Amy J. Elias

Department of English
University of Tennessee
aelias2@utk.edu

 

Suzanne Keen. Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2001.

 

“Understanding, which separates men from brutes,” writes Suzanne Keen of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, “amounts to an enumeration of debts” (69). This statement asserts that in Spenser’s narrative world, comprehension of a state of social reality is possible through something called “understanding”; that such understanding results from uniquely human processes of ratiocination; and that this understanding can be produced only through a comprehensive training of the intellect that includes the study of history, defined as knowledge of the wisdom and ethical questing of previous human generations who have shaped the present. Examining the importance of historical knowledge to Spenser’s work is hardly shocking in the context of Early Modern studies, but encountering a critic who takes Spenser’s position as a starting point for a study of the post-imperial moment in British fiction gives one whiplash. Keen’s Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction does just this: it asserts that Spenser’s romance begins a tradition that, despite postmodernist countercurrents, remains vigorous and has even gained cultural force in the novels of the last few decades.

 

This is a (sub)genre study: the genre is the novel, the subgenre is detective fiction (with traces of the historical novel), and the sub-subgenre is the “romance of the archive.” Keen defines seven characteristics of the romance of the archive: it contains character-researchers, endowed with the corporeality and round psychology of the realistic novel; romance adventure stories, in which research features as a kernel plot action, resulting in strong closure, with climactic discoveries and rewards; discomforts and inconveniences suffered in the service of knowledge; sex and physical pleasure gained as a result of questing; settings and locations containing collections of papers; material traces of the past revealing the truth; and evocation of history, looking back from a post-imperial context (63).

 

The book’s thesis is that there has been a resurgence of interest in sleuthing in contemporary British fiction, but that this sleuthing has taken a special form: academic and non-professional researchers (“questers”) are main characters of novels, and the goal of these characters is to investigate the past through archival research. Their objective is to arrive at some truth about the past, and more often than not, after doing investigative research in libraries or private collections, they do indeed find this previously hidden truth. These “romances of the archive” thus are a traditionalist narrative rejoinder to the proliferation of mid- and late twentieth-century postmodernist experimental fiction. Keen complicates this thesis by arguing that these books form a conservative sub-genre that reflects the need to assert British heritage in the face of England’s traumatic loss of imperial and colonialist status in the late twentieth century. The romance of these novels–their construction of the researcher as “questor” and their frequent assertion through plot construction that it is possible to “seek and find solid facts, incontrovertible evidence, and well-preserved memories of times past”–is what links them to the Spenserian tradition of romance, as well as to detective fiction, gothic fiction, and conspiracy thrillers (à la John Le Carré).

 

Keen approves of these novels; it is clear throughout the study that she is not sympathetic with postmodernism’s insistent interrogation of cultural metanarratives. She is also distrustful of much recent “theory”: this is not a book participating in the (increasingly self-referential) theoretical conversation about postcolonialism and globalization. In this book, Keen does not feel compelled to make sweeping claims about British culture or global capitalism. She focuses her analysis on specific novels, and while working out the whys and wherefores of this fiction, she keeps theoretical musings to a minimum. The book is tightly focused on literature itself, making claims about literary history and using historical context to reveal rationales for literary construction.

 

However, Keen avoids being hermetically sealed within a formalist method, for she historicizes this British fiction in the context of post-Suez and post-Falklands political anxiety, debates about the teaching of history in British schools, and the real-world attitudes of contemporary British writers toward their homeland, toward history, and toward narrative. In her analysis of Peter Ackroyd’s work, she quotes from his papers, housed at the Beinecke Library at Yale University; when making claims about British history as an area study today, she quotes from documents relating contemporary controversies in England concerning the National Curriculum for History. Her twenty-one page bibliography attests to her fastidious research. Clearly, Keen has the kind of archival sensibility that she identifies in her subject. Romances of the Archive is itself a “romance of the archive” in many ways, a tour de force of literary criticism that assumes that answers can be found through the practice of rational critical investigation.

 

Keen recognizes that “even the fluffiest romances of the archive” are freighted with “political visions of contemporary Britain and its relation to its past” (60). While novels such as Barry Unsworth’s Sugar and Rum and Sacred Hunger complicate and criticize the British past, novels such as Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton reveal “a fundamental romanticism” about history that values connections between the present and the past. At the other side of the continuum, a novel such as A.S. Byatt’s Possession defends British heritage against a postmodern attack on history. Thus these romances of the archive run the gamut from postmodernist critique to neo-conservative assertion of nationalist history. These

 

romances of the archive...show fictional characters endeavouring to come to terms with a British past unexpurgated of its rough patches. Gravitating to the gaps in school history, revisiting glorious episodes with a critical eye, and attempting to recuperate heritage sensations from periods rendered inert or shameful by academicians, romancers of the archive enact and criticize their culture's fascination with the uses of the past. (109)

 

Yet in the final analysis, Keen asserts, many of these contemporary British novels are epistemologically traditionalist, overtly supporting modern humanist values and repudiating the supposed “crisis in history”: “they unabashedly interpret the past through its material traces; they build on a foundation of ‘documentarism,’ answering the postmodern critique of history with invented records full of hard facts” (3). In addition, these novels often are politically conservative, reviving a Whig interpretation of history and rebuilding a nationalist pride in Britishness. While she has sympathy with their support of modern rationalism, Keen is much more skeptical and critical of these novels’ defensiveness about the British national past. With touches of acerbic wit, she often points out their ideological contradictions. For example, when discussing Byatt’s Possession, which pits theory-sodden and status-seeking American academics against English amateur researchers in a race to find valuable historical documents, she notes that Byatt writes as if British heritage were at stake: the amateur British sleuths represent pure, disinterested research that will serve as the basis of true British history and autonomy, both threatened by American materialism and cultural imperialism. Byatt therefore “plays the heritage card in defence of literary history. When she invokes the competing literature of American and postcolonial writers, Byatt places Britain and British writing in the sympathetic role of underdog. The fact that British libraries and museums still contain treasure troves gathered from around the world lies concealed, for Byatt does not invite closer scrutiny of the imperial history of collecting and acquisition” (60).

 

Keen is right to note that the Right’s attitudes toward the “postmodernists” closely resemble those found in romances of the archive: that is, they construct a new arena for the ancients vs. the moderns debate, pitting postmodernism against the keepers of the culture (what Keen would call the heritage preservationists). While in the 1980s this conservative contingent railed against secular humanists in the academy, in the 1990s and later they tended to decry the ascendancy of the “postmoderns,” who strip secular humanism of its utopian social action agendas and even of its basic assumptions about human agency, reality, truth, and meaning.

 

What Keen doesn’t consider as deeply is that these novels critique and re-present not just a politically conservative need to assert British heritage over academic history, but also the turn toward history and archival research in academic theory since the 1970s. Great Britain played a large role in the genesis of this trend. Fueled by the events of 1968, the turn to history was indebted to an influx of ideas from outlets such as the New Left Review; the growth of cultural studies at the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies (founded in 1964) under the influence of, first, social science inquiry and then, later, the Marxist work of Louis Althusser and the cultural studies work of Stuart Hall; and the cultural materialist work of Raymond Williams. Combined with the development of New Historicism and neo-Marxist (or poststructuralist Marxist) theories in the U.S. and the general “crisis in history” perceived in all disciplines but especially in history, the post-1960s academy on both sides of the Atlantic has fueled ferocious debates about history and repeatedly advocated that we return to it as the wellspring of understanding. In its poststructuralist forms, this theoretical return to history has implied that we can get some “truth” about history from our archival research, even if that truth is the truth about historical contingency. For Marxist theorists, this is not an implication but an imperative: Fredric Jameson’s injunction to “Always historicize!” asserts that there is a point to historical research, that digging in the archives leads to some real revelation about the past that is provisional only in the sense that it may be incomplete. Keen is justifiably skeptical about the ultimate significance of what transpires in the arcane world of academic theory. But this turn to history in influential British academic centers such as the Birmingham Center clearly needs to be credited with a certain real impact, not only in Britain but in universities throughout the world. And it needs, as well, to be differentiated from the “postmodernist perspectives on history” that Keen constructs as the antithesis of archival romance.

 

As the notion of an acting self was increasingly attacked by the notion of the constructed subject in post-1960s linguistic and Foucauldian theories, Marxist and other social justice theories scrambled to find a way to repudiate or modify the idea of social determinism of the psyche without relinquishing the idea of the economic and/or cultural determinism of lived experience. As the century drew to a close, even the more linguistic or seemingly formalistic strains of poststructuralism had turned back to the problem of self and ethics, worrying the paradox of (historically situated) ethical action in the face of subject construction. The Left was turning to history with a vengeance and puzzling out its own theoretical self-contradictions as a result. The confusing result was often that both the Left and the Right attacked postmodernism as the bogeyman of history and social justice (the Left calling it fascist and the Right calling it nihilist). Postmodernist theory became the Other to both sides of the political spectrum in the “theory wars.” The relationships among the turn to a traditional belief in history in romances of the archive, the coterminous return to a belief in historical research in academic Leftist theory, and the demand for a return to history by the conservative Right on both sides of the Atlantic could be elucidated a good deal more clearly in this study.

 

Keen’s book, however, not only gives useful readings of specific works of fiction but also posits a social significance for the rise of this particular subgenre at this particular moment in British history. Keen discusses fiction by Julian Barnes, A.S. Byatt, Penelope Lively, Barry Unsworth, Peter Ackroyd, Kingsley Amis, Lindsay Clarke, Lawrence Norfolk, Nigel Williams, P.D. James, Robert Harris, Peter Dickinson, Margaret Drabble, Alan Hollinghurst, Adam Mars-Jones, Robert Goddard, Stevie Davies, Derek Walcott, Keri Hulme, Amitav Ghosh, and Bharati Mukherjee. A dual focus on technique and thematic subject leads her to interesting linkages. For example, she links detective fiction to romance through their shared “questing for truth,” a claim that runs counter to many studies of detective fiction that regard it as the genre most aligned with realism and modernity, particularly in its assumptions that deductive logic and humanist values can solve the puzzles of the universe. The romance of the archive incorporates detective fiction’s rationalist questing but adds to it romance’s “theological, political, and personal frames of reference for making moral and ethical judgments about human behaviour” (157). For example, in her chapter “Envisioning the Past,” Keen discusses novels that scrutinize the archival past to re-evaluate expectations of gender roles and sexual orientation and concludes that these novels tend toward the uncanny and a libidinal narrative experimentation. In the last chapter, “Postcolonial Rejoinders,” she unflinchingly discusses how English writers often display a “nostalgia, defensiveness, and anxiety” about British colonial history that includes “regret about Britain’s decline in global status and annoyance at the complaints of postcolonial subjects” (215). These writers, she believes, attempt to manage the anxieties of the post-Falklands decades by offering a “reassertion of British glory” (230).

 

Keeping her focus tightly trained on realist literature and British literary history, Keen observes the psychology of contemporary British writers often ignored by critics trained on avant-garde or postcolonial fiction. Keen offers a study of the British realist novel in a post-imperial age, a discussion of the mainstream center rather than the postcolonial border. Her book is written clearly (this is a critical study that undergraduate students could actually read and understand) and could be used as the basis for a special topics course on contemporary British fiction, particularly in this subgenre. Romances of the Archive is a nuanced account of contemporary British fiction that analyzes the way that romances of the archive are indeed romances, incorporating presentism, antiquarianism, and humanist (even theological) values. What Keen’s own archival and critical quest has revealed–essentially, a new mode of literary nationalism–certainly deserves our further attention.

 

 

 

 

Volume 13, Number 1
September, 2002

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The following responses were submitted by PMC readers using regular e-mail or the PMC Reader’s Report form. Not all letters received are published, and published letters may have been edited.

 

Copyright (c) 2002 by the authors, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the authors and the notification of the publisher, the Johns Hopkins University Press.

 

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Reader’s Report on Joseph Tate’s “Radiohead’s Antivideos: Works of Art in the Age of Electronic Reproduction” (PMC 12.3):

 

These comments are from: Jeremy Arnold

 

There is perhaps no greater sign of the decadence of Postmodern Culture (the journal and the phenomenon) than Joseph Tate’s interpretation of Radiohead’s anti-videos. My goal is not to combat his interpretation of the videos with my own, but to argue against the assumptions of the text itself. And in the spirit of postmodern disclosure, I will admit that this response is being subversively written from my cubicle in San Francisco, which will explain the absence of page references and direct quotes.

 

Rather than detail every point of disagreement I have, I will simply mark out a few points of difference.

 

The use of unquestioned theoretical constructs to explain, rather than understand (in the sense of the Germanic distinction most often associated with Heidegger) a given cultural product seems as unhelpful as deconstructive readings of comic books. I love Baudrillard as much as the next guy, but the fact is even he doubts his own credibility, as evidenced by his infamous comment that he is an anti-prophet, in that everything he says isn’t (or doesn’t become) true. In that sense, I would argue that Baudrillard, perhaps in line with Zizek, wants a return to the Real, that for all the talk of hyperreality and the procession of simulacra, metaphorics of emptiness and deserts, there is a politically motivated “desire” for the Real. A desert may be devoid of water, but it is not pure form; it is its own kind of Real, where survival is, perhaps, more at stake than in the comfy confines of PoMo suburbanity.Under my reading then, Radiohead’s music, despite its pastiche and the utter futility in locating a single event of performance, is also not designed to play out the VR [virtual reality] fantasy; there is, both lyrically and musically, a reality in the songs. Yorke’s constant references to scenes of material, technologically produced destruction (“Lucky,” “Airbag” on OK Computer), politics (“You and Whose Army,” on Amnesiac) and existential moments of doubt (just about every damn song they ever wrote) refer us not to a dematerialized sphere of virtuality, but through the hyper-consciousness of the technological mediation of our experience of reality these days, sends us back to the real human emotions (or the difficulty in feeling those emotions) involved in any situation.

 
Musically speaking, Tate seems way off the mark, perhaps as a result of his simple appropriation of PoMo theory, which prevents him from listening to the music instead of finding out its status as an object. (Frankly, I wouldn’t mind that analysis if there wasn’t an equation made between the economic and the aesthetic, a leap that is given no argumentative support.) This is most evidenced by his misguided assertion that Bitches Brew is not as much a product of instrumental virtuosity as it is a product of Ted Macero and Miles Davis’s production chops (we will return to the word “chops” in a moment). The simple fact of the matter is that Bitches Brew, while a collage of improvised pieces of music pasted together by a brilliant team of musicians and engineers, is an achievement because of the musical ground it broke. It breaks down the harmonic elements of jazz to their most basic structures, removing standard progressions and improvisation over changes (a project begun in Davis’s earlier modal music, most notably on Kind of Blue) while introducing a significant amount of rhythmic diversity that was predicated less on swing and more on pulse (a pulse inspired by rock, perhaps, but in no way reducible to it).Radiohead has performed its own kind of revision of the canon of rock, not by revealing its “phantasmic” structure (hasn’t rock always been, more than any art, aware of its own phantasmic existence? what else could explain the existence and appeal of hair metal bands in the 80s?) but by radically investigating the implicit possibilities that rock music, as an historical process (has Tate forgotten history in all of this?), offers. Radiohead is not the first to use electronics instead of instruments (Brian Eno, Can, etc.) or odd time signatures (although they have often said they hate progressive rock, odd time has been a feature of the genre since its inception) or to deal with PoMo culture (the Talking Heads, whose song “Radiohead” gave Radiohead its name, brilliantly assessed the PoMo world on Remain in Light, which I feel is one of the greatest albums in rock history).What Radiohead has done, in my opinion, is to insert a strong melodic sensibility that rock often lacks. What always brings the music back to a real human situation is the power of the melody, even in the fragmented songs on Kid A. The melody forces us back to the Real and ultimately forces us to listen again and again because there is something “there.” It is the relationship between a powerful melody (and the harmonic background, which is often quite traditional) and the complex and disjunctive rhythm that makes Radiohead an incredible band. They do have chops (unlike most rock musicians, all of Radiohead’s members except Yorke read music), evident in the complexity of the arrangements, the odd time, and the execution of the songs (nothing ever seems like a mistake in Radiohead; it all seems intended, even if it’s not). This IS a distortion of rock, in that it is GOOD, which is why musicians from other genres (classical and jazz) are beginning to work on Radiohead’s music.

 
My final point concerns one of the keywords used in the article, “ideology.” I would argue that the article itself is a classic example of a certain ideology, grounded in the aforementioned unquestioned use of theory to explain art. Tate reveals his prediliction for theory in the autobiographical account of his first interpretation of the Amnesiac antivideos. His first impulse was to find a postmodernist revelation of pure advertising, buttressed by a reading of the allusion (finally some history) to Cage’s 4’33”.Radiohead is doing theory! But then, he learned that the reason there was no music in the videos was that they were works in progress; they were not works at all, at that point. I think in that situation I might just laugh off the whole thing as an exuberant but premature attempt to think myself into the band Radiohead (something I’ve thought about before, to be honest). But, Tate’s reading is merely “disturbed,” so he looks for an alternate reading, one that moves toward an instantiation of the “history of shit.” But is this the correct reading? It is one thing to argue that capitalism has a “shitty” aspect to it, and that the question of waste is important both ecologically and as an approach to the cultural aesthetic of postmodernity. But is that what the artist, Cris Bran, said? He said, ultimately, that Radiohead was attempting to make a gallery of ideas, in other words, a gallery of possibilities, future plans for action. The videos don’t expose the waste products of manic production; they expose the artistic process as a dialectic between potentiality and actuality, the flux between becoming and being. And what could possibly be extraneous about that?All this talk of becoming, incontinence, etc. reminds me of Nietzsche. Tate’s critique sounds more and more like a classic example of ressentiment.The critic, while open to the labrynthine maze of an art work, can’t stop at mere understanding; the critic has to capture it in one or another theoretical construct. Ultimately, the work, as evidenced in the failure to read the antivideo as “Baudrillardian,” resists the attempts to capture it, as Wallace Stevens said, “almost successfully.”In other words, the work is allegorically read back into the critic, into an established framework of interpretation. The best art, theory, and philosophy, the work of Baudrillard, Heidegger, Zizek, Radiohead, Joyce, Stevens (the list goes on), is intended to make strange and unfamiliar what was presupposed. If Radiohead is merely a cultural manifestation of PoMo theory, then why listen to Radiohead? I don’t need Thom Yorke to tell me that we live in a technological world, nor do I need him to understand capitalism’s dirty little remainder. What I do need Radiohead for is the aesthetic brilliance, the originality, the possibility that they provide; I in fact need them because they opened up a whole new world (that is, possibility) of art and life to me that I never would have known had I never heard their music. To that end they do deserve intense listening, criticism, and thought, and they do deserve to be placed in the same sentence with Zizek, Lacan, and Baudrillard, not as an affirmation of the latter’s brilliance, but as an affirmation of their own.

 

Joseph Tate replies:

 

In replying to Jeremy Arnold’s reader mail, I want to begin where Arnold ends. He concludes by writing: “I don’t need Thom Yorke to tell me that we live in a technological world, nor do I need him to understand capitalism[‘]s dirty little remainder. What I do need Radiohead for is the aesthetic brilliance, the originality, the possibility that they provide.” The aesthetic brilliance to which Arnold alludes–presumably an objective quality of the work and/or band members–is undoubtedly linked to what he mentions earlier, that Radiohead’s music does not refer us “to a dematerialized sphere of virtuality,” but rather “sends us back to the real human emotions (or the difficulty in feeling those emotions) involved in any situation.” The songs send the listener, or put differently, they transport the listener back to real emotions. Though what each variant of “real” is meant to connote (“real,” “the Real,” and “reality” are used interchangeably) is unclear, Arnold’s “real human emotions” in this instance are likely shorthand for what might be called phenomenological presence, a presence reachable via Radiohead’s music. Thus, objective aesthetic brilliance induces a “real” emotional state, and it is this my essay fails to address–an arguably fair reframing of Arnold’s thesis.

 

My essay does not touch on this phenomenon largely because Radiohead’s entire project can be read, almost successfully, as an argument against this very sort of listener experience. I appropriate Arnold’s use of Wallace Stevens’s phrase “almost successfully” because Stevens’s poem, “Man Carrying Thing,” is indeed instructive: “The poem must resist the intelligence, / Almost successfully” (lines 1-2, 350). The poem, or in this case the music of Radiohead, must and does resist intelligence almost successfully, that is, not quite successfully: art does resist critical understanding, but never does it remain completely inarticulate or inscrutable. We can and should, I think, as Stevens says in closing his poem, “endure our thoughts all night, until / The bright obvious stands motionless in cold” (lines 13-14, 351). The bright obvious here is that Radiohead’s music doesn’t return us to “a reality,” to use Arnold’s phrase, or “real human emotions” at all. Instead, with systematic clarity, their work asks for anything but the aesthetic transport of the listener.

 

Parenthetically, had I but world enough and time, I would undertake a more extended argument against Arnold’s “real human emotions.” Presumably, “real” here means something akin to “actual” or “immediate” in the literal sense of unmediated. That emotions felt in response to fictions like Radiohead’s music can ever be real has been debated for centuries, but the most extensive debate among current scholars of emotion began in 1978 with Kendall Walton’s essay “Fearing Fictions” and continues into 1997 with Eva Dadlez’s What’s Hecuba to Him? Fictional Events and Actual Emotions. Also, for a cogent theorization of emotions as mediated, social constructs, Katherine Lutz’s Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and Their Challenge to Western Theory is enlightening. The argument of Lutz’s book in a nutshell is that “emotional meaning is fundamentally structured by particular cultural systems and particular social and material environments” (5). Another more recent book on the cofunctioning of affect and langauge that deserves wider attention is Brian Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation.

 

Reading the band’s work as self-reflexive, the lyrics of the title track to Kid A represent aesthetic response, or musical ecstasy to be exact, as an experience with potentially horrifying results. As the song ends, Yorke’s barely decipherable, computer-manipulated voice sings: “The rats and children follow me out of town / The rats and children follow me out of their homes / Come on kids.”[1] Via overt reference to the Pied Piper story, a narrative of child-abduction that is perhaps especially horrifying to the contemporary American imagination given the recent prominence of abductions in the popular media, Radiohead’s exaggeration of their music’s power to sway listeners would seem, like the Pied Piper story itself, to be a cautionary tale.[2]

 

If children in this song and others are read as signs of emotional sincerity, then the band’s lyrics have an anxiety-ridden perspective on affective honesty. The 2001 b-side song “Fog” figures the perpetual presence of a child as a fast-growing, subterranean baby alligator familiar from urban mythology:

 

There’s a little child
Running round this house
And he never leaves
He will never leave
And the fog comes up from the sewers
And glows in the dark

 

Baby alligators in the sewers grow up fast
Grow up fast

 

Similarly, amid the OK Computer song “Fitter Happier” and its catalogue-like litany of mundane self-help advice, there intervenes a chilling line meant to have a conventional cinematic visual layering effect: “(shot of baby strapped in back seat).” The speaker of Kid A track “Morning Bell,” thrice intones the imperative, “Cut the kids in half,” and the title of a new unreleased song first performed this summer by the band is “We Suck Young Blood.”

 

Likewise, instead of sincerely asking listeners to follow them childlike out of town, the band warns in “Dollars and Cents” from Amnesiac that:

 

we are the DOLLARS & CENTS
and the PoUNDS and Pence
the MARK and the YEN
we are going to crack your little souls
we are going to crack your little souls

 

The we of these lines is not literally autobiographical, but is metaphorically Radiohead, a product we buy with pounds and pence that will crack (open up or break down?) the listeners’ supposedly diminutive souls.

 

In this way, any pleasure listeners experience with Radiohead’s music is mired in the foregrounded trappings of its marketplace consumption: the “aesthetic brilliance” cannot be arrived at without first paying for it with dollars and cents, pounds and pence. The music cannot be readily liberated from the production-line logic and mass marketing by which it comes to listeners, and Radiohead, as I argue here and in my essay, does not want listeners to forget the product they are listening to is just that: a product.

 

At this point it is worth clarifying that citing the band’s lyrics as I have above by no means establishes an authoritative reading. Nevertheless, I do think there is a strong case for the assertion that the band’s project time and again calls emotional legitimacy, immediacy, aesthetic response, and the tangled web they weave into question.[3]

 

To close, one song and its music video provide a useful corrective to both my perspective and that suggested by Arnold’s letter. In the music video for “Pyramid Song,” a featureless, computer-rendered avatar with whom viewers explore a submerged, underwater city is always connected to the surface via a lifeline, an instrument not as important in-itself as what it facilitates: a return, one indirectly confirmed by the lyrics’ consistent past-tense.[4] Though the visual story does not neatly narrate the lyrics or vice versa, the two elements of sound and vision share this common thematic of going-to and coming-back. Lyrically, the speaker has been, seen, and is come back to tell:

 

I jumped in the river what did I see?
blackeeyedangelsswamwithme.
a moonful of stars and astral cars.
and all the figures i used to see.
all my lovers were there with me.
all my past and futures.
and we all went to heaven in a little row boat. [sic]

 

Visually, however, as the video ends and the camera’s perspective rises to the surface, the avatar stays below. Physiological limits dictate that humans cannot stay underwater for long, even with breathing apparatuses, but given that the avatar is not human, is a digital creation, it accomplishes what we can only imagine: it settles into a chair in an empty house. Ultimately, the audience is here given a choice: to remain submerged in the music’s ocean of nostalgic beauty with “nothing to fear and nothing to doubt,” as the lyrics claim, or to trace the lifeline out of emotional depths and return to the fluxing contours of Radiohead’s refractive surface. Problems and possibilities attend either decision, I argue (and I think Arnold would agree), in equal portions.

Notes

 

1. Except for songs on Amnesiac, all lyrics are taken from Jonathan Percy’s online archive: <http://www.greenplastic.com/lyrics>. Lyrics for Amnesiac are available on Radiohead’s own web site here: <http://www.waste-game.com/hogger/numeeja/lyrics/packtframe.html>. Macromedia’s free Flash Player is required to view this page.

 

2. In another instance, Radiohead critiques aesthetic rapture: the beloved in “Creep” from Pablo Honey, is said to “float like a feather in a beautiful world,” but the speaker ultimately admits his inadequacy in the face of such beauty: “I’m a creep.” Confronting something beautiful, or something perceived as beautiful, repeatedly causes problems for the protagonists in Radiohead’s music.

 

3. This suspicion is linked to, but not synonymous with, what Fredric Jameson calls “the waning of affect in postmodern culture” (10). The linkage is a topic for another essay.

 

4. The video is available online here in Windows Media Player format: <http://hollywoodandvine.com/radiohead/rha_primary_frame.html>. Be warned that this web site is not user- or bandwidth-friendly. Choosing “Video” in the page’s topmost menu will take you to another page where you can then select the video you would like to see.

 

Works Cited

 

• Dadlez, E. M. What’s Hecuba to Him? Fictional Events and Actual Emotions. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania UP, 1997.
• Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991.
• Lutz, Catherine. Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and Their Challenge to Western Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988.
• Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, and Sensation. Durham, NC and London: Duke UP, 2002.
• Meeting People is Easy. Dir. Grant Gee. Capitol Records, 1998.
• Pyramid Song. Dir. Shynola. Capitol Records, 2001.
• Stevens, Wallace. “Man Carrying Thing.” The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. 1954. New York: Knopf, 1997. 350-51.
• Radiohead. “Creep.” Pablo Honey. Capitol Records, 1993.
• —. “Fitter, Happier.” OK Computer. Capitol Records, 1997.
• —. “Fog.” Knives Out, Part Two. Capitol Records, 2001.
• —. “High and Dry.” The Bends. Capitol Records, 1995.
• —. “Knives Out.” Amnesiac. Capitol Records, 2001.
• —. “Packt like Sardines in a Crusht Tin Box.” Amnesiac. Capitol Records, 2001.
• —. “Pyramid Song.” Amnesiac. Capitol Records, 2001.
• —. “The Bends.” The Bends. Capitol Records, 1995.
• —. “We Suck Young Blood.” Unreleased, 2002.
• Walton, Kendall. “Fearing Fictions.” Journal of Philosophy 75 (1978): 5-27.

 

Andrew Kimbrough

Guangdong University of Foreign Studies
andrewmkimbrough@yahoo.com

 

Frozen Palaces. CD-ROM by Hugo Glendinning and Tim Etchells with Forced Entertainment. Collected on artintact 5, produced by Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe (ZKM), 1999. Buchhandelsausgabe/Trade Edition;

 

and

 

Nightwalks. CD-ROM by Hugo Glendinning and Tim Etchells with Forced Entertainment. Sheffield, UK: Forced Entertainment, 1998.

 

Both CD-ROMs are available through Forced Entertainment via their website, <http://www.forced.co.uk>.

 

Using as a springboard Marshall McLuhan’s observation that different media in the twentieth century recuperated sensory operations denied by writing, media theorist Paul Levinson postulates that the computer best provides an interactive medium wherein the faculties of hearing, speech, sight, and touch may be employed in immediate communication, hence duplicating the experience of the live. Whereas the dislocation of space and time in such media as the video and telephone interrupts the experience of direct physical presence, Levinson argues, the computer fosters a tangible immediacy through the involvement of many senses. I am attracted to Levinson’s theorizing, but I think it incomplete in explaining the magnetic attraction of cyberspace. For as any online gamer knows, more than simply attempting to duplicate the live, interactive computer technology offers a heightened and very different experience, one that the live cannot provide. As theorist Matthew Causey attests, with a nod to Heidegger, something “uncanny” erupts in the performative experience of technology. Such uncanniness may be experienced in the interactive use of the CD-ROMs produced by the British theatre company known as Forced Entertainment.

 

Since 1984, the dozen actors and designers who comprise Forced Entertainment under the artistic direction of Tim Etchells have been exploring the boundaries of theatre and performance in a manner slightly reminiscent of Elizabeth LeCompte and the Wooster Group in New York. However, rather than challenging the traditional reception of the (classical) theatre text–a practice that distinguishes LeCompte’s pieces–Forced Entertainment work from improvisations and Etchells’ written texts, and their experiments have taken them from their own small warehouse theatre in Sheffield, England to found spaces, live and videated gallery installations, film, and even CD-ROM. With several new works produced annually, and past shows kept in repertoire, Forced Entertainment maintains steady touring schedules in the UK and Europe, with occasional trips to the US. (I first encountered them at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis in March of 1999, where they performed their compelling Speak Bitterness, the text of which is included in Etchells’s 1999 publication Certain Fragments.) Critics have hailed the group’s work as definitively postmodern for its break with theatrical convention, its obsession with the inadequacy of language, its seemingly fragmented nature, and its penchant for the appropriation and undermining of pop sensibility. (Videos of past productions are also available through Forced Entertainment’s website, < http://www.forced.co.uk>.) But with its forays into CD-ROM, Forced Entertainment also confirms the noted relationship of the postmodern with the technological. With CD-ROM, Forced Entertainment explores a new performative dimension located in the multimedia intersections of photography, the theatrical, and computer technology.

 

Both Nightwalks and Frozen Palaces defied my previous experiences with CD-ROM. Neither unfolds in linear fashion like the digital film with alternate scenarios and endings, nor are they goal-oriented like the interactive game. Rather, the CD-ROMs seem to play upon the type of audience reception found within the art gallery. Both employ the same format, presenting Hugo Glendinning’s striking color photographs of locations peopled with members of Forced Entertainment and accompanied by minimalist soundscapes scored by John Avery. Digital technology, however, allows the photographs to be viewed in a novel way: as 360-degree panoramas. On-screen, the photographs are designed to be shifted and manipulated by use of the control and shift keys in tandem with the mouse: the user may zoom in and out of the image, and scroll left or right in circular fashion. By means of a small pointer icon that appears on-screen over two or three detailed images within a photograph, the user may also access other photographs that in turn open into a seemingly limitless maze of images, visual associations, and aural meanderings. Such associations are fostered not by a story line that may be read into (or out of) the photographs, but by a disjointed continuity established by the locations and hints of “character” suggested by the static poses and expressions of the actors, who may appear in more than one photograph. For indeed a strength of Forced Entertainment lies in the unique physical presence of the performers themselves, a presence that seeps through digital reproduction and offers the user-observer some kind of connection with the human and the live/real.

 

Figure 1: Image from Nightwalks. Photograph by Hugo Glendinning.

 

 

 

 

The liner notes for Nightwalks claim that Glendinning’s deserted, nighttime London cityscapes resemble “a catalogue of forgotten locations for an imaginary film.” The metaphor (added for marketing purposes?) is unfortunate for its simplifying reduction of the vast interpretive potential the images hold. Granted, the locations feel out of the way and untravelled, and they are well suited for the film noir genre. But by means of Glendinning’s and Etchell’s judicious placement of people–sometimes posed, sometimes active, in various states of undress, alone or coupled–the locations start to breathe on their own and hint at scenarios that defy the generic confines of the movies (or even the comic book). The notes correctly encourage the audience to “explore,” since the design compels the user to seek out connections and follow tangents. Some locations are shot from various angles; some characters appear in more than one image; pointer icons sometimes return the user to a previously encountered image and beckon a fresh departure. Yet, the surface realism of the industrial London locations clashes with the beguiling and fantasmic intimations evoked by the presence of the performed body. Who is that naked man in the metallic corridor? Why does that woman wear angel wings? Nightwalkscreates intrigue not by supplying answers but by defying them. Details offer evidence without explanation. The photographs invite the user’s gaze, but deny the modernist quest for meaning.

 

Figure 1: Image from Frozen Palaces. Photograph by Hugo Glendinning.

 

 

 

 

Frozen Palaces engages the user in similar fashion as Nightwalks, but here Glendinning and Etchells’s manipulation of location provides a much denser field of exploration. The first image reveals the parlor of a house after a party, clued by the torn wrapping paper, half-eaten cake, and deflating balloons. The maze of images available, however, suggests three or four more separate interior locations, without clarifying whether they are all in the same house or not. The party imagery permeates one floor; a séance takes place on another; a man lies dead in a bathtub while a woman scrubs a bloody knife; scenes of erotic encounters shuffle within a bedroom; and a body lies on the bare earth of a cellar. Again, Glendinning and Etchells establish a familiar realism within the surroundings, but the situations and expressions of the “characters” evade explanation, and Avery’s eerie repetitive tones complement the sense of disorientation evoked. More palpable connections seem to exist between the characters than in Nightwalks, but the relationships are never made clear. As the images resist clear readings, the experience of the posed actors shifts: they are no longer objects of inquiry; rather, their inscrutability returns the user-audience’s gaze as if to query the incessant need to know.

 

Nightwalks and Frozen Palaces can be seen to operate on three levels. On one, the user witnesses the artistry of the collaboration between Glendinning and Forced Entertainment. The photographs are vivid, rich in color, and dense in visual information. As the CD-ROMs mimic the gallery viewing experience, the viewer may move closer to or away from each visual display, and one can decide how much time to spend with individual images. Additionally, the 360-degree design reminds me of an inverted sculpture–since the user, not the piece, occupies the center–and I must travel around it in order to take in its totality. On another level, the compulsion to move interactively and traverse the imagery subsumes the aforementioned appreciation of artistry. Indeed, the need to explore and solve soon replaces the fascination with individual images. The sensation resembles playing an elaborate board or card game, wherein the players need to keep abreast of information as it is revealed piecemeal. If anything, a weakness of the design lies in the circuit of repetition in which one eventually finds oneself. The images by necessity must repeat themselves, and I found myself impatient to move faster through familiar territory in order to find the quickly diminishing unfamiliar. Since there is no sense of completion, given the lack of a narrative, one must at some point simply decide to stop. Given the alternating poles of experience, the first sensation of mystery gives way to a closing sensation of exhaustion and ill-ease. Precisely in this discomfiture, however, a third experience surfaces: that of the photographs betraying another ontological dimension which becomes manifest only after the user exhausts habitual modes of inquiry and understanding. As the viewer’s ego is not rewarded but rather stifled and displaced, the photographs must be regarded differently, and from other, non-linguistic sensibilities.

 

Nightwalks and Frozen Palaces succeed as unique performative experiences, but not simply because of their interactive dimension or their undoubted artistry. Through their deft and aggressive exploitation of media, they offer an encounter with both performance and photography that one cannot find in a gallery, book, or theatre. There is no pretense of duplicating an experience found elsewhere, particularly within the “live,” since Glendinning, Etchells, and the members of Forced Entertainment have devised a project that, with an idiosyncratic virtuosity, negotiates the parameters and possibilities of the CD-ROM. In light of McLuhan and Levinson’s theorizing, the online performances of Forced Entertainment indeed recuperate senses and faculties that the one-dimensional photograph cannot engage. With the CD-ROMs, the user looks, listens, moves, feels, remembers, and anticipates, as well as appreciates. Since Glendinning and Etchells avoid storytelling, the sense is in the experience. In this regard, their work lends support to McLuhan and Walter Ong’s oft-neglected alternative definition of the postmodern, found in their recognition that technology allows us to think, feel, and communicate in unfamiliar and uncanny ways, ways we have only been able to realize in the last half of the twentieth century. The experience of Nightwalks and Frozen Palaces thereby approximates Heidegger’s view of art and language as a nonrepresentational revealing of what lurks on the outskirts of consciousness. As Forced Entertainment demonstrates, performance in technology helps to push us further into those unfamiliar and uncharted spaces.

Works Cited

 

• Causey, Matthew. “The Screen Test of the Double: The Uncanny Performer in the Space of Technology.” Theatre Journal 51.4 (December 1999): 383-94.
• Etchells, Tim. Certain Fragments: Contemporary Performance and Forced Entertainment. London and New York: Routledge, 1999.
• Levinson, Paul. Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium. London and New York: Routledge, 1999.
• McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. 2nd ed. New York: Signet, 1964.
• McLuhan, Marshall, and Bruce R. Powers. The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.
• Ong, Walter J., S.J. Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977.
• —. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982.

 

Jesse Cohn

English Department
Purdue University North Central
jcohn@purduenc.edu

 

Saul Newman, From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2001.

 
Newly resurgent anarchist movements, shaking the streets from Seattle to Genoa, are caught in a field of tension between two magnetic poles: Eugene, Oregon, and Plainfield, Vermont. Eugene is the home of John Zerzan, author of Future Primitive (1994), who has pushed anarchist theory in the direction of an all-encompassing negation of “civilization.” At the Institute for Social Ecology in Plainfield in 1995, Murray Bookchin issued his much debated challenge to the “anti-civilizational” anarchists, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm. Bookchin’s “social anarchism” is in the tradition of the anarcho-communism theorized by Peter Kropotkin, calling for the replacement of nations and markets with a decentralized federation of self-managing communities. Zerzan’s “primitivism” calls for the destruction of the “totality,” including the abolition of technology, language, and history itself, in favor of a wild, primordial freedom (Future Primitive 129).¹ The “chasm” between Eugene and Plainfield is wide, certainly. Zerzan and Bookchin agree on one thing, however: both hate postmodernism.

 

Bookchin calls it a form of “nihilism” tailored to “yuppie” tastes (19). “Postmodernism leaves us hopeless in an unending mall,” Zerzan complains, “without a living critique; nowhere” (134). For Bookchin, theorists such as Foucault and Derrida simulate a kind of individualistic rebellion while vitiating social anarchist commitments to reason, realism, and ethical universals (9-10). For Zerzan, on the contrary, they bolster the reigning order by liquidating any notion of the autonomous individual: “the postmodern subject, what is presumably left of subject-hood, seems to be mainly the personality constructed by and for technological capital” (110).

 

This dispute is one of the significant contexts in which Saul Newman’s From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power arrives. Another is the rediscovery by the academy of the anarchist theoretical tradition, where until recently anarchism had endured an official oblivion even longer and deeper than its erasure from public memory. The rediscovery of anarchist theory is a timely gift for theorists such as Todd May (The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism, 1994), who are eager to politicize poststructuralism but leery of bolting their concepts onto ready-made Marxist frameworks. Both May and Newman see Marxism, in all its varieties, as an ineluctably “strategic” philosophy (to use May’s term), perpetually drawn to the postulate of a “center” from which power must emanate (May 7; 10).

 

“In contrast to Marxism,” writes Newman, “anarchism was revolutionary in analyzing power in its own right, and exposing the place of power in Marxism itself–its potential to reaffirm state authority” (6). Mikhail Bakunin and Karl Marx tore the First International asunder in 1872 over the question of the State: was it a mere instrument of ruling-class power, as Marx thought, in which case it could be seized and used by the proletariat, or was it an “autonomous and independent institution with its own logic of domination,” as Bakunin argued, in which case any “transitional” State would merely constitute a new reigning regime (Newman 21)? History has given a poignant weight to Bakunin’s premonitions of a “red bureaucracy,” of course, but for a poststructuralist rereading, his importance lies in his challenge to Marx’s method–the “strategic thinking” for which “all problems can be reduced to the basic one” (May 10). Anarchist critique undermines the confident assumption that power is merely an “epiphenomenon of the capitalist economy or class relations,” which in turn opens the way to a post-Foucauldian apprehension of the ubiquity of power relations–the “dispersed, decentered” power which comes from everywhere (Newman 2; 78).

 

At the same time, Newman and May concur, classical anarchism ditches its own best insight: “anarchism itself falls into the trap of the place of power” (Newman 6). Both Bakunin and Kropotkin found resistance on a certain notion of human nature as an “outside” to power–a pure origin of resistance. Power, as incarnated in the State, represses and distorts the goodness of humanity; once it is eradicated by the revolution, “human essence will flourish” and power will disappear (Newman 13). For Newman, however, power is ineradicable, and any essentialist notion of “human nature” is the basis for a new domination.

 

From the diagnosis, the prescription: for anarchism to become meaningful once again, it must be detached from its investment in essentialist conceptions of power and human identity, made to face the reality that power is everywhere. But how to do so while avoiding the gloomy conclusion that because power is everywhere, resistance is nowhere? If “resistance to power cannot be conceptualized without thinking in terms of an outside to power,” how can this “outside” be thought without resorting to yet another equally foundationalist theory of “the place of power” (97)? Overcoming this “logical impasse” is the task Newman sets for himself in the following chapters, as he scours the resources of poststructuralism for “a non-essentialist notion of the Outside” (6).

 

But what does Newman mean by “power” when he seeks its “Outside”? It’s not always clear what Newman means by this key term. Throughout the book, he seems to engage in a certain code-switching–sometimes conscious and clearly marked, sometimes surreptitious or unconscious–alternating between at least two senses of the word. In the first chapter, Newman alerts us to the possibility of confusion; while thus far he has used “power,” “domination,” and “authority” as synonyms, “by the time we get to Foucault, ‘power’ and ‘domination’ have somewhat different meanings,” and often Newman seems to follow Foucault in defining “power” as “inevitable in any society,” while characterizing “domination” as “something to be resisted,” At other times, he retains the definition of “power” as “domination” (12). Leaving this ambiguity open weakens the argument that follows.

 

A second weakness stems from a misreading of classical anarchist theory. Newman’s argument is premised, in the first place, on his reading of Bakunin and Kropotkin as wedded to the notion that the human subject is naturally opposed to “power.” He then notes that they also have recourse to a characterization of this human subject as fatally prone to “a ‘natural’ desire for power.” From this, he draws the conclusion that classical anarchism is riven by a fundamental inconsistency, a “hidden contradiction” (48-9). The unstated assumption which warrants this move from premise to conclusion is that these two representations of the human subject are mutually exclusive–that Bakunin and Kropotkin cannot possibly intend both.

 

This assumption should raise the question: why not? A close reading of Bakunin and Kropotkin would more strongly support a different conclusion–that for both of these thinkers, the human subject itself, and not their representation of the subject, is the site of what Kropotkin calls a “fundamental contradiction” between “two sets of diametrically opposed feelings which exist in man” (22). In other words, as Dave Morland has explained, these thinkers’ “conception of human nature” is not statically unified, but dialectically “double-barreled”: human beings are possessed of equal potentials for “sociability” and “egoism” (12). Since neither of these potentials is necessarily more likely to be expressed than the other, ceteris paribus, neither constitutes a species destiny: “history is autonomous” (21).

 

The (arguably mistaken) discovery of a “hidden contradiction” at the core of anarchist discourse prompts Newman’s fear that classical anarchism is dangerously open to the potential for domination, which in turn forms the rationale for the rest of his project. Errors propagate through this system, as the logic of an undertheorized “anti-essentialism” prompts him to ask the wrong questions and get the wrong answers, or to ask the right questions without looking for answers at all. If “humans have an essential desire for power,” Newman argues, “then how can one be sure that a revolution aimed at destroying power will not turn into a revolution aimed at capturing power? How can one be sure, in other words, that an anarchist revolution will be any different from a Marxist vanguard revolution?” (49).

 

There are a number of problems with this question. First of all, depending on which version of “power” Newman is referring to, the question may depend on a false assumption. If “power” as an endless play of mutual influence, action, and reaction is distinguished from “domination,” then neither Bakunin nor Kropotkin have any pretensions about “destroying power” per se. Indeed, to a surprising extent, both are aware of the ubiquity of “social power,” which no revolution can (nor should) abolish; both understand that it is a “natural” product of human subjects, rather than an artificial imposition from outside; and both distinguish it from force, coercion, or domination, while acknowledging its potential to generate these effects, particularly when it is allowed to accrete (Bakunin, God and the State 43n).

 

Apart from its problematic premise, however, Newman’s question is also needlessly framed as merely rhetorical or unanswerable, when it really does admit of an answer in political practice. Anarchist practices, conditioned by a theoretical emphasis on the immanence of ends within means, are distinguished from those of “a Marxist vanguard revolution” by the insistence that the immediate form of revolution (direct action, direct democracy, egalitarian self-management, the leaderless group, etc.) be its future content. Thus the anarcho-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World union named as their project “forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old” (Renshaw, frontispiece).

 

Newman, however, focuses more on theory than on practice. And this is why he fails to ask the following question: if classical anarchist theory is so wedded to this notion of the natural harmony of human subjects in society, why is it so deeply preoccupied with questions of action and organization? Why bother to organize, to intervene, unless something is in need of this intervention, i.e. unless it is disorganized? In fact, these theorists do not regard anarchy as something merely spontaneous, natural, biological, given, but as something that had to be evoked, elicited, created, made from the materials of history and biology. What “every individual inherits at birth,” according to Bakunin, is “not ideas and innate sentiments, as the idealists claim, but only the capacity to feel, to will, to think, and to speak”–a set of “rudimentary faculties without any content”; this content must be supplied by the social milieu (Bakunin 240-41). Nature is a set of potentials, not a telos; social construction is the determining factor. In this sense, classical anarchist theory goes beyond the binary opposition of essentialism/non-essentialism.

 

Rather than dwelling on the ostensible limitations of anarchism as articulated by its most influential theorists, Newman turns his attention to what he sees as the untapped potential of a relatively marginal figure in anarchist history: Max Stirner, the fellow “Young Hegelian” whom Marx so viciously assails in The German Ideology. In his 1845 Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (variously translated as “The Ego and His Own” or “The Unique One and Its Property”), Stirner uses the stick of nominalism to beat every philosophy built on abstract ideals or categories, including not only the religious submission to God but also the fetishization of “Man” in liberalism and communism: “no concept expresses me, nothing that is designated as my essence exhausts me; they are only names” (490). The self in Stirner is a subject to which all “predicates” are merely properties, so that it cannot be said to have an identity or essence (450)–leaving, as Newman sees it, ‘a radical opening which the individual can use to create his own subjectivity,” unhampered by essentialisms.

 

This proto-Nietzschean insight excites Newman: “The importance of Stirner’s notion of becoming for politics, particularly poststructuralist politics, is great indeed: he has shown that resistance to power will never succeed if it remains trapped within fixed, essential identities” (68). Ultimately, Stirner provides Newman with a non-essentialist account of how the self, rather than encountering a power which is imposed upon it, actually produces the power to which it submits by binding itself to “fixed ideas” (ideologies and essentialist identities) and annuls this power by dissolving these abstract chains through analysis (Newman 64).

 

Newman does consider the charge, leveled at Stirner by numerous anarchist critics, that Stirner’s “unique one,” abstracted from all history, disembedded from every relationship, and detached from all context, simply constitutes a new “essentialist identity” (and a mystified one at that) but he does not really spell out why this critique is mistaken (71). Not only does the Einzige closely resemble Sartre’s classless, genderless, cultureless, ahistorical cogito a little too closely–it also bears some resemblance to the protagonist of laissez-faire marketplace economics, the Rational Actor, whose infinite desire and arbitrary caprice (i.e. “selfishness”) are likewise purported to be the very measure of freedom.

 

None of this prevents Newman from moving forward with his project–the reconstruction of anarchist theory within a poststructuralist framework. Four chapters provide a creative, suggestive, and relatively accessible rereading of work by Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Derrida, and Lacan as Newman searches for a “non-essentialist notion of the Outside.” Foucauldian genealogy and Deleuzo-Guattarian schizoanalysis extend Stirner’s insight into the abstract nature of the State, “whose formidable omnipresence exists mostly in our minds and in our subconscious desire to be dominated,” by demonstrating that “the individual represses himself,” and that “we subordinate ourselves to signifying regimes all around us” (79; 83; 100). Derridean deconstruction adds a “strategy” for “undermining the metaphysical authority of various political and philosophical discourses,” releasing action from its obligation to any “founding principle” or arché (130). In the end, Newman stakes his money on Lacan as presenting the most persuasive “non-essentialist figure of resistance” (111).

 

Here, I suspect, will lie one of the primary points of interest for readers of poststructuralist theory, as Newman draws on Lacan’s account of how “the subject is constituted through its fundamental inability to recognize itself in the symbolic order” to explain how this apparently omnipresent and omnipotent order creates its own other–its own utopia, actually: a non-originary origin or “nonplace” (ou-topos) of resistance, blossoming in the heart of power itself (139). This nonplace is the “leftover” which is continually and necessarily generated by the operation of “the Law,” which “produces its own transgression” (140; 144). In effect, Newman uses Lacan to clarify what Foucault seemed to have left mysterious–the logic whereby power never appears without resistance appearing as well.

 

But wait–isn’t this a little too close to Bakunin’s declaration, which Newman cites as evidence of his “essentialism,” that “there is something in the nature of the state which provokes rebellion” (qtd. in Newman 48)? If Newman argues that these two antagonists, the “state” which provokes and the “subject” who rebels, could not “exist without each other” (48), how can he avoid concluding that this goes double for the Lacanian struggle between the constitutive “Law” and the “transgression” it produces? Moreover, one might ask what it has meant to discover this “concept” or “figure” if what anarchism opposes is not “power” but “domination.” Was the quest in vain? Has all of this culminated in yet another insurgent subject which just can’t seem to do without the power that dominates it?

 

These important questions remain unresolved. More important for anarchist readers, however, is the question of what practical consequences might ensue from the “postanarchism” which Newman formulates in his final chapter (157). How can a politics, which presupposes cooperation and joint action, found itself on Stirner’s notion that my unique ego has literally nothing in common with yours? Newman calls attention to Stirner’s proposal for a “union of egoists,” a merely voluntary and instrumental association between individuals, as opposed to a “community” which one is “forced” to participate in (70), but this amounts to a universalization of the instrumentalist logic of capitalism: “For me,” Stirner writes, “no one is a person to be respected, not even the fellow-man, but solely, like other beings, an object in which I take an interest or else do not, an interesting or uninteresting object, a usable or unusable person” (414-15). Indeed, for Stirner, “we have only one relation to each other, that of usableness, of utility, of use”; everything else is ideology (394). While Newman wants to read Stirner as “not necessarily against the notion of community itself” (70), it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Stirner himself flatly declares: “community . . . is impossible” (414). This is precisely the hyper-individualism that placed Stirner outside the mainstream of the anarchist movement, which remained committed to community and collective practice, constituting itself as “social anarchism” rather than mere individualism. “Needless to say,” Newman admits in a footnote, “some modern anarchists do not exactly embrace this postmodern logic of uncertainty and dislocation” (175 n7).

 

In any case, it’s a relief to find someone willing to think seriously about the political outside of the confines of Marxism, rather than continually fiddling around with Marxist texts in yet another attempt to take Marx beyond Marx (as Antonio Negri has put it) or else completely scrapping that urge to “change the world” in favor of some ironic or nihilistic embrace of the world as it is (the Baudrillard solution). Post-Marxist theorists have stripped away one key concept after another (historical stages, centrality of class conflict, “progressive” colonial/ecocidal teleology, productivism, materiality/ideality binary, ideology, alienation, totality, etc.), peeling away the layers of the onion, driving Marxism further and further in the direction of its old repressed Other, anarchism–protesting all the while that “we are not anarchists” (Hardt and Negri 350).

 

As refreshing as it is to step outside this endless Marxist monster movie, with its perennial Frankfurtian pronunciations of death, periodic Frankensteinian re-animations, and perpetual “spectres,” I would argue that anarchism has more to offer poststructuralism than Newman and May seem to recognize, and that poststructuralism affords other and better resources for the development of anarchist theory than their example would imply. In fact, it could do much to redress the damage done to the core ethos of social anarchism, as cataloged by Bookchin, by post-1960s theoretical tendencies which regard all structure, organization, and coherence as repressive. It offers a weapon for the Plainfield social anarchists against the politically and intellectually sterile primitivism of Eugene.

 

Foucault’s demonstration of the poverty of the “repressive hypothesis” and of the positive potential of self-structuring askesis could be used to neutralize the influence of left-Freudian theories of liberation as antisocial “de-repression” (Benello 63). The wisdom of Derrida’s “there is nothing outside the text”–as Zerzan is well aware (116-17)–could be marshaled against the primitivist quest for a pure pre-social origin. Even Lacanian psychoanalysis, with its narrative of the construction of the self in and through the Symbolic, could reinforce Bookchin’s distinction between “individual autonomy” and “social freedom” (4).

 

From Bakunin to Lacan is overly eager to get from Bakunin to Lacan–a perhaps too uncritical teleological trajectory–but at least it inquires about the way from one point to the other, which is a siginificant contribution in itself. As anarchist movements, roused from their long slumber, attempt to orient themselves in a world of globalizing capitalism, sporadic ethno-religious violence, and growing ecological crisis, they will find themselves in need of more such contributions.

 

Notes

 

1. See Zerzan’s Elements of Refusal, particularly chapters 1-5, for the full extent of his “anti-civilizational” project.

 

Works Cited

 

• Bakunin, Mikhail. Bakunin on Anarchy: Selected Works by the Activist-Founder of World Anarchism. Ed. and trans. Sam Dolgoff. New York: Knopf, 1972.
• —. God and the State. New York: Dover, 1970.
• Benello, C. George. From The Ground Up: Essays on Grassroots and Workplace Democracy. Boston: South End, 1992.
• Bookchin, Murray. Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm. Edinburgh, Scotland: AK, 1995.
• Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000.
• Kropotkin, Peter. Ethics: Origin and Development. Trans. Louis S. Friedland and Joseph R. Piroshnikoff. Dorset: Prism, 1924.
• May, Todd. The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 1994.
• Morland, Dave. “Anarchism, Human Nature and History: Lessons for the Future.” Twenty-First Century Anarchism. Ed. Jon Purkis and James Bowen. London: Cassell, 1997. 8-23.
• Renshaw, Patrick. The Wobblies: The Story of Syndicalism in the United States. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967.
• Stirner, Max. The Ego and His Own. Trans. Steven T. Byington. New York: Benj. R. Tucker, 1907. May 18, 2002. <http://flag.blackened.net/daver/anarchism/stirner/theego0.html>
• Zerzan, John. Elements of Refusal. Seattle: Left Bank, 1988.
• —. Future Primitive and Other Essays. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1994.

 

Jason Camlot

English Department
Concordia University
camlot@vax2.concordia.ca

 

John Kucich and Dianne F. Sadoff, eds., Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000.

 

Consider the following “true” story as an exemplum for approaching the idea of the Victorian postmodern: in the mid-1990s, artist and critic Todd Alden asked 400 art collectors to deliver to him canned samples of their feces for an art show. The idea for the show, as explained in the letter he sent to the collectors, was to represent “a historical rethinking of the Italian artist Piero Manzoni’s epoch-making work, Merda d’artista,” in which Manzoni “produced, conserved, and tinned ninety cans of his own feces, which he sold by the ounce, based on that day’s price of gold” (Alden 23). Alden noted that cans of Manzoni’s shit, which found few buyers back in 1961 when the work was first “made,” were “now being sold for as much as $75,000”; he proposed to make some of the cans he collected available for sale, and, further, “as a courtesy, each collector/producer [would] be offered the option to retain one of his/her ‘own’ cans at an amount that is one half of the initial offering price” (24). In May 1996, Alden’s display featuring eighty-one such cans was scheduled to open in Manhattan, but the New York Observer revealed Alden’s claim to be a hoax since only one collector had actually contributed as instructed. Now, the briefest consideration of Victorian art critic John Ruskin’s notion that “consumption absolute is the end, crown, and perfection of production” (217) in relation to Todd Alden’s proposal for Collector’s Shit will reveal how distant a postmodern notion of critique is from that of the nineteenth-century critic of culture and especially from the life-centered conceptions of culture and value promoted by the likes of Ruskin and William Morris.

 

Ruskin continues, in the passage cited above, to say that “wise consumption is a far more difficult art than wise production” (217), and the Ruskinian question that arises in relation to Alden’s art proposal is how does one best consume it (in Ruskin’s sense, meaning use it, employ it, live with it–promote life with it)? The initial answer is that the act of purchasing it is the sole means of consumption available in this particular transaction. Subsequently one can only own it, have it, but not live with it in any other way. Admittedly such passive ownership does represent a means of action, for the “collectors” (with their single bargain-tins) and especially the artist/owner himself, in owning the tins, are actually “sitting on them” as investments that they hope will rise in monetary value over a period of time. Value here depends almost exclusively upon the second of the two conditions that John Stuart Mill deemed necessary for a thing to have any value in exchange, that is, the “difficulty in its attainment” (544), and it is upon this principle that the limited edition, the autographed novel, or the signed can of feces will bring its monetary return, or so the collector hopes. I say that the cans’ value depends upon this condition almost exclusively because, although the first of Mill’s two conditions for a thing to have value in exchange (“it must be of some use”) may seem glaringly absent from such an object, the counterargument may be made that the tins (hoax or not) are responsible for a valuable chain of critical thoughts about art, value, utility, culture, and history. The apparent uselessness of the tins of feces is arguably useful in that it leads one to consider the relationship between use value and exchange value, and in doing so it brings us to one of the key conundrums arising in an attempt to theorize the relationship between a Victorian past and a postmodern present. That is, it is often the distinction between an artifact’s inherent value (of which shit, no matter whose it is, has little to none now, although it was worth something in the time of Henry Mayhew’s “pure”-finders and mudlarks [142; 155]) and its marginal or institutional value (of which canned shit can have enormous value) that we are grappling with when we try to understand how the Victorian period (which is already a vexed formulation) continues to live in the present.

 

An exploration of how we live with culture now as compared to how Victorians lived with culture in the nineteenth century, and how we can best pursue “a historical rethinking” of the Victorians in our present cultural endeavors, is the primary focus of the articles collected under the title Victorian Afterlife. John Kucich and Dianne F. Sadoff state in their editors’ introduction that the contributors of the fifteen essays in this collection “construct a history of the present by writing about rewritings of the Victorian past” (xiv), but this collection does not really construct a history of now so much as provide a diverse sampling of some kinds of historical knowledge that are deemed possible or warranted in contemporary cultural studies. I am not suggesting by this distinction that the latter project is less valuable than the former. It is perhaps more valuable and certainly is more tenable. Besides, by the end of this introductory essay, Kucich and Sadoff relinquish the idea that their volume constructs a history of the present and say that they “hope to provide instead multiple ways to measure the ideological motives and effects of a postmodern history that inevitably ‘forgets’ the past, or remembers it by trying to imagine it as present, or fashions its past by retelling the history of its present” (xxviii). They see the debate that structures their anthology “as an opening for the profoundly important analysis of the conditions of postmodern historicity and of postmodernism itself as a reflection on historical knowledge” (xxviii). I think this is a fair assessment of many of the essays in the collection, although some of them focus on how postmodern culture rewrites or has rewritten the nineteenth century without really theorizing the ideas of historicism or periodization that inform their methods of reading. Nor does a strong sense of the meaning of the term “postmodern” emerge from this collection, in which we find nothing like the barrage of attempts to develop a working framework for this concept that we experienced in the mid-1980s. The subtitle of the collection is “Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century,” and probably it should come as no surprise that “culture” is a more comfortably handled term than “postmodernism” in this collection, since about two-thirds of the book is authored by scholars who specialize in the nineteenth century.

 

Again, as the subtitle of the book suggests, many of the essays in the collection consider rewritings either of key Victorian texts or figures by contemporary authors, artists, and filmmakers, such as, for example, the cinematic afterlife of Dracula; contemporary representations of Oscar Wilde, Jane Austen and Lewis Carroll’s Alice; and A.S. Byatt’s “ghostwriting” of the Victorian realist novel. Tracing specific intertexts across a century, these essays at their best suggest hypotheses about the significance of how Victorian texts have been rewritten (Hilary Schor’s essay on A.S. Byatt is a case in point). At their weakest, they fall into the genre of the catalogue, listing the various instances of rewriting without truly developing a thesis about the implications of the various contemporary manifestations of Victorian figures they have compiled.

 

Jonathan Culler has remarked that “intertextuality is the general discursive space that makes a text intelligible,” which ultimately “leads the critic who wishes to work with it to concentrate on cases that put in question the general theory” one brings to the table in the act of interpretation (106-7). Hilary M. Schor’s essay, “Sorting, Morphing, and Mourning: A.S. Byatt Ghostwrites Victorian Fiction,” is one of the stronger instances of the more specifically analogical essays in Victorian Afterlife because she approaches the idea of intertextuality as something that provides a frame of meaning requiring analysis and not as a predetermined assumption. She poses from the outset a large and valuable question about the status of realism in contemporary fiction and then explains that Byatt is less a “postmodernist” than a “post-realist,” in that she “invents a contemporary version of realism that can reanimate the complicated literary genres of the past” by approaching the novel as “a ‘literary’ device for giving forms form” (237). The specific strategies that Schor finds in Byatt–those of “sorting, morphing, and mourning”–are strategies borrowed both from the Victorians and from contemporary technologies, from Victorian science fiction and sociology, “to our computer-generated fascination with morphing and transformation, to cinematic and other technological ways of drawing attention to form itself” (239). In identifying this diverse range of strategies used by Byatt to generate her own version of realist narrative, Schor establishes a truly useful means of considering how a Victorian mode of inquiry (Darwin’s naturalism, in this case) can find a strange sort of afterlife via the nature shows on television (to which Byatt attributes the genesis of her novella Morpho Eugenia) and in contemporary fiction.

 

Again from Culler, we get a sense of what is most important in approaching a work as a rewriting of a previous one, the main problem of interpreting a text according to such a framework becoming “that of deciding what attitude the [text] takes to the prior discourse which it designates as presupposed” (114). Schor’s essay does a good job of showing how Byatt grapples with the implications of Victorian realism as a seemingly transparent mode of organizing experience–by her use of the “sorting” mechanisms of other nineteenth-century genres and of twentieth-century media–and thus spells out the Victorian novel that Byatt presupposes in composing her own novella. Some of the essays in this collection do not spend as much time on this question of the attitude of a contemporary text toward its Victorian analog and subsequently fall into cataloguing shared themes, figures, and forms without developing enough of an argument about the significance of the similarities and coincidences that are being traced. So, while Shelton Waldrep’s “The Uses and Misuses of Oscar Wilde” and Kali Israel’s “Asking Alice: Victorian and Other Alices in Contemporary Culture” offer many, many examples of Wilde and Alice reincarnated on the contemporary screen, stage, and page, we end up with something more like a pile of specifically described instances than an attempt to analyze the combined meaning of these instances. And when we do get such attempts, for example, when Waldrep concludes that “Wilde’s current popularity has much to do with his proto-postmodernism,” or that “our nostalgia is for him, but our representations of him betray our own anxieties about our origins and structures for knowing ourselves” (62), they are not very satisfying.

 

Other essays tracing specific intertexts offer more in the way of theses about why we in the 1990s seemed so fascinated by the cultural artifacts of the 1890s and earlier. Mary A. Favret’s “Being True to Jane Austen” shifts effectively between a close textual analysis of Austen’s novels Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility and film versions of these novels by Roger Michell and Ang Lee, respectively, which Favret says “are uncannily attentive to the sorts of fidelity currently demanded of Austen’s faithful” (64). Favret’s reading sketches out the connection between an ethos of sexual fidelity in Austen’s novels an the fidelity of the film to its source text and argues that “at the heart of these films is the question, made redundant by the plot of each novel, of whether or not being true is an animating or mortifying process” (64). Favret concludes that the intimation of death characteristic of the film versions of these novels represents a sense of the ultimate inaccessibility of the past and of “our own postmodern inability to conceive in any substantial way of immortality–even for Jane Austen” (80). Ronald R. Thomas develops an interesting thesis about the “irrepressible haunting of contemporary visual culture by the specters of nineteenth-century novel culture,” arguing that the nostalgia and anxiety informing films based on Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula come from the sense that we have “lost a nineteenth-century conception” of autonomous “character” and “the modern belief that the forces of the past drain the life from the present even as they sustain it” (289). This last part of Thomas’s thesis is enlarged into a truly interesting reading of Dracula as cipher for the nexus of new media and subjectivity. Thomas’s reading of Dracula could be seen to interestingly augment that of Friedrich Kittler (see, for example, Kittler’s “Dracula’s Legacy”) but there is no reference to Kittler in Thomas’s essay.

 

Not surprisingly, many of the essays in this collection focus on the theme of technology. Jennifer Green-Lewis’s “At Home in the Nineteenth Century: Photography, Nostalgia, and the Will to Authenticity” considers Victorian photography in order to explain the particular kind of nostalgia that we have for the period. She argues that “the Victorians are visually real to us because they have a documentary assertiveness unavailable to persons living before the age of the camera” (31). Green-Lewis goes on to assess the kind of Victorian things we give visibility to and want to see, noting the popularity of pastoral over urban photographs, and pictures of Victorians “pretending to be something other than themselves” (39), dressed in costumes of an earlier era, and thus replicating our present desire to find ourselves in these figures of the past. Both Judith Roof’s “Display Cases” and Jay Clayton’s “Hacking the Nineteenth Century” draw connections between computers and Victorian systems of knowledge, although the trajectories of their arguments move in opposite directions. Roof compares present-day computer graphics and layout to the typological tactics of Victorian print culture and the organizing techniques of Victorian museums, arguing (more by analogy than from a historically grounded genealogy) that “Victoriana links new technology to an older tradition, making it seem safe and familiar” to us (101). She smartly suggests that the Victorian exhibit and the modern computer are both representative of “the development of a technology of display designed to attract visitors to a vision of mastery and national wealth” (104). Again, despite her reading of the Macintosh “trash can” as a metaphor that transforms “metonymic computer logic into [a] trite, vaguely humorous, familiar” metaphor (113), Roof does not engage Kittler’s work on how the material particularities of “sound and image, voice and text” inherent in specific Victorian technologies “are reduced to surface effects, known to consumers as interface” (Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter 1). Clayton examines William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s historical sci-fi novel The Difference Engine, its interest in how Victorian technologies (such as Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine) troubled the human/machine binary way back in the 1830s, and the possible disjunctions between technological advance and ethical advance. He argues that “to hack the nineteenth century in a literary work means altering the temporal order of events, deliberately creating anachronisms in a representational world” (195) and then shows us, through an interesting reading of The Difference Engine with respect to Benjamin Disraeli’s Conservative condition-of-England novel Sybil, that the climax of Gibson and Sterling’s novel is an anachronistic “throwback to the days when English engineering and empire reigned supreme, when few challenged the marriage of technology and the police, and when masculine power and the erotics of vulnerable femininity were widely approved norms” (198). His general argument suggests that the two main ideological assertions of postmodern fiction’s fascination with Victorian technology are “escapism” and the articulation of “a politics of the future” that challenges the present with the past.

 

Other essays engaging explicitly with Victorian politics and their afterlife are Ian Baucom’s “Found Drowned: The Irish Atlantic,” which considers how Paul Muldoon’s poetry invokes traumatic Victorian events (like the Irish famine) to rethink present-day Irish political identity, and Simon Gikandi’s “The Embarrassment of Victorianism: Colonial Subjects and the Lure of Englishness,” which begins by wondering how native anti-colonialists could promote dominant colonialist values, and then demonstrates that the seeds of colonial liberation existed in the most traditional of Victorian moral codes. Together, Laurie Langbauer’s essay “Queen Victoria and Me,” which draws parallels between the political scripts of female power performed by Queen Victoria and the public roles that contemporary feminist academics must assume, and Susan Lurie’s reading of Jane Campion’s rewriting of Henry James’s desexualized Victorian heroines, in terms of the relative political worth of the unconventional Victorian sexualities revived by postmodernism, represent an interesting meditation upon feminism’s Victorian origins.

 

Finally, the two essays in the collection that most explicitly engage in thinking about what the “Victorian Postmodern” means as a critical concept are John McGowan’s “Modernity and Culture, the Victorians and Cultural Studies” and Nancy Armstrong’s “Postscript: Contemporary Culturalism: How Victorian Is It?” These two essays frame the book as a whole; McGowan’s text opens the discussion and Armstrong’s closes it, and together they may represent the most valuable line of thinking that the book has to offer. When, in 1985, Jean-François Lyotard curated an “art and technology extravaganza” at the Georges Pompidou Center in an attempt to chart “the new order of our postmodern condition”–this from a flyer distributed at the exhibit–Lyotard had the visitors work their way through a labyrinth of electronic gadgetry, “old” art juxtaposed with “new” art juxtaposed with “non” art, all the while donning headphones and listening to “great” modernist writers reading from their works (Rajchman 111). Lyotard’s exhibit, titled “Les Immatiriaux,” forwarded the curatorial argument that the very idea of postmodernism has emerged from and continues to play itself out according to the soundtrack of modernism. McGowan and Armstrong’s essays articulate the general insistence of Victorian Afterlife upon a version of the present that thinks its way out of that early and powerful version of the postmodern. McGowan does this by acknowledging that the concepts of periodization, Zeitgeist (the idea that ages have spirits or conditions), and our proclivity to situate ourselves and to characterize eras are inherited from “a group of German-influenced English writers who were the first literary (or artistic) intellectuals cum social critics,” people like Mill, Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, Harriet Martineau and William Morris (3). His essay first connects the idea of “Zeitgeist” to concepts of “the modern” and “culture,” then sketches out how all of our categories of political orientation are derived from these three terms, and finally tries to “speculate on what the critical enterprise would look like if we somehow managed to dispense with the ‘modern’ and ‘culture’ as signposts” (4). As it turns out, the critical enterprise under this dispensation looks a lot like a Nietzschean will to consider “what elements of the past can mean in relation to our purposes in the present” (24). McGowan articulates the results of such a conditional line of thinking: “Instead of viewing things that appear as indices of who they (the Victorians) were and/or who we (postmoderns?) are . . . we would see in stories of the past images of being in the world that tell us there are multiple ways to be human and that we are engaged in the project of living out some of those ways” (24).

 

Similarly, Nancy Armstrong argues that the critical work of Victorian Afterlife renders “obsolete the whole question of whether postmodernism represents a break from modernism or just another version of it” (313), and suggests instead that “postmodernism is a consequence and acknowledgment of the Victorian redefinition of the nation” (312) and of the nineteenth-century sense of acculturation as a praxis of decorum. The main connection she draws between then and now has to do with the status of the idea of “the real” or of authenticity as a defining aspect of identity. She says, “postmodernism asks, what if the most oft-repeated and banal aspects of our culture . . . are the only basis for our selves” and “just another cultural formation that we happen to consider most primary and real?” (319). In asking this question in relation to a notion of Victorian culture that was already aware of this, Armstrong suggests that, “in this respect, postmodernism is perhaps more Victorian than even the Victorians were,” and its focus on the details informing genres of action represents “an extension of the Austen principle that decorum–which for the novelist was the accumulation of rather small but absolutely appropriate details–is what we really are” (319).

 

So the afterlife of the Victorians exists, according to the postscript of this collection, in the realist’s attention to minute details that ultimately provide a script for behavior and an actual sense of being. Armstrong’s account of the Victorian qualities inherent in our postmodern present seems to take Carlyle’s key sign of the time–the assumption of his age “that to the inward world (if there be any) our only conceivable road is through the outward” (70)–and presents it, not as the symptom of the “mechanical” malady, but as the status quo of our postmodern condition. Going back to the nineteenth century, Armstrong remarks, “commodity culture created a world in which virtually anything spontaneous and natural about . . . life could be bought up and resold in a predictable commercial package that would in turn elicit only canned responses” (315). The Victorian sense of “the real” that emerged from this commodity culture has now moved so far in the direction of a commercially packaged and canned experience, Armstrong says, “that how people are represented may well be who they are” (323). Viable cultural criticism, then, must approach the canned world as the real one “if the material conditions in which people live and die are going to improve” (323). This idea is not so distant from Carlyle’s definition of cultural criticism back in 1829 as that which critiques “our own unwise mode of viewing Nature” (83). “Because our [Victorian] forebears were so successful in establishing their picture of the world as the world itself,” Armstrong tells us, “cultural theory is not just a legacy they bequeathed to us, but one of the most effective means of intervening in the reproduction of that picture” (323-24). This confidence in the transforming potential of cultural theory is probably the most Victorian thing about this collection of essays as a whole, and it is an intimation worthy of a long and healthy afterlife.

 

Works Cited

 

• Alden, Todd. Letter. “Rear-Action Avant-Garde.” Harper’s Magazine 286 (May 1993): 23-4.
• Carlyle, Thomas. Selected Writings. New York: Penguin Books, 1980.
• Culler, Jonathan. The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1981.
• Kittler, Friedrich A. “Dracula’s Legacy.” Trans. William Stephen Davis. Stanford Humanities Review 1.1 (1989): 143-73.
• —. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999.
• Mayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor. Vol. 2. New York: Dover, 1968.
• Mill, John Stuart. Principles of Political Economy. Ed. W. J. Ashley. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1909.
• Rajchman, John. “The Postmodern Museum.” Art in America 73 (Oct. 1985): 110-17.
• Ruskin, John. Unto This Last and Other Writings. New York: Penguin, 1985.

 

 

David Herman

Department of English
North Carolina State University
dherman@unity.ncsu.edu

 

Roy Harris, Saussure and His Interpreters. New York: New York UP, 2001.

 

The author of a 1983 English translation of Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale, as well as two previous books centering on Saussure’s theories of language (Reading Saussure and Language, Saussure, and Wittgenstein), Roy Harris brings a wealth of expertise to his new book on Saussure. More than this, as is amply borne out in the early chapters of Saussure and His Interpreters, Harris is deeply familiar with the various manuscript sources (i.e., students’ notebooks) on which Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye relied in producing/editing what became the Course in General Linguistics, the first edition of which was published in 1916. ¹ Added to these other qualifications is Harris’s stature as an expert in the field of linguistic theory more generally. ² From all of these achievements emerges the profile of a commentator uniquely positioned to interpret–to understand as well as adjudicate between–previous interpretations of Saussure.

 

To be sure, Harris’s background and research accomplishments–his knowledge of the origins, details, and larger framework of Saussurean language theory–are unimpeachable. ³ But while Harris’s credentials are unimpeachable, there remains the question of whether those credentials have equipped him to take the true measure of Saussure’s interpreters, i.e., those who claim (or for that matter disavow) a Saussurean basis for their work. This question, prompted by the tone as well as the technique of a book cast as an exposé of nearly a century’s worth of “misreadings” of Saussure, is itself part of a broader issue exceeding the scope of the author’s study. The broader issue concerns the exact nature of the relation between ideas developed by specialists in particular fields of study and the form assumed by those ideas as interpreted (and eo ipso adapted) by non-specialists working in other, more or less proximate fields. Also at issue are the nature and source of the standards that could (in principle) be used to adjudicate between better and worse interpretations of source ideas imported into diverse target disciplines–that is, into domains of study in which, internally speaking, distinct methods and objects of interpretation already hold sway. Indeed, even within the same discipline in which the ideas in question had their source, interpretations can vary widely–as suggested by Harris’s chapters on linguists who in his view misunderstand or misappropriate Saussure (the list includes such major figures as Leonard Bloomfield, Louis Hjelmslev, Roman Jakobson, and Noam Chomsky). Although these deep issues sometimes surface during Harris’s exposition, they do not receive the more sustained treatment they deserve. The result is a study marked, on the one hand, by its technical brilliance in outlining the “Rezeptiongeschichte” of Saussurean theory, but on the other hand by its avoidance of other, foundational questions pertaining to the possibilities and limits of interpretation itself. The salience of those questions derives, in part, from the transdisciplinary legacy of Saussure’s own work.

 

It is worth underscoring at the outset that Harris’s account of Saussure and his interpreters is not merely a descriptive one. Granted, the author carefully traces the transformation and recontextualization of Saussurean ideas as they were propagated within the field of linguistics and later (or in some cases simultaneously) migrated from linguistics into neighboring areas of inquiry. ⁴ But Harris does not rest content with pointing out where an intra- or interdisciplinary adaptation differs from what (in his interpretation) is being adapted. Persistently, in every chapter of the book, and sometimes in quite vituperative terms, Harris construes this adaptive process as one involving distortion, i.e., a failure to get Saussure right. ⁵ I discuss Harris’s specific claims in more detail below. For the moment, I wish to stress how this prescriptive, evaluative dimension of the author’s approach is at odds with what he emphasizes at the beginning of his study–namely, the status of Saussure’s text as itself a construct, a constellation of interpretive decisions made by those who sought to record and, in the case of his editors, promulgate Saussure’s ideas.

 

Indeed, Harris’s meticulous analysis of the textual history of the Course invites one further turn of the Saussurean screw: if the very text on which all subsequent interpretations have been built is itself the product of students’ and editors’ interpretations, then who, precisely, is in a position to interpret Saussure’s interpreters? Or rather, where is the ground on which one might stand to distinguish between the wheat of productive adaptations and the chaff of non- or counter-productive misappropriations, whether these borrowings are made within or across the boundaries of linguistic study? ⁶ In this connection, there is a sense in which Harris seeks to have his cake and eat it, too. The author advances the claim that, in the case of Saussure’s text, interpretation goes all the way down, meaning that no feature of the Course is not already an interpretation by Saussure’s contemporaries. But he also advances the claim that at some point (is it to be stipulated by all concerned parties?) interpretation stops and the ground or bedrock of textual evidence begins (2), such that those of Saussure’s successors who engaged in particular strategies or styles of interpretation can be deemed guilty of error, of violating the spirit (if not the letter) of Saussure’s work.

 

As demonstrated by the early chapters of Saussure and His Interpreters, no writer is more aware than Harris that the book often viewed as the foundational document of (European) structuralism was in fact a composite creation, a portmanteau assemblage of more-or-less-worked-out hypotheses by Saussure himself, re-calibrated for the purposes of undergraduate instruction; notes taken by students not always consistent in their reports of what Saussure actually said in class; conjectures, surmises, extrapolations, and outright interpolations by the editors of the Course; and, later, interpretations of Saussure by linguists, anthropologists, semioticians, and others–interpretations because of which later generations of readers came to “find” things in Saussure’s text that would not necessarily have been discoverable when the book first appeared. As Harris puts it in chapter 1, “Interpreting the Interpreters,” “the majority of Saussure’s most original contributions to linguistic thought have passed through one or more filters of interpretation” (2). As Harris’s discussion proceeds, the emphasis on Saussure’s ideas as inevitably interpretively filtered gives way to a series of attempts to dissociate Saussure’s theories from a group of filters that seem to be qualitatively different from those falling into the initial group (i.e., students and editors). Harris distinguishes between the two sets of filters by dividing them into contemporaries and successors (3-4), although by Harris’s own account neither group can be exempted from the process by which Saussure’s ideas were actively constructed rather than passively and neutrally conveyed. Given that (as Harris discusses in chapter 3) Saussure’s editors took the liberty of writing portions of the Course without any supporting documents, it is not altogether clear why the parameters of distance in time and intellectual inheritance (4) are sufficient to capture what distinguishes a successor’s from a contemporary’s interpretations. An editorial interpolation is arguably just as radically interpretive as any post-Saussurean commentator’s extrapolation. In any case, in interpreting Saussure, neither contemporaries nor successors have stood on firm ground, whatever their degree of separation in time and tradition from the flesh-and-blood “author” of the Course.⁷

 

Indeed, Harris’s concern early on is with the difficulty or rather impossibility of getting back to the solid ground of Saussure’s “true”–unfiltered–ideas. In chapter 2, “The Students’ Saussure,” the author remarks that two separate questions must be addressed in considering the students’ notebooks as evidence concerning Saussure’s ideas: on the one hand, whether the students understood their teacher’s points; on the other hand, whether what Saussure said in class always reliably indicated his considered position on a given topic (17). With respect to the latter question, Saussure may have sometimes been unclear, and he also may have sometimes oversimplified his views for pedagogical reasons. The challenge of reconstructing the Saussurean framework on the basis of student notes is therefore considerable. Moreover, Saussure’s decisions about what to include in his lectures were in some cases dictated by the established curriculum of his time, rather than by priorities specific to his approach to language and linguistic study. Assuming as much, Saussure’s editors expunged from the published version of the Course the survey of Indo-European languages that he presented in his actual lectures (18-23), to mention just one example.

 

As for the editors themselves, Harris discusses their role in chapter 3. The author notes that, in statements about the Course written after the publication of the first edition, Bally and Sechehaye came to quote their own words as if they were Saussure’s (32). The publication of Robert Godel’s Les Sources manuscrites du Cours de linguistique générale de F. de Saussure in 1957, however, revealed that many of the editors’ formulations lacked any manuscript authority whatsoever. They were imputations by Bally and Sechehaye rather than, in any nontrivial sense, reconstructions of the student notebooks. Also, in selecting which Saussurean materials to include in the Course and in making decisions about which ideas should be given pride of place in the exposition, the editors were inevitably biased by their own linguistic training and theories. The editors’ biases came into play in their choices about how to present such key distinctions as those between signification and value, synchrony and diachrony, and “la langue” and “la parole.”

 

In chapters 4-10, Harris’s focus shifts from contemporaries to successors, with chapter 11 attempting to take stock of “History’s Saussure.” As the first group of interpretive filters, Saussure’s contemporaries already impose a layer of mediation between the linguist’s theories and modern-day readers’ efforts to know what those theories were. But the second group of filters imposes what often comes across as an even thicker–and somehow more reprehensible–layer of intervening (mis)interpretations on top of the layer already there because of the contemporaries’ (mis)interpretations. Thus, the chapters in question portray a process by which a series of filters get stacked one by one on top of Saussure’s already-filtered ideas, according to the following recursive procedure:

 

Filter 1 (Saussure's ideas filtered through students and editors)
Filter 2 (Filter 1(Saussure's ideas filtered through students and editors))
Filter 3 (Filter 2(Filter1(Saussure's ideas filtered through students and editors)))
etc.

 

As each successive filter gets pushed onto the stack, Saussure’s ideas (at least as they were interpreted by his contemporaries rather than his successors) recede farther in historical memory. Even worse, the filters continually being loaded on the stack are the handiwork of commentators guilty of carelessness (Chomsky), incomprehension (Bloomfield, Jakobson, Claude Lévi-Strauss), confusion (Roland Barthes), or even meretricious slander (Jacques Derrida), as the case may be.

 

Again, though, this compilation of misreadings seems strangely at odds with Harris’s earlier emphasis on the instability of the Course as itself an assemblage (one might even say stack) of more or less plausible interpretations. Does Harris mean to imply that, in shifting from contemporaries to successors, the interpretations of the former become “evidence” on which the latter must base their own, later interpretations? If so, by what mechanism (and at what point on the continuum linking contemporaries and successors) does an interpretation or set of interpretations achieve evidential status? Though centrally important to Harris’s study, these questions about validity in interpretation are never explicitly posed (let alone addressed) by the author.

 

To take the linguists first, Harris identifies a host of misinterpretations of Saussure on the part of scholars who, as specialists in Saussure’s field of study, apparently should have known better. None of the linguists included in the author’s scathing series of exposés emerges in very good shape. In “Bloomfield’s Saussure,” Harris suggests that the famous American linguist misunderstood the distinction between synchronic and diachronic linguistics, the Saussurean conception of the sign, and, more generally, the relationship between Saussure’s theoretical position and his own. “Hjelmslev’s Saussure” characterizes the Danish linguist’s theory of glossematics as one that claims to be the logical distillation of Saussurean structuralism but ends up looking more like a “reductio ad absurdum” of Saussure’s ideas: “Glossematics shows us what happens in linguistics when the concept of la langue is idealized to the point where it is assumed to exist independently of any specific materialization whatever” (90), and thus stripped of the social aspects with which Saussure himself invested the concept (93). ⁸ In “Jakobson’s Saussure,” Harris notes that whereas Jakobson presented himself as a Saussurean, the Russian linguist rejected a number of Saussure’s key tenets, including the crucial principles of linearity and arbitrariness (96-101). More than this, Harris rather uncharitably discerns a careerist motive for the fluctuations in Jakobson’s estimates of Saussure’s importance over the course of his (Jakobson’s) career. Harris’s argument is that while Jakobson was still in Europe, he felt obliged to pay tribute to Saussure; but when Jakobson emigrated to the U.S. and tried to establish himself as a linguist during a time when anti-mentalist, behaviorist doctrines were the rule, he shifted to an attack mode.

 

Even harsher than his comments on Jakobson, however, are the remarks found in Harris’s chapter on “Chomsky’s Saussure.” In the author’s view, “far from seeing himself as a Saussurean, from the outset Chomsky was more concerned to see Saussure as a possible Chomskyan” (153). But though Chomsky tried to map the distinction between “la langue” and “la parole” into his own contrast between competence and performance, and also to conscript Saussure’s mentalist approach into his campaign against then-dominant behaviorism,

 

Saussure's apparent indifference to recursivity showed that being a "mentalist" did not automatically make one a generativist, while at the same time Saussure's view of parole raised the whole question of how much could safely be assigned to the rule-system alone and how much to the individual. Thus Saussure's patronage brought along with it certain problems for Chomsky. (155)

 

In criticizing Chomsky’s attempts to extricate himself from these problems, Harris seems to abandon constructive debate in favor of sniping: “Chomsky’s much-lauded ‘insight’ concerning the non-finite nature of syntax turns out to coincide–unsurprisingly–with his poor eyesight in reading Saussure” (166). This barb reveals a degree of animus not wholly explained by even the worst interpretive slip-up vis-à-vis Saussure. Why is it that Bloomfield’s incomprehension of Saussurean ideas merits a far less severe reprimand than what appears to be a careless misappropriation of Saussure on Chomsky’s part? Again, the criterion for determining degrees of fit between interpretations and Saussure’s theories–the ground from which better and worse interpretations might be held side-by-side and adjudicated–is never explicitly identified in Harris’s study. Hence it remains unclear why Chomsky should be subjected to much rougher treatment than Bloomfield, since both theorists are (according to the author) guilty of misjudging the relation between Saussure’s ideas and their own. ⁹

 

The chapters devoted to nonspecialist interpreters of the Course–i.e., scholars working outside the field of linguistics–raise other questions pertaining to Saussure and the grounds of interpretation. At issue is whether a commentator based in the host discipline from which a descriptive nomenclature, set of concepts, or method of analysis originates has the license or even the intellectual obligation to point out where others not based in that discipline have gone wrong in adapting the nomenclature, concepts, or methods under dispute. At issue, too, is just what “going wrong” might mean in the context of such inter-disciplinary adaptations. I submit that such considerations, barely or not at all broached in Harris’s account, in fact need to be at the center of any account of Saussure and his interpreters.

 

Chapter 7 is devoted to “Lévi-Strauss’s Saussure”; chapter 8 and chapter 10 concern “Barthes’s Saussure” and “Derrida’s Saussure,” respectively. Already in 1945 Lévi-Strauss had begun to characterize linguistics as the “pilot-science” on which the fledgling science of anthropology should model itself, but it was not until 1949, in Lévi-Strauss’s article on “Histoire et ethnologie,” that Saussure’s Course was celebrated as marking the advent of structural linguistics (112). As Harris points out, however, although both Lévi-Strauss and Lacan regarded the development of the concept of the phoneme as the crucial breakthrough made by modern linguistics, Saussure cannot be given credit for this idea (117). Lévi-Strauss for one placed great emphasis on the phoneme as a kind of paradigm concept, famously adapting it to create the notion of the “mytheme” (or smallest meaningful unit of the discourse of a myth) (Lévi-Strauss, “Structural”). The problems with this particular recontextualization have been well documented (see Pavel); Harris subsumes those problems under a more general “anthropological misappropriation of the vocabulary of structuralism” (126). Lévi-Strauss’s misappropriation encompasses not only the idea of phonemes but also Saussure’s opposition between synchronic and diachronic and the very notion of system or structure. Thus, “although [Lévi-Strauss] constantly appeals to the Saussurean opposition between synchronic and diachronic, he is manifestly reluctant to accept Saussure’s version of that crucial distinction” (126). More broadly, whereas “both [Saussure and Lévi-Strauss] use terms such as langage, société, and communication, their basic assumptions with respect to language, society and communication differ widely. For Saussure, it seems fair to say, Lévi-Strauss would be a theorist who not only shirks the definition of crucial terms but constantly speaks and argues in metaphors in order to evade it” (130-31).

 

In conformity with the stacking procedure described in paragraph 8 above, the sometimes “wooly thinking” of which Harris accuses Lévi-Strauss (131) becomes a deep, abiding, and unredeemable confusion by the time Barthes embarks on his own neo-Saussurean program for research. (Sure enough, although Lévi-Strauss’s misinterpretations looked bad in chapter 7, in chapter 8 [140, 142] they come across as less pernicious than Barthes’s.) Commenting on Barthes’s proposal for a translinguistics, which actually assumed several forms over the years (135) and which Barthes seems to have based on Hjelmslev’s suggestion that a “broad” conception of linguistics would accommodate all semiotic systems with a structure comparable to natural languages (134), Harris notes that for the French semiotician Saussurean linguistics stood “at the centre of a whole range of interdisciplinary enterprises in virtue of providing a basic theory of the sign and signification” (134). Yet because Barthes (b. 1915) probably did not read Saussure until 1956, his interpretation of the Saussurean framework “was an interpretation already shaped from the beginning by the glosses provided by such linguists as Jakobson, Benveniste and Martinet and, outside linguistics, by Lévi-Strauss and Lacan” (136). The implication here is that Barthes’s subsequent willingness to “tinker” with the structuralist model (e.g., in the “simplified version” of the Saussurean framework offered in Éléments de sémiologie [1964]) resulted from Barthes’s relatively high position on the stack of interpretive filters and his proportional distance from the historical Saussure. More than this, Harris suggests that Barthes adopted the label of “trans-linguistique” for self-serving reasons: to block criticism from bonafide linguists, and to present Barthes’s approach as being in advance of contemporary linguistics (146). But from Harris’s perspective, in a work such as Éléments Barthes only succeeds in “demonstrat[ing] his own failure to realize that the ‘basic concepts’ he ends up expounding are, at best, lowest common denominators drawn from quite diverse linguistic enterprises, and at worst incoherent muddles” (148).

 

Harris’s greatest scorn, however, is reserved for Derrida, whose position among the non-linguist interpreters is parallel with (or even worse than) that of Chomsky among the linguists. Focusing on De la grammatologie and beginning with Derrida’s efforts to link Saussure’s with Aristotle’s conception of the sign, Harris affiliates Derrida’s expositional technique with what as known is the “smear” in political journalism:

 

Rather than actually demonstrate a connexion between person A and person B, the journalist implies connexion by means of lexical association. This technique is all the more effective when the lexical association can be based on terms that either A or B actually uses. This dispenses with any need to argue a case; or, if any case is argued, its conclusion is already tacitly anticipated in the terms used to present it. (173)

 

 

But the dominant metaphor deployed by Harris in this chapter is that of Derrida as unscrupulous prosecutor and Saussure as hapless plaintiff, whose words and ideas are taken out of context and used against him, but for whom it is physically impossible to mount a proper defense.

 

After critiquing Saussure indirectly on the basis of his philosophical and other “associates,” Derrida, says Harris, finally puts “the accused himself…in the witness box,” with “some twenty pages of Heidegger-and-Hegel” intervening between the insinuations concerning Saussure’s Aristotelianism and Derrida’s direct examination of the linguist himself (176). It is not just that Derrida gratuitously blames Saussure for the concentration on phonology found in the work of his successors (177). Further, when faced with statements from the Course suggesting that sound plays no intrinsic role in “la langue,” “Derrida attempts to present them as symptomatic of a conceptual muddle” (178). What are we to make of the alleged contradictions, the supposed “web of incoherence,” that Derrida purports to discover in Saussure’s text?

 

As regards the web, it unravels as soon as one begins to examine how Derrida has woven it. The [Course], as commentators have pointed out, proceeds--in the manner one might expect from an undergraduate course--from fairly broad general statements at the beginning to progressively more sophisticated formulations. In the course of this development, the terminology changes. Qualifications to earlier statements are added. By ignoring this well-crafted progression, Derrida finds it relatively easy to pick out and juxtapose observations that at first sight jar with one another. (179)

 

Much of the remainder of this chapter (183-87) is devoted to an account of how Derrida quotes “selected snippets” of Saussure’s book out of context, in order “to make Saussure appear to say in the witness box exactly what Derrida wanted him to say” (183). When, four years later, Derrida denied that he had ever accused Saussure’s project of being logocentric or phonocentric, Harris calls this claim an “astonishing display of Humpty-Dumptyism” (187) and a confirmation that “Derrida’s interpretation of Saussure is academically worthless” (188).

 

Harris himself reveals a strong prosecutorial flair in his account of the nonspecialist adaptations of Saussure, impugning Lévi-Strauss’s anthropological misappropriations, Barthes’s incoherent muddles, and Derrida’s academically worthless interpretations. These are strong words, and they invite questions about the interpretive criteria or canon on the basis of which Harris’s charges might be justified. Harris waits until his concluding chapter on “History’s Saussure” to sketch some of the elements of the canon that has, up to this point, implicitly guided his analysis of the specialist as well as nonspecialist interpretations. Remarking that he does not share Godel’s confidence in being able to discern “la vraie pensée de Saussure” (the true thought of Saussure), the author does think it possible to recognize when a given interpretation of Saussure is “in various respects inaccurate or mistaken. If there is no ‘right’ way of reading Saussure there are nevertheless plenty of wrong ways” (189-90). Whereas the first part of this claim (there is no right way of reading Saussure) squares with some versions of relativism, the second part of the claim (there are in fact wrong ways of reading Saussure) is a corollary of Harris’s avowedly anti-relativistic stance. For the author, “relativism has made such inroads into historical thinking that it is nowadays difficult to pass judgment on interpretations of Saussure (or any other important thinker) without immediately inviting a kind of criticism which relies on the assumption that all interpretations are equally valid (in their own terms, of course–an escape clause which reflects the academic paranoia that prompted it)” (190). By contrast, “Saussure himself… did not belong to a generation accustomed to taking refuge behind relativist whitewash”–i.e., “a generation who supposed that any old interpretation is as good as another” (190).

 

Readers familiar with the work of Stanley Fish, for example, will recognize here a caricature of the relativist’s actual position. Relativism is not, except in Harris’s straw-person argument, tantamount to the view that any interpretation goes. Rather, it suggests that some interpretations should and do win out over others because of the way they “gear into” more or less widely agreed-upon standards of argumentation and proof procedures. What therefore need to be spelled out, in a relativistic as well as a non-relativistic model, are the criteria by which some interpretations can be evaluated as less correct or less useful than others. In the present case, one possible criterion, i.e., degree of faithfulness to Saussure’s actual formulations in the Course, is ruled out by Harris’s own account of how the text was saturated with extra- or at least para-Saussurean interpretations before it ever made it into print. But as I have already emphasized, the author advances (in explicit terms at least) no other criterion or set of criteria for successful or useful interpretation in this context. ¹⁰

 

At this juncture, I am brought back to another of the deep questions that needs to be explored in any study of Saussure’s reception history, but that is not considered by Harris: do the criteria for successful or useful interpretation (whatever they might be) remain the same for both intra- and inter-disciplinary adaptations of Saussure’s descriptive nomenclature, operative concepts, and methods of analysis? This question is a necessary one because Saussure’s work actually has had two contexts of reception, two historical series of interpretive adaptations, which have sometimes converged, intersected, and even been braided into one another, but which should be kept distinct for analytical purposes in a study such as Harris’s. That is to say, Harris’s chronological arrangement of his chapters, by intermixing specialist and nonspecialist interpretations of Saussure, obscures another, arguably more important pattern subtending the reception of Saussurean theory over the past one hundred years. This pattern, rare in modern intellectual history, is the result of the peculiarly dual status of Saussure’s discourse–a status that the account of “transdiscursive” authors developed by Michel Foucault in “What Is an Author?” can help illuminate.

 

Recall that, for Foucault, the so-called “founders of discursivity” need to be distinguished from the founders of a particular area of scientific study (113-17). Like scientific founders, the initiators of a discourse are not just authors of their own works, but also produce the possibilities and the rules for the formation of other texts–texts that relate by way of differences as well as analogies to the founder’s initiatory work. However, in the case of scientific founders, their founding act “is on an equal footing with its future transformations; this act becomes in some respects part of the set of modifications that it makes possible” (115). Thus, “the founding act of a science can always be reintroduced within the machinery of those transformations that derive from it” (115). Newton’s theory of mechanics, for example, is in some sense continuous with any experiments I might perform (e.g., using wooden blocks and inclined planes) to test the explanatory limits of that theory. By “contrast,” argues Foucault, “the initiation of a discursive practice is heterogeneous to its subsequent transformations” (115). To expand a type of discursivity is not to imbue it with greater formal generality or internal consistency, as is the case with refinement of scientific theories through experimentation, “but rather to open it up to a certain number of possible applications” (116). In this Foucauldian framework, clearly, a successful or useful interpretation will not be the same thing across the two domains at issue–i.e., types of discursivity and types of scientific practice.

 

Saussure, I suggest, was a Janus-faced founder. He was the initiator of scientific (specifically, linguistic) discourse on the nature of signification and value within synchronic systems of signs, on the study of “la langue” versus “la parole,” and on the concept of the linguistic sign itself, among other areas within the study of language. Successful linguistic interpretations of Saussure’s ideas about these topics, it can be argued, will adhere to a particular set of interpretive protocols (which I have suggested remain underspecified in Harris’s account). But Saussure was also the founder of a type of discursivity that came to be known as structuralism, whose practitioners across several disciplines made constant returns to Saussure in their attempts to test the limits of applicability of his theories. This sort of return, as Foucault notes, is part of the discursive field itself, and never stops modifying it: “The return is not a historical supplement which would be added to the discursivity, or merely an ornament; on the contrary, it constitutes an effective and necessary task of transforming the discursive practice itself” (116). Accordingly, interpretations of Saussure viewed as a founder of discursivity, and in particular as the initiator of structuralist discourse, can be deemed successful if they bring within the scope of structuralist theory phenomena that were heterogeneous to that discourse at the time of its founding. Thanks to the efforts of the nonspecialists “returning” to Saussure, myths, narratives more generally, fashion systems, and other phenomena were brought under the structuralist purview. Again, however, this is not tantamount to saying that any interpretation of Saussure as the founder of structuralist discourse will be as good as any other. The goodness-of-fit of such an interpretation will depend on a complex assortment of factors, including its internal coherence, its relation to previous attempts at broadening the applicability of the discourse, and its productivity in terms of generating still other interpretations.

 

For his part, Harris develops what might be termed a contextualist explanation of “why, outside the domain of linguistics, Saussure’s synchronic system was such an attractive idea” (194). Specifically, the author argues that “synchronic linguistics was eminently suited to be the ‘new’ linguistics for an era that wanted to forget the past” (195), especially the barbarity of the first world war and its negation of “virtually every Enlightenment idea and ideal of human conduct” (195). In other words, Saussure’s synchronic approach could be construed as a “validation of modernity” (196), “for the values built into and maintained by the synchronic system are invariably and necessarily current values: they are not, and cannot be, the values of earlier systems” (195). Harris thus selects historical context as a ground for interpreting Saussure’s nonspecialist interpreters, at least.

 

Although this contextualist explanation perhaps identifies historical conditions that necessarily had to be in place for the Saussurean revolution to have taken hold, it does not suffice to account for how Saussure’s ideas (and not those of others similarly positioned in history) have functioned as a magnet for (re)interpretations anchored in such a wide range of disciplinary fields. It is just possible that the rare, synergistic interplay of Saussure’s “scientific” and “discursive” foundings were required to generate the extraordinary level of interpretive activity directly and indirectly associated with the Course. More than this, Saussure’s dual status as a scientific and a transdiscursive author have arguably led to a rethinking of the very concept of interpretation–a rethinking that should be a major focus of any study of Saussure and his interpreters. If claims about the ideas of one and the same author must be judged in accordance with different interpretive protocols, depending on the context in which the claims were formulated, then validity in interpretation becomes a matter locally determined within particular domains. To put the same point another way, in the still-unfolding Saussurean revolution, the necessity to interpret becomes the constant, whereas the grounds for interpretation vary.

 

Notes

 

1. Harris himself edited for publication the notebooks of one of the students who attended Saussure’s Third Course (see de Saussure, Saussure’s).

 

2. In particular, Harris is a proponent of “integrational linguistics,” an approach to language-in-context that seeks to overcome the limitations of both structuralist and generativist models. See Harris, Introduction, Harris and Wolf, and also Toolan.

 

3. Jonathan Culler’s Ferdinand de Saussure provides an excellent introductory overview of Saussure’s main ideas, a familiarity with which Harris’s study presupposes.

 

4. Harris is careful to distinguish the term Saussurean idea from the term idea attributable to Saussure, construing the latter term as narrower in meaning than the former. I do not make this distinction here, particularly since, as Harris himself shows so effectively, it is not altogether clear which ideas are attributable to Saussure and which ideas are the product of interpretations by the students and editors. Harris’s third chapter portrays this interpretive filtering of Saussurean doctrine as ineliminable, i.e., built into the very process by which readers try to make sense of Saussure’s Course. Hence, by Harris’s own account, the distinction in question, although valid in principle, is one that proves difficult to maintain in practice.

 

5. Harris’s remarks concerning a passage about Saussure in Fredric Jameson’s The Prison-House of Language are not unrepresentative of the tone adopted by the author in some of his more biting critiques: “This gives the impression of having been written by someone who had many years ago attended an undergraduate course in linguistics, but sat in the back row and whiled away most of the time doing crossword puzzles instead of taking notes” (10-11).

 

6. For accounts of the porousness (i.e., historical variability) of the boundaries of linguistic inquiry vis-à-vis other fields of study, see Herman, “Sciences” and Universal.

 

7. As Harris points out (3), even apart from his ideas about language, the name Saussure denotes three different entities, sometimes conflated by scholars and critics: “the putative author of the [Course], even though [a]ttributing a certain view to the Saussure of the [Course] is in effect little more than saying that this view appears in, or can be inferred from, the text… as posthumously produced by the editors… (2) the lecturer who actually gave the courses of lectures at [the University of] Geneva on which the [Course] was based… (3) the putative theorist behind the… lectures [themselves]… trying out [his] ideas [in] a form that would be accessible and useful to his students” (3). As his study unfolds, however, many other Saussures come to populate Harris’s universe of discourse: Oswald Ducrot’s Saussure (2, 5-7), René Wellek’s and Robert Penn Warren’s Saussure (8-9), F. W. Bateson’s Saussure (9-10), Antoine Meillet’s Saussure (54-58), Bloomfield’s Saussure, Barthes’s Saussure, etc.

 

8. Interestingly, as Harris points out (90), it was Hjelmslev who coined the term paradigmatic relations as a substitute for Saussure’s “rapports associatifs.” Part of his attempt at an overall formalization of Saussure’s ideas, Hjelmslev’s coinage was designed to replace a focus on mental associations with a focus on definable linguistic units and their relations. Later, in his famous essay on “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” Jakobson used Hjelmslev’s terminology, mistaking it for Saussure’s (95).

 

9. Internal evidence (cf. 106-7, 169-70) suggests that Harris objects to the early version of Chomsky’s transformational generative paradigm mainly because of its postulate that language can be treated, for descriptive and explanatory purposes, as a univocal code shared by an idealized speaker and hearer, viewed in abstraction from their status as social beings deploying a socially constituted and enacted language system. If this conjecture is warranted, then in turn an implicit criterion or ground for judging interpretations of Saussure seems to emerge from Harris’s account: given two or more candidate interpretations of Saussure’s approach, then ceteris paribus the interpretation that most closely adheres to Saussure’s insight that “la langue” is a social fact will be the best, most appropriate, or most correct of those interpretations. My point is that, because his book centers on the practice of intra- as well as inter-disciplinary interpretation, Harris is obliged to engage in argumentation along these lines–i.e., to make explicit the protocols for his own interpretive practice.

 

10. The “justification of the method” offered in the final chapter does not in fact articulate Harris’s criteria for successful interpretation of Saussure’s ideas, but rather explains why the author draws together in one book a set of interpretations that he deems erroneous: “questionable or flawed interpretations, precisely because they are questionable or flawed, can be important as historical evidence. Particularly if, as in the cases that have been considered here, what emerges from studying and comparing them is that they were not the products of random error or personal idiosyncrasy, but are related in a coherent pattern” (190-91).

Works Cited

 

• Culler, Jonathan. Ferdinand de Saussure. Revised edition. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986.
• de Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General Linguistics. Ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, in collaboration with Albert Riedlinger. Trans. Wade Baskin. New York: Philosophical Library, 1959.
• —. Course in General Linguistics. Ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, in collaboration with Albert Riedlinger. Translated and annotated by Roy Harris. London: Duckworth, 1983.
• —. Saussure’s Third Course of Lectures on General Linguistics (1910-1911), from the Notebooks of Emile Constantin / Troisième cours de linguistique générale (1910-1911) d’après les cahiers d’Émile Constantin. Ed. and trans. Eisuke Komatsu and Roy Harris. Oxford: Pergamon, 1993.
• Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1980.
• Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. Trans. Josué V. Harari. New York: Pantheon, 1984. 101-20.
• Godel, Robert. Les Sources manuscrites du Cours de linguistique générale de F. de Saussure. Geneva and Paris: Droz, 1957.
• Harris, Roy. Introduction to Integrational Linguistics. Oxford: Pergamon, 1998.
• —. Language, Saussure, and Wittgenstein: How to Play Games with Words. London: Routledge, 1990.
• —. Reading Saussure. London: Duckworth, 1987.
• Harris, Roy, and George Wolf, eds. Integrational Linguistics: A First Reader. Oxford: Pergamon, 1998.
• Herman, David. “Sciences of the Text.” Postmodern Culture 11.3 (May 2001) <http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.501/11.3herman.txt>.
• —. Universal Grammar and Narrative Form. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.
• Jakobson, Roman. “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances.” Fundamentals of Language. Ed. Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle. The Hague: Mouton, 1956. 52-82.
• Jameson, Fredric. The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972.
• Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “Histoire et ethnologie.” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 54 (1949): 363-91.
• —. “The Structural Study of Myth.” Critical Theory Since 1968. Ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle. Tallahassee: UP of Florida. 809-22.
• Pavel, Thomas G. The Feud of Language: The History of Structuralist Thought. Trans. Linda Jordan and Thomas G. Pavel. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.
• Toolan, Michael. Total Speech: An Integrational Linguistics Approach to Language. Durham: Duke UP, 1996

 

 

Janet Holtman

Department of English
Pennsylvania State University
jmh403@psu.edu

 

Power "produces reality" before it represses. Equally it produces truth before it ideologizes, abstracts or masks.

–Gilles Deleuze, Foucault

 

In The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Fredric Jameson distinguishes between a “properly Marxian notion of an all-embracing and all-structuring mode of production…and non-Marxist visions of a ‘total system’ in which the various elements or levels of social life are programmed in some increasingly constricting way” (90), thus setting his own totalizing theory apart from the “monolithic models” of the social body which, he claims, do not allow for an effective “oppositional or even merely ‘critical practice’ and resistance” but rather “reintegrate” such resistances “back into the system as the latter’s mere inversion” (91). One of the primary targets of this apparent criticism is, of course, the theory of Michel Foucault, whose “image” of the social “gridwork,” according to Jameson, provides for an “ever more pervasive ‘political technology of the body’” (90). ¹ Of course, one of Jameson’s goals is to show how such theories may be subsumed under the umbrella of his own Marxist discourse in order to reopen pathways for such “resistance;” thus Jameson points out Foucault’s totalization but then is able to include his theory in an overall plan that manages to account for such “disturbing synchronic frameworks” (91). That Jameson’s theories and perspective have been enormously influential hardly needs to be (re)stated, but I would like to point out the fact that Jameson’s reading of Foucault has perhaps colored the reception, perception and manipulation of Foucault’s theories, particularly in terms of how the technologies of Discipline, often figured by the panopticon, have become a sort of metaphor of the “total system” that seems to shut down a useful deployment of Foucault’s theories of social force while enabling their subsumption within discussions that deploy very different theories.

 

My interest in bringing up this influence, and in touching upon some current appropriations of Foucauldian theory tinged by it, is to provide a foundation from which to offer an alternative conceptualization through an extended example of the application of Foucauldian theory to a type of discourse, one that might be expected to be particularly rife with possibilities for such an analysis: the documentary prison film. While it is, of course, not possible or useful to trace out completely the Jamesonian influence on contemporary cultural studies, one may at least note certain uses of Foucauldian theory that bear a strong resemblance to Jameson’s incorporation of Foucault, or at least seem to owe a debt to Jameson’s conceptualization of disciplinary power as a progression of ever more oppressive technologies of the body that call for a Marxist dialectical framework to free it from a sort of political “grid”lock. Mark Poster’s Foucault, Marxism and History immediately comes to mind as employing a similar strategy if a somewhat different reading of Foucault. ² And in film criticism, one sees occasional conscriptions of Foucault into the theoretical service of cultural studies analyses that are to a greater or lesser degree inharmonious with his poststructuralism due to their primary grounding in Marxist discourses. This is perhaps done best by such able critics as Toby Miller, whose discussion of Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies in Technologies of Truth, while informed by a notion of Foucauldian discipline, nonetheless seems to rely upon fairly traditional cultural studies strategies of interpretation and ideology critique. It is done worst by those critics whose references to, for instance, the panopticon as a central figure for all of Foucault’s theories are fatuous at best.

 

But regardless of their level of rigor, the few film studies that do take up Foucauldian theory seem to make use of it primarily in terms of thematic operations, a use that subsumes the Foucauldian question “what does it do?” into the ideology critique question “what does it mean?” In his essay “Disciplinary Identities; or, Why Is Walter Neff Telling This Story,” David Shumway, for instance, employs a Foucauldian notion of disciplinarity in order to read Double Indemnity as a text exemplifying the manner in which discipline shapes subjectivities, particularly the subjectivities of those positioned within an institutional apparatus, such as academics. Shumway’s discussion, relying as it does upon the idea of hegemony and the “internalization” of discipline by the subject, is firmly rooted in the assumptions as well as the methods of ideology critique. But I do not set out here to advocate a sort of postmodernist purism nor to offer a corrective to the strategies of past and recent contemporary film criticism; rather, I merely offer another way to think Foucault with filmic discourse, one that may answer the familiar (and still pervasive) Jamesonian criticism of the “total system” while offering an alternative use for Foucauldian theory in discussions of filmic discourses that still, in spite of some worthwhile postmodern counterdiscourses, tend to be dominated by treatments based on notions of ideology and representation.

 

Before proceeding, however, it seems necessary to clarify the theoretical platform from which this discussion will proceed and which parts of Foucault’s discussion of discipline as a complex and fluid set of forces provide the most relevant grounding. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault provides a detailed definition of “discipline” as it arose in the nineteenth (and early twentieth) century: It is “a modality for [power’s] exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a ‘physics’ or an ‘anatomy’ of power, a technology” (215). It is important to note that discipline cannot be reduced to any one of its techniques or instruments, but rather describes any number of social forces, including various techniques for gathering and producing knowledge. Foucault’s later description of the disciplinary society helps to make this clear, in addition to stating his revolutionary theory about the productive nature of power:

 

"the circuits of communication are the supports of an accumulation and a centralization of knowledge; the play of signs defines the anchorages of power; it is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies." (217)

 

Discourse and forms of knowledge, then, according to Foucault, do not form anything like a repressive ideological structure, as some Marxist cultural studies critics have understood and suggested–in spite of the forbidding words “discipline” and “power” that Foucault uses to describe the ways in which social force shapes institutions and individuals. Rather, knowledge and the play of signs are involved in productive processes within society; they are involved in the formation of subjects. In a later chapter, Foucault makes clear that the production of subject positions, such as “the delinquent” (the criminal defined not by his actions but by his life history and position within the socius), came about through the flow of various forces of power within the social body. Popular discourses comprised a portion of these forces, of course, from the newspapers that reinforced the partitioning of society by juridical power to the crime novels and other media that served to place, define, and popularize “the delinquent” as a special form of identity (286). Foucault does not spend much time discussing the role of such popular discourses, choosing, rather, to make them secondary to his discussion of prominent humanist social scientific discourses such as psychoanalysis and criminology. But he does make clear that popular discourses also enact social force and that they derive much of their content and direction from dominant modes of humanist thought.

 

Of course, if the late twentieth and early twenty-first century social organization is a refinement or intensification³ of Foucault’s disciplinary society, a social body that produces and controls subjects according to the dispersion and interaction of a myriad of forces, then popular discourses such as film and television documentaries necessarily continue to take part in the production of subject positions within the social body. This is the case in spite of the fact that the forms of the popular media today differ from those of the nineteenth century, not only in that they are more numerous and specialized but also in that they are dispersed throughout a higher percentage of society and occupy a place of greater importance socially. Even so, Foucault’s brief, localized discussion of the newspapers and crime novels of the nineteenth-century can still offer us some possible directions for speculation about how power works through certain modern media productions today. For if the nineteenth century newspapers engaged with and distributed questions and responses to criminality that derived from, and, in turn, took part in humanist discourse, how much more effective might modern media productions be at the dissemination of similar kinds of force?

 

As mentioned above, and for perhaps obvious reasons, the documentary prison film is a type of discourse that seems to offer particularly interesting possibilities for analysis in terms of Foucault’s theories. It is perhaps here that one might look to find a discursive formation whose effects are clearly recognizable on Foucauldian terms; an analysis of this particular cultural production as a type of truth-production may evidence the ways in which filmic discourses perpetuate humanist values such as the movement toward prison reform, the continuation of the social construction of subjectivities such as “the delinquent,” and the normalization and implementation of some of the social scientific technologies of discipline that Foucault describes, such as the examination and the case study. A key question here, in other words, is “what do documentary prison films do?”

 

We can begin to answer this question by recognizing, first of all, that cinematic presentations of prison life coincide with, perpetuate and intensify the types of discourses that, according to Foucault, have proliferated since imprisonment became the primary form of punishment for crime: “Prison ‘reform’ is virtually contemporary with the prison itself…. In becoming a legal punishment, [imprisonment] weighted the old juridico-political question of the right to punish with all the problems, all the agitations that have surrounded the corrective technologies of the individual” (Discipline 234-235). Discourses and political movements that sought to reform prisons and the subjects they housed did not arise, then, from a recognition of the failure of the prison, or from an impetus to move, eventually, beyond imprisonment to a better means of punishing crime; rather, they arose as an integral part of the institution itself (234). According to Foucault, such humanist discourses go hand-in-hand with the disciplinary institutional apparatus; disciplinary power seeks to improve itself by becoming both more efficient and more humane. Therefore, it is not surprising that prison environments are usually presented in filmic discourses as throwbacks to earlier forms of power, to the inefficient forms that acted directly on bodies and did not know how to create subjects who discipline and monitor themselves: such presentations serve the humanist reformatory project which is integral to disciplinary power.

 

But in what ways do such narratives support disciplinary power, and how do they contribute to the social perception of institutions and the construction of subjects? One way that they accomplish these effects is by reproducing and distributing, in a mass register, the “official” discourses that have become imbedded within the social grid. Social scientific discourses like psychoanalysis, sociology, and criminology, as well as various systems of humanist ethics, are all interwoven and reproduced in the prison narrative. Consequently, these films may be read on several different “levels,” and with varying interpretations, by cultural critics who may see them as either perpetuating ideology or as calling for subversion, while still enacting much the same social force throughout society through their connection with these “higher” discourses. Just as the newspapers and crime novels of nineteenth-century France circulated various definitions of the delinquent but nevertheless assumed (and furthered the notion) that there was such a subject who needed to be defined, so do documentary prison films, which are shaped by and redistribute various definitions and conceptions of “the criminal,” “the prisoner,” and “the disciplinary institution.”

 

At this point, though, it becomes necessary to provide a basis for clarifying the ways in which documentary prison films produce sets of intensities at a different pitch from those of more mainstream Hollywood productions. The production of truth by documentary films should not be set up in opposition, then, to the truth-production of mainstream Hollywood films. They both, in fact, rely upon similar strategies. A Deleuzian notion of intensities, then, as in “there are no negative or opposite intensities” (A Thousand Plateaus 153), is a more productive concept here because it will allow for a more thorough understanding of the fashioning of truth by each without relying upon a false binary. It also allows for a good deal more precision in accounting for the various processes involved, especially as it allows us to build upon the understanding of the operations of cinematic discourse established by postmodernist thinkers like Steven Shaviro, whose use of certain Deleuzian concepts in discussing the simultaneously bodily and textual stresses of cinema can offer an important bridge from film to Foucault.

 

But in order to understand better the distinction between mainstream films and documentaries, one must first understand the documentary form, its discursive mode, its reliance upon social scientific discourse, and its reception by audiences. Documentaries are historical records, and as such, they attempt to produce certain types of knowledge. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault distinguishes between “history, in its traditional form” which “undertook to ‘memorize’ the monuments of the past, transform them into documents, and lend speech to those traces which, in themselves, are often not verbal” and archaeology, which is “a discipline devoted to silent monuments, inert traces, objects without context, and things left by the past” (7). “In our time,” Foucault says, “history aspires to the condition of archaeology, to the intrinsic description of the monument” (7). This distinction is important in terms of the effects produced by each version of historical inquiry. Traditional history produces meanings, is interested in interminable commentary, transforming the monumental into that which can be interpreted, especially in terms of some larger worldview. Mainstream prison films utilize much the same type of significatory narrative force, situating the subject within a larger framework of humanist meaning. But archaeological history produces discontinuous, dispersed studies, serial and specific, incompatible with a transcendent signification. And documentary films aspire to this second type of history; they attempt to be asignificatory recording projects: “Whatever else viewers expect from a documentary, they consider that one of its most important tasks is to tell us something about the workings of the socio-historical world–the sights, sounds and events in the external world before they are transposed into a representational form” (Kilborn and Izod 4).

 

In drawing this crucial distinction, however, it is important to note that mainstream films do not operate in a merely textual manner. In The Cinematic Body, Steven Shaviro discusses the popular cinematic apparatus as a “technolog[y] of power” (21), in the Foucauldian sense, which acts directly on the body: “The flesh is intrinsic to the cinematic apparatus” (255). Audiences’ reactions to film, according to his theory, are largely visceral and involve a complex interaction of sensation and meaning. Shaviro does not deny that films are, to some degree, textual, but he insists that film viewing is not a strictly intellectual and symbolic process. ⁴ Cinematic images are, rather, “events” that involve a simultaneous effacement of the viewer’s own subjectivity as s/he is acted upon immediately and physically by the film and a possibility for “self-assertion and self-validation” that can be a form of resistance to the insubstantial flickerings of “meaning” presented on the screen (Shaviro 23-27). The bodily nature of film viewing is that which, for Shaviro, enables the hybrid process by which the truth of a film is produced through the interaction of film and viewer(s). These theories fly in the face of both film theory’s distinctly psychoanalytic roots (the “truth” of psychoanalytic discourses having been called into question by Foucault in the The History of Sexuality) and Neo-Marxist cultural studies’ insistence upon the ideological role of cinema.

 

According to Shaviro’s theories, a film does not merely deposit ideology into the brains of passive individual viewers; rather, it negotiates “truth” with viewing subjects through their bodies. It presents, through emotion-laden images that act directly on these bodies, popular discourses that may resonate with their own subjectivity. We can fairly easily see such a process at work in a popular prison film such as The Shawshank Redemption, in which the incarcerated hero undergoes a physical and emotional trial by fire and finally effects his own inspirational escape from prison by literally carving out a space within its walls. Film critic Brian Webster summarizes a typical audience response to the film: “When the film’s conclusion starts to unfold, you suddenly realize that this is one of the more inspiring films you’ve seen in a long time–yet you don’t feel the least bit manipulated.” Of course, Shaviro posits a Foucauldian variety of resistance within such a process: “[The] body is a necessary condition and support of the cinematic process: it makes that process possible, but also continually interrupts it, unlacing its sutures and swallowing up its meanings” (257). This notion complicates and perhaps redefines the production of “truth” by cinema, but it does not eliminate or deny it. Certain reinforcements of social assumptions, definitions, and meanings, such as the necessity for prison reform and “the delinquent,” respectively, are still enacted by film texts, through the very pleasure of bodies that Shaviro discusses.

 

Contrary to what one might think at first glance, however, documentary films rely on the body in ways somewhat similar to those of mainstream film, but they usually do so at a lower level of physical intensity (for instance, viewers are often warned in advance at the approach of a graphic scene, which serves to control their physical response by way of a mediating authority). Viewers’ expectations of the documentary involve, instead, a greater reliance upon the fact-value of the filmic text and the authenticity of its authority. In his essay on documentary and subjectivity, Michael Renov notes, “few have ever trusted the cinema without reservation. If ever they did, it was the documentary that most inspired that trust” (84). Renov locates the impetus for such public trust of the documentary in its involvement with, or derivation from, scientific discourse: “It is the domain of nonfiction that has most explicitly articulated this scientistic yearning; it is here also that the debates around evidence, objectivity, and knowledge have been centered. I would argue, then, that nonfiction film and the scientific project are historically linked” (85). Evidence of such a linkage between scientific discourse, especially social scientific discourse, and documentary film may be seen in some of the cinematic techniques of documentary filmmaking.

 

One of the most frequently utilized is the “documentary interview,” which presents to the audience a focus on certain individual subjects not unlike that which we find in psychoanalytic case studies. In documentary prison films such as Liz Garbus’ The Farm: Angola USA, viewers hear several inmates relate their stories as well as their fears and hopes. Thus, the prison film interview resembles the psychiatric/criminologic interview, which is, as Foucault has shown, a form of the confession, which “governs the production” of true discourse, and the examination, which allows a body of individualizing knowledge: “The examination that places individuals in a field of surveillance also situates them in a network of writing; it engages them in a whole mass of documents that capture and fix them” (Discipline 189). The documentary interview, then, fulfills the audience’s expectation of a subject-centered presentation, but it also fulfills the expectation of a sort of social scientific authenticity by relying on the interview/examination so familiar and useful in social scientific discourse. Consistent with this observation is the fact that the documentary, unlike mainstream popular films, often allows the filmmaker’s voice to be heard off-camera asking questions. This goes far in establishing both a scientific authenticity and a sort of self-referential realism. Such documentary techniques call attention to the fact that the film is not a mere representation but a “real case,” and the camera is an acknowledged part of it. Of course, the ostensible purpose of such a case is to inform and to teach. And it is the didactic quality of documentary films, run by the engine of social scientific discourse, which causes their failure in terms of the work of archaeology–they end up working a lot like regular, entertainment-driven films, producing meaning in similar ways, reducing a monument to a document.

 

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that conventional documentary films such as The Farm, while portraying some of the harsh realities of prison life are, nonetheless, welcomed by prison officials and social administrators: “The Farm has been roundly praised by both Louisiana prison officials–who want to use it for guard-training programs–and the governor’s office” (Lewis). Filmmakers like Liz Garbus, who may believe that their films are transgressive due to their sympathetic portrayal of rehabilitated-yet-still-imprisoned inmates, are puzzled by such reactions of acceptance by administrators: “‘Now that really surprised us; I won’t even try to explain it,’ says Garbus. ‘I suppose that everyone takes what they want into a film’” (Lewis). But it is not difficult to see how these significatory documentaries are easily compatible with, and appreciated by, a bureaucracy and a society⁵ that places value on the reform of delinquents and the accumulation of individualized knowledge about them, the same values and technologies of discipline that have, according to Foucault, been emphasized since the rise of the prison. Thus, by attempting to subvert the institution of the prison by enacting its own discourse of reform and employing the disciplinary tactics of information-production, Garbus’s film merely acts as another social scientific node by which the disciplinary power of the prison functions. Of course, here one might pause and ask a rather Jamesonian question: doesn’t this example demonstrate the manner in which Foucault’s theory constitutes a vision by which attempted resistance is “reintegrated” into a total system? On the contrary, this example simply demonstrates the manner in which Foucault can provide a cautionary strategy that enables a clearer perception of the way in which projects of humanist “resistance” such as Garbus’s documentary cannot act as levers against disciplinary power, situated as they are within it, and clearly cannot make progress in terms of the subversion of dominant discourses, reproducing as they do those very discourses.

 

Documentary films, then, rely upon authentic technologies and discourses as well as upon bodies. The audience’s expectation is to be informed, taught, and possibly moved and motivated. Documentaries, usually through their production of images, impact bodies, and the audience is anticipating a process of truth-production, one that relies upon both the scientific objectivity of the documentary filmmaker as a sort of authentic popular social scientist and the documentary itself as a significatory text. Can such expectations, and the frustration of those very expectations, be a possible explanation for the extreme negative reaction by social scientists and officials to a film like Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies? What is the relationship of Wiseman’s film to other films, both mainstream and documentary? How does his film produce not a document of disciplinary institutional truth but a monument that refuses not only such truths but also the processes by which they are produced?

 

Titicut Follies

 

 

The film product which Wiseman made [Titicut Follies]...constitutes a most flagrant abuse of the privilege he was given to make a film.... There is a new theme--crudities, nudities and obscenities.... It is a crass piece of commercialism--a contrived scenario--designed by its new title and by its content to titillate the general public and lure them to the box office.

 

–from the ruling by Judge Harry Kalus in Commonwealth v. Wiseman, 1968 (Anderson and Benson 97)

 

In their detailed narration of the events that arose around the filming and banning of Titicut Follies, Carolyn Anderson and Thomas Benson explain that Frederick Wiseman was given permission to shoot a film at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Bridgewater because the facility’s administrators assumed that his film would enact the usual sort of documentary social force:

 

Superintendent Gaughan was particularly eager to educate the citizenry about the variety of services at Bridgewater and the difficulties the staff encountered in providing those services adequately. At that time, both Wiseman and Gaughan assumed that heightened public awareness would improve conditions; both subscribed to the Griersonian notion that a documentary film could be a direct agent of change. Both saw opportunities in the documentary tradition of social indignation. (Anderson and Benson 11)

 

This notion that Wiseman’s film might contribute to reformation of the institution is further revealed by Wiseman’s testimony that the superintendent had claimed “that there was no film [he] could make…that could hurt Bridgewater” (qtd in Anderson and Benson 11). Obviously, the assumption that even a film that depicted the grim conditions at the Bridgewater facility could only be beneficial to the institution is deeply rooted in the humanist disciplinary discourses that assume the ultimately beneficent possibilities of the rehabilitative institution and the continual need to reform it. But something went wrong. Wiseman’s film failed to live up to the expectations of the social scientists, prison administrators, etc. who had hoped that the film would further the process of reform. Shortly after its limited release, they rushed to have it banned. Perhaps the reason for this turn of events is that, instead of taking part in familiar social scientific discourses, Wiseman’s film seemed to disrupt them. Instead of providing the hope for institutional reform so commensurate with a humanist progress narrative, Wiseman’s film seems to call the facility’s various forms of institutional discipline and rehabilitation, and even the “truths” upon which they are based (such as the possibility of, and need for, “rehabilitation” itself), into question.

 

One of the first things that one notices upon viewing the film is the absence of narratorial voice, which some viewers find immediately disconcerting. French documentary filmmaker Jean Rouch has said: “I would like [Wiseman] to say something, say what his thesis is…. In Titicut Follies there isn’t any [commentary or ‘guiding hand’], it’s a certified report, which could perhaps be interpreted as a cynical and sadomasochistic report” (qtd in Anderson and Benson 39). Wiseman foregoes the usual directorial voice (removing from the film the disciplinary quality of a “certified report”) and the documentary interview, dismantling the documentary film’s role as a technology of individualizing knowledge, a social scientific documentation of, definition of, “the external frontier of the abnormal” (Discipline and Punish 183). Rather than utilizing such techniques as the interview/examination, Wiseman’s film simply presents them as the institution employs them. Hence, in one shot, we see a traditional Freudian psychiatrist grilling an inmate about his past sexual experiences, asking him how many times a day he masturbates and whether he has had any homosexual experiences, carefully noting the information. Later, we see confrontations between a patient and his doctors, as the patient doggedly and lucidly argues for his own sanity and for the fact that the facility is actually “harming” him. Wiseman captures the smug, clinical condescension of the doctors along with a sense of the absurdity of their attempts to “rehabilitate” the patient through the use of strict discipline, drugs, and psychoanalysis.

 

Wiseman also rejects any pretence to scientific objectivity, editing the film in such a way that the prison’s disturbingly comic musical “follies” frame the film, creating a sense of parodic disjunction with the film’s primary content. Regarding the role of the documentary as a scientifically impartial text, Wiseman says:

 

Any documentary, mine or anyone else's, made in no matter what style, is arbitrary, biased, prejudiced, compressed and subjective. Like any of its sisterly or brotherly fictional forms it is born in choice--choice of subject matter, place, people, camera angles, duration of shooting, sequences to be shot or omitted, transitional material and cutaways. (qtd in Miller 225)

 

Wiseman doesn’t even refer to his films as documentaries, preferring, instead, to call them “reality fictions,” apparently as a sort of “parody” of the documentary form (Anderson and Benson 2). Instead of reinforcing documentary’s aspirations to social science by categorizing and recording individuals, Wiseman’s film creates disjunctions by utilizing some of the conventions associated with the most mainstream cinema. For instance, he uses cutaways for ironic effect and portrays bodies in such a way as to create intense discomfort for the viewer, as when the film cuts away from the view of Mr. Malinowski being force-fed to Mr. Malinowski’s corpse being shaved and groomed for burial. The body in its relationship to the restraining, training, and marking by institutional power is one of the primary foci of the film; the nude, abject bodies of the prisoners provoke uncomfortable sensations in the audience in scene after scene.

 

Such a use of bodies, those of the film’s subjects and those of the audience, recall Shaviro’s conceptualization of the production of cinematic truth as a negotiation between discourse and subjectivity through the mediation of the physical sensations brought about by images. Toby Miller quotes Christopher Ricks as saying that “‘Wiseman’s art constitutes an invasion of privacy,’ the privacy of the viewers, their right to be left undisturbed” (222). Of course, Miller is primarily interested in a more traditional critique of the film that involves the ways in which Wiseman’s art re-positions or challenges the gaze of the spectator (227). He says, “Titicut Follies provokes an uncomfortable gaze at the self by the spectator” (227). But such a view sets up a relationship between audience and film that relies upon notions of the subject and social awareness that do not seem particularly useful in an analysis of this film. Titicut Follies does not so much provoke social awareness as it disrupts it as a concept. Shaviro’s theories may prove a more effective tool for analyzing Wiseman’s film and the reactions to it. It may be the bodily element of Wiseman’s filmmaking, for instance, that provoked the somewhat bewildering criticism by Judge Kalus during Commonwealth v. Wiseman that the film was titillating and obscene, “excessively preoccupied with nudity” and “a crass piece of commercialism” (Anderson and Benson 97).

 

That Titicut Follies could in any way appeal to the prurient interests of its audience is, of course, the height of absurdity, but Judge Kalus’ comments are, perhaps, revelatory of his perception that the film does utilize some of the physically oriented techniques and stresses of mainstream cinema, but without the reassuring signification which normally accompanies them. Kalus’ outrage, then, and the outrage of the social scientists, administrators, and guards who opposed the film’s release was largely a response to the fact that the film did not enact the type of social force that it was supposed to do. Instead, it combined “authentic” documentary with the audience-based methods of truth-production of mainstream cinema, subjective presentation, and physical provocation. In other words, by rearranging the intensities of mainstream cinema and documentary and by reneging on its “promise” of social scientific objectivity, Titicut Follies actually accomplished the (usually unaccomplished) work of the documentary film project by creating an asignificatory monument.

 

What is perhaps most interesting about the response that Titicut Follies provoked is the fact that juridical power was actually called in by the purveyors of social scientific discourse to prohibit the distribution of this monument, except (after a number of legal appeals) to those who possessed the proper training and subjectivity to view the film: “Titicut Follies could be shown in Massachusetts to qualified therapists. Screenings had to be accompanied by a statement that Bridgewater had been reformed” (Miller 224). That the screenings were accompanied by the statement of reform demonstrates clearly the manner in which the film was re-situated as a significatory social scientific project. Judicial authority specified the audience (one that had been extensively trained to perceive the film in the proper manner) and thus redefined the discursive mode of the film. If it could not change who was speaking, or perhaps, the fact that no one was speaking, it could use the audience as a substitute speaker, bringing the film in line with the sort of authoritative enunciative modality that Foucault discusses in the Archaeology of Knowledge:

 

Who is speaking? Who, among the totality of speaking individuals, is accorded the right to use this sort of language (langage)? Who is qualified to do so? Who derives from it his own special quality, his prestige, and from whom, in return, does he receive if not the assurance, at least the presumption that what he says is true? What is the status of the individuals who - alone - have the right, sanctioned by law or tradition, juridically defined or spontaneously accepted, to proffer such a discourse? (50)

 

In other words, and put simply, it was an attempt to turn the “monumentary” Titicut Follies into a document, one that was to be written and read by authorized viewers. ⁶ Interestingly, many scholars and critics continue to refer to the film as “subversive” (Anderson and Benson 38), in much the way that Garbus’s The Farm: Angola USA is “subversive,” in a similar mode of documentary critique, one that makes claims for the film’s significatory value. These attempts to interpret the film as a project of social critique are perhaps not surprising given the sort of juridical response that the film provoked. But it is interesting that critical responses to Titicut Follies seem to have focused on precisely what is not most relevant to an understanding of what the film does. And it is doubtless worthwhile to note that the initial audience response, which might be described as a somewhat halting inability to speak in the face of the monument, or at least as a bewildered struggle to find a relevant point of signification from which to begin an interpretation, eventually transmuted (in the hands of institutionally sanctioned cultural critics) into later broad claims for the film’s subversive meaning.

 

Of course, it is clear from Foucault’s work that it is never a question of subverting ideology but merely a question of producing a counterdiscourse to a discourse, a force to oppose another force. This is something that Wiseman’s film certainly does by “investigat[ing] how discourses and institutions produce and oversee identity” as Toby Miller claims (225). On the Museum of Television and Radio’s Documentary Films of Frederick Wiseman A to Z videotape (1993), Wiseman remarks that “the real subject of documentary filmmaking is normalcy,” a comment followed by the force-feeding sequence [in Titicut Follies] (Miller 225). This notion is more than a little reminiscent of Foucault’s assertion that “to find out what our society means by sanity, perhaps we should investigate what is happening in the field of insanity. And what we mean by legality in the field of illegality” (“Afterword” 211). But if Wiseman’s film produces a monument that differs substantially from the documents produced by mainstream feature films and social documentaries, it is not because he produces a different version of “truth,” but because he, like Foucault, “strips society to the relationships of forces” (Wexler qtd. in Miller 225).

 

For Foucault, the production of “truth” involves the various mechanisms by which discourses define and organize our social world; some discourses become dominant or accepted versions of reality and others become marginalized, according to the interactions of power. In both Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Foucault enumerates the ways in which humanistic, social scientific discourses are imbricated within the web of power relations, the social grid. Psychoanalysis and criminology constitute forms of social scientific discursive “truth” that are still dispersed in various forms throughout the social body. Today, the mass media, including the film industry, are perhaps the most extensive set of apparatuses for the distribution of definitions and concepts perpetuated by social science. And one of the most “authentic” discursive forms within this industry is the documentary film. But as a film like Titicut Follies demonstrates, documentary film is also one of a number of points of resistance within power which “play the role of adversary, target, support, or handle in power relations” (Sexuality 95). Documentary films such as Wiseman’s darkly absurd “reality fiction” may not be subversive or transgressive in a Marxist sense, but they may number among the many “odd term[s] in relations of power…inscribed in the latter as an irreducible opposite” (Sexuality 96).

 

Notes

 

I would like to thank Jeffrey T. Nealon for his encouragement and insightful commentary during the revision of this essay.

 

1. Jameson also points out Foucault’s “totalizing dynamic” in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (5). It should probably be noted here once again, though it has doubtless been noted before, that Jameson’s reading of Foucault’s discussion of disciplinary power’s various technologies in Discipline and Punish does not attempt to account for the localized specificity of the techniques of power in question, tending, instead, to use the umbrella term “technologies of the body” to stand in for a number of forces and specific developments in the rise of disciplinary power.

 

2. In what I would call a more careful and rigorous reading, Poster reads Foucault’s “technologies” as “technologies of power” which, he says, “suggests that discourses and practices are intertwined in articulated formations,” an observation that he follows up with the somewhat baffling claim that this notion is “not fully conceptualized in the works of Foucault” (52).

 

3. See Deleuze, “Postscript.”

 

4. Shaviro uses Deleuze’s conception of the “double articulation” to clarify this apparent duality between the bodily and the intellectual. For Deleuze, the double articulation operates as a double doubling that involves “intermediate states between” through which “exchanges” pass (A Thousand Plateaus 44).

 

5.The Farm: Angola USA won a National Society of Film Critics Award and was nominated for an Oscar for Feature Documentary in 1999.

 

6. In recent years, of course, much of Wiseman’s work, including Titicut Follies, may be viewed in limited exhibition at major art galleries or museums in urban centers such as Boston or Washington, D.C. Always difficult to situate as a social scientific text, the film now seems to have been placed with a view toward establishing artistic and “high cultural” merit, a suitably amorphous signification, and one that is likely to be accepted by the audiences high in cultural capital and educational training who would constitute the primary audience for a documentary in such a venue. For more on educational level, cultural capital and film viewing, particularly in urban areas, see Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Of particular relevance here is Bourdieu’s assertion that “any legitimate work tends in fact to impose the norms of its own perception and tacitly defines as the only legitimate mode of perception the one which brings into play a certain disposition and a certain competence” (28).

 

Works Cited

 

• Anderson, Carolyn, and Thomas W. Benson. Documentary Dilemmas: Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991.
• Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984.
• Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans. Sean Hand. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.
• —. “Postscript on Control Societies.” Negotiations. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. 177-82.
• Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
• The Farm: Angola USA. Dir. Liz Garbus and Jonathan Stack. Co-dir. Wilbert Rideau. Narr. Bernard Addison. Firecracker Films; Gabriel Films, 1998.
• Foucault, Michel. “Afterword: The Subject and Power.” Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. 2nd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983. 208-226.
• —. The Archaeology of Knowledge. 1969. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon, 1972.
• —. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 1977. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1995.
• —. The History of Sexuality: Volume I, An Introduction. 1978. Trans. Robert Hurley. NewYork: Vintage, 1990.
• Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981.
• —. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991.
• Kilborn, Richard, and John Izod. An Introduction to Television Documentary: Confronting Reality. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1997.
• Lewis, Anne S. “The Farm.” The Austin Chronicle 9 Nov. 1998. 23 Apr. 2000. Online. <http://desert.net/filmvault/austin/f/farmthe1.html>.
• Miller, Toby. Technologies of Truth: Cultural Citizenship and the Popular Media. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998.
• Poster, Mark. Foucault, Marxism & History: Mode of Production versus Mode of Information. Cambridge: Polity, 1984.
• Renov, Michael. “New Subjectivities: Documentary and Self-Representation.” Feminism and Documentary. Ed. Diane Waldman and Janet Walker. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999. 84-94.
• Shumway, David. “Disciplinary Identities; or, Why Is Walter Neff Telling This Story?” symploke 7.1-2 (1999): 97-107.
• Shaviro, Steven. The Cinematic Body: Theory Out of Bounds, Vol. II. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.
• Titicut Follies. Dir. and prod. Frederick Wiseman. Wiseman, 1967.
• Webster, Brian. “Apollo Leisure Guide’s Review of The Shawshank Redemption.” 1998-2000. 23 Apr. 2000. Online. <http://apolloguide.com/mov_fullrev.asp?CID=1866>.

 

Christopher Douglas

Department of English
Furman University
christopher.douglas@furman.edu

 

We are about four or five years into the formation of a new discipline, digital game studies. Though by one account computer games have been around for more than four decades (Aarseth), and by another computer and video game sales in the United States are rivaling movie box office sales (Frauenfelder), academic attention to the medium has come relatively recently. At this early stage, digital game studies is necessarily and self-consciously concerned with its own formation, and is heavily engaged with an argument about whether this new phenomenon is to be swallowed by already existing disciplines, or whether it needs to and could develop into a discipline of its own, with a coherent object of study and institutional support. 2001 was an interesting year in this regard. Espen Aarseth, whose Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature aims to unseat “hypertext” as the paradigm for studying electronic literature, editorializes in the inaugural issue of the new online journal Game Studies that “2001 can be seen as the Year One of Computer Game Studies as an emerging, viable, international, academic field.” As editor of Game Studies, Aarseth notes “the very early stage we are still in, where the struggle of controlling and shaping the theoretical paradigms has just started.” His editorial both invites and warns, however, as he cautions against the “colonizing attempts” of other disciplines: “Making room for a new field usually means reducing the resources of the existing ones, and the existing fields will also often respond by trying to contain the new area as a subfield. Games are not a kind of cinema, or literature, but colonizing attempts from both these fields have already happened, and no doubt will happen again.” The problem, Aarseth argues, is the kind of methodological blindnesses that would be imported into digital game studies along with other baggage. While “we all enter this field from somewhere else, from anthropology, sociology, narratology, semiotics, film studies, etc., and the political and ideological baggage we bring from our old field inevitably determines and motivates our approaches,” Aarseth envisions “an independent academic structure” (of which Game Studieswould surely stand as one institution) as the only viable way for digital game studies to avoid obscuring its object through inappropriate lenses borrowed from other fields.

 

Also in 2001, the October issue of PMLA contained an article on the “new media” by influential cinema studies critic D. N. Rodowick. Rodowick argues that, for reasons of an “aesthetic inferiority complex” and a sustained debate about both the medium-object and a “concept or technique” that might ground film studies, this discipline “has never congealed into a discipline in the same way as English literature or art history” (1400). While the “great paradox of cinema, with respect to the conceptual categories of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aesthetics, is that it is both a temporal and a spatial medium” (1401), Rodowick argues that “the new digital culture” is not emerging in the same “theoretical vacuum” that film did; rather, that good digital culture studies, including the study of games, already

 

recirculates and renovates key concepts and problems of film theory: how movement and temporality affect emerging forms of image; the shifting status of photographic realism as a cultural construct; how questions of signification are transformed by the narrative organization of time-based spatial media; and the relation of technology to art, not only in the production and dissemination of images but also in the technological delimitation and organization of the spatiality and temporality of spectatorial experience and desire. (1403)

 

While seeing film studies as having grappled for a half-century with spatial-temporal images, thus providing us with the beginnings of a vocabulary with which to approach digital gaming, Rodowick nonetheless notes gaming’s different status, saying that “interactive media promote a form of participatory spectatorship relatively unknown in other time-based spatial media” (1402).¹

 

One can see the gap here between Rodowick’s optimism at the prospect of refitting existing conceptual categories for the study of new digital media, including computer and video (console) games, and Aarseth’s pessimistic assessment of how such moves amount to a sort of hostile takeover of what might have been a theoretically and institutionally independent new field. These positions seem to me to characterize the current state of digital game studies. (And we might, following both Rodowick’s and Aarseth’s attention to institutions and power, wonder if it’s not coincidental that the optimistic position is articulated by an influential–perhaps even powerful–chair of film studies at King’s College, London in a prestigious print journal–itself a disciplinary emblem 116 years old–while that of the pessimists is articulated by the author of the iconoclastic Cybertext in an online journal in its infancy.) While it is likely that much of the actual work getting done in digital game studies falls somewhere between Rodowick’s ideal of adaptability and Aarseth’s nightmare of ignorant misapplication, I hope in this paper to show what a broadly conceived literary studies might offer the new digital game studies, and so highlight both Aarseth’s warning and Rodowick’s invitation. Games are not, as Aarseth says, literature, but they can sometimes be productively approached with conceptual categories borrowed from literary studies. Indeed, it may be that what we find most useful in approaching this new cultural phenomenon is the disciplinary baggage accumulated along the way.

 

Aarseth’s concerns are articulated a little more fully in the same inaugural issue of Game Studies in an article by the journal’s co-editor Markku Eskelinen.² In “The Gaming Situation,” Eskelinen, using Aarseth’s image of colonization, also mourns the way conceptual categories improperly imported from other fields are misused to study digital games: “if and when games and especially computer games are studied and theorized they are almost without exception colonised from the fields of literary, theatre, drama and film studies. Games are seen as interactive narratives, procedural stories or remediated cinema.” Eskelinen’s answer to the methodological problem that he and Aarseth delineate is to begin the “necessary formalistic phase that computer game studies have to enter” by developing a complex though introductory taxonomy of the different possible gaming situations. This taxonomy confronts “the bare essentials of the gaming situation: the manipulation or the configuration of temporal, spatial, causal and functional relations and properties in different registers.” In the preliminary taxonomy that follows, Eskelinen develops a system for understanding games as “configurative practices” rather than interpretive ones, and draws extensively on the narratology advanced by those such as Gerald Prince and Seymour Chatman. Insofar as it goes, and keeping in mind Eskelinen’s own admission that he is initiating a “necessar y formalistic phase” in order to name the parts of a new phenomenon, Eskelinen’s approach is a useful hermeneutic grid by which we can categorize and understand the real and potential forms that games take. Though one might not always agree with some of Eskelinen’s preliminary thoughts on the gaming experience–his taxonomy seems to overemphasize the movement from start to finish, ignoring the ludic pleasures of side-plots or repetitive play–this style of formal functionalism will help us get a grasp of the variety of digital gaming experience.

 

That said, what becomes apparent in Eskelinen’s critique of other disciplines’ colonizing moves is the danger attending any transdisciplinary academic enterprise: the tendency to misconstrue what other disciplines do, or to regard them as monolithic, neglecting their many internal debates and divisions. For example, Eskelinen condemns literary studies for seeing games as “interactive” stories or for misapplying “outdated literary theory.” While both of these missteps are certainly possible, they don’t exhaust the possibilities for a literary studies approach to computer games (as even Eskelinen’s own use of narratology shows). I will use two examples here to illustrate my point. First, it is the lack of a story that provides a useful way into the player’s experience of first-person shooters such as Half-Life or countless others; Eskelinen’s useful narratological tools notwithstanding, it is the very repetition of the same sequence and the experience of storied intention that might be worth noting from a literary studies point of view. Second, with other games in the tradition of Sid Meier’s Civilization series, literary studies’ methodologies (as well as its baggage) can help us grasp the way games come into being as repetitions of traditional cultural-semiotic formations.

 

In Joystick Nation, J. C. Herz makes a distinction between a game’s “two stories superimposed. One is the sequence of events that happened in the past, which you can’t change but is a very good story. The other is the sequence of events that happens in the present (e.g., you are wandering around trying to solve puzzles), which is a lousy story but is highly interactive” (150). But this split–a good background story that you can’t affect and a poor excuse for a plot that you perform as you interact in gaming space–is rarely true for first-person shooters. In typical shooters such as the Quake or Duke Nukem series, there is no interesting background story. Typically, aliens have invaded or monsters have sprung up and you need to shoot ’em. That’s it. Half-Life develops this theme a bit by having the player’s avatar be a dorky, spectacled, theoretical physicist who inadvertently aids the accidental opening of a dimensional rift that allows all kind of baddies through to our world, but even this is still a rather rudimentary and clichéd background story.

 

On Herz’s other level, however, there’s even less “story,” and in this sense, shooter games make very poor interactive narratives. Things move, you shoot them. Try to find the right door and make the right jump. There are some more things–shoot them too. This episodic series of encounters does not make an interesting tale, and here one would have to agree with Eskelinen that interpreting computer games of this genre (at this stage of development) as “interactive fiction” would be woefully misguided and wouldn’t tell us a whole lot about the game or the experience of playing it. Or, rather, testing narrative against Half-Life reveals an interesting lack. Peter Brooks formulates his inquiry into plot as the “seeking in the unfolding of the narrative a line of intention and a portent of design that hold the promise of progress toward meaning” (xiii). What’s interesting in many games is the combination of, first, a plot rarely interesting enough to create in the player a narrative desire for meaning, and, second, a sense nonetheless of design in the world, design that promises absolute meaning. If Half-Life does not enplot me as the character-operator in an interesting way, it is nonetheless existentially soothing in that shooter games (and other genres) encode a kind of narrative of design that is created in part through repetition. That is, I can replay scenes endlessly for a better outcome. Most shooter and adventure games in particular contain several or even many such scenes that necessitate this, such as a particularly difficult jump or a sudden ambush–I must play it several times before I even know what tactic will get me out of a situation into which I am “thrown,” and then several more times before I get it right. This might sound like cheating, but it isn’t. This is the experience structured into the gaming process–the multiple tries at the same space-time moment. Like Superman after Lois Lane dies, we can in a sense turn back the clock and replay the challenge, to a better end.

 

In view of this systemic repetition or déjà vu built into a game, one might remember Albert Camus’s attraction to the figure of Sisyphus, doomed in hell to eternally roll a heavy stone up a hill, despite knowing that it will tumble back down again. Sisyphus’s repetitive act has no resolution to it–he’s doing the same thing, but won’t be able to figure out a way to do it “properly” eventually, so that the rock will stay put at the top of the hill. In the game world, this would be known as a programming error–I can’t make the big stone stay at the top of the hill so I can get to the next level–and the software maker would promptly send out a patch to fix the bug. In other words, it’s a flaw in the game world’s design. But what attracted Camus to Sisyphus’s situation was its resonance with the essential structure of human experience–absurdity. “Sisyphus is the absurd hero” (89), Camus reports. What is absurd is that, against our desire for order and meaning in the universe, the universe meets us as blank, a fact that does not, however, destroy our desire. Camus defines the absurd human situation this way:

 

I said that the world is absurd, but I was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. (16)

 

Our world is not reasonable, as Camus says, because it is without design–it carries no mark of having been made with us in mind. By itself, this designless, random, irrational world is not absurd. The absurd’s structure, Camus repeatedly notes, is always double and relational: the world is absurd only by virtue of being perceived by our minds, which desire order and design in it.

 

In the face of this absurd realization, humans create constructs that help us escape it–which is where narrative comes in, not only in the narratological sense, but in the sense of creating plots, designs, intentions in our world. We look for something that might assure us of design and intention, which is what religion does, but it’s also what games do. Games therefore do not threaten film’s status so much as they threaten religion, because they perform the same existentially soothing task as religion. They proffer a world of meaning, in which we not only have a task to perform, but a world that is made with us in mind. And, indeed, the game world is made with us, or at least our avatar, in mind. As Lara Croft’s creator puts it, “The whole Tomb Raider world is utterly dependent on Lara’s size and animations. The distance she can jump, reach, run forward and fall are set variables. In this way, her world is designed for her to exist in” (qtd in Poole 212). This is true of the gaming world, not just in virtual-physical measurements but also in terms of the lack of autonomy of everything within the world. In the game world there is random chance in the form of computer-generated virtual dice-rolls, but no contingency: I might play a game for 80 hours and arrive at a place where a broken box hides a passage that has been prepared–just for me. Or I might find at the beginning of a game a key, and pocket it with the certainty that after tens of hours of play (sometimes years in game time) the key will be absolutely necessary to open a door I’ve just found. Of course, I might find and pocket a key in this bug-ridden piece of software we call “reality” as well, but it almost certainly will not end up opening a door for me. Such keys represent sheer potentiality. In my life, many millions of such potentialities are never realized–I’ll never know what door this key opens–whereas in the game, most of them are. They come to me by design, not by chance; they are oriented toward my success and enjoyment. Computer games, particularly those with worlds prepared for our exploration like shooters, adventure, and role-playing games, thus existentially soothe us amid the terror that we otherwise feel.³

 

In these ways, literary studies’ experience with reading designed worlds (fiction) might help us understand how digital games situate their operators, and give us a view onto the pleasurable work that they do. To “read for the plot,” as Peter Brooks puts it, is thus not to see games as stories–even interactive ones that purportedly involve the “reader” more directly than traditional tales or films–but to see the player’s experience as one of unraveling the design inherent in the game world.⁴ This kind of investigation may, however, differ from what Eskelinen calls “traditional literary studies” which is “based on literary objects that are static, intransient, determinate, impersonal, random access, solely interpretive and without links” (“Cybertext”). Eskelinen foresees a productive “combinatory and dialogic interplay” between literary studies’ interpretive practices and that taxonomic formalism that he advocates, and he’s probably right–though this Anatomy of Criticism for the playing of digital games remains to be written. In briefly investigating a second genre, that of the turn-based strategy games of Sid Meier’s famous Civilization series, I want to show how our interpretive practices are useful in opening up the cultural semiotics of the game. But, just as importantly, it’s the very disciplinary baggage coming with old methodologies, which Eskelinen and Aarseth fear will obfuscate the new object, that turns out to be the source of insight into the medium, not only as a text to be read but as the normative historical rules within which the operator works, and which, in turn, work on the operator.

 

Civilization III, the latest iteration of Sid Meier’s influential series,⁵ was published in 2001 to much critical acclaim. It is a turn-based strategy game in which the player-operator plays the role of the (fortunately ageless) ruler of a nascent civilization, from 4000 B.C. to 2020 A.D. As ruler, the player governs the developing civilization throughout six millennia by exploring the world, sending out settlers to found new cities, developing existing cities by building city improvements, coming into contact with other, and eventually rival, computer-controlled civilizations, and setting tax policy (how much of a civilization’s wealth should be devoted to citizen’s consumption, technological research, or to the governor’s coffers). Beyond expanding the territory of one’s civilization, whether through settling, warfare, cultural influence or espionage, one of the most important aspects of the game is researching new technologies. The game involves 82 “technological” advances which are military, governmental, financial, theological, scientific, and theoretical in nature. New technological breakthroughs allow cities to build city improvements, to build new military units, or to embark on what’s called a “Wonder of the World.”

 

Unlike Civilization II, in which Wonders of the World are unique projects (that is, in any game a Wonder can only be built by one city on the planet) with empire-wide beneficial effects, Civilization III has Great Wonders, which follow the above rule, and Small Wonders, which can be built once by each rival civilization. For example, in both games the discovery of Literature (called Literacy in Civilization II) allows a city to build the Great Library, which in turn bestows upon its owner any technological advance already known to two other civilizations. With the discovery of Electronics, on the other hand, a civilization is allowed to build the Hoover Dam, which puts a hydroelectric plant in each of the continent’s cities (thus improving production). Typically, a civilization further up what is termed in the strategy game genre the “technology tree” has a competitive edge–social, economic, and military–over its rivals.

 

The bulk of the game’s play in Civilization III occurs around and in the cities. The map of the world is divided into a diagonal grid on which cities are built and over which units move. Once built, cities extend a zone of control two squares in every direction. A city’s population works this area, extracting food, production materials, and trade goods. Cities are the sites of industry, commerce, and research for each civilization, and their relative health is an index to the strength of the civilization as a whole. The game accordingly inscribes an expansionist narrative, whereby one wins only by settling new cities or conquering those of one’s opponents.

 

Figure 1: A City on a Hill

 

 

 

When the game begins, the world is shrouded in unexplored darkness, the player has no diplomatic contact with the rival civilizations, and the opening message announces that “Your ancestors were nomads. But over the generations your people have learned the secrets of farming, road-building, and irrigation, and they are ready to settle down.” The first goal is to found a capital city, from which the empire will proceed to grow (Figure 1). There are two phases to this process of expansion: the exploration of nearby terrain, during which the darkness recedes, and the settling of that terrain by settler units, who found new cities. Eventually, the expanding empire comes into contact with rival civilizations, at which time diplomacy begins.

 

Figure 2: The Virgin Land

Figure 3: Full of Wild Beasts and Wild Men

 

 

 

 

What is interesting for the purpose of this paper is the way in which the land appears empty of inhabitants until one runs into the rival civilizations (Figure 2). Once the terrain is revealed, there is no presence other than one’s civilization and its rivals. However, placed at random intervals over the map are village icons (which are not cities; see Figure 3) representing the existence of a “minor tribe”–populations which, according to Civilization III‘s manual, “are too isolated, not organized enough, or too migratory to develop into major civilizations” (Manual 67). In terms of Civilization‘s gameplay, however, these are known as “goody huts” in that exploring them often confers benefits upon the explorer, such as a technological advance, a sum of money, a military unit, or even a new city that joins the player’s civilization. But frequently one encounters a hostile reception when entering a hut square, during which, as Civilization II‘s manual puts it, “a random number of barbarian units comes boiling out of the terrain squares that adjoin the village” (83; see Figure 4). Or, as the game screen expresses it, “you have unleashed a horde of barbarians!” In any event, the village disappears, and the land once again is clear for settlement–provided, of course, you can dispatch the barbarians.⁶

 

Figure 4: You Have Unleashed a Horde of Barbarians!

 

 

 

Civilization III and its predecessors thus posit the land as both inhabited and not inhabited by populations that seem to be on the land yet somehow, paradoxically, don’t occupy it. The Civilization III manual’s explanation of such minor tribes as being “too isolated, not organized enough, or too migratory to develop into major civilizations” must be discounted as the game’s first ideological ruse: no village is any more “isolated” at the start of the game than the player is; the tribes are not “migratory” because they remain fixed on a single terrain square; and since such tribes can offer the occasional technological advance, they obviously are not too “unorganized” to develop into a civilization. In fact, these games posit a fundamental opposition between a tribe’s mere squatting on the land, taking up space, and the civilization’s real tenancy on the land. And here one meets the first paradox of the American national symbolic staged by the game. American mythology has it that the Americas were essentially empty of inhabitants prior to colonization by European powers. What the Civilization series stages is the contradiction between this comforting “national fantasy” (Berlant 1) of the virgin land and the reality of the complex aboriginal societies all over the Americas. In the Civilization series, the barbarians appear to emerge from the land as a kind of terrestrial effect. This effect comes about not only by the exploration of the villages, but from random appearances of several barbarian units in land that has been explored but not settled. This dynamic inevitably takes place on the frontier of the player’s civilization–that liminal place where one’s smallest cities are located, between the center of one’s empire (and its bigger and better-defended metropoli) and the seemingly empty wilderness beyond. It is primarily on this frontier that the logic of civilization finds itself through a meeting with its opposite, the frontier being, as Frederick Jackson Turner imagined it, “the meeting point between savagery and civilization” (qtd in Drinnon xiii). This dynamic, of what the game calls the “boiling out” of symbolic Indians, is enough to strike terror into the heart of the civilization ruler, a terror akin to that American terror of the new world. Our early records of settler conceptualizations of their Indian neighbors give evidence of this terror; early Puritan separatist William Bradford, in Of Plymouth Plantation, wrote in the 1620s of “a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men” (62). For Bradford, “the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hue” (62).

 

The best defense against barbarian-Indians is to “settle” the land by extending one’s cities. In Civilization II, if all squares of what Bradford called the “hideous and desolate wilderness” come within city radii, the “wild men” he referred to never emerge. In other words, the game imagines the indigenous presence as a kind of wildness in the land that simply disappears when the land has been domesticated. In this way, these games arrive at an ideological solution that echoes the one achieved by early Christian settlers of America. The problem is this: how can the pagan Indian presence be accounted for in this land that is understood to have been given by God’s grace to his Christian people? This problem and its resolution are nicely articulated in another early Christian record of settlement, Mary Rowlandson’s 1682 account of her capture, enslavement, and eventual ransoming from the Wampanoag nation in what is today Massachusetts. When Rowlandson is captured during a raid on the settler town of Lancaster, she has to try to make sense of her Indian captor’s presence and agency in terms of the mythology that was currently governing the northeast colonies. In this “the vast and desolate wilderness,” as she calls it (122-23), echoing Bradford, the Indian presence is seen, ultimately, to be a method whereby God tests his people. Why, for Rowlandson, has God seemed to leave His people to themselves? After all, God could annihilate the heathens but chooses not to. The answer Rowlandson comes to is that the Wampanoag are the means by which God teaches His people moral lessons (158-59). This answer takes the agency away from the Indians–it’s not their own knowledge about how to feed themselves during a particularly brutal New England winter that gets them through it (they’ve been there for centuries, after all), but God’s will. As Rowlandson puts it, “I can but stand in admiration to see the wonderful power of God, in providing for such a vast number of our Enemies in the Wilderness, where there was nothing to be seen, but from hand to mouth” (160). The Civilization games pursue a parallel logic–the Indian presence is understood to be a kind of obstacle, the overcoming of which is the register of the civilization’s vitality and superiority. The Indians exist not as a civilization in their own right, but as an obstacle to be surmounted by civilization; in the game, as in Rowlandson’s account, the enemy Indian Other is imagined as being the mechanism whereby the nascent American self is tested and found to be powerful.⁷

 

Figure 5: Pink, Pillaging Barbarians

 

 

 

Civilization III transforms this symbolic content and, displaying the result, thereby conceals its ideological commitments. It offers, in other words, a series of interpretive ruses, such as the manual’s explanation of the nature of the minor tribes, to distract our attention. Among the other ruses are the fact that, while the “barbarians” cannot become a rival civilization, the game allows you to play as the Iroquois or Aztecs (or Mayans, Aztecs and Sioux in Civilization II). And indeed there are other ruses as well–such as the visibly pinkish skin of the barbarians that emerge from the land in Civilization II‘s and Civilization III‘s iconography (see Figure 5). It was the iteration in 2000 of Civilization: Call to Power (one of several sequels to Civilization II) that accidentally literalized the symbolic content in its iconography, having the barbarian units (and the player’s early warrior units) replete with headdress (Figure 6).

 

Figure 6: Blood Shall Run!

 

 

 

The barbarian units also respond to a player’s commands with the phrase “blood shall run,” spoken in the Hollywood Indian’s characteristic monotone. Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauricame perilously close to literalizing the symbolic when it routinely announced a player’s encounter with the aboriginal fauna using the ominous words, “indigenous life-forms,” the very postcolonial diction of which raises such intertextual, historical echoes.

 

Figure 7: Culture Tames the Wilderness

 

 

 

Civilization III adds a new component to this ideological framework, that of national “culture.” In Civilization II, the player’s civilization does not have a border as such: or, rather, its border is in a sense a series of city states whose collective territory is only the map squares that the cities work. Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri adds a territorial border to the game that exceeds by several squares the immediate land that is worked by one’s cities; this is useful because another civilization can’t then place dozens of troops almost at one’s city gates just before declaring war, since it would have to trespass across the territorial border first. Civilization III adds a logic to this border, and makes it integral to the experience of the game when it introduces the new concept of national culture. In Civilization III, cities can create improvements like temples, cathedrals, libraries, palaces, universities, or Wonders that generate “culture points” every turn; when enough have accumulated, a visible line representing a civilization’s cultural borders extends further outward from the city, beyond the squares that the city can work directly. When each contiguous city’s cultural borders touch together, a national culture is created, represented on the map by a visible line that demarcates one’s territory from that of another civilization (Figure 7). The game also represents the national borders of rival civilizations; in fact, a small city with little culture of its own on the border of a rival civilization with a powerful culture can be swayed to depose its governor and convert to the rival civilization. What’s interesting here too, however, is the role that culture plays vis-à-vis the Indians: first, Indian villages don’t generate culture, and second, they won’t emerge from “empty” land that is within your cultural borders but beyond the reach of your cities. As the manual puts it,

 

though you might conquer the active tribes in your immediate area, new ones arise in areas that are outside your cultural borders, in areas that are not currently seen. . . . Thus, expanding your network of cities over a continent eventually removes the threat of active tribes, because the entire area has become more or less civilized by your urban presence. (67)

 

 

In other words, again repeating traditional American mythology, the Natives don’t have culture (because their “villages” don’t generate it like your “cities” do), but they can be tamed by it. Or, to put it yet another way, the absence of Native title to the land they squatted on is betrayed by their lack of real cultural formations that might confer tenancy.

Figure 8: Barbarians Inside the Gates

Figure 9: Barbarians Outside the Gates

 

 

 

 

 

In these games, the fact that the Indians are understood not to occupy the land is linked fundamentally to the Native inability to develop technology. That is, they propose that indigenous populations improperly take up space in the empty land precisely because they don’t develop technology and therefore aren’t nascent civilizations. Conversely, these populations don’t develop technology because they don’t have a meaningful presence on the land–when they are in their “goody huts” they don’t, that is, work the land (as agriculture, mining, trade) as a resource in order to advance along a teleological model of technical progress. Even when the barbarians manage to take over a player’s civilized city (Figure 8), which happens from time to time in Civilization II but which feature has been excised from Civilization III, they work the land in the city’s radius but don’t improve the land (through irrigation or creating mines), they can’t make city improvements (like a granary to store grain or barracks to train troops), and they can’t collect taxes or research new technology (see Figure 9 in contrast). In this way, Civilization II and III construct the indigenous population as another obstacle of the landscape–and one which, like the others, needs to be settled and disciplined. Eradicating the minor tribes and the land’s erupting barbarians is not an unfortunate side effect to the march of progress–it is actually constitutive of one’s civilization.

 

Thus far I have argued that the Civilization series is infused with an American ideology that is comforting insofar as it justifies genocidal practices and the stealing of land by positing an empty virgin continent that is paradoxically populated by what the game manual calls “minor tribes” that can’t improve the land and tame the wilderness. Literary studies’ strengths in reading semiotic codes, in seeing historical parallels, and in reading for the gaps and fissures, knowing that “what the work cannot say is important” (Macherey 87), are as important as any narratological contribution it might make to digital game studies. But, in this instance at least, it is precisely the disciplinary-institutional baggage of American literary studies that helps bring into focus the problematics through which the Civilization series works without explicitly naming them. In the last twenty or so years, American literary studies has begun to recognize its own historical and ongoing evasion of the United States’s practices of empire and colonization. “The land was ours before we were the land’s,” intoned Robert Frost in the land’s eastern capital in 1961; as his inaugural poem describes America’s spiritual “surrender” to the land, “we gave ourselves outright . . . / To the land vaguely realizing westward, / But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced” (467). Five years before, in his well-known preface to his Errand Into the Wilderness, the influential historian Perry Miller retrospectively discerned the coherence in his work to be, as he put it, “the massive narrative of the movement of European culture into the vacant wilderness of America” (vii). Both Frost and Miller articulate a central tenet of one American mythology: that the United States was founded upon an empty land devoid of inhabitants. As Amy Kaplan puts this problem:

 

United States continental expansion is often treated as an entirely separate phenomenon from European colonialism of the nineteenth century, rather than as an interrelated form of imperial expansion. The divorce between these two histories mirrors the American historiographical tradition of viewing empire as a twentieth-century aberration, rather than as part of an expansionist continuum. (17)

 

Though much recent and some older work in American studies has begun to unravel this strand of American ideology,⁸ the comforting notion of the “vacant wilderness” awaiting European settlement remains essential to this culture’s symbolic self-understanding, even as repressed reminders of the historically vast aboriginal presence in the land continually rise to challenge the empty land hypothesis. In this case, it’s the initial blindness to American empire and colonization in American literary studies–and then a corrective movement, represented by such important works as Kaplan and Pease’s Cultures of United States Imperialism (1993) and Rowe’s Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism (2000), not to mention the new areas of inquiry opened by postcolonial theory and Chicano and Native American studies–that constitutes the “baggage” literary studies can helpfully introduce to digital game studies. Like the Civilization series, other games might pursue similar strategies of transformation, display, and concealment: strategies now retroactively recognizable within the institutional, disciplinary history of American literary studies. While this baggage is useful, however, the kind of reading of ideology it allows is no different from that which might be performed on Mary Rowlandson, William Bradford, Robert Frost, or Perry Miller, to use my emblematic examples above. But when we turn our attention to the generic status of these texts registering this American ideology, we begin to see how an old style of ideology critique fails to take into account what I have called the “staging” of the ideology in this computer game. By this term I mean not the way the game creates a kind of panoramic representation of a peculiar set of political or social ideals, something that a reader of a book might (more or less) passively receive. Rather, if we, following Eskelinen’s lead, borrow Aarseth’s terminology and see games as configurative (in addition to interpretive) practices, the peculiar status of the computer game is to actually incorporate the player, making us into actors within the ideological staging: we also produce the ideological effects that the game registers each time we play the game.

 

In this view, computer games could be understood to set the rules of play wherein the human player navigates through particular ideological or social contradictions; as rules, importantly, they naturalize certain historical and cultural contingencies. A game’s rules thus permit a select set of (re)solutions to the conflicts in the national symbolic which the game stages. Among other ideological effects, Civilization III makes inevitable, natural, and universal several Western-centered ideas of technological progress, the use of the land, and the opposition between “civilization” and “savagery.” In this way, historical specificity is forgotten, and the game reinforces the sense that those who have been displaced were only ever natural obstacles erupting randomly from the wilderness to block (American) civilization’s advance. Because these ideas are coded into the game rules they appear as inevitable historical rules. The game places the player in the position of guiding America’s development (even if the name of the civilization we play is different); we reenact the historical-territorial drama. The rules are the natural and naturalized logic of development within which that drama is played out (to a certain end).⁹ This process goes beyond the audience reacting to an ideological image or representation; instead, the player participates in producing an ideological effect that is not totally explicit anywhere, and that she or he may not fully comprehend. But of course, full comprehension is not the goal of the national symbolic, or of ideology.

 

Players also learn to literally “play by the rules” in the game, which helps incorporate us into a society in which there will also be rules to be followed. What some games accomplish at an early age is to establish the idea of rules as something that are given, a status akin to that of a natural law. But Civilization III‘s typically adult players¹⁰ are taught again that success or failure happens within the rules that create a “level playing field” as the current cliché has it. In board games or computer games, however, players actually do start out in relative equality (although there are some chance elements as well, depending on the game), whereas in real life, so many characteristics of one’s life are already determined before birth, including social and economic standing, political freedom, skin color, gender, etc. What games accomplish is the instilling of the ideology of equality, which postulates that we are born equal and that differences emerge later on; the primary difference to be explained in this way is that of economic disparity, and games help explain that difference as the result of, in America, hard work and effort vs. laziness. Thus gaming helps inculcate the ideology that covers over the fact that, with the exception of the information technology bubble, most of those who are wealthy in the United States were born that way.¹¹ Beyond this narrow ideological function, the game helps create subjects that accept the inevitability of rules as things that are given and must be “played” within–or else there is no game. This process is not total or ever complete, as the current gaming discourse complaining about the rules shows; here, players critique a game’s rules in view of a conventionalized notion of how “reality” works, or, less often, how a game’s playability is compromised by rules that are too “realistic.”¹²

 

I would further venture that the game helps rehearse this ideology of equal opportunity not only on the individual level, but also on a national-cultural one. Civilization III posits a similar “level playing field” for different cultures at the dawn of human history. But a recent synthesis of work in several scientific and humanist disciplines suggests that the field was anything but level. In Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Jared Diamond advances a biological and geographical study of human history. In probing the ultimate and proximate reasons for why Europeans since the fifteenth century have been able to dominate other peoples in the Americas, Australasia and Africa–why, as he frames the problem in short hand, the forces of King Charles I of Spain were able to subdue the Incan capital of Cajamarca in 1532 instead of the forces of Incan emperor Atahuallpa subduing Madrid that same year (68)–Diamond explicitly and politically frames his work as an answer to the “racist explanations privately or subconsciously” (19) held by many Westerners. Resisting this genetic, and therefore racial, explanation for the fates of human societies, Diamond instead traces the influences of environment on their evolution. To briefly and inadequately summarize Diamond’s thesis, the east-west axis of the Eurasian continent allowed for the spread of wild plant and animal species and resultant biodiversity to a much greater extent than the predominantly north-south axes of the Americas and of Africa. The greater range of wild plant and animal species in the Eurasian/north African continent than in the Americas–with, for example, 33 species of wild large-seed grasses and 13 domesticable large mammals in the former, as opposed to 11 species of wild large-seed grasses and one large mammal in the Americas (140, 162)–meant that more human populations on the Eurasian land mass could become farming communities. Farming societies, as opposed to largely hunter-gatherer ones, tended to produce food surpluses and food storage techniques, allowing for the development of “large, dense, sedentary, [and] stratified societies” (87). These populations selected for resistance to several important epidemic diseases whose origins are ultimately in domesticated animal populations in a way that, obviously, societies without those same domesticated animals were never able to (with catastrophic results for those without the disease resistances). The larger and stratified societies tended to produce hierarchical political systems that were interested in territorial gain, writing, and technological developments that would eventually include oceangoing ships, guns, and steel. In summary, Diamond’s interpretation of the evidence is that European imperial domination of the Americas, south Asia and Australasia, and Africa was based not on a kind of genetic superiority, but on ultimate factors that Europeans had little control over or knowledge of–geographical and environmental traits.

 

One can see from this inadequate summary that the kind of narrative Diamond is engaging in is similar to the one addressed by the Civilization games and others like them. By bringing these two texts into contact, I am not intending a critique of the games’ failings to accurately represent the dynamics of the growth of and conflicts between civilizations.¹³ Indeed, such a critique might be anachronistic, at least for the iterations of the series prior to Civilization III, as Diamond claims that his 1999 book is a new synthesis of old and new data, requiring knowledge of

 

genetics, molecular biology, and biogeography as applied to crops and their wild ancestors; the same disciplines plus behavioral ecology, as applied to domestic animals and their wild ancestors; molecular biology of human germs and related germs of animals; epidemiology of human diseases; human genetics; linguistics; archaeological studies on all continents and major islands; and studies of the histories of technology, writing, and political organization.¹⁴ (26)

 

Rather, the contrasts between the game’s narrative and Diamond’s narrative are interesting in that they highlight the ideologically productive ideas at work in the game’s code. That is, the gaps between these narratives suggest spaces where culturally useful–and ideological–ideas get worked out. This game’s designers did not invent these ideas; rather, they transcribed them from the larger culture into the interactive medium of the Civilization series.

 

One might argue that Civilization III (and its predecessors) have subversive potential to challenge notions of Western supremacy. The game enables the simulation of alternative histories, recognizable as still being historical because their referents come from real things–names of actual nations and cities and people, and the real things that happen, such as trade, war, peace, exploration. In one sense, these alternative histories can be imagined and simulated, and different historical narratives explored. A player playing the Iroquois nation, or India, for example, might dominate the game, crushing opponents such as the Americans and the British and the Chinese, and win by either defeating everyone else or by sending a colony ship to Alpha Centauri (Civilization II‘s and III‘s other “winning condition”). In a lovely moment of irony and anachronism, a player playing Mohandas Gandhi (the game’s suggested ruler name for one playing as India, whose robed portrait appears during the diplomacy screens), might face down and conquer Elizabeth I of England, Catherine the Great of Russia, and others. What would be revealed in such a narrative is the contingency of human history: that things might have turned out differently to the extent that those nations understood to have been the losers in twentieth-century history (because the “Iroquois” and the “Indians” beat up on other peoples before the “Americans” and the “British” came along) could have in fact been the dominant society. Or, to put this in Diamond’s terms, Atahuallpa’s general might have arrived in Spain in the sixteenth century and sacked Madrid. But though some might find the game’s recognition of historical contingency progressive and liberating, I would argue that its ultimate effect is to reinforce the pattern of interaction between the colonizing power and the aboriginal. That pattern is reinforced not only by the necessary enactment of imperialism’s need to master the native land and its inhabitants, as I have argued above. Rather, a second kind of ideological work this performs is produced precisely because of the possible alternative histories. Things might have turned out differently because the game constructs history as a level playing field. So why didn’t the Iroquois conquer the Americans? Why weren’t the Indians able to colonize London and its outlying areas? Because those colonized peoples didn’t work as hard as–or didn’t have the noble spirit of–we Europeans. The game has abstract radical potential, but it is circumscribed by how things really turned out. That radical potential thus works ideologically to reinforce the notion of cultural and maybe racial supremacy. That things might have turned out differently need not produce existential-national anxiety in Western players, in light of the imaginable histories that include the subjugation of those players on an alternative, virtual earth. Rather, the actual story becomes explicable, when faced with the endlessly replayable historical simulations of civilization, only through reference to a kind of spiritual or cultural rightness of European civilization.

 

These last observations suggest that computer and video games are indeed “configurative practices” rather than merely interpretive ones, as Eskelinen suggests; however, exceeding his taxonomy, the games are not the only thing configured. In fact, games may work on their operators to configure our expectations of the real, our sense of history, national identity, race and gender, or economic justice, not just in terms of representation, but in the way that rules teach universal laws and routine behavior. This is true not just in the way that the FBI and police agencies recognize when they use shooter-type games to train for shoot/no-shoot responses (see the somewhat hysterical Grossman 312-16), or the way in which the U.S. Army and Marines have teamed up with commercial game publishers to develop squad-based games to train officers and others how to “leverage human resources and information” (“Army”; Riddell). Nor is it only the pleasure of forming what Ted Friedman calls a “cybernetic circuit” or feedback loop with the computer, “in which the line demarcating the end of the player’s consciousness and the beginning of the computer’s world blurs” (137). Even in highly-reflective play, as is intensely the case in fan discourse on games, the ideological procedures of the games may not come to light. On the other hand, the hacker communities and digital game scenario sites suggest that the awareness of game rules–and the urge to rewrite them–often subverts the games’ standing rules governing the way a game can be configured, but they also exceed the rules’ ability to configure the operator’s paths of thought. Such discourse includes discussion of the aesthetic qualities of the rules themselves: why some rules and algorithms are downright beautiful–like the one that recently had a polite, smiling, cooperative Gandhi send an army of 40 or so Indian units across a continent (and many years) and over my peacetime border to launch a Pearl Harbor-like attack on my innocent Persian civilization. This is the two-way process of configuration–operator on game, game on operator–that digital game studies will have to address in the years ahead. We will need all our collective powers.

 

Notes

 

I thank Cort Haldeman for his technical help in rendering some of the audiovisual material quoted in this essay.

 

1. Rodowick’s essay was a preview of his Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy After the New Media, published that same year. As if in example of the “recirculation” of cinematic concepts in new media studies was Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media, also in 2001. Manovich’s book is fascinating as it traces the history of the screen in the West, suggesting both that the classical cinematic screen has its formal genealogy in Renaissance painting’s frame (80), and that the computer screen (and thus games) have their more proximate lineage not directly in cinema, but in radar screens that presented information in real time (99). The Language of New Media engages the new media, which include “a digital still, digitally composited film, virtual 3-D environment, computer game, self-contained hypermedia DVD, hypermedia Web site, or the Web as a whole” (14), through a history of visual media, primarily cinema and photography. This breadth is of course its strength–as it relates contemporary computer use to the history of visual form–and its weakness for game studies. Manovich, for instance, spends little time discussing actual games; Doom and Myst (both released in 1993) stand in for computer games in much of his discussion, and when he does refer to other games, they are mostly within the subcategory of action games (that is, wherein the user is the “camera” in a first-person perspective). So, for instance, when Manovich discusses 1990s computer games’ debt to the cinematic interface, he argues that “Regardless of a game’s genre, it came to rely on cinematography techniques borrowed from traditional cinema, including the expressive use of camera angles and depth of field, and dramatic lighting of 3-D computer-generated sets to create mood and atmosphere” (83). This is certainly true of many computer and video games (the latter of which Manovich, for an unexplained reason, does not mention in his book), but it is not true “regardless of a game’s genre.” Here, at least, Markku Eskelinen’s warning (and he refers specifically to Manovich’s book) against the colonizing attempts of other disciplines rings true, as the scope of Manovich’s claim about digital games’ lineage in cinema needs important qualifications. For example, Civilization III, discussed below, has its genealogy in board games, while Magic Online has its genealogy in the still-popular fantasy trading card game Magic: The Gathering, and though these two computer games emerged in 2001 and 2002, they both existed in previous iterations in the 1990s. Almost all of Manovich’s examples are first-person perspective action, exploration, or racing games, and when he does refer to real-time strategy games (such as the Warcraft series), one has to wonder how they make use of cinematic perspectives rather than, with Civilization III and other strategy games (sometimes called together “god-games” because of their omniscient visual perspective and the vast power they extend to players), previous board games or tabletop model wargames. Though these facts qualify Manovich’s expansive claims–others are made later when he states that games are experienced as narratives (221-22; always? what about Tetris?), and that “Structuring the game as a navigation through space is common to games across all genres” (248; but what of Tetris and Magic Online?)–they don’t negate the future necessity for game studies to attend in detail to the history of film (and other visual arts) and a cinema-derived analytical repertoire.

 

2. Indeed, much of the first issue of Game Studies can be seen as a sustained assault against the notion that literary or film studies provide adequate tools for the new phenomenon. Jesper Juul’s “Games Telling Stories?” also uses narratology to refute three arguments that digital games can be considered kinds of narratives. That Aarseth, Eskelinen and Juul question the practice of unproblematically applying literary or film concepts to digital games, as Henry Jenkins also did seven years ago, shows how slowly this new discipline is forming. In the now-famous “Nintendo® and New World Travel Writing: A Dialogue,” Jenkins notes that two earlier books erroneously “presuppose that traditional narrative theory (be it literary or film theory) can account for our experience of Nintendo® in terms of plots and characters” (60), and offers instead a model of narrative for games as movement through space rather than in terms of characters and plots.

 

3. Furthermore, the player alone has real agency in the game world. There do seem to be other people existing in the world, but they don’t do anything except wait for you and respond to your requests and actions. That is, nothing really happens in the game except through you. The newer games (Half-Life and Baldur’s Gate II) are increasing their use of scripted events, which simulate actions and events independent of you, and which you trigger by walking into a certain area of the game world. In these instances, the game simulates the idea that you come across lives in medias res. But in most of these scripted events, your actions and decisions are why they are there in the first place–they’re meant to give you a clue; or, your own action (which side will you help?) proves decisive in determining the outcome of the event. This is, of course, not the case in massively multiplayer online games, in which thousands or tens of thousands of players simultaneously interact in a persistent online world.

 

4. And Brooks points to this connection as well, suggesting that “the enormous narrative production of the nineteenth century may suggest an anxiety at the loss of providential plots: the plotting of the individual or social or institutional life story takes on new urgency when one no longer can look to a sacred masterplot that organizes and explains the world” (6).

 

5. The series has a rich and varied genealogy. Civilization was introduced as a computer game by Sid Meier in 1990, though it was inspired by a board game by Avalon Hill. It was followed up by Colonization for Windows 3.1/95 in 1995, which was a game focused more narrowly on the various European powers colonizing North America, and by CivNet, an online multiplayer version of Civilization for Windows 95 released by Microprose in 1995. Civilization II (for Windows 95) was released in 1996. Since then there have been several different sequels to Civilization II: these include Microprose’s Civilization II: Test of Time (1999), Activision’s Civilization: Call to Power (1999), and, after legal wrangling over the Civilization franchise, a sequel by Activision called only Call to Power II (2000). Another kind of sequel to Civilization II is Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri (1999), a science-fiction themed game of the same genre designed by Sid Meier which begins where Civilization II ended, with the colonization of a planet around Alpha Centauri; this can be considered an heir to Civilization II in that its gameplay remains essentially the same–even to the point of including barbarians. The “true” sequel is regarded as Civilization III.

 

6. Thus the Civilization series shares with some Nintendo games the mapping of space, but here, as opposed to the Nintendo games that Henry Jenkins and Mary Fuller analyze in “Nintendo® and New World Travel Writing: A Dialogue,” the colonization is literal and not merely metaphoric, as it is in their assertion that “Nintendo® takes children and their own needs to master their social space and turns them into virtual colonists driven by a desire to master and control digital space” (71). Touring through and thereby “mastering” a game’s digital space is not the same as the simulation of the settlement of land and territory and destroying native inhabitants along the way, as in the Civilization games.

 

7. Most strategy games center around gathering resources from the land in order to construct units, build base improvements, or research technology (e.g. the Age of Empires series, the Warcraft series, the Command and Conquer/Red Alert series); all these games imply a similar model of the relation between humans and the land. What I have in mind in this essay is perhaps a sub-genre that imagines a role for the “native” life-form: whether the “barbarians” in Civilization II and its sequels Civilization: Call to Power, Civilization: Test of Time and Civilization III; the “natives” in Master of Orion II; or the “mind-worms” of Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. In all these cases, these forms that threaten civilization can be tamed and put to work or, untamable, must be destroyed.

 

8. See, for instance, Kaplan and Pease, including Kaplan’s and Pease’s introductions and the essays therein. Kaplan names William Appleman Williams’s 1955 The Tragedy of American Diplomacy as an early critic of the American exceptionalism thesis, that America alone among the modern powers never developed an empire.

 

9. When Friedman remarks that “the fact that more than one strategy will work–that there’s no one ‘right’ way to win the game–demonstrates the impressive flexibility of Civilization II,” he is referring to the two possible “winning conditions” of the game–eliminating all other rival civilizations, or sending a spaceship to colonize Alpha Centauri. My point is that though the game permits these two strategies to win the game, one bloody and one peaceful, both depend on the extensive development and mastery of the land by one’s civilization. Only by such mastery can the player achieve the infrastructure necessary for warfare or for the space race to Alpha Centauri. And what the mastery of the land means, as I have argued, is mastery over its barbarian inhabitants as well. This is true even in Alpha Centauri and in Civilization III, where players can pursue diplomatic, scientific, and economic victory paths, although the scientific victory path in Alpha Centauri produces an interesting coda to this paper in that it involves the almost-too-late recognition of the sentience of, and transcendental unity through, the equivalent of the Indians in the game, the “native” life-forms.

 

10. Demographically, computer game players tend to be older than video (console) game players. Other demographic distinctions can be made according to game genre, by which turn-based strategy games tend to attract older players.

 

11. In this sense, the Civilization series betrays a specifically American ideology that goes beyond an association with other settler colonies like Canada, Australia, or South Africa, all of which model civilization-savagery binaries. The games also carry the mark of the American Dream–that success corresponds to hard work and effort, not outside determining factors like heredity and geography. Since Crèvecoeur, this idea of America as a place where hard work, not privilege, is rewarded has been part of the national mythology.

 

12. One example of this “fan” discourse was the demand before its release that the game designers of Civilization III create the more difficult levels of play through a variegated “AI” (or Artificial Intelligence, the optimistic name given to the set of algorithms that manage the computer-controlled rival civilization’s moves in the game), and not merely that the computer-controlled civilizations “cheat” by being able to build city improvements and units for a fraction of the cost of human players. Players recognizing this still play the game, but seem disturbed by the violation of the ideology of equality that the game promotes. It’s challenging to play as the underdog, with the field tilted against you, but we still understand this to be in some way “unfair.”

 

13. Say, for example, the historical inaccuracy of having every game civilization begin with the technologies of farming, road-building, and irrigation, despite the actual lack of domesticable plant and animal species in many parts of the world. As Ronald Wright remarks, “Ancient America was criticized for lacking things that Europe had–things deemed epitomes of human progress. The plow and the wheel were favorites; another was writing. It never occurred to Eurocentric historians that plows and wheels are not much use without draft animals such as oxen or horses, neither of which existed in the Americas before Columbus” (6). Native Mexicans did invent the wheel–but, lacking draft animals, used them for toys (Diamond 248).

 

14. But interestingly, the demand for realism and accuracy–whether visual or in games’ models of economics, physics, diplomacy, strategy, tactics, etc.–plays a large role in the reception of computer games. This requirement that virtual worlds be faithful in some sense to real worlds mirrors similar demands on cinema and literature, and can be seen in both printed and online reviews of games, and in the discourse of player websites devoted to particular games. One interesting example of this is a number of projects sponsored by Apolyton.net (a semi-official site catering to the Civilization series and games like them) devoted to the creation of open-source games like the Civilization series. One such project, called none other than “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” aimed for increased accuracy and realism in modeling the development of civilizations, and the debate among the game’s designers centered on ways they might implement some of the specific ideas in Diamond’s book. Though this particular project appears moribund, others continue.

Works Cited

 

• Aarseth, Espen. “Computer Game Studies, Year One.” Game Studies: The International Journal Of Computer Game Research 1.1 (2001) <http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/editorial.html>.
• Activision. Civilization: Call to Power. CD-ROM. Activision, 1999.
• “Army to Fund Video Games for Aspiring Commanders.” New York Times, October 25, 2001.
• Berlant, Lauren. The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991.
• Bradford, William. Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647. 1856. Ed. Samuel Eliot Morison. New York: Knopf, 1952.
• Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Vintage, 1985.
• Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Trans. Justin O’Brien. New York: Vintage, 1955.
• Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: Norton, 1999.
• Drinnon, Richard. Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building. 1980. Norman, OK: of Oklahoma P, 1997.
• Eskelinen, Markku. “Cybertext Theory and Literary Studies, A User’s Manual.” electronic book review 12 (2001) <http://www.altx.com/ebr/ebr12/eskel.htm>.
• —. “The Gaming Situation.” Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research 1.1 (2001) <http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/eskelinen/>>.
• Firaxis Games. Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. CD-ROM. Infogrames, 1999.
• —. Sid Meier’s Civilization III. CD-ROM. New York: Infogrames, 2001.
• —. Sid Meier’s Civilization III. Instruction Manual. New York: Infogrames, 2001.
• Frauenfelder, Mark. “Death Match: Your Guide to the Box Wars.” Wired Magazine 9.05 (2001). 7 June 2001 <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.05/deathmatch.html>.
• Friedman, Ted. “Civilization and Its Discontents: Simulation, Subjectivity, and Space.” On a Silver Platter: CD-ROMs and the Promises of a New Technology. Ed. Greg M. Smith. New York: New York UP, 1999. 132-50.
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• Kaplan, Amy and Donald E. Pease, eds. Cultures of United States Imperialism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993.
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David Rando

Department of English
Cornell University
dpr27@cornell.edu

 

Since the September Eleventh airplane attacks on the World Trade Center, it is difficult to imagine American readers responding to the opening sentences of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbowin quite the same ways as they had previously. “A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now” (3). Suddenly these famous words are thrust into new contexts, and yet, I would like to argue that the idea of “comparison” still pervades our ways of understanding. Who can forget the horrifying doubling and déjà vu of the images of the second airplane crashing into the second tower? That scene of doubled impact and destruction at once creates the desire for and, with its sense of radical singularity, denies bases of comparison. Pynchon recognizes that in the face of traumatic or devastating events we seek refuge in the comfort of comparison, in our sense that what bears similarity offers solace.

 

Indeed, the events of September Eleventh were first brought into sense through frames of comparison, or metaphor. Immediately, evocations of the attack on Pearl Harbor shot through the media. That the movie Pearl Harbor enjoyed recent success at the box-office only helped to prime the American imagination for that easy parallel of surprise attack. Among other functions, the Pearl Harbor comparison helped to locate September Eleventh within an archetypal American loss-of-innocence story. But Pearl Harbor did not offer a metaphor for thinking about the vulnerability of a major metropolis, terms that newly pressed themselves upon the imagination. For this reason, it is fitting that New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was the first person to invite comparisons between New York and London during the Battle of Britain. “I think people should read about the Battle of Britain and how the people of London lived through the constant daily bombardment by the Nazis,” Mayor Giuliani told Barbara Walters in an interview that aired on September nineteenth. “They took terrible casualties, terrible losses. They never gave up. They never gave up their spirit and they figured out how to go about their lives and they prevailed. There’s nothing wrong with being afraid, but you don’t give in to it.” Mayor Giuliani probably does not have Gravity’s Rainbow in mind when he urges New Yorkers to read about London during World War Two. What Mayor Giuliani’s interview reinforces, however, is how tenaciously the mechanism of comparison occurs to us in the light of contemporary events and how transparently we appeal to the relations between events, texts, and contexts.

 

In the wake of September Eleventh, the questions that literary criticism has asked about the precise nature of the relationship between text and context, events and history, and narrative and culture take on a new kind of urgency. In this essay, I would like to take seriously Mayor Giuliani’s suggestion that we turn to texts and history in order to make sense of current events. Specifically, I want to set the discourse of childhood and innocence in Gravity’s Rainbow in dialogue with the proliferation of post-September Eleventh anecdotes about children who selflessly break their piggy banks to contribute to relief funds. It seems as though each news organization and each local newspaper has its own version of this familiar kind of story. What is the relationship between these anecdotes of innocence and charity, the devastation at the World Trade Center site, and the United States’ present military campaign in Afghanistan? How are anecdotes such as these poised in an important position at the nexus of event, narrative, and history? How can understanding these recent anecdotes help us to understand Pynchon’s sexualized depiction of children in Gravity’s Rainbow? Conversely, what can Pynchon’s discourse of innocence in that novel teach us about how the recent piggy-bank anecdotes do cultural work in our current war? Finally, how might a new understanding of the function of anecdotes in general contribute to broad efforts in literary criticism to comprehend the connections between texts and history? In the process of addressing such questions, I mean to develop a space within anecdotes and the anecdotal where texts and history can have demonstrable and substantial connections in literary criticism through specific metonymical and metaphorical devices, where other historicist methodologies only project metaphorical connections.¹ Anecdotes, which form at the very skin between history and narrative, may illuminate such connections by points of contact as well as by comparison.

 

The status of children in Gravity’s Rainbow continues to be a problem for critics. How do we account for Pynchon’s graphic sexualization of children such as Bianca, Geli Tripping, or Ilse Pökler? Take, for example, these sentences from Slothrop’s sexual encounter with Bianca on the Anubis:

 

Her eyes glitter through fern lashes, baby rodent hands race his body unbuttoning, caressing. Such a slender child: her throat swallowing, strummed to a moan as he grabs her hair, twists it...she has him all figured out. (469)

 

Though this is not one of the more pornographic sites in this passage, these sentences are otherwise typical of Pynchon’s manipulation of childhood and sexuality in this and other scenes. “Baby” and “slender child” function as constant reminders amid sexual depictions that Bianca is a small ten- or eleven-year-old girl. Set off by the word “glitter,” the doubling of consonants in the words “unbuttoning,” “caressing,” “swallowing,” and “strummed” sustain both a sensuous prolonging of sounds and induce a miniaturizing effect through doublings that work similarly to the “-ette” suffix. “Fern” and “rodent” align Bianca first with flora, then with fauna, while the particularization of “lashes,” “hands,” “throat,” and “hair” disperses the subject into diffuse objects in an erotic field.

 

The second sentence is especially resistant to grounding in sense. Pynchon seems to signal a fundamental violence in the representation of Bianca through the apposition of “strumming” and “twist.” Have we gentle effects (“moans”) from a violent cause (“twisting”), or rather, is the moan a moan of pain? If it is pain, how does the gentle sense of “strum” find expression in the passage? In one sense, at the level of trope, twisting and strumming are irreconcilable images. The strings of an instrument, mapped as hair, cannot be strummed when grabbed in a fist. The gap left in this trope, I suggest, is symptomatic of the scene’s resistance to becoming settled or brought into sense within either discourses of sex or of childhood. Most vexing of all is the final phrase, “she has him all figured out.” This is startling considering that Slothrop seems more the actor or agent as he grabs and twists Bianca’s hair; the switch within the same sentence of Bianca from acted upon to orchestrator prolongs the passage’s unsettled representations. Of course, it matters greatly through whom this final phrase is focalized. Is this Slothrop’s sexual projection onto the little girl or does it express Bianca’s machination and complicity? I believe that the shifting narrative positions and the self-destructing tropes purposefully leave this question unanswered. Pynchon is very careful not to polarize Bianca as either innocent or experienced, victim or seductress, subject or object, though it is not immediately clear why this strategic destabilizing of oppositions is structurally important to Gravity’s Rainbow.

 

From local scenes like the one between Bianca and Slothrop, it is important to move out and consider the various contexts that frame them. What are the narrative contexts to which we might relate such scenes? One way to answer this question is to place these sexualizations within Pynchon’s larger project of producing a taxonomy of sexual alternatives with which Gravity’s Rainbow is rife. While the episodes with Geli and Bianca share qualities with other sexually deviant scenes in the novel, however, I would like to cordon the children off from this order temporarily and try to understand them in the context of Zwölfkinder. Zwölfkinder, where “Ilse” brings Franz Pökler during her visits, is the state-sponsored construction site of childhood and innocence in Gravity’s Rainbow.

 

In a corporate State, a place must be made for innocence, and its many uses. In developing an official version of innocence, the culture of childhood has proven invaluable. Games, fairy-tales, legends from history, all the paraphernalia of make-believe can be adapted and even embodied in a physical place, such as at Zwölfkinder. Over the years it had become a children's resort, almost a spa. If you were an adult, you couldn't get inside the city limits without a child escort. There was a child mayor, a child city council of twelve. Children picked up the papers, fruit peelings and bottles you left in the street, children gave you guided tours through the Tierpark, the Hoard of the Nibelungen, cautioning you to silence during the impressive re-enactment of Bismarck's elevation, at the spring equinox of 1871, to prince and imperial chancellor...child police reprimanded you if you were caught alone, without your child accompanying. Whoever carried on the real business of the town--it could not have been children--they were well hidden. (419)

 

Zwölfkinder becomes a matrix from and to which all of Pynchon’s descriptions of children issue and must return. The “official version of innocence” is both state created and state sustaining. Zwölfkinder resembles a factory where the state generates its innocence, a palpable, deployable cultural construct that may be put to “invaluable” uses. Pynchon does not offer in expository form an explanation of what uses these may be or the mechanism by which constructed innocence serves the state. We may infer, however, from the cultural and historical miniaturization and re-enacting, that Zwölfkinder is the state’s laundering service for its history and its actions. Just as illegal money may be laundered by channeling it through legitimate enterprises, so can the state launder itself innocent by re-enacting itself through the medium of children. The children of Zwölfkinder do not just play “mayor” or “city council.” They do not quaintly copy the institutions of the state. Through the children’s performance of these roles, “mayor” and “city” are actually brought into being, constituted as innocent. Pynchon shows us that the innocence of the state relies upon what only looks like the cultural and historical repetition and secondariness of Zwölfkinder. In fact, the centrality of state and corporate institutions to the function of Zwölfkinder is signaled by emphasis upon the “child city council of twelve,” hence the “Twelve children” of the city’s name.

 

On some level, Pynchon represents Zwölfkinder as though it were consciously and unproblematically established by the state in order for it to invest itself with an official innocence. Verbs such as “making,” “developing,” “adapted,” and “embodied” seem to attach to unseen agents, a paradigmatic “Whoever” that clenches its fist unseen. On another level, however, Pynchon recognizes that Zwölfkinder can only generate innocence to the extent that it mediates between two different desires, not only the desire of the state but that of the public as well. The public’s desire and pleasure are figured in the recreational and resort-like dimension of Zwölfkinder, crucial both to its function in the fiction and to the efficacy of Pynchon’s figure in the narrative. The public agrees to bear witness to the performative production of innocence because its desires are fulfilled in turn. The accompanying adult visitors enjoy the leisure of a theme park and a reprieve from the all-consuming World War waging outside of the cordoned-off Zwölfkinder. It is a place where state and public desires can meet across a single object, their children. Not to be discounted is the public’s own desire to see its state’s roles and its history laundered in the children’s performances of them at the very moment that the state prosecutes its war. In the children the state sees everything it desires its public to be. In the children the public sees everything it desires the truth about its state to be. The very coincidence of state and public desire establishes a context in which the children’s performances can be contracted as performatives. Without this contract the children’s acts would be mere reenactment or mimicry. Zwölfkinder, like the anecdotes I discuss below, must serve desire at both ends and at every point in between in order to have the generative power that Pynchon insists upon.

 

It is no wonder that Zwölfkinder serves as the setting where Franz Pökler nearly acts upon his frustration and anger about being used by the state in an act of “incest,” with “Ilse,” who may be his real daughter, or who may just be another invention of the state. In fact, through the state’s appropriation of the innocence produced when children enact the state, in a sense, both the imposter Ilse and the real Ilse are functions of the state. Which is to say that innocence is punctuated with state structures manufactured by Zwölfkinder while the state is riddled with innocence. In Gravity’s Rainbow the two can seldom be disentangled. The complicity of innocence with the state underwrites Pökler’s fantasy of rebellion, dooming it:

 

He hit her upside the head with his open hand, a loud and terrible blow. That took care of his anger. Then, before she could cry or speak, he had dragged her up on the bed next to him, her dazed little hands already at the buttons of his trousers, her white frock already pulled above her waist. She had been wearing nothing at all underneath, nothing all day...how I've wanted you, she whispered as paternal plow found its way into filial furrow...and after hours of amazing incest they dressed in silence, and crept out into the leading edge of faintest flesh dawn, everything they would ever need packed inside her flowered bag, past sleeping children doomed to the end of summer, past monitors and railway guards, down at last to the water and the fishing boats, to a fatherly old sea-dog in a braided captain's hat, who welcomed them aboard and stashed them below decks, where she snuggled down in the bunk as they got under way and sucked him for hours while the engine pounded, till the Captain called, "Come on up, and take a look at your new home!" Gray and green, through the mist, it was Denmark. "Yes, they're a free people here. Good luck to both of you!" The three of them, there on deck, stood hugging....

 

No. (420-421)

 

The startling negotiation of sexuality and childhood in this passage bears remarkable similarity to the scene on the Anubisbetween Slothrop and Bianca. Here again we observe physical violence, miniaturization, and dazed complicity. More remarkable, perhaps, is how Pökler’s supposed route to freedom, Ilse’s body, might be said to compose nothing save figures of enclosure, masquerading in human name and shape. First, Ilse “takes care of,” or contains Pökler’s anger. Then she encloses him as a “furrow.” Next, everything needed for his survival gets “packed” in Ilse’s bag. “Stashed” below the decks of the ship, Ilse “snuggles” Pökler further yet, until, with the vista of freedom finally in sight, Ilse “hugs” Pökler on the deck. Pökler’s fantasy of incest and escape, then, is bound to fail. The more he resorts to violating innocence, the more firmly he is bound in his servitude to the state. Ilse can facilitate neither transgression nor rebellion. It is merely the vulnerable-looking construction of her innocence that makes her appear to Pökler as though she can. In violently rending the innocent mirage “They” have created of his daughter, Pökler fantasizes a route of escape. Realistically, Pökler’s maneuver can never constitute more than a repetition of the innocence-to-experience story, a tale already thoroughly written by the state, both backwards and forwards. Pökler’s desire for rebellion through a temporal movement that passes chronologically from innocence to experience can never hope to elude the state’s spatial sense of the narrative relations of its own story. The resounding “no” that dislodges Pökler’s day-dream is an acknowledgment that the premises of his fantasy–that Ilse is his daughter and that innocence/experience stories indeed exist, with the state’s children in starring roles–are from the beginning illusions cultivated by the state. The character in the dream cannot outdream the dreamer. Pökler’s day-dream cannot function as a source of wish-fulfillment because neither the wish nor its subject are stable or tangible materials. We remember, of course, Slothrop’s second Proverb for Paranoids: “The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master” (241). The greater a role innocence plays, the more experienced those who “carry on the real business of the town.”

 

If it is true that the state produces and consumes stories of innocence and experience, the transgressive hypothesis about such sexualized children in Gravity’s Rainbow begins to unravel. If innocence is already complicit with the state, we are bound to learn as Pökler does that its violation is already a familiar subplot in the state’s narrative structure. In order to understand more fully Pynchon’s sexualization of children, then, it is necessary to examine sites similar to Zwölfkinder, places where innocence is actually produced, in order to establish a narrative context against which to read Pynchon’s scenes.

 

I would like to suggest that the narrative form most uniquely suited and situated for examining the instantiation of innocence in the state context is the anecdote. Easily mistaken for a miniature or an innocent itself, the anecdote renders the private, gossipy, or hidden in the process of becoming narrative and public as it fills the vacant spaces in more esteemed public histories. The anecdote, though typically imagined as representational and primarily metaphorical, is also composed of a metonymical narrative field where we can read constellations of contiguity as they settle into narrative logic.

 

Do anecdotes gain currency in times of war? Gravity’s Rainbow argues that they do when Pynchon suggests that “the true war is a celebration of markets” (105) and “information [has] come to be the only real medium of exchange” (258). In the following, I would like to imagine these concepts in both their literal and figurative senses to show that there indeed exists an information market which uses innocence for its currency in the United States since September Eleventh. Like all markets, this market is an instrument that registers the ebb and flow of desire. After September Eleventh, anecdotes about innocent children gained measurable value, beginning immediately with the piggy-bank anecdotes. As a market, multifarious desires drive the stock of children higher, yet each piggy-bank anecdote functions as a miniature Zwölfkinder where innocence is produced around state exigency. Like Zwölfkinder, these anecdotes are mediated by various desires that coalesce around the children that star in them. Though they serve the state’s desire for an innocence that would let it wage war with impunity, these anecdotes are of course not state-issued, nor do they directly serve the state’s interests. Rather, the stories are more directly mediated by various public, institutional, and journalistic desires that can all take their pleasures in the same nexus of childhood and innocence, as the wildly diverse interests of Chaucer’s pilgrims once found fulfillment in the same pilgrimage. The journalists that press the acts of specific children into a predictable form do so because there already exists a public market for patriotism, sentiment, stability, and perhaps even for a willful blindness to the actions of its state. Organizations such as the Red Cross have something to gain in the market as well. These institutions take their pleasure on the anecdotal dimensions of charity while the journalists take theirs in the consumption of the stories. Once again, the public and the state invest their various desires for stability in the object of their children. State and public look up lovingly over the shoulders of their children and their gazes meet, though their fantasies are different. Part of what Zwölfkinder teaches is that the proliferation of certain stories after September Eleventh is neither unique nor unpredictable. As a result of this predictability, however, we can read our own historical condition in the characteristics of this common form that do seem unique or in the formal peculiarities that could not have been predicted. It is precisely because the discourse of childhood that follows September Eleventh is really no exception at all that our close attention to it and its variant in Gravity’s Rainbow can uncover what is peculiar in both.

 

Although they exhibit important variations, all of the anecdotes of innocence presented here are structurally similar. Typically, a small child between four and eight years old is deeply affected by the disaster and, in what he or she sees as an act of patriotism, contributes his or her savings to relief funds for World Trade Center victims. These stories often demonstrate communal effects in which adult members of the community are inspired by the innocent children’s donations and are thus strengthened in their own patriotic and nationalistic resolve. While these anecdotes were profuse immediately following September Eleventh, I will also try to demonstrate that this structure of anecdote has a history and may be said to constitute a transnational and, to some extent, a transhistorical genre of its own. I treat these little newspaper narratives as anecdotes because each is a private story made public that fills a gap in the “official” narrative of history. They answer to anecdote’s Greek sense of “things unpublished” and the French root of “to give out” or “publish.” As these two nearly contrary senses emphasize, “anecdote” is a word that tends toward and finally subsumes its own opposite meaning in regard to the hidden or the revealed. The anecdote is never wholly free from the pull of either its private or its public pole but oscillates instead suspended between the two. In its form there is always something public about the secret anecdote as there is something that remains private in the form of the published anecdote. Journalism often takes the anecdotal form because of its position between current events and narrative, thus “the secret, private, or hitherto unpublished narratives or details of history” (OED), and because it serves public desire for the kinds of narratives it wants to consume.

 

By exploring these anecdotes of innocence in the context of state exigency, I hope to demonstrate that the manipulation of children in Gravity’s Rainbow should be read as a means of resisting the state’s long history of appropriating the innocence of its children for its prosecution of war. Certainly, Pynchon entertains no illusions that sexually violating the innocence of children can be a means of eluding or subverting state power (as demonstrated in Pökler’s failure to escape and in his utter servitude). Instead, his insistence on representing children as already startlingly experienced blocks the state’s Zwölfkinder-type production and use of innocence, which is especially useful to the state when it attempts to justify military action. Pynchon’s achievement with respect to this discourse is to have rendered the state’s and the public’s mutual desire for innocence visible by making the representation of that desire literal and sexual. He underscores the investments that the public and the state make in the innocence of children by confronting us with the sexual dimension of desire and by forcing us to acknowledge its resemblance. The discourse of innocent children, though mediated in multiple ways, plays a role in producing favorable circumstances for war whose violence is just as palpable as Pynchon’s discourse of sexual violence. While the latter discourse elicits shock and disgust, the violent aspect of the former discourse remains concealed. The invisibility of violence depends upon the perception that there is indeed an essential difference between sexual and non-sexual desire, a denial of the fact that every desire is shot through with other structures of desire. Pynchon enables us to perceive the violence in both categories of childhood representation through a kind of commutative law that lets the discourses cross at the object of desire. His overturning of sexual innocence provides a means for rethinking the easy stories of innocence in which various interests take their pleasure, finally, by a commutation of our responses to the two discourses. Pynchon challenges us to read the following stories of innocence alongside our shocked and disgusted response to his own experienced children. How do we bring such divergent stories into sense when juxtaposed? What will become evident is how the post-September Eleventh anecdotes constitute and do not merely represent innocence in the first instance. In other words, while I do not doubt that the particular instances reported in these anecdotes actually occurred in some manner or another, I wish to emphasize instead how they already conform to well-established literary and anecdotal forms. Further, there never was a time when the opposite was true, that such anecdotes became structured by events that were unmarked by or innocent of this narrative structure.

 

The most basic form of these anecdotes of innocence may be expressed in the following four examples:

 

 

1. John DeCristoforo, in charge of fundraising at the New York chapter [of the Red Cross], said he’ll never forget one of the first visitors to his donation booth.”A 4-year-old girl walked up and opened her Pokemon backpack. She pulled out a matching Pokemon wallet, which she unzipped and dumped on the table,” DeCristoforo recalled. “She donated $4.37 in quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies to the disaster relief fund. We saw many young people make sacrifices like this, but that little girl was one of the first, and one of the youngest.” (Ward)
2. Katelyn Riant is broke.Her mother couldn’t be more proud.The 4-year-old Decatur resident carried her piggy bank to the Decatur Fire and Rescue headquarters at Flint and dumped her life savings–$22.30–into a shoebox. She handed it, along with a hand-drawn picture, to a firefighter. (Huggins) 
3. Flowers and notes left by well-wishers have become impromptu shrines to the World Trade Center victims at area fire stations. Last week, an angel piggy bank was left outside a National City fire station. A child’s note was attached:”My name is AnnaLuz Montano. I am 8 years old. I am very sorry for what happened to New York City. So I’m donating my savings to help the family [sic] that went through so much tragedy. God bless America. I will be praying for all the family [sic] and to the firefighter.” [sic]Inside her bank was $53.17.Touched by her generosity, eight members of National City’s Firefighters Association visited AnnaLuz in her third-grade classroom at Lincoln Acres Elementary Thursday. They introduced themselves, gave her a commendation and proclaimed her a firefighter for the day. She gave them each a hug–and there were tears all around. (Bell)

    

4. Sami Faqih, an 8-year-old McKinley Elementary School student of Palestinian descent, turned his sadness over the terrorist attacks into action on behalf of the relief effort.On Saturday, Sami went to the Corona Fire Department station of McKinley Street with his father and donated his piggy-bank–filled with $40 to $50 worth of coins–to the New York City firefighters’ relief fund. Sami also gave a firefighter a crayon drawing depicting a frowning sun and a row of tombstones with the inscription: “I wish you can com [sic] back Please.”Sami’s father, Wael Faqih, who emigrated to the United States in 1990 from Palestine, said his son was deeply moved by the terrorist attacks and felt compelled to help.”That’s our civic duty, isn’t it?” Faqih said. “He had a lot of emotions. He wanted to help America.” (Press Enterprise)

    

 

Anecdote one begins with the adult frame of the story, which is central to this genre of innocence anecdote. The fundraiser occupies a knowing, experienced position with respect to the child. This relationship is requisite if the child’s gesture of patriotic charity is to move him or to spill over into the adult world, as all of these anecdotes are situated to do. They must be so situated because there is a public market that desires this effect, which precedes their service to newspaper, charitable organization, or state. The child must leave an indelible impression upon an adult. There is usually great detail about the child’s precise age, about the dollar amount of the contribution (often about the denomination [1, 2, 3], nearly always some mention of coins [4]), and also about the money container. Citation of age, instead of simply evoking “children,” functions as naturalistic detail and also deploys a specific category of the four or the eight year old that is already marked as small and innocent in our culture. It is provocative to think that Pynchon’s nearly categorical refusal to mark his children with precise ages somehow works to disrupt our recourse to this cultural association. The Pokemon backpack and wallet may be said to function as similar naturalistic and categorical markers, but its naming, like the naming of the piggy banks in the other anecdotes, alerts us to the importance of the actual money container. It is vital that the currency the children donate be as innocent as they are. It must not have previously circulated in markets of exchange, but have grown penny by penny in the cordoned-off space of the piggy bank. As the children at Zwölfkinder launder history, so do these children launder currency by storing it in a non-circulating or innocent space. The precision of dollar amounts, besides affording us unprecedented knowledge about our nation’s piggy banks, reinforces the innocence of both the child and the transaction. The uneven denominations both signal a child giver (adults are more liable to give even, calculated amounts) and tell us that every last penny has been sacrificed. The emphasis on coins, it almost goes without saying, lends a miniaturizing effect to the donation and the child. The focus in the first anecdote on the physical act of “unzipping” and the “dumping” of “quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies” further establishes the innocence in the child’s unrefined mode of transaction.

 

The second anecdote exhibits many of the above features but has some interesting variations. For one, while the first child donated in Manhattan, this precisely named child donates in a Decatur, Illinois fire department, reinforcing the idea that the attacks of September Eleventh were a national and not simply a local tragedy. The donation to the Decatur Fire Department assumes a unified civil or state service with national connections, although fire departments are usually thought of in the most local or municipal of terms. That a donation can be made to a universal fire department strengthens the idea of a large state structure that the child can make her innocent contact with. The hand-drawn picture, which also appears in anecdote four, compounds the sense that the children give more than money. The drawing lends a certain emotionality or expressiveness to the dollar amount to create an effect that the money could not accomplish alone. None of these anecdotes, nor any that I found, features solely creative drawings or notes without money, however.

 

Anecdote three puts extra emphasis on the community impact of the donation when it stages the resultant visit of the firefighters and their conferral of an honorary “firefightership” upon the child. Also of note is the inclusion of the text of the child’s letter, which links to the inscription in anecdote four. In anecdote three, the grammatical mistakes of the letter tend to singularize plural and diffuse entities. The many families of the victims and the many firefighters become a single family and a single firefighter. This note, then, is remarkably articulate, if unwitting, about the general unifying function that these anecdotes perform.

 

Anecdote four shows the potential in this form for adaptation and for variations upon a theme. Like anecdote three, the ungrammatical note produces real affect, especially when coupled with the disturbing depiction of the “frowning sun” and the “row of tombstones.” It is unclear whether the inscription, “I wish you can com back Please,” appears inscribed on the tombstones, or appears as a caption for the drawing. In either case, the inscription plays on categories of innocence, both in the misspelling of “come” and in the innocent conception of death. The inscription conveys a perfectly adult, or experienced sentiment until the capitalized “Please” suggests that the dead possess the agency to return. Though it is possible to read this inscription with religious emphasis or in innumerable other contexts, in the newspaper sphere the inscription is formulated to produce an affect of innocence.

 

What seems most striking about anecdote four, however, is that unlike the three previous examples, the child in this case is of Palestinian descent. This anecdote performs many of the moves that the others do, but its improvisation with the form makes it exemplary of the uses to which the form may be put. In the context of the war and other exigencies of national interest, the other anecdotes perform an important unifying and innocence-generating function. Here, the form varies such that it performs very specific work in a specific context while the general effects become peripheral. Before the military campaign in Afghanistan even began, the Bush Administration took every opportunity to reiterate the fact that they were not at war with all Arab people or with Islam. This rhetoric was vital for American and foreign support for the war, regardless of how the Administration may have thought of its goals. The anecdote of the Palestinian child maps innocence onto race and performs the idea that the category of “American” supersedes more refined categories of identity and identification. “Civic duty” cuts across the child’s Palestinian origins (and perhaps his Muslim faith, which I believe we are meant to identify in the form, whether or not this particular Palestinian family is Muslim). Perhaps more disturbing than the fact that this anecdote enacts or performs the rhetoric of the state is that it so transparently situates itself in relation to the rhetoric of metonymy between Arab and terrorist. This anecdote enacts what it supposes is a necessary intervention in this rhetoric by appealing twice to the “terrorist attacks,” each time in opposition to “Palestine” or “Palestinian.”

 

In order to demonstrate the longevity of the anecdotal form that I have discussed above, I would like to examine the following anecdote of an innocent Silesian peasant girl from an anonymous 1815 book review, which appeared in the Quarterly Review, of Gentz’s On the Fall of Prussia. It is instructive for its marked structural similarity to the above anecdotes and because it wears more plainly the mechanisms of metaphor and metonymy implicit in the World Trade Center charity anecdotes:

 

An anecdote of a Silesian peasant girl deserves to be recorded, as it shews the general feeling which pervaded the country. Whilst her neighbours and family were contributing in different ways to the expenses of the war, she for some time was in the greatest distress at her inability to manifest her patriotism, as she possessed nothing which she could dispose of for that purpose. At length the idea struck her, that her hair, which was of great beauty, and the pride of her parents, might be of some value, and she accordingly set off one morning privately for Breslau, and disposed of her beautiful tresses for a couple of dollars. The hair-dresser, however, with whom she had negociated the bargain, being touched with the girl's conduct, reserved his purchase for the manufacture of bracelets and other ornaments; and as the story became public, he in the end sold so many, that he was enabled, by this fair maiden's locks alone, to subscribe a hundred dollars to the exigencies of the state. (436n)

 

I like this anecdote in particular because the first sentence explicitly recognizes the way literary, specifically metonymical, reasoning stands between the representative anecdote and the general “feeling” of Silesia. The anonymous critic divulges the metonymical mediation between the anecdote and the real. It is worth trying to sort out how different discourses and powers exert themselves in complex configurations on the Silesian girl. “Parents” and “neighbors” converge in the second sentence amid a rather elaborate metonymical logic. The familial discourse about the girl’s relationship to her parents slides into apposition with “neighbors” until her relationship to her neighbors can substitute for familial relationships. This is a familiar way of thinking about how the idea of the nation as an extended family gets figured. On the other hand, we have the contiguity of “war” and “expense,” which are cemented to the neighbor and the family through the discourse of “contributing” and “patriotism.” Patriotism is constituted as contributing to the war effort, from within an economic scale of “possessing” and “dispossessing.” “At length the idea struck her,” suggests that the truthfulness of these relations must be arrived at by careful consideration and, conversely, that careful reasoning ensures, rather than interrogates, these metonymies. “Pride” abuts beautiful hair until, under the parental/national value system, the hair becomes currency that can be contributed to the war effort. The hairdresser, a neighbor, completes the metonymy of hair/ornament/capital, perhaps motivated by the same powers that moved the girl, but more probably moved by discursive principles that the girl herself brought into being for him.

 

As was vital to the function of the post-September Eleventh anecdotes, the child’s innocent patriotism, constructed by the form itself, spills over in the adult world in which a hundred dollars are generated for “the exigencies of the state.” The previous anecdotes do not cite so openly their state affiliations, nor do they so easily lend themselves to obvious analysis. This is so because in the fully modernized present the anecdotes must accommodate greater varieties of desire. They cannot simply direct themselves toward the “exigencies of the state” because, while these exigencies are their cumulative object, the anecdotes must first act as ringbolts for more local desires as diverse as those for sentiment, patriotism, political insulation, financial profit, notoriety, stability, and so on. While this form might be said to recur as a kind of ideological response to war, its formal attributes are deeply historical in character and suit themselves to their own peculiar historical climate. This would account for the distortions of the form in the current anecdotes relative to the Silesian peasant anecdote, which in turn is itself a historical distortion of a prior form. For instance, to take just one example, it seems significant that the Silesian girl’s hair is translated quite causally into money through the economic inventiveness of the hairdresser. This is markedly different from the insistent emphasis that the new anecdotes place upon the child’s direct issuing of funds, innocent and uncirculated in character. This emphasis is perhaps the point in each anecdote marked by the specific historical conditions of our present war in which economic interests and motivations have and likely will continue to be questioned. Perhaps the fact that the September Eleventh disaster occurred quite pointedly at the financial center of the United States also contributes to the necessity for representations of economic fortitude and economic innocence. Still, long before this local detail contributes to the state, it serves the purposes of an organization like the Red Cross that has more uses for money than it does for locks of hair. Further, these stories are less likely to elicit subscriptions of money directly to the state, as in the Silesian peasant’s story, than they are to profit the news media. If these piggy-bank anecdotes do not cite as openly their state affiliations, then, this is because their affiliations are much more numerous and fractured than those of the 1815 anecdote. Anecdotes like these are necessary because local desires and the global desires of the state do not merely line up, one behind the other. They come from multiple angles, directions, and interests so various that it is imperative they all cross at least once at a common point. A stable society becomes adept at finding such points of common desire, and children are perhaps most commonly desired above all.

 

Despite its historical differences, however, the anecdote of the Silesian peasant girl is very much at work all around us today, and the modes of innocence production remain structurally unchanged. Anecdotes do indeed gain (and become) currency in times of war, especially if we follow Pynchon in imagining war as a celebration of (especially information) markets. Such anecdotes direct our attention to the important line where power leaves its mark on children, whose little lives are pressed into the shape of discourse. Pynchon gives us means for sustaining dialogue with the categories performed and produced at this line with his refusal to ground his children in either innocence or experience. Near the end of Gravity’s Rainbow, the return of the child Ludwig, whom Slothrop found searching for his “lost lemming Ursula,” is representative of Pynchon’s deliberate destabilizing of children’s categories:

 

It is fat Ludwig and his lost lemming Ursula--he has found her at last and after all and despite everything. For a week they have been drifting alongside the trek, just past visibility, pacing the Africans day by day...among trees at the tops of escarpments, at the fires' edges at night Ludwig is there, watching...accumulating evidence, or terms of an equation...a boy and his lemming out to see the Zone. Mostly what he's seen is a lot of chewing gum and a lot of foreign cock. How else does a foot-loose kid get by in the Zone these days? Ursula is preserved. Ludwig has fallen into a fate worse than death and found it's negotiable. So not all lemmings go over the cliff, and not all children are preserved against snuggling into the sin of profit. To expect any more, or less, of the Zone is to disagree with the terms of the Creation. (729)

 

Like Slothrop when he finds the long-lost harmonica that he pursued down the toilet years earlier, Ludwig finds Ursula for another unexpected reunion. Even the category of return, however, refuses to stabilize without irony. For Slothrop, the reunion is only another moment of misrecognition: “It happens to be the same one he lost in 1938 or -9 down the toilet at the Roseland Ballroom, but that’s too long ago for him to remember” (622-23). Ludwig’s discovery of Ursula, however, might reify the idea that everything eventually returns (an innocent faith), though from the beginning Pynchon’s string of story-book formulas such as “at last,” “after all,” and “despite everything” cautions against such a reading. In displaying literary formulas that are related to children’s discourse and its various productions of innocence, Pynchon brings them to the fore of our cultural associative consciousness precisely so that the remainder of Ludwig’s story can be read against them.

 

What has the boy who found his lemming been doing since we last saw him? He has been following Enzian and the Zone Hereros, “watching…accumulating evidence, or terms of an equation…a boy and his lemming, out to see the Zone.” We do not know why or for whom Ludwig accumulates evidence or terms for an equation, but such calculated and precise behavior seems at odds with the last part of the sentence. “A boy and his lemming, out to see the Zone,” plays upon the formulaic “boy and his dog, out to see the world.” This locution connotes carefree wonder and openness, which at once ironizes and is ironized by the calculation of “evidence” or “equations.” The substitution of “lemming” for “dog” enacts similar categorical transgressions and keeps the tone of the passage unstable, allowing neither the clichéd structures of childhood nor the defiance of these structures to dominate it. The syllepsis of “seeing” “a lot of chewing gum” and “a lot of foreign cock” also defies structures and values in both directions. The possibility that the chewing gum may have been Ludwig’s payment for sex acts with men further complicates the assignment of category and value by suggesting that modes of exchange exist between the two dissimilar “markets” of chewing gum and sex. The innocent market overlaps the experienced one. Further, children do not usually “negotiate,” especially not with “fates worse than death.”

 

All of these suspensions and reversals culminate in the moral of Ludwig’s tale: “So not all lemmings go over the cliff, and not all children are preserved against snuggling into the sin of profit.” The myth of sexual and financial innocence is comparable to the myth of lemming suicide; neither is true, but both are powerful and therefore enduring. Pynchon’s attention to the Zone context in the final sentence of this passage is of great importance. The war created the Zone where the innocence of children like Ludwig is demythologized. As the post-September Eleventh anecdotes and the Zwölfkinder show us, however, the state relies for its very prosecution of war on the production of innocence through its children, though it does so as the cumulative result of diverse and often disparate desires along the way. Pynchon draws this paradox out in his children’s sexual figurations and in the disfigurations of children in the Zone. Thus, by shuttling between fiction, piggy-bank anecdotes, and historical events, we can make the middle term exfoliate and name connections between the former and the latter term. We can allow Gravity’s Rainbow and September Eleventh to call to one another across a narrative and historical divide, over their common points of contact, in the unassuming assembly hall of the anecdote (where plenty of work gets done).

 

Notes

 

1. I think specifically of the charge against New Historicism that the untheorized spaces between texts and contexts are bridged by various metaphorical maneuvers. Alan Liu expresses this best:

 

A New Historicist paradigm holds up to view a historical context on one side, a literary text on the other, and, in between, a connection of pure nothing. Or rather, what now substitutes for history of ideas between context and text is the fantastic interdisciplinary nothingness of metaphor.... What is merely "convenient" in a resemblance between context and text...soon seems an emulation; emulation is compounded in analogy; and, before we know it, analogy seems magical "sympathy": a quasi-magical action of resemblance between text and context.... (Liu 743)

Works Cited

 

• “Gentz–On the Fall of Prussia.” Rev. of On the Fall of Prussia. Quarterly Review 13.26 (July 1815): 418-442.
• Bell, Diane. “A Little Angel, Age 8, Appears and Lifts Spirits.” SignOnSanDiego.com 29 Sept. 2001. 16 Nov. 2001. <http://www.uniontrib.com/news/metro/bell/20010929-9999_7m29bell.html>.
• Giuliani, Rudolph. Interview with Barbara Walters. “American Fights Back: Interview with Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.” 20/20. ABC News. 19 Sept. 2001.
• Huggins, Paul. “4-Year-Old Girl Empties Piggy Bank for Relief Aid.” The Decatur Daily News Online Edition. 21 Sept. 2001. 16 Nov. 2001. <http://www.decaturdaily.com/decaturdaily/news/010921/relief.shtml>.
• Liu, Alan. “The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism.” English Literary History 56.4 (1989): 721-71.
• “Palestinian-American Donates Piggy Bank.” The Press-Enterprise. Online. 22 Sept. 2001. 16 Nov. 2001. <http://www.pe.com/terrorindex/stories/09-22/local-notes.html>.
• Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Penguin, 1995.
• Ward, Christina. “America’s Children Reach Out: Across the U.S., Young Americans Raise Money for Relief.” American Red Cross. Online. 27 Sept. 2001. 16 Nov. 2001. <http://www.redcross.org/news/yo/wtc/010927childfund.html>.

 

Bradley Butterfield

Department of English
University of Wisconsin, La Crosse
butterfi.brad@uwlax.edu

 

In the end it was they who did it but we who wished it. If we do not take this into account, the event loses all symbolic dimension; it becomes a purely arbitrary act. . . . (A)nd in their strategic symbolism the terrorists knew they could count on this unconfessable complicity.

 

Terrorism is the act that restores an irreducible singularity to the heart of a generalized system of exchange.

 

The globe itself is resistant to globalization.

 

–Jean Baudrillard¹

 

From Princess Diana to 9/11, Jean Baudrillard has been the prophet of the postmodern media spectacle, the hyperreal event. In the 1970s and 80s, our collective fascination with things like car crashes, dead celebrities, terrorists and hostages was a major theme in Baudrillard’s work on the symbolic and symbolic exchange, and in his post-9/11 “L’Esprit du Terrorisme,” he has taken it upon himself to decipher terrorism’s symbolic message. He does so in the wake of such scathing critiques as Douglas Kellner’s Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond (1989), which attacked Baudrillard’s theory as “an imaginary construct which tries to seduce the world to become as theory wants it to be, to follow the scenario scripted in the theory” (178). Did Baudrillard seduce 9/11 into being–is he terrorism’s theoretical guru?–or did he merely anticipate and describe in advance the event’s profound seductiveness?

 

To Kellner and other critics, Baudrillard’s theory of postmodernity is a political as well as an intellectual failure:

 

Losing critical energy and growing apathetic himself, he ascribes apathy and inertia to the universe. Imploding into entropy, Baudrillard attributes implosion and entropy to the experience of (post) modernity. (180)

 

To be sure, Baudrillard’s scripts and scenarios have always been concerned with the implosion of the global capitalist system. But while Baudrillard’s tone at the end of “L’Esprit du Terrorisme” can certainly be called apathetic–“there is no solution to this extreme situation–certainly not war”–he does not suggest that there are no forces in the universe capable of mounting at least a challenge to the system and its sponsors (18).

 

As in Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976) and Simulacra and Simulations (1981), Baudrillard again suggests that terrorism is one such force, and that it functions according to the rule of symbolic exchange. Terrorism can be carried out in theoretical/aesthetic terms, the terms Baudrillard would obviously prefer, or in real terms, that is, involving the real deaths of real people, a misfortune Baudrillard warns against.² Though he states clearly “I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons,” he is characteristically ambivalent in relation to “real” terrorism, since the real is always in question, and perhaps also because ambivalence is Baudrillard’s own brand of theoretical terrorism (Simulacra 163). One moment of his thought is the utopian dream of radicality and reversal, a revolution of symbolic exchange against the system, and the other moment is one of profound pessimism: “The system…has the power to pour everything, including what denies it, into indifference.”

 

In Simulacra and Simulations (1981), Baudrillard wrote that systemic nihilism and the mass media are to blame for the postmodern human condition, which he describes as a combination of “fascination,” “melancholy,” and “indifference.” Against the system and its passive nihilism, Baudrillard proffers his own brand of what might be termed active nihilism, a praxis that includes theoretical and aesthetic “terrorism,” but not, in the end, the bloody acts of actual violence his theory accounts for. The terrorist acts of 9/11, as his theory predicted, were destined to be absorbed by the system’s own narrative, neutralized by the very mass media they sought to exploit.

 

In “L’Esprit,” Baudrillard nevertheless attempts to explain again the logic, the spirit, of terrorism and to account for its power. Two of the three letters written to Harper’s Magazine after its February 2002 printing of “L’Esprit” would, predictably, take Baudrillard to be an apologist for the terrorists’ means and ends. Edward B. Schlesinger and Sarah A. Wersan of Santa Barbara, California, write:

 

Embedded in Jean Baudrillard's almost incomprehensible prose is the shocking assertion that terrorism is justifiable, that the threat of globalization, as visualized by Baudrillard, justified the World Trade Center attack. (Kelly et al. 4)

 

Average Harper’s readers may be spared blame for not comprehending Baudrillard’s theoretical prose, but the point of “L’Esprit” is not that 9/11 was justifiable in any moral sense, but that, as Nietzsche held, true justice must end in its “self-overcoming” (Genealogy 73). Baudrillard explicitly states that “if we hope to understand anything we will need to get beyond Good and Evil” (“L’Esprit” 15). In light of his past writings, I suggest that his unspoken stand on the issue of justice concerning 9/11 would have to be what Nietzsche’s would have been: that there is no justice, only forgiveness, and only the strong can forgive. But Baudrillard does not explicitly state this claim, which I see as an implicit conclusion to his thought. Instead he plays the provocateur by laying claim to the terrorists’ logic, which was their greatest weapon. If, as Kellner would have it, Baudrillard wants to seduce us into following his script, we must be sure to understand the script well so we can decide how to act on it. The fact that 9/11 was arguably the most potent symbolic event since the crucifixion of Christ has inspired Baudrillard to dress up his old ideas about the symbolic and symbolic exchange. To understand what he means by “symbolic dimension” and “strategic symbolism” in the quotation from “L’Esprit” above, let us consult the origins and uses of the concept of the symbolic in his earlier work.

 

Baudrillard’s Symbolic and Death

 

Baudrillard’s theory of the symbolic serves as a response to what he saw as the metaphysical underpinnings of the Marxist, Freudian and structuralist traditions. All three, he claims, uphold the fetishization of the “law of value,” a bifurcating, metaphysical projection of the mind which allows us to measure the worth of things. The law of value effectively produces “reality” in each system as both its effect and its alibi. For Marx this reality, this metaphysical claim, was found in the concept of use value, for Freud it was the unconscious, and for Saussure it was the signified (and ultimately the referent). According to Baudrillard, any critical theory in the name of such projected “real” values ultimately reinforces the fetishized relations it criticizes. He therefore relocates the law of value within his own Nietzsche-styled history of the “image”–a term used as a stand-in for all that the words representation, reproduction, and simulation have in common. In “How the ‘True’ World Finally Became a Fable: The History of an Error,” Nietzsche outlines in six concise steps the decline of western metaphysics and its belief in a “True world” of essences, beyond the Imaginary world of appearances (Portable 485). Baudrillard’s four-part history of the image (commonly referred to as his four orders of simulation) closely mirrors Nietzsche’s history of the “‘True’ World”:

 

1. it [the image] is the reflection of a profound reality;
2. it masks and denatures a profound reality;
3. it masks the absence of a profound reality;
4. it has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum. (Simulacra 6)

 

Marx, Freud and Saussure were stuck in the second order, where the critique of appearances was thought to yield a glimpse of a deeper reality. We have since turned from the critique of appearances to the critique of meaning and of reality itself (the third order), and from here can only enter into the fourth order, the hyperreal. This is because we live in profoundly mediated environments, wherein coded images are produced and exchanged far more than material goods, and the more these codes are exchanged throughout the culture, the more erratically their values fluctuate, until at last they can no longer be traced to their origins. Hyperreality thus describes the extreme limit of fetishization, wherein re-presentation eclipses reality. Here the spectacle continues to fascinate, but indifference is the attitude du jour (indifference having long been associated with the postmodern). But Baudrillard’s history, it seems, has one more step to take before it completes its circle. Baudrillard imagines that from within the fourth order, where all metaphysical distinctions of value have disappeared, there will emerge a type of postmodern primitivism (I propose to call it), which he outlines in his conceptions of the symbolic and symbolic exchange.

 

Baudrillard’s symbolic derives loosely from Mauss’s analysis of the Potlatch, Bataille’s theory of expenditure, and a deconstruction of Lacan’s symbolic/real/imaginary triad. For Lacan, the symbolic marks the adult world of discourse, wherein the subject comes fully into being as it leaves the narcissistic fantasies of the imaginary order to recognize, and be recognized by, the other. Entry into the symbolic, however, also severs the subject from “the real” or material “given,” which always remains beyond the reach of signification. The symbolic for Lacan plays a balancing act between the demands of a lost imaginary and a lost real, while for Baudrillard “the effect of the real is only ever . . . the structural effect of the disjunction between two terms” (Symbolic 133). The real and the imaginary are not lost causes, but rather lost effects of consciousness, and the symbolic is that within a social exchange which is irreducible to the real/imaginary dichotomy:

 

The symbolic is neither a concept, an agency, a category, nor a "structure," but an act of exchange and a social relation which puts an end to the real, which resolves the real, and, at the same time, puts an end to the opposition between the real and the imaginary. (133)

 

When we enter the Baudrillardian symbolic dimension, the biased distinctions of Western metaphysics–Cause/Effect, Being/Nothingness, Real/Imaginary, Normal/Abnormal, Good/Evil–are to be considered deconstructed, over-come in the French Nietzschean tradition of the aesthetic turn. The symbolic is Baudrillard’s trope for the revaluation of all values, jenseits von Gut und Bose, a revolutionary theory for the age of digital reproduction and the generalized aesthetic sphere. In the Baudrillardian symbolic, one hears the echo of Nietzsche’s merriment at the end of metaphysics: “pandemonium of all free spirits” (Portable 486). The “death drive” in Baudrillard is therefore not a matter of a repressed instinct (Freud), nor even yet of a universal force within language (Lacan), but of an incipient implosion of “the code,” which stands for all terms and forces valued in opposition within the system. In the wake of his implosionary vision Baudrillard hopes will arise, at least in theory, a liberated and continuously creative new set of relations, governed not by semiotic or economic codes, but by the principle of symbolic exchange.

 

In For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, Baudrillard harkens back to the “primitive” notion of the symbol as transparent, binding, and potentially brutal in its demands (he does not qualify the term primitive, and after all it is the model that is important to him, whether his generalizations are accurate or a projection of desire³). This would-be dark side of Baudrillard’s symbolic stems from what he himself calls a dangerous allusion to primitive societies in Mauss’s illustrations of the Kula and the Potlatch (Critique 30). Mauss describes the primitive practice of Potlatch as involving an agonistic exchange of gifts between two chieftains in which each one seeks to gain standing for himself and his clan through gift exchange (Mauss 6). Baudrillard clarifies that

 

the gift is unique, specified by the people exchanging and the unique moment of the exchange. It is arbitrary [in that it matters little what object is involved], and yet absolutely singular. As distinct from language, whose material can be disassociated from the subjects speaking it, the material of symbolic exchange, the objects given, are not autonomous, hence not codifiable as signs. (Critique 64-65)

 

The symbolic value of a gift or of any gesture depends upon the involuntary consciousness of the fact that the consciousness of the other poses a singular challenge to our own. And we cannot not respond to this challenge, once we have received it, because even ignoring someone or something is a way of responding. The gift represents a qualitative measurement of honor or disgrace between two parties and in that sense is symbolic, but it is also symbolic in Baudrillard’s other sense, that is, as standing only for itself, as a unique and ineluctable challenge to counter give. It takes a certain amount of Orwellian doublethink to ignore the challenge represented by the other once we have grasped the reciprocal nature of our fates. For Baudrillard’s and Mauss’s “primitives,” events such as the Potlatch involve conspicuous consumption and expenditure, a sumptuous wasting of goods that turns out in the end to be essentially usurious and sumptuary (see Critique 30, Mauss 6).

 

Baudrillard formulates the term “prestation” with regard to Mauss to signify that within our social exchanges which makes us feel obligated to “an irrational code of social behavior,” namely the law of symbolic exchange (Critique 30, n. 4). This mechanism of social prestation, says Baudrillard, adheres to every exchange and is fraught with ambivalence, for in it lies “the value . . . of rivalry and, at the limit, of class discriminants” (Critique 31). Symbolic exchange, at some level, always involves an agonistic struggle for domination and status. Baudrillard does not issue a moral judgment on the matter of social domination, but rather suggests that symbolic exchange will continue to haunt our political economies:

 

Behind all the superstructures of purchase, market, and private property, there is always the mechanism of social prestation which must be recognized in our choice, our accumulation, our manipulation and our consumption of objects. This mechanism of discrimination and prestige is at the very basis of the system of values and of integration into the hierarchical order of society. The Kula and the Potlatch have disappeared, but not their principle. (30)

 

The symbolic value of commodities–the connotations of wearing a certain brand of basketball shoe or driving a certain car–are seen here as barbaric in the social relations they imply. And so Baudrillard warns in an interview:

 

If we take to dreaming once more--particularly today--of a world where signs are certain, of a strong "symbolic order," let's be under no illusions. For this order has existed, and it was a brutal hierarchy, since the sign's transparency is indissociably also its cruelty. (Baudrillard Live 50)

 

One nevertheless senses in this disavowal of the primitive symbolic order, where signs were singular and binding, a hint of admiration, echoing Nietzsche’s musings on the cruel but proud days when power was signified outright, and not behind the guises of morality.⁴

 

Despite this transparent warning, in Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976) Baudrillard went on to sketch several examples of symbolic exchange in relation to death in today’s political economy. The anagram in Saussure, the Witz in Freud, graffiti in New York, the Accident in the media are all treated by Baudrillard as symbolic events wherein death, denied and repressed, poses a challenge to life. From the standpoint of 9/11, his theory of death in primitive and modern cultures is most pertinent. Like Foucault, Baudrillard sees the history of Western culture in terms of a genealogy of discrimination and exclusion:

 

At the very core of the "rationality" of our culture, however, is an exclusion that precedes every other, more radical than the exclusion of madmen, children or inferior races, an exclusion preceding all these and serving as their model: the exclusion of the dead and of death. (Symbolic 126)

 

According to Baudrillard, the dead in primitive societies played integral roles in the lives of the living by serving as partners in symbolic exchange. A gift to the dead was believed to yield a return, and by exchanging with the dead through ritual sacrifices, celebrations and feasts, they managed to absorb the rupturing energy of death back into the group. But

 

there is an irreversible evolution from savage societies to our own: little by little, the dead cease to exist. They are thrown out of the group's symbolic circulation. They are no longer beings with a full role to play, worthy partners in exchange....Today it is not normal to be dead, and this is new. . . . Death is a delinquency, and an incurable deviancy. (126)

 

Modern Western cultures have largely ceased to exchange with the dead collectively, partly because we no longer believe in their continued existence, and partly because we no longer value that which cannot be accumulated or consumed. The dead have no value by our measurements. We give them nothing and expect nothing from them in return, and yet they remain with us, in our memories, obligating our recognition and response. How do we respond to the symbolic challenge of death and the dead, the challenge they pose to our conscious experience? This is the question of 9/11.

 

The primitives, Baudrillard maintains, responded to this challenge collectively through symbolic exchanges with their dead and deities. Their belief in the sign’s transparency, its symbolic singularity, can be seen in animistic practices such as voodoo, where the enemy’s hair is thought to contain his or her spirit. If the dead are only humans of a different nature, and if the sign is what it stands for, then a symbolic sacrifice to a dead person is every bit as binding as a gift to a living person. The obligation to return is placed upon the dead, and they reciprocate by somehow honoring or benefiting the living. Most Christians believe in and employ this same mechanism when they pray to the resurrected Christ, but even they do not believe that their symbolic gestures are anything but metaphors. We no longer believe in the one to one correspondence of signifier and signified, and we know the loved one is not really contained in the lock of hair. Americans will doubtless commemorate the deaths of those killed on 9/11 as long as our nation exists, but we know that our gifts to the dead are only symbolic, which for us means imaginary.

 

Baudrillard’s postmodern-primitive symbolic, on the other hand, aimed to obliterate the difference in value between the imaginary and the real, the signifier and the signified, and to expose the metaphysical prejudice at the heart of all such valuations. His wager was that this would be done through aesthetic violence and not real violence, but having erased the difference between the two, there was never any guarantee that others wouldn’t take such theoretical “violence” to its literal ends. Graffiti art, scarification and tattooing are just the benign counterparts of true terrorism, which takes ritual sacrifice and initiation to their extremes. Literalists and extremists, fundamentalists of all sorts, find their logic foretold in Baudrillard’s references to the primitives. What the terrorists enacted on 9/11 was what Baudrillard would call a symbolic event of the first order, and they were undeniably primitive in their belief that God, the dead, and the living would somehow honor and benefit them in the afterlife. Unable to defeat the U.S. in economic or military terms, they employ the rule of prestation in symbolic exchange with the gift of their own deaths. But Americans are not “primitives”–we do not value death symbolically, but rather only as a subtraction from life. Capitalism’s implicit promise, in every ad campaign and marketing strategy, is that to consume is to live. We score up life against death as gain against loss, as if through accumulation we achieve mastery over the qualitative presence of death that haunts life. Our official holidays honoring the dead serve no other function than to encourage consumption.

 

When it comes to actually dealing with death and the dead, even in public, we do so in private. As Baudrillard points out, “This entails a considerable difference in enjoyment: we trade with our dead in a kind of melancholy, while the primitives live with their dead under the auspices of the ritual and the feast” (134-35). Because we devalue death and thereby the dead, we view them only as a dreaded caste of unfortunates, and not as continuing partners in exchange. Ultimately, however, it is not so much the dead but our own deaths, our negative doubles, that we insult by denying their value. When we posit death as the negation of life, we bifurcate our identities and begin a process of mourning over our own eventual deaths, a process which lasts our whole lives. The more we devalue our death-imagoes, that is, the greater they become, until they haunt our every moment, as in Don DeLillo’s darkest comedy, White Noise. This leads us, according to Baudrillard, to an obsession with death that can be felt in the media fascination with catastrophes like 9/11. Death “becomes the object of a perverse desire. Desire invests the very separation of life and death” (147). Political economy’s inability to absorb the rupturing energy of death is thus compensated by the symbolic yield of the media catastrophe. In these events we experience an artificial death which fascinates us, bored as we are by the routine order of the system and the “natural” death it prescribes for us. Natural death represents an unnegotiable negation of life and the tedious certainty of an unwanted end. It therefore inspires insurrection, until “reason itself is pursued by the hope of a universal revolt against its own norms and privileges” (162). The terrorist spectacle is an example of such a revolt, in which death gains symbolic distinction and becomes more than simply “natural.” We may not think we identify with the terrorists’ superstitions about honor in the next life, but in events like 9/11, Baudrillard would suggest, we nevertheless identify despite ourselves with both with the terrorists and their victims:

 

We are all hostages, and that's the secret of hostage-taking, and we are all dreaming, instead of dying stupidly working oneself to the ground, of receiving death and of giving death. Giving and receiving constitute one symbolic act (the symbolic act par excellence), which rids death of all the indifferent negativity it holds for us in the "natural" order of capital. (166)

 

Violent, artificial death is a symbolic event witnessed collectively. “Technical, non natural and therefore willed (ultimately by the victim him- or herself), death becomes interesting once again since willed death has a meaning” (165). Was 9/11 willed by the victims? Obviously not, and yet, Baudrillard would suggest, in our identification with both the killers and those who died, we ourselves are not so innocent.

 

Nihilism and Terrorism

 

Implosion of meaning in the media. Implosion of the social in the masses. Infinite growth of the masses as a function of the acceleration of the system. Energetic impasse. Point of inertia.

–Baudrillard (Simulacra 161)

Baudrillard’s most prescient statements regarding terrorism and the spirit that motivates it were issued in the 1981 essay “On Nihilism,” which falls at the end of Simulacra and Simulations. Here he distinguishes the first two great manifestations of nihilism by placing them parallel to his second and third orders of simulation. Recall:

 

1. it [the image] is the reflection of a profound reality;
2. it masks and denatures a profound reality;
3. it masks the absence of a profound reality;
4. it has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum. (6)

 

The first wave of nihilism occurs in the second order of simulation, and corresponds with the Enlightenment and Romantic revolutions against the order of appearances, “the disenchantment of the world and its abandonment to the violence of interpretation and of history” (Simulacra 160). Nihilism is thus first and foremost, for Baudrillard, the signature of the post-metaphysical philosopher. He thus places Nietzsche’s statement that “God is dead” at the center of all modernity, but adds that once the critique of metaphysics has run its course, a new type of nihilism is ushered in. “When God died, there was still Nietzsche to say so,” i.e., after God there is Nietzsche, after Nietzsche, only simulation (159). “God is not dead, he has become hyperreal.”

 

This second wave of nihilism occurs in the twentieth century and spans the third and fourth orders of simulation, beginning with “surrealism, dada, the absurd, and political nihilism” (159), which sought to reveal the absence of a profound metaphysical reality behind our representations, and ending in

 

postmodernity, which is the immense process of the destruction of meaning, equal to the earlier destruction of appearances. He who strikes with meaning is killed by meaning. (161)

 

After discovering the absence of a profound meaning behind the world of appearances, those who seek the true meaning of things end up impaled on the truth that there is no true meaning to be had. Nietzsche’s dilemma. And so Baudrillard boldly declares: “I am a nihilist,” and swears himself to the destruction of both appearance and meaning, the first two waves, but also to the destruction of the appearance/meaning dichotomy altogether, the postmodern phase of the second wave. If western culture can now be characterized by Baudrillard’s notion of a fourth order simulation society, where simulacra dominate our lives and the faith in a “profound reality” has turned radically agnostic, it is here that one must plant one’s (post-) philosophical flag. Rather than take the reactionary approach of a return to metaphysics, Baudrillard affects a nihilistic version of Nietzschean amor fati, accepting the system’s melancholy and pushing to its limit the “mode of disappearance” it effects in everything it touches (162). The melancholy in Adorno and Benjamin, holds Baudrillard, already stems from this recognition that dis-enchantment, dis-appearance, the critique of reason itself are all inherent to the system’s functionality. But their “dialectic” was already “nostalgic,” their melancholy the last healthy pulse of “ressentiment” against the systemization of death, a third order phenomenon. Melancholia today, says Baudrillard, is no longer a matter of disenchantment and demystification: “It is simply disappearance.” No longer an affect one can deploy in a critique of the system, it is now the affect of “the brutal disaffection that characterizes our saturated systems.”

 

Though Baudrillard does not deny melancholia as our appropriate Zeitgeist, his implicit suggestion in the essay, which Kellner neglects, is that the passive nihilism (inertia, entropy, implosion) produced by the implicitly nihilistic system is the philosophical enemy, which he means to challenge by means of his own brand of active nihilism: “What then remains of a possible nihilism in theory? What new scene can unfold, where nothing and death could be replayed as a challenge, as a stake?” (159). The system has effectively absorbed the first two waves of active, critical nihilism into its own nihilism, and induces a state of stupefied, melancholic indifference in the “receivers” (we are no longer spectators) of its mass mediations. Baudrillard’s strategy, then, is to push the system faster (“revenge of speed on inertia”), to the point of its implosion, by writing theory that is the equivalent of intellectual terrorism (161). All other theory at this point only “assists in the freezing over of meaning, it assists in the precession of simulacra and of indifferent forms. The desert grows” (161). In the desert of the real, no amount of analysis can “resolve the imperious necessity of checking the system in broad daylight. This, only terrorism can do” (163). Terrorism, writes Baudrillard,

 

is the trait of reversion that effaces the remainder, just as a single ironic smile effaces a whole discourse, just as a single flash of denial in a slave effaces all the power and pleasure of the master. The more hegemonic the system, the more the imagination is struck by the smallest of its reversals. The challenge, even infinitesimal, is the image of a chain failure. Only this reversibility without a counterpart is an event today, on the nihilistic and disaffected stage of the political. Only it mobilizes the imaginary.

 

This is of course what happened on 9/11, as Baudrillard has since pointed out, but Kellner would also likely point out that Baudrillard, having himself wished for 9/11, begins “L’Esprit” by projecting this wish onto the rest of us (180). Our collective complicity in the wish is of course impossible to gauge, but in “On Nihilism” Baudrillard had already confessed his own complicity with nihilistic terrorism in the most carefully calibrated terms:

 

If being a nihilist, is carrying, to the unbearable limit of hegemonic systems, this radical trait of derision and of violence, this challenge that the system is summoned to answer through its own death, then I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons. Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only recourse left us. But such a sentiment is utopian. Because it would be beautiful to be a nihilist, if there were still a radicality--as it would be nice to be a terrorist, if death, including that of the terrorist, still had meaning.

 

Baudrillard gives up on the idea of a radicality in theory, a position of negativity relative to the system, Adorno’s position. But he is at his negative dialectical best in this passage, which is a statement of complicity with the utopianism of the terrorist’s challenge, as well as a statement of the utmost pessimism regarding the subject’s ability to effect a change in the system, which in the end neutralizes every event, no matter how deadly:

 

The dead are annulled by indifference, that is where terrorism is the involuntary accomplice of the whole system, not politically, but in the accelerated form of indifference that it contributes to imposing. Death no longer has a stage, neither phantasmatic nor political, on which to represent itself, to play itself out, either a ceremonial or a violent one. And this is the victory of the other nihilism, of the other terrorism, that of the system. (Simulacra 163-164)

 

Did death have a stage on September 11th? Have the dead since been annulled by indifference, caught up in the media’s mode of disappearance? Despite the terrorists’ successful attempt to put death back on stage in a symbolic exchange with “the system,” the majority of Americans have by now assimilated its violence into the broader narrative of a war against terrorism and Evil, one of the many things on TV.

 

The 9/11 attacks have succeeded, as Baudrillard says, in turning the U.S. into a vengeful police state and in accelerating its attempts to dominate the world through military force, and this in turn has likely accelerated the mood of passive nihilism (with its fascination, melancholy, and indifference). No one can claim that any sort of progressive politics were served by the terrorists’ actions. Baudrillard certainly does not. And the terrorists weren’t even nihilists, they were fundamentalists, a far cry from Baudrillard’s romantic ideal of the philosopher-terrorist. In “On Nihilism,” Baudrillard, like Adorno in the end, prefers theory as praxis to actual praxis. He concludes not on a note of cynicism and melancholy, as Kellner reads him, but on a note of paradoxical idealism:

 

There is no more hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal. But that on which it has imposed its ephemeral reign, what it hoped to liquidate in order to impose the reign of the Enlightenment, that is, appearances, they are immortal, invulnerable to the nihilism of meaning or of non-meaning itself. This is where seduction begins. (163-164)

 

Rather than respond with apathy and indifference to the disappearance of meaning now under way, Baudrillard resurrects the once banished realm of appearances, the aesthetic, in a move beyond the nihilism of meaning/nihilism of non-meaning dichotomy. As Kellner writes: “Like Nietzsche, he wants to derive value from the order of appearances without appeal to a supernatural world, a hinterwelt or a deep reality” (120). Kellner, who apparently thinks a more Nietzschean joyfulness, as opposed to Baudrillard’s melancholy, is still preferable at the end of the twentieth century, nevertheless holds to the metaphysics of morality against the aestheticism of the French Nietzscheans. For those who no longer acknowledge a “hinterwelt,” however, the idea that we exist in a world of appearances which are irreducible to true essences (like Good and Evil), is not so far fetched. One thus takes the Nietzschean turn, toward the aesthetic, and this, Baudrillard tells us, “is where seduction begins.” His later work on this concept in On Seduction need not be elaborated here, but we should note that Rex Butler has shown the concept of seduction in Baudrillard to be an elaboration on the concept of symbolic exchange (71-118). “Symbolic exchange,” according to Butler,

 

is not simply the negation of economic value but rather its limit. It is the thinking of that loss, that relationship to the other, which at once allows exchange, opens it up, and means that it is never complete, never able to account for itself. (81-82)

 

If seduction is what rules the chasm left by a symbolic exchange between the challenger and the system, what was the direction of the seduction created by 9/11? Were we seduced? Was Baudrillard? Are we being seduced by Baudrillard? Having revisited his perspective on terrorism prior to 9/11–terrorism as the ultimate metaphor, but naïve in its utopianism—let us consider his perspective après le spectacle.

 

9/11: Morning of the Living Dead

 

The spectacle of terrorism forces upon us the terrorism of the spectacle.

— Jean Baudrillard (“L’Esprit” 15)

 

In “L’Esprit du Terrorisme,” Baudrillard maintains that the U.S. as lone Superpower conjures its own Other; by dominating the globe it creates global resistance. Baudrillard’s opening gambit–“In the end, it was they who did it but we who wished it”–means to implicate us all in a symbolic exchange with 9/11:

 

It goes well beyond the hatred that the desolate and the exploited--those who ended up on the wrong side of the new world order--feel toward the dominant global power. This malicious desire resides in the hearts of even those who have shared in the spoils. The allergy to absolute order, to absolute power, is universal, and the two towers of the World Trade Center were, precisely because of their identicality, the perfect incarnation of this absolute order. ("L'Esprit" 13)

 

The twin towers, like the twin political parties in the U.S., represent a balance of power, two forces locked in opposition. But like the Democrats and the Republicans, both towers are virtually identical, and their dualistic logic leaves no room for remainders. People rebel, either secretly or openly, against an airtight system, two towers of power representing the same people in charge, the illusion of difference. Finally someone throws a monkey wrench into the works in the form of four jet airplanes, aimed not only at the symbols of American power, but at the American mass media, which serve to broadcast the terror and violence worldwide. By way of our simulation technologies, the terrorists were able to issue a singular challenge to each American, and it is in this way that the event is properly symbolic in the Baudrillardian sense, as a gift demanding return. This is a common motif in Baudrillard, this moment where simulation society is somehow reversed or revolutionized by the symbolic. By insisting on our unconfessable complicity, the assumption that we all have a soft spot for the underdog and a sore spot for the overdog, especially when the latter is on the brink of dominating the global playpen, Baudrillard further challenges us to answer the challenge of 9/11, to enter the debate at the level of a singular exchange. As individuals, our ability to influence what is done in the name of the U.S. is limited, but as intellectuals, we must ask ourselves: what is the symbolic meaning and effect of the event? An essay exam for the whole nation. The twin towers symbolize corporate globalization, the Pentagon the American military, and both together stand for what Baudrillard calls “the system.” The numbers 9-1-1 signal Emergency, and the date marks a number of historical events: the 1989 massacre in Haiti which ousted Aristide; the 1973 overthrow of Allende in Chile; and the 1683 battle of Vienna, where Islam was ultimately defeated by Poland, the beginning of the end of the Ottoman Empire.⁵ But for Baudrillard the symbolic meaning of the event lies not only in its reducibility to such referents, but in its irreducible, singular, and irrevocable challenge to each and every imagination. Doubtless most Americans would deny any complicity with the terrorists on 9/11, but few would deny that it was the most fascinating day of the century, and this fascination, the product of the system, was what the terrorists counted on.

 

Baudrillard demonstrates in this essay that what the terrorists carried out is indeed one version–the most literal version–of what he has meant all along by a symbolic death exchange with the system, thus implicating his own theories as those which explain, and in this sense further fortify, the symbolic power of terrorism. His instruction manual continues:

 

Never attack the system in terms of the balance of power. The balance of power is an imaginary (revolutionary) construct imposed by the system itself, a construct that exists in order to force those who attack it to fight on the battlefield of reality, the system's own terrain. Instead, move the struggle into the symbolic sphere, where defiance, reversion, and one-upmanship are the rule, so that the only way to respond to death is with an equivalent or even greater death. Defy the system with a gift to which it cannot reply except with its own death and its own downfall. . . . You have to make the enemy lose face. And you'll never achieve that through brute force, by merely eliminating the Other. (16)

 

Certainly the terrorists’ attack on the battlefield of reality was devastating on its own, but their attack on the symbolic battlefield, Baudrillard maintains, was far more devastating in terms of achieving their global aspirations. According to the system’s logic, the Other loses when they only kill one of your soldiers and you kill all of theirs, but according to the symbolic logic of the terrorists, the greater the sacrifice, the greater the symbolic honor. “In dealing all the cards to itself, the system forced the Other to change the rules of the game,” and under the new rules, the strongest power in the world violently decimating one of the weakest powers at the cost of a single life is not honorable, it is only efficient (14). Baudrillard, scandalous as ever, hands the symbolic victory of the war on terror to the terrorists, all but crediting them with recent economic, political, and psychological “recessions” in the West, and with the fact that “deregulation has ended in maximum security, in a level of restriction and constraint equivalent to that found in fundamentalist societies” (18).

 

Since they cannot not report and sensationalize the event, the media are enlisted in a symbolic exchange that only amplifies the terrorist’s power to terrorize: “The media are part of the event, they’re part of the terror,” and so “this terrorist violence is not ‘real’ at all. It’s worse, in a sense: it’s symbolic” (18). The “real” violence here is thus conducted through the technologies of simulation, which the terrorists have hijacked for their symbolic ends. Baudrillard’s claim that the symbolic violence was worse and hence more “real” than the real violence of 9/11 is typically provocative, and another letter to Harper’s takes him on on this score. ⁶ The argument over which violence was worse, however, is a dead end, for the question of “the spirit of terrorism” is what is at stake. What the terrorists count on is that

 

at the level of images and information, it is impossible to distinguish between the spectacular and the symbolic, impossible to distinguish between crime and repression. And it is this uncontrollable outburst of reversibility that is the veritable victory of terrorism. (18)

 

Here again this motif in Baudrillard, where simulation society (the society of the spectacle) is somehow reversed by the symbolic. The reversibility of crime and repression depends upon the media’s being seduced into working for the criminals, and in effecting this reversal, the terrorists set off a symbolic-atomic bomb. Their physical violence was aimed at the lives of thousands of American taxpayers, but their symbolic violence was aimed at the symbols of corporate globalization, the American military and perhaps all of Christendom. The agencies of the latter are thus forced into the symbolic arena, and must choose how to respond, what appearances to deploy.

 

In one of the letters to Harper’s, Matthew Kelly writes that “the attack’s symbolic wallop is obvious to a toddler,” but it is not just about recognizing that the twin towers and the Pentagon stand for. Baudrillard means for us also to recognize the primitive symbolic challenge, the sacrifice, the gift of their own deaths, which demands our response if we are to save face. One wonders how many Americans would be willing to sacrifice their lives as a show of support for what the twin towers and Pentagon symbolize. Baudrillard’s point about primitive symbolism is that the symbol represents a unique and binding challenge, a gift that must somehow be returned by everyone it affects. How are we, if we are the U.S., to respond? Our first priority in formulating a response should be to pose the question the U.S. news media have deemed too sensitive to ask, namely: why did they do it? On October 7, 2002, however, Osama bin Laden issued his statement on a videotaped message:

 

What America is tasting now is something insignificant compared to what we have tasted for scores of years. Our Nation (the Islamic world) has been tasting this humiliation and degradation for more than 80 years. Its sons are killed, its blood is shed, its sanctuaries are attacked and no one hears and no one heeds. Millions of innocent children are being killed as I speak. They are being killed in Iraq without committing any sins. . . . To America, I say only a few words to it and its people. I swear to God, who has elevated the skies without pillars, neither America nor the people who live in it will dream of security before we live it here in Palestine and not before all the infidel armies leave the land of Muhammad peace be upon him. (Andreas 29)

 

The challenge represented in the gift is clear: “you will not know peace until your military leaves us in peace.” This implies a direct question: why is the U.S. military in Arab countries? The answer, of course, is that the U.S. military is there to protect U.S. economic interests, in accordance with its long-held notions of manifest destiny. But U.S. officials do not respond to this implicit question, their response is no response, which of course is a response in itself in symbolic terms. The terrorists count on the likelihood that the U.S. will make a move the world will view as symbolically dishonorable and aesthetically ugly, in relation to their act of defiance, that the harder it strikes back, the worse it will look, and the greater the global resistance. The U.S. can only win on the aesthetico-symbolic plane, where prestation rules, by staying its hand, for there is no courage or beauty in brute force.⁷

 

So does Baudrillard really support terrorism? Do we? Once again playing the devil’s hand, he seduces us to play the avenging angel by taking a moral stand. But suppose we take the Nietzschean turn, with Baudrillard, and view the issue in aesthetic terms: can moral goodness not still succeed in being beautiful if it avoids making metaphysical claims? When morality is conceived in aesthetic terms, it loses its guarantee of universality, but not its symbolic force. And yet by forcing Good on the world, the U.S. only forces Evil to gain strength. “Terrorism,” Baudrillard tells us, “is immoral,” but it is a

 

response to globalization, which is itself immoral. We are therefore immoral ourselves, so if we hope to understand anything we will need to get beyond Good and Evil. . . . In the end, Good cannot vanquish Evil except by declining to be Good, since, in monopolizing global power, it entails a backfire of proportional violence. (Simulacra 15)

 

The U.S., if it wishes to be Good, can only win, in symbolic terms, by refusing to play, by refusing to be Good. Baudrillard certainly does not proffer war, which he concludes is simply “a continuation of the absence of politics by other means” (18). What he recommends, without naming it, is the forgiveness of debt, the redemption of “Evil.”

 

Compare this, then, to Nietzsche’s advice, which might have been directed at a future world power such as the U.S.:

 

It is not unthinkable that a society might attain such a consciousness of power that it could allow itself the noblest luxury possible to it--letting those who harm it go unpunished. "What are my parasites to me?:" it might say. "May they live and prosper: I am strong enough for that!" The justice which began with, "everything is dischargeable, everything must be discharged," ends by winking and letting those incapable of discharging their debt go free: it ends, as does every good thing on earth, by overcoming itself. This self-overcoming of justice: one knows the beautiful name it has given itself--mercy; it goes without saying that mercy remains the privilege of the most powerful man, or better, his--beyond the law. (Genealogy 72-73)

 

The triumph of justice, according to Nietzsche, is its self-overcoming; the most moral is the extra-moral, beyond the war of Good and Evil. If the U.S. had gone with its first name for its new war effort–“Operation Infinite Justice”–would Americans have become more readily aware of the ironic fact that their country had in many ways served injustice in the Middle East for a great many years? Would some have been quicker to see that “infinite justice” can only amount to infinite forgiveness? In this passage, Nietzsche taunts America’s wealth and dignity, seducing us with an image of ourselves more befitting our vanity than the image of a vengeful America. Vengeance, ressentiment, always claims morality as its cause, but forgiveness does not have to, because it is a washing away of guilt/debt, because it is a gift. Rather than make claims, it gives them away, which nevertheless poses a challenge to the other to counter-give with a symbolic response. This is for Nietzsche, as for Baudrillard, one would gather, the most beautiful aesthetic/symbolic gesture, an extra-moral gesture, beyond Good and Evil. It is also the only means to peace short of the total annihilation of a virtually invisible enemy. Would a Nietzschean-style forgiveness of debt not entail gestures like the removal of U.S. military bases from the Middle East, the nationalization of Arab oil assets, the discontinuation of all support for dictatorships in the area and around the world, and the promotion of a Palestinian nation? And if such tokens of “forgiveness” were offered, does anyone doubt that a more livable peace would soon be at hand, and that the U.S. would incur its greatest possible symbolic honor?

 

If we assume, with Baudrillard, that there is a rule of reciprocity between conscious beings, wherein their symbolic standing vis à vis one another depends on what they give in exchange, and if we assume that the recognition of this rule of value runs deeper in humans everywhere than does the recognition of the rule of value imposed by capitalism, and if we assume that the terrorists have appealed to this rule before the world, do we choose to play by the rule, or to ignore it? So far the U.S. has ignored it by refusing to answer the implicit questions: Why do they hate us? Why is our military there? By what right do we exploit their resources, overthrow their elected leaders, and drop bombs on their people? But no response is still a response, symbolically speaking, and the world is listening. What the system did in response to 9/11, or instead of responding to it, was to re-absorb its symbolic violence back into the never ending flow of anesthetized simulation, i.e., it has attempted “to replace a truly formidable event, unique and unforseen, with a pseudo-event that is as repetitive as it is familiar” (Harper’s 18). This is exactly what Baudrillard predicted would happen in “On Nihilism,” this neutralizing of the terrorist event by the system. In “L’Esprit,” he notes that:

 

In the terrorist attack the event eclipsed all of our interpretive models, whereas in this mindlessly military and technological war we see the opposite: the interpretive model eclipsing the event. (18)

 

Baudrillard would have us recognize that the attack on 9/11 succeeded in poking a hole in the U.S.’s mighty shield, thus opening a space “where seduction begins,” and in provoking a murderous response. The terrorists therefore succeeded (are succeeding) in making the U.S. look bad on the symbolic battlefield, and in pushing the system further toward its limit and its implosion, a goal Baudrillard expressly favors. It seems most reasonable to conclude, however, that such violent, physical provocations serve no one, not even Baudrillard, and need not be equated with the kind of theoretical terrorism and aesthetic violence advocated by him (though one can always accuse him of being the first to blur the lines between the real and the imaginary). Given his cynicism about the system’s ability to neutralize every opposition, however, Baudrillard sees such dramatic gestures (as 9/11) as naïve in their utopianism. And yet he too has his utopianism, which can be found in the silent evocation of the only decent, beautiful solution to the challenge of 9/11. Unlike naïve terrorists and secondary critics, however, Baudrillard will not speak his utopia,⁸which in this case is the possibility of forgiveness as a world-historical symbolic event. This utopian moment in Baudrillard, this idea that the U.S. might forgive its debtors, is obviously unrealistic as yet, but every challenge opens up a new space in the universe. This is where seduction begins.

 

As for death, it is still un-American. We live mostly, as Ernest Becker claimed, in denial of death, which our marketing specialists have yet to fully package. We live in ignorance of the death and misery caused by our military and its industry. No one knows how many lives, or anything about the individuals killed. We see only TV spectacles. We do not see the real, or know the real, but we are a culture fascinated by its simulacrum. Approximately 3,000 more people joined the ranks of the dead on 9/11 and for most of us they were only abstractions, but the fascination we felt, the release, is something everyone is now anticipating, every false alarm a tease. Whether we see it in Baudrillardian or Freudian terms, this is the death drive. The most recent Gallup poll shows 53% of Americans in favor of the U.S. invading Iraq alone. Toward the end of Symbolic Exchange and Death, Baudrillard states what he believes is on all of our minds:

 

Death itself demands to be experienced immediately, in total blindness and total ambivalence. But is it revolutionary? If political economy is the most rigorous attempt to put an end to death, it is clear that only death can put an end to political economy. (86-87)

 

Forget waiting for it, let’s have another spectacle; let’s demand death now! Is Baudrillard being sinister when he tempts us with our desire for more death? Is he death’s seducer? Not if we allow for his caveat about the term “death” found in the book’s second footnote: “death ought never to be understood as the real event that affects a subject or a body, but as a form in which the determinacy of the subject and of value is lost” (5, n. 2). Baudrillard uses the term death to signify “the real event” throughout Symbolic Exchange and Death, and only sometimes uses it as a conceptual figure like this, but if he is not talking here about real death, where some subject and some value are certainly lost, what is he talking about? Death, in Baudrillard’s specialized sense, signifies the end of “bound energies in stable oppositions,” but since the system itself is also capable of imposing such deaths, he clarifies that the death of the system can only be achieved by way of its strategic reversal:

 

For the system is master: like God it can bind or unbind energies; what it is incapable of (and what it can no longer avoid) is reversibility. Reversibility alone therefore, rather than unbinding or drifting, is fatal to it. This is exactly what the term symbolic "exchange" means.

 

Baudrillard contends that the system cannot reverse itself, but that one might cause it to enact “death” as the form of an exchange in which its values no longer apply, in which its determinations become indeterminate. One does this by giving it a gift it cannot respond to without killing itself in this way, without undermining its own authority. This can be done effectively with words and/or pictures:

 

Figure 1: The Selling of Joy9 © Thomas Antel Used with permission of photographer

 

but it can also be done with jet airplanes:

 

Figure 2

 

53% of our baser instincts may demand that real death, the “real event that affects a subject or a body” (whether in Baghdad or Manhattan) be experienced now, but Baudrillard does not. Baudrillard is far more nihilistic than most terrorists and warmongers. The capitalist system, he says, will sooner or later reclaim all such “freed energies.” Whether or not we share his pessimism, his conception of the symbolic affords us a view of human relations that is based on recognition and reciprocity, instead of ignorance and domination, which is about what America needs right now. As for his remarks on terrorism and death, however, let us hope Baudrillard does not suffer Nietzsche’s fate and wind up the misread philosopher of murderous thugs.

 

Notes

 

1. From “L’Esprit du Terrorisme” (13, 14, 18).

 

2. See Symbolic Exchange and Death (5, n. 2), which I discuss in the final section of this essay.

 

3. It is likely that Baudrillard’s theory of the primitive and his whole theory of the symbolic (as gift) derive more from a history of colonial projection than from the truth about the colonized. In The Potlatch Papers: A Colonial Case History, Christopher Bracken argues that the potlatch in twentieth-century European anthropology and philosophy is the invention of a nineteenth-century Canadian law meant to outlaw it. Bracken does not mention Baudrillard, but Lyotard does along these same lines: “How is it that he does not see that the whole problematic of the gift, of symbolic exchange, such as he receives it from Mauss…belongs in its entirety to Western racism and imperialism–that it is still ethnology’s good savage, slightly libidinalized, which he inherits with the concept?” (106). No longer believing in true origins, however, Baudrillard would like to be free of the distinction between the real and the imaginary savage so as to focus on the concept of symbolic exchange, a concept containing a compelling, if understated, ethic: that one must respond, and is responsible, to the other; that one’s honor depends on what one gives; and that the value of the gift is not quantifiable but is symbolic. One will get nowhere trying to verify his speculations about the “real primitives,” and I could not speak for indigenous people as to whether they should value his “gift” to them as a compliment or an insult. See Piper for discussion of Baudrillard’s place in the new primitivist counter-culture, “the drop-out culture of the sixties redefined as both indigenous and postmodern” (177).

 

4. See for instance “Homer’s Contest” (Portable 32-39).

 

5. See Stille and Alden.

 

6. Matthew Kelly of Brooklyn writes “I choked on the quotation marks buffeting the word ‘real’ . . . which, in his view, the September 11 violence was not” (86).

 

7. As I write, President Bush has declared a new, “preventive” unilateralism in U.S. military policy, and the Senate has authorized the President to proceed with an invasion of Iraq at his own discretion, regardless of international opinion. This current push toward global domination by force must strike all but the most authoritarian Americans as deeply ignoble. After all, it flies in the face of our TV and Hollywood upbringing, which teaches us that it’s only bad guys who want to rule the world and that nobody should end up as “lord of the rings.” Indeed, the contradiction between image and reality is becoming so apparent that, in keeping with the Orwellian nature of the Bush administration, we might almost expect revisionist remakes to start replacing the standard Hollywood movies. We’ll find that Austin Powers and Dr. Evil have somehow changed roles, and that we’re cheering for good guys who rule the world with an iron hand while egalitarian villains plot against them.

 

8. In The Illusion of the End, Baudrillard cites Adorno to this effect: “Every ecstasy ultimately prefers to take the path of renunciation rather than sin against its own concept by realizing itself” (104).

 

9. There’s a powerful narrative implied in this photo; an annoyed resident of the so-called “third world” holds a box of Joy for the camera, and suddenly we don’t feel so happy about Joy. When we are made conscious of the implicit, metaphysical insult of a class-based global village, we are made aware of the symbolic standing between the first world and the third. The anti-commercial is a symbolic challenge to the real commercial, posing one image against another, demanding a response. Baudrillardian symbolic exchange is based on this principle of reversal and seduction, and so has much in common with Guy Debord’s and the Situationists’ concept of “detournement” and with what Kalle Lasn and Adbusters call “culture jamming” (see Lasn 103-109).

Works Cited

 

• Alden, Dianne. “History is the Root Cause of Everything.” NewsMax.com 11 Oct. 2002. 29 Aug. 2002. <http://www.tysknews.com/Depts/terrorism/root_cause.htm>.
• Andreas, Joel. Addicted to War: Why the U.S. Can’t Kick Militarism. Oakland: AK, 2002.
• Baudrillard, Jean. Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews. Ed. Mike Gane. New York: Routledge, 1993.
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• Kelly, Mathew; Schlesinger, Edward B.; Wersan, Sarah A. “Letters to the Editor.” Harper’s Magazine (May 2002): 4.
• Lasn, Kalle. Culture Jam: The Uncooling of America™. New York: Eagle Brook, 1999.
• Lyotard, Jean-François. Libidinal Economy. Trans. Iain Hamilton Grant. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993.
• Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: the Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Trans. W.D. Halls. New York: Norton, 1990.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1967.
• —. The Portable Nietzsche. Ed. and Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin, 1954.
• Piper, Karen. Cartographic Fictions: Maps, Race, and Identity. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2002.
• Stille, Alexander. “The Many Meanings of 9/11.” Council on Foreign Relations. (2001). 29 Aug. 2002. <http://www.cfr.org/Public/publications/xStille.html>.