if the latter fully participated in the former, determinate reality would never emerge because the more fundamental substance would “swamp the other world-constituents and never allow them to develop” (Kirk et al. 113). According to Paul Feyerabend, this implies that “the basic substance, or the basic elements of the universe, cannot obey the same laws as the visible elements” (58). A modern reaffirmation of this principle, he continues, is Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which posits an interference effect between the material constituents of the world and the light by which we see them.
But why should light be this kind of fundamental substance? Aside from the aforementioned anomalies, what warrants the suggestion that light visually announces the world without announcing itself as a separate entity in the world? Speaking epistemically, there is no other option. If seeing occurs by the agency of light, then no explanatory purpose is served by “seeable” light: seeing is thereby defined in its own terms, and we fail to move to a more fundamental level of explanation.4
This rationale applies to all unexplained phenomena, but it would seem to apply with particular force to light. Because light is integral to all visual experience, we should resist the inclination to clothe it with visible properties. Such restraint brings light forward simply as a principle of seeing; that is, something that is communal with and prior to our optical investigation of nature. Before we try to grasp the world, light freely gives us a graspable world. This is an empirical fact–light gives us the event-articulated expanse we call the cosmos–but the tendency is to overlook this giving or pre-giving in favor of distinct, light-illuminated objects and events.
Light, of course, readily permits oversight of itself. By allowing other things to spring forth visually at a cost to its own visuality, light introduces us to another–an other–world. Communal with light but now stretched by light’s absence into otherness, we find ourselves in an untoward setting, one provoking restlessness and disquietude. What is missing is light’s presence, which is given up to other things.
Better than any other discipline, modern physics affirms physical light’s metaphysical depth by problematizing the commonsensical assumption of light’s presence in local and intermediate space. This assumption is eroded by the dawning realization that light is missing from the space-time regime in which things other than light make their appearance. One might say it is present elsewhere, but this ambiguous construction is fostered by light, by the way light cedes its own immediate presence to that of distant objects, thereby affording us the epistemic luxury of mentally endowing those objects with presence. Given this movement away from self and towards otherness, we should be wary of restricting light to the space-time setting (the material cosmos) it announces. Physics rewards such caution by indicating that light is absent from that setting, notwithstanding routine discourse to the contrary. Indifferent to the separating modalities of space and time, light is larger than–unconfined by–the objects and set of objects it makes visible.
Classical physics regarded light as one of many elements in the space-time set of things, but modern physics implies that light is not a proper member of that set. Indeed, light is its own, higher (more comprehensive) set, one that gathers up and supersedes space-time. To be sure, this fact is rarely acknowledged in an explicit way in modern physics, but it resides tacitly in its foundational principles. In relativity theory, the speed of light is given as a universal constant that informs the structure of space-time and thereby limits the velocity of material bodies. As bodies are seen to accelerate by stationary observers, they undergo changes that make further acceleration increasingly difficult. They become more massive (thus requiring greater energy input to maintain acceleration) and their length (or space itself) is contracted in the direction of their motion. Given these effects, reaching the speed of light is a physical and conceptual impossibility, for that would entail skipping from the realm of finite, measurable intervals to one of zeros and infinities. If a body were to achieve light speed, for example, its length would be contracted to zero and its mass would become infinite. Moreover, the body’s passage through time would slow to a halt, since moving bodies also undergo the relativistic effect of time dilation.
Although this nether-realm of zeros and infinities is off limits to material objects, it is light’s native economy. Since the speed of light is intrinsic to light, light may be said to be beyond space and time, whose aegis ceases at light speed. This claim, however, seems to be contradicted by the fact that light travels at a finite velocity–186,000 miles per second. How can light be a matter of zeros and infinities on the one hand, and, on the other, reducible to a finite numerical value?
Of all the ambiguities associated with light, this one is fundamental. In his first paper on relativity theory, Einstein brought the speed of light forward as a universal constant or unchanging velocity: no motion or maneuver on our part can alter the finite value that we assign to light upon measuring its speed. Having posited this constancy, Einstein wrote that “the velocity of light in our theory plays the role, physically, of an infinitely great velocity” (401). This tension between finiteness and infinitude is central to relativity theory, and it plays itself out in ways that touch on the aforementioned profundities regarding our optical experience of light.
Widely publicized are counterintuitive scenarios like the twin paradox (where two twins undergo asymmetric aging owing to time dilation). Of greater import is the simple fact that light does not move in a conventional way. Any phenomenon whose velocity is an irreducible value cannot be said to move as other things move. Well before Einstein, thinkers realized that a body’s velocity is not an objective or absolute fact. It is a function of both the body and the motion of the observing person or instrument. Hence, one object can have as many relative speeds as there are external observers, if each observer is moving differently. This, of course, is hardly abstract scientific fact but the stuff of everyday experience. Light, or the motion of light, does not accommodate itself to such experience, however. Our own motion does not affect the observed motion (speed) of light.
Going further, one may propose that once light is said not to move conventionally, we may say that it does not move at all. We can, of course, infer light’s motion. As already noted, however, such inference has no basis in direct experience. Even in relativity theory, light’s motion is no more than an inference, and one that is challenged by the theory itself. True, light is said to travel invariably at 186,000 miles per second, but as the theory unfolds, the assertion that light travels unconventionally opens out onto the realization that we lack the resources for imagining how light travels, if in fact it does.
For a body to move in a conventional sense, it must negotiate space and time. But a ray of light whose clock is stopped (whose time dilation is complete) is not in temporal process. Consequently, in Hermann Bondi’s words, “light does not age; there is no passage of time for light” (108). Once time falls out of light’s nature, so, by implication, does space. What would it mean, after all, to travel through space timelessly? It would mean something like the following:
In the reference frame of light, there is no space and time. If we look up at the Andromeda galaxy in the night sky, we see light that from our point of view took 2 million years to traverse that vast distance of space. But to a beam of light radiating from some star in the Andromeda galaxy, the transmission from its point of origin to our eye was instantaneous. (Haisch 31)
In allowing us to see distant stars, light situates us within a vast expanse of space-time. Classical physics took this expanse as complete and definitive, an absolute and all-encompassing reference frame. In positing the speed of light as a universal constant, however, Einstein subordinated space and time to a new absolute. Light consequently became “its own thing” (Zajonc 260), not part of the space-time regime. So, while the classical image of light moving through space and time may still be invoked in relativity theory, eventually it must be set aside, and this because the theory assigns to light a velocity that cannot be reduced to the familiar terms of motion: space and time. Granted, light shows up in the space-time regime moving at 186,000 miles per second, but it always shows up in conjunction with other (space-time) things, thereby tilting our vision and understanding away from itself and its own uniqueness. Furthermore, that motion is merely inferred, never directly witnessed, as light allows material space-time bodies–otherness–to become the cynosure of all eyes.
Reasoning from relativistic principles, P. W. Bridgman concluded that it is “meaningless or trivial to ascribe physical reality to light in intermediate space, and light as a thing travelling must be recognized to be a pure invention” (153). While this judgment issues up from Einstein’s redefinition of light, it has always been implicit in our optical experience of the world. To state the matter in terms made plausible by both modern physics and contemporary philosophy, light admits no spectators. If we experience light, it is because we participate in the space-time drama it offers us. Never do we see it from a distance; never do we get any objective distance from it. In a literal sense, light is always “in your face,” striking the retinas and ceding its own local presence to distant bodies. This double-movement–the absenting of immediate light and the presencing of other things across space-time intervals–turns light into an opening without recovery or bounds. Were it bounded or encompassed by space and time, it could hardly play the role of “an infinitely great velocity,” and the structure of the world (and our experience thereof) would be very different.
Light, in brief, has no space-time frame; it is an unframed window on the material world, an opening or clearing in which that world is situated. This idea is made explicit by physical experiments that indicate light’s indifference to space and time intervals. Two distantly separated parts of light–two photons–interact non-locally; that is, as if they were conjoined (Chiao et al.). This is a dead-end puzzle for anyone invoking the classical assumption of light’s subordination to space-time. Liberation occurs when one realizes that light itself is liberated. Not part of the space-time regime, light does not participate in modes of action that presuppose space-time intervals.5
I am not suggesting that light may be fully understood via attempts at non-local, holistic thinking. As the very coin of illumination and understanding, light cannot be traded against itself. That said, there is merit in allowing it to expand our thinking, for expansion is integral to its essence and action. In the case of photons interacting non-locally, the lesson to be drawn is that light is “a single thing with the universe inside” (Zajonc 299). Put differently, light qua light is not part of the space-time (material) cosmos; if it were, it could not bring many other things into common embrace–into a single, unitary cosmos. What makes this view difficult to accept is our inability to see light’s integrative embrace, but such is consistent with the whole meaning of light. By not announcing itself, the circumambient light-sphere goes on endlessly, never to be overtaken by sight and thereby caught within the kind of visual limit that marks the seeing of finite material bodies. Given this, the world may be said to be like a window. A person who values a window solely for its material properties fails to grasp the idea of a window. Windows begin with a few material constituents, but they end, or, more correctly, fail to end, with light.
Physics, of course, gives us the notion of parts or particles of light–photons–but these, as noted earlier, do not behave as local entities in a larger system. As units of pure receptivity, of unbounded openness, photons freely receive material entities. Defined as the smallest parts of light, they nevertheless offer themselves up in the moment of vision as vessels of wide otherness: we do not see photons per se but images of distant objects. Void of self-defining (and self-confining) space-time limits and the visual texture that normally attend such limits, photons possess an expansionary largeness of being that keeps the universe from being restricted to an absolute frame of reference.
Relation is central to the question of otherness. How successfully, if at all, can otherness be related to sameness or ego (the “I”)? Levinas proposes that the other–at least the personal other–always and forever exceeds one’s conception of it; thus, the relation is never secured but ongoing and infinite–a “relation without relation” (Totality 80). With this formula, he offers an alternative to Husserl and Heidegger, both of whom (he feels) “totalize” otherness by drawing it into the economy of the self or sameness. One’s apprehension of the other, Levinas believes, forever trembles on the possibility of novelty, owing to its irreconcilable strangeness and brimming autonomy. Moreover, light enables such apprehension by its singular ability to yield ontological ground to other things:
Light makes possible… this enveloping of the exterior by the inward, which is the very structure of the cogito and of sense. Thought is always clarity or the dawning of a light. The miracle of light is the essence of thought: due to the light an object, while coming from without, is already ours in the horizon which precedes it; it comes from an exterior already apprehended and comes into being as though it came from us, as though commanded by our freedom. (Existence 48)
Levinas seems to acknowledge light’s bi-directionality, its ability to make other things present while absenting itself in the clarity of the moment. Further, light “comes from an exterior already apprehended,” so that it seems to arise from within. Already “there” before we make the here/there distinction, light seems “here” as well.
While light’s ambiguity erodes the authority of familiar space and time intervals, it also undermines our ability to speak clearly about its nature. David Michael Levin states that Levinas’s view of light and vision is “quite complicated” owing to an ambivalent characterization (250). Often Levinas describes light as imperialistic and totalizing: its expansiveness overtakes the world and thereby subjects it to objective knowing. What’s more, that kind of knowing engenders a self-satisfaction that keeps one from trying to see beyond the expanse marked out by light:
To see is always to see on the horizon. The vision that apprehends on the horizon does not encounter a being out of what is beyond all being. Vision is a forgetting of the there is [il y a] because of the essential satisfaction, the agreeableness [agrément] of sensibility, enjoyment, contentment with the finite without concern for the infinite. (qtd. in Levin 249)
Interpreted thusly, light acts to delimit and finitize human experience. Yet Levinas also recognized that seeing by lightinvolves an immediacy, a closeness without interval, that runs counter to the finite, interval-laden vision that we see:
Sight is, to be sure, an openness and a consciousness, and all sensibility, opening as a consciousness, is called vision; but even in its subordination to cognition sight [still] maintains contact and proximity. The visible caresses the eye. One sees and hears like one touches. (Collected 118)
This characterization calls forth light’s generosity, its graciousness in revoking the interval so that visible images may caress the eye. Here light’s infinite aspect emerges as the finite intervals that inform the seeing experience are invisibly overcome. At issue is the uncanniness of light as it put us in touch with distant, seeming untouchable entities. That touching bespeaks integrative embrace, welcoming, rather than objective knowing, borne of separating intervals.
For Levinas, the other is not seen at a distance; rather, its eruptive immediacy or hereness radically dislocates the viewer by revoking ego-protective intervals. At this point, “vision turn[s] back into non-vision, into… the refutation of vision within sight’s center, into that of which vision… is but a forgetfulness and re-presentation” (Levinas, Outside 115). Something occurs to reverse the apparent geometry of the world that affords us survey of distant objects: intervals fall away and otherness punctures the pretense of the self as an aloof, objective agent.
Once more, light’s bi-directionality emerges: light gives us the visible expanse through an invisible merging of perceiver and perceived. Sappho wrote:
Thou, Hesper, bringest homeward all
That radiant dawn sped far and wide,
The sheep to fold, the goat to stall,
The children to their mother’s side. (57)
Sunset gathers together what sunrise scatters abroad, and the evening star, hinting at the imminent collapse of light’s expanse, prepares us to see the world “feelingly,” as Shakespeare’s Gloucester put it after losing his eyesight (King Lear, IV.vi). More prosaically, light simultaneously gives us expansive spatio-temporal visibility and takes it back by its own invisible action. When experienced, that taking-back is Levinas’s revelation of the other: empathy borne of light’s invisible coupling eclipses the wide visual experience with its pretense of dispassion borne of separating intervals.
In his preface to Totality and Infinity, Levinas wrote that “this book will present subjectivity as welcoming the Other, as hospitality; in it the idea of infinity is consummated” (27). Infinity for Levinas is that which cannot be overtaken by thought or even (Heideggerian) Being. It is, on the one hand, outside Being, but on the other, intrusive of Being: it possesses an experiential abruptness that contradicts the thought that it is infinitely distant. Thus, infinity entails the collapse of separating intervals and the consequent integration of self and other. As noted earlier, light effects such integration by its indifference to space-time intervals, which indifference brings us forward as participants unable to command light as we command lighted things. Furthermore, infinity is found in that indifference–in light’s non-local action whereby visibly separated objects are brought into timeless, spaceless conjunction. So, for both Levinas and Einstein infinity is never consummated in intervals–perhaps least so in those that seem to stretch off endlessly. It is instead consummated in proximity, contact, and integration.
One may specify a point at which physical light merges into otherness by attending to a fundamental difficulty that would seem to foreclose any apprehension of the latter: how does the other bridge into our experience when its very saliency is strangeness and apartness? Would not an absolute other lie beyond both comprehension and experience? Any answer to this question inevitably seeks for a way to make “the infinite distance of the Stranger” traversable, the end-result being a collapse of the normally distinct categories of finiteness and infinity–though, for Levinas, not a collapse of the other into the familiarity of sameness. For those dubious of this “self-challenging double movement” (Davis 38), light, particularly as it is rendered by modern physics, offers a striking retort. Nowhere are infinity and finiteness more mutually implicated. When the finite velocity of light is found to be incommensurable with the finite space-time metric of the material world, infinity suggests itself, and this suggestion becomes more pronounced as the inquiry ensues. The picture that emerges points back to the question of otherness with its concern for an underlying metric to mediate the relation between the ego and the other.
In the case of light, there is no underlying metric. When Einstein dismissed the luminiferous (light-bearing) ether, he freed light from the universal substratum that putatively supported its motion through space and thereby made its behavior intelligible in terms of relation. Absent that substratum, the mind naturally reaches for something–some other constancy–to set light’s motion in relation to. But by making the motion itself constant (immune to variant readings), Einstein turned light into a completely auto-referential phenomenon: it is its own metric and one that cannot be coordinated with or related to the space-time metric of the material world. Despite that, light opens the world to view, thereby affording us vision of something other than itself.
A similar dynamic seems to inform Levinas’s outlook. Not scaled into an underlying metric that interconnects all entities, the other has an integrity, a metric, of its own. It is kath’auto, self-existing and self-expressing, a fact that allows it to exceed, as if by a never-overtaken constancy, the ideas one musters up to understand it. Like the speed of light, its own value cannot be assimilated into a relation between object and observer. The other transcends objectifying relation and is therefore unrealizable as a determinate phenomenon.
For Levinas, this irreducibility carries over into the ethical sphere. More accurately, there it begins as the shock of otherness “opens humanity” (Levinas, Totality 50) by signaling a shared world of implied moral responsibility. Thus, ethics is “first philosophy”: when the other ruptures (Heideggerian) Being, that intrusive event calls us out of ontological self-enclosure (the self-absorbing need to fashion the world in our own image) into unending moral concern. Indeed, since we cannot subsume otherness into our own being, our moral obligation to it is never fully discharged. We lag behind it, unable to close the distance either ethically or conceptually on the other.
In this respect, the other bears a light-like relation to the self: it erupts into our experience, but we cannot recover that eruption as understanding. In the case of light, we cannot reduce it to the familiar and seemingly universal terms of space and time. Similarly, the other comes to us but registers an alien economy that cannot be scaled into our own. Incommensurability thus fosters the polar extremes of immediate contact and infinite separation with no intermediate commonality to bring the two into reconciliation. Moreover, this breach between the two, this openness that freely receives the other and that cannot be overtaken by sight or reason, is the origin of seeing. “Ethics is an optics,” wrote Levinas, albeit “bereft of the synoptic and totalizing” images that accompany visual experience (Totality 23). Those images come after the ethical awakening and, being derivative, have no authority over it.
Inasmuch as light enables apprehension of the other, we should not assume separate, though analogous, processes. Light reveals otherness, throws it so cleanly and seamlessly into our experience as to cover or re-veil its own action. That revelation, I submit, is the basis for the infinite though traversable distance between the same and the other: light, in one stroke, gives and takes away the distance; it functions simultaneously as a principle of separation and of unification. It gives us expanse, and thereby a sense of apartness, but only by coupling us to things across space-time intervals. That coupling is immediate (unmediated), not actually a passage across space-time but a nullification of the same owing to light’s autonomy from the space-time regime. Thereby the hegemonic frame of everyday reality is broken so that infinity replaces totality. The world, normally hedged-in and fully complete by its very being, undergoes renewal as openness and un-self-containment.
In sum, the otherness or strangeness of light is bound up in its sublime capacity to announce other things visibly while itself remaining hidden from view. That hiddenness, moreover, is an openness or clarity that fosters the seeing, knowing experience. After describing how photons circumvent space and time in physical experiments, John Wheeler proposes that each photon constitutes “an elementary act of creation” when it finally strikes the human eye or some other instrument of detection. He then asks: “For a process of creation that can and does operate anywhere, that reveals itself and yet hides itself, what could one have dreamed up out of pure imagination more magic–and fitting–than this?” (“Law” 189). We could not have dreamed up the non-local photons that constitute light, for they are the means by which we see, know, and imagine other things.
1. James J. Gibson writes: “What about the sensation of being dazzled by looking at the sun, or the sensation of glare that one gets from looking at glossy surfaces that reflect an intense source? Are these not sensations of light as such, and do we not then see pure physical energy? Even in this case, I would argue that the answer is no; we are perceiving a state of the eye akin to pain, arising from excessive stimulation. We perceive a fact about the body as distinguished from a fact about the world, the fact of overstimulation but not the light that caused it. And the experiencing of facts about the body is not the basis of experiencing facts about the world” (55).
2. As noted above, the earth’s blue airy brightness arises from the scattering of sunlight by atmospheric particles. Without the atmosphere, the sun would be encompassed by darkness (as it is when seen from the moon, which has no atmosphere). Faint starlight does little to illuminate the atmosphere, and so we see it as being almost completely coincidental with its physical origins.
3. P. W. Bridgman writes: “The most elementary examination of what light means in terms of direct experience shows that we never experience light itself, but our experience deals only with things lighted. This fundamental fact is never modified by the most complicated or refined physical experiments that have ever been devised; from the point of view of operations, light means nothing more than things lighted” (151). Jonathan Powers writes: “When we see an object we see patches of colour, of light and shade. We do not see a luminescent stream flooding into our eyes. The ‘light’ we postulate to account for the way we see ‘external objects’ is not given in experience; it is inferred from it” (4).
4. Discussing our inability to visualize atomic phenomena adequately, Norwood Russell Hanson insists that “electrons could not be other than unpicturable. The impossibility of visualizing ultimate matter is an essential feature of atomic explanation.” This is because “what requires explanation cannot itself figure in the explanation” (119-20). I thank Dennis Rasmussen for bringing Hanson’s argument to my attention.
5. John Wheeler writes that “light and influences propagated at the speed of light make zero-interval linkages between events near and far” (Journey 43). This remarkable statement emerges from the role light plays in a space-time setting, wherein light speed is defined as an upper limit for the transmission of signals between distant events. Whereas events separated by space-like or time-like intervals are truly distant from each other, those connected by light-like intervals (i.e., connected by light rays) are not spatially or temporally separated. This follows from the absolute constancy of the speed of light.
