Volume 13, Number 3
May, 2003 Every issue of Postmodern Culturecarries notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcements, free of charge. Advertisements will also be published on an exchange basis. If you respond to one of the ads or announcements below, please mention that you saw the notice in PMC.
Mimi Yiu
English Department
Cornell University
msy4@cornell.edu
Review of: Jean Baudrillard and Jean Nouvel. The Singular Objects of Architecture. Trans. Robert Bononno. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002.
Structured as two free-ranging dialogues, The Singular Objects of Architecture brings into conversation two of the most thought-provoking cultural innovators of our time: Jean Baudrillard and Jean Nouvel. It is perhaps ironic that Baudrillard, the poststructuralist French theorist best known for such works as Simulacra and Simulation and The Vital Illusion, ponders the very material discipline of architecture, and with a practicing architect to boot. Of course, Baudrillard finds in Nouvel a kindred spirit fascinated by the conceptual intersections of transparency, illusion, and ideology. The creator of such landmark buildings as the Arab World Institute and the Cartier Foundation in Paris, not to mention the Hotel Broadway in New York, Nouvel has received the Grand Prix d’Architecture, among numerous international honors, and was the subject of an acclaimed exhibition at the Centre Pompidou last year. His works are marked by a preoccupation with surfaces, textures, falls of light, and the visual framing of spaces. Both Baudrillard and Nouvel are very much concerned with the status of cultural artifacts as products of contemporary state power and, especially in these dialogues, with the notion of singularity in objects.
The extended discussions found in this book are the result of a series of dialogues between architects and philosophers held at a multi-segment conference entitled “Urban Passages,” which took place in Paris throughout 1997 and 1998. The Singular Objects of Architecture was first published in France in 2000; the present volume, a translation by Robert Bononno, includes a thoughtful introduction by K. Michael Hays, the Eliot Noyes Professor of Architecture at Harvard and editor of Architecture Theory Since 1968. The format that Baudrillard and Nouvel have chosen for their collaboration seems intellectually productive and felicitous, especially considering the fate of a similar joint venture undertaken by Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman just a few years ago. Invited by architect Bernard Tschumi to contribute one allotted section to the Parc Villette project in Paris, Derrida and Eisenman met, corresponded, and participated in forums over several years, but never actually contributed anything tangible–architecturally speaking–to the Parisian site. Not surprisingly, considering the theoretical nature of both men’s work, the only result of their collaboration is a book entitled Chora L Works, which documents their futile endeavors at planning a built space that would express their mutual commitment to conceptual experimentation. Eventually, as letters published within the book attest, the whole project self-destructed as personality conflicts arose and their partnership broke up. Baudrillard and Nouvel, wisely, do not even attempt to engage the technical and material side of architecture, opting rather to remain in the purely discursive realm amenable to both thinkers and their disciplines.
Ever the provocateur, Baudrillard claims right off the bat that he has “never been interested in architecture” (4); instead, he cites a fascination with the singularity of built objects and the world they translate as his primary point of entry into architecture. It seems curiously appropriate, then, that Baudrillard cites here the World Trade Center as a question mark in interpretation. Does architecture merely translate its contemporary societal context, or does architecture constitute an anticipatory illusion, a sort of self-fulfilling cultural myth? It is telling that, for Baudrillard, the pre-9/11 towers evoke “two perforated bands” whose architectural truth lies in its context of a “society already experiencing hyperrealism” (4). Of course, this prescient apprehension of the twin towers cannot help but resonate with those of us who first and foremost associate the buildings with those hypperreal television and Internet images of planes puncturing the structures, images that have indelibly inscribed themselves upon the national consciousness. Nouvel’s response–that architecture can unexpectedly convey “things we cannot control, things that are fatal” (6)–seems to echo his interlocutor’s concern with the signifying capabilities of built space and the sense that architecture remains a communal enterprise, reaching far beyond the designs of a single mastermind.
Indeed, what the World Trade Center tragedy reminds us, inevitably, is that buildings have ideological weight, that buildings can be singular and yet doubled, that architecture cannot be divorced from the world of images. Our relationship with architecture, as Nouvel points out, is strongly correlated with our visual impressions and memories of places, which in turn lead to a narrativizing of spatial dimensions. Drawing an analogy between an architect and a film director, Nouvel stresses how the built environment relies heavily upon sequence, narrative, and memory; a peer of Paul Virilio’s from the 1960s, Nouvel is likewise very much interested in the temporal and visual restructuring that has occurred with the rise of postmodernism. In his own work, Nouvel pursues what he calls a “critical architecture” that deflects the hegemonic, panoptic gaze and radically destabilizes space. By playing with the conventions of sightlines and visibility, these subversive structures attempt to erase themselves from the legibility and surveillance of dominant cultural forces. Often, Nouvel’s buildings suspend the viewer between multiple modes of visuality, forming nodes of instability within a given urban system.
Indeed, Nouvel’s architectural philosophy shares two key terms with Baudrillard’s cultural theory lexicon: transparency and illusion. Opposed to the transparency demanded by a hegemonic regime, Nouvel attempts to construct “a space that works as the mental extension of sight,” performing a type of vanishing act that leaves the viewer wondering where the object went (6). Similarly, Baudrillard’s theorizing in such works as The Transparency of Evil ponders ways to subvert the perfect transparency of both individual and system, an ideal that he considers complicit with the powers-that-be in rendering every object legible and classifiable. Reworking Virilio’s notion of the aesthetic of disappearance, in which real objects are gradually replaced by virtual counterparts and individuals evanesce into the network, Baudrillard proposes a type of disappearance that is more a metamorphosis, a “chain of interlinked forms . . . where everything implies its own disappearance” (29). This theoretical notion can be carried out in the practice of architecture, Nouvel implies, through a play of visual accessibility that foregrounds for the viewer the problematics of transparency. In essence, the buildings’ selective opacity and surprising views constitute a refusal to yield to the ideal standard of universal legibility and coherence.
Nouvel’s own architecture is greatly concerned with what he terms “dematerialization”–a reconfiguration of material substance so as to confound traditional notions of the object and its mapping in Cartesian space. Defying the monumental impulse even in his large-scale projects, Nouvel aspires to the legerdemain of making the building vanish, or at least making the vanishing point of linear perspective vanish. As Nouvel explains it, the goal is to render ambiguous the boundary between materiality and non-materiality, between image and reality (62). That is, spaces no longer try to make themselves accessible and thus knowable to the controlling eye, but rather fragment into local sites and illusory dimensions, conflating real and virtual in unanticipated ways. Indeed, dematerialization in this sense often implies a type of demobilization that breaks up regimented formations, both physical and mental. At the same time, however, both he and Baudrillard agree that complicity with the dominant regime is unavoidable, and even essential. After all, an architect must work in tandem with the client, the end-user, and the already-existing social and geographical spaces. Deconstructing the opposition between transparency and a hidden complicity, Nouvel observes that complicity is “the only guarantee that we’ll be able to push the boundaries” (77).
Probing the limits of architecture, Nouvel and Baudrillard discuss such landmark buildings as the Beaubourg in Paris and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. For Baudrillard, Frank Gehry’s curvaceously deconstructed Bilbao museum exemplifies the disappearing chain mentioned earlier, where one object merges and transforms into another. Indeed, architectural elements are juxtaposed, recombined, and reinvented in novel ways, so that the finished product transcends the sum of its parts. For Baudrillard, such seemingly serendipitous permutations, which have their beginning in computer manipulations of graphic ideas, constitute the ultimate expression of readymade architecture. As Nouvel adds, the computer revolution allows architects to open “a direct passage from desire to the built reality” (49). Whether these technological shortcuts to creative and indeed psychic fulfillment are seen as positive or negative developments remains unclear from Nouvel and Baudrillard’s dialogues. At times, Baudrillard seems to exult in the proliferating potentialities made possible by virtuality and decentered, destabilized spaces; at other times, we see evidence of the nostalgia that crops up again and again in his other writings on the age of simulacra, as he laments the advent of cloned structures that lack “quality or a sense of nobility” (50). Nouvel, on the other hand, embraces a more practical approach to the technological innovations that have changed the practice of architecture and, indeed, repositioned the architect’s role within the design process. As the architect of a museum space–the Cartier Foundation in Paris–whose glass walls problematize if not downright prohibit the installation of art, Nouvel can never be accused of succumbing to bland corporate utilitarianism, but he definitely comes across here as the more down-to-earth of the two speakers. Although Nouvel is deeply invested in the philosophical implications of dematerialization and the disappearance of the modern object, he nevertheless shows a workmanlike sensibility for what can be built and never strays too far in his thinking from the realm of functional architecture. For Baudrillard, however, architecture remains primarily a vehicle for talking about spatial politics and the postmodern dissolution of stable, material objects. Like a counterweight, then, Nouvel’s responsibility towards the pragmatics of the architecture profession checks Baudrillard’s more effusive and hyperbolic theoretical pronouncements, creating a balanced textual architectonic that is both dynamic and productive.
What is sometimes frustrating for the reader of The Singular Objects of Architecture, however, is the choppy editing of these extended conversations. Although section headings indicate the general gist of the discussion at any given moment, the two speakers occasionally seem to refer to ideas or points raised in dialogue that has not been transcribed and published. These gaps could be considered a postmodern deconstruction of the text, a performative gesture towards the indecipherability and rupture of any speech act, a reminder of the ephemerality of enunciation and the impossibility of total transcription. It is on these grounds that Derrida and Eisenman’s Chora L Works sets out to confound readers’ expectations playfully, by breaking down the structure of the book itself: sections refuse to follow in set order, the table of contents lies buried in the middle of the text, and holes are punched through the entire book so as to obscure or render forever missing specific words. By thus putting into praxis the theory of chora as spatial absence elaborated in the book’s essays, these disjunctures in the material text serve to bind form and content even closer, indeed making the book into an architectural artifact that substitutes for the unrealized Parisian project. Yet in Baudrillard and Nouvel’s work, the textual non-sequiturs seem like just so much sloppy proofreading, especially since the section headings and straightforward layout clearly valorize cohesion and accessibility. Although, in the acknowledgments, the authors claim to have reworked the original dialogues towards a resolution that is also a “radical and necessary incompletion” (xv), the desultory feel of the book appears to have less to do with theoretical provocation and more to do with infelicitous editing decisions. At times, I kept flipping back in the book to see whether some prior referent could be found, but to no avail: while an oppressive drive towards transparency ought not to be the goal, these small slippages in the chain of reasoning are nonetheless puzzling, forcing the reader to a painful awareness of being on the outside. The book is only 80 pages in length, leaving ample space for publishing the dialogues in full or having the authors write more extensive elaborations on a few topics. As it is, the inconsistencies in the text create a sense of unexplained selectivity and complicity–in the negative sense–on the authors’ part.
Despite these occasional overtones of collusion, there are enough moments of genuine collaboration to make the book a joyful and worthwhile read. Baudrillard and Nouvel are complementary thinkers who push each other to new considerations of ideas that both have elaborated in their respective fields. Indeed, although I would gladly dispense with section headings in exchange for the messiness of actual unedited dialogue, these headers do make apparent recurring themes in the two interviews. While the brevity of the sections, which run from one to two pages on average, disallows in-depth meditation on any particular subject, there are flashes of brilliance that gather in momentum as Baudrillard and Nouvel revisit, albeit always from a slightly different angle, concepts of transparency, virtuality, radicality, and, above all, singularity. Paradoxically, singularity in this conversation diverges into a multiplicity of views on the same object, an uncanny thread that keeps emerging persistently in different guises. In the acknowledgments, the two authors explain that the dialogues have been edited to focus on the notion of singularity. Long an important idea in Baudrillard’s other writings, singularity here is applied to buildings that, like the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, appear almost to float in a vacuum, isolating themselves from the surrounding architectural matrix. Indeed, singular buildings are a challenge to their environment and prevalent ways of thinking; they anticipate future developments rather than merely translate current needs and desires.
By blocking the transparent ideal prescribed by the prevailing cultural regime, these buildings question the norms that force architecture to assimilate and facilitate. Thus disappearing into illegibility even as they frame the buildings around them, singular buildings test the limits of what architecture can signify within its sociocultural context. As Michael Hays puts it in the book’s foreword, the singular object is a “way of access . . . opening onto the determining conditions of its cultural surround” (xii). Because singular buildings both stand out and efface themselves, they slip into the singular vanishing point of the extant ideological and spatial grid, denying perspective its hegemonic power over the interpellated viewer. Thus suspending the order imposed upon the mental and geographical topography, singular structures force us to pose the difficult questions of “what if,” “what now,” and “what next.” Indeed, as Nouvel perceptively points out: “Architecture is always a response to a question that wasn’t asked” (79).
Martin Wallace
English Department
University of Manitoba
kaplanrose@hotmail.com
Review of: Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination. Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001.
Pierre Bourdieu’s Masculine Domination is the English translation of La Domination Masculine (1998), which was developed from an article of the same name published in 1990 in Actes de la Recherché en Sciences Sociales. It articulates Bourdieu’s theories of gender construction and his analysis of the pervasive and insidious power of masculine domination, which is, in “the way it is imposed and suffered . . . the prime example of this paradoxical submission” through which “the most intolerable conditions of existence can so often be perceived as acceptable and even natural” (1). This domination is effected, subtly, through a form of what Bourdieu calls “symbolic violence, a gentle violence, imperceptible and invisible even to its victims, exerted for the most part through the purely symbolic channels of communication and cognition (more precisely, misrecognition), recognition, or even feeling” (1-2). Despite Bourdieu’s reference to “gentle violence,” symbolic violence is the most powerful weapon in masculine domination’s arsenal, since, despite its virtual invisibility, it creates the conditions of possibility for other, more immediate and explicit forms of violence, whether economic or physical.
At one hundred and thirty-three pages (including notes and index), Masculine Domination is one of Bourdieu’s shortest books. This, moreover, is not the only way in which Masculine Domination is atypical. In books such as Distinction, Bourdieu has shown his ability to examine social structures minutely by producing and interpreting huge blocks of data. At its best, Bourdieu’s work is a potent mix of scientific analysis and literary interpretation, with each of these methods allowing him to reach those places where the other will not take him. A further strength has been his willingness to analyze every available position in the huge “fields” that he examines. In contrast, the sole “data” that informs Masculine Domination comes from anthropological information about the Kabyle society (a Mediterranean ethnic group) that Bourdieu gathered in the 1960s and a reading of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. By comparison with the thoroughness of his earlier work, Masculine Domination seems a brisk treatment of a subject that does not have Bourdieu’s full attention.
Bourdieu justifies choosing the “particular case” of Kabylia by pointing out that “the cultural tradition that has been maintained there constitutes a paradigmatic realization of the Mediterranean tradition,” and, further, that “the whole European cultural domain undeniably shares in that tradition,” a contention for which he offers as proof only “a comparison of the rituals observed in Kabylia with those collected by Arnold Van Gennep in early twentieth-century France” (6). Bourdieu uses this tenuous series of connections to establish Kabyle society as a source of examples of masculine domination that he refers to throughout the book. In using Kabyle society in this way, Bourdieu allows a confusion to develop between evidence and illustration. Furthermore, as Terry Lovell (one of Bourdieu’s most frequent and incisive critics) points out, “it is not always possible to know when [Bourdieu] is restricting his observations to the particular case of Kabyle society, when he is extending them to encompass the whole Mediterranean culture of honour/shame, including that of the modern period, and when he is offering universal generalizations” (20). It is therefore difficult to summarize Bourdieu’s analysis of Kabyle society, since he does not proceed in any systematic way. In fact, there are only a dozen or so specific references to Kabyle society throughout the book, many of which are very brief, as when Bourdieu simply states, without mentioning specific details, that it represents “the canonical form” of the masculine/feminine oppositions to which he wants to point (56). At other times, Bourdieu will describe a particular aspect of Kabyle society, only to leave it impatiently in an apparent extrapolation of his conclusions to universal circumstances. Asserting that “it is not exaggerated to compare masculinity to a nobility,” Bourdieu notes
the double standard, with which the Kabyles are very familiar, applied in the evaluation of male and female activities. Not only can a man not stoop without degrading himself to certain tasks that are socially defined as inferior (not least because it is unthinkable that a man should perform them), but the same task may be noble and difficult, when performed by men, or insignificant and imperceptible, easy and futile when performed by women. (60)
Bourdieu then points to “the difference between the chef and the cook, [and] the couturier and the seamstress” (60) that operates in our own society, apparently unconcerned that he has made no more than a vague reference to the specific tasks that are designated as male and female in Kabyle society.
Bourdieu can link such apparently disparate objects of analysis as Kabyle society and Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse because he treats them in essentially the same way–as texts that he may pull down from the bookshelf when he wants to make a point and then quickly put back. His analysis of To the Lighthouse focuses mainly on Woolf’s portrayal of Mr. Ramsay, the patriarch of the Ramsay family, who is “a man whose words are verdicts” (70). Despite the masculine power that this would seem to suggest, Bourdieu sees Mr. Ramsay as “a pitiful being who is himself a victim of the inexorable verdicts of the real and himself needs pity” (77). For Bourdieu, Mr. Ramsay is an example of the way in which symbolic violence redounds on those who initially benefit from it, those who are “in Marx’s phrase, ‘dominated by their domination’” (69), who are granted “the double-edged privilege of indulging in the games of domination” (75). While men may enjoy the power that masculine domination permits them, they can wield this power only through a continual self-regulation, “the effort that every man has to make to rise to his own childhood conception of manhood,” in which his own weaknesses are carefully hidden from others. Sympathy for Mr. Ramsay, however, is available from Mrs. Ramsay, who “continuously humours her husband” in a “kind of condescending pity for the male illusio” (77). In Bourdieu’s reading, Mr. Ramsay exemplifies the way in which men are permitted to play games that, while they may grant tremendous power, also carry enormous risks; in contrast, Mrs. Ramsay exemplifies the way in which women are freed from these risks, but only so that they are rendered mere spectators who are “seen as frivolous and incapable of taking an interest in serious things, such as politics” (75).
Since its original appearance in article form in 1990, Masculine Domination has been heavily criticized by feminists (a fact that seems to have motivated the new “Preface to the English Edition”). While many of its flaws are immediately apparent, it wasn’t until my final draft of this review that I finally put my finger on what is often so objectionable about Bourdieu’s work here. Bourdieu’s complicated, yet oddly seductive, style perhaps blinded me to the fact that Masculine Domination is not primarily concerned with analyzing the exercise of masculine power, but rather with analyzing women’s apparent acquiescence to it. This often puts Bourdieu into the position of seeming to lecture “victims” of domination about their complicity in their own victimization.
I don’t want to accuse Bourdieu of suffering from the same malady that he so expertly diagnoses. His suggestions of women’s participation in their own domination are founded on his concept of the habitus, which has proven immensely important for feminist theory. Lovell notes that “habitus names the characteristic dispositions of the social subject. It is indicated in the bearing of the body (‘hexis’), and in deeply ingrained habits of behaviour, feeling, thought” (12). The habitus is thus “not a matter of conscious learning, or of ideological imposition, but is acquired through practice” (12). Bridget Fowler notes the usefulness of the concept of the habitus in collapsing the artificial distinctions “which are barriers to thought–between the dualisms of mechanistic thought and voluntarism, between mind and the body, between coercion and willed complicity.” According to Bourdieu, our social identities are neither imposed upon us, nor voluntarily chosen, but rather acquired as a result of the experiment of living (what “works for us”), an experiment that is not consciously undertaken, but is rather coincident with the practical matter of living in a society. In Masculine Domination, Bourdieu focuses on how “the division of the sexes” is not only present in “the objectified state–in things (in the house, for example, every part of which is ‘sexed’)” but also “in the embodied state–in the habitus of the agents, functioning as systems of schemes of perception, thought and action” (8).
Even as this description makes clear the value of the concept of the habitus for feminism, however, it should also expose the problems the concept raises. While Bourdieu’s work points to the dominated position of women in society as something not natural but rather naturalized, it can nonetheless be seen to counsel pessimism and political inertia. The negative effects of a dominated habitus cannot be overcome by will alone, since the habitus does not operate at the level of conscious thought but rather is reflected in the “embedding of social structures in bodies” (40). Thus Bourdieu is able to easily dismiss the “intellectualist and scholastic fallacy which . . . leads one to expect the liberation of women to come through the immediate effect of the ‘raising of consciousness’” (40). “The symbolic revolution called for by the feminist movement,” insists Bourdieu, “cannot be reduced to a simple conversion of consciousnesses and wills” (41).
I take Bourdieu’s point here, and in general, Masculine Domination is an important reminder to feminists of the strength and insidiousness of the obstacles to be faced. At the same time, there is something frustrating about the ease and briskness with which Bourdieu dismisses whole schools of feminist thought. Bourdieu remarks in a footnote that he “cannot avoid seeing an effect of submission to the dominant models in the fact that, both in France and in the United States, attention and discussion focus on a few female theorists, capable of excelling in what one of their critics has called ‘the race for theory’, rather than on magnificent studies . . . which are infinitely richer and more fertile, even from a theoretical point of view, but are less in conformity with the–typically masculine–idea of ‘grand theory’” (97n31). This might be seen as Bourdieu’s attempt to defend himself, however obliquely, from the charge that he has failed to engage the work of those “few female theorists” in Masculine Domination. However, Bourdieu’s claims that the great deal of attention paid to these theorists is due to their “conformity with the . . . idea of ‘grand theory’” and is an effect of “submission to the dominant models” can be turned against him. One could just as easily accuse Bourdieu himself of ignoring these theorists because, unlike the female authors he cites who stick to areas constructed as “feminine,” they have transgressed upon territory that the dominant model of intellectual pursuit tacitly reserves for men.
That Bourdieu anticipated such criticism is evident in the somewhat defensive quality of many of his comments. In one footnote, for example, Bourdieu refers to a passage in his The Logic of Practice, “if only to show that [his] present intention does not stem from a recent conversion” (3n2). This is to misapprehend the problem, however. What is at stake is not the duration of Bourdieu’s interest in the issue of Masculine Domination, but rather the time that it has taken him to give it the prominence in his work that it deserves. Now that he has finally undertaken this task, his refusal to deal with “those who already occupy the well-tilled ‘field’ of gender studies” is, as Lovell points out, “quite remarkable” (27n1). “Bourdieu’s decision to ignore almost all of this work [of feminist theory],” continues Lovell, “is surely no unwitting exercise of the symbolic violence he knows so well how to analyse” (27n1). Indeed, Bourdieu seems almost impatient with feminist thought. In a footnote to the original 1990 article, Bourdieu dismissed prominent feminist theorists Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray as “essentialist.” In the present volume their names are not even mentioned, as if Bourdieu could not even be bothered to expand or clarify his earlier remarks.
Throughout Masculine Domination, Bourdieu deals with important feminist problems by first invoking two “extreme” positions, which he presumably intends to signify the limits of the debate, and subsequently discarding each of them for their failure to confront the true social nature of domination. Here, for example, is Bourdieu on the issue of sexual harassment: “Because differential socialization disposes men to love the games of power and women to love the men who play them, masculine charisma is partly the charm of power, the seduction that the possession of power exerts, as such, on bodies whose drives and desires are themselves politically socialized” (79). He continues in a footnote: “This point is made against the tendency to classify all the sexual exchanges of the bureaucratic universe, particularly between managers and secretaries either as ‘sexual harassment’ (which is probably still underestimated even by the most ‘radical’ denunciators), or as the cynical, instrumental use of female charm as a means of access to power’” (79n44). And thus, Bourdieu impatiently dismisses an entire range of questions concerning power and sexuality in the workplace.
As Bourdieu himself notes, “the idea that the social definition of the body, and especially of the sexual organs, is the product of a social labour of construction has become quite banal through having been advocated by the whole anthropological tradition” (22-3), and, one might add, by a significant number of feminists. But, Bourdieu argues, “the mechanism of the inversion of cause and effect that I am trying to describe here, through which the naturalization of that construction takes place, has not, it seems to me, been fully described (23). Even if we take Bourdieu’s word that such a description has heretofore not been provided, we must then ask why he fails to provide it himself. Bourdieu’s opening remarks about “dismantling the process responsible for this transformation of history into nature, of cultural arbitrariness into the natural” (2) suggest a sociologically based study that will expose the workings of Masculine Domination throughout history, not a brief overview limited to a few unrelated sources of data.
Bourdieu’s decision to use Kabyle society as an object of analysis stems from his desire to extract “everything that knowledge of the fully developed model of the androcentric ‘unconscious’ makes it possible to identify and understand in the manifestations of our own unconscious” (54). Since the gender divisions and dominant practices that Bourdieu wishes to identify are so explicit in Kabyle society, by examining it he hopes to engender in the mind of “the unprepared reader” a form of “disconcertion, which may be accompanied by an impression of revelation or more precisely, of rediscovery, entirely analogous to that produced by the unexpected necessity of some poetic metaphors” (55). Eventually we gain “not the familiarity supplied by the acquisition of a simple knowledge (savoir), but the familiarity gained by that reappropriation of a knowledge (connaissance) that is both possessed and lost from the beginning, which Freud, following Plato, called ‘anamnesis’” (55). This complex explanation of Bourdieu’s methodology (which, in its reference to “poetic metaphors,” contains for me echoes of the “defamiliarization” with which the Russian formalists credited literary language) may be seen as Bourdieu’s attempt to solve provisionally the epistemological problem forever raised by his “reflexive sociology,” a problem that is especially relevant here. If masculine domination is as ingrained in our perceptions, thoughts, and actions as Bourdieu suggests, how may we perceive it? May we not be congratulating ourselves on recognizing some of its more obvious manifestations, only to pass over more hidden, and therefore more important, ones? It seems to me that what is required of “the unprepared reader,” after all, is a kind of intuitive sympathy that by definition partially escapes the more damaging effects of masculine domination. Readers who do not share this sympathy could simply argue that Kabyle society represents an extreme case that has little if anything to do with their own. Bourdieu could have overcome this objection by including in Masculine Domination the sort of detailed sociological data and analysis that is so characteristic of earlier works like Distinction. Instead, much of Masculine Domination takes place on the level of assertion. The universal expression of masculine domination throughout all times and places is simply taken for granted, and so Bourdieu need only make minimal effort to distinguish specific from general cases.
This is not to underplay the value of Bourdieu’s observations here. For example, Bourdieu recognizes that “male privilege is also a trap, and it has its negative side in the permanent tension and contention, sometimes verging on the absurd, imposed on every man by the duty to assert his manliness in all circumstances” (50), noting that “what is called ‘courage’ is thus often rooted in a kind of cowardice” since it springs “from the fear of losing the respect or admiration of the group, of ‘losing face’ in front of one’s ‘mates’ and being relegated to the typically female category of ‘wimps’, ‘girlies’, ‘fairies’ etc” (52). “Manliness,” Bourdieu points out, “is an eminently relational notion, constructed in front of and for other men and against femininity, in a kind of fear of the female, firstly in oneself” (53). Bourdieu, furthermore, incisively points out the way in which this relational notion is the operating principle that lies behind the series of oppositions that structure society, even though the specifically gendered nature of these oppositions may not always be fully recognized. The “fundamental opposition” between masculine and feminine is instead “‘geared down’ or diffracted in a series of homologous oppositions, which reproduce it but in dispersed and often almost unrecognizable forms” (106). Turning briefly to one of his favored topics, the academic “field,” Bourdieu points out “the opposition between the temporally dominant disciplines, law and medicine, and the temporally dominated disciplines, the sciences and the humanities, and within the latter group, between the sciences, with everything that is described as ‘hard’, and the humanities (‘soft’), or again, between sociology, situated on the side of the agora and politics, and psychology, which is condemned to interiority, like literature” (105).
In the present edition of Masculine Domination, Bourdieu has included a postscript on domination and love in which he poses the question, “Is love an exception . . . to the law of masculine domination, a suspension of symbolic violence, or is it the supreme–because the most subtle, the most invisible–form of that violence?” (109). In an uncharacteristically romantic and idealistic gesture, Bourdieu seems to suggest the first answer, calling attention to “the perfect reciprocity through which the circle in which the loving dyad encloses itself, as an elementary social unit, indivisible and charged with a powerful symbolic autarky, becomes endowed with the power to rival successfully all the consecrations that are ordinarily asked of the institutions and rites of ‘Society’, the secular substitute for God” (112). As Lovell remarks of this postscript, “it is difficult to resist a certain feminist cynicism here” since “men do not lay aside their male power when they love, as many women have discovered to their cost” (29n17). Bourdieu’s decision to include this postscript was ill-advised to say the least, since, coming at the end of a text so problematic for feminists, it cannot help but be seen as patronizing or as an attempt to “appeal to women [to] forbear to exercise such power as may fall to them in this manner” (Lovell 27n1). Bourdieu compounds this problem by further including an appendix titled “Some questions on the gay and lesbian movement” in which he credits homosexuals with being “particularly well armed to achieve this task” of destroying the principle of division and of being able to “implement the advantages linked to particularisms in the service of universalism, especially in subversive struggles” (123). Bourdieu’s remarks in this very brief section are particularly cogent, yet one cannot help but notice the generous ease with which he grants the gay and lesbian movement the freedom and ability to effect change that he so insistently denies the feminist movement. It is no wonder that many feminists view Masculine Domination with alarm.
Bourdieu died in 2002, and Masculine Domination is thus one of the final books of his career. Masculine Domination is not the sort of foundational masterwork that Distinction and The Logic of Practice have become. Yet Masculine Domination is useful to feminists as a concise statement of Bourdieu’s thoughts concerning gender construction and as (to use one of Bourdieu’s favoured terms) a “limit case” of social constructivist thought. Ultimately, however, Masculine Domination is most valuable for its status as a conceptual toolkit which feminists can use, as Lovell would say, to think with, against, and, inevitably, beyond Bourdieu.
Kevin Marzahl
English Department
Indiana University
kmarzahl@indiana.edu
Review of: Jed Rasula, This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry.Athens: U of Georgia P, 2002.
I remember well the March 1984 cover of National Geographic because it seemed that I could look right into it at an iridescent eagle perched on a floating branch within a third dimension that, of course, vanished if the volume was not held just so. The holography that I see today is put to more practical uses (which that Geographic issue no doubt discussed), as an element of credit cards and software authentication certificates. Reading Jed Rasula calls that eagle to mind for the simple, if idiosyncratic, reason that he applauds and practices what he calls a holographic or hologrammatic approach to writing, in which the “argument is . . . not hypotactic–that is, not hierarchically disposed, but radically egalitarian. Its parts are its wholes and vice versa” (This Compost 8). As Rasula explains elsewhere, the “ultimate implication of the holographic method is that the whole book may be derived from a single proposition” (“Brutalities” 772), an effect with considerable appeal given the media environment in which the book must compete and to which it must adapt, largely through cultivating “redundancy in the information-theoretic sense: it is coded to survive the noise of inattention and distraction” (771).
I have been dwelling recently on this method because Rasula has just given us a compelling book, This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry, in which this “radically egalitarian” hologrammatic style is supplemented by the practice of dissociative collage (8-9). Whatever Rasula has accomplished with this book (over twenty years in the making1) is ultimately inseparable from these practices, which, taken together, constitute what Rasula calls wreading. As Rasula explains, “‘Wreading’ is my neologism for the collaborative momentum initiated by certain texts, like The Maximus Poems, in which the reader is enlisted as an agent of the writing. Reciprocally, the writer discloses his or her own readerly orientation . . .” (11-12n). The result is a frequently recursive structure organized by headings rather than chapters and supporting a dense tissue of allusion and analogy peppered with utterances–call them holographemes–which are at root identical. At its best, Rasula’s wreading produces memorable assertions that achieve the “pungency” of the dialectical aphorisms that Adorno calls for in Minima Moralia:
Dialectical thinking . . . means that an argument should take on the pungency of a thesis and a thesis contain within itself the fullness of its reasoning. All bridging concepts, all links and logical auxiliary operations that are not a part of the matter itself, all secondary developments not saturated with the experience of the object, should be discarded. In a philosophical text all the propositions ought to be equally close to the center. (71)
The center in Rasula’s case turns out to be nothing less than a new atavism, a revival of the Olsonian muthologos. One of the virtues of This Compost is precisely its return to Olsonian posthumanism2, but its excavations in the open field yield claims entranced, and compromised, by grave archaisms exerting a strong centripetal pull on an otherwise excentric project.
Holography simplifies the task of elucidating this thesis, for if the part contains–in good holographic fashion–the whole, then it should be possible to peer under a single heading of This Compost in the right light to see the whole eagle of Rasula’s argument spread its finely crafted wings. I will choose as that section “The Starry Horizon,” wherein the book’s central liability is as apparent as anywhere, but not before a brief introduction to Rasula’s aims, which he targets in the first place because “certain challenges persist: the need of long-term views, the need to reckon our own wild nature into any consideration of ‘nature’ as such” (10).
Rasula’s radical atavism is immediately apparent from the book’s epigraphs (their collective avant-garde rhetoric and typography inflected with sociobiology), while his deliberately unconventional citation practices necessitate his Preface, much of which is devoted to orienting readers to the book’s unusual structure. This Compost, Rasula tells us straightaway, is first of all “an anthology of sorts, concentrating on the Black Mountain lineage in modern American poetry,” the trailing qualifiers signifying that while there are “tacit limits to the poets included,” his “anthology of sorts” is not grounded in what he has elsewhere called “canontology” (xi).3 If Rasula is not interested in canonizing “a particular set of poets” (xi), he is concerned to secure a place for something much larger than the poets themselves: “this book does not validate aesthetic claims commonly made in literary criticism so much as document a stance toward the living planet, a stance these poets share with many people who know nothing of poetry” (xi). Demonstrating that poets as diverse as Walt Whitman, Louis Zukofsky, Gary Snyder, A.R. Ammons, and Jorie Graham share a common stance will be one burden of his book, or, as Rasula prefers, his “essay,” albeit a lengthy one; there are no “chapters as such” but “headings” that “indicate topoi in the old rhetorical sense: sites of excavation and deliberation” (xi). In the first indication of a centripetal force acting upon this project, Rasula notes that although the book is “arranged to be read chronologically, the method is somewhat circular, so the reader will find certain topoi recurring in a seasonal rotation” (xi). And if the argument proceeds according to a natural cycle, so too “footnotes appear at the bottom of the page because . . . I favor a bifocal prospect, atavistic residue perhaps of hunting and tracking instincts” (xi).
While such circuitousness and a preference for asterisks and daggers, rather than the more-conventional numbered endnotes, may not strike readers as anything more than pleasantly anachronistic, if any practice is likely to engender some confusion it is what I refer to above as “dissociative collage.” Long familiar to readers of postmodern poetry, what this method entails is the in-text parenthetical citation of prose but no such page references–and on the whole not even in-text attributive tags–for the poetry that Rasula collages, sometimes for two and three pages at a stretch (indicating a change of authorship only by a tilde at the far right margin). More often than not, readers must consult a special section at the end of the book if they are curious about the disparate sources from which these collages are composted, but even there Rasula foregoes page references for any poetry published prior to the twentieth century “since there are so many editions” (xii).
In spite of this elaborate apparatus, Rasula tells us that the book “is not altogether a scholarly project” but “represents an intersection of communities,” which remark occasions from Rasula a digression on the project’s origins in not only his “ongoing participation in an extensive network of poets” but also, tellingly, his involvement “in the milieu of archetypal Jungian psychology” and a two-year stint reviewing books on Pacifica Radio’s KPFK from 1979-1981 (xiii). The intersection most important to Rasula is that moment, preserved in the pages of journals like Alcheringa, before the myriad practices and communities enabled by the precedents of Charles Olson and Robert Duncan and company became institutionalized as Ethnopoetics and Language writing. Rasula recaptures this nebulous moment in twentieth-century poetics through his dissociative collages, which are justified thus: “By dissociating the name of the poets from many of the citations, I wanted to restore to the poetics at hand that solidarity in anonymity which is the deep issue of planetary time, for that is the ‘issue’ in several senses of the poetry of This Compost” (9). While he prefers not to speak of what “literary politics has made it misleading to call ‘open’” poetics (6) (which for him is too bound up with careerism and its personae), Rasula does subscribe to the notion of “poetry as ecology in the community of words” (7). Moreover, Rasula wants to demonstrate that this stance grounds the identity of “a poetics-in-process” encompassing most of American radical poetics since World War II, “all documents of a poetics attentive to the poem as mutho-logistical, of psyche’s logos, and cosmographic”; even writers like Silliman, Watten, Bernstein, Andrews, Hejinian, and Scalapino share in “this investigative propensity . . . with some different emphases” (45n). As Rasula himself makes clear, then, his project aims to restore a collective identity, as if such a “solidarity in anonymity” was ever the case, as if it was not so clearly an identity under construction.
The heaping of quotations onto the compost pile begins immediately. The Introduction tosses Snyder alongside Thoreau on top of Melville, shovels on Jolas, Emerson, and Bateson, mixes in Atlan, Maturana and Varela, and Santayana, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries indiscriminately rotting together in a ripe but not altogether unpleasing compilation of the various uses to which the figure of composting has been put over the last couple of centuries. Rasula is particularly attentive to the ways Romanticism and Transcendentalism anticipate contemporary ecology, especially as those traditions inform a postwar American poetics itself engaged in epistemological explorations:
Calling on the imagination as a resource of ecological understanding means calling on poetry in a truly re-creational capacity, one that redefines “recreation” as original participation, much as Coleridge sought a poetry that would propagate a continuum initiated by the divine fiat. Such a prospect has gone in and out of focus during the past two centuries, but its reemergence under the countenance of a so-called “Black Mountain” school was historically congruent with, and sometimes affiliated with, the interdisciplinary matrix gathered around what Norbert Wiener named “cybernetics.” (3-4)
Such reemergences and congruities are the very stuff of Rasula’s compost library. But one has to dig deeper into the essay for the strongest whiffs of his thesis, in holographemes like this: “The biological awareness of human species-life animated by the compost library is a crucial link between dormant animal tact and the metabolism of intelligence as it flourishes in writing” (50). For the baldest rendering of Rasula’s argument, it might be most economical simply to reproduce a series of similar claims as a collage4, both to reveal the implications of Rasula’s position and to provide readers a taste of his method:
The post-human–the posthumous Homo Sapiens–passes from cosmos to chaos. But chaos has always been with us, intrinsic to cosmos if not to cosmology . . . . The subterranean transmissions of composting poetry have been compacted in the compost library, where biodegradable thinking occurs, where we can conceivably speak of an “ecology of consciousness” in which psyche wandering is in touch with human boundaries, noting the logos that forestalls the corruption of cosmos by chaos.
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The propioceptive and ecological necessities impinging on the creative act--the psyche acting in the poem on cosmos through logos--are vital to Olson's legacy.
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History is inconsequential data unless animated by the old story sense of psyche (a protagonist) working on creation (cosmos) with some tool (logos). To recover the old lore as evidence of a prior logos is insufficient; one's own psyche mingles involuntarily with psyches elsewhere or in other times. Story--logos--stirs and disturbs psyche.
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What we have at hand now is a need to reimagine the archaic (soul: the archaic word for human) so that it includes logos (certitude, sign) but is not dominated by it, leaving room also for psyche (our personal bit of chaos, which daily and nightly delivers a recycled portion of our "faculty of tact as members of life").
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Myth is amorphous and protean because it so freely changes hands or mouths. Myth is the legacy of biodegradable thought, compost rumination. Myth comes to mouth to make apparent what the eye can't see. It is a means of giving scope to idiosyncrasy and gratuitous beauty--the bounty of gratuity.
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The poetry I've been wreading here enacts myth as carnal movement of words within words, seeds of images and story, feeling and thinking, emerging from the muthologistical certainty of all the evidence we can lay claim to as the centrifugal force of our inner inherence. Net and web, ring and circle, coil and labyrinth, whorl and cup: all shapes, forms, insignia of nature . . . . Finding or "experiencing" nature makes no difference at all without the sense of good nature that stamps all force and form with grace and tact.
Chaos, cosmos, logos, muthos, psyche. Rasula is aware of the dangers attendant upon this lexicon: “When we try to imagine the archaic we know neither what we’re looking for nor what we’re seeing. The old lore is at once a body of testimony and an invitation to risk” (46). To what does such “lore” testify, then, and what do we risk for the sake of surprise? I turn now to “The Starry Horizon” to shed some light upon just these questions.
Robin Blaser, Charles Olson, Kenneth Rexroth, and Walt Whitman figure prominently in “The Starry Horizon,” but not so much as Nathaniel Mackey, Paul Metcalf, and Kenneth Irby (whose poem “Delius” furnishes the title of the section). Irby’s poetry, Rasula informs us in his Bibliographic Glossary5, “is intellectually oriented to a sense of open form and geographical space by way of Olson and Dorn,” although he has an “interest in hermetica . . . nourished by his association with Duncan, Kelly, and Lansing, among others” (240). That many readers have probably not encountered his poetry is no surprise since “most of his work has been issued in ephemeral form” (240). In any case, the section is a typical compaction of poetry and mythological studies, all of it in this instance testifying to the universal importance of “star lore” and the terrible consequences of its loss. Recalling Calvin Martin’s assertion that poetry is a means of computing “where, in the deepest sense, one is in the bio-sphere, using words and artifice that have accurately touched the place” (qtd. in Rasula 8n), “The Starry Horizon” begins from the premise that knowledge of the night sky “facilitated imaginal placement as a coordination of mind and map, psychodynamics and geophysics posing together in astronomical apparel” (114). Such “coordination of mind and map” is most assuredly not cognitive mapping in the sense popularized by Fredric Jameson, who appropriated the concept from social geography in order to suggest the possibility of developing an ability “to grasp our positioning as individuals and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle” (54) over against “the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects” (44). Where Jameson seeks to confront our disorientation under late capitalism, Rasula seeks a Paleolithic sublime in his “lore,” here metonymic of muthologistics in general: “Through . . . such burrowings in the compost library we begin to glimpse an ecological import in mythic lore which makes a point of recalling and imagining a world of profundities exceeding comprehension” (114).
I am tempted, given the status Rasula accords C.G. Jung’s Aion “as a charter of compost poetry” (114), to call mythic lore a kind of racial memory. And what anamnesis, from Whitman to Pound to Olson, disinters from the teeming humus or recollects in searching the heavenly firmament, is nothing less than what R. B. Onians calls “the imagined primal cosmic psyche or procreative power, liquid and serpent” (qtd. in Rasula 115). Or as Rasula himself puts it, “pysche is a personal stain, a portable speck of chaos, a gleaming scale of the ouroboros” (115). Lore is a virtual reservoir, the liquid foundation of an ancient identity: “Pysche itself becomes the ocean of wisdom and tact spans the human world as the oceans of water span the globe” (115). It is a proposition that Rasula will go on to formulate in terms suggested by the late Paul Shepard, who went Bruno Latour one better, arguing that We Have Never Left the Pleistocene. His scholarship has obvious appeal for proponents of ethnopoetics, as a passage like this makes clear:
White European/Americans cannot become Hopis or Kalahari Bushmen or Magdelenian bison hunters, but elements in those cultures can be recovered or re-created because they fit the heritage and predilection of the human genome everywhere, a genome tracing back to a common ancestor that Anglos share with Hopis and Bushmen and all the rest of Homo sapiens. The social, ecological, and ideological characteristics natural to our humanity are to be found in the lives of foragers. (173)
One element of hunter/gatherer cultures that Shepard was particularly concerned to recover is a tribal social structure in which the initiation of adolescents into adulthood is given the attention that it deserves. So far as Rasula is concerned, we might even view “our entire acknowledged civilization as nothing but a series of adolescent gang-related incidents” (116).6The loss of the old lore is that serious a matter for Rasula, and Americans bear particular responsibility “as last first men to breed that monstrance, a civilization whose entire institutional propagation has been riddled with profound lapses of imagination” (116-17). This rhetoric culminates in some very instructive examples of a supposedly devastating “disregard for the American past” in a paragraph from “The Starry Horizon” which I quote in full:
Along with the ravaging of natural and human resources in America, there is a corresponding disregard for the American past. We have little dissemination of such basic contradictions to the inherited views as the Bat Creek, Tennessee, Hebrew coins of 100 A.D.; New England engravings in Roman Numerals indicating adherence to Sosigene’s calendric reforms of 45 B.C.; or traces of an ancient Libyan alphabet in the Virgin Islands. Where do we go for such news but to the poets? (117)
This would be news indeed! But the mystery of why such astounding “basic contradictions” (which Rasula finds in the work of Mackey, Metcalf, and Irby) find “little dissemination” outside of obscure poetry is rapidly dispelled when, hunting in the footnotes, one discovers that this lore ultimately stems from the work of Cyrus Gordon and Ivan van Sertima, both of whom are notorious for what anthropologists, archeologists, and paleographers do not hesitate to call pseudo-science.
Take the first claim, for instance: that remnants of the lost tribes of Israel found their way to the center of North America nearly two millennia ago, as evidenced by the discovery in an Eastern Tennessee burial mound of “Hebrew coins of 100 A.D.” In fact, no such coins were ever discovered. What was purportedly discovered “in 1889 by John W. Emmert, a Smithsonian Institution field assistant, during the course of the Bureau of American Ethnology Mound Survey,” is what has come to be called the Bat Creek Stone (Mainfort and Kwas 2). Mainfort and Kwas offer this dispassionate description of the artifact in question: it is “a relatively flat, thin piece of ferruginous siltstone, approximately 11.4 cm long and 5.1 cm wide. Scratched through the patinated exterior on one surface are a minimum of 8, and possibly as many as 9 . . . signs that resemble alphabetic characters” (3). As Mainfort and Kwas go on to relate, these characters were initially mistaken by Emmert’s supervisor Cyrus Thomas as evidence of a Cherokee alphabet predating Sequoyah’s syllabary and thus as proof of Thomas’s pet theory that the Cherokee were responsible for the mounds which so mystified nineteenth-century Americans. The stone did not become well known until the early 1970s when Cyrus Gordon claimed that by “inverting the orientation of the stone relative to the published illustrations” the characters became legible as a Paleo-Hebrew inscription meaning “‘for the Jews’ or some variant thereof” (2). Contemporary scientific opinion, however, is unequivocal: the Bat Creek Stone is a fraud, very likely perpetrated by the alcoholic Emmert (who was recognized even in the late nineteenth century as not entirely reliable) in a bid to curry favor with his superior Thomas in hopes that proof of Thomas’s theory would lead to permanent employment with the Smithsonian.7 Despite such consensus, the Bat Creek Stone remains an object of fascination for amateur archeologists with other agendas.
Readers are probably more familiar with Ivan van Sertima’s contemporary Afrocentrism than with nineteenth-century artifacts of dubious provenance. Indeed, Van Sertima’s most vocal critics have taken on the task of debunking his work precisely because it is an especially tenacious example of cult archeology.8 These critics note that educators have increasingly found themselves confronted by students who want to know “whether there is any truth to the claim that the ancient Egyptians and Nubians might have influenced or might have created the first ‘civilizations’ to emerge in the Americas” (“They” 199). Critics are motivated, too, by the not-inconsiderable concern that such claims about superior Africans importing the seeds of civilization to the inferior peoples of the Americas also “dimini[sh] the real accomplishments of Native American cultures” (“Robbing” 421). It is a charged and polarizing issue; critics who dispute Van Sertima’s scholarship are for their trouble accused of conspiring to silence the truth about civilization’s African origins, of being “academic terrorists” and the like. Readers can judge for themselves the relative weights of the arguments and counterarguments, but the consensus among professional anthropologists and archeologists seems to me as clear in this case as it is concerning the Bat Creek stone: “There is hardly a claim in any of Van Sertima’s writings that can be supported by the evidence found in the archeological, botanical, linguistic, or historical record” (“Robbing” 431). Gerald Early, invited by Current Anthropology to comment upon the debunking work of Haslip-Viera, Ortiz de Montellano, and Barbour, is even bolder: “The authors are right in suggesting that Afrocentrism is Eurocentrism in blackface. One of the serious problems that oppressed people like African-Americans face is dealing with the sometimes destructive tendency to create parallel institutions that copy white ones almost entirely” (“Robbing” 434). That is, as his critics point out, Van Sertima’s narrative is simply an inversion of “the old ‘Heliolithic hypothesis’ that was so popular among racialist scholars in Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In essence, its proponents believed that civilization arose only once, in a ‘white’ ancient Egypt, and diffused from there to the other parts of the world” (“Robbing” 420n7). Afrocentrism solarizes this hypothesis, as it were, while pushing its claims for the diffusion of civilization from an Egyptian center even further.
Does the lack of mainstream attention to such “news” really constitute a “disregard for the American past” comparable to “the ravaging of natural and human resources”? Is there really any question as to why this “news” is not widely disseminated? What is particularly disappointing about the perpetuation of at best controversial and at worst downright fraudulent information under the rubric of “lore” is that it is so unnecessary to making a larger, and more egalitarian, argument here. That our species has its origins in Africa is almost certain. That global migrations and intercontinental trade predate Columbus is not news. After all, as Jared Diamond points out in Guns, Germs, and Steel, there was an extraordinarily improbable cross-cultural exchange between East Africa and Southeast Asia, via Madagascar, long before Europeans came along (381). Now, Rasula knows something about fact-checking (aside from his considerable scholarship, he was once a researcher for Ripley’s Believe It Or Not!), and it seems unlikely that he is unaware of the scholarly consensus regarding fringe archeology. All of which invites the question, why perpetuate such claims, or at least lend them credibility, at the risk of vitiating his own project? But then again, Rasula makes clear in his Preface that “This Compost is not altogether a scholarly project” (xiii). Moreover, in a gesture that evokes one of Whitman’s most famous utterances, Rasula would seem to foreclose any possibility of conventional criticism of the sort I am leveling here: “If holes are found in the ‘argument,’ all the better–they’re for burrowing, for warmth and intimacy” (8). Can we bring “scholarly” criteria to bear upon a book that looks at first like an academic duck but at second glance resembles a rabbit?
The question recalls another commentary from the issue of Current Anthropology discussed above. Anthropologist David Browman commends Haslip-Viera, Ortiz de Montellano, and Barbour for the “thankless” work they undertake in even engaging Van Sertima’s work when most academics simply ignore it; but Browman goes on to suggest that this “quest is in one sense futile, as they attempt to apply academic definitions of ‘knowledge’ in a cultural situation where such standards simply are not seen as appropriate by the members of the group involved” (“Robbing” 432). The problem of incommensurable epistemologies is all too familiar to readers of postmodern theory. And it issues once again from Rasula’s book. I would like in closing to approach this problem by juxtaposing Rasula’s Olsonian posthumanism with the work of two other posthumanist scholars with whom he might be expected to have some affinity, in hopes that the differences that emerge might disclose the contingency of Rasula’s observations. I will turn first to William V. Spanos, who has done so much to enable a philosophical discourse on American poetry, and then to Cary Wolfe, who has been diligently synthesizing developments in posthumanism while revealing the speciesist limits of many of those advances, and whose Critical Environments draws upon some of the same philosophers and theorists whose work informs Rasula’s (particularly William James, Foucault, Deleuze, and Maturana and Varela).
In The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism, Spanos reminds us that for millennia “the logos in the Aristotelian sentence ‘Man is the animal who is endowed with logos‘” has been rendered as some variety of rationality (6). Thus, the “‘onto-theo-logical’ tradition has covered over and eventually forgotten its origin in legein (to talk)” (6). In short:
de-struction discloses that the Western tradition at large, despite the apparent variations, has been a logocentric tradition, one based on a philosophy of presence–the mystified assumption of an original Identity . . . that has been dispersed with the “fall” into time. This logocentric/recuperative interpretation of human being thus results eventually in the total acceptance of the secondary or derived (constructed) notion of truth as correspondence–as agreement of the mind with its object of knowledge . . . . (6-7)
And in a particularly germane passage, Spanos notes that “this diagnosis of the discourse of Western man” is not “restricted to postmodern philosophers,” but is shared by a number of “postmodern writers,” among them Charles Olson, whom Spanos goes on to quote from Letter 23 of The Maximus Poems (“muthologos has lost such ground,” etc.) (11). While Spanos, like Rasula, finds much to admire in early critiques of logocentrism, he argues that they are not sufficient, not least because humanism has been too quick to criticize “the limitations of positivistic scientific inquiry” without acknowledging that the “vicious circularity of technological method has been inscribed in all the disciplines” (19). This is why Spanos ultimately calls for a transdisciplinary practice, one which overcomes rather than reinforces “the false and secondary opposition between the humanities and the sciences” (23). Hence, “the oppositional intellectual,” for Spanos, “must recognize the affiliative bonds between the specific sites of repressed and alienated forms of knowledge” (xxi). He continues, “What is needed is a specifically engaged but collaborative practice” (xxi).
So far this seems very much in tune with Rasula, whose wreading practices are collaborations in the ongoing construction of a poetic counter-memory. And in a statement on the curricular implications for a posthumanist pedagogy congruent with Rasula’s critique of canontology, Spanos writes, “To utilize history to overcome history, the oppositional intellectual, of whatever critical persuasion, has the responsibility of gaining a commanding view of history and its multiple coercions, not in the sense of a panoptic mastery, but in the genealogical sense of their socially constituted origins and ideological ends” (xxii). This is a fit description of what Rasula has accomplished for postwar literary history in The American Poetry Wax Museum. But while Rasula may have begun to chart the genealogy of his own position–that niche in the open field between Ethnopoetics and Language–his “commanding view” does not escape ontotheology’s gravity.
As Spanos shows, logocentrism fuels a “longing for the lost origin, for enlightenment” (11). The nature of that origin may have changed with humanism’s historical rejection of “the Word of God in favor of the mind of mortal Man” (21), the substitution of “the anthropologos for the theo-logos” (22), but the ends of logocentrism’s pedagogical narrative did not change: “human beings exist in some kind of fallen state and therefore . . . the essential purpose of learning is self-evidently recuperative: to regain the heights–and the mental and spiritual well-being–from which they have fallen into the disease of time” (11). Or again: “Western education has thus always reaffirmed a nostalgic and recuperative circuitous journey back to the origin. More specifically, it has always had as its essential purpose the domestication of new knowledge by resorting to the itinerary of the recollective cultural memory” (15). As we have seen, Rasula’s ecological imperatives legislate a project of restoration, although the ouroboros is a recuperative figure activating not so much “cultural” as phylogenetic memory. Humanism may have rejected the theology of a fall from the permanent presence of Identity into diseased Difference, but in its place emerged an anthropology to secure a similar circuit, and now a radically atavistic muthologistics holds that the wilderness of Difference has been tamed by a monoculture, with ecologically disastrous results (to recall the first of Rasula’s epigraphs: “the animal” has been “stolen from us”). This species of posthumanism substitutes the mutho-logos for the anthropo-logos, with a corollary reversal of the poles of Difference and Identity. Of course, not all atavistic theories achieve even this reversal; Paul Shepard seems to find in the Pleistocene a secular prelapsarian moment: “We live with the possibility of a primal closure. All around us aspects of the modern world–diet, exercise, medicine, art, work, family, philosophy, economics, ecology, psychology–have begun a long circle back toward their former coherence” (170, emphasis added). But whether ethnopoetics seeks to recover a primal Identity or an original Difference, it turns to the deep past in the name of our “mental and spiritual well-being.” The center changes, the circle remains intact, or, as Rasula might say, in tact. But even if tact is necessary to any oppositional practice, it is not enough. This, at any rate, is one of the claims that arises in Cary Wolfe’s Critical Environments.
Wolfe is certainly not alone among contemporary critics in pursuing what Spanos calls transdisciplinarity, in the sense of an oppositional intellectual practice that traces “contemporary power relations in terms of a relay extending throughout the indissoluble continuum of being, from the ontological (the anthropologos) through the cultural (the discourse of Man) to the economic and sociopolitical (the practices of consumer capitalism, patriarchy, and racism)” (xxiii). But he has been crucial to the dissemination of systems theory in America. And a comparison between Rasula’s timely but brief nods to cybernetics in his Introduction and Wolfe’s more sustained study suggests that in composting autopoeisis until it is indistinguishable from lore, Rasula’s posthumanism may serve, as Spanos might say, to domesticate this “new knowledge.” At the very least, we can say that there is a very different position vis-à-vis “wisdom” to be derived from systems-theoretical transdisciplinarity, and Wolfe has formulated it succinctly thus: “the only way out is through” (Critical xiv). What Wolfe’s slogan for a reconstructed pragmatism means is that we must “follow through to its conclusion the problem of contingency, to assert that ‘everything that is said is said by someone,’ and to then remember that all such assertions are based on a ‘blind spot’ of paradoxical distinction that not the observer in question, but only other observers, can disclose . . . . Self-critical reflection is thus, strictly speaking, impossible, and must instead be distributed in the social field among . . . a ‘plurality’ of observers” (xviii).
I will forego a lengthy explication of what such a distribution of blind spots throughout the social field entails and how Wolfe arrives at this conclusion. As I noted before we began this detour through other posthumanisms, my hope was simply to disclose the contingency of Rasula’s observations. Or, put otherwise, to show that Rasula sees what he can see, namely a pressing need for “long term views” which “reckon our own wild natures into any consideration of ‘nature’ as such” (10). It comes as no surprise, then, that he feels an affinity for Maturana and Varela, whose biological research leads them (like many of the poets in Rasula’s “anthology of sorts”) to recognize East Asian wisdom. It is an affinity grounded in what Wolfe identifies in Critical Environments as the hope “that ethics may somehow do the work of politics” (80). While Wolfe is careful not to dismiss the explanatory power of mutual causality, he asserts that Maturana and Varela’s “repeated calls for us to heed the wisdom of Buddhist ‘mindfulness’ and ‘egolessness’” are an attempt “to solve by ethical fiat and spiritual bootstrapping the complex problems of social life conducted in conditions of material scarcity, economic inequality, and institutionalized discrimination of various forms” (81). Mutatis mutandis, this discloses quite clearly the limitations of Rasula’s closing endorsement of “the sense of good nature that stamps all force and form with grace and tact” (199).
Fifteen years ago, in a reply to Charles Altieri called “The Politics of, the Politics in,” Rasula noted, with some scorn, that contemporary poets were accommodating “the ascendent public discourse of self-promotion and advertisement” (317), singling out “the Care Bears soft touch of Hugh Prather, the carnival geek antics of Charles Bukowski, and the Age of Aquarius spell-casting of Bly, among others” (317). A few pages on, however, he has a different take on “spell-casting”; following Charles Bernstein, Rasula recalls with approval
a venerated principle germane to the poetic tradition of the high sublime: the hypnotic reverie, the stupefied assent of the reader drugged with bewitching words. As Brecht would remind us, a self-critical method of delivery need not entail a less impassioned spectacle; it simply serves as a way of maintaining a functional perspective that visibly operates alongside the passion it conveys. (320)
Holography seems to be Rasula’s own signature accommodation, his sentences no less astute for being enchanting, the lore they transmit by no means irrelevant for being archaic (however much it taxes my credulity). But I get the sense, reading Rasula, that such magic really suffices as an oppositional practice if one adopts the long view of deep history, and this gives me pause.
If, following Wolfe, we measure concepts pragmatically by the work they enable–by the observations they make possible–what can we make of the view that Rasula’s framework affords us:
We face a dilemma unprecedented in the entire epoch of Christian moralism or the preceding age of Greek pride: the danger is no longer wicked tyrants and evildoers, it is the cumulative byproduct of normality, with its increasing disinterest in plants and animals, the earth and the stars; its marginal awareness of economic and political dereliction; and a corresponding hyperattention to mass-mediated fame and fortune. (190, emphasis added)
There is no doubt that we live in the midst of an environmental crisis. But as for the rest of Rasula’s characterization of our situation at the start of the twenty-first century (or, as Gary Snyder calculates it, the fiftieth millennium9), his is not a world I recognize. I recognize the caricature that he has drawn here well enough, to be sure. But where Rasula sees “increasing disinterest” and “marginal awareness” I see burgeoning activism and new practices of everyday life, both owing much to the new media. “Increasing disinterest in plants and animals” does not generate trade disputes over genetically modified organisms or fuel a skyrocketing organic foods industry, and as Wolfe points out in the Introduction to his latest book, Animal Rites, contemporary scholarship is only now catching up to popular culture in interrogating our speciesism (1). “Marginal awareness” does not explain the international movement for global justice, while cultural studies has shown again and again that there is more to consuming mass-mediated products than a distracting or narcotizing “hyperattention”; indeed, the blurred line between reading and writing that Rasula so values has analogues in numerous fan subcultures. If Rasula does not see any of this, then of course poetry will appear most valuable as a vehicle for the transmission of good nature. And if poetry is not equipped for alternatives, like the cognitive mapping alluded to earlier, then we can all join with William Carlos Williams in his refrain from Paterson, Book 3: “So be it” (97-98).
“Foster or debunk. It’s a strategic question,” argues Brian Massumi in Parables for the Virtual. In what may be the most refreshingly direct address I have read in some time, Massumi asks:
why not hang up the academic hat of critical self-seriousness, set aside the intemperate arrogance of debunking–and enjoy? If you don’t enjoy concepts and writing and don’t feel that when you write you are adding something to the world, if only the enjoyment itself, and that by adding that ounce of positive experience to the world you are affirming it, celebrating its potential, tending its growth, in however small a way, however really abstractly–well, just hang it up. (13)
There is no question that Rasula has added, in no small way, to the pleasure that I continue to take in poetry. Rasula’s practice affirms and celebrates the potential of poetry to model careful comportment. All the same, my reservations–neither intemperate nor arrogant, one hopes–stand. Many of us share a desire for what Olson, near the end of The Maximus Poems, calls “the initiation / of another kind of nation” (633). That initiation surely requires the decentering of the human. But it just as surely should not circuitously plant the seeds of another center out of the (masculinist) desire for the Paleolithic which Rasula shares with so many of those who opened the field for those of us working today.
1. Rasula himself draws attention to the duration of the book’s composition in his Preface (xiii). One wonders if he does not also have himself in mind when he opens the Introduction with fraternal remarks on Thoreau, whose “instincts were not scholastic, but ecological” and who prepared Walden “with geophysical patience,” thus testifying both “to a composting sensibility: attuned to the rhythms by which literary models decayed and enriched the soil” and to a “reverence for the pagan hieroglyphic divinity of the natural world” (1).
2. Note that this is not a posthumanism avant la lettre but is, at least as early as 1952, an explicit and self-conscious posthumanism; see Olson, “The Present Is Prologue.”
3. Readers may recall this neologism (one of Rasula’s favorite devices) from The American Poetry Wax Museum, where Rasula offers this by way of definition:
Insofar as a canon is more than a roster of names, it is a collocation of attributes, a showcase for modalities of the exemplary. Canontology has to do with sanctioned prescriptions for being, which translates in a given generic setting to styles of belonging. Canontology regulates membership. (471)
And again:
Poetry is at the center of a pedagogic matrix, where it is administratively put to work for canontology. For several centuries, anthologists have labored in the canonical mine at the center of national cultures, separating the purported ore from a murky amalgam of subterranean deposits. I want to suggest by this fanciful analogy that anthologists devoted to the Enlightenment task of sorting the grains of wisdom and beauty have really been working in the dark. (472)
A more comprehensive review would pursue the question of just how far removed Rasula’s project is from this canontological excavation of “grains of wisdom.”
4. The following quotations can be found on pages 43, 45, 46-47, 179, 183, and 199, respectively (all emphasis in the original). If readers imagine each quote as coming from a different author, they will have some sense of what it is like to read substantial sections of Rasula’s “anthology of sorts.”
5. Rasula’s Bibliographic Glossary, an appendix of sorts, would seem to belie his disavowal of canontological motivations, since the “rudimentary contextual data” the Glossary provides is intended to fill lacunae owing to the poets’ not having “been widely anthologized” or not having “received much critical attention” (237). Given these criteria, surely John Ashbery, Robert Creeley, and Gary Snyder have no place in this Glossary.
6. Compare this to Shepard, who suggests that “much of modern angst has its roots in the episodes of failure to mitigate regressive psychological traits in personal development between the twelfth and sixteenth years . . . and the endless social aggression that follows. The lack of appropriate initiation ceremonies for adolescents today is a glaring tear in the fabric of society, patched up by sports, teams, and clubs and exacerbated by gangs, where adolescents create their own identity without the watchful guidance of elders” (160).
7. While the evidence that the Bat Creek Stone is a fraud seems to me incontrovertible, Mainfort and Kwas acknowledge that identifying the culprit is more difficult and that they “have no unequivocal data to present” about the identity of the perpetrator (12). Even though the circumstantial evidence that they marshal against Emmert is quite convincing, it is ultimately moot. There are no coins (as Rasula, following Irby, has it), and the stone has been considered suspect since not long after its appearance; even “Cyrus Thomas and other staff members at the Smithsonian Institution came to doubt the authenticity of the stone” (14). Mainfort and Kwas revisit the entire matter in “The Bat Creek Fraud: A Final Statement.”
8. I am referring to Warren Barbour, Gabriel Haslip-Viera, and Bernard Ortiz de Montellano, who co-authored two major critiques of Van Sertima published in 1997. In order to simplify parenthetical citation, I will hereafter reference Haslip-Viera, Ortiz de Montellano, and Barbour as “Robbing,” and Ortiz de Montellano, Haslip-Viera, and Barbour as “They.”
9. See Snyder. Please note that this parenthetical remark is not meant to disparage Snyder’s call to rethink our calendar according to what he calls “the implicit narrative of Euro-American science” (390). As Snyder notes, “We humans are constantly revising the story we tell ourself about ourselves. The main challenge is to keep this unfolding story modestly reliable” (390). It is precisely the “reliability” of Rasula’s “story we tell ourself about ourselves” which is in question here.
Matthew Hart
English Department
University of Pennsylvania
matthart@english.upenn.edu
Review of: Christopher Hitchens, Why Orwell Matters. New York: Basic, 2002
Orwell’s relevance to contemporary political thought dominates recent treatments of his essays and fiction. In his introduction to a recent Penguin Modern Classics miscellany, Orwell and Politics (2001), Timothy Garton Ash asks, “Why should we still read George Orwell on politics?” before providing the comforting answer that his exemplary political essays mean that “Orwell’s work is never done.”1 The same problem motivates much of Christopher Hitchens’s Why Orwell Matters, where the prolific author, journalist, New School Professor of Liberal Studies, and self-described “contrarian” defends Orwell’s “power of facing” as a political and writerly weapon that retains its potency in an age of postmodern thought and post-Cold War geopolitics (13).
It is a pity for Hitchens that he evidently wrote this book, parts of which were originally published as magazine articles, before the events of 11 September 2001. For Orwell’s reputation as a combative left-winger–a man willing to fight fascism in Spain, join the Home Guard in wartime England, and put pacifists to the sword of his rhetoric–has provided the signature note of Hitchens’s promotional interviews for Why Orwell Matters. In the opinion of the writer celebrated by the New York Times as “the Romantic” among a group of “liberal hawks,” there is no doubt that Orwell, too, would have supported war in Afghanistan and Iraq.2 There is little of this language in Why Orwell Matters, but hardly an interview has gone by without Hitchens bolstering his pro-war stance, and defending Orwell’s relevance, by invoking the ghost of European appeasement and Orwell’s consistent opposition to fascist militarism.3
As I write, the British and United States governments are seeking approval for a United Nations resolution legislating the invasion of Iraq. The times are tense, with a constant flow of words dedicated to explaining a casus belli that a confused public appears to find inexplicable, inexplicably simple, or–if opinion polls are to be believed–explicable only by virtue of demonstrably false beliefs.4 Hitchens’s contributions to this torrent of opinion have consistently been received in light of his recent identification with Orwell. In the words of Ron Rosenbaum, Hitchens is an author “in possession of,” in fact, “possessed by, the spirit of George Orwell.” Or, as David Brooks has it, Why Orwell Matters shows us why “Hitchens matters more than Orwell.”5 Or, if you have taken against Hitchens since 9/11, join Alexander Cockburn in dismissing his departure from The Nation as something “inevitable ever since the Weekly Standard said he was more important than George Orwell” (Lloyd C3). Still, you may be relieved to hear that neither “regime change” nor “Islamo-fascism” is the subject of this essay. My subject is twofold: Hitchens’s attitude to Orwell’s left critics, and–most importantly–the way a reading of Why Orwell Matters reveals the ever-increasing distance between the political conjuncture of post-war Britain and the terrorized, incompletely globalized polis of our millennial moment.
I will return to this last point in the final section of this essay, where I argue for an account of Orwell’s contemporary relevance that complicates Hitchens’s argument. In the meantime, another question goes begging for an answer: Why does Why Orwell Matters matter? The short answer is that it doesn’t–much. As postmodern political critique, Why Orwell Matters has little to offer beyond the axiomatic pieties of the “power of facing” and combative accounts of Orwell’s misuse by left and right alike. As a literary study it might, if lucky enough, find a place among other short works of criticism by literary authors, like Muriel Sparks’s fine book on Mary Shelley.6 But even then, Hitchens’s work begins by swimming against the current of recent academic writing, where Orwell’s brand of socialist humanism and self-consciously “transparent” prose is as antipathetic to the theorized vernacular of the modern humanities program as it is manna to an anti-intellectual media (and disillusioned professoriate) that claims to be scandalized by academic obfuscation and pseudo-radicalism.7 My sense is that Orwell’s early novels, including the excellent Coming Up For Air (1939), are constantly in print but rarely the object of serious critical condescension. Meanwhile, the late novels on which his reputation largely rests, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), are seen as high-school perennials bearing largely symptomatic cultural worth–itself subject to deflation during the post-Cold War 1990s, when totalitarianism appeared briefly to be a defunct political concept.8 Orwell’s nonfiction does a little better: Homage to Catalonia (1938) remains a prestigious artifact of the Spanish Civil War, while essays like “Shooting an Elephant” garner the faint praise of persistent inclusion in freshman composition handbooks.
This point can be made another way by considering Orwell’s place in a growing field of literary studies. Despite the recent expansion and diversification of modernist studies, much of it underwritten by the Modernist Studies Association (MSA), Orwell remains resolutely unfashionable among professors and graduate students pursuing advanced scholarship on literature written between 1920 and 1950 (dates which just happen to capture the period of literary modernism’s first mass readership as well as the span of Orwell’s writing life). The program of the most recent MSA conference lists papers on many a George (Schuyler, Auden, Gershwin, Lamming, and Oppen) but not one on George Orwell.9 Indeed, I can think of only one significant recent book that treats Orwell as an important figure in the evolving history of international modernism, in either its “high-,” “late-,” or “post-” manifestations. That book is Tyrus Miller’s Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars (1999), which describes “Inside the Whale” as a “brilliant, undeceived examination of the main lines of British twentieth-century writing” (8). Miller takes seriously Orwell’s description of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer as a final exhaustion of both the pre-modernist Whitmanian “democratic vistas” and the reactionary modernist “yearning after lost faith and impossible civilizations” (Collected 1: 548, 558). In Miller’s persuasive reframing of inter-war literary modernism, “Inside the Whale” is key to the periodization of late modernism–and not just because Orwell is so adamant about the depressing social relevance of Henry Miller’s “voice from the crowd, from the underling, from the third class carriage, from the ordinary, non-political, non-moral, passive man” (Collected 1: 549). Orwell’s insight lay in recognizing the “neither-nor” tone implicit in Tropic of Cancer and 1940s Europe alike: “the endgame of modern individualistic culture” (Miller 8-9). As Miller puts it: “Orwell posed the writer with a stark choice of two undesirable positions: the autism of being permanently removed from any effective participation in modern life, or the mutism of not being able to practice the free craft of writing” (38-39).
The periodization of late modernism suggests just one way in which Orwell’s writing is relevant to cultural histories of modernity.10 I think, then, that it is reasonable to share–and make plural–Miller’s frustration with the fact that “few critics have developed in a systematic fashion Orwell’s essayistically formulated insight[s]” (9). Whatever the reasons for this neglect, it is a strange fate to befall a writer who, to quote just a few of the most topical elements from Hitchens’s catalog of Orwellian achievements, can be credited with “work on ‘the English question’, as well as the related matters of regional nationalism and European integration; . . . interest in demotic or popular culture, and in what now passes for cultural studies”; as well as an “acute awareness of the dangers of ‘nuclearism’ and the nuclear state” (11). Why Orwell Matters should be important, then, for the opportunity it affords to look again at Orwell’s contribution to the formation of political and literary discourse in late-modern Britain.
But Orwell deserves better treatment than he receives in these pages: I cannot fully recognize this Orwell who, despite all Hitchens’s righteous bluster, appears strangely anemic and de-radicalized. The value of Why Orwell Matters is mostly unconscious. By denying Orwell’s radicalism, making him safe for millennial left-libertarian criticism, Hitchens tidily underscores the predicament of the contemporary Left and the gulf that separates Orwell’s mid-century socialism from our postmodern conjuncture. Reading Why Orwell Matters affords us a valuable opportunity to return to the scene of so many crimes, in particular the bitter fight–joined, in this case, by Raymond Williams–over the values of left cultural criticism in a half-century dominated by the moral defeat and eventual collapse of Soviet-brand revolutionary socialism. And because, against all the odds, Hitchens’s bleak liberal version of Orwell so strangely resembles Williams’s portrait of Orwellian pessimism, Why Orwell Matters reminds us of what has been lost in the journey from Nineteen Eighty-Four to 2003.
To put it this way is to suggest that Orwell can still teach us an historical lesson or two. In Hitchens’s opinion, however, Orwell’s writing is permanently relevant, since its values are independent of political or aesthetic contingencies, but rest upon the certainties of an “irreducible” writerly ethic. The following comes from his conclusion:
The disputes and debates and combats in which George Orwell took part are receding into history, but the manner in which he conducted himself as a writer and participant has a reasonable chance of remaining as a historical example of its own. (205)
And again, in the closing paragraph:
What Orwell illustrates, by his commitment to language as the partner of truth, is that “views” do not really count; that it matters not what you think, but how you think; and that politics are relatively unimportant, while principles have a way of enduring, as do the few irreducible individuals who maintain allegiance to them. (211)
By themselves these passages suggest that Hitchens has abandoned any defense of Orwell’s ideas. Yet crediting Orwell with developing cultural studies avant la lettre demonstrates that Hitchens is still very much invested in the matter, as well as the measure, of Orwell’s writing. There are, then, two distinct strains to Why Orwell Matters, which do not synthesize as nicely as Hitchens would like. On the one hand, there is an abstract or contentless celebration of Orwell’s struggle for independence; on the other, a defense of Orwell as “uncommonly prescient not just about the ‘isms’–imperialism, fascism, Stalinism–but about many of the themes and subjects that preoccupy us today” (10).
The lever that brings these contradictory virtues together is Hitchens’s description of Orwell as a man who struggled to master strongly-felt prejudices and emerge on the right side of history:
The absorbing thing about his independence was that it had to be learned; acquired; won. The evidence of his upbringing and instincts is that he was a natural Tory and even something of a misanthrope. . . . He had to suppress his distrust and dislike of the poor, his revulsion from the “coloured” masses who teemed throughout the empire, his suspicion of Jews, his awkwardness with women and his anti-intellectualism. By teaching himself in theory and practice, some of the teaching being rather pedantic, he became a great humanist. (8-9)
This insight leads to the most interesting moments of Why Orwell Matters, where Hitchens celebrates Orwell’s existential contrariness: an acquired ideological autonomy that is, simultaneously, the source of his greatest insights and the background against which his unresolved prejudices stand out. Thus Hitchens admits to, while haphazardly defending, Orwell’s “problems with girls”; criticizes the “missed opportunity” of his non-engagement with the culture and politics of the United States; and chastises him for his homophobic dismissal of W. H. Auden. That these passages are comparatively rare testifies to Hitchens’s basically heroic depiction of his writer-sage.11 More generally, it reflects the fact that the tide of liberal opinion has largely vindicated Orwell’s cussedness regarding “the three great subjects of the twentieth century” (5): the lies and massacres of Stalinist Communism; the need to fight Nazism to utter destruction; and the reality–too seldom acknowledged in the socialist circles of Orwell’s day–that “the overwhelming bulk of the British proletariat [did] not live in Britain, but in Asia and Africa” (Collected 1: 437). In Why Orwell Matters the definitive guarantee of Orwell’s relevance is the fact of his personal struggle to face the three “isms” in a resolutely contrary, if incompletely oppositional, manner. Hitchens presents Orwell’s legacy as a testament to the necessity of principled political disillusion.
The reader will recognize the value of this ethic to a writer who, at least since his small contribution to the impeach-Clinton movement, has been the poster-boy for principled political back-stabbing.12 That said, there are parts of his analysis that I cannot disagree with. Hitchens is too quick to universalize Orwell’s “three great subjects,”13 but even Orwell’s ideological opponents tend to grant him the boon of his honesty and the fruits of his remarkable self-analysis. Raymond Williams (to whom I will return before long) begins the “George Orwell” chapter of Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (1958) by acknowledging this quality: “It is not that he was an important thinker, whose ideas we have to interpret and examine. His interest lies almost wholly in his frankness” (285). Hitchens seeks to avoid biography and hagiography; his short chapters are arranged so as to extricate Orwell from the deathly embrace of friends and enemies alike, rescuing “Saint George” from beneath “a pile of saccharine tablets and moist hankies” (3). But though he is generally successful in meeting these goals, there is no getting round the problem that a text so dependent on the hard-won integrity of Orwell’s literary and political vision needs greater socio-biographical weight to explain its subject’s struggles with history and conscience.
Consider, for example, the rather incredible fact that Hitchens offers no comment on the question of how Eric Arthur Blair, hack writer and disillusioned ex-Imperial Policeman, transformed himself, between the writing and the publication of Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), into what Williams identifies as his greatest creation, the character of “Orwell–honest observer” (Orwell 89-90).14 Hitchens writes without even the most rudimentary analysis of the relationship between Orwell’s pseudonymy and his characteristic assumption of ideological neutrality: his strategy of trying “to write as if any decent person standing where he was would be bound to see things in [his] way” (Williams, Politics and Letters 388). I am quoting Williams not because I agree wholeheartedly with his conclusions about Orwell’s work, but because his analysis reveals the essential lacuna in Why Orwell Matters–a refusal to consider “not Orwell writing, but what wrote Orwell” (Williams, Politics and Letters 388). Hitchens’s frame of reference is retarded: Orwell’s personal struggle with prejudice is, finally, an insufficient mediating frame for the job of justifying “why Orwell matters.”
Unless it bears the mark of ineradicable wound or betrayal–the suppression of the POUM or a fascist sniper’s bullet–history in Why Orwell Matters is something to be mastered and exposed by Orwell’s victories “in theory and practice.”15 The historical conjuncture from which Orwell wrote is not mined for clues to Orwell’s present-day relevance. Why Orwell Matters offers no thorough analysis of how Orwell came to occupy a social and intellectual position from which he was able to develop what Hitchens celebrates as an ethically reliable method of judgment. Unwilling to historicize Orwell’s novels, essays, or point-of-view (and surprisingly tentative when it comes to advocating an analogous critique of contemporary culture or politics), Hitchens is reduced to settling scores with his critics. Anyone daring to criticize or misread Orwell comes in for a rough kicking in the typically combative pages of this book–and since Hitchens is such a fine stylist and savage wit, his book is a highly enjoyable read. Still, the wrong-headedness of Orwell’s critics will never prove sufficient for the job of explaining his contemporary relevance. One begins to wonder, then, why Why Orwell Matters fails so completely in its appointed mission. I will seek to answer that question by analyzing Hitchens’s disagreement with Raymond Williams–a rigged fight that helps frame a different account of Orwell’s contemporary relevance.
Of all the left-wing critiques anatomized in the chapter on “Orwell and the Left,” none exercises Hitchens so much as Williams’s lament for the “sad ghost of [Orwell’s] late imagination” (Williams, Orwell 71). After making his debut in a sampler of the “sheer ill will and bad faith and intellectual confusion” that has attended Orwell’s reception by left critics, Williams is later advertised by Hitchens as “my prime offender,” worth “saving up for later” (Hitchens 39, 44). When “later” arrives, Williams is described as “representative of the general [left-wing] hostility” toward Orwell (46). Once granted, this status gives added weight to predictable ad hominem attacks on Williams as an ex-Communist who is alleged to have “formed an organic part” of “Stalin’s ‘community’” (53).16 Among Williams’s other sins, personal and intellectual, are found the unacknowledged borrowing of Orwell’s opinions regarding Gissing and the semi-deliberate loss of the manuscript of Orwell’s essay on Gissing–sent to Williams in 1949, when he co-edited Politics and Letters–thus preventing “George Gissing” from appearing in print until 1960 (49). Besides attacking Williams’s integrity, Hitchens’s strategy is to suggest that his critical readings of Orwell are compromised by envy and bad faith (57-58).17
Williams’s argument with Orwell is ultimately political, originating in what he sees as Orwell’s “substitution of communism for fascism as the totalitarian threat” (Williams, Orwell 67). He sees Orwell as a penetrating and mobile political thinker, committed to essential liberties, but hindered by a social imagination that over-identified “oligarchic collectivism” with communism:
[Orwell] gave most of his political energies to the defense of civil liberties over a wide front. But in his deepest vision of what was to come, he had at once actualized a general nightmare and then, in the political currents of the time, narrowed its reference until the nightmare itself became one of its own shaping currents. (Orwell 68)
Hitchens dissents from any characterization of Orwell as the prophet of Cold War despair (he never met an anti-Stalinist he didn’t like), but the fierceness of his attack on Williams obscures the fact that there are local points of interpretation on which they agree. Indeed, some of Hitchens’s observations appear to have their origin in the texts he otherwise excoriates. Writing on “Orwell and Englishness,” Hitchens comments that Orwell’s famous metaphor of England as a family with the wrong members in control “is notable for having no mention of a father in it” (127), while Williams says of the same passage that “the image, as it happens, admits no father” (Orwell 21). In his chapter on the novels, Hitchens quotes from “Writers and Leviathan” (1948) on the post-war political “compunction . . . which makes a purely aesthetic attitude towards life impossible,” where our “awareness of the enormous misery and injustice of the world” means that “no one, now, could devote himself to literature as single-mindedly as Joyce or Henry James” (Collected 4: 409). Regarding this “curiously adolescent” passage, Hitchens notes that “Finnegans Wake was completed in 1939 . . . and were not George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, to say nothing of Dostoevsky, alive to injustice and misery?” (173). Compare this to Williams’s remarks on the same text: “Finnegans Wake was completed in 1939. . . . Reading Orwell’s account quickly, one might never remember the English novelists from Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell to George Eliot and Hardy” (Orwell 32). And later in the same chapter, Hitchens’s observation that Orwell’s Trafalgar Square dialogue in A Clergyman’s Daughter gives us “a distant echo of Joyce” (183) appears to owe something to Williams’s account of this scene as “derived from the night-town chapter in Ulysses” (Orwell 43). As Hitchens remarks apropos of Williams’s borrowings from Orwell’s Gissing essay, “it does not take a literary detective” to notice the affinity between these moments of allusion (49).
Given Hitchens’s unstinting scorn for even a hint of intellectual bad faith, it would be disingenuous to deny the pleasure one feels in noticing such correspondences. Still, the significance of Hitchens’s borrowings from Williams cannot be reduced to a matter of authorial ethics. Why Orwell Matters is a popular book, and I do not suppose that its difficulties in achieving a level of scholarly integrity are particularly egregious. I believe, rather, that Hitchens’s non-attributions are symptomatic of his inability to address the ideological basis of his argument with Williams. The basis of that argument–nowhere theorized in Why Orwell Matters but ever-present in the defensiveness of its rhetoric–is over the status of collectivity and exile, community and dissidence, as rival political values. This is an argument which, given Williams’s attachment to an exploded notion of state socialism, should be an easy one for Hitchens to win. The irony–and, I would add, importance–of Why Orwell Matters is that he does not.
Williams’s disagreements with Orwell are remarkably consistent. In Culture and Society he quotes from Nineteen Eighty-Four, criticizing Orwell for omitting any liberating purchase beyond the narrator’s description of the proles “as an undifferentiated mass beyond one, the ‘monstrous’ figure” (294). Thirteen years later, he finds that the same passages evince a “stale revolutionary romanticism” that involves “a dreadful underestimate . . . of the structures of exploitation through which the metropolitan states are sustained” (Orwell 79-80). In Politics and Letters, Orwell’s depictions of the working classes are related to “an extreme distaste for humanity of every kind” that Williams claims to observe “in Orwell’s choice of the sort of working-class areas he went to, the deliberate neglect of the families who were coping . . . in favour of the characteristic imagery of squalor” (390). Throughout these texts, Williams puts the accent on Orwell’s “inhuman” denial of proletarian consciousness and revolutionary possibility (Orwell 73). His judgment, over the years, becomes harsher and more comprehensive; but it is clear, reading these essays and interviews, that one is involved in a debate over the necessary values of a post-Stalinist left cultural criticism: a discourse in which Williams cannot reconcile Orwell’s “power of facing” with his desire for a utopian estimate of human–collective and working-class–potentiality.
This is an argument which Hitchens embraces with gusto:
A phrase much used by Communist intellectuals of the period was “the great Soviet experiment.” That latter word should have been enough in itself to put people on their guard. To turn a country into a laboratory is to give ample warning of inhumanity. (187)
It is clear from Why Orwell Matters, as it is from his recent rejoinder to Martin Amis’s Koba the Dread (2002), that Hitchens has done with even the vestiges of socialist utopianism: “If it matters, I now agree with [Amis] that perfectionism and messianism are the chief and most lethal of our foes” (“Lightness” n.p.). His anger with Williams emanates from the judgment that in Orwell “the substance of community is lacking” and that, having affirmed a principle of autonomy or self-exile, Orwell could not “carry [himself] directly through to actual community” (Williams, Culture and Society 289-90). Hitchens reacts viscerally to comments such as these, and especially to the insistence that “‘totalitarian’ describes a certain kind of repressive social control, but, also, any real society, any adequate community, is necessarily a totality” (Williams, Culture and Society 291). In Hitchens’s estimation, the left need not–pace Amis–apologize for the horrors of the Soviet “experiment.” And yet the only “believing community” that he upholds within the pages of Why Orwell Matters is the one in which he situates Orwell and himself: a community of “dissident intellectual[s] who [prefer] above all other allegiances the loyalty to truth” (52). Against “the torpid ‘community’ loyalty of men like Raymond Williams,” Hitchens poses the Eastern European dissidents who read and reproduced samizdat versions of Orwell’s dystopic novels.
These are points well made, spoiled only by Hitchens’s over-identification of dissidence with liberal anti-Stalinism–a rhetorical move that allows him to ignore the other half of Williams’s argument:
[Orwell’s] attacks on the denial of liberty are admirable: we have all, through every loyalty, to defend the basic liberties of association and expression, or we deny man. Yet when the exile speaks of liberty, he is in a curiously ambiguous position, for while the rights in question may be called individual, the condition of their guarantee is inevitably social. (Culture and Society 291)
If, as Orwell says in “Writers and Leviathan,” the writer must “draw a sharper distinction than we do at present between our political and our literary sensibilities” (Collected 4: 412), then one can see the justice of Williams’s claim that “the exile” fears political “involvement” not only because “he does not want to be compromised” but also because “he can see no way of confirming, socially, his own individuality” (Culture and Society 291). This is the familiar dilemma of liberal individualism, where the guarantee of social identity is framed by a series of negative liberties and identifiers. It is in this sense, then, that Hitchens misrepresents Williams’s comments about totalitarianism, which end with the crucial qualifier that “to the exile, society as such is totalitarian” (Culture and Society 291, emphasis added). I wish to suggest that Hitchens cannot engage with this discourse without exposing the underbelly of his depiction of Orwell’s politics: a left-libertarian Orwell whose commitment to democratic socialism has been reduced to a series of oppositional poses. Hitchens is scornful of postmodern interpretations of Orwell’s writing. His assertions about moral objectivity to the contrary, however, his politics are as postmodern as one could like, being largely a matter of rhetorical positionality, without even Orwell’s tenuous connection to the politics of class, systems, and economic structure.
As Williams points out, Orwell’s political writings lack any cohesive theory of power or class society: “Orwell hated what he saw of the consequences of capitalism, but he was never able to see it, fully, as an economic and political system” (Orwell 22). But here, Williams joins with Hitchens in his failure to engage with the socialist remnant of Orwell’s writing–and it is this remnant that will save Orwell from friend and enemy alike. Orwell’s assault on proletarian pieties was necessarily ameliorated by the persistence of social democratic governments within Europe: “actually existing” welfare-state economies. This is the fact which Williams downplays and which Hitchens ignores completely. In Williams’s account, the “condition of Orwell’s later works is that they had to be written by an ex-socialist. It also had to be someone who shared the disillusion of the generation: an ex-socialist who had become an enthusiast for capitalism could not have had the same effect” (Politics and Letters 390). Here, Williams refuses to acknowledge that Orwell’s lack of “enthusiasm” for capitalism could otherwise be read as a persistent belief in socialism itself. Orwell’s August 1945 “London Letter” to Partisan Review, written days before the publication of Animal Farm and during the composition of Nineteen Eighty-Four, analyzes the general election victory of the Atlee-led Labour Party in terms that holds the mainstream British left to a radical political standard:
A Labour government may be said to mean business if it (a) nationalises land, coal mines, railways, public utilities and banks, (b) offers India immediate Dominion Status (this is a minimum), and (c) purges the bureaucracy, the army, the diplomatic service, etc so thoroughly as to forestall sabotage from the Right. . . . The great need of the moment is to make people aware of what is happening and why, and to persuade them that Socialism is a better way of life but not necessarily, in its first stages, a more comfortable one. (Collected 3: 396-7)
Unless one ignores or reworks Orwell’s definition of the term, it is false to describe him as an “ex-socialist.” Socialism was, for the later Orwell, synonymous with “Social Democracy” and the need to demonstrate that “Social Democracy, unlike capitalism, offers an alternative to Communism” (Collected 4: 397). Reading Orwell’s later political writings one does not only witness a doctrine of despair or outsiderism–there is, also, a tenacious belief in the Western nations’ ability to draw on a “tradition of democratic Socialism” extant in Europe and Australasia (Collected 4: 371). Orwell might not have the vocabulary to reconcile his political program with the need to “[confirm] his social identity” in a fashion that goes beyond the negative identity of liberal democracy, but Hitchens and Williams ultimately share the fault of making him seem a more blighted and pessimistic political thinker than he is.
Reading Williams and Hitchens alongside one another suggests that Orwell the novelist is a more ideological writer than Orwell the journalist. A novel like Nineteen Eighty-Four is less well-attuned to Orwell’s political imagination than are his restless, endlessly inquisitive, error-strewn political essays. In “Writers and Leviathan,” Orwell asserts that “in politics one can never do more than decide which of two evils is the lesser” (Collected 4: 413). This dogma is supposed to free the writerly side of one’s brain for unconstrained truth-telling. Yet in the dystopias of his late novels, the evil of oligarchic collectivism crowds out the petty, everyday struggle for socialist policies in this world. This is Williams’s great observation, but it comes at the price of neglecting Orwell’s journalistic attempts to make liberal values work in the service of collective social policy. Hitchens, meanwhile, finds value only in the negative critique of Orwell’s dystopic side–a fact that can be explained by his greater reluctance to engage with the British left’s historic failure to defend socialism against its extinction by neo-liberalism. “Community” in Why Orwell Matters is not just the condition of being back inside the whale; its anathematization is the price Hitchens pays for rescuing his hero. Re-historicizing Orwell would compel Hitchens to re-radicalize him beyond the bounds of liberal ethics, for only ideas such as “community” can explain the puzzling-through of class and collective action that is everywhere present in Orwell but absent from Hitchens’s reconsideration of his political and literary hero.
It is this which connects Hitchens to the British New Left intellectuals whom he alternately glad-hands and upbraids. And here we can take counsel from a different–and more polite–argument among the theoreticians of the post-Stalinist left in Britain. I want to end with Perry Anderson’s recent retrospective on Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes, where he argues that Hobsbawm is still prone to a “persistent underestimation of neo-liberalism as the dominant idiom of the period” (Anderson 17). It is the extinction of any existing alternative to neo-liberal political economies, and the concomitant destruction of welfare-state social democracy, that really separates Hitchens and his readers from Orwell and Williams. Anderson writes of two competing instincts in Hobsbawm’s historiography: the “dream of the Popular Front . . . that there was no victory of one party over the other” and the pessimistic realization that
the struggle between revolutionary socialism and capitalism was a fight whose disastrous end, in the death of one at the hands of the other, is the measure of all that has been lost with the elimination of the difference between them. (17)
As long as Orwell is read and a left intelligentsia remains, battles will be fought over where we should situate him amid this difference. The negative value of Why Orwell Matters is that its belated vision of Orwell’s importance prompts us to remember him as a writer from a multipolar age, where the “difference” between Russia and Europe offered some room for maneuver. Why Orwell Matters is proof that this notion now feels like a bad historical memory, a nostalgia not to be contemplated, especially for the contrarian prophet of Islamo-fascism.
1. These quotations are from an edited version of Garton Ash’s introduction, published online in the Hoover Institution’s Hoover Digest, No. 4 (2001).
3. What is inconsistent in Orwell, however, are the means and modality of anti-fascist resistance. It is not beneath notice that Hitchens fails to explain such shifts, never referring to Orwell’s letters and essays from 1939, when Orwell associated the militarism of the anti-fascist Left with a political myopia likely to bring about the kind of “fascizing process” it ostensibly sought to oppose. In a 1939 letter to Herbert Read, entertaining plans for secret anti-war agitation, Orwell wrote that “the fascists will have it all their own way unless there is in being some body of people who are both anti-war and anti-fascist” (Collected 1: 425).
4. I am referring to opinion polls, conducted by media conglomerates like Knight Ridder and AOL/Time Warner, which suggest that fifty percent of Americans believe that one or more of the 9/11 hijackers was Iraqi, and that seventy-two percent think Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was personally involved in planning the 9/11 attacks. See Rubin, A19.
5. See works cited list for full bibliographic details of these online sources.
6. Muriel Spark, Child of Light: A Reassessment of Mary Shelley (Hadleigh, Essex: Tower Bridge, 1951).
8. A survey of the MLA database confirms this general sense: there is no shortage of work being done on Orwell, but little by leading critics from the United States and the United Kingdom, while the only debate in which he has seemed essential has been the relentless controversy over “bad writing” (see n. 7, above). The most recent article of note in a major scholarly journal is Rita Felski’s 2000 PMLA essay on Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), “Nothing to Declare: Identity, Shame, and the Lower Middle Class.” The majority of recent essays on Orwell–some of them very fine–have been published in smaller journals, in essay collections published on the European continent, or in foreign-language journals.
9. See the website for MSA 4 (University of Wisconsin, Madison: 31 October-3 November, 2002) at: <http://msa.press.jhu.edu/NM4sched.html> (accessed October 10, 2002). The “Auden” in question is, I assume, Wystan Hugh Auden’s father, George Auden.
10. There are many other elements of his work that remain insufficiently discussed, including potentially less flattering ones like the link between English patriotism, the essay “Politics and the English Language,” and the racialized models of linguistic reform detailed by Michael North, among others.
11. This quality is measurable both in the extent of Hitchens’s claims for Orwell as an intellectual pioneer and in his habit of ending his chapters with endorsements of Orwell’s positions. Thus, “Orwell and the Feminists” closes: “At least it can be said for Orwell that he registered his participation in this unending conflict” [i.e., “the battle over what is and what is not, in human and sexual relations, natural”] “with a decent minimum of hypocrisy” (154). The chapter on Orwell’s supposed post-war report on Communists and fellow-travelers ends in similar fashion: “In this essential confrontation, Orwell kept his little corner of the Cold War fairly clean” (169). The emphasis, in both these statements, rests on Orwell’s ethical decency, and allows–especially regarding Orwell’s opinions on human sexuality–for a modicum of dissent from his views. But these statements are perorations to chapters that, respectively, find every feminist reading of Orwell wanting in some important respect and describe Orwell’s “List” as insignificant and, anyway, largely correct. Few readers are likely to read Hitchens’s encomiums to Orwellian virtue as merely compensatory.
12. The details of Hitchens’s fights with erstwhile colleagues on the Left and Right will have to await a braver and more dedicated writer than the present author: they go back far beyond the contradiction of Sidney Blumenthal that was Hitchens’s contribution to the Clinton impeachment trial. To be fair to Hitchens, he is candid and (to this unsympathetic reader, convincing) in his public accounting for his more recent renunciation of certain left-wing identities. The following is from one of Hitchens’s many contributions to a discussion of Why Orwell Matters held on Andrew Sullivan’s website. It is dated 30 October 2002: “I stopped identifying myself politically about two years ago, which meant in practice that I no longer thought it worthwhile to say I was a socialist. It doesn’t sting me when leftists accuse me of being a class traitor or a sellout, because that language lost its power decades ago in any case. I would, however, distinguish myself from people like David Horowitz–who has been friend and enemy by turns and whom I respect–in this way. David repudiates his past. I am slightly proud of the things I did and said when I was on the left, and wouldn’t disown most of them. I am pretty sure that I won’t change on this point, and don’t feel any psychic urge to recantation.” See <http://www.andrewsullivan.com/bookclub.php> (accessed 19 November 2002).
13. Imperialism, Communism, and Fascism are not a bad trio, but what about the “ism” of Feminism: the victorious fight for female suffrage in the West, and the struggle–in despotic and liberal states alike–for economic and sexual freedom? Hitchens’s chapter on “Orwell and the Feminists” considers feminist readings of Orwell’s novels and journalism but does its best to imply that Orwell’s failure to engage with feminism (as a mass political movement or as a re-evaluation of the politics of everyday life) should hardly figure in the debit column when we come to assess his twenty-first-century relevance. The defensiveness of Hitchens’s engagement with Orwell’s feminist critics is already signaled in feminism’s erasure from the list of the twentieth century’s “three great subjects.”
14. Hitchens does not, I must add, entirely ignore the question of Eric Arthur Blair’s pseudonymous identity: he brusquely dismisses the whole question. In the midst of disagreeing with Edward Said’s depiction of Orwell as a bourgeois writer, he refers to Peter Stansky and William Abrams, writers of the biographical study, Orwell: The Transformation, as “co-authors obsessed with the Blair/Orwell distinction” (42). This is the closest Hitchens comes to commenting on this matter.
15. On the question of Orwell’s mastery of ideology, the British edition of Why Orwell Matters is more brazen: it is titled Orwell’s Victory (Allen Lane: Penguin, 2002).
16. As it happens, I agree with Hitchens that there’s nothing especially unreliable about ad hominem polemics. I may resent him calling Williams “the overrated doyen of cultural studies” (which is just rude); but I cannot object to him noting that Williams’s “first published work, co-authored with Eric Hobsbawm, was a Cambridge student pamphlet defending the Soviet Union’s [1939] invasion of Finland” (73, 47). As Hitchens says in defending Orwell over his addition of ethnic and sexual characteristics to his “List” of Communists and fellow-travelers: “These things about people are worth knowing” (165).
17. See 53-55 and 71-72 for Hitchens’s treatment of Williams as a critical reader of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, respectively.
Krister Friday
English Department
Michigan State University
kfriday@msu.edu
There is a brief but suggestive moment in Chuck Palahiuk’s popular novel, Fight Club, in which the first-person, unnamed narrator describes how Tyler Durden splices tiny pornographic frames into film reels. In the scene (dramatized in David Fincher’s largely faithful cinematic adaptation of the novel), the narrator describes how Tyler, working as a projectionist at a public theater, comes to splice the image of an erection into a family film:
You’re a projectionist and you’re tired and angry, but mostly you’re bored so you start by taking a single frame of pornography collected by some other projectionist that you find stashed away in the booth, and you splice this frame of a lunging red penis or a yawning wet vagina close-up into another feature movie.
This is one of those pet adventures, when the dog and the cat are left behind by a traveling family and must find their way home. In reel three, just after the dog and cat, who have human voices and talk to each other, have eaten out of a garbage can, there’s the flash of an erection. Tyler does this. (29-30)
Significant in its brevity, this recollected scene comes as close as any in encapsulating Fight Club‘s narrative logic and its complex, imaginative imbrication of identity and historical self-consciousness.
For what Tyler inserts is a single, subliminal frame that represents a moment of masculine prowess. It flickers for an instant, barely registered, before leaving an afterimage that lingers in the (future) memories of the audience. In sequence and out of sequence, fleeting and memorable, framed and frameless, the afterimage serves as the phallic signature of the novel’s charismatic and mischievous anti-hero–and as such as an appropriate emblem for the text’s conception of masculine identity in late-twentieth-century American culture. Much like Tyler’s subliminal insertion, Fight Club avers and projects a masculine identity it sees as both revolutionary and evanescent, an identity whose arrogated transience raises several questions regarding its historical lineaments and periodic framing. Why is this projection necessary? To whom is it addressed? Not from where, but from when does Tyler insert his image, and against what or when is that image, identity, and time visible? How is the constitutive, performative relationship between identity, narrative, and temporal assertion to be understood? In raising these questions through its narrative and its narrative structure, Fight Club provides one example in contemporary postmodern fiction of how the dynamics of identity formation, the logic of narrative, and the antinomies of historical periodization can be conflated–governed as they are by the same impossible, tautological logic.
In the form of a pornographic intrusion, Tyler’s subliminal frame suggests that Fight Club will code its masculinity in terms of the scandalous and the prohibited, an assumed identity-position that is coincidentally confirmed by at least one hostile reading of the film (and by extension, the novel’s) construction of masculinity.1 Moreover, as a fleeting afterimage, one framed as a recollected moment, the pornographic frame “exists” in the diegesis of Fight Club as a twice-removed ontology–as a memory of something that must have persisted in a (remembered) audience’s memory. Prohibited and temporally removed, this moment of masculine prowess is deliberately projected and framed as the marginal, as the erased, as a form of identity that is as imperiled as it is transient.
Indeed, the excess suggested by Tyler’s pornographic emblem is realized in Fight Club‘s conspicuous, if not exaggerated, theme of besieged and waning masculinity. Early in the narrative, when the unnamed, first-person narrator consults a doctor because of unrelenting insomnia, he is given advice that can be seen as paradigmatic for the text’s overt interest in masculine affliction and its etiology: “Insomnia is just the symptom of something larger. Find out what’s actually wrong. Listen to your body” (19). What the narrator discovers, of course, is that this “something larger” is a crisis of masculinity in contemporary American culture–a crisis that produces conspicuous symptoms and necessitates even more conspicuous remedies.
An insurance adjuster jaded with work and his own endless consumer consumption (“what kitchen set defines me as a person?” he wonders sardonically in Fincher’s film), the sleep-deprived narrator attends a series of support groups for the terminally ill, begins a vexed relationship with fellow support-group addict Marla Singer, and eventually meets Tyler Durden, a charismatic soap salesman and iconoclastic mischief-maker and eventual terrorist. The narrator and Tyler Durden seduce and then rebuff Marla, discover a taste for late-night, masochistic, bare-knuckled brawling between men, and start an underground boxing network as deliberate compensation for the emasculating effects of white-collar work and culture. According to the narrator, “You aren’t alive anywhere like you’re alive in Fight Club” (51). Under Tyler’s leadership the fight clubs acquire an underground popularity leading to their transformation into a more politicized, revolutionary movement: Project Mayhem, a series of escalating disruptions aimed at businesses, consumer consumption, and the financial system itself. Eventually, the narrator, along with first-time readers/viewers, discovers that Tyler Durden is merely the narrator’s alter ego.
Both the novel and the film are structured by an extended flashback with the narrator, holding a gun in his mouth, explaining how he met “Tyler,” joined and then resisted both fight club and Project Mayhem, and now finds himself, at the close of the frame, engaged in struggle with “Tyler” in a financial building wired with Tyler’s bombs. In the novel, the narrator awakes to find himself in a mental institution after having shot himself, and in the film, the narrator shoots himself before reuniting with Marla as the bombs detonate across the financial district.
As this narrative summary reveals, the wounding and masochism of Fight Club are key to the text’s construction of masculine identity, making Fight Club another example of what Sally Robinson has identified as a “dominant or master narrative of white male decline” prevalent in post-sixties, white-male American fiction (2). Robinson argues that such narratives construct a notion of male victimization and its related symptomology as redress for a perceived political and social emasculation–a way of compensating for a sense of disempowerment created by a contemporary culture in which the white male no longer occupies a central, unchallenged, normative position. In the context of the cumulative “threats” of identity politics, minority gains in the academy and in the workplace, the decline of single wage-earner households, and a waning of the white male’s monopoly on political power, these narratives have sublated the aforementioned cultural shifts into a new identity position–the embattled underdog and/or victim. In this way, Robinson argues, these narratives of decline allow white men to “mark” themselves as distinctive, even if that “marking” is only the dialectical obverse of an already eroding identity position. In Fight Club, this marking is achieved through the narrative’s compensatory trajectory. In the juxtaposition of male physicality and male bonding as a revolutionary alternative to emasculating white-collar work, ennervating consumer culture, and even vexing heterosexual relationships, Fight Club certainly stages a narrative of “white male decline,” but it is a narrative in which an atavistic notion of masculinity (i.e., one based on fist-fighting and terrorism) is first recovered and then offered the chance to regain its efficacy and reconstitute itself through revolutionary action.
More importantly, as a biographical flashback of male decline and re-emergence, Fight Club is a narrative of identity, one that explains how the narrator came to be; how a certain identity (“Tyler”) emerges and comes to recognize itself; how the narrator, with the help of “Tyler,” acquires his “revolutionary” consciousness; and how, ultimately, the narrator “now” finds himself with a gun in his mouth. This retrospective structure is foregrounded by the dramatic frame of Fight Club, raising the broader and much more important question of the constitutive relationship between identity and narrative history. For the narrator’s flashback is a history of sorts, and as such it offers an example of the traditional logic of cause and effect that underwrites historical knowledge, especially biography: I am what I am because of what I was, what I did, and what happened to me. Told in retrospect, histories offer accounts of the past, and these accounts are inherently (but sometimes only implicitly) teleological, explaining, as they do, the present. That is why it is a commonplace to say that all (narrative) histories, including Fight Club, are primarily expressions of the present and for the present, and its condition, and its identity.2
To be effective, linear, historical narratives must negotiate between temporal sameness and temporal difference, perpetually oscillating between the two. In order to allow historical transitions to be recognized as such, there must be qualitative differences between beginning and end, or between past and present. Without transition, there cannot be linear history. This means that in traditional histories–especially histories that justify or explain a certain distinctiveness of period, culture, or nation–the present and its uniqueness must be both present and absent in its own historical record or tradition. Similarly, an identity with a narrative history of its origins must be, quite simply, external and internal to its own temporal antecedents and matrices. This identity must be present in the sense that all its constitutive events or elements are now, in retrospect, seen as expressions or harbingers of the same, but identity must also be absent from its past, insofar as its uniqueness came to be and (necessarily) emerged from difference.3
This same logic is foregrounded in Fight Club‘s singular, biographical flashback, but it is precisely this oscillation between temporal difference and sameness that Fight Club‘s narrative both needs and jeopardizes, as if the masochism contained in the text’s theme emanates into an openly self-defeating narrative logic. Although Fight Club‘s biographical structure offers an account in which a schizophrenic identity (i.e., “Tyler”) develops and comes to recognize itself (an account in which the present condition is the cumulative effect of the past), in truth the narrative and its frame, (i.e., the diegetic past and present), are, qualitatively speaking, too similar. They are, ultimately, equivalent expressions of the same condition, the same identity, and the same time. This is inevitable, for the simple reason that biography, like other narrative forms of history, suffers from a fundamental tautology. As Tony Myers explains, the oscillation between sameness and difference is integral to history, but it collapses because the interest of the present inevitably appropriates the past as an extension of itself:
history becomes less a putatively disinterested account of the past, than a project of concatenation which yokes together the past, present, and future in a seamless flow leading to some form of enlightenment. Whether from the point of view of the “moment” of enlightenment or that of the present itself, then, history so conceived becomes a variety of hysteron proteron, ceaselessly maladapting the other to itself and finding only that which it is able to impute in the first place. (35)
In other words, history succumbs under the logic of the same in which the “present” extends and consumes the historical horizon, making history merely a “record of its own inscription, a record that, of course, then succumbs to its own inscription, and so in a vertiginous thrall to the present” (Myers 34).
This tautological relationship between present and narrative past has been well-rehearsed, especially in modern and postmodern conceptions of history, and it is certainly not an exclusive insight offered by a text like Fight Club. However, by casting its biographical flashback as a schizophrenic’s narrative, Fight Club foregrounds the way any history, pressed into service as support for identity, is necessarily both schizophrenic and tautological in the way it figures temporal sameness and difference and in the way it accounts for the fact that narratives about identity and its origins must, according to Zizek, “overlook the way our act [of recollection, of analysis] is already part of the state of things we are looking at” (Sublime 59 ). So, for example, in order for Fight Club‘s flashback to maintain the appearance of a teleological development in which a “new” identity emerges, the flashback cannot be Tyler’s at all. It must “belong” to another, to an unnamed narrator who serves as the precursor or precondition for Tyler’s emergence. What is a first-person narration must be disavowed–projected as it were–into the third person. Despite this, the biography is, ultimately, Tyler’s biography; it is the biography of a schizophrenic, albeit one who knows, at the beginning of the frame, that he and Tyler are the same: “I know this because Tyler knows this,” he reveals at the beginning of the frame (12). Tyler doesn’t “emerge” through a narrative sequence or linear flashback; he is present (present in his own past, so to speak) from the very beginning, even if that “presence” must be denied. In retrospect then, the very existence of this narrative flashback–a narrative that must deny its true presuppositions in order to read like at history at all–is merely a symptom, a narrative index or a narrative testimony to Tyler’s present condition and existence.
Indeed, a closer examination of Tyler’s biography reveals that the frame–the “present” in which the gun is inserted into the mouth–and the historical “explanation” that is the flashback are both simply expressions of the same condition. Although Fight Club‘s narrative trajectory suggests, at first glance, that the crisis of male identity is something that is overcome through a redemptive recovery of male prowess and the development of revolutionary consciousness, the narrative only leads up to a “present” condition–captured in the opening and closing frame–of continued helplessness and the related sense that any male identity that exists is simultaneously on the brink of extinction, not emergence. Moreover, Project Mayhem is a movement that stresses the subordination of individual identity to the collective goal of destroying contemporary consumer culture and “blast[ing] the world free from History” (124). As such, its development represents a dialectical reversal whereby agency and identity (the fight clubs where “You aren’t alive anywhere like you’re alive [there]”) engender their own negation (Project Mayhem). In Project Mayhem, the narrator explains, individual identity exists only retrospectively: “only in death will we have our own names since only in death are we no longer part of the effort. In death we become heroes” (178). In essence, Project Mayhem is a movement that subsumes the identity of the individual subject (including Tyler Durden himself) and acquires an internal momentum beyond the control of the individual. Once he realizes that Marla Singer might be in danger and that the movement will inevitably kill thousands, the narrator tries to stop “Tyler” and Project Mayhem, but he fails. The movement, it seems, has grown beyond him.
Ironically, although it is a movement that aspires to destroy “every scrap of History” (12) and secure a new identity for its participants and adherents, the genesis of Project Mayhem is itself an atavistic, compressed recapitulation of the familiar rhetorics and ideologies of western political history: demagoguery, fascism, and the class politics of the infamous communist parties. Despite the promise of a new, emergent masculine identity that becomes conflated with revolutionary rhetoric, Project Mayhem offers only the same masculine identity positions–the “scrap[s] of history”–it sought to sublate. As the fight clubs grow in popularity, Tyler’s cult status grows, and the fight clubs quickly evolve into an incipient movement structured around Tyler’s fascist-like cult of personality–complete with rules, uniforms, acolytes, militaristic overtones, and a “cell” structure. Eventually, the movement adopts the collective goal of class warfare and revolution, reducing each man to an instrument of the project’s collective will. As Tyler Durden explains, “no one guy understands the whole plan, but each guy is trained to do one simple task perfectly” (130).
All of this should suggest that despite appearances to the contrary, Fight Club is not a teleological narrative. It cannot locate the temporal difference that underwrites its central claim: masculine prowess is an identity or condition that came to be, that is part of the evolution of Tyler Durden. In fact, all that Fight Club represents is the (narrative) circularity of the one condition that remains constant as a source of identity: masochism. Is the masochistic, male violence that informs the practices of the fight clubs a palliative, a vehicle to a new identity (You aren’t alive anywhere like you’re alive in Fight Club), or is it merely another symptom of the powerlessness and crisis of identity it is supposed to redeem? That fact that the fight clubs eventually lose their appeal and are sublated into Project Mayhem suggests that the masochistic violence that informs the fight clubs is merely another symptom to be overcome, another obstacle on the path to an authentic–and stable–male identity. In fact, as the narrator confesses, “You can build up a tolerance to fighting, and maybe I needed to move up to something bigger” (123). Moreover, the fact that Project Mayhem “culminates,” narratively speaking, in the closing frame in which Tyler inserts a gun into his mouth and shoots himself suggests that Project Mayhem is no different from the masochistic fight clubs it purportedly transcended. Ultimately, the culmination of Project Mayhem is merely another act of masochism and therefore, according to the aforementioned logic, merely another symptom. The collapse of the difference between frame and flashback, which is also the collapse between present and past, means that there is nothing, qualitatively speaking, beyond the symptom that is masochism. Although the narrator of Fight Club is advised to locate “something larger” beyond his symptoms, there is no redemptive meaning, no otherness to the symptom that can underpin a new identity for the narrator. Simply put, in Fight Club, symptom and its redress are one and the same, just as Tyler and the narrator and beginning and end are all the same.
This tautology–Tyler is the narrator, the beginning is the end, redress is the symptom–means that in effect, there is no temporal difference in Fight Club‘s narrative. There is only the existence of a singular, a priori, masochistic condition that has no real temporal context or coordinates outside of its own act of self-assertion. Like Tyler’s pornographic splicing in the movie theater, this identity as symptom must be inserted into a (narrative) sequence in order to arrogate the ontology and “appearance” of a masculine identity at all. This act shows how narratives like Fight Club‘s flashback are always, so to speak, “after the fact.” They do not so much explain a condition as they justify or compensate for the condition’s inherent contradictions or impossible premises. As Zizek points out, “narrative as such emerges in order to resolve some fundamental antagonism by rearranging its terms into a temporal succession. It is thus the very form of narrative which bears witness to some repressed antagonism”(Plague11). In the case of Fight Club, this “repressed antagonism” is the fact that the masculine identity celebrated in the text is a performative tautology–one that takes its own act of self-assertion as proof of its “history” and its own ontological and temporal consistency. The logic of Fight Club‘s narrative is precisely this circularity, one that says, I became who I am because of my symptoms, but my symptoms are (already) who I am. However, like Tyler’s act of cinematic sabotage–one that requires a theater, a sequence, and a screen–the notion of masculinity averred by Fight Club is similarly in need of completion: it needs first to create, and then be projected into, a temporal context. It needs, in other words, both a time and, eventually, a history in order to become visible to itself.
The logic of Fight Club‘s central symptom, masochism, raises the question of this temporal/historical dimension to identity, and it shows how Fight Club is much more than a reactionary assertion of masculine, gender politics. As we have seen, the collapse between identity and symptom is both necessary and inevitable, because it is through the symptom that the subject comes to be at all. At least I am a subject who has/needs this, the subject seems to say through his/her symptoms, and according to Lacan, this logic explains why the subject “loves his symptom more than himself” and will cling to it even after it has been interpreted and explained (away) in analysis.4 But the embrace of masochism is itself a temporally indeterminant logic, based as it is on abeyance, postponement, and anticipation. As Deleuze explains in his classic reading of Sacher-Masoch, masochism is a relationship to a pleasure that has not yet come:
The masochist waits for pleasure as something that is bound to be late, and expects pain as the condition that will finally ensure (both physically and morally) the advent of pleasure. He therefore postpones pleasure in expectation of the pain that will make gratification possible. The anxiety of the masochist divides therefore into an indefinite awaiting of pleasure and an intense expectation of pain. (63)
In Fight Club, the “pleasure” of masochism is associated with the new masculine identity it seemingly affords Tyler and his followers (You aren’t alive anywhere like you’re alive in Fight Club). By extension, we can say that this masochism, the very support for Tyler’s identity, is itself an empty form without content: it is an expectation of an identity that is to come. What Fight Club offers, in conflating identity as symptom, is a conception of identity in which abeyance and expectation become themselves the positive support for white male identity.
Nothing underscores the way anticipation itself becomes the form of identity so much as the frame of the narrative itself, a frame which “prolongs” the masochistic act in diegetic time, subordinates all narrative events to itself, and suggests, through these formal indices, that masochism as a process is both the beginning and the end of Fight Club‘s narrative construction of identity.5 As a flashback “leading” to the present, Fight Club betrays the linearity of its narrative form and instead “display[s] the most intense preoccupation with arrested movement” (Deleuze 62) as its notion of identity becomes, in effect, the wait for identity.
In this logic of masochism, it is the future itself that becomes the source of this (absent) meaning of identity, just as in Lacanian psychoanalysis, the inherent logic of the symptom points to the future as the context for the symptom’s interpretation. Although they are “meaningless traces” (Sublime 56) in and of themselves, symptoms presuppose their own interpretation and at least offer the promise, however illusory, that they will be read definitively. As such, the symptom is conceptualized by Lacanians as a message that appeals to the future:
The symptom arises where the world failed, where the circuit of the symbolic communication was broken: it is a kind of ‘prolongation of communication by other means’; the failed, repressed word articulates itself in a coded, ciphered form. The implication of this is that the symptom can not only be interpreted but is, so to speak, already formed with an eye to its interpretation: it is addressed to the big Other presumed to contain its meaning. In other words, there is no symptom without its addressee: in the psychoanalytic cure the symptom is always addressed to the analyst, it is an appeal to him to deliver its hidden meaning. (Sublime 73)
Of course, one of the fundamental Lacanian insights is that “the big Other does not exist”: there is no inherent meaning to the symptom; no self-grounding, signifying logic that can irrevocably redeem it; and most importantly, no final authority or context that can account for and contain all its iterations as instances of the same.6 Nevertheless, despite the Lacanian insistence on the metonymic “slippage” of meaning (and by extension, identity), the identification with the symptom is also a way of presuming or positing just the opposite; it is a way of arrogating at least the promise of such a proper symbolic context for identity even where there is none. Identifying with the symptom is thus a way of misrecognizing the symptom’s inherent metonymy, ignoring the fact that ultimately “perhaps a symptom…is not a question without an answer but rather an answer without its question, i.e., bereft of its proper symbolic context” (Tarrying 185). As a result, in the case of Fight Club, the male subject hinges his transgressive, masculine identity on the symptom, and in doing so, he is then obliged to look for his symptom’s proper context and thereby locate the temporal means to frame his identity as something unique or distinctive.
This proper frame is, of course, history, and because of this we can begin to see why Fight Club displays such a conspicuous concern with both masochism and historical periodization as the twin lineaments of the text’s construction of masculinity. As Tyler’s signature act of cinematic insertion suggests, identity seeks a time that it can call its own, a time that says I am now and not then, a time that can render Heidegger’s temporality of Being into a sameness we call identity. As Bhabha writes in The Location of Culture, time, in the form of continuity and tradition, is frequently invoked as a sameness that subsumes contested space(s) and contested time(s) under the rubrics of national, cultural, and ethnic singularities.7 Bhabha’s study of the temporality of collective signification identifies a long-standing assumption that identity is constituted, ontologically, by the time(s) to which it lays claim. To belong to an era, a history, or a tradition, in other words, is to partake of an essential condition that in many ways marks and shapes us as distinctive, as belonging to this time and not another. The fact that the ontology of any historical condition and the ways in which it (allegedly) marks us are perpetually contested does not challenge the logic itself, but only serves to underscore how crucial time and history are to most conceptions of identity.
What this means is that in Fight Club, the very identification with historical period, along with the essence it is thought to confer, becomes integral to the text’s construction of masculine identity. Periodization become the “screen” against which the text’s projected masculinity can become visible and emerge as itself, even if this “screen” is constitutive of identity rather than reflective. Periodization, in other words, is the promise of the symptom’s final context and the possibility of identity’s ultimate guarantee. As a result, because of the importance of periodization, it is Fight Club‘s historical imagination that is charged with envisioning the final, (historical) context that will “complete” the text’s notion of identity.
An important declaration of Fight Club‘s historical self-consciousness is given by Tyler Durden (and repeated by his acolytes) in his explanations of the significance of the fight clubs. Tyler’s reasons for the necessity of both the fight clubs and then Project Mayhem are explained in conspicuously historical terms: it is not simply that contemporary consumer culture has emasculated men, but rather, the identity crises afflicting the (white) male subject should be read as the result of a postmodern “present” bereft of historical distinctiveness or identity. In other words, Tyler reads the crisis of masculinity and the concomitant need for masochism as imbricated within a larger historical condition. Variants of this “Tyler Durden dogma” (141) are expressed throughout both Fight Club texts, and Fincher’s film wisely condenses them into a manifesto-like speech given by Tyler Durden at the beginning of the first fight club:
We are the middle children of History, man, with no purpose or place; we have no great war, no great depression; our great war is a spirit war, our great depression’s our lives. (Fincher)
It is here that we can first glimpse Fight Club‘s anxiety over historical periodization, or more precisely, an anxiety over the absence of periodization that could serve as the proper context/support for identity. What Tyler announces is a familiar form of postmodern historical self-consciousness–one in which the “present” is conceived in crepuscular terms as an aftermath without recourse to a form of History predicated on the event. It is the event that anchors traditional History and makes periodization possible by negotiating sameness and difference: it is the event that distinguishes one time from another, and it is the event that marks/creates any particular period, which in turn is governed by the logic of the same. Without the demarcation of the event, periodization as a form of sameness is impossible, and without periodization, identity as a form of temporal distinctiveness is impossible.8
According to Tyler Durden, Fight Club‘s deployment of hypermasculinity and masochism should be read as an expression of anxious preterition or “end of History” anxiety.9 The men of Fight Club fear their exclusion from a teleological and/or eschatological structure to History, and as the narrator suggests, this structure of History is personified into religious, patriarchal terms:
We are God’s middle children according to Tyler Durden, with no special place in History and no special attention. Unless we get God’s attention, we have no hope of damnation or redemption. Which is worse, hell or nothing? Only if we’re caught and punished can we be saved. (141)
Clearly, “nothing” is worse, because it is the very absence of periodization and its essence that leaves identity equally void. Bereft of “God’s attention,” an hypostatization of History as a metaphysical presence, the “present” becomes interstitial–not yet eschatological and thus not yet Historical. In Derridean terms, this condition is the “disjointure” that (un)marks the present and (un)marks all related ontologies, including periodization. In contrast to the alleged sufficiency of the present to be itself, to be a distinctive time of the same, Derrida conceives of temporality as characterized by a Heideggerian “in betweenness” that disrupts the boundaries between present, past, and future. In a reading that takes Hamlet’s lament that “time is out of joint” as emblematic of this disjointure, Derrida paraphrases this understanding of time as it is proposed in Heidegger’s “Anaximander Fragment”:
The present is what passes, the present comes to pass [se passi], it lingers in this transitory passage (Wiele), in the coming-and-going, between what goes and what comes, in the middle of what leaves and what arrives, at the articulation between what absents itself and what presents itself. (Specters 25)
Caught in this disjointure as the “middle children of history,” Tyler Durden and his followers await the event and with it, the distinction that periodization supposedly brings. Ironically, Tyler’s very conception of this disjointure–of this diegetic “present” that has not (yet) become a period–precludes the very identificatory closure that periodization allegedly promises. History as a form of identity, it seems, is always to come.
Instead, what remains as Fight Club‘s most consistent condition–in addition to its relentless masochism–is the “perpetual present” described by theorists of postmodern consumer culture.10 The diegesis of Fight Club is precisely this postmodern present, one whose only salient feature is the “simultaneity and instantaneity” (Heise 23) of Western technological, communicative, and consumptive practices. In one notable sequence in Fincher’s film, for instance, consumer items instantly “appear” in the narrator’s condominium as he mentions them by name, and periodically, throughout his narration, brand names intrude, Delillo-like, into his consciousness. Similarly, the constraints on any kind of Jamesonian cognitive mapping of this temporal “present” or space are conveyed stylistically, rendered in Fincher’s film through its somber, caliginous lighting and ubiquitous anonymity. There are no wide-angle, establishing shots that might avail some purchase or perspective, and there are few proper names, locations, or dates. This is, in most respects, a claustrophobically generic city, nation, and time.
Curiously, as Tyler’s description of the “middle men of history” reveals, this postmodern “condition” is perceived to be an inadequate form of distinctiveness and thus a failed lineament of a new, anticipated periodization. Why might this be so? Why does the masculinity/masochism Tyler and his followers embrace belong to another (future) context and not the present? It would be tempting to locate the essence of this masculine identity as akin to the “present.” The narrator, could, in other words, identify with his insomnia as a defining symptom of his own, postmodern time and become one more postmodern subject who laments his Baudrillardian, simulated condition, as the narrator seemingly has the opportunity to do in the beginning of Fight Club:
So I didn’t cry at my first support group, two years ago. I didn’t cry at my second or my third support group, either. I didn’t cry at blood parasites or bowel cancers or organic brain dementia. This is how it is with insomnia. Everything is so far away, a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. The insomnia distance of everything, you can’t touch anything and nothing can touch you. (20-1)
As we have seen, however, it is because of the logic of the symptom that the narrator looks to a future time in which his identity will become meaningful or “complete.”
This proleptic move is necessary, not only because the masochistic masculinity averred by Fight Club is merely a form of deferral, but also–and more inclusively–because Fight Club‘s narrative needs to identify another time as a possible location of difference and an “outside” to its own narrative presuppositions. It is important to remember that histories of identities suffer from the same tautology that besets histories of periods: the subject is hopelessly conflated with, and implicated in, its (historical) object. In Fight Club the diegetic past is the diegetic present: there is no history of something other than Tyler’s masochistic condition. Analogously, as Tony Myers explains, modernity and postmodernity cannot locate or identify themselves as distinct, consistent historical eras with distinct, consistent antecedents, because each “is of a piece with the history it underwrites, forever repeating itself…in the mirror of inscription at the expense of its object” (37). As a result of this conflation between subject and object, history–in the mode of a diachronic unfolding and a proliferating of difference–disappears as it is transformed into a object/period of study and a temporal frame that supports the present. Without difference or otherness there cannot be temporal change; without temporal change, there cannot be temporal distinction; without temporal distinction, there cannot be the historical “framing” of identity as something unique, even revolutionary. As Myers summarizes, “without the ‘otherness’ of the past we have nothing against which to define the now. We are thus besieged by a ‘nowness’ for which we can prescribe no limits” (34). In order to misrecognize this circular logic as something other than a hopeless, tautological gesture, Fight Club must locate the otherness necessary for its own act of historical framing. It must, in other words, “locate” a history for its identity and tell the story of how a new identity emerges and comes to be. Ultimately, the present, postmodern “condition” will not work as the sole support for identity: it is already too much a part of identity’s tautological gesture and thus too close to the identity it needs to objectify and foreground.11
In the context of this tautology, it is clear that the theater projection that is one of Tyler Durden’s signature acts should be read as an allegory for Fight Club‘s overriding historiographic impulse, representing as it does the desire to “see” oneself historically and to locate–from without, from another time–the contours of one’s temporal identity. This desire is, of course, pure fantasy, but it is also the necessary, imaginative response to an impossibility created by historical self-consciousness. In other words, how can any historically situated act of reflection or discourse–a discourse that is itself a temporal event and part of a diachronic process of cultural production–see the boundaries of its own historicity as the “time” in which similarity inheres but also gives way to difference? According to Lee Spinks, this is the antinomic tension between “genesis and structure” that raises the question of “how a term within a totality could act as a representation of that totality” (2). As the image of Tyler’s unsuspecting theater audience suggests, the “solution” to this historiographic impossibility is to have one’s time and one’s identity (for both are conflated in Fight Club) recognized by the Other. This is a crucial reformulation of the way historiography is usually conceived. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, recognition plays a key role in the formation and support for identity. In this framework, the identity of the subject is equivalent to the subject’s perceived position in the sliding metonymic signification that is the Symbolic order. This process makes subjectivity beholden to the evanescent, shifting logic of the signifier, which, according to Lacan’s famous definition, “represents the subject for another signifier.” Within this metonymic logic, the consistency of identity is achieved through an appeal to the “Big Other” as that which (finally) guarantees identity, and this “appeal” often assumes the form of interpellation: a quasi-Hegelian dynamic of intersubjective (mis)recognition and symbolic identification. As Zizek explains, this interpellation means that the subject assumes a role it plays for the Other, and it is this role that confers consistency on the subject:
the subject is always fastened, pinned, to a signifier which represents him for the other, and through this pinning he is loaded with a symbolic mandate, he is given a place in the intersubjective network of symbolic relations. The point is that this mandate is ultimately arbitrary: since its nature is performative, it cannot be accounted for by reference to the “real” properties and capacities of the subject. (Sublime 113)
Implicitly, the Other is itself an effect of the logic and structure of the signifying network; it is the necessary presupposition that makes symbolic identification–and hence identity–possible. It enables us, according to Lacan, to “make ourselves seen” to ourselves through the process of recognition vis-à-vis the Other.12
For Tyler Durden and the men of Fight Club, the Other can only be a personified History itself, and the Other’s “symbolic mandate,” as theorized by Zizek, is the perceived call to revolution. As the “middle children of history” (141) and “a generation of men raised by women” (50), the men of Fight Club await the return of a figurative, absent father and the historical recognition “he” will bring. The Father qua History is, in essence, the judgment of the future, the final (symbolic) context that will confer meaning on masochism, Project Mayhem, and the masculine identity that pins its hopes on both. For this reason, Tyler and his men don’t care if they achieve “damnation or redemption” (141)–all that matters is that they are recognized as having an historical identity as such.
This identity and the form of historical recognition it requires are complicated by the fact that both masochism and Project Mayhem are asserted as a revolutionary movement bent on creating a revolutionary time that will support a revolutionary identity for its participants. Within the context of Tyler’s conception of eschatological History, how is this revolutionary identity to be framed? Is the new, revolutionary movement related in any way to the emasculating, postmodern context and that context’s cultural/historical antecedents, and if not, how can one frame a decisive break as something not dependent–even in its negation–on those antecedents? How, in other words, can the revolutionary identity be both unique and historical?
In Fight Club, this impossibility is registered in terms of an ambivalent, contradictory relationship to the Other qua History. On the one hand, the men see themselves as bereft of patrimony in a post-historical, post-stadialist present, and this patrimony is figured as a form of parental neglect and/or abeyance. On the other hand, and by virtue of the impossible logic of periodization, that absence of History must become, dialectically, an oppressive presence against which the defining event of the (future) revolution and masculine identity can be framed. It is this contradictory, dialectical “presence” of History that the Other embodies and figures. As a result, Tyler Durden and his followers often imagine themselves as the victims of the Other qua History, victims who must face the accumulating excretions of a History in decline. According to the narrator, “What Tyler says about being the crap and the slaves of History, that’s how I felt,” (123) and similarly, the narrator observes that
for thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now History expected me to clean up after everyone. I have to wash out and flatten my soap cans. And account for every drop of used motor oil. (124)
As these passages suggest, the historical imagination in Fight Club oscillates between a rhetoric of orphanhood, neglect, and disjunction and a rhetoric of (oppressive) continuity. In short, there is the perception that there is not enough History and at the same time too much.13As a result, the figuration of the symbolic mandate of the Other becomes equally inconsistent. According to the narrator, if Project Mayhem succeeds in destroying the infrastructure of capital, it will effectively “blast the world free of History” (124). Like all revolutions, Project Mayhem is as much an assault on the past, on the antecedent, as it is a transformation of the present into the future:
Somewhere in the one hundred and ninety-one floors under us, the space monkeys in the Mischief Committee of Project Mayhem are running wild, destroying every scrap of History. (12)
At the same time, however, the revolution needs History, or more precisely, it needs to become History and be assimilated within a transcendent, temporal logic that will someday–finally, irrevocably–recognize the revolution’s significance for what it must really be. Contemplating the imminent bombing of the financial tower in which he stands, the narrator of Fight Clubpresumes the existence of the Other’s judgment, and as a result, he imagines the impending destruction as already imbricated within its future documentation as a Historical event:
The demolition team will hit the primary charge in maybe eight minutes. The primary charge will blow the base charge, the foundation columns will crumble, and the photo series of the Parker-Morris Building will go into all the History books. The five-picture time lapse series. Here the building’s standing. Second picture, the building will be at an eighty-degree angle. Then a seventy-degree angle. The building’s at a forty-five-degree-angle in the fourth picture when the skeleton starts to give and the tower gets a slight arch to. The last shot, the tower, all one hundred and ninety-one floors, will slam down on the national museum which is Tyler’s real target. (14)
Conspicuously, of course, Tyler’s perspective on the defining event of his revolution and the historical “perspective” on that event are literally one and the same. By arrogating the (future) perspective of the Other, Tyler hedges his bets against the judgment of History–imagining that the future, as the Other, will recognize his movement and its attendant masculinity in the same way that Tyler himself sees them.14
As the culmination of Project Mayhem’s revolutionary event and, as such, the support for Fight Club‘s notion of masculinity, the anticipated destruction of the Parker-Morris building brings us back to the logic of the interstitial afterimage. Like the pornographic insertion that will exist only in retrospect, this revolutionary act of terrorism will also only be remembered as a “five-picture time-lapse series” (14) that will exist only for future historians. Both are phallic projections writ large, ones whose physical size compensates for their evanescence and thus for the tenuousness of the masculine identities associated with them. As the earlier description of Tyler’s cinematic sabotage makes clear, both are phallic “towers” that are in danger of not being recognized as such:
A single frame in a movie is on the screen for one-sixtieth of a second. Divide a second into sixty equal parts. That’s how long the erection is. Towering four stories tall over the popcorn auditorium, slippery red and terrible, and no one sees it. (30)
It is against the “screen” created by the Other qua History that Tyler Durden projects and frames his notion of masculinity–an act designed so someone can indeed come to see this figurative, historical erection that is Tyler’s revolutionary time. It is the Other that allows Tyler to disavow his performative assertion and thereby imagine the contours of this time from “outside” of his own narrative and historiographic presuppositions. Just as Tyler “sees” himself through the displaced, split mirror of an anonymous narrator, Fight Clubdramatizes how historical self-consciousness, as a form of (narrative) identity, is necessarily schizophrenic because it is necessarily and inevitably tautological.
In the context of postmodern historiography and the debates over how to conceptualize postmodern historicity, perhaps the complex, historical construction of identity in Fight Club hints at an alternative dynamic at work in contemporary postmodern fiction–one that offers a rejoinder of sorts to those who, following Fredric Jameson, conceive of postmodernity as “an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place” (Postmodernism ix). According to Jameson in his now well-known argument, postmodern theoretical and aesthetic practices, as well as the omnipresence of a totalizing, spatial logic of global capitalism, have pre-empted all attempts to “think the totality” of our cultural/material condition and to construct a “genuinely dialectical attempt to think our present of time in History” (46). Jameson’s seemingly contradictory attempts to historicize the “waning of our historicity” (21) should be viewed as part of larger attempt not only to think the totality by critiquing the “present” in historical-material terms but also–and perhaps more importantly–to ground or account for the act of critique itself as it doubles back upon its own temporal matrix. Jameson’s career seems bent on constructing the complex hermeneutic and dialectical frameworks that could answer such a question–namely, how can critique be both “of its time” ideologically while still offering the ability to obtain conceptual purchase on the totality that is the “present.”15 However, what if there is no such position and thus no “outside”–temporally, dialectically, and hermeneutically–that could frame “postmodernity” as a consistent object, time, or material condition? What if, in other words, thinking the totality of postmodernity from within or from without is perpetually doomed to failure, largely because “Jameson’s critique of contemporary cultural production therefore appears destined to become merely the latest effect of a system of conceptuality that he wants to outflank” (Spinks 13)?
What Fight Club suggests is that this failure isn’t as debilitating for historical production as it might seem. In fact, it may be vital to it. With the absence of viable conceptuality to “think the totality” of the present in ontological, historical, or material/cultural terms, we are still left with the exigencies of constructing identities–a process that nonetheless still invokes History and periodization as the necessary, transcendent horizons for framing identity, even if these are largely empty, formal categories without content or closure. For this reason, perhaps Jameson was right to suggest that fictive narrative articulates “our collective thinking and our collective fantasies about history and reality” (emphasis added) (Political Unconscious 34), but only if an emphasis on fantasy obliges further exploration of how psychoanalysis can frame the historiographic impulse, especially as it underwrites identity.16 In other words, “thinking historically” is a process that can never locate its object qua period/identity, but according to Fight Club, what may be more important is the way that this process of failure becomes itself a more fundamental dynamic of identity formation in postmodern historicity.
What texts like Fight Club can contribute is a depiction of the ways a certain kind of figured, historical intersubjectivity informs the historiographic process. Thinking historically is a process whose only consistency seems to be its own perpetual, tautological gesture to frame itself and its own attempts to misrecognize this gesture by imagining an Other and a concomitant symbolic mandate that are, by necessity, “outside” of the temporal frame of what Teresa Brennan has aptly dubbed the “ego’s era.” In its invocation of the Other qua History as the support for identity, Fight Club suggests that maybe Jameson is right to insist on “cognitive mapping” as a means of thinking postmodernity’s material/cultural condition–but only if this form of interpellation is truly, as Jameson announces, part of a “return to the Lacanian underpinnings of Althusser’s theory” (Postmodernism 53). From a Lacanian perspective, historical interpellation is less about identifying the historical/material lineaments of the postmodern “present” and more about creating and securing an identity through a perpetual, imagined form of historical recognition vis-à-vis the Other.17 Although the Other is merely an effect–a necessary presupposition–in the system that produces “identity,” the Other supports the process of identity formation by providing a logic and a structure that explains why identity, historically speaking, is always to come. Just as the meaning of Tyler’s masculine revolution is always to come, the identity of postmodernity–as a period, condition, or a practice–is similarly deferred and unavailable.
Ultimately, the presence of this intersubjective dynamics changes our understanding what it means for a text to be “historical” as a reflection of its time. Texts like Fight Club are not immanently “marked” or informed by their postmodern period or time so much as they assert–performatively, imaginatively, tautologically, in a most Tyleresque fashion–what their time (and identity) ought to be.
Fight Club is a wildly compensatory text, one that brims with a decidedly American, white-male-centered version of “our collective thinking and fantasies about History and reality” and one whose historical imagination is imbricated within a graphic celebration of a “deeply conservative articulation of masculinity…[which] is associated with the virility of industrialization and the social assertion of masculine power in physical labor and war” (Giroux and Szeman 33). In its megalomaniacal assumption that a single individual can engender a historically definitional social and political movement, Fight Club clearly expresses the kind of compensatory paranoia Patrick O’Donnell identifies as a defining temporal logic of American postmodern literature and film. Paranoia, O’Donnell argues, is a narrative strategy for recouping the identity of the postmodern, fragmented, rhizomatic subject by, in effect, conflating it with national and cultural identities within a prefigurative temporal framework. Paranoia is, in other words, the use of “destinal” History to consolidate identity, a process that requires “a certain suturing of individuals to the social imaginary in which crucial differences between agency and national or other identificatory fantasies are collapsed” (13).
In Fincher’s cinematic adaptation of Palahniuk’s novel, this paranoia is encapsulated in the final scene of the film, although this scene is, as mentioned earlier, a rare but pivotal departure from the novel. After the film’s narrator shoots himself, his “Tyler” personality vanishes, and he is reunited with Marla Singer as the two survey the detonations that signal the onset of Project Mayhem. As if to underscore the paranoid conflation of psyche and History at work in the scene, the narrator explains to his long-suffering love-interest, “you’ve met me at a very strange time in my life” (Fincher). Not only does the scene aver the paranoid suturing of the narrator’s biography and the revolutionary event, but in doing so it also ends with a metaphysical guarantee: with the beginning of Project Mayhem, the revolution–and by extension, History itself–will unfold according to the logic and plan of Tyler Durden. By implying the “success” of the vision of History announced by Tyler Durden, Fincher’s film demonstrates how the paranoid (narrative) attempt to situate oneself in History results in an paradoxical “elision of temporality” (O’Donnell 25) in which temporal difference is erased in favor of a conception of History in which change can be predicted and future iterations are immanent–and thus “knowable”–by virtue of their origins.18 In other words, Fincher allows Tyler’s vision of History to be the final word on the matter, and this paranoid confirmation of the shape and logic of the future is tantamount to knowing what the judgment of History will be. As a (confirmed) part of History, Project Mayhem will, in the future, be grasped and understood as part of a continuity whose cynosure is the bombing of the Parker-Morris building.
On the other hand, Fincher’s paranoid conclusion is, ultimately, a distortion, if not an outright repudiation, of the Lacanian logic of the novel. If, as I have been arguing, Fight Club provides an example of a psychoanalytic dynamic at work in the way postmodern texts “think historically” and recognize themselves as historical, then the apparent efficacy of Fincher’s ending–its narrative that conflates the subject with a reconstituted, metaphysical Historical logic–would seem to deny the crucial Lacanian insight that the construction of both personal and historical identity is an interminable process in a perpetual state of deferral or impossibility.
In contrast to Fincher’s conclusion, Palahniuk’s novel emphasizes this inevitability of deferral. Because Tyler Durden awakes in a mental institution after his self-inflicted gunshot wound, the onset of Project Mayhem’s revolutionary event is presumably pre-empted, and the reliability of the narrator and hence the ontology of the “revolution” are both thrown into question. Although the existence of bruised and battered orderlies in the asylum, along with their remarks to Tyler, suggest an independent confirmation of the existence of the fight club movement, Tyler’s closing remarks from the hospital emphasize the choice of deferral over the engagement of the movement itself:
But I don’t want to go back. Not yet. Just because. Because every once in a while, somebody brings me my lunch tray and my meds and he has a black eye or his forehead is swollen with stitches, and he says:
“We miss you Mr. Durden.”
Or somebody with a broken nose pushes a mop past me and whispers:
“Everything’s going according to the plan.”
Whispers:
“We’re going to break up civilization so we can make something better out of the world.”
Whispers:
“We look forward to getting you back.” (207-8)
Critically, Tyler chooses to delay his return to the outside world because it is here, inside the institution, that anticipation–and thus the same logic of deferral that governs masochism–can be endlessly prolonged. Tyler Durden will never “break up civilization,” and Tyler’s postmodern “present” will never achieve its distinctive, revolutionary significance and identity; instead, this impossibility itself is deferred and thereby transformed into possibility. In Zizekian terms, this is a dialectical reversal whereby deferral itself becomes the object of desire and the positive support for identity: “the impeded desire converts into a desire for impediment; the unsatisfied desire converts into a desire for unsatisfaction; a desire to keep our desire ‘open’: the fact that we ‘don’t really know what we really want’–what to desire–converts into a desire not to know, a desire for ignorance” (For They Know Not143-144). Given what we know about the difficulties of figuring and accounting for one’s historical identity, this ending seems preferable to Fincher’s–if only because it reminds us of how thinking and positioning oneself historically is always an act of fantasy that can never end and never succeed. It must wait, in other words, for just the right time.
1. In what looks to be the only academic review of Fincher’s film, Henry A. Giroux and Imre Szeman excoriate Fincher’s film and by implication, Palahiuk’s novel, arguing that far from a viable, Marxist critique of consumer culture, Fight Club essentially offers merely a “regressive, vicious politics” that “reconfirm[s] capitalism’s worst excesses and re-legitimate[s] its ruling narratives” (33).
2. For example, in The Writing of History, Michel de Certeau argues that historical “knowledge” is more about contemporary interests and identity and less about preserving the Otherness of the past. In this view, history is the means by which one generation expresses its difference from its predecessors and that, as a figurative “dialogue with the dead,” history “engages a group’s communication with itself through this reference to an absent third party” (46).
3. Most historical logics “solve” this problem through the concept of latency, in which identity can be both “present” and “absent” in the tradition or the historical record. For a discussion of the way in which latency serves as the iterative, contentious ground for national and ethnic identities, see Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture, especially Chapter 8. See also Slavoj Zizek’s Tarrying with the Negative, specifically his account of how “a nation finds its sense of self-identity by discovering itself as already present in its tradition” (148). For a discussion of how postmodern subjectivity appropriates latency for similar ends, see Patrick O’Donnell’s Latent Destinies.
4. In his discussion of Lacan’s changing notion of the symptom in relation to the sinthome, Zizek concludes the following:
What we must bear in mind here is the radical ontological status of symptom: symptom, conceived as sinthome, is literally our only substance, the only positive support for our being, the only point that gives consistency to the subject. (Sublime 75)
5. In its approach to violence, even if it is largely masochistic violence, Fight Club betrays the same performative logic shared by most mainstream action movies: it positions violence (or masochism) as a vehicle in the service of something else (e.g., a lofty socio/political goal, a resolution facilitating a new identity position, etc.), but its construction of masculine identity depends not upon the goal, but upon the vehicle itself. If it is the vehicle that supports identity, then the vehicle must be prolonged. As Sally Robinson’s work makes clear, the narratives of white male decline operate according to this performative logic: it is not the wounding that leads to its own reversal and a new identity–it is the wounding itself and its perpetuation that confers identity. This is why, according to Robinson, narratives of white male decline have an interest in perpetuating the very conditions they seem to bemoan:
In fact, and in consonance with the logic we’ve already seen many times in this study, that deterioration is necessary to the cultural recuperation of white masculinity–not because wounds are the necessary condition for recuperations, but because those wounds and the impossibility of their full healing are the basis of a new, post-liberationist white masculinity. (89)
6. In other words, according to Lacan, meaning is signification that has not (yet) changed: it is signification that has not (yet) given way to subsequent signs and subsequent contexts. However, the consistency of meaning is inherently menaced by the sliding, metonymic signification that is the Symbolic order and the inherent logic of language. Like words in a sentence whose meanings are only “finished” when the sentence ends (but again always subject to additional sentences and additional paragraphs, and so on), meaning is always and only the process of postponement and revision.
7. In his seminal work, The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha articulates how historical narratives of continuity, narratives that retroactively create culture, nation and “the authenticating ‘inward’ time of Tradition,” (149) are internally menaced by the logic of iteration and the constant need to performatively transform signs of the present into signs of “Tradition.” For Bhabha, this split between the “pedagogical” and the “performative” means that the postcolonial time of the present and all its attendant identities is always split, always ambivalent, always never present, except in retrospect. As a result, what is modern becomes nothing so much as a contested space of iteration:
The problematic boundaries of modernity are enacted in these ambivalent temporalities of the nation-space. The language of culture and community is poised on the fissures of the present becoming the rhetorical figures of a national past. Historians transfixed on the event and origins of the nation never ask…the essential question of the representation of the nation as a temporal process. (142)
8. In his reading of Foucault’s genealogy of Western mental illness, Derrida explains how any history that invokes the event as a transitional concept at the same time invokes History as a metaphysical presence and continuity:
The attempt to write the history of the decision, division, difference runs the risk of construing the division as an event or a structure subsequent to the unity of an original presence, thereby confirming metaphysics in its fundamental operation. (Cogito 40)
9. In many ways, Derrida’s Specters of Marx is a meditation on what remains, historically speaking, without the event. In a question that has implications for Tyler’s “end of history” speech, Derrida asks,
How can one be late to the end of history? A question for today. It is serious because it obliges one to reflect again, as we have been doing since Hegel, on what happens and what deserves the name of event, after history; it obliges one to wonder if the end of history is but the end of a certain concept of history. (15)
10. According to Jameson, the postmodern “present,” in its erasure of historical difference, is characterized by an intensity that is both overwhelming and euphoric. Jameson writes,
The breakdown of temporality suddenly releases this present of time from all the activities and intentionalities that might focus it and make it a space of praxis; thereby isolated, that present suddenly engulfs the subject with undescribable [sic] vividness, a materiality of perception properly overwhelming, which effectively dramatizes the power of the material–or better still, the literal–signifier in isolation. (Postmodernism 28)
Summarizing contemporary theories of postmodern historicity, Ursula Heise explains how the “perpetual present” of postmodernity impoverishes our historical self-consciousness and, in historiographic terms, precludes the historiographic contextualization of the present as period or object. According to Heise, these theories all emphasize the contemporary focus on a present that is increasingly conceived as taking over both past and future, and the difficulty of envisioning temporal patterns that transcend the present and allow the observer to view it from a distance. (30)
11. The collapse between the present and the self, and the way this collapse inhibits historical understanding, is explained Teresa Brennan’s History After Lacan. Brennan argues that capitalism, especially its commodification of nature, reinforces the ego’s psychotic, “foundational fantasy” in which the ego attempts to assimilate all objects as extensions of the self. Brennan observes that “an objectifying projection is a condition of subjectivity” and that rampant commodification only exacerbates the desire to control as a means of maintaining and expanding the domain of the ego (23).
The fact that the narrator of Fight Club feels emasculated by his own instantaneous consumption and the fact that he yearns for a revolutionary historicity outside of that consumption suggests that his present is in the grips of the “ego’s era” in which the ego reduces what there is to itself, it reduces it ‘to the same place’: to one’s own standpoint, and, in this sense, eliminates the distance between one’s experience and that of the other. By locating these experiences in the same place, by making them spatially identical, the ego’s expansion thus eliminates the reality of distance. In turn, this means that the historical reference point that enables one to say that something is outside or beyond the self’s present experience is also the reference point which would enable a line to be drawn between the here and the now in perception, and images and memories that appear to be immediate but are not. It is this reference point that the ego’s era erases. (39)
12. Zizek makes an important distinction between imaginary and symbolic identification, the latter being the notion of identification I am ascribing to the dynamics of postmodern historical self-consciousness. In imaginary identification, the subject appropriates a flattering image or identity for itself, although Zizek argues that most instances of imaginary identification have a built-in symbolic dimension as well. According to Zizek, this symbolic dimension means that
imaginary identification is always identification on behalf of a certain gaze in the Other. So, apropos of every imitation of a model-image, apropos of every ‘playing a role,’ the question to ask is: for whom is the subject enacting this role? Which gaze is considered when the subject identifies himself with a certain image? (Sublime 106)
It is symbolic identification, then, that creates the possibility of intersubjectivity and thus, the possibility for a historically-mediated relation to the Other.
13. Interestingly, this ambivalent experience of history as both too much and too little correlates with Peter Middleton and Tim Woods’s observation that in postwar American culture and fiction there is “a widespread sense that the past has changed, but considerable disagreement as to whether it has mutated, become foreign, dangerous, been murdered or lost all its power…” (50).
14. Lacanian psychoanalysis argues that identity can only be described and taken as a “complete” object in the past tense or in the future perfect tense. As Lacan explains, the emergence of identity is “a retroversion effect by which the subject becomes at each stage what he was before and announces himself–he will have been–only in the future perfect tense” (306). It is from this perspective, the perspective of the future anterior, that Tyler attempts to “see” himself historically.
15. As Steven Helmling explains, for Jameson
to “historicize” means on the one hand to achieve a narrative awareness of History and of your critique’s own place in it (thus, in good Hegelian fashion, to achieve a self-consciousness indispensable to any hoped-for Aufhebung), on the other to figure and attest History as an “untranscendable” Necessity that critique must suffer as its very condition (thus, in good Marxist fashion, to own that consciousness cannot determine, but is inescapably determined by, material conditions). (91)
16. As a reflection of what Peter Middleton and Tim Woods describe as “signs of changing cultural experiences of the past” (141) in postmodern culture, there are a handful of recent studies that explicitly or implicitly explain the act of “thinking historically” or constructing history in postmodern fiction in terms of psychological/psychoanalytic dynamics.
For instance, in Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960’s Fiction, Amy Elias argues that postmodern historical fiction is a form of “metahistorical romance” that combines a post-empirical, post-narrative skepticism toward historical ontology with a fabulist impulse to rewrite, reshape, and rework a “sublime” history that resists totalizing representations. Elias compares the workings of the metahistorical romance to a “traumatized consciousness” and argues that “history is something we know we can’t learn, something we can only desire” (xviii).
Similarly, in Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia and Contemporary U.S. Narrative, Patrick O’Donnell explains how paranoia is the narrative strategy through which (historical) identity is asserted and affirmed in the face of postmodern cultural and theoretical decenterings and dispersions. According to O’Donnell, paranoia is the dominant form of historical self-conscious in American culture today, in part because paranoia offers “fantasies of control and identification” (8) in a postmodern, late-capitalist global network that threatens the integrity and agency of the subject. As a mode of figuring history, paranoia offers
the last epistemology, the final form of human knowledge before knowledge passes away into information. Paranoia is, at root, a way of knowing ourselves in relation to others as having the capacity to be known, to be seen, to be objects of desire and attention. (9)
17. In The Writing of History, Michel de Certeau advances a similar, psychoanalytic account of historiography that has greatly influenced my own, arguing that the Other is integral to the historiographic endeavor itself and, by extension, to the identities of those who write history:
A structure belonging to modern Western culture can doubtless be seen in this historiography: intelligibility is established through a relation with the other; it moves (or “progresses”) by changing what it makes of its “other”–the Indian, the past, the people, the mad, the child, the Third World. (3)
For Certeau, the Other is an impossible object of knowledge: as the very limit of or resistance to understanding, it is the unfailing support for a perpetual hermeneutic endeavor, even though that endeavor is predicated on assimilating–and thus destroying–the otherness it presupposes and the otherness on which it ultimately depends. This is why, in the passage given above, Certeau suggests that the discourse of history must perpetually “change what it makes of its other” and find new otherness in order to support its own activity. By implication, history and the historiographic act need to be prolonged and renewed because they are, primarily, discourses of power and identity. History is, in other words, a means of establishing the identity of the present by invoking the other.
18. Implicit in O’Donnell’s work is an important distinction between temporality and (paranoid) history, a distinction that I have assumed in this paper. According to O’Donnell, paranoia is a retroactive, narrative resignification, but one that must misrecognize its own performative intervention and its own elision of temporality in favor of a seemingly self-evident, “destinal logic” of History. O’Donnell writes,
the consequences of such constructed destinies are inevitably forged in the aftermath of the event itself, but as if the event, in its latency, always possessed this meaning and was always being prepared for by history itself. In this sense, history under paranoia is latent destiny, or history spatialized and stripped of its temporality. (20)
Philip Metres
Department of English
John Carroll University
pmetres@jcu.edu
More than a decade has passed since the 1991 Persian Gulf War, a war that offered up an “instant history” that effaced the histories of colonialism and empire in the Middle East, thanks to saturation media coverage that covered up far more than it revealed.1 There is little doubt now that mass media sources, from CNN to the local news, acted principally as an extension of the military effort. This media saturation has led critics like Jed Rasula in The American Poetry Wax Museum to suggest that the only proper way to resist the war was to refuse to watch television (376).2 Yet Western intellectuals who opposed this war could reach no consensus about how to resist, or even about the very possibility of resistance within the centers of empire; the war seemed to evacuate the very notion of “centers,” as television coverage of Pentagon news briefings infiltrated homes throughout the world.
The crisis of oppositionality appeared most visibly in the impasse between Jean Baudrillard’s postmodern analysis of the war (captured in the provocative title of his book, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place) and Christopher Norris’s Chomsky-inflected critique (no less provocative in the directness of its attack on what he terms Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals, and the Gulf War).3 Neither articulates a completely convincing reading of the war, and each, in light of the other, feels somewhat one-dimensional. To overcome the seeming impasse presented by these contrary paradigms requires an analysis flexible enough to value both the productive paranoia of Baudrillard and the hyperrationality of Chomsky. The Baudrillardian mode impels us to: 1) question not only mass media coverage, but information itself, insofar as it becomes indistinguishable from propaganda in times of war, particularly in what Baudrillard calls “the profound immorality of images”; 2) recognize the way in which war itself has become virtualized, simulacral, and based upon the logic of deterrence; 3) describe the war as a Western civilian experiences it, where the media and military use of optical technology merge to a single aim; and 4) pursue a risky rhetorical strategy that mimics the dominant narrative in order to subvert it. The Chomskyan mode, on the other hand, provides us a model that helps to: 1) deconstruct U.S. media coverage of the war by producing an historical narrative of U.S. foreign policy that emphasizes its complicity in the situation it aims to solve by war and by producing an alternative narrative of war resistance, both at the center of empire and in the Third World; 2) investigate the effects of war on the ground in Iraq (not to mention in the United States, where thousands of veterans suffer from Gulf War Syndrome); and 3) suspend the (postmodern?) illusion that just because something is not covered by the press does not mean that it’s not real. Each paradigm seems to supply the perspectives that are absent from the other, and yet something is missing from both. Neither critic manages to capture his own positionality, or rather, his own subjective history.
If intellectuals and activists struggled to find and transmit their positions vis-à-vis the Persian Gulf War, poets seemed half-paralyzed by its televisual brilliance, missile-eye camera perspectives, and obfuscatory debriefing sessions, by its effacement (via media and military censorship) of corpses, and its blitzkrieg speed.4 Perhaps because of its avoidance of traditional poetic modes that rely on subjective immediacy and imagery, Barrett Watten’s Bad History (1998) wrestles with the war in a way that is almost commensurate with the logic of what Paul Virilio calls “Pure War”–the state of preparedness for war that constitutes the real war.5 At its best moments, Bad History articulates a poetic strategy that mediates the theoretical deadlock between Baudrillardian postmodernism and Chomskyan rationalism. By pursuing Baudrillardian immersiveness without fatuously reveling in it and thereby flattening the contested landscape of history, while at the same time laying the groundwork for a Chomskyan poetic critique of the war that does not extract itself from its own subjective position, Watten’s Bad History effects a resistance that moves beyond smug self-congratulatory rhetoric. By invoking, and then countering, a poetic form that itself has glorified wars–the epic–in a poetry adequate to the conditions of postmodernity, Bad History stands out as perhaps the most important poetic engagement of the Persian Gulf War.6
At the same time, to say that the only way to read Bad History is as a poem about the Gulf War would be overzealous. Of the thirty prose pieces comprising the book, only the first seven (Part A of Parts A-F)–a mere 27 pages of a poem spanning 128 pages, with 21 pages of endnotes–centrally concern the event of the war. The range of subject matter–from readings of office buildings to meditations on William Carlos Williams, from reflection on being named his mother’s executor to mulling over the ongoing shifts in area codes and the subject positions of screen savers–belies any reading of this work as simply a “Gulf War” poem. And yet, that Bad History is framed by the language of the art review (“The 1980s”–“Philip Johnson’s postmodern office building”) and the language of a financial prospectus (“The 1990s”) evokes the conditions of postmodernity in which a war like the Gulf War takes place. Bad History, in short, is not simply about the Gulf War; but in its attempt to lay bare the problematics of narration, of subjectivizing the history of the 1980s and 1990s, it actively resists the representation of that war as star-spangled tracers and ticker-tape parades.
Because of its obsessional relation to narration and history-making, Bad History evokes most particularly the tradition of twentieth-century epic initiated by Ezra Pound’s Cantos, itself a counter to the tradition of epics narrating the birth of a nation through the heroism of warfare. Bad History counters its own epic tendencies in three basic ways. First, it problematizes the history-making procedure of epic by enacting a “poetics of interference” and by stretching an account of the Gulf War beyond the forty-three-day television event known as “Operation Desert Storm.” Second, it articulates a subjectivity vacillating between complicity and resistance, creating a text at war with its own positionality. Third, even though it forgoes the rhetorical oppositionality of anti-war verse, it nonetheless resists through form. Using hypotactic sentences, footers, columnar style, and a hefty appendix of secondary sources, it challenges the formal and ideological limits of mainstream lyric poetry through a language-based “poetry for use.”
| Figure 1: Decoy #1 © Michal Rovner Used with permission of the artist. |
How to frame a poem attempting to cover a subject as virtualized as the Persian Gulf War? The photograph on the cover of the book, “Decoy #1” by Michal Rovner, introduces some of the essential problems with any history of the Gulf War. It is itself an enactment of Bad History. Slightly off-center, the photo depicts a gray, indistinct figure set also slightly off-center, holding both arms above his or her head. Nothing else is visible, and even the ground is indistinct from the sky, creating the impression that the figure could be suspended in utero. The grainy grays of the photo render it, indeed, somewhere between an intrauterine sonograph and the televisual images that were released from the Pentagon, which were replete with target markers and “missile-eye” views of the buildings, bridges, and vehicles to be destroyed. Lacking all context, our “reading” of the image is blocked. We do not even know, for example, whether the figure is American or Iraqi; is the gesture one of victory or surrender? Nor do we know whether the figure faces us or someone else, outside of the picture. We do not know when or where the picture was taken, or even if it is a photograph at all. It seems equally possible that it appeared as a cave sketch of sun worship. But even if Decoy #1 leaves open the possibility that it is an image of an American or an Iraqi, its very inscrutability deprives it of particularity and of affect, blocking a reader’s attempt at identification.
Rovner’s work anticipates the poetics of interference central to Bad History.7 In a 1992 review of Rovner’s exhibition, Watten noted how the artist’s premise was that “where unthinkable events are concerned, interference is as much a form of knowledge as clarity” (“Michal Rovner” 14). In contrast to the tradition of war photojournalism, in which the photograph articulates in its fine detail not only the scene of war but also the position of the journalist-witness–and, hence, the imagined audience at the home front–Rovner’s images, according to Watten,
obstruct and render virtually abstract the faces of war...through the limits of the media, and in Rovner's self-conscious imitation of the gaps in transmission through techniques of reprocessing and reframing, what is depicted is a new relation of knowledge to events.... This knowledge is open-ended, a permanent threat. (14)
In other words, Rovner reproduces the war in such a way that it lacks decisiveness, it lacks a narrative, it lacks the fine grain of the hero’s face. And yet, because Rovner’s images enact the very technology of information transmission, in all its gaps, they are themselves an historical record of the Gulf War, insofar as the war was one of information transmission and obstruction, in which the war’s first hero, in the words of a CNN video, was “the Patriot missile.”
Watten, along with others in the “language poetry” movement emerging in the early 1970s, has similarly worked to articulate a poetry resistant to commodification, absorption, and manipulation, countering the image-economy that is the engine of mainstream lyric poetry.8 I will forgo a full examination of language poetry’s history, innovations, and principal agents, since it is the central focus of this essay to show not that Watten is a language poet, but that he is a poet who, by virtue of his experimental approach to language, offers a particularly useful model of war resistance poetry. Further, such an analysis is probably no longer necessary–given the current critical attention on the movement (or, in Ron Silliman’s term, the “moment”)–and perhaps impossible, given its heterogeneity.
However, a brief glance at some of the contours of language poetry might explain how Watten’s experimental tactics emerge precisely from the realization of lyric poetry’s failure as social action during the Vietnam War.9 According to Bob Perelman’s witty definition, language writing was
a range of writing that was (sometimes) nonreferential, (occasionally) polysyntactic, (at times) programmatic in construction, (often) politically committed, (in places) theoretically inclined, and that enacted a critique of the literary I (in some cases) (21).
Perelman’s parenthetical amendments suggest the degree to which the writers who found each other in the early 1970s shared a multiplicity of poetic tactics, rather than a single poetic strategy–though this common set of tactics does suggest a distinctive movement. Frequently, those tactics struck out against illusions of poetic transparency: transparency of subjectivity (the lyric self), transparency of language (common language made pure), and transparency of image (the image as window into the real). For example, in their 1988 essay, “Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry: A Manifesto,” five language poets, including Watten, offer two proposals: 1) to dissociate the “marginal isolated individualism” of the narrative persona so valued in contemporary poetry (264), and 2) to write a “contaminated” rather than a “pure” language (269).10
These proposals for a new poetry, from a certain angle, address the way in which antiwar poetry such as Denise Levertov’s presumed a position of pristine distance from which one could compose transparent images of U.S. war atrocities on Vietnamese civilians with the pure language of the lyric, without regard for the ways in which American antiwar poets were implicated in the war by their privileged position as citizens of the United States, distant from the scene of battle. In the end, this poetry undergirded the illusion that a “pure” lyric language could resist another “pure” language without consequences–in particular, the bureaucratic language of the Department of Defense, with its technocratic terms such as “body counts,” “collateral damage,” and “friendly fire.”
Watten’s poetry prior to Bad History pursued a rigorously abstract, theoretical, self-distancing strategy of writing that might be considered the absolute negation of the lyric; at times, it is difficult to tell the difference between Watten’s theoretical writing and his poetry. The most evident difference is often simply the publication context–that is, to state one of Watten’s poetic concerns, a frame that tells us “this is a poem.” In a poem alluding, perhaps mockingly, to Pound’s ABC of Reading, Watten’s “The XYZ of Reading” (1988) waxes theoretical about the danger of the lyric as substitute for political action (an implicit attack on the work of Levertov and Carolyn Forché) and anticipates Bad History:
Romantic negativity, the avoidance of any conditions that compromise the subject leading to the subject's lyrical denial of itself, is too easily symptomatic. It's easy enough to feel victimized by the daily news, for example, and that maybe what is intended. Lyrical horror is our "participation in democracy" at the level of violence of compulsory voting in El Salvador. Taken as an assertion, then, such lyricism no longer works even as a form of bondage between writers. (Frame 153)
Watten’s language here aggressively provokes the question: how is this a poem? There are none of the poetic devices that one might encounter in a traditional poem; it reads more like a poetic statement or a manifesto than a poem. What we have, at its most stripped down, is the movement of a mind troubled by the poetry of witness, insofar as it appears a symptom rather than a symbolic action. For Watten, poets today can no longer retain any illusions that writing lyric poetry is a kind of (or replacement for) participatory democracy, as writers like Levertov had felt during the Vietnam War. Watten’s remark in Leningrad, a text co-authored by four language poets reflecting on their encounter with the Soviet Union, cuts to the heart of the problems of lyric subjectivity: “Isn’t there a complicity with power, however at odds one may be with it, behind the sense that one is at the center of things?” (110). What Watten pursues is a poetry that might move against expressions of lyrical horror–which often become mere aestheticizations of violence for the purpose of bourgeois consumption–and instead locates itself in a consciousness constantly worrying over its own epistemological limits.
By countering (not only on the cover, but throughout the book) the lyric’s tendency to rely on image, Bad History revises the televisual history of the Gulf War. Below, I will show how Watten filters the “images” of war through a disembodied voice that hyperconsciously details the overdetermined nature of those images. Here let it suffice that this poem resists the war on the level of its illusion of transparency. But Watten does not simply replace the official media representation of the war with a Chomskyan alternative history, or a Forché-influenced lyric poetry of witness.
In his evasion of the image-economy and lineation of lyric poetry, Watten’s poem uses the sentence as his principle formal device. Heralded by Todorov as an “appropriate form…for a thematics of duality, contrast, and opposition,” the prose poem has an extensive tradition as counter-poetry (qtd. in Monroe 18). Unlike mainstream prose poetry, the “New Sentence,” in the hands of experimental poets like Ron Silliman or Watten, has an unsettlingly non-narrative and cross-discursive thrust. Watten’s combinations and deformations of multiple and often disparate discourses move beyond the critique of political language outlined in Orwell’s famous essay, “Politics and the English Language.” Critiques like Orwell’s hold out for a transparent, common-man language, a throwback to Wordsworth. In Bad History, we encounter a poetic subjectivity that cuts diagonally through art criticism, journalism, romantic lyric, dream language, and financial prospectus. The sentences stretch, harry, and perhaps even subvert the discourses they invoke. Poetry is not a kind of language divorced from these various discourses, but rather, to paraphrase Jerome McGann, a complicating procedure toward and within those discourses.11 The poet becomes, at least for the span of certain sections, a dissenting journalist.
Watten, therefore, moves beyond the space-time miniaturization of the lyric (in its private individual moment) into larger, more expansive cross-dimensional spaces, and over longer stretches of time, through a strategic invocation of the epic. This is admittedly a strange subgenre for Watten to choose, since the epic poem emerged as the form of nationalism par excellence–the story of a people’s triumph by battles–and even more so because televisual coverage of the Persian Gulf War resembled an epic in which generals and technological weaponry were equal characters. However, with Ezra Pound’s Cantos arose a new kind of epic, opposed both to the lyric poem that had risen into dominance by the early twentieth century and to the old epic, which required a more unified and univocal society. In Michael André Bernstein’s formulation, Pound’s “modern verse epic” might still court the strategy of articulating a national (or Western) culture, but it does so “in a society no longer unified by a single, generally accepted code of values…justifying its argument by the direct appeal of the author’s own experiences and emotions” (79). Pound’s Cantos opened the way for modernist experimentation in poems that would collage different texts, voices, and narratives into explorations of national (and even international) subjectivity; Muriel Rukeyser, William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, and many others are indebted to Pound’s opening of the form.
Bad History‘s jacket blurb suggests that the poem both invokes the Poundian epic (it is a poem “including history”) and counters it (“In…Bad History, history includes the poem”) by questioning the notion that the text can somehow exist outside of history while attempting to record history.12 Watten’s “epic,” therefore, is fundamentally at odds with the formal characteristics of epic but not with the project of epic-making, of narrating a subjective (and even national) history. The opening caveat in the book’s acknowledgements page, that “Bad History is a work of literature and makes no claim to factual accuracy,” reverses the docudramatic co-optation of reality for literature, even while in practice Bad History rigorously harries any stable notion of history and factual accuracy. Further, the epigraph, from Mark Cousins’s “The Practice of History Investigation,” alludes to Watten’s cagey approach to history, one equally interested in the problem of trauma and representation as in censorship and representation:
The evident irritation expressed with a concept of event which does not measure up to its canons of evidence, the shock expressed at a practice whose interpretations refer to events which 'historically' may not have happened.... Imagine a practice of interpretation which prefers secondary sources, and unreliable witnesses! (vii)
First, we see that Cousins is interested in the “irritation” and “shock” expressed by people (most likely historians) who are confronted with a counter-method that questions the very basis upon which “objective historiography” has relied. Second, we should note the distinction between the event and the evidence of the event, and the blurring of fiction and history. Finally, in a war in which media coverage rendered impossible even the fantasy of secondary witness (that is, mediated witnessing), Bad History foregrounds the difficulty for American civilians in reconstructing what actually happened; any reconstructed narrative must rely, as former Attorney General and activist founder of the International Action Center Ramsey Clark assiduously attempts to do in The Fire This Time: War Crimes in the Gulf, on secondary witnesses and shaky sources. But if we are to take the quotation as somehow representative of Watten’s poem, then the “preference” for secondary sources represents a sort of provocation, since this preference does not imply the “availability of only” secondary sources.
The Gulf War–itself an event to which most of us were secondary or even tertiary witnesses, if witnesses at all–is the ground from which Bad History emerges. For Watten the event of the Gulf War cannot speak for itself alone. Perhaps because of the incredibly brief span of the war, in marked contrast to the Vietnam War, Watten’s text draws backward and propels forward, beginning in the 1980s and ending in the late 1990s. The war isn’t just the war, but the social and historical conditions that yielded its brief, deadly blooms.
Part A, “The 1980s,” begins with something not immediately concerned with the Gulf War: Philip Johnson’s “postmodern office building.” Watten’s art-critical musings, rather than simply avoiding history and the war, actually look awry at both. By suspending an immediate discussion of the War and by focusing on a particular building that signifies the cultural historical (postmodern) spirit of the 1980s, Watten’s move intimates that any discussion of the war must reach backward into the past, rather than toward the particulars of the war’s beginning. The office building becomes a mnemonic for the 1980s; even more, it suggests the way in which structures of monumentality signify a certain way of remembering. The book begins:
Philip Johnson's postmodern office building at 580 California. The combination of facing motifs shows a simultaneous fascination with ironic control and the disavowal of any consequences. Cynically juxtaposing corporate-induced localism with functional office grids, the artificer has reduced all construction to a memorial bas-relief. Each view is a little tomb, complete with signature crosslike prison bars. These bay windows must be our final release! (1).
His description indicates how the architecture itself foregrounds “ironic control” and “disavowal of any consequences,” two aspects that marked the position of the television viewer of the Gulf War. In this sense, then, the building anticipates the war–or perhaps even creates the conditions where such a war could be possible. In addition, each window view–“a little tomb, complete with signature crosslike prison bars”–suggests the television screen merging with the crosshairs of a weapon sight. Moreover, the building seems to enact a kind of faux sublime transcendence–“these bay windows must be our final release!”–and becomes instant memoir, just as the Gulf War became instant history. Echoing Baudrillard, each pedestal on the rooftop is a “blank marker for an event that might have been but never took place” (2). The building, in the end, suggests a widespread cultural situation in which events themselves could be mediatized out of existence.
Bad History is a counter-epic in another sense, insofar as epics also have traditionally been the founding stories of nations, mythologizing its inner conflicts and external wars from the perspective of an impersonal communal voice.13 Because the media representation rendered the Gulf War–at least for the American viewer at home–an antiseptic affair, a Hollywood fantasy rewrite of Vietnam, Watten’s counter-epic refuses the nationalist narrative and becomes itself a “bad history.” That is, it is a naughty history, an anti-nationalist history that shows bad form, that subjectivizes another history. But rather than a simplistic rendering of Chomskyan oppositionality, Watten’s self-positioning rejects the anti-war argument that there is good and bad history–that we are constantly subjected to the bad history of mass media–and need to articulate a “good history” that accounts for leftist analysis.
Bad History, therefore, is an epic of worried subjectivity, attempting to resist even while knowing its own complicities and limits–all the while refusing to bracket the moment at which the text is being produced. True to Cary Nelson’s articulation of history as a “palimpsest of two durations, then and now,” the writing of Bad History itself is an event essential to understanding Bad History (Nelson 3). In other words, as Watten wrote in an email, “I’m living what I’m writing, not writing about what I experienced.”14 Bad History thereby rejects the tradition of anti-war verse that dominated during the height of the anti-Vietnam War movement, a tradition that relied on a poetry of witness (as in Levertov’s early anti-war poems) and epistemological authority (as in Robert Bly’s deep image poetry of The Light Around the Body and “The Teeth Mother Naked at Last”). It should not be surprising, given that the language poetry movement reached back into another poetry tradition, that Watten’s work evokes another anti-war poetry tradition.15
Informed by his numerous reviews of art exhibitions in the early 1990s, Watten’s Bad History struggles against three prevailing artistic pitfalls that emerge in the art of that period: first, oppositional art frequently responded just to the event itself, not to the conditions that made that event possible; second, oppositional art “preached to the converted”–embracing its own marginality in ways that closed down its possible audience; and third, oppositional art tended to foreground identity politics in ways that limited exploration of its own epistemological limits.16
So even as Bad History refuses the traditional subjective position of the nationalist epic poet, it also is inflected by the successes and failures of oppositional art from the period; rather than simply relying on a self-protective oppositionality, it becomes a subjective history swinging between complicity and resistance. The resistance of Bad History bridles against its own limitations, situated at the “homefront,” distant from the scene of the war.17
After Part A’s postmodern office building, Section I, called “Bad History,” initiates the emergence of this resistant/complicit “I,” puzzling over the language of wars’ beginnings and endings:
A bad event happened to me, but its having occurred became even more complicated in my thinking about it. Even if this event had happened only to me, it was only recently made available for retrospection; it had to be proved as taking place in every other event. Take the War, for example; I no longer know for certain which war is meant.... It is always "the era between two wars." So there was a very long war before a period of time in which that war had just been over for a very long time--even though it took its place as immediately preceding that time. Then a very short war called that very long time to question....All those times even now seem to guarantee each other, as part of an assertion of the reality of the first and only war. (5-6)
This is a disembodied, indeterminate, distracted voice, worrying over the problem of language and temporality. The “I” is like a voice in an echo chamber, reverberating until estranged into a flattened affect, as if amnesiac: “a bad event happened to me, but its having occurred became even more complicated in my thinking about it.” But rather than sounding like Fredric Jameson’s postmodern subject, whose affect in the end represents a fundamental loss of historicity, Watten’s “speaker” pursues relentlessly its own flattened sense of time. It is as if the lyric subject had been traumatized by the event, which though distinct, “had to be proved as taking place in every other event.” The War, too, becomes a floating signifier, not attached from any specific war, but somehow including all the permutations of war–the Second World War, Korean War, Vietnam War, Gulf War, Cold War. The Cold War–“always on the verge of ending”–lingers over all the wars. This sense of an ongoing perpetual war echoes Virilio’s notion of “Pure War,” in which the Cold War superpowers engage in a war marked by the constant preparation for war; what Watten’s speaker gropes for is a name for that war’s perpetuity, the war without end.
The subject’s disbelief in the War, necessitated perhaps by the psychic inability to remain in a state of constant crisis, paradoxically leads to a feeling of responsibility for its existence. This stance creates a demonstrably different tone from much war resistance poetry, accustomed as it is to the clarity of oppositionality. When the war ended, “it was a relief–I always doubted the extent to which the poet could just by writing think he could keep it going, even for the space of a lyric poem” (8). Watten’s line reverses the formulation that the war resistance poet writes poems about the war in order to end the war; what this line suggests, rather, is that the lyric poet writes about the war in order to make it real for the writing-self distant from the conflict. These lines seem particularly addressed to the lyric poetry of Denise Levertov, imagining the Vietnam War in poems like “Life at War,” in which Delicate Man
still turns without surprise, with mere regret,to the scheduled breaking open of breasts whose milk
runs over the entrails of still-alive babies,
transformation of witnessing eyes to pulp-fragments,
implosion of skinned penises into carcass-gulleys. (122)
Paradoxically, Watten’s lines suggest that the lyric poet who seeks to resist the war through means of imagery does so in order to convince herself of the reality of the war, but ends up initiating a vicious circle of traumatized representation.
The Cold War, with its small and distant wars and its possible path to nuclear armageddon, forced people into a condition of disbelief, “a kind of suspension” (7). Watten’s echo of Coleridge’s famous formulation from Biographia Literaria regarding the reader’s necessary openness toward his “supernatural” poems in Lyrical Ballads suggests the way in which fictional and historical narratives function by the same logic. Watten also references how Robert Creeley’s poem “The Tiger” invokes a “reassuring but freakish monstrosity that would rivet us in our seat, as in a Stephen King movie” (8). At both moments, Watten pursues a Baudrillardian line of analysis that applies both to the Cold War and the Gulf War. The Cold War was the war that lacked overt signs of warfare, and hence could be disbelieved; the Gulf War, experienced by the distant television spectator as a virtual media event, could be believed only insofar as one was willing to enter its fictionalized televisual representation, with Hussein as its Godzilla to be destroyed.
Watten’s notion of disbelief, incidentally, spans both the willing (postmodern?) consumer of the Gulf War as heroic epic and the (Chomskyan) dissenter who sees this representation as frankly “unbelievable.” In other words, by focusing on the problem of disbeliefs, Watten’s poem addresses the dilemmas of being an (American) civilian at the center of empire, distant from the conflict, without choosing the more comfortable, but ultimately less productive, oppositional mode.
In order to believe in the Gulf War, the viewer needed to suspend the disbelief that wars have human consequences, which always requires a faith in technological mastery. In this war, perhaps more so than in any previous war, technology took its place as a key character in the postmodern epic. Here, again, Watten avoids the oppositional mode, trying to retrace the thoughts of a speaker who is haunted by the seeming reality of the virtualized televisual conflict:
each new war being the culmination of our old belief in the supersession of a new technology.... Only later did we find out that the success rate for Patriot missiles was only 6 percent. How can we be so thoroughly trained to disbelieve the evidence of our senses? Didn't I see an incoming missile come down through the sky from the vantage point of a TV crew in Dharan, Saudi Arabia.... while the cameraman tracked the outgoing Patriot to an explosion that was visible proof of its success? (9)
The speaker expresses puzzlement at how the information regarding the Patriot’s success rate violates his sense of the images he “witnessed.”
This puzzlement is contrasted with the glee of a certain “poet,” who failed to think about the consequences of all this virtualization: “the poet didn’t want to think about that ground [which would be destroyed by the Patriots and Scuds], so pleased he was with the spectacle of a disbelief that called into question any criterion for an historical event” (10). It is unclear who this poet is; this character experiences pleasure in the totality of the spectacle of a disbelief. If this line read “pleased…with the spectacle,” we might say that Watten is critiquing Baudrillard’s euphoria over spectacles themselves. But the line reads: “the spectacle of a disbelief,” which makes it seem equally possible that it refers to some Chomskyan dissenter who resists the spectacle as well. The poet could be Watten himself. In the end, naming names matters less than acknowledging the speaker’s uneasiness with the way the poet’s pleasure in his stance toward the event seems to distance him further from the brute reality of the bombs.
This section concludes by tracking the very circulation that Watten’s ruminative repetitions of words and phrases have enacted. The “bad event,” obscured by false witnesses and faulty technologies, still remains at a distance. However, its very repetition through representation–particularly in the form of those Patriot missiles hitting their targets–finally instigates the speaker to language: “it was the continuous, circling treadmill of its displacement for a very long time, brought to a single image–obscured, interfered with, reprocessed at a third remove over remote-control channels of communicative links–that got me here to say this” (10). The speaker’s voice, then, becomes an analogue for the virtualization of the Gulf War; only through such a poetics of interference, the poem suggests, might we become conscious of the obscuring workings of interference itself.
Watten’s poem does not rest in its own fascination with the interfered virtualized images, as an eviscerated Baudrillardian analysis might; instead, it pursues the consequences of the “ground.” However, in contrast to a Chomskyan analysis, Watten’s juxtaposes dissident witness accounts of the effects of the bombing to a narrative of vexed American subjectivity. Part III, “Iraqi,” suggests the gulf between the American civilian and the Iraqis (and those other Arab and non-Arab civilians caught in the “crossfire”) who bore the brunt of the bombing. The definition–“Iraqi: various scenarios for wearers of a mark of distinction and/or shame” (15)–that begins the section opens the poem into a consideration of how identification with the other is always complicated by the ease with which we can disown that identification. Watten re-tells the story, told in Ramsay Clark’s War Crimes, of a Jordanian woman whose husband had been strafed by machine-gun fire from American planes; the husband, driving his cab to Amman, becomes an example of “the consequences of appearing Iraqi at a particular moment in time.” Juxtaposed to this story is the (American) speaker’s account of wearing a pin from the Iraqi pin project that identified him as “Iraqi”: “Guys would loom out of the crowd, saying, ‘Hey, an Iraqi!’” (16). The speaker becomes so conscious of his pin that he “always remember[s] to take my pin off for official meetings at work” (16). While the Jordanian man’s misidentification as Iraqi leads to his death, the American maintains distance from his adopted identity for “official meetings at work.” So even though the pin communicates a willingness to stand with “Iraqis,” it also problematizes that relationship, and forces its wearer to acknowledge the gulf between his experience and the Iraqis’. Finally, this section foregrounds the way in which even the story of atrocity comes secondhand, from secondary witnesses and distant sources.
Because the war was not simply the event of war, but the years of cultural and military preparation for the war, what better place to begin than with children’s toys? Section IV, called “Museum of War,” meditates on how the constant preparation for war requires young warriors to be prepared and leads to the inevitable sacrifice of children. This “Museum of War” does not exist in actuality, but rather is a virtual museum of Watten’s imagining, one which perhaps cohabits the literal Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green, London. Taking his son Asa to the Museum of Childhood, Watten describes an artist’s diorama where “each display is designed to be the perfect miniature of a moment of loss” (17). The diorama described both resembles a child’s toy and invokes the bombing of the Amiriyah shelter during the Gulf War, where “at least 300 children and parents were incinerated in a structure we knew had been built for civilians; now they must reelect the entire PTA!” (19). The absurdity of the non sequitor “PTA” brings us to the insurmountable gap between our experience of raising children and the horror of the Amiriyah bombing. The imagined diorama makes us wonder whether representations of war are always already domesticated by our limited vision of what war is.
Layered into this section’s description of these two museums is the language of statistics and numbers. The language of statistics invokes the military’s (and mass media’s) fascination with weaponry specs and lingo–“Imagine the ‘daisy cutter’ effect of a 7.5 ton superbomb manually pushed from an open end of a C-130 cargo plane–shock waves ripple out in all directions, leveling all structures 500 meters on either side” (19)–and the way the naming of weapons seems to take the place of visualizing their effects.
Watten’s imagined dioramas in the Museum of War also lead to a more disturbing possibility; can one represent (or imitate) the war and yet still resist it? Is the process of representation a kind of repetition, a re-enactment of the trauma? Perhaps representational art might always fail to be oppositional: “Here an online editor objects that imitation of war in rapid displacement of incommensurate remarks is not an argument against war–it could likewise be a form of participation” (19). How, indeed, can one represent war through poetry in a way that avoids merely replicating the war, in which both writer and reader become, willy-nilly, more participants? How to evoke the devastation of the “Highway of Death” so as to re-member it, to make it present, and erase the censored blank spaces? Watten cannot “remember a flatbed truck containing nine bodies, their hair and clothes burned off, skin incinerated by heat so intense it melted the windshield” (20). In the end, Chomskyan arguments notwithstanding, what would having such images represented in the media or in a “Museum of War” accomplish? Perhaps the Gulf War, whose mass media representation was so vigorously censored and therefore de-realized, may actually be a war which art can make real in a way that is not simply repeating the war.
In Section V, “Intellectuals,” Watten yokes together Marxism and Romantic lyric in a piece on the 1991 L.A. riots. Donald Pease has argued that the Rodney King beating, the innocent verdict on the white California police officers, and the resulting riots “activated an alternative memory” (576) that dispelled the illusion of internal consensus against an external enemy manufactured during the Gulf War. The riots interrupted “U.S. spectators’ previous identification with the surveillance apparatus of the New World Order…[and] reversed the effects of U.S. disavowal of neocolonialist brutality in the Gulf…” (561). The King verdict and riots laid bare the unsettling divisiveness within the United States around race and class.
What burns Watten, however, is the distance between the intellectual, in his ever-higher highwire morality act, and the reality on the ground:
Who will save us? Intellectuals--split off from the mass of revolutionary clouds returning from a daily fog bank? The fog moves back to reveal smoky haze rising over burnt-out districts of Los Angeles, ô intellectuals, you who speak as if there were no one to hear you! But this smoky haze has spoken again, as we knew it would.... Ô intellectuals, wheeling back and forth in a conscious morality play--a balancing act of self-undoing moral tightropes, not falling into the waiting gasps of the crowd but spinning always higher, dangerously out of reach, while the crowds below realign your center of gravity for you! (23-24)
The ironic call–“who will save us?–mimics the intellectual’s (and, one might add, the lyric poet’s) desire to rescue the masses from the most powerful even as it mimics a more bourgeois voice, wondering who will protect him from the advancing destruction of the crowd. In the second voice, the answer is tautological–the police, whose violence set off the violence of the rioters, will save us. The intellectual, by contrast, cut off from the discontents that led to the conflagration, can only perfect his own hermetic moralism.
The tautological (and fraternal) order of police is also, not surprisingly, a mirror to the larger tautology of Pure War. In Section VI, “Against All,” Watten spins out, in Steinian fashion, a traumatized repetition of battles:
Always already, all wars are ready. But this is the war of all against all. The war has begun again, the war to renew all wars. Everywhere is war. Echoes answer war already--echoes always answering war. "War is not the answer." We need to escalate! (25)
In this thickly intertextual passage, Watten deftly weaves theoretical, philosophical, and pop cultural references into a Steinian attack on war: a war of words. Using the Althusserian formulation, “always already,” which designates the illusion that ideological constructs are natural and eternal, Watten suggests that wars, rather than promising to end war, seem only to ensure future wars. The “war of all against all” refers to Hobbes’ philosophical pessimism, and rubs against Marvin Gaye’s plaintive protest song “What’s Goin’ On,” which itself adopts one of the anti-war slogans of the 1960s–“war is not the answer.” But Watten’s poem reverses Gaye’s plea: “Father, father, we don’t need to escalate.” Gaye’s plea is one that has not only domestic implications (Gaye was later murdered by his father), but also racial ones; Gaye’s song is as much about the tumult in U.S. ghettos and the state response as it is about Vietnam.
The Gulf War, which begins the book, therefore, cedes to the race/class war of the L.A. riots, to Waco, and beyond, to global financial war. If what follows in Bad History moves further outward from the Gulf War, one might argue that it moves further inward into the Gulf War as well–the Gulf War as symptom of a cultural-historical situation. However, such a reading might obscure the fact that the permutations of war in Bad History are ultimately subordinate to the problem of national and personal history.
Bad History counters the televisual representation of the Gulf War as an heroic epic not only through its foregrounding of the interfered image, its manifestation of a vexed complicit/resistant subjectivity, but also through its form. In particular, Bad History employs the generic conventions of both newspapers and scholarly texts, with its central newspaper-like column, running footers, and endnotes.
The running footer of dates to the text and the columnar print style evoke the newspaper form. However, instead of quoting and then critiquing the mass media representation of the war, Watten’s text denies any exact relationship between the dates and the text. The dates, in fact, do not speak for themselves, nor do they take control of the text. Here, as elsewhere, Watten acknowledges in his notes his indebtedness to the work of Iranian-born Seyed Alavi. Alavi’s artistic re-workings of newspapers–principally, the removing of the dates–enacts the vexing counterpoint, in Watten’s words, “between two kinds of time: one created by their work in its process of development, and another embodied in the materiality of the encompassing culture that surrounds it and surrounds and threatens to engulf it” (“Seyed Alavi” 15). Unlike the typical manipulation of headlines for political ends, Alavi’s work renders a resistance to the overdetermined language of official history and, in Watten’s formulation, “to replace it with a time of our own.”
Similarly, Watten’s use of historical dates invokes a Chomskyan concern for drawing out an historical counternarrative. The text’s dates begin with 16 January 1991, then skip ahead and back to other dates: 1 March 1991, 28 January 1990, 19 April 1993, and end finally with 27 December 1993. 16 January, of course, marks the beginning of the bombing, but what about the other dates?18 How should we read the connections between the footer-date and the text itself? Watten, in contrast to the Chomskyan mode, leaves these investigations to the reader; part of the reader’s work, perhaps, is not only to figure out the significance of those dates, but also to take part in the construction of the history of the poem. One finds, for example, that 1 March 1991 marks the day after the official ending of the conflict, (even though the war continued long after that date and plainly continues, in different permutations, down to the present).
The choice of 28 January 1990 is not immediately clear. However, Watten has revealed that the date also marked the death of his mother, and that her birthday was 19 April, the day that would later be remembered nationally for the Waco conflagration, and then a year later the Oklahoma City bombing, committed by Gulf War veteran Timothy McVeigh. Watten’s use of this date of personal significance suggests, therefore, the limits of the outworn notion that the language poetry requires active construction by the reader. By introducing something from his own biography not knowable within the text, yet somehow essential to the text’s meaning, Watten shows that he cannot escape the biographical contours of his own subjectivity, however objectivized.
Finally Watten’s dates, particularly the evocation of the official beginning and ending of the war, also enable us to question the very primacy of those dates as markers of conflict. When did the Persian Gulf War begin? If we look at chronological tables from three different sources–1) PBS Frontline‘s Gulf War website, 2) Seeing Through the Media: The Persian Gulf War (1994), and 3) Beyond the Storm (1991)–we note the degree to which the event of the war depends upon what events are seen as having led to the war. For the official history provided by Frontline, the first date provided is 2 August 1990, when Iraq invades Kuwait. But the second source presents an introductory caveat, noting that “in order to understand the historical meaning of the Persian Gulf War, we need to go as far back as World War II and the British reconfiguration of the territorial boundaries of the nations of the Middle East” (307). Thus it begins with 17 July 1990, when “Saddam Hussein accuses the U.S. and the Gulf states of conspiring to cut oil prices” (307), and focuses on the infamous exchange between Saddam Hussein and April Glaspie on 25 July 1990. The third source, Beyond the Storm, provides an even lengthier historical trajectory, beginning in 1869, when “Suez Canal and powered river transport open up Mesopotamia to international trade” (356). It goes on to detail Western oil investment, military intervention, and covert operations in Iraq beginning in 1912, and provides a thorough account of the politics of the Middle East. Obviously, these three examples suggest that how we discuss the war as an historical event can vary significantly, depending on how one frames the events that lead up to war.19
In the material construction of the page, the text is impinged by margins that are almost as large as the text. The white space–the unspoken–lingers on either side of the hypotactic sentences. It is as if we were reading the only column of a newspaper to which we do not have complete access, which we cannot complete reading. In contrast to the slim margins of an industry book, the extensive margins create an eerie effect, the feeling that something is missing. It also gives the active reader much room for marginalia, to make connections with the text. Although it would be easy to overinterpret such a formal gesture, it nonetheless points to Watten’s obsession with frames–his desire to counter the domination of authorial presence, and his humility in the face of what he does not, or cannot know.
The extensive annotations at the back of the book provide a useful archival function, in the mode of a Chomskyan dissenter; at the same time, they show Watten’s indebtedness to a whole range of texts and knowledges–from high literary theory to human rights texts, from chance encounters to unavoidable fate. In contrast to Chomskyan analysis, however, these texts do not stand as guarantors of scholarly integrity and historical truth, but rather create a tangle of narratives from which we must wrestle our own bad histories. Our lives, Bad History suggests, “cannot be lived as ‘one story’ but as stories that overlap, from one to the next, with no final form to hold them together” (74). They overlap with each other’s and with the grand narratives of nations and empires, in ways that are often obscured and unknown to us. History is enacted in a financial prospectus, no less so than in the newspaper or on a calendar, the date marking the death of a mother.
For a poem to be historical and to resist war at the same time is no straightforward task. Bad History‘s limitation as a poem of war resistance lies, perhaps, in how it abandons the investigation of what remains outside its ken and instead focuses on the limitation of its perceptual frame, in all its primordial negativity. For example, continued investigation of the ongoing narratives of the Gulf War in Iraq and of U.S. veterans, or further dialogue with activists and war resisters in the United States, might have enabled the text to function as an agent of further texts and events. But such limitations are built into what it means to be a subject, much less a resister. In the end, Watten succeeds in resisting the tendencies of poems and poets to bow quickly for the emperor’s laurel, or, conversely, for congratulations from the like-minded and already-converted.
Thanks to Tom Foster for his characteristically helpful suggestions for this essay, which emerged from the ashes of a review that appeared in Indiana Review (Spring 2000).
1. This essay was written prior to the Second Gulf War, “Operation Iraqi Freedom”; however, given that the Iraqi people have lived under a state of economic siege since the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the second declaration of war functioned as a continuation of the first conflict rather than an initiation of an entirely new one.
2. Numerous analyses of mass media coverage have shown the degree to which the media acted as an extension of the military effort. In Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War, John R. MacArthur details how Pentagon front-man Pete Williams cajoled, coddled, and ultimately convinced the major media industry into agreeing to press restrictions, in the form of “press pools,” which assured that all journalists would compete against each other for the same stories, distant from the scene of war, and always mediated and censored by military escorts. In particular, the omnipresence of PAOs (military public affairs officers) compromised journalists’ ability to have even a free interview with a soldier. According to NBC correspondent Gary Matsumoto,
Whenever I began interviewing a soldier, this PAO would stand right behind me, stare right into the eyes of the [soldier], stretch out a hand holding a cassette recorder, and click it on in the soldier's face. This was patent intimidation...which was clear from the soldiers' reactions. After virtually every interview, the soldier would let out a deep breath, turn to the PAO, and ask [something like], "Can I keep my job?" (171)
The Pentagon, even after delaying “unilateral access” to the front lines, delayed further coverage with news blackouts during the initial phases of the ground invasion. Unfortunately, “most of [reporters’] dispatches and film took so long to get back to Dhahran [the media base in Saudi Arabia] that they were too dated to use. The Pentagon’s real Phase III was censorship by delay” (189). Intriguingly, media complicity in the military effort during the 2003 war, though far more mutually satisfying, was no less problematic; the innovation of “embedding” reporters with various divisions granted reporters more “access” but paradoxically rendered them even more vulnerable to reporting the war from a partisan, indebted point of view.
3. Jean Baudrillard’s first article on the Gulf War appeared just days before the war, arguing that the war “would not take place.” (Two succeeding articles round out his meditation on the event-ness of the Gulf War.) Christopher Norris directs his critique principally at Baudrillard, though he has larger schools of fish to fry (“postmodernists,” “deconstructionists,” etc.) which largely evade his critical net. A fuller treatment of this debate would, of course, enumerate the ways in which both critics demonstrate their theoretical blindspots. Oddly enough, and contrary to his earlier writings, Baudrillard shows himself at times to be an anti-image moralist. Norris, by contrast, willfully misreads Baudrillard and postmodern theory more generally. For the sake of this article, however, I have limited myself to a consideration of the productive edges of each theoretical analysis of the Gulf War.
4. Despite the obstacles to poetic response, poetry did emerge in response to the Persian Gulf War. Protest poetry–in its embrace of a transient, engaged, anti-nationalist, and performative poetics and its rejection of the modernist lyric’s monumentality, implicit nationalism and detachment–such as June Jordan’s “The Bombing of Baghdad,” Calvin Trillin’s “deadline poems” (appearing in The Nation), Tony Harrison’s Guardian-commissioned long poem “A Cold Coming,” and William Heyen’s book-length meditations on the war entitled Ribbons: The Gulf War–offered an immediate, if perhaps ephemeral response to the machinations of war rehearsed on (inter)national media. While the poetry anthologies responding to the Persian Gulf War (with some notable exceptions in both After the Storm and Rooster Crows At Light From the Bombing) occasionally replicated the problems of lyric poetry–elision of poems’ historical context, often-bourgeois antipathy toward the mass representation of war–they also provided a site for gathering and sustaining war resistance beyond the event itself.
5. Paul Virilio argues that we live in a state of “pure war,” in which the real war is not the battle itself, but the endless (cultural, media, industrial) preparation for war. Though Virilio dates the military-industrial complex from the 1870s, he argues that the postwar era is actually an extension of the Second World War, in which “all of us are already civilian soldier, without knowing it. And some of us know it. The great stroke of luck for the military’s class terrorism is that no one recognizes it. People don’t recognize the militarized part of their identity, of their consciousness” (26). Pure War thus pervades all aspects of culture, from the increasingly violent and technophilic video games like “Duke Nukem,” “Quake,” or “Doom,” that invite young people into the cockpits of fighter jets and to view the world through the target eye, to less immediately violent but no less virulent displays of nationalism such as that found in television coverage of the Super Bowl or the Olympics.
Pure War manifests itself, as well, in what Eisenhower famously called the military-industrial complex. The U.S. military-industrial complex impacts the globe not simply through U.S. military engagements, but also through counterinsurgency and covert operations, military training of Latin American officers in places like Fort Benning’s School of the Americas, military occupation of land in places like Okinawa and Vieques, and in skyrocketing levels of indiscriminate sales of weapons, sometimes to opposing sides in conflicts. Pure War, for Virilio, amounts to “endocolonization” (95)–a situation in which one’s own population is colonized by state power.
6. Interestingly, Watten’s poetic project seems to have found its ideal mediating subject in the Persian Gulf War. His use of poetry as mode of theoretical inquiry; his obsession with the problem of the frame; and his “attempt to articulate a productive negativity” (Friedlander 124). All come to maximum use in “writing through”–(as John Cage’s or Jackson Mac Low’s procedural “writing through” texts)–the Gulf War.
7. During the period before and after the Gulf War, Watten wrote some forty reviews of art exhibitions in the San Francisco Bay area, some of which articulated–or at least provided the inspiration for strategies of oppositionality that the poet would attempt to incorporate in his work.
8. The emergence of the language writing movement during the closing years of the Vietnam War deserves further exploration. Bob Perelman has suggested one way in which the war affected these writers: “language writing coalesced as American involvement in Vietnam was nearing its bankrupt conclusion: this was a significant cause of the unaccommodating nature of its poetics” (13). What is “unaccommodating” about the politics of language writing? The language writers (from Bernstein to Andrews to Silliman) have demonstrated, if not a range of political views, then certainly a range of ways in which to activate a poetry of politics. One could just as easily speak of Denise Levertov’s unaccommodating politics at the end of the war, but her writing could not be confused with “language poetry.” In short, that war (and, doubtlessly, the poetic response to that war) may need further elaboration, to explain the crystallization of the need for avant-garde modes.
9. Watten’s argument is made explicit in his recent essay, “The Turn to Language and the 1960s,” which describes the origins of the language poetry movement as a result of the failure of 1960s political poetry, particularly that of Levertov.
10. Relatedly, Charles Bernstein’s verse essay “The Artifice of Absorption” argues for a poetry that is anti-absorptive–one that is marked by “impermeability, imperviousness, ejection/repellence” (20). For Bernstein, the anti-absorptive poem rejects the transparency of realism and statementalism. Bernstein sees anti-absorption as a positive strategy not simply for its resistance to commodification, but for its ability to address postmodern conditions. In his words, “In contrast to–or is it an extension of?–Adorno’s famous remarks about the impossibility of (lyric?) poetry after Auschwitz, I would say poetry is a necessary way to register the irrepresentable loss of the Second War” (217). In “The New Sentence and the Commodity Form: Recent American Writing” (1988), Andrew Ross argues that language poetry’s strategies for resisting the prevailing powers of commodification include a fourth proposal: in a time when “rhetoric no longer acts as agent provocateur” (377), the language poets challenge through form itself.
11. Watten asserts his poetic use of these discourses: “quite a lot of the impetus for Bad History came from my writing in that [art criticism] medium. For one thing, I was going against journalistic practice by writing long sentences, with tons of hypotaxis, and not breaking them up in small paragraph units” (personal correspondence).
12. The blurb on the back of the book, more so than the blurbs on mainstream poetry texts, which often invoke the most commodifiable and romantic elements of contemporary poetry’s discourse, is essential to understanding the work:
In a famous modern definition, an epic is a poem including history. In Barrett Watten's Bad History, history includes the poem. Begun to mark the first anniversary of the Gulf War, the poem looks back on the decades previous and forward toward--a duration of events, which, because the poem is in history, do not cease to occur. The poem, too, becomes the event of its own recording.
At this point, an important question arises: to what degree do we accept without reservation the assertion that this work is a version of epic? In other words, perhaps this statement is simply not true, or even more cunningly, is a ruse. Reading this book with The Iliad, The Aeneid, or even Paterson in mind, one might be hard-pressed to find epic “characteristics.” So perhaps this claim is merely a red herring, a satire on the over-earnest reader. A cursory glance at other language poetry books suggests that, despite critical claims to the contrary, experimental poets do engage the “mainstream tradition” in their pursuit of an experimental future of poetry. To quote one example, just as the blurb for Bad History suggests parallels to the epic, the blurb for Lyn Hejinian’s Oxota suggests parallels to Pushkin’s verse novel Evgeny Onegin. Rather than being a mere Hitchcockian “McGuffin,” these allusions to traditional poetic forms, subgenres, or works suggest that much work needs to be done in articulating the way in which the avant-garde engages–and here the military notion of “engagement” feels right–what might be termed “the tradition.” Clearly, as evidenced in Watten’s text, one way to talk about the project of experimental writing is not as a reinvigoration of these forms and genres (à la the New Formalism), but rather a representation of their exhaustion, both ideologically and poetically.
13. In this way, Watten’s poem participates in the larger literary-historical arc of the verse epic grounded in a particularized consciousness or speaker, from Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” to Peter Dale Scott’s Coming to Jakarta, to more recent verse epics.
14. Watten, a draft resister during the Vietnam War, wrote that his poetics attempts to articulate his traumatic experience of the Vietnam War, which was, in his words, “both totally threatening and a non-event…experienced…through resistance, negation” (personal correspondence). Bad History provides, in this particular way, a revision of the Vietnam War even as it revises the Gulf War.
The really effective anti-war poetry, for me, in some sense engages the irrational. Pound's section of Mauberly with its incantations, and the hell canto. Duncan's passages on the war. Sandburg's buttons poem. Ginsberg, particularly "Wichita Vortex Sutra." On the other hand, the kind of liberal position taking one finds in Levertov or Lowell I particularly mistrust. I remember vividly Denise Levertov on the steps of Sproul Hall, acting out her fantasies of revolution, just before the chain link fence of People's Park was stormed (Berkeley, 1969). So the tradition of antiwar poetry I'm engaged with rejects any form of symbolization for a more processual, and temporal account, one that does not simply leave the poet on the higher ground. (Email)
16. In his article, “No More War! An Unwanted Animal at the Garden Party of Democracy at Southern Exposure Gallery,” Watten meditates on the problem of oppositional strategies in light of the state of readiness that Virilio had theorized some years before:
Artists concerned with oppositional strategies [during this new war] must therefore take into account that there is well-developed 'state of readiness' for what could be a protracted struggle for the social control of meaning-- a struggle in which art may well have a role. We are not starting at ground zero; the War has been with us for some time. (Artweek February 7, 1991, page 1)
Given the state of “preparedness” of the Pentagon for the Gulf War, the art that simply responds to the event itself might fail to be oppositional at all. The war itself would simply be the conclusion of a long argument; to attack it is to miss its body.
17. In contrast, for example, to Levertov’s “Staying Alive,” her notebook of poems cataloguing a history of the Berkeley anti-Vietnam movement and invoking a romantic collective identity in opposition to the government, Watten’s Bad History is saturated with a sense of subjective isolation. Perhaps only in this way, Levertov’s and Watten’s poems are similar in that they most closely articulate the particular epistemological and political limits of war resistance during their respective historical moments, and demonstrate the tremendous differences between Vietnam and the Persian Gulf War.
18. Though Watten’s strategy is to pursue a Zukofskyan “thinking with things as they exist,” the dates cannot represent only the time of writing, since in the section footed by the date 16 January Watten notes that “only later did we find out that the success rate for Patriot missiles was only 6 percent” (9). Watten’s use of the dates may represent an impossible desire for a writing that aims for full awareness of its subjective-historical moment or a method of anchoring a meditation against a specific historical moment.
19. An equally straightforward question–when did the Gulf War end?–also yields three different answers: 1) 8 June 1991: “Victory parade in Washington”; 2) 6 January 1992: “An ABC 20/20 story airs on the deliberate U.S. public relations campaign regarding the false reports on Iraqi soldiers and incubator babies” (321); and 3) 15 August 1992: “UN Security Council votes to allow Iraq six months to sell limited amount of oil to finance civilian needs” (374). Oddly, none of these endings corresponds to the official 28 February 1991 ceasefire; the ensuing rebellions in Iraq by Kurds and Shi’ite Muslims in March does not even appear on the official chronology, even though some of the bloodiest fighting took place during this period. Finally, the policy of economic sanctions against Iraq and bombing sorties against infrastructure might also qualify as a continuation of the war, even though official hostilities ended in 1991. The 2003 war, “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” suggests yet another “end point,” itself perhaps only a point on a much longer vector.
Julie Hayes
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures
University of Richmond
jhayes@richmond.edu
Editor’s Note: For the original French versions of selected quotations, please mouse over or click on the ¤ symbol.
“Lire, écrire, affaire de tact”
J-L Nancy
In the summer of 1999, Jean-Luc Nancy wrote to the artist Simon Hantaï with a request: to produce a work that might be used as the frontispiece of a forthcoming book on Nancy by their mutual friend, Jacques Derrida. Hantaï responded enthusiastically and set to work on a series of “unreadable manuscripts,” meticulously written and re-written on fine batiste, stiffened, crumpled, and folded. Derrida’s Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, accompanied by black and white photographs of Hantaï’s “travaux de lecture,” appeared in early 2000, but the exchange of letters between Hantaï and Nancy continued for several months. In late spring, Nancy asked Hantaï to consider the publication of their letters; a year later, La Connaissance des textes: Lecture d’un manuscrit illisible (Correspondances) appeared, with the text of the correspondence, full-color plates of Hantaï’s “travaux de lecture,” photographic reproductions of all the letters, and a final letter by Derrida addressed to both correspondents.
I propose a reading of La Connaissance des textes that takes into account its epistolary dynamics: its logic of sending and receiving, its “message strategy,” its complex negotiation of visual and discursive modes, and its relationship to a set of significant pre-texts–the passages from Nancy’s Etre singulier pluriel and Derrida’s Donner le temps that Hantaï laboriously renders “unreadable” in his haunting works–and, of course, Le Toucher itself. Furthermore, I want to look at La Connaissance des textes not only as a “text,” but also as a “book”: a physical object, manifesting production constraints and editorial choices that subtly interact with the dialogue of the correspondents.
Epistolary discourse has long been a site for reflecting on the paradoxical entwinement–particularly, though not exclusively, inasmuch as letters bespeak affect, passion–of bodies and words, embodied words. In earlier forms of epistolarity, the materiality of letters (the physical state of paper and ink, the letter’s trajectory through space) reinforced the impression of incarnation. Even in the apparently abstract medium of fiber-optic-borne email, we concoct means to preserve this connection. Letters intrigue us because they ultimately tell us a great deal about writing, and reading, as such. Epistolary writing is productive, or “machinic,” in a Deleuzian sense; it exceeds attempts to reduce it to a function of absence, to a uni-dimensional communication circuit, or to a univocal meaning. In this reading, I would like to explore first Simon Hantaï’s “unreadable manuscripts” themselves, then the complex folds of the correspondence, its machinic qualities and resistance to closure, the physicality of the letters, and the questions of reproducibility and readership that arise in connection to the production of the published correspondence. Last, I will look at the “late arrival” in the exchange, Derrida’s concluding letter-essay on “intimation.”
Born in Hungary in 1922, active in France since the late 40s, Simon Hantaï experimented with different techniques as he engaged first with surrealism and then with the expressionism of Jackson Pollock. 1960 is often seen as a turning point in his work, with the emergence of “folding as method” (le pliage comme méthode) that he has explored in one form or another in the decades since: canvases folded or crumpled, painted or written upon in different ways, stretched or left folded. As Hantaï writes to Nancy,
As I've already written somewhere, something happened through and in painting--line, form, colors united in a single gesture (after the long history of these questions). Scissors and the stick dipped in paint. Folding was an attempt to confront the situation.1 ¤
After decades of successful exhibitions, including a major retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in 1976 and the 1982 Venice Biennale, Hantaï ceased exhibiting for 16 years, preferring to study, to read, and to pursue his art away from public view until the late 90s.2 Of his most recent work, the Laissées, a group of folded and collaged canvases incorporating pieces of earlier work, critic Tom McDonough writes:
“They are perhaps the finest achievement of his career to date, works which embody the great themes of the visible and the invisible, the revealed and the hidden, the painted and the unpainted. . . . The programmatic denial of painterly proficiency evident throughout Hantaï’s mature career reaches its acme in these pieces, where the artist never picks up the brush. Scissor replaces brush, and collage is not, as in Matisse, placed in the service of painting, but is rather instated at its heart, as a challenge to be met.”3
Thus, when Nancy writes to Hantaï inviting his collaboration on Le Toucher (5 July 99; 25), the painter writes back to propose a work of ink on paper, copying passages from both Nancy and Derrida, recalling an earlier project based on la copie, “une peinture-écriture” from 1958: “Copying interminably, one over another, to the point of unreadability, where a few words spring out of the chaos” ¤ (9 July 99; 27). A day later, he writes again with a second proposition involving different techniques of pliage (and enclosing a photo showing a 1997 unearthing, défouissement, of paintings buried in his garden). Nancy responds enthusiastically, noting that “folding is making something touch” ¤ (39). With the approval of Derrida and Michel Delorme, director of the publishing house Galilée, Hantaï sets to work.
The pieces that result are a set of five large “travaux de lecture”4 on batiste that has been treated, folded, and stiffened to become a writing surface on which Hantaï painstakingly copies and recopies passages from Donner le temps: 1. La fausse monnaie and Etre singulier pluriel, stopping just short of the saturation point, in a process bewildering to eye and mind–“disconcerting abracadabra experience,” ¤ as he later calls it (61). One of the five, ultimately, will be unfolded and stretched, so that multiple irregular swaths of white cut through the fields of writing; a detail appears as the frontispiece of Le Toucher.5Nancy’s first reaction to photographs of the work-in-progress emphasizes the dizzying effect of textual dissolution through repetition, saturation:
here is a never-before edited text or a text edited as never before… Or rather, unheard-of, if you definitively bury in those folds the sonority of the voices that would have uttered these words, making the words disappear along with their meaning, their voice (voces), leaving nothing to touch but their crumpled and pressed traces, stuffed into the cloth that ends up eating the text…. Because it’s about Derrida, about a touch among you, Derrida, and me–one could say without forcing it, without giving an illustrative interpretation, that you replay the game of his “writing” but referring it elsewhere, displacing it toward what you’ve just suggested to me: the cloth eats the text (which is itself textile). (15 Aug. 99; 59) ¤
Nancy points out that the project unites Hantaï’s signature pliage technique with the “calligraphic” elements of a painting that is considered a turning point in his career, just prior to the emergence of pliage: his 1958-59 Ecriture rose.6 The passages Hantaï chose to copy–to present and to make disappear–offer important resonances, new folds, and implications both for the travaux and for the correspondence.7
In his initial proposal, Hantaï announces that he will choose to copy “a text already written lending itself (implicitly or explicitly) to dispersion” ¤ (26 July 99; 43). The passage from Donner le temps includes part of a long footnote proposing a rereading of Heidegger’s “Anaximander Fragment” in terms of three interconnected themes: the gift, the hand, and the logos (201n.). The main text is Derrida’s reading of the final part of Baudelaire’s prose poem, “La Fausse monnaie,” the logic of which involves the touching, or contamination, of two economies distinguished by Aristotle as the khrema–that is, limitless (and illusory) potential of commerce–and the oikos–that is, domestic economy of (healthy) finite exchange. As Derrida points out, the “gift” of a counterfeit coin in Baudelaire’s ironic fable points toward a phantasm of limitless power (the khrema), and ultimately to the dissociation of the “gift” and the principle of generosity: “the gift, if it exists, must go against or independently of nature; breaking, at the same time, at the same instant, with all originarity, with all originary authenticity” ¤ (Donner le temps 205). Even in the moment when he believes himself to have understood his friend, the giver–and condemned him as “unpardonable”–Baudelaire’s narrator fails to “see” his own speculation, his own credulity, his own misunderstanding of both gift and pardon.The passage Hantaï chooses from Nancy falls within a discussion of a passage in Heidegger’s Beiträge, through which Nancy develops the possibility of a “co-existential analytic” or pre-comprehension of meaning, sens, in terms of relation, being-with, “the originary plural folding” ¤ (Etre singulier 118). There follows a dense unfolding of what is already a dense passage in Heidegger (Derrida will cite part of it in his afterword to Connaissance, 151-52), elaborating the profound “with-ness” within self, an originary “mediation without mediator” which itself does not “mediate,” but is simply the space between, “half-way, place of partaking and passage” ¤ (Etre singulier 119).8 Ultimately, Nancy argues, the structure of “self” is the structure of “with”; solipsism is singulier pluriel (Etre singulier 120). He will go on to interpret the being of Dasein, être-le-là, in terms of this new value of being, être, as “disposition,” simultaneously separation, écart, and proximity (Etre singulier 121).
In the passage chosen by Hantaï, Nancy announces the need to “force a passage” within Heidegger’s existential analytic in order to give greater prominence to the notion of mitsein that Heidegger subordinates to it. Nancy argues for a rereading–or a rewriting–of the German philosopher that gives primacy to “being with.” His close reading of a passage in the Beiträge is a masterful unfolding, explication, of the text: reading not only “with” Heidegger but also through him, in the interstices, an elaboration of the text that is also a dialogue with it. It is worth noting that Nancy prefaces the discussion in the paragraph immediately preceding Hantaï’s passage by articulating his own relationship to Heidegger (Etre singulier 117), a relation that is neither one of facile antagonism nor docile sectarianism but rather something between or beyond, and always in progress.
Read together–a phrase that takes on new meaning in the context of Hantaï’s work–these texts add to one another in unexpected ways. Both are close readings, replications and explications of other texts: Baudelaire, Heidegger. Both propose, within the textual fold of a footnote, a rereading or rewriting of Heidegger, which neither actually carries out, although Derrida sketches his in further.9 In the course of his correspondence with Nancy, Hantaï suggests several times that he will reveal his thinking on the two passages; he had, in fact, been rereading Etre singulier pluriel prior to Nancy’s invitation, and one of the earliest letters in the series includes a series of questions about specific passages in the book (7 Apr. 99; 19). In the end, however, he confines himself to alluding to a “troubling experience of these modifications in reading” ¤ (12 Aug. 99; 55) and elsewhere to a profound “disorientation” provoked by the “differences” between the two texts (6 Sept. 99; 69).10 Of Hantaï’s experience in copying I will say more in the discussion of the letters, but I would like to linger a bit more on the relation between the two texts, forever embedded in one another in the travaux, yet increasingly distinct from one another in the artist’s mind. Certainly, Nancy’s passage offers a much more “immediate” connection to the works; its complex situating of relation at the heart of identity bespeaks the “with-ness” of the travaux, which visually blur textual boundaries and distinctions even as they maintain them, cohesive yet fragmented, the contacts both reinforced and threatened by the folds in the writing surface. As Nancy writes elsewhere, “no contact without separation” ¤ (Corpus 51). Derrida’s reflections on the gift have a clear, if startling, relation to the travaux which are created in response to friendship and become literally a gift when Hantaï mails all five works to Nancy in Strasbourg in March 2000. Derrida too is concerned with a space between, with the permutations of relationality implicit in the khrema: “to require, to need, to lack, to desire, to be indigent or poor, then duty, necessity, obligation, need, usefulness, interest, thing, event, destiny, demand, desire, prayer, etc“ ¤ (Donner le temps 201). To which one might add, “intimation,” his term for the disorienting experience of reading the correspondence, as we shall see.In Derrida’s reading of Baudelaire, the khrema is initially introduced as the “mauvais infini” threatening the stability of domestic exchange (Donner le temps 200), but it is quickly shown to be the operative law of exchange, radicalized by a notion of absolute gift. A “gift” cannot be grounded in “generosity” nor pardon in any form of “merit,” for such grounding limits the freedom of the act. As Baudelaire’s narrator condemns his friend for committing “evil from stupidity,” ¤ Derrida nods briefly in the direction of Nietzsche and Bataille (205) and argues that the narrator has taken the side of desire and the will to knowledge, something “closer to the khrema than to the oikos” (212), finally identified as the Kantian Sapere aude, philosophical Enlightenment.
Certainly the initial frameworks of these two passages are quite different: the narrator of “La Fausse monnaie” condemns his sometime friend without appeal, whereas “the violence of current events” lends a particular urgency to Nancy’s being-with, formulated as exposure without alienation, as compassion.11 The arguments are conducted quite differently as well, so that Hantaï would later say that even as he wrote and over-wrote the texts into a blur, they became increasingly distinct in his mind. And yet both the desiring infinities of the khrema and the hovering “singular plural” prior to existence, prior to beings, represent forms of inter-mediacy, or intermediality. And both are contained within the travaux de lecture.
Deleuze saw analogies between Hantaï’s work and Leibniz’s theory of obscure perceptions, according to which experience is composed of an infinity of microperceptions, our internal representation of the plenum, the labyrinth of continuity; our ability to distinguish between objects and events is contingent on “forgetting” continuity, selecting some aspects and letting others remain obscure: “microperceptions or representatives of the world are these tiny folds in all directions, folds in folds, on folds, along folds, a painting by Hantaï…” ¤ (Le Pli 115).12 As we look to the correspondence as a whole we can see a further analogy. The correspondence too is a complex network of question and answer, understanding and confusion, memory and forgetting. If we look closely, it becomes infinite and the act of reading interminable. Each letter is itself a “series” of intersocial and intertextual allusions of infinite depth, yet must remain part of a succession of (other individually infinite) moments. This is the logic of “plis dans plis.” Just as monads obscurely bespeak the entire world, “even if not in the same order” (Deleuze 122), the quotations bespeak the works from which they came, which in turn point to other texts, other conversations; and the letters bespeak both the correspondence and an often obscure network of quotation, allusion, and speculation. Again speaking of Leibniz’s “folds,” Deleuze notes that “the unfold is never the opposite of the fold” ¤ (124); once stretched, the unfolded canvas or cloth could not be reconstituted as folded, as the complexity of the process and the role of chance prohibit an exact repetition. The unfolded work emphasizes its own insertion in temporality and the (time) gap between writing and folding, even as it leaves open the possibility of further physical changes, new writing or folding. In the letters following the production of the travaux, Hantaï seems indeed to be contemplating further action. He refers to a “second phase” yet to come (69, 75) and after unfolding one piece hesitates as to the other four, still waiting, “en attente” (97): should they be further photographed? unfolded? rewritten? He refers to his work not as “finished,” but rather as “abandoned” (n.d.; 119). Having “opened” only one piece and having ceased the work of copying just prior to the saturation point, Hantaï maintains his project “in progress,” in-between, open to possibility, keeping its “with-ness” entire.13
The dynamics of epistolary writing have been much studied in recent years. The implications of reading a missive originally addressed to someone else, while exploited in novels from Laclos’s Liaisons dangereuses to Matt Beaumont’s electronic frolic e: A Novel, also create disturbances for editors and readers of “real” correspondences, who must renounce seeing in letters simple “documents” of a particular time and place, and instead confront them as “texts” that are not always susceptible to complete explication or decipherability, but which nevertheless bear a different relation to the world than, say, the marquise de Merteuil’s Letter 81.14 In any event, the act of reading a published correspondence is inevitably shaped by a series of decisions and affective investments made by the editors and by the letter-writers themselves. In an earlier project I argued that one could see a correspondence as a “desiring machine,” a system of libidinal ruptures and flows constructed from “marking” or selecting a correspondent; interpreting one’s own letters as part of a series; “inscription and distribution” or elaborating interpretative strategies and writing “toward”; and “feedback” or rereading letters, letting their meaning shift recursively in addition to the ongoing processes of marking and inscription.15 The machinic model is useful inasmuch as it provides an enabling conceptual vocabulary for coming to terms with a phenomenon that is both affective and social, patterned but not predetermined, and productive rather than stemming from “lack.”16
We can see these processes in the Nancy-Hantaï exchange as well: the book, La Connaissance des textes, comes into being at a particular moment, in response to a particular set of circumstances. Letters have already been exchanged, perhaps for years, presumably without either participant considering them as an exercise leading to publication. “Marking” takes place in the manner that the correspondents define one another and come to see their correspondence as having its own identity as a body of writing. The sequence of published letters begins in medias res, with Hantaï’s response to an earlier request from Nancy on the eve of a departure for a few days in his country house.17 The interlocutors’ mode of address is amicable, respectful, and collegial; part of the correspondence’s “plot” is however the construction of a zone of more intimate friendship, underscored most notably in the shift, at Nancy’s request, to first names (the significance in the change is underscored by Nancy’s simultaneous expression of concern for the health of Hantaï’s wife, Zsuzsa, “if she will allow me to name her thus” ¤ [15 Aug 99; 59]), but also by expressions of concern about each other’s health, requests for news of family members, etc.18But if in other sets of epistolary circumstances the consolidation of protocols of intimacy is accompanied by a wish for privacy (“Burn the letter!”), in this case the opposite occurs, when Nancy proposes as early as 16 September 1999 to “faire quelque chose” with the letters (71). He returns to the suggestion in March 2000, emphasizing the importance of Hantaï’s letters:
we could gather our letters since the beginning of the work--"ours," that is primarily yours, the only ones that count (mine would provide the connections) and whose work that you've termed "of reading" is already itself a text and/or an over-script, an overstrike of the work on cloth.*[Nancy’s footnote] If you haven’t kept my letters it’s not a problem–I have all of yours, assuming none has strayed (in general I keep all the mail I receive, absolutely all–it sleeps in the cellar). (123) ¤
Singling out a thread in his “cellar” of correspondence, it is Nancy who creates the opportunity for the production of Connaissance, which becomes in effect a return gift, a portrait of Hantaï: “I wanted others to read these letters that show the painter-copyist at work” ¤ (Connaissance 9).19The second component of the epistolary machine is the act of reading, interpretation, imbricated within the act of writing. To focus on reading is to bring to light the complexity of the “communication” process, to recall that not all questions are answered, or even understood, that any message encounters scrambling upon entering the zone of associations and responses that constitute the reader. Letters cross in the mail; the disturbances in their delivery alter their messages. Even when the letters arrive in order, their writers may write at cross-purposes, each missing what the other is saying. Connaissance offers not only a “picture of the artist at work,” but also any number of other objects in the room, the significance of which varies according to the spectator. Take for example Hantaï’s typically elliptical reference, in his letter of 6 September 1999, the letter announcing the “end” of his copying: “Seeing the allure, the illuminating tendency (book of Kells) in Derrida, in bricks of material in you” ¤ (69). Nancy, the conscientious reader, asks in his next: “You write parenthetically ‘(book of Kells)’–and I don’t know what that is” ¤ (71), only to receive an even more perplexing answer:
Book of Kells and etc. are ellipses. I wanted to talk about the differences that appeared in that zone of indifference, once preference, predilection, ground up as well. I couldn’t write about it without getting into a polemic. Experiences before choice, without judgement. Predilections stripped naked. Fields ploughed endlessly, stones and boulders coming up from below, ploughshare running into the singularities of their weight and their voices. (15-19 Sept 99; 77) ¤
In his next letter, Nancy tries again: “There’s an allusion I don’t understand: ‘Book of Kells etc. etc. are ellipses…’ Is it a title I’m forgetting?” ¤ (n.d.; 81). The answer comes months later, in a long letter that Hantaï dates 28 November-17 December, when under a postscript headed “Retouches,” he picks up this and other loose ends: “Book of Kells, like the Saint-Gall lectionary, manuscripts with pictures, stylized ornamentation, Irish, seventh century” ¤ (103). While banal in appearance–Hantaï realizes only belatedly that Nancy sought not an ontological explanation for his allusion, but merely a gloss–this side exchange shows the fluidity and unpredictability of both reading and writing. What begins as an evocative metaphor–Derrida’s text imagined as an illuminated manuscript–becomes in its repetition an emblem of Hantaï’s physical and mental exhaustion in the weeks immediately following cessation of the travaux, of the impossibility of articulating the differences that he “felt” between the two texts in the course of his work. The initial sketch of a comparison–Derrida as “enluminure,” Nancy as “briques de matériaux”–suggests not, I think, a comparison between “decoration” and “substance” (hardly in keeping with either Hantaï’s or Nancy’s relation to Derrida!), but rather a perception of two very different forms of complexity, different forms of internal organization, as much between the ways of engaging the prototexts Baudelaire and Heidegger as between the manifold khrema and the pliure plurielle de l’origine.
The work of interpretation in Connaissance is given additional depth inasmuch as both correspondents are engaged in “dialogue” with the travaux themselves: Hantaï most directly, of course, but Nancy through the photographs Hantaï sends and the (telephonic) accounts he receives from Derrida and Michel Delorme, both of whom visit Hantaï and observe the work in progress. (Nancy’s one projected visit is cancelled because of illness, prompting Hantaï to ship all five travaux to his home in Strasbourg.) Certainly the heart of the correspondence lies in Hantaï’s accounts of his work: the initial choice of materials (9 Aug. 99; 53); the early stages of the work:
I’m coming to a first stage of saturation that I’ve already told you about. There are threshholds of saturation, tidelines. Time passes, I write, nothing seems to move. But soon signs appear (strokes accumulating on one another, next to one another, heading toward marks, toward another picturality). (12 Aug. 99; 55) ¤
(Nancy responds to this letter, and its accompanying photographs, with the observation cited above, “le tissu mange le texte,” and the request to call Simon Hantaï by his first name.) On 9 September (the “Book of Kells” letter), Hantaï announces that he’s stopping, although for the moment he does not exclude the possibility of further works in the series, or a “deuxième phase.” This letter and those following, however, emphasize his mental state: “I am also stopping from fatigue and especially from disorientation” ¤(69). A week later: “Coming back to the stop: I was at the end. Uselessness of dancing trinkets. Vacuity. Indifference. Sitting on the doorstep, seeing only the effects of light coming through the holes between the leaves…” ¤ And, describing the act of copying: “At the beginning, in spite of some uneveness in the surface, the pen glides, the eye looks ahead and helps overcome obstacles, the written text is readable. After going back over it hundreds of times, the eye’s no longer good for anything, the pen gropes and bumps almost without interruption, breaks the words and the letters” ¤ (15-19 Sept. 99; 75).20Short exchanges of ideas and photographs follow. In late November, however, Hantaï begins writing a long letter that he will continue over two weeks, a remarkable text recapitulating “the work of the copyist, banal, humble, and stupid, that I undertook at your request” ¤ (28 Nov.-17 Dec.; 95). He describes the camera work on the details to be used for Le Toucher–reproducing, making visible the travaux–even as he explains his project as a “decanonization of the privilege of sight” ¤ (97).21 The disorientation of vision leads to an altered apprehension of the texts and a loss of connections, of meaning: “modification of the articulations touching its matter, rupture and reconnection constantly modified, redislocated, contact interrupted, lost, etc.” ¤ (101). And last: “I don’t know where I am” ¤ (103). Physical illness intervenes in the month that follows; Hantaï writes again in February, his mood bleak following a severe fever, to announce that he is abandoning his project of a book for Gallimard: “Affirmation of a fall. Cutting off, spacing, dislocation, dispersion, the senses unbound, without relation, outside any possible relation, unbridgeable cut, irreparable” ¤ (16 Feb 00; 108). Hantaï’s intense concentration on the two texts that seek to evoke a “space between” appears to have taken him deep into that space, to the point that its “edges,” the point of articulation, are no longer clear.22 While expressing his delight over the new set of photographs, Nancy becomes concerned: “Your note is so painful” ¤ (n.d.; 113). Shortly thereafter, he offers a reading of the travaux that may serve as well to help restore their maker, affirming both the “coupure” and the “lissée” as well as the “faire” in “faire voir,” reading the travaux as “work,” “ouvrage contre l’oeuvre,”23 rather than a space of disintegration, and asking Hantaï to reflect a bit on their “musical” qualities (6 Mar. 00; 118). At this point, Hantaï ships the works to Nancy. Nancy asks again to publish the correspondence (in terms that imply that he has already made plans with the publisher: “I know that Galilée would be ready to do it” ¤ [21 Mar. 00; 125]).The painter emerges from his dolorous withdrawal, or perhaps simply recovers from his earlier debilitating fever (“what was I thinking?” ¤[29 Mar. 00; 129]). His final evocation of his “expérience de copiste” foregrounds connections, not disjunction (“connected worlds, hyphens, lines of synthesis, of communication…” ¤ [133]). From this point on, the letters turn to questions of publication and reproduction. The title–or titles–chosen for the collection, La Connaissance des textes: Lecture d’un manuscrit illisible (Correspondances),24 emphasizes the centrality of reading, and its paradoxes–understanding and misunderstanding, reading and unreadability (or reading as evacuation, even pain, and reading as restorative), the partitions of private experience and their overcoming–all overwrite one another as the two correspondents seek to comprehend their relation to one another and to the work of art.25The third major component of the letter-machine, recursive rereading and feedback, is most evident in correspondences that take place over a long period of time, where the correspondents have occasion to rethink the relation between past and present. A friend tells me, for example, that years earlier he had a life-changing experience, a dream, of which I knew nothing at the time; I reread his letters, weighing them anew, and reconsider the present in the light of the altered past. At its painful extreme this reconsideration becomes what Proust called l’ébranlement du passé pierre à pierre. In the present instance, a simple reading might lead to a simple attribution of meaning: the story of the making of the travaux, for example, or of the painter’s struggle with the fundamental incompatibility of the lissée and the coupure, and subsequent reemergence, whole, but not untouched by the experience.26 Such is the mobility and complexity of the acts of reading within Connaissance, however, that we are deterred from assigning it a single narrative. The recursive reading occurs most clearly perhaps in the letter appended by Derrida–the one letter intended from the outset for publication–that asks the question, “how can one read a correspondence?” ¤ In the process of elaborating–or intimating–an answer, Derrida points to the “literariness” of one of the most unstudied of all the letters, Hantaï’s note of 15 June 1999, written on the eve of his departure for Meun, “to stretch out in the grass and cut a passage through the weeds and treat the quince tree” ¤ (13). The letter is already part of a chain, yet something prompts the correspondents-become-editors to choose it as Letter I, leading Derrida subsequently to marvel over its appropriateness (an appropriateness constructed retrospectively in the light of his own Wordsworthian associations): “how did you know the turn it would take, all the way to publication?” ¤ (148).27 The quince tree, le cognassier, quickly extends its ramifications of metaphorical association and personal recollection throughout Derrida’s essay. At what point does a letter in an indefinitely structured series become Letter I? Only when one is seeking something that responds at some level to that which comes later, and even then the meaning of the individual letters changes with every rereading. The machinic syntheses at work, à l’oeuvre, in a correspondence cast into clear relief the productive nature of epistolary writing, which is not really about absence (as has often been claimed), anymore than a letter can be reduced to a single unvarying meaning or its author to a stable unchanging subject.
A correspondence is also an object, or set of objects and material practices. In a recent study of “the postal system,” Bernhard Siegert has examined how the “materiality of communication” has informed modern subjectivity, transforming knowledge from a set of static “places” into messages sent and received. From the initial marking or delimitation of sender and receiver, through technical innovations such as the rise of delivery services and the invention of the postage stamp, the postal system rationalizes emergent authorial, libidinal impulses and directs their energy into communications networks. As such, the writing of letters (whether love letters, fan mail, letters of condolence or complaint, letters to elected representatives, to Santa Claus, or to Mom) participates in the disciplinary and rationalizing processes of modernity, producing postal subjects who always arrive at their destinations. While I admire Seigert’s work very much for its meticulous reading of cultural history, I do not think that we can discount the unruly and unpredictable potential of epistolarity, the changing labyrinth within the grand system, the letter that contains the potential for not arriving (Derrida, La Carte postale 135). That the rational system contains the necessary preconditions for the emergence of the epistolary subject does not reduce that subject to the “law of the postal system.” Electronic and digitized modes of communication have not radically transformed this situation, though certainly they have provided new sites for reflecting on its wider implications, as we see in The Telephone Book, Avital Ronell’s exploration of the analogies between communications technology and Heidegger’s “call.” Yet, in spite of this work’s startling typographic metamorphoses, its playfulness, cross-chatter, and interruptions, I wonder if the underlying point isn’t ultimately a conventional, reassuring one, in which the message sent is finally received and the visual and discursive anomalies prove to have their elegant conceptual parallels. The postal system, indeed. Even so, Ronell brings out the strangeness of the rational system itself, its schizophrenic core.
While equally as impressive visually, nothing could appear further removed from the graphic eccentricities of The Telephone Book than the exquisitely documented correspondence of La Connaissance des textes, whose material qualities I would now like to consider. Each letter appears both in print and in photographic reproduction, accompanying the superb color plates showing details of the travaux de lecture. During the discussion of publication within the correspondence, Nancy conceives an even more ambitious plan. Under the initial euphoria of seeing the travaux, he comes back to his idea to “faire quelque chose” with the letters: “I imagine a book in which there might be at least one page of batiste thus treated… Is it imaginable?” ¤ (21 March 00; 123). Hantaï’s reply is practical and realistic, asking whether the purpose is to create a collector’s item or a book affordable by all:
Your wish, as I see it, is to multiply and distribute what you have in front of you. In a sense, there is only one copy, along with the letters. It is yours…. Your proposal comes down to this: a book with limited edition plates, expensive for collectors, originals produced a couple of hundred times, and this time for aesthetic reasons only, lacking the motivations, the unpredictable, copyist. This is impossible for me. (1 Apr. 00; 137) ¤
Hantaï emphasizes that this is not a refusal, simply an attempt to “situate the real questions.” He wonders about other technical solutions: “A piece of cloth folded and written upon, or a piece of cloth simply folded? I have an idea for a folded piece with a photo-engraving printed on it… Let’s leave things be, almost without thinking of them” ¤ (139). It is the final letter in the published exchange.In the end, of course, photography and mechanical reproduction take the place of real cloth, real writing, real folds, in the representation of the travaux. The four folded works, distinguishable by the different colors of their ink, each appear in a series of six two-page color spreads appearing at regular intervals. (The unfolded piece that appears as the frontispiece in Le Toucher is not reproduced in Connaissance.) Each series starts with a photograph of a section approximating life size (see Figure 1); the details that follow successively zoom in at greater and greater magnification, “to go somehow beyond the eye,” ¤ as Nancy puts it in his preface (9; see Figure 2): another form of the unsettling of vision.
| Figure 1: Hantaï [blue-green-black] (Connaissance 78-79) Images courtesy of Editions Galilée Click for larger version of image. |
| Figure 2: Hantaï [blue-green-black] (Connaissance 104-05) Images courtesy of Editions Galilée Click for larger version of image. |
If readers of Connaissance are vouchsafed a view unavailable to the natural eye of the precise effects of ink amidst the filaments of batiste, they must nevertheless forego the most obvious part of the experience of an actual viewer of the works, seeing them each as a whole: the book offers only “details.” Each of the letters is carefully reproduced, down to the scribbled legend on the back of a photo. We are able to appreciate Hantaï’s “simultaneously round and angular ductus“ ¤ (91), the same handwriting that appears overwritten to unreadability on the canvasses, airily slanting up a page (see Figure 3) and contrasting with Nancy’s own neat, concentrated script (see Figure 4).
| Figure 3: Hantaï Letter (Connaissance 94) Images courtesy of Editions Galilée Click for larger version of image. |
| Figure 4: J-L Nancy Letter (Connaissance 112) Images courtesy of Editions Galilée Click for larger version of image. |
Even the afterword, Derrida’s letter-essay on “intimation,” includes two photographed pages, rendering the set of “handwriting samples” complete. The availability of the manuscripts highlights the editorial work of the printed versions and reminds us of the editorial choices present in any published correspondence. Most of the changes are of a practical nature: obvious misspellings are corrected, and Michel Delorme’s home phone number, visible in one letter, is discreetly left out of the print version. On the other hand, the transcription-edition of Hantaï’s letters makes no attempt to render the complexity of their composition, the numerous crossings-out, the insertions, the self-corrections that suggest a constant process of self-reading and internal editing. Nancy’s manuscript letters bear almost no evidence of revision and the reproduced sections of Derrida’s essay similarly appear to have been written in a continuous gesture. The photographs of Derrida’s manuscript point out one intriguing anomaly: whereas the “intimation” essay is punctuated periodically by bracketed ellipses ([…])–the conventional sign of an editorial cut–in at least one instance (and, one suspects, the others, but the entire manuscript is not reproduced) a comparison of print to manuscript versions reveals that no material was deleted.28 The ellipses would appear to function as pauses, spaces between, virtual folds, in the text. Throughout all the letters, slippage, erasures, additions provoke questions but provide no answers regarding the status of the published letter and its relation either to its origin or to “truth.”
Handwriting, perhaps even the “hand” tout court, occupies a central place in Connaissance. Certainly the travaux themselves offer a new twist on Hantaï’s long-established challenge to “the mastery of the gesture” (Pacquement 211) via folding and other techniques. Here, even in the complete abandonment of brushwork, the artist’s hand is more present than ever; Nancy sees a connection between Hantaï’s “retour à la calligraphie” and the great calligraphic traditions of China and the Islamic world (91). Given Nancy’s initial fantasy of a book that would include actual handwritten cloth, the final “mechanically reproduced” result would seem to imply a loss of authenticity, or “aura,” in Benjaminian terms: “a plurality of copies” substituted for “a unique existence” (Benjamin 221). But, as Hantaï pointed out, even the fantasy book is just that, a fantasy, an illusion of authenticity; he rejects the idea not because of the labor involved “a year or two of working with powder in the eyes” ¤ (137), but because the physical effort is no longer connected to “les motivations” that inspired the originals. The original travaux are the record and the product of a particular experience, “des traces de mon expérience de copiste” (137) and as such, irreproduceable (“il existe un exemplaire unique, avec les lettres. Il est à vous . . .” [137]).Even so, reproduction figures at the heart of the project. The originals are already copies and the original experience an “expérience de copiste” in which the artist has undergone a complete evacuation of self and sense, “to the point of dizziness and the exhaustion of indifference… Unforseen and rare gift received” ¤ (95). Even more to the point is the centrality of photography in the unfolding process: “the unfolding of the whole is profoundly linked to photography. The ‘originals’ are of little importance. They’re just a support for other things on the way” ¤ (28 Nov.-17 Dec. 99; 97).29 In spite of his insistence on the aura of the singular artifact, Benjamin nevertheless admired still photography’s ability to capture the specificity of a fleeting moment (226), as well as film’s capacity to focus our attention via close-ups on “hidden details of familiar objects” (a function he likened to Freud’s psychopathology of everyday life [235-36]). By concentrating on a particular moment, the photographs of the travaux evoke hidden potentials within folds, or a past process leading up to the unfolded state. As much might be said of the letters, carefully photographed in such a way as to emphasize the textures of the different kinds of paper and especially the creases: the proximity of the travaux helps us to see the letters, too, as unfolded works. So, if initially it might appear that the printed letters, like the photographs of the travaux, exist in a dependent relation of copy to original (or writing to speech), this relationship is unsettled: first, by the “essential” connection of photography and travaux; second, by the juxtaposition of the letters to the travaux themselves. Hantaï’s manuscript letters are distinct from the travaux because they are more readable and because they represent the artist’s own words, but the presence of the endlessly copied travaux remains to remind us that no word is ever entirely our own. Which is not to say that all letters are reabsorbed into the Postal System inflecting all consciousness. Rather, the travaux send us back to the letters, urging us to focus on the hidden details, the insertions and cross-outs, the perpetual process of reading and revising oneself, on the move, en route.In his footnote reflecting on the relation of the gift and the hand in “La Fausse monnaie,” one of the passages embedded within the travaux, Derrida asks whether the relationship obtains “when money is so dematerialized as no longer to circulate as cash, from hand to hand? What would be counterfeit money without a hand? And alms in the age of credit cards and encrypted signatures?” ¤ (Donner le temps 203n.). To consider the present instance: what is handwriting without a hand? This is one of the key questions of Connaissance, a book that foregrounds–almost provocatively!–handwritten letters in the age of email. Part of the answer comes from the elision of the difference between original and copy that we have seen, the importance of the copy in the constitution of the original, which removes, in effect, the grounds we would have for privileging the actual paper, the actual cloth, of the “exemplaire unique.” The other part comes from the capacity of the letters, of language, to “touch.”
As Nancy observes, Hantaï’s project is about “un toucher entre vous, Derrida, et moi” (15 Aug 99; 59) as much as or more than it is “about” the book Le Toucher, whose progress to conclusion and through production we follow in the letters.30 It is Nancy who has articulated with particular eloquence and “tact” the forms of touch that lie within and through writing.
Whether we want it or not, bodies touch on this page, or rather, the page itself is touch (of my hand that is writing, of yours holding this book). This touch is infinitely detoured, deferred–machines, transports, photocopies, eyes, other hands have intervened–but there remains the infinitesimal stubborn grain, the dust of a contact that is everywhere interrupted and everywhere pursued. In the end, your gaze touches the same outlines of characters that mine touches in this moment, and you are reading me, and I am writing for you. (Corpus 47) ¤
The effect is all the more pronounced in words that flee material associations, whose medium is composed of oscillating digits, fiber optics, pixels; fragile, ephemeral, subject to immediate erasure, power shutdowns: handwriting without a hand.31 Yet a sentence glowing on a computer screen can cause a body to double over in pain. Words touch us, enter into us, become embodied, become flesh. The extreme visibility of the handwriting in Connaissance, available only through photographic reproduction, serves to remind us of its absence, and thereby to remind us that the “touch” of writing is hardly dependent on a paper “base.”32 Hantaï: “painting does not depend on sight, nor music on hearing” ¤ (133).
“The paper falls away, leaving me with a cursor that turns itself into a tiny hand when it moves over the email address of a distant friend: ‘et vous me lisez, et je vous écris.’”
In his concluding essay, addressed to both Nancy and Hantaï (“Cher Jean-Luc, cher Simon”), Derrida promises to write “on intimation” (143), promising in language drawn from Hantaï’s description of his own work to make the word both “appear” and “disappear”: “disparition par saturation.” Intimation, the “law of intimation,” becomes the guiding trope for Derrida’s position as a reader of the correspondence of his friends. On the one hand, J.D. being “implicated” throughout the letters, his comings and goings noted by both Nancy and Hantaï, “je sens venir quelque intimation,” a call or summons to respond. And yet the correspondence is complete without his intervention: “No reader will ever change anything in this conversation ‘between you’ that will have taken place and that will remain unwitnessed.” ¤
An intimidating situation, J.D. says, adding: “I prefer to stay in my corner.” ¤ The double summons–appear, disappear–is inscribed within the etymology of the word, “to intimate,” which sends us both to juridical Latin, intimare, the injunction to appear, faire acte de présence, to acknowledge the (intimidating) power of the Law, and to the language of the heart, intimus, “l’intime, le dedans, le chez-soi” (145). Shifting between Latin, French, and English (a brief footnote refers us to Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality,” which will play a leitmotivic role throughout the essay [145n.]), “the law of intimation” resonates in more than one language, sustaining both its mobility and its efficacity.33
The scope of the present essay does not allow me to follow every turn of Derrida’s piece, which reflects his position as insider/outsider, reader/respondent, in what is in many ways a very literary reading of the letters, an examination of themes, allusions, structures, as well as the associations provoked by puns on phrases appearing in the letters: Hantaï/entaille (150n.) emerges during a reflection on “la coupure,” and ver-à-soie/ soi takes us straight back to the passage from Heidegger’s Beiträge discussed in the letters (and analyzed in Nancy’s text in the travaux), which Derrida cannot resist citing in German, without further commentary: “Die Selbstheit ist ursprünglicher als jedes Ich und Du und Wir. . . .” (151).34 The commentary takes us into the text from all directions; even the puns ask us to consider a passage into language created by pure sound, just as the travaux require us to “look” without reading.35
I would like to focus on a set of recurring questions asked by Derrida: “How can one read a correspondence? How can one read two friends at once? How can one address two friends at once?” ¤ (153). Despite the apparent specificity of his own implication in the exchange of letters, it should be clear that Derrida’s situation is that of any reader of a correspondence: “excluded third party, late-comer.” ¤ The same is true of any of us, since we need not share memories in common with the writers in order to be interpellated, intimated, touched by their words. How does one read a correspondence? Like this, mindful of the mutual engagement of Ich und Du und Wir, the “pliure plurielle de l’origine.” As for addressing more than one friend at once, J.D. seems only able to alternate throughout the essay between “toi, Jean-Luc” and “vous, Simon.”36 And yet, at the same time, “how not to?” (153), for this is precisely the structure of intimation. “Intimation” is the name for IYouWe, the originary fold that is no static formation, but rather an ongoing injunction, a summons that enables me to read one friend when I am reading another, and to address them both when I address a single one. Although, as Nancy says, “touching on the body, touching the body, touching finally–happens all the time in writing” ¤ (Corpus, 13), this capacity in all writing is nowhere more manifest than in epistolary writing. “Intimation” is the last of the “passive syntheses” of the epistolary machine: the place of the reader. We are different, distinct, but profoundly and irreducibly implicated in one another; in Nancy’s terms, our “dis-position” with respect to one another is inseparable from our mutual “exposure.” When someone enters a room and is instantly situated or “disposed” in relation to all other objects in the same space, that person is also “exposed”: “he exposes himself: thus he is ‘self,’ or in other words he is–or becomes thus–as often and whenever he comes into the disposition” ¤ (Etre singulier, 121). The “existential co-analytic” is vividly present in a correspondence, where both the urge to confess, to explain, and to justify oneself, as well as the opposite urge, the flight from intimacy and exchange, are forms of exposure, intimations, passions…
In closing, Derrida asks two more questions. What happens to “l’intimation qui circule entre nous” once it has passed through “l’élément virtuel et quasiment liquide” of multiple computer screens? I take this as a late variant (“tard venu”) on the question of the “dematerialized hand” in Donner le temps and as such, a question that was answered when the decision was made to photograph the letters. . . or earlier, perhaps, in Nancy’s evocation of the “coming into presence” (“venue en présence”) (and the “glorious materiality of coming”–matérialité glorieuse de la venue) of moving images on a television screen (Corpus 57). Every screen is a “touch screen,” an intermedial limit that simultaneously separates and connects.
Derrida’s second question also echoes earlier queries. Are these letters and travaux really readable, he asks, “readable without the law of the texts therein incorporated, encrypted, vanished, prescribing this or that reading, this or that rewriting?” ¤ (154). In other words, can we read these letters without fully explicating their every fold, every reference from Aristotle to Merleau-Ponty? Derrida answers: “Non. Mais oui.” And he proceeds to offer us a spectacular vision:
An order might be given us to proceed to a reversibility test: to bring forth, reconstitute, restore, from the transmutation to which you submitted them, Simon, the body of the text, the whole, articulated, readable words, the sentences with their meaning. Unless we were to give the order, without really believing it, to any potential reader. Perhaps that’s the meaning of your titles, The Knowledge of texts.Reading of an unreadable manuscript, or rather, I myself would say, “the quince tree of manuscripts.” (154) ¤
As we earlier saw in discussing Deleuze’s “plis dans plis” in Leibniz, the series is infinite, including as it does not only the history of philosophy evoked by Derrida, but the full range of textual microperceptions, nuances, events. The infinite series is an invitation to read, a summons or an intimation, to which, as readers, we can only respond.
The book, La Connaissance des textes, could end with the vision of the travaux transformed into a bounteous textual quince tree, but does not. Instead, Derrida tells us a story about his trip to Australia in the summer of 1999 (mentioned by Nancy, 31 July 99; 49) and his leaving a diskette with the rough draft of Le Toucher in the hands of sculptor Elizabeth Presa, who printed out the pages, folded, stitched, and transformed them into an extraordinary piece, an airy, standing garment resembling a Victorian wedding dress, for her exhibit, “The Four Horizons of the Page.” As one critic comments:
Why this book of Derrida’s? No sculptor could fail to be intrigued by a study of touch, for touch is what a sculptor knows intimately when making a work and what a philosopher usually declares to be out of order if one is to talk about art, not the material of art. And why the typescript of his book and not the book itself? Because it contains traces of Derrida’s touch that are silently erased in Galilée’s handsome production. Here a finger lingers for a moment too long on a key, producing an additional “s” on a word, while just there one notices two words run together in a moment of excited typing. So something of Derrida is folded into these sculptures . . . (Hart, “Horizons and Folds”)
Derrida himself concludes Connaissanceby quoting Presa’s artist-statement in English on her aim to “construct garments from and for the horizons of the page–east and west, north and south–horizons achieved within a body of language, my language, spoken with my antipodean accent, formed by my antipodean touch” (156). Derrida’s constant shifting in and out of French is confirmed by Presa’s emphasis on the shift in language from his French to her English, and, within English, from British or American English to English with an “antipodean accent.” It is a graceful and fitting end to the book: we are left to imagine Presa’s work, which is not reproduced, a further “absorption” of text into art, a further rendering of “touch.”
Another fruit from the quince tree: two centuries before the Nancy-Hantaï exchange, another correspondence took place between a philosopher and an artist, between Denis Diderot (named in Le Toucher as one of Nancy’s “predecessors” in the history of “touch” [159, 161, 246], but also, we should note, a thinker of relationality, rapports) and Etienne-Maurice Falconet. In his final letter to the sculptor, Diderot writes:
We are where we think we are; neither time nor distance has any effect. Even now you are beside me; I see you, I converse with you; I love you. And when you read this letter, will you feel your body? Will you remember that you are in Saint Petersburg? No, you will touch me. I will be in you, just as now you are in me. For, after all, whether something exists beyond us or nothing at all, it’s we who perceive ourselves, and we perceive ourselves only; we are the entire universe. True or false, I like this system that allows me to identify with everything I hold dear. Of course I know how to take leave of it when need be. (Oeuvres 15:236) ¤
I would like to thank Stephen Melville, Michael Newman, and Gary Shapiro for their questions and comments on an earlier version of this piece. I am also grateful to Joanna Delorme for her kind assistance with the images from La Connaissance des textes, which are reproduced courtesy of Editions Galilée.
1. Letter of 9 July 1999 (Connaissance 27; further references will appear with date and/or page number only). Hantaï similarly spoke of pliage as a “solution” to a problem in an interview published in 1973:
An interrogation of gesture becomes necessary. The problem was: how to defeat the privilege of talent, or art, etc…? How to make the exceptional, banal? How to become exceptionally banal? Folding was one way of resolving the problem. Folding came out of nothing. You simply had to put yourself in the place of those who had never seen anything; put yourself in the canvas. You could fill a folded canvas without knowing where the edge was. You have no idea where it will stop. You could go even further and paint with your eyes closed. (Bonnefoi 23-24) ¤
2. On Hantaï’s career, see Melville, “Simon Hantaï” (112-18); on his influence on French painting in the late twentieth-century, see Pacquement, (Melville, ed. 209-15).
3. See Parent’s discussion of Hantaï’s “denial of painterly proficiency” in terms of Barthes’s essay on the death of the author.
4. Translator’s note. Travaux de lecture: literally, “works”–in the sense of “physical work,” rather than “work of art” or oeuvre d’art–“of reading.” Large construction projects may be spoken of as travaux.
5. A larger section of the same piece appears near the end of the Le Toucher (344-45). Other folded travaux appear 24-25, 152-53, 296-97.
6. Working at set hours, day by day, over the course of an entire year, Hantaï covered the enormous smooth white surface of the work with the liturgical texts associated with the church calendar, as well as philosophical texts, overwritten to illegibility, punctuated by a few significant iconic symbols, a dense and mesmerizing work. Pacquement: “During this period of interrogation into the foundations of pictorial practice, a whole ensemble of processes emerge tending toward the disappearance of mastery, the refusal of the authority of gesture, and resulting in a slowing down of the hand, in effacement” (Melville, ed. 212). See also Baldassari 11-16. Ecriture rose now hangs in the permanent collection of the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou. A small-scale image (too small, unfortunately, for the handwriting to appear as anything other than a translucent blur) may be seen on the museum’s web site <http://www.centrepompidou.fr>. (Click “rechercher” and search under artist = hantai.) Several others of Hantaï’s works appear here as well.
7. Hantaï indicates that he intends to copy Donner le temps 203-06, including all or part of the notes, and Etre singulier pluriel 118-19 and part of 120, including footnotes (43). He later indicates that in practice he deviated from this plan to some extent (101); the name “Marx” appearing prominently in one detail (41) would seem to confirm this, as it does not occur within the passages originally specified.
8. Derrida discusses the “rethinking of ‘with’” in Etre singulier pluriel in juxtaposition with Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “coincidence” in Le Toucher, 224-26.
9. Derrida: “Ici s’imposerait une relecture de La Parole d’Anaximandre” (Donner le temps 201n.); Nancy envisions a more sweeping program: “Il faut réécrire Sein und Zeit . . . c’est la nécessité des oeuvres majeures” (Etre singulier 118n.).
10. Elsewhere: “I tried to say a few words, suspended, about the differences that appeared at that stage between the two texts. But I would tell you nothing new” ¤ (15-19 Sept. 99; 75); later he speaks of the “increasingly abyssal differences between the two texts that appeared during the stretch of time of the copying”¤ (28 Nov-17 Dec 99; 95).
11. Nancy’s vocabulary in Etre singulier pluriel and his recurring use of the term “exposure” (s’exposer, exposition) suggest an implicit dialogue with the work of Emmanuel Lévinas, particularly Autrement qu’être, which Nancy salutes in a note as “exemplary” (Etre singulier 52n.) but does not discuss further per se. In Le Toucher, Derrida refers to “deux pensées de substitution” in Lévinas and Nancy (292), but his primary reference is to Lévinas’s Totalité et infinite, rather than the central chapter on “substitution” in Autrement qu’être.
12. See also Deleuze’s more extended comparison, Le Pli 50-51. Deleuze also mentions Hantaï in Pourparlers 211. (I thank Charles J. Stivale for this reference.)
13. Pacquement: “Hantaï’s painting . . . is not structured in a finalized history, or at any rate, that history remains to be written. There are entire layers (pans) of his work that remain to be discovered, as if the foldings had literally veiled certain parts; or as if the observation of the work, inscribed in a much too linear structure, had sidestepped moments of consequence that remained invisible merely for lack of someone’s eye chancing upon them” (Melville, ed. 210).
14. On historical and methodological questions, see Bossis and Altman (as well as a number of the other articles in the same volume). For a range of contemporary theoretical approaches to the reading of “real” correspondences, see Kaufmann, Melançon, and Abiteboul. Chamayou offers a consideration of epistolarity, real and fictional, that is also sensitive to issues of historicity (see esp. 161-82).
15. See Hayes, “The Epistolary Machine,” Reading the French Enlightenment 58-85. As the phrasing suggests, the model follows the general lines of the “desiring machines” described in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, L’Anti-Oedipe 43-50.
16. See also Nancy’s critique of the notion of desire as lack, L”il y a’ du rapport sexuel (36-37).
17. As an editorial footnote–that staple of epistolary novels–helpfully informs us, “we have retained the letters exchanged just before the beginning of the project of the ‘travaux de lecture’”¤ (13n.). As there is no reason given for this decision, one tends to agree with Derrida that Hantaï’s evocation of bucolic life (“regardant les enfants et ‘l’herbe pousser”) provides the ideal literary setting, “l’installation discrète mais savante d’un décor,” for the text to follow (Connaissance 148).
18. The ongoing references to the bodily states of the two interlocutors create a background music of concern and intimacy. “How is your health, now? I wanted to ask and didn’t dare,” ¤ writes Hantaï in one of his earliest letters (21). The word “maintenant” underscores a recognition of Nancy’s ongoing struggles. Later, Hantaï’s wife Zsuzsa, whose health is also a subject of concern, reads L’Intrus, Nancy’s account of his heart transplant (15-19 Sept; 75). In his afterword, Derrida is unable to resist a reference to the memoir: “l’intrus, c’est moi” (155). In Le Toucher, he returns to L’Intrus and Nancy’s operation on a number of occasions in passages that bespeak both philosophical engagement and friendship (Toucher 113-15, 301, 308-9). See in particular a note on gratitude and “the heart” and evoking a “souvenir presque secret” of a phone conversation between the two held the day preceding the operation (Toucher 135n.).
19. Others have wanted to “do something” with Hantaï’s letters. His lapidary style tends to appear in many of the texts written about him, as if in echo of earlier written or conversational exchanges. A series of letters written from the painter to critic Georges Didi-Huberman between February 1997 and January 1998, was published in the catalog for the major Hantaï retrospective held in Münster in 1999; they have been translated into English and included in As Painting (Melville 216-29). Accompanied by many photographs, but missing Didi-Huberman’s replies, these letters suggest less a “correspondence” than a set of programmatic statements by the artist.
20. Hantaï’s altered consciousness via work on the travaux is reminiscent of the impersonal, quasi-meditative execution of Ecriture rose, which critics have likened to “spiritual exercises” (Baldassari 11-16; see also Didi-Huberman, 32-6). In his essay for Hantaï’s Biennale catalog, Yves Michaud describes Ecriture rose in terms that apply equally well to the travaux: “Here all the elements count: not only the forgetting of self implied by the infinite copy, but also the manner of confiding in others, abandoning oneself to others, implied in making others’ discourse one’s own…. The same manner of forgetting oneself, silencing oneself, acceding to a full silence” (16). ¤
21. A thematics of blindness runs through Connaissance, beginning with Hantaï’s reference to a Hungarian proverb, “Bêche ses yeux” (33), his musings on a possible contribution to the “haptic-optic debate” (85), and so on to his dismissal of one of Nancy’s more ambitious ideas for publishing the letters as “Un an ou deux de travail de poudre aux yeux” (137). The question of blindness extends deep into Hantaï’s career, where it is intimately related to his notions of the hand and of “folding as method.” As Dominique Fourcade wrote for Hantaï’s 1976 retrospective at the Centre Pompidou: “How far we have come from the time of Matisse, when it was just a question of cutting out the tongue! The problem is having nothing left in one’s hands, having to paint with hands behind the back. It seems to be a question of painting with your eyes put out” (n.p.). ¤
22. “One can only touch a surface, that is a skin or the covering of a limit (the expression, ‘to touch the limit’ returns irresistably, like a leitmotiv, in many of Nancy’s texts that we will examine). But a limit, limit itself, by definition, seems deprived of a body. It cannot be touched, will not let itself be touched, it eludes the touch of those who either never attain it or forever transgress it” (Derrida, Le Toucher 16). ¤
23. Translator’s note: both “ouvrage” and “oeuvre” may be translated as “work,” as in “an artist’s works”; the former however implies a single object as well as the physical act of making, whereas the latter suggests a completed (body of) work.
24. Nancy attributes both phrases to Hantaï in his preface (9).
25. A reviewer of Connaissance commented on “l’énigme du titre,” noting that the first subtitle corrects or “retouches” the main title, foregrounding the paradox of reading the unreadable, and calling attention to the use of the plural and to the use of parentheses in the second subtitle as well as to the curious displacement of Nancy’s name to third place in the attribution of authorship on the cover and title page (G. Michaud 13-14).
26. Hantaï’s book project with Gallimard, mentioned in the first letter of the series (13), is abandoned or at least suspended by him in the wake of his bout with fever (108), along with expositions and other “projets longtemps travaillés.”
27. One could read further “foreshadowing” in the first sentence of this “Letter I.” Hantaï is writing to authorize Nancy to make use of a photograph: “the portrait of the artist is at your disposal” (13). ¤ As Nancy explains in his preface, the entire collection shows, in effect, “le peintre-copiste au travail” (9). (The photograph, a close-up of Hantaï’s blue-jean encased knees, appears in Nancy, Le Regard du portrait, plate 13.)
28. A bracketed ellipsis precedes the paragraph beginning “J’arrive donc le dernier,” despite the fact that there is no material missing from the manuscript (152-53). The technique is reminiscent of the “missing lines” from Derrida’s letter-novel “Envois” in La Carte postale.
29. See Didi-Huberman on the role of photography in Hantaï’s recent work, the Laissées (L’Etoilement 100-01). More broadly, on the role of the “copy” within contemporary aesthetics, see Radnòti.
30. Nancy invites Hantaï’s participation in July 1999, saying that Derrida’s book will appear in the fall (25); Delorme visits Hantaï in August to observe the work in progress and gives the artist to understand that “le temps ne presse pas” (55); decisions are being made regarding the format of Le Toucher in September (71); when Derrida visits Hantaï later that month, bringing a copy of the manuscript, “Visiblement rien n’est encore décidé” (75). On receipt of his copy of the manuscript; Nancy admits to being nervous at being “un objet d’investigation théorique” but finds Derrida’s work remarkably liberating (81). Even as he speculates about the creation of a book containing “une page de batiste,” Nancy notes his admiration for the limited-edition Hantaï print in the “exemplaire de tête” of Le Toucher, a gift from Derrida (123).
31. In an interview, Derrida rightly points out that email and other electronic texts hardly exist entirely “without a hand,” but that they nevertheless point to “une autre histoire de la main” within “l’histoire de la digitalité” (“La Machine à traitement de texte” 153-54). As I am arguing, the “touch” of electronic writing, however indirect and redirected, remains part of its phenomenology.
32. See Sobchack for an analysis of “a new perceptual mode of existential and embodied ‘presence’” via electronic and cinematic representation.
33. The echoes of Derrida’s essay can be heard in Nancy’s recent L’ “il y a” du rapport sexuel, which came out a few months after Connaissance. Nancy teases the double etymological thread of intimation in “l’intimité de Thanatos avec Eros”: “the subject of desire is insatiable… because it does not respond to a logic or an economy of satiety. It nourishes itself, but that responds neither to a replication nor to a return to self: rather to an intimation, an imperious need to push into the depths, or its inner depths” (37-38). ¤
34. The passage from Heidegger referred to by Nancy and cited by Derrida, in English translation: “Selfhood is more originary than any I and you and we. These are primarily gathered as such in the self, thus each becoming each ‘itself.’ Conversely, dispersion of the I, you, and we and the crumbling and levelling off of these are not merely a failing of man but rather the occurrence of powerlessness in sustaining and knowing ownhood, abandonment by being” (225).
35. I have discussed the allure of language’s visual aspect in a different context in Hayes, “Look But Don’t Read.”
36. Impossible not to hear an echo of the conflicted singular and plural address in the phrase attributed to Aristotle by Diogenes Laertius (“O ami” or “O amis”) analyzed in Derrida’s Politiques de l’amitié, where the ethical problem of the address is bound up with a problem of translation Derrida refers to as “le repli” (Politiques 219-52). A reference to the phrase also appears in Donner le temps, a few pages before the passage chosen by Hantaï for the travaux (195).
Temenuga Trifonova
Film Studies
University of California, San Diego
ttrifonova@UCSD.Edu
The discourse of materiality or objective reality today is, first of all, a discourse of ethics. Objective reality is either treated as a victim that has been wronged by subjectivity (the latter must, therefore, be brought to justice) or is regarded as “fearful,” “fatal,” or “revengeful” (as in Baudrillard’s work). This new discourse of materiality aims at getting rid of subjectivity, which it naïvely stereotypes as a puppeteer grown too controlling and tyrannical, oversignifying the world instead of letting the world express itself. In an attempt to surmount what it regards as the inherent anthropocentrism of centuries of philosophy and aesthetics, contemporary philosophy has taken it upon itself to dissolve subjectivity into something vague, unstable, indeterminate, unidentifiable, fragmented, amorphic, and always impersonal. Hence the lively recent interest in Henri Bergson’s philosophy of becoming. While the discourse of materiality claims to be an attack on metaphysics, Jean-François Lyotard insists that it is actually a revival of the very essence of metaphysics, “which [is] a thinking pertaining to [impersonal] forces much more than to the subject” (Inhuman 6, emphasis added). The question arises: How can the subject annihilate itself completely or, conversely, as Deleuze puts it in Cinema 2: The Time-Image 2, how can the object become a point of view in its own right?
Jean Baudrillard has often been criticized for his bleak interpretation of postmodern culture. In place of Baudrillard’s “‘sour’ post-structuralism,” we are urged to accept “a ‘sweet’ post-structuralism…for example, Derridean post-structuralism, with its emphasis upon the delirious free play of the signifier” (Coulter-Smith 92). Supposedly, Baudrillard cannot be of any help to us in this technological age because he is too scornful of it, too nihilistic, incapable of overcoming his “romantic concern for the loss of the real, the natural and the human” (98), which makes his writing sound both melancholy and apocalyptic. Others feel we ought to be warned against Baudrillard’s seductive but insubstantial ideas and style. It’s been said that too much of the criticism on Baudrillard is written by his devoted fans and that his works can “be regarded as little more than strings of aphorisms, and thus not worthy of critical engagement” (Willis 138). There is a strange incongruity between these two critiques. According to the first, Baudrillard is not sufficiently postmodernist; according to the second, he is too postmodernist, as his fragmented, aphoristic style testifies. Rather than discrediting Baudrillard’s work, these criticisms actually present it as worthy of critical attention, especially now that postmodernism is drawing close to the brink of self-exhaustion. It is far more interesting to ask “What is there beyond the sweet and delirious free play of the signifier?” than to keep juggling the clichés of postmodernism. This is why, as I seek to demonstrate below, it is important to consider Baudrillard’s texts as articulating an ontology rather than an epistemology.
In many respects Baudrillard’s theory of images is a reformulation of Bergson’s imagistic ontology developed in Matter and Memory. Although both Bergson and Baudrillard are interested in the ontological and epistemological significance of light as the prime guarantor of the real, their notions of the image differ significantly. Bergson does not distinguish an image from a thing: things do not have images, and neither do we produce their images. Things, insofar as they are made of light vibrations, are already images. Or, taken more metaphorically, a thing is an image (or a representation) of the totality of images from which perception isolates it like a picture. Baudrillard, however, conceives images as capable of detaching themselves from things and either preceding or following them. What he really means is that things have lost their solidity and have been dematerialized into images, reduced to their pre-given meanings. Images are neither exclusively visual nor exclusively mental; rather, Baudrillard emphasizes their “pre(over)determination,” their extreme proximity to us, which makes them virtually invisible. In Baudrillard’s work, the image becomes a metaphor, and a deliberate misnomer, for the end of visibility. When everything has been rendered visible, nothing is visible any more and we are left with images. The image is a sign of overexposure or oversignification. Whereas Bergson describes the “production” of images as a process of dissociation or diminution (in which the image is dissociated or isolated from something bigger), Baudrillard describes the reverse process: the image is produced through a process of intensification or saturation, which overexposes a thing into an image. Both resort to photography to illuminate the nature of the image: the Bergsonian image is produced by obscuring rather than by throwing more light on the object, whereas Baudrillard’s image is produced by overexposing the object, throwing excessive light on it, making it more visible than visible.
Although Bergson’s critique of cinematographical perception, in Creative Evolution, appears illogical in light of the fact that the description of natural perception in Matter and Memory is precisely a description of cinematographical perception, it is also true that in the same work Bergson underscores the necessity of overcoming the limits of natural perception through the “education of the senses” (49). The “education of the senses” seeks “to harmonize my senses with each other, to restore between their data a continuity which has been broken by the discontinuity of the needs of my body, in short, to reconstruct…the whole of the material object” (49). The continuity of objects of perception is broken by the discontinuity of our needs, by the selectivity of conscious perception. The restoration of the continuity of the object of perception requires a sacrifice of the selectivity and discontinuity of perception. Conscious perception has to be “corrected.” For Bergson, however, conscious perception is the difference that tears apart the original neutrality of matter. To reconstruct the continuity of the aggregate of images is to surrender the difference which, by breaking that continuity, has given birth to conscious perception. Bergson demands that we educate our perception so that it approximates that of a material object. We must reconstruct the totality of external images that our perception (and our consciousness which is born in the delay of perception) has torn apart in being born. We must annihilate the very discernment through which difference enters the material world. We must reconstitute the very continuity whose break we ourselves are. The multiplicity and discontinuity of our needs must be reduced back to the uniformity and continuity of matter. The radical meaning of Bergson’s doctrine of the education of the senses is that the evolution of consciousness is measured precisely by the degree to which our perception approximates that of a material point. To educate our senses is to try to compensate for the limits of perception as a selection and organization of a small part of the actual, to attempt to enlarge our perception. However, given that our perception is a narrowing down of “universal consciousness” or matter (for Bergson they are the same thing), the enlarging of perception would require a descent to matter: “To perceive all the influences from all the points of all bodies would be to descend to the condition of a material object” (49). Precisely those states that are deprived in the greatest degree of the discernment of conscious perception best reconstruct the reality of an object. To carry this line of argument to its logical conclusion: the further away we move from consciousness–for example, in sleep or unconsciousness–the more sides of an image we perceive, until our perception reaches the extreme point where it barely manages not to collapse back into matter. Intermediary states, such as sleep and hallucination, approximate total perception.
Baudrillard, however, does not concern himself with the question of reconstructing the real: the real, he believes, never takes place, since it is determined by, and varies with, the speed of light. The essential immateriality of the world is a result of the very nature of light, which makes things distant or absent from themselves:
The objective illusion is the physical fact that in this universe no things coexist in real time–not sexes, starts, this glass, this table, or myself and all that surrounds me. By the fact of dispersal and the relative speed of light, all things exist only on a recorded version, in an unutterable disorder of time-scales, at an inescapable distance from each other. And so they are never truly present to each other, nor are they, therefore, “real” for each other. The fact that when I perceive this star it has perhaps already disappeared–a relationship that can be extended, relatively speaking, to any physical object or living being–this is the ultimate foundation, the material definition…of illusion. (Perfect 52)
Paradoxically, both the objectivity and the illusion of the world are functions of light.1 Bergson had suggested something similar when he observed that since perception is never pure but always pregnant with memory, there is always a delay between the world and our perception of it so that what we actually see is only the past. From the very beginning things are already absent from themselves (not contemporaneous with themselves) and absent from other things (distant from them). Both time (contemporaneity) and space (distance) are, originally, unreal.
In addition to stressing the role of light in determining the scope of the real, both Bergson and Baudrillard attribute ontological significance to the virtual. However, their ideas of the virtual are strikingly different. From Bergson’s point of view, Baudrillard’s virtual would be a false concept as it relies on the erroneous though common identification of the virtual with the merely possible:
Once, the two terms were linked in the living movement of a history: the actual form emerged from the virtual, like the statue emerging from the block of marble. Today they are entwined in the notorious movement of the dead. For the dead man continues to move, and the corpse of the real never stops growing. The virtual is, in fact, merely the dilation of the dead body of reality–the proliferation of an achieved universe, for which there is nothing left but to go on endlessly hyperrealizing itself. (Baudrillard, Perfect 47, emphasis added)
For Bergson, the virtual is an aspect of the life of the real precisely because the real is never fully realized. The discussion of the difference between the possible and the real occurs in The Creative Mind where Bergson challenges the illusory belief that the possible is less than the real, that the possibility of things precedes their existence “in some real or virtual intelligence” (22). This illusion is almost unavoidable since “by the sole fact of being accomplished, reality casts its shadow behind it into the indefinitely distant past: it thus seems to have been pre-existent to its own realization, in the form of a possible” (23). Nevertheless, the possible cannot be represented before it becomes real since the possible is what will have been: “we find that there is more and not less in the possibility of each of the successive states than in their reality. For the possible is only the real with the addition of an act of mind which throws its image back into the past, once it has been enacted” (118).
It should be emphasized that Baudrillard does not identify the hyperreal or the virtual with the imaginary or the unreal. The latter are forces of negation whereas the pathological involution of the real in the hyperreal puts an end to negation. For Baudrillard, the virtual or the hyperreal is the fulfilling of the dialectic. The imaginary is not produced but destroyed by the surpassing of the real. The virtual/hyperreal results from a reversal of causality, the introduction of the finality of things at their origin, the accomplishment of things even before their appearance. Things become excessive when they appear as already accomplished, when there is no gap between their appearance and their realization. However, Baudrillard describes the constitutive illusion of the world also in terms of a disturbance of causes and effects. The event is not determined: it appears as an effect without a cause. Just as the world is illusory insofar as it is uncaused, unintelligible, the hyperreal does not have a cause either: its end functions as its cause. Baudrillard clarifies the difference between illusion and hyperreality/virtuality thus: “The great philosophical question used to be ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ Today, the real question is: ‘Why is there nothing rather than something?’” (2). Although in both cases the cause as such no longer exists, the results are different. The illusory is that which exists though it could have just as well not existed (the possibility of disappearance, of nothingness) whereas the virtual is that which has always already existed and cannot be destroyed (the impossibility of disappearance). In the first case, nothing is given that could not be taken away at any moment; in the second case everything has been given from the beginning and, therefore, nothing remains to be given. It is essential, however, that there always be something to be revealed because the real exists only as long as it reveals itself as illusion.
The virtual/hyperreal threatens to destroy illusion precisely through its perfection:
Virtuality tends toward the perfect illusion. But it isn’t the same creative illusion as that of the image. It is a “recreating” illusion (as well as a recreational one), revivalistic, realistic, mimetic, hologrammatic. It abolishes the game of illusion by the perfection of the reproduction, in the virtual rendition of the real. (Baudrillard, “Objects” 9)
The Bergsonian virtual, on the other hand, does not threaten to extinguish the real or to become confused with it. This virtual is also the double of the real but it does not drive the real toward an identification with itself that would attenuate it, collapse it into a perfect reproduction of itself. The virtual is the sign of difference that can always infiltrate the present moment or the real: not to question it but rather to enrich it. Bergson insists on a distinction between images and virtuality, arguing that images themselves are not virtual but are merely the actualization of virtuality and, thus, its degeneration. The virtual cannot be exhausted in an image: one can follow the self-actualization of the virtual in images but one can never reconstitute the virtual from images. For Baudrillard, however, the difference between virtuality and image has collapsed. There is no more virtuality: there are only virtual images, perfect copies of the real which have supplanted the real. The virtual is the annihilation of representation, illusion, distance, time, and memory. Baudrillard’s virtual is the ultimate threat: absolute self-identity, absolute self-contemporaneity, absolute proximity. By contrast, the Bergsonian virtual expresses the fact that everything is larger than itself, that nothing coincides with itself because the past is preserved in everything without being actualized.
That the postmodern notion of the virtual is inconceivable within Bergsonism becomes clear in Bergson’s critique of the concept of absence: “The idea of absence or of nothingness…is…inseparably bound to that of suppression, real or eventual, and the idea of suppression is itself only an aspect of the idea of substitution” (Creative Mind 115). Absence–whether it is the absence of matter or the absence of consciousness–is an illusion for “the representation of the void is always a representation which is full and which resolves itself on analysis into two positive elements: the idea, distinct or confused, of a substitution, and the feeling, experienced or imagined, of a desire or a regret” (Creative Evolution 308). Baudrillard’s virtual foregrounds the impossibility of determining whether an object still exists or has disappeared, leaving behind its virtual ghost. Yet Bergson would argue that even a virtual existence is still an existence insofar as it is thinkable: “Between thinking an object and thinking it existent, there is absolutely no difference” (Creative Evolution 310). The problem with declaring an object unreal or virtual is that we tend to focus on the exclusion of this object from the real when in fact we ought to focus on that which excludes–on the real.
Baudrillard’s description of virtuality stresses the poverty of the virtual, of which one can only say “it exists, I’ve met it” (Perfect 28). The world is virtual or poor because “referential substance is becoming increasingly rare” (29-30). One is reminded of Lyotard’s description of the intrinsic poverty of the postmodern sublime. Like the poverty of the virtual, the poverty of the sublime lies in that it neither signifies nor is it the object of signification. Lyotard notes that the only response the sublime provokes is “Voila!” or “Here I am!” However, it is difficult to differentiate between poverty as excess (something is, and that is already more than what was expected) and sheer poverty (the only thing we can say of something is that it merely exists). It is as if at any given moment the sublime object–the image that does not signify–could slide into the hyperreal/virtual. There are no criteria for distinguishing between the sublime as non-signification and the virtual/hyperreal as non-signification, between “good” self-referentiality (an image drawing attention to itself, thus underscoring its autonomy) and “bad” self-referentiality (the hyperreal drawing attention to its own reality and thus surpassing it, making itself dubious) i.e., there is no way to distinguish between event and simulacrum. In the first case, it is a question of affirming the autonomous existence of something other than the mind by eliminating ourselves as a privileged point of view. In the second case, just the opposite is at stake, the affirmation of the connection between mind and reality. Reality is virtual or hyperreal when it operates independently of us, when we cannot determine whether it is real or not. Whatever exists independently of us has withdrawn absolutely and we can no longer affect it. It develops according to its own laws: it has become “obscene.”2
By “obscenity” Baudrillard means the annihilation of duration, of the slightest delay or lag in the existence of a thing, which makes it different from itself and thus impossible to decode or appropriate. What happens in virtual time is not an event, because it is instantly telegraphable, already containing its double. However, what is memory other than the instant replication or telegraphability of each moment? If, as Bergson argues in Matter and Memory, the photograph is already snapped in matter (perception is already “in” matter), couldn’t we say that the photograph is always already snapped in conscious perception–that is, the memory-image is already inherent in the perception-image? Could the memory-image be simply the unreflective (latent) consciousness of the present moment, while the perception-image is the manifest, reflected consciousness of the moment? Could we conceive the relationship between image and memory-image, or between perception and memory, as that between reflective and unreflected consciousness? According to Bergson, all unreflected consciousnesses are preserved in duration and they are constantly enriching our mental life. However, for Baudrillard it is precisely the richness of memory that is dangerous, the fact that each moment already has its double–the (unreflected) memory-image that accompanies it rather than following it. This preservation of the past in the present threatens the present by making it instantly telegraphable. Unlike Bergson who credits memory as a sign of our transcendence, our difference from matter, Baudrillard holds memory responsible for the loss of transcendence. The difference in their views of memory accounts for their contrasting interpretations of the virtual. In Baudrillard’s texts memory is associated with the de-realization of each instant, the collapse of distance, the turning of the present into a memory. As the memory-image supplants the present, the image becomes a repetition of itself and the past coincides with the present. What Baudrillard’s works record is the obsolescence of time. Time is the indetermination of things, the possibility for a thing to appear and to vanish. The real exists only as a limit. Things are real only as long as they keep crossing the limit, constantly appearing and disappearing. Once disappearance–i.e., illusion–is no longer possible, the world is de-realized.
Baudrillard’s view of illusion remains ambivalent. On one hand, he considers it a resistance to total simulation. Illusion is the possibility of things to disappear, but also to appear: only that which is destructible or which has not appeared is capable of appearing at all. On the other hand, however, “illusion” signifies the possibility of passing beyond matter into the realm of the virtual. Perhaps Baudrillard’s ambivalence toward illusion has something to do with his reconceptualization of the role of memory in perception. If Bergson is right that the duration of a given perception represents the work of habit-memory, and if that work is a variable, then it must be possible to influence or control it, thus controlling perception as well. Indeed, Bergson’s belief that every perception is already a memory is intricately connected to Baudrillard’s idea of the disappearance of the real as a result of the slowing down of the speed of light. Since the real depends on the speed of light, if the speed of light changes–if, for example, it drops very low–images will start reaching us with greater and greater delay that will be impossible to measure precisely because of the change in the speed of light, which was before the criterion for establishing the reality of a phenomenon. While Bergson considers memory a source of spirituality, Baudrillard is much more suspicious of the work of memory. For Bergson, habit-memory works to facilitate perception–that is, memory has a pragmatic significance; however, Baudrillard finds that the work of memory has gone beyond mere condensation: perceptions have become memories in the more dangerous sense of being predetermined (not spontaneously recollected). Perceptions have become neutralized, habitualized, but not in the harmless sense of habit as condensation for the purpose of action.
If the virtual is the pathological involution of the real, the “fatal” is a resistance to the virtual. Toward the end of Fatal Strategies Baudrillard introduces the idea of the fatal object as a way of thinking beyond metaphysics. “Radical” or “fatal” thought assumes the point of view of pure objectivity or what Baudrillard calls “the principle of Evil” (Fatal 182). The object is Evil or inhuman because of its resistance to interpretation, its secrecy or seductiveness. The inhuman is beyond causality and accident, even beyond negativity. In line with the ethical appeal of Lyotard’s idea of the inhuman as a resistance to the tyranny of subjectivity, Baudrillard defines the fatal or the inhuman as an expression of the enigma of the world, its resistance to metaphysics:
Metaphysics…wants to make the world into the mirror of the subject….Metaphysics wants a world of forms distinct from their bodies, their shadows, their images: this is the principle of Good. But the object is always the fetish, the false…the factitious, the lure, everything that incarnates the abominable confusion of the thing with its magical and artificial double; and that no religion of transparency and the mirror will ever be able to resolve: that is the principle of Evil. (Fatal 184)
The “fatality” of things lies in their excessiveness, which can never be represented. Existence is always already a surplus. Only through the threat of annihilation, through the return of the annihilated, and thus ultimately through repetition, does a thing appear at all:3
From a certain moment on, these second comings comprise the very design of existence, where consequently nothing happens by chance; it’s the first coming–which is not meaningful in itself and loses itself in the banal obscurity of living–that happens by chance. Only by redoubling can it make of itself a true event, attaining the character of a fatal happening….Predestination eliminates from life all that is only destined–all that, having happened only once, is only accidental, while what happens a second time becomes fatal; but it also gives to life the intensity of these secondary events, which have, as it were, the depth of a previous existence. (Fatal 187)
For Baudrillard repetition is not an external addition to some original substantial reality; rather, the real is only insofar as it is repeated. What happens only once is merely an accident, but if repeated it is an event. The real is produced, dissociated, repeated, represented, predestined, but none of these terms have their usual negative connotations. For example, “predestination” does not signify unfreedom or overdetermination; on the contrary, it underscores the irreducible singularity of the predestined object or event. More generally, representation–a key metaphysical concept–is no longer a “bad word.” Representation–the second coming of something–makes it significant in itself, absolute, singular. Representation is not an act performed by the subject on the objective world but a law presiding over all beings. Baudrillard challenges metaphysics by enlarging the concept of representation well beyond the realm of subjectivity and turning it into an ontological law: everything (both subjects and objects) is a representation. Refusing to think representation in terms of agency, he implicitly posits an impersonal force that indiscriminately represents everything. From this point of view, the image is not a threat to the real but its ground.
Such a positive interpretation of the image, however, is the exception rather than the rule in Baudrillard’s work, which generally treats the image as an epitome of the simulacral or the hyperreal. The critique of obscenity in The Perfect Crime is based on a notion of the simulacrum as transparency, excessive visibility, overexposure, supersaturation of the real with itself, which leads to the production of the hyperreal. In The Ecstasy of Communication Baudrillard notes that the “simulacra have passed from the second order to the third, from the dialectic of alienation to the giddiness of transparency” (79). The notion of the simulacrum as a threat to the material illusion of the world is based on a still-existing belief in a subject and its discourse, while the idea of a third-order simulacrum constituting the illusion of the world, its infinite reversibility, is already developed from a point of view beyond that of the subject and its discourse, from the point of view of the object itself:
The object itself takes the initiative of reversibility, taking the initiative to seduce and lead astray. Another succession is determinant. It is no longer that of a symbolic order…but the purely arbitrary one of a rule of the game. The game of the world is the game of reversibility. It is no longer the desire of the subject, but the destiny of the object, which is at the center of the world. (Ecstasy 80)
While transparency is the absolute proximity of the object to the subject, the object rendered more visible than visible, fatality is the absolute inaccessibility of the object, which is “always already a fait accompli…In a way, it is transfinite. The object is inaccessible to the subject’s knowledge since there can be no knowledge of that which already has complete meaning, and more than its meaning, and of which there can be no utopia, for it has already been created” (Ecstasy 88-89, emphasis added). The illusion of the world is preserved even in a simulacral world, though with a slight twist: originally, illusion is the possibility of meaning (things are meaningful insofar as they are different from themselves), but in a world where things have become themselves, illusion exists only as the absolute meaninglessness of everything, as indifference and inertia. Even after the disappearance of the subject there still remains a world, the world of pure events (70), in which the subject appears and disappears, following the rules of the game just like any other object (Forget 76). At this stage, there are only effects, no causes; things metamorphose into other things “without passing through a system of meaning” (78). Baudrillard refers to this process as “panic,” “ecstasy,” or “speed.”
Although in Forget Foucault Baudrillard calls “ecstasy” the liberation of effects from causes, the originary meaninglessness (or the objective illusion) of the world, in The Ecstasy of Communication he uses the term “ecstasy” as a synonym for “simulation,” placing it on the side of the virtual/hyperreal. From Baudrillard’s point of view, the postmodern sublime–as theorized in Lyotard’s The Inhuman: Reflections on Time–is an example of “ecstasy” in this second sense of the term. The sublime is a kind of simulation, because it draws attention to the sheer existence of something, “verifying to the point of giddiness the useless objectivity of things” (Ecstasy 31-32). The intentional poverty of the postmodern sublime might be compared to that of pornography, which desperately draws attention to “the useless objectivity of things” (32). The postmodern sublime is obscene because it tries not to signify or rather to signify only its own existence. But is not the reduction of a thing to its existence, its quod, the most extreme case of the miniaturization of things, the denial of the possibility of transcendence? The impossibility of true sublimity is due to the disappearance of transcendence into immanence, the eclipse of “seduction” by “production.”
Baudrillard’s distinction between “seduction” and “production” in many respects parallels Sartre’s distinction, in Being and Nothingness, between pre-reflective and reflective consciousness and, more generally, poses the question of the relationship of reflexivity or self-referentiality to authenticity. There are two types of non-reflective consciousness. First, there is a pre-reflective consciousness that is immediate and non-signifying from the very beginning. Second, although it sounds counterintuitive, a kind of non-reflective consciousness can be attained through an excess of self-reflexivity or self-referentiality. Even though the gesture of self-reference begins “in” a subject, greater degrees of self-reference eventually tear it away from the subject. Self-reference becomes an absolute, no longer an attribute: it no longer presupposes a consciousness in which it would be reflected. Insofar as self-reflexivity presupposes a self only to tear itself away from it, it is absolutely unreflexive, self-sufficient, operating according to its own laws rather than manipulated by a subject who is now external to it. When the description of an object replaces the object absolutely, when there is nothing left of the real object except the description referring to itself, the object has become virtual (in Baudrillard’s sense): the object is most real precisely when we can no longer tell whether it is still there or all we have is its description.
This virtual object, this absolute self-reference, does not differ from itself. What Sartre missed when he articulated the distinction between pre-reflective and reflective consciousness is that reflective consciousness is capable of producing or at least simulating the pre-reflective or, to put it more broadly, that consciousness is capable of producing the real while hiding from itself this act of production. Baudrillard is well aware of this when he distinguishes subjective from objective illusion. Subjective illusion is the possibility to mistake the unreal for the real or the real for the unreal: “So long as an illusion is not recognized as an error, it has a value precisely equivalent to reality. But once the illusion has been recognized as such, it is no longer an illusion. It is, therefore, the very concept of illusion, and that concept alone, which is an illusion” (Perfect 51). Objective illusion, however, is the very nature of the physical world insofar as it is not what it is: it is never contemporaneous with itself and thus never contemporaneous with our perception of it.
In Sartre’s view, consciousness is the only de-realizing force; the world itself cannot be a source of illusion. Since the image is possible only when its material analogue is absent or non-existent, a material thing can never be transformed into an image. The image, warns Sartre, must not be confused with an aesthetic attitude: one cannot apprehend an existing object imaginatively. When one tries to contemplate real objects, the result is not an image but an intensification of the nauseating disgust that characterizes the consciousness of reality (Psychology 281). The object then appears as an analogue of itself; its materiality or the absence of anything transcendent in the object is underscored. An image, on the other hand, is beautiful precisely because it is not bound by its material analogue, because the analogue points to something transcendent that does not show itself. The doubling (analogue of an analogue) that occurs when one contemplates real objects is the de-realization of the real: the real appears too real and, namely because of that, as falling short of something essential or transcendent that would have made it real. Because it is real, it appears now as only real.
Sartre’s description of the degradation of things to their analogues anticipates Baudrillard’s account of the de-realization of the world as a result of its increasing immediacy. In the same way that one cannot contemplate a real object because it is not sufficiently distant from us (contemplation requires distance), things that are too immediately available are no longer real (we cannot look at them because “looking” requires distance). But while Sartre refuses to call real objects “images,” thus preserving the honorific connotations of the term “image,” Baudrillard describes this degradation of looking–the obscene immediacy of the world–precisely as a proliferation of images. The image, Sartre argues, demands the absence of the material world; the image, Baudrillard objects, epitomizes the inescapable immediacy of the world.
What makes Baudrillard’s theory of the hyperreal problematic is the possibility for confusing the hyperreal with the pure or the impersonal (the fatal) since both are defined as the collapse of the subject/object distinction. On one hand, the pure or the impersonal is the elimination of human perception as an external, privileged point of view. However, the hyperreal is also defined as the elimination of the subjective point of view, the suppression of the look, the fact that the object of perception is always already there, already seen, thus preventing the act of seeing. Obscenity then has two possible and mutually exclusive meanings: it signifies either the absolute triumph of subjectivity (the world has been preempted by consciousness, objects are merely extensions or reflections of the subject) or the complete objectivization of the world (everything becomes objective because what is already seen is, for that very reason, no longer accessible; it cannot be manipulated or relativized by the subject but exists independently).
The difficulty in distinguishing between the Absolute and the hyperreal, between real immediacy and manufactured immediacy, is also evidenced by Baudrillard’s slippery distinction between “seduction” and “production.” “Seduction” designates difference or otherness; thus, a sign that “fall[s] from seduction into interpretation” (Ecstasy 61) loses its otherness, its secret, is completely exposed and, once exposed, can be produced over and over again. The distinction between seduction and production (obscenity) is far from clear since both are a form of immediacy, the only difference between them being that the sign that seduces is immediately undecipherable, whereas the sign that has lost its seductive power is immediately–always already–deciphered. The confusion stems from the fact that both the immediately undecipherable and the immediately pre-deciphered resist us to an equal degree: both appear “unknown” and inaccessible to us. This point is usually missed, since we assume that overinterpretation and reflexivity are always connected to subjectivity, which has produced them and is now in control of them. The truth is that the products of such self-referential acts eventually separate themselves from the subject, assuming an independent existence. In fact, whatever the subject produces in its least self-reflective states remains bound to subjectivity, while the more self-reflexive production becomes, the greater its independence from subjectivity.
As counterintuitive as this sounds, the absolute replacement of things with their descriptions does not make the world subjective. On the contrary, the absolute victory of artifice is the very definition of objectivity and the law of nature is precisely obscenity and self-identity. Nature is obscene since it is too obvious, glued to itself, with no mystery, no transcendence, absolutely transparent, more visible than visible. Only illusion can protect things from the obscenity of absolute resemblance to themselves: “There exists a terror, as well as a fascination, of the perpetual engendering of the same by the same. This confusion is exactly that of nature, the natural confusion of things, and only artifice can put an end to it. Only artifice can dispel this lack of differentiation, this coupling of same to same” (Fatal 51, emphasis added). Nature is always already a threat to the constitutive illusion of the world, which is preserved only through artifice. Baudrillard suggests that nature is obscene and that it takes the highest levels of artifice (self-referentiality, self-reflexivity) to reveal things as they are. Contrary to common sense, the more we manipulate things (through artifice), the more they become pure expressions rather than representations. Nature, insofar as it is the constant engendering of the same by the same–“the natural confusion of things”–is already virtual. Artifice is our only resistance against nature’s inherent obscenity.
The confusion over the real nature of self-reflexivity accounts for a number of inconsistencies in Baudrillard’s texts. For instance, Baudrillard’s privileging of “seduction” as the space of “surface and appearance,” of the “giddiness of reversibility,” over “production” as the space of meaning, depth, truth, is surprising in the general context of his critique of simulation and of the infinite proliferation of images, which are characterized precisely by superficiality, lack of referentiality i.e., by their seductiveness. If production is the space of meaning, signification, referentiality, and if, on the other hand, obscenity is the threat of losing referential material, why does Baudrillard assure us that “THERE IS NEVER ANYTHING TO PRO-DUCE” (Ecstasy 64)? If there is nothing to produce, nothing to refer to, then the world is devoid of illusion from the very beginning. But this is not what Baudrillard has told us about illusion, which, he insisted earlier, is constitutive of the world and whose disappearance renders the world obscene. This is a fundamental incongruity in Baudrillard’s thought. On one hand, the material illusion of the world makes meaning possible, while simulation seduces us into a world without illusion (hence meaning is “good” and simulation “bad”). On the other hand, the production of meaning is “bad” for trying to make everything signify, while simulation is “good” because it resists the mad urge to expose all things. In this second sense, seduction is actually identified with illusion: “Seduction is not the locus of desire…but of giddiness, of the eclipse, of appearance and disappearance, of the scintillation of being. It is an art of disappearing, whereas desire is always the desire for death” (Ecstasy 66).
Accordingly, whereas earlier Baudrillard conceived the image as pure presence, as the death of illusion (32), now he identifies image with illusion, insofar as illusion is the ability of a thing to appear and disappear. The image is now credited as a source of illusion and thus of the real, which exists only as long as it is seduced or challenged by the image: “All these things [the truth, the real, God] only exist in the brief instant when one challenges them to exist; they exist…precisely through seduction, which opens the sublime abyss before them–the abyss into which they will plunge ceaselessly in a last glimmer of reality” (Ecstasy 69). The strategy of the image is absence, not the saturation of the real with itself. Now the image is completely on the side of the material illusion of the world rather than illustrating its degradation into an obscene proliferation of images. Indeed, now Baudrillard suggests that originally the entire world must have consisted of images insofar as things did not coincide with themselves but were infinitely substitutable and reversible (reversibility is the nature of the image, what distinguishes it from a “thing”). Almost imperceptibly, Baudrillard has transformed the image from the epitome of obscene self-identity into a manifestation of originary difference:
The principle of reversibility, which is also the one of magic and seduction, requires that all that has been produced must be destroyed….Seduction is party to this: it is that which deviates…that which makes the real return to the great game of simulacra, which makes things appear and disappear. It could almost be a sign of an original reversibility of things. One could maintain that before having been produced the world was seduced, that it exists…only by virtue of having been seduced. (Ecstasy 71-72)
Here the simulacrum is defined as the originary difference of things from themselves and from one another rather than as the obscene, total realization of the real, the annihilation of originary difference. The world turns out to be, originally, a simulacrum but in the good sense of “simulacrum”–continually dissimulating and dissembling rather than identifying, revealing, or verifying itself.
In its “bad” sense, the simulacrum is the de-realization of the objective world, which has become predetermined, reduced to a mere representation of the subject. Yet this is a one-sided view of the matter because it rests on the assumption that the subject’s de-realization of the world has left the subject itself unchanged. The fact that Baudrillard also uses the term “simulacral” to characterize the constitutive illusion of the world (Ecstasy 71-2) makes sense only if it is acknowledged that by dispersing itself, by making the world coextensive with itself, the subject too has changed: it has objectified itself. Baudrillard’s discourse of the murder of the real is, in fact, a discourse of the subject and its new destiny. The de-realization of reality is the destruction of subjectivity but, as Baudrillard notes, the crime is never perfect. If the real is still preserved–as the trace of what has been murdered–the subject also survives its annihilation or dispersal; its destiny passes into the object. By subjectivizing or de-realizing the world, the subject has revealed its ability to appear and disappear (to lose itself in multiplicity) which is, in fact, the strongest proof that there is still a subject: after all, Baudrillard himself defines the constitutive illusion of the world as the possibility of things to appear and disappear. By disappearing, by eliminating itself as a point of view, the subject has proven itself even stronger and more real than Baudrillard might have expected. Subjectivity includes its own annihilation, its pseudo-sacrificial self-reduction to an object.
To sum up, the simulacrum should be understood not only as the de-realization of the world by the subject but, simultaneously, as the subject’s self-objectification. The “event” is not the absolute annihilation of subjectivity, only its modification. The subject cannot disappear, just as the real cannot disappear. Despite the fragility of the real, it can never be completely negated because negation itself takes place on the foundation of the real. Even in the extreme case that all reality is negated, there will remain the memory of that annihilated reality. The paradox of the real is that it is never real enough–never self-sufficient, never a full positivity–but, at the same time, it is never annihilated and remains to haunt the unreal. The real derives its power from its own powerlessness. Something that never was in the first place remains: this is the real.
Does the real exist only as its own end? Baudrillard considers the real as already sublated in the hyperreal. Although he suggests that the real, whose disappearance he laments, emerges only within a certain time frame as it depends on the difference between causes and effects, he remains fascinated precisely by events that do not belong to a subject and therefore cannot be reduced to causes. On one hand, the real depends on causality, on the lag between causes and effects, on time as a source of difference; on the other hand, the event, which Baudrillard credits with the power to restore the real (the constitutive illusion of the world) is the very elimination of time. The real is possible only if nothing is contemporaneous with itself or with other things but the event, which Baudrillard posits as an access to the real after it has been threatened by the hyperreal, is precisely the negation of time, the triumph of contemporaneity or simultaneity.
Baudrillard cannot decide whether the event is on the “good” side of illusion or on the “bad” side of hyperreality. First, insofar as it collapses time and space, the event belongs to the hyperreal or the virtual: in the event, there is no delay, no distance, and both delay and distance are essential to thought. The event illustrates best the obscenity of the immediate and the contemporaneous. The event cannot be integrated in our mental life, because it has no beginning and end. And since it cannot appear and disappear–precisely because it has no beginning or end–it is also the end of illusion. However, occasionally Baudrillard uses the term “event” to designate the material illusion of the world. The world is illusion only to the extent that it is an event, a creation ex nihilo, which is also to say to the extent it is unintelligible (the assumption being that only that which can be inscribed in a cause-and-effect sequence–that is, that which has a history, is intelligible). The unintelligible cannot be annihilated because it can never be realized, never fulfilled. Things are illusory to the extent that they appear suddenly and without cause. The value of the event lies precisely in this absence of reason, in its absurdity:
This suddenness, this emergence from the void, this non-interiority of things to themselves, continues to affect the event of the world at the very heart of its historical unfolding….Nothing gives us greater pleasure than what emerges or disappears at a stroke, than emptiness succeeding plenitude. Illusion is made up of this magic portion, this accursed share which creates a kind of absolute surplus-value by substraction of causes or by distortion of effects and causes. (Perfect 58)
Yet, how are we to reconcile this glorification of the event as a surplus-value with Baudrillard’s critique of the drive to exhaust all possibilities, a drive that is responsible for the annihilation of all “reserves of uselessness?” “These,” Baudrillard continues, “are threatened with intensive exploitation. Insignificance is under threat from an excess of meaning. Banality is threatened with its hour of glory. The supply of floating signifiers has fallen to dangerous levels” (49). Supposedly, the event’s significance derives from its poverty, and its effect of suddenness from its non-anteriority, from a simple that. But is there anything more banal than the fact that something exists? Isn’t the banality of the quodnow threatened “with its hour of glory”? Is not the event part of the dangerous drive to “greater visibility, transparency and hypercoincidence” (62)? Does not the event announce the end of surpassing insofar as the event declares itself to be a transcendence but a transcendence that is immanent to things or works of art, their very existence or facticity having become a transcendence? Is transcendence in immanence still a transcendence or is it rather an artificial transcendence similar to that achieved by Andy Warhol’s images, which Baudrillard gives as an example of “the elevation of the image to pure figuration, without the least transfiguration” (76)? If the event as a sublime experience attains the absolute, the distinction between real and ideal, between facticity and transcendence disappears, making negation impossible. From Baudrillard’s point of view the postmodern sublime experience is an excess of being as it partakes of the obsession with immediacy he condemns. In the realm of the hyperreal every event has become as inconsequential as a catastrophe:
Beyond this point there are only inconsequential events (and inconsequential theories) precisely because they absorb their sense into themselves. They reflect nothing, presage nothing. Beyond this point there are only catastrophes. Perfect is the event or language which assumes its own mode of disappearance, knows how to stage it, and thus reaches the maximal energy of appearances….The event without consequence–like Musil’s man without qualities, the body without organs, or time without memory. (Fatal 17)
In the event origin and end coincide. The event remains equally indifferent to every interpretation because none ever makes it intelligible. Lyotard interprets the event’s meaninglessness as liberating, stressing not its indifference to various interpretations but rather the fact that it refuses to be explained away (by being made intelligible). Far more reluctant to give up meaning, Baudrillard laments the inconsequentiality of the event. He compares its unsettling immediacy to the sense of instantaneity characteristic of a schizophrenic’s experience:
The schizo is deprived of all scene, open to all in spite of himself, and in the greatest confusion….What characterizes him is less his light-years distance from the real, a radical break, than absolute proximity, the total instantaneousness of things, defenseless, with no retreat; end of interiority and intimacy, overexposure and transparency of the world that traverses him without his being able to interpose any barrier. For he can no longer produce the limits of his own being, and reflect himself; he is only an absorbent screen… (Fatal 69-70)
Like an object or an image in pure perception, the schizophrenic subject is open on all sides to all things: no discrimination, no choice, no discreteness, no conscious perception to delimit or isolate a part of the world of images. Clearly, Baudrillard would like the subject to preserve its boundaries, not to dissolve in the objectivity of the world as the schizo does, but at the same time he celebrates what he calls “the revenge of the crystal,” which is supposed to overthrow the tyranny of subjectivity. This description of the schizophrenic subject corresponds very closely to Deleuze’s account of Bergsonian pure perception or, in Deleuze’s own thought, to the idea of a “crystalline regime of images” in which images exist only for one another without varying for a human consciousness. In Bergsonian pure perception, images are neutral to one another: they do not act on one another, do not appear to one another but merely reflect one another. Similarly, Deleuze’s “time-image” or “crystal-image” is a schizo-image insofar as it does not reflect a privileged point of view but is dispersed amongst multiple points of views across the aggregate of images. Both the schizo subject and the pure object (the “crystal”) are characterized by their anonymity: they are “whatever-subjects” or “whatever-objects.”
It must be pointed out, however, that what Deleuze, in The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, calls “hallucinatory perception” has nothing to do with the schizo subject’s peculiar perception. Rather, it is natural, ordinary perception that Deleuze designates “hallucinatory.” Starting from the premise that consciousness is “a matter of threshold” (Fold 88), Deleuze posits that conscious perception–the perception of qualities–takes place when the “differential relations among…presently infinitely small [perceptions]…are drawn into clarity” (90). The filtering of an infinite number of inconspicuous perceptions results in the extraction of the remarkable or the clear (the finite) from the obscurity of the infinite. This discrimination or selection, however, is never simply a reaction to an external excitation: “Every perception is hallucinatory because perception has no object. Conscious perception has no object and does not even refer to a physical mechanism of excitation that could explain it from without: it refers only to the exclusively physical mechanism of differential relations among unconscious perceptions that are comprising it within the monad” (93). The idea of hallucinatory perception seems to pose Baudrillard’s problem of the impossibility of distinguishing reality from simulacra. Nevertheless, an important distinction should be made between Baudrillard’s notion of the virtual as a perception without object, a perception that reifies the real into the simulacral, on one hand, and Deleuze’s hallucinatory perception, which affirms the indetermination of the subject by material reality, on the other hand. The deep-seated nostalgia for the real that permeates Baudrillard’s description of the virtual or the obscene is completely foreign to Deleuze’s account of the free monad, whose perceptions are not grounded in the objective world. The “resemblance” posited between what is commonly called “the object of perception,” on one hand, and the perceived, on the other hand, is key to understanding this self-sufficiency of the perceived:
In the first place, Leibniz is not stating that perception resembles an object, but that it evokes a vibration gathered by a receptive organ: pain does not represent the needle…but the thousands of minute movements or throbs that irradiate in the flesh….Here the relation of resemblance is like a “projection”: pain or color are projected on the vibratory plane of matter. (95)
Perception is comprised of “affective qualities” or “natural signs” (96), which do not represent a corresponding object but instead resemble the vibrations produced in matter. Any kind of “affective quality,” such as pain for example, is taken not as representing or implying an object in the world but as resembling the vibrations produced in the material body: “Pain does not represent the pin in extension, but resembles molecular movements that it produces in matter” (96).
Deleuze’s seemingly backward way of thinking is made possible by his reversal of the understanding of resemblance whereby “resemblance is equated with what resembles, not with what is resembled” (96). The conclusion Deleuze does not himself draw, but which follows logically from his argument, is that perception is always already virtual–in the sense that it has no object–because the fact “that the perceived resembles matter means that matter is necessarily produced in conformity with this relation, and not that this relation conforms to a preexisting model” (96). Deleuzean perception is virtual or hallucinatory in two complementary senses: first, the perceived resembles the vibrations projected in the material body and, second, these vibrations resemble an object in the world. This is how Deleuze imagines the relationship of the monad to the world:
(1) clear-obscure perception manifests a relation of resemblance with a material receptor that receives vibrations; (2) such receptors are called organs or organic bodies, and as bodies they constitute the vibrations that they receive to infinity; (3) the physical mechanism of bodies (fluxion) is not identical to the psychic mechanism of perception (differentials) but the latter resembles the former. (Fold 98)
To simplify things: the material world resembles my material body, and my material body resembles the soul. Although “the monad draws all perceptive traces from itself” (99), it does not perceive without having a body that resembles what it perceives. Deleuze does not deny the existence of the material world; he only insists that the world does not determine my body, just as my body does not determine the perceived (subjectivity).4
In his Introduction to Deleuze’s Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, Constantin Boundas rightfully notes that Deleuze’s “struggles for subjectivity” (4) and his critique of phenomenology are always “marked by the tension created by a radical critique of interiority and a simultaneous quest for an inside deeper than any internal world” (11). This tension results in the elaboration of “a line of subjectivity” and a “line of objectivity” in Bergsonism. The line of subjectivity is that of memory “which puts us at once into the mind,” while the line of objectivity is that of perception “which puts us at once into matter” (Bergsonism 26). These two “lines” differ in kind. However, Deleuze later posits that all differences in kind fall on the side of subjectivity or memory, while all differences in degree fall on the side of perception or matter. Since the difference between perception/matter and memory/mind is a difference in kind, it falls on the side of subjectivity. Therefore, the line of objectivity (matter, perception) is part of the line of subjectivity or, put differently, the difference between object and subject is subjective: in fact, the subject is nothing else but this difference.
The purpose of The Fold is to reconstruct the line of subjectivity before the constitution of a subject. Deleuze attempts to do this by redefining point of view in terms of the line of subjectivity rather than identifying it with the subject. The tension of which Boundas speaks accounts for the co-existence of two mutually irreconcilable tendencies in Deleuze’s understanding of “perception in the folds”: on one hand, the reconceived notion of point of view (the subject is not a privileged, essentializing point of view on the object; the object itself is undergoing a continuous variation) and, on the other hand, the idea of the perceived as absolutely enclosed in the monad, “the pleats of matter” resembling “the folds of the soul.” Deleuze situates himself in a line of philosophers–Nietzsche, Whitehead, William and Henry James–whose perspectivism he hastens to distinguish from the common-sense notion of relativism: “It is not a variation of truth according to the subject, but the condition in which the truth of a variation appears to the subject” (Fold 20). Indeed, William James’s idea of “pure experience” already anticipates Deleuze’s reconceptualization of point of view:
Experience, I believe, has no…inner duplicity; and the separation of it into consciousness and content comes, not by way of substraction, but by way of addition. . . . Just so, I maintain, does a given undivided portion of experience [whether perceptual or conceptual], taken in one context of associates, play the part of a knower, of a state of mind, of “consciousness”; while in a different context the same undivided bit of experience plays the part of a thing known, of an objective “content.” In a word, in one group it figures as a thought, in another group as a thing, And since it can figure in both groups simultaneously we have every right to speak of it as subjective and objective both at once. (James 7)
Since consciousness “connotes a kind of external relation, and does not denote a special stuff or way of being” (14), pure experience is “only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet.
Deleuze calls the new object “objectile,” arguing that “the new status of the object no longer refers its condition to a spatial mold–in other words, to a relation of form-matter–but to a temporal modulation that implies as much the beginnings of a continuous variation of matter as a continuous development of form….The object here is manneristic, not essentializing: it becomes an event” (Fold 19). The subject, on the other hand, is never given before its point of view:
Such is the basis of perspectivism, which does not mean a dependence in respect to a pre-given or defined subject; to the contrary, a subject will be what comes to the point of view, or rather what remains in the point of view….Just as an object becomes objectile, the subject becomes a superject. A needed relation exists between variation and point of view: not simply because of the variety of points of view…but in the first place because every point of view is a point of view on variation. The point of view is not varied with the subject, at least in the first instance; it is , to the contrary, the condition in which an eventual subject apprehends a variation (metamorphosis)…. (19-20)
Deleuze attempts to do away with the notion of point of view as belonging to or being embodied in a subject with respect to an object and thereby determining or immobilizing the object. His strategy is to conceive both the object and the subject as going through a continuous variation so that the variation of the object is as much determining the point of view as the point of view is determining the object.
What remains implicit in this new conception of the subject/object relationship is, first, that the object’s variation is a variation from itself (it does not vary for a subject) and, second, that point of view or subjectivity can only be a point within the temporal modulation of the object, since the object is not “essentializing.” Therefore, point of view or subjectivity is only a point in the continuous variation of matter. This conception of subjectivity combines Deleuze’s idea of “a practical subject” (Empiricism 104) with Bergson’s theory of perception as a process of selection and condensation of the aggregate of images that constitutes the material world. Deleuze’s debt to Bergson becomes clear in the example he gives of a point of view on variation which excludes any notion of a privileged center or configuration: “The most famous example is that of conic sections, where the point of the cone is the point of view to which the circle, the ellipse, the parabola, and the hyperbola are related as so many variants that follow the incline of the section that is planned” (Fold 20-21). The point of view from the summit of the cone provides a point of view on a series of variations, instead of a separate point of view corresponding to each figure. Similarly, to illustrate the “architecture” of the human mind in Matter and Memory Bergson chooses precisely a cone turned upside down so that the point of the cone cuts into the plane of perception (the present) while the bottom of the cone recedes in the infinite world of pure memory (the virtual).
Like Baudrillard’s philosophy of “the fatal object,” Deleuze’s redefinition of the relationship between subject and point of view denies the subject its status of a master of representation. Instead, it is the object that imposes on the subject its own random form and discontinuity. Neither Deleuze nor Baudrillard seem to acknowledge the fact that the call to stop signifying, to return to pure perception, to let things express themselves is meaningful only from the point of view of the subject’s destiny. Even if there was “an inhuman”–a pure object–we can only talk of it in human terms: “master,” “power,” “representation,” even “inhuman.” The inhuman is not the end or “death” of the subject but simply another point of view from which the subject can look at itself: becoming-object, becoming-animal, or becoming-inhuman are all human projects. Nothing can eliminate subjectivity underneath these anti-subjective projects, whether the subject disperses itself in a multiplicity of points of view for noble, ethical reasons or just out of boredom. The power of representation is absolute: if the subject has this power when it represents the world to itself (from its privileged, external point of view), it wields the same power when it renounces its privileged position. Power is not to be confused with truthfulness: the subject’s power as a master of signification does not consist in the truthfulness of its representation; conversely, the inhuman point of view cannot be “more” truthful or objective. The notorious “death of the subject” that has been proclaimed on more than one occasion now is nothing more than an outburst of melodrama in a philosophical trend–postmodernism–predisposed to pseudo-apocalyptic generalizations.
Baudrillard welcomes what he believes to be the end of the order of representation, the beginning of a pre-human or non-human reality:
All metaphysics is in effect swept away by this reversal of situation where the subject is no longer at the origin of the process, and no longer anything but the agent, or the operator, of the objective irony of the world. The subject no longer provides the representation of the world (I will be your mirror!) It is the object that refracts the subjects… (“Objects” 14)
Nevertheless, he cannot help but scorn “pure objects” that have been stripped of any secret or illusion (or of any relation to subjectivity), elevated to “pure figuration, without the least transfiguration [by a subject]. No transcendence any more, but a potentialization of the sign, which, losing all natural signification, shines in the void with all its artificial splendour…an image…without quality, a presence without desire” (16). In the end, Baudrillard is not so much concerned with getting rid of the subject as he is with recovering ways in which the world can still affect the subject. The subject must be sacrificed not because the objective world has to avenge itself but because it is necessary to assure ourselves that the subject is still alive. The subject can testify to its existence, to its difference from inanimate things, only by sacrificing itself and thus proving that it is still capable of being affected.5In the end, it is not the object but the subject that is the endangered species in Baudrillard’s philosophy.
1. It would be interesting to read Baudrillard’s theory of the simulacrum as the precession of images over things against Einstein’s theory of relativity, to inquire to what extent the phenomenon of the simulacrum (the decline of representation) is due to certain identifiable physical laws, such as the speed of light, for instance. In his novel Einstein’s Dreams, Alan Lightman imagines the different conceptions of time Einstein might have come up with before he formulated the theory of relativity. See also Mullarkey, 112-17, for an illuminating comparison between Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity and Bergson’s theory of time. Mullarkey distinguishes between Einstein’s partial relativism (in Einstein’s theory the idea of a privileged frame of reference is preserved despite the acknowledgement of other frames of reference) and Bergson’s “full-relativism” (117), in which all frames of reference–or as Deleuze will later say, all points-of-view-whatever–are equally valid.
2. Baudrillard is not particularly consistent in his writings on the notion of the virtual, to which he attributes both a destructive and preserving potential. The virtual stands either for total realization or for a strategy of escape from the threat of total realization; it has either already happened or it is a premonition, a warning against the danger of hyperreality.
3. Compare this notion that of repetition in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling/Repetition. According to Kierkegaard, repetition has been wrongly called mediation, whereas in fact it is the liberation of the particular from its subsumption under the universal. Opposing the Greeks’ idea that all knowledge is recollection (what is has been), Kierkegaard claims that being is not immediate or given; rather, things come into existence only through repetition–only through repetition can an event detach itself from the original confusion of things. Repetition is impossible when one seeks it consciously: then it inevitably degenerates into recollection. Recollection inscribes events; repetition is the coming of things into being.
4. It is another question whether the notion of resemblance upon which Deleuze’s whole argument rests is sufficient to overcome determinism. After all, resemblance is not part of the given but a kind of relation that becomes possible only with the transition from mind (associations) to subject (differential relations), as Deleuze argues in Empiricism and Subjectivity. Resemblance does not ground the relation of subject to the world but is simply a relation the subject establishes between its idea of itself and its idea of the world. In fact, in his essay on Hume Deleuze acknowledges that relations are never given but are only established by a subject. Having distinguished between “mind” and “subject”–the former is merely a collection of discernible perceptions while the latter spontaneously establishes differential relations between them–Deleuze notes that “the mind is not the representation of nature either” (88). The positing of a relation with nature–a relation of resemblance–is possible only after the mind has been transformed into a subject, because “the question of a determinable relation with nature has its own conditions: it is not obvious, it is not given, and it can only be posited by a subject questioning the value of the system of his judgments…” (88). Therefore, inasmuch as “relations are external to ideas” (98), resemblance remains a subjective reconciliation of the subject with the world.
5. See Readings, 97-101, for a discussion of the event as “affect”–that which cannot be conceptualized or signified.
Michael Truscello
Department of English
University of Waterloo
novel_t@rogers.com
The traces of power in the network society are equally located in the architecture of bricks and mortar and the architecture of information, the discursive practices that constitute the coding of network topologies. This paper examines the discourse of computer programming through Eric Raymond’s ethnographical account of the Open Source software developmental model. Raymond’s Open Source software manifesto, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” (hereafter, “CatB”), the infamous text that inspired Netscape to release the source code for its Web browser in 1998 in an attempt to compete with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, differentiates Open Source software development, which is figured as nonlinear and self-organizing, from Closed Source, which is represented as hierarchical and authoritarian. The Open Source model has been characterized by some as representing a liberatory politics for the information age. Open Source, as represented in the work of Raymond, is a tactical political philosophy whose central architectural metaphors–the bazaar, and its supplementary term, the cathedral–share theoretical homologies with anarchistic poststructuralist statements by Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Lebbeus Woods, and Hakim Bey. The intent of this essay is to examine points of generative convergence between the history and philosophy of software development and certain proponents of poststructuralist thought. In doing so, I wish to initiate a cultural analysis of the historically situated discourse that shapes software development, the texts and practices that inform the coding of the architecture of information. Raymond’s bazaar shares theoretical homologies with Deleuze’s modulations, Woods’s freespaces and heterarchic societies, and Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zone, but it is in the figure of the programmer especially that the intersecting discourses of electronic and concrete spaces converge and the inescapably cultural base of technology emerges.1 The bazaar programmer loses the distinction of “developer” and becomes a “co-developer,” dissolving the categorical distinction between those who code and those for whom there is a Code.
Critiques of the information age and the role of cyberspace in the operation of the surveillance society often ignore the fact that “electronic space is embedded in the larger dynamics organizing society” (Sassen 1). Cyberspace is not a separate space, a virtual room of its own, but an embodied architecture of networks and actors situated in disparate geographical, sociological, psychological, and economic spaces. The very history of the Internet and its cyberspatial enclaves is immersed in ideologically antagonistic contexts: the Internet was ostensibly developed by the U.S. Department of Defense but nurtured by the libertarian leanings of early hacker culture. In its originary moment, then, the Internet was emblematic of both control and freedom, the apotheosis of the surveillance society and the dream of anarchistic autonomy.2 In Saskia Sassen’s re-theorization of electronic space, the increasing commercialization of public networks and centralization of power in private networks have created “cyber-segmentations” that are contrary to the Internet’s supposed dream of decentralization and openness (2). The encroachment of multinational postindustrial capitalism, the context in which cyberspace is “embedded,” produces online inequalities centralized in the offline spaces of power (5).
Sassen believes that “a focus on place and infrastructure in the new global information economy creates a conceptual and practical opening for questions about the embeddedness of electronic space” (5-6). Taking a cue from Sassen, the current essay focuses on network infrastructure through the metaphors of architecture; the architecture of places and information; urban design and systems design; and the trace of spatialized power that informs them. Cyberspace is constructed by operating systems and software applications. People often overlook the social conditions of software creation, just as they often ignore the cultural conditions of cyberspace, preferring instead to see cyberspace as the digital perfection of our messy analog desires. The “architects of information” engineer software,3 and just as discourse implicates these architects of information in the latent discursive practices of their particular time and place (in this case, much of the ethos of programmer culture emerges from the West Coast of the United States), the software they create registers in the web of normative practices that constitute discourse. A focus on “place and infrastructure,” as suggested by Sassen, must include a focus on the infrastructure of the code, the architecture of information, which contributes as much to the centralization of power in places as the commercialization of access to information, the emergence of infomediaries, and the prevalence of private corporate networks, Sassen’s primary forms of “cyber-segmentation” (9).
Architect Lebbeus Woods, whose “anarchitecture” attempts to create “freespaces” through indeterminate structures, identifies the relationship between architecture and ideology: “While architects speak of designing space that satisfies human needs, it is actually human needs that are being shaped to satisfy designed space and the abstract systems of thought and organization on which design is based” (279). Mark Poster makes a similar claim for information architects when he discusses the impact of the Superpanopticon: “Surveillance by means of digitally encoded information constitutes new subjects by the language employed in databases” (Mode 94). Architecture, whether it refers to buildings or databases, constructs subject positions through the spatialization of power. Much has been written about the architecture of bricks and mortar, but very little, if anything, has been written about the architecture of information, the discourse of computer programming; and this is so even as the two architectures become inseparable.4 This essay engages a variety of discourses on the sometimes liberatory architectural models of what Todd May calls “tactical poststructuralist anarchism.” In particular, the model of the software engineer as a subject working within and creating autonomous spaces, a tactical anarchism for the information architect represented by CatB, offers an instance of resistance that defies the monolithic rendering of the surveillance society described by Poster and others, an almost cyborgian moment in which information architects “seize the tools that write them” for the purpose of a tactical, temporary “uprising,” to use Hakim Bey’s preferred term.
“Linux is subversive.” One can only wonder if CatB would have had as much success without its provocative first three words. Raymond, described as “the armchair philosopher of the open source world” and “a hard-core libertarian” (Wayner 106-07), originally wrote CatB to demarcate the factions that existed within the Free Software movement and to establish his camp–the more market-friendly, “open source” camp–as the desirable, though not singular, option. For Raymond, Open Source software development offers significant technical benefits over Closed Source, and this improved product development cycle should be the central motivation behind adopting such practices. However, he does not advocate the prohibition of proprietary software. CatB, which was originally presented to the Linux Kongress on 21 May 1997, convinced Netscape to release its Navigator source code on 22 January 1998, an event that brought much public attention to Raymond’s essay and much private-sector approval to Linux, the enormously successful operating system on which CatB is based. Just how subversive Linux is–politically, philosophically, economically, sociologically–remains unclear, but the architectural metaphors on which Raymond’s essay is based may be considered an exemplary expression of techno-cultural anarchistic politics. The advance of Open Source software development has been described as a modern-day Lutheranism, and Raymond’s Open Source manifesto has been described by FEED magazine’s Steven Johnson as “the Port Huron Statement of the movement.” Raymond told Johnson in an email that what Open Source subverts specifically are “classical software-engineering assumptions about how to do high-quality software. More generally, [Open Source subverts] assumptions about the organization of cooperative work–that it has to be organized on either command-and-control or scarcity-economics principles” (“Whole Web”).5 To which Johnson wondered, “Is Open Source the ultimate expression of the techno-libertarians, or a startling revival of the progressive, anti-corporate sentiments that last flourished with the SDS?” Raymond’s brand of Open Source is certainly not anti-corporate, but it does possess a subversive political philosophy, a philosophy I shall categorize here as “tactical poststructuralist anarchism,” embodied by the architectural metaphors of the cathedral and the bazaar. The architectural metaphor foregrounds not only software engineering as a “situated knowledge,” but also the transformation in software engineering enabled by the emergence of the Internet; that is, the infrastructure of the Internet that evolved in the “real” world enabled a reformulation of the political terms in which the very same technological infrastructure could evolve (primarily, as Raymond argues, in the way the Internet enables “parallel debugging”); the architecture of networked computing created a new space for information architecture (the coding of the code).
In CatB, Raymond employs his titular metaphor to differentiate his brand of Free Software (Open Source) from other forms of Free Software, such as Richard Stallman’s Free Software Foundation (FSF). Raymond believed that the FSF operated too much like cathedral-style development, with a hierarchical structure of authority in which one central project leader (in this case, Stallman) determined the development path for the source. When Raymond became aware of Linux, a Unix-based operating system created by 21-year-old computer science student Linus Torvalds at the University of Helsinki in 1991, he was immensely impressed by the way it had evolved through an open distribution of the source code over the Internet. This decentralized model of software development took advantage of the collective debugging power of thousands of computer programmers and essentially enlisted “users” as “co-developers.” The first official release of Linux came in 1994, with changes being made and new versions being posted daily. Even though Linux was developed five years after Microsoft began developing Windows NT, Linux has become a competitive alternative to NT with a worldwide user base around twelve million (Moore), a fact that many suggest proves the efficacy of its open development model. A recent Business Week cover story on Linux notes the operating system’s accelerated penetration into the server market, from almost no percentage of the market three years ago to 13.7% of the $50.9 billion market in 2002, a figure expected to reach 25.2% by 2006. For this reason, business experts are calling Linux “the biggest threat to Microsoft’s hegemony since the Netscape browser in 1995” (Kerstetter et. al. 78).6 In the short-term this may, however, be an overstatement. Microsoft revealed for the first time in November 2002 that four of its seven business units are losing money, while its Windows division generates an 85% profit margin. In other words, the Windows OS is still where Microsoft makes most of its money, and it is on the desktop where Open Source projects like Linux have made the least impact. That said, Linux and other Open Source software developmental models have proved to be an effective and widely accepted alternative to various proprietary software.7
CatB borrows much of its structure and codification of the principles of software engineering from a classic text in the field, The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick P. Brooks. A twentieth-anniversary edition of Brooks’s text was issued just prior to the composition of CatB, and Raymond makes specific mention of the text in his notes. The central thesis of Brooks’s classic text has become known as “Brooks’s Law”: “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later” (25). Brooks formulated this law before the age of the Internet, before the advent of a truly scalable form of “parallel debugging.” Linus Torvalds was the first person to refute Brooks’ Law in a demonstrably successful application of what Raymond in CatB famously dubs “Linus’ Law”: “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” Adding manpower by distributing the source code freely over the Internet, as Torvalds did in 1994 just as the Internet was emerging as a cultural phenomenon, can actually improve the quality of a piece of software while maintaining its architectural integrity, and it can do so on time. The focus of Raymond’s manifesto, in an intertextual dialogue with Brooks’s software engineering classic, is not the quality of Torvalds’s code in the Linux kernel, “but rather [Linus’s] invention of the Linux development model” (Raymond).
Raymond also derives the cathedral metaphor from Brooks. In The Mythical Man-Month, the cathedral-builder represents the ideal form of software engineering, an architectural unity of design across generations of builders. However, most cathedrals are problematic, says Brooks, because they bear witness to different architects and different styles that have been applied, a visible legacy of heterogeneity.
It is better to have a system omit certain anomalous features and improvements, but to reflect one set of design ideas, than to have one that contains many good but independent and uncoordinated ideas. (42)
It is important to note that when Brooks refers to the architecture of a system, he means “the complete and detailed specification of the user interface,” something not to be confused with the implementation of these design specifications (45). The system architects, then, are something of an aristocracy in his eyes, granted the noble task of envisioning the system in its entirety, authors of the metanarrative, or autocrats of information. Brooks points to the triumph of the WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointing) interface as an example of perfect architectural integrity in software engineering, an exemplar of his cathedral-builder.
The WIMP is a superb example of a user interface that has conceptual integrity, achieved by the adoption of a familiar mental model, the desktop metaphor, and its careful consistent extension to exploit a computer graphics implementation. (260)
Of course, the WIMP interface, which found its way from Xerox to Apple to Microsoft, is now the controlling metaphor of the most popular operating system in the world, and perhaps the emblem of proprietary software and the monopolistic practices of the leading cathedral-builder, Microsoft. Windows may be “a superb example of a user interface that has conceptual integrity,” but it is also a grisly parody of the way in which the computer is always mediated by the space of work (in this case, the central metaphors Windows uses to organize the computer’s content and functionality are metaphors of the workplace: trash cans, files, desktops, and so forth). Brooks’s sense of conceptual integrity becomes a sort of normative principle in computer-mediated communication: the desktop metaphor works because it is “a familiar mental model,” but it is a familiar mental model because it reifies the spatial order of hegemonic discourse. If the system’s architecture is more important than incremental but heterogeneous improvements on that design, then where is the space for adaptation? Or, if one conceives of “the code” as a discourse of subjugation, where is the space for counter-hegemonic discourses, what Steven Johnson aptly calls “user-hostile design” (Interface Culture 227)?
J. Mitchell Morse describes cathedral building (the brick-and-mortar kind) as an aspect of “the grandiosity-glorification syndrome, an aspect of the fully developed leisure-class authoritarian syndrome,” and, pointing to texts as diverse as Vico’s New Science and Kafka’s “The Great Wall of China,” he characterizes such stories as tales of “secret government” of “an ancient authoritarian habit that afflicts every nation” (104). He also recalls, citing Vico, that many of these ancient societies built their “secret governments” on the foundations of languages, languages–from hieroglyphs to Latin Bibles–indecipherable to the slavish masses who constructed their pyramids, great walls, and cathedrals. The process of governing was “secret” in the sense that these secret languages reinforced the status of the ruling class without the subjugated entirely understanding the terms of their subjugation; in the cathedral, then, resides a form of “false consciousness.” The cathedral-builders of postmodernity have again harnessed a language at once complex and capable of being “hidden” from the masses: the compiled and proprietary source code. The Windows operating system–whose development is driven by market forces and the corporate interests of Microsoft, perhaps the most powerful cathedral-builder in history because of its global imperative–is the monument of Arthur Kroker’s “virtual class,” the “authoritarian habit” of the ruling class of the information age.
Raymond contrasts the cathedral, an authoritarian and linear model of software development associated by implication with the monopolistic behemoth Microsoft, with the bazaar, an open and nonlinear model of software development whose champion is Linus Torvalds and the Linux operating system. Raymond describes the Linux community as “a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches . . . out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles.” As Ko Kuwabara depicts the Open Source community, based largely on Raymond’s ethnographic essays, it behaves much like an emergent system as described by complexity theory. Both Kuwabara and Raymond suggest Linux’s development model succeeded because it obeys certain natural laws governing the evolutionary development of complex systems: “The case of Linux suggests . . . that aggregate behaviors are better understood as emergent properties–properties that emerge out of micro-level interactions among constituents–than as qualities intrinsic to the system and independent of its constituent parts” (Kuwabara). Raymond further compares the Linux community to “a free market or an ecology,” an echo of his technolibertarian ideals; but this representation of “central planning” as the artificial and oppressive antithesis of the more organic and natural evolution of complex systems is too reductive and ignores both certain benefits of central planning and the fact that even Microsoft utilizes Open Source development models some of the time.8 Reductive rhetoric about the natural evolution of “free markets” is especially problematic for those who profit from the Internet because it was originally established and developed by the government. There is a naturalistic fallacy at work here, a troublesome tendency to say the Open Source model is more “natural”–and therefore better–than closed source.9 The bazaar might be better defined by the “tactical poststructuralist anarchism” I discuss below.
First, it should be noted that the primary distinction Raymond makes between the cathedral-builder and the bazaar is the use of “parallel editing.” Raymond writes:
Here, I think, is the core difference underlying the cathedral-building and bazaar styles. In the cathedral-builder view of programming, bugs and development problems are tricky, insidious, deep phenomena. It takes months of scrutiny by a dedicated few to develop confidence that you’ve winkled them all out.
In the bazaar view, on the other hand, you assume that bugs are generally shallow phenomena–or, at least, that they turn shallow pretty quick when exposed to a thousand eager co-developers pounding on every single new release.
This is the essence of Linus’ Law (“given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”), and it exemplifies the means by which Open Source deconstructs the otherwise stable and antithetical subject positions of “developer” and “user.” According to Linus’ Law, a “user,” formerly the colonized subject of imperialist cathedral-builders, now participates in the development of the code and is an equal “owner” of the code. Instead of “users” and “developers,” everyone is a potential “co-developer.” The bazaar becomes a liminal zone of subject-creation, an interstitial space for the negotiation of identity.
Homi Bhabba, commenting on Clifford Geertz’s use of the bazaar and the English gentlemen’s club as social spaces of diversity and homogeneity respectively, imagines a more “agonistic and ambivalent” relationship between the two, suggesting that “anxious passage” between the two merges “the encounter between the ontological cultural impulse and the memory of the displacements that make national cultures possible” (36). The bazaar has traditionally been identified with oriental exoticism; however, recent studies refute this colonialist historicism and reveal that bazaar markets “can equally be found in developed industrialised economies” (Fansellow 262). The use of the “bazaar” as a metaphor for Open Source immediately performs a sense of otherness and dislocation, but it does not establish Open Source as the binary opposite of cathedral building; while the two might be construed as equivalent terms of comparison–one evoking Christianity, the other Islam–Raymond’s stated intention when employing the “bazaar” metaphor was to invoke the marketplace, not religion. He was originally going to call the essay “The Cathedral and the Agora,” to suggest an open space of public exchange. The convergence of the metaphors occurs on the level of “enclosed” and “open” spaces, the cathedral the epitome of an enclosed space, and the bazaar an open space that for some economists is the “model of the perfectly competitive market” with “the apparent absence of monopolistic competition” (Fansellow 262).
The second central feature of the bazaar model is its adaptive teleology. While Raymond requires some sort of goal for the development community (“When you start community-building, what you need to be able to present is a plausible premise“), it is not a fixed goal. Rather, what makes the Linux model advantageous is its ability to adapt to shifting contexts, a tactical philosophy that contrasts with the strategic philosophy of cathedral-building. This tactical approach “produces a self-correcting spontaneous order more elaborate and efficient than any amount of central planning could have achieved” (Raymond). The adaptive order of the bazaar, with its tactical constitution of “the code,” resembles the poststructuralist construction of the subject through cultural codes and a multiplicity of possible subject positions. This analogy is developed in greater detail below.
To this point, I have discussed the representation of Open Source software development in Eric Raymond’s “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” a seminal work in the public dissemination of hacker culture. Raymond’s essay is an inescapably ideological work, from the provocative opening sentence to the engaging architectural metaphors. The attributes of the bazaar software development model share theoretical homologies with what Todd May calls “tactical poststructuralist anarchism,” and an examination of some prominent forms of poststructuralist anarchism will provide the necessary bridge in this analysis from the discourse of software engineering to the political philosophy of poststructuralist anarchism.
In the introduction to The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism, May attempts to map the migratory space that political philosophy inhabits, and he suggests the tension between metaphysics and ethics (essentially between what is and what ought to be) determines the mutable boundaries of this discursive site. He divides the spectrum of political philosophies into the categories of formal, strategic, and tactical. Formal political philosophy cleaves “either to the pole of what ought to be or to the pole of what is at the expense of the tension between the two” (4). Strategic political philosophy recognizes the contingencies of history and social conditions, often addressing the concrete historical conditions under which the political “strategies” are composed, but never allowing ethical goals to be subsumed by contextualizations; thus the aim is to promote the “assumed justice,” the ethical goals, given the historical context (8). Strategic philosophies graph power onto the world in the form of “concentric circles” which emanate from a central “core problem” (10). This concept of power distinguishes strategic political philosophies from tactical, since tactical philosophies, such as anarchism and elements of French poststructuralism, May argues, remain “in the tension,” where there is no center of power, only intersecting practices of power (11). By remaining in the tension between what ought to be and what is, unlike formal and strategic philosophies which tend to gravitate to one pole or the other, and by conceptualizing power spatially as a network of interconnecting matrices, tactical philosophies reject representational political intervention, such as that of a vanguard, and embrace the decentralization or removal of hierarchical power structures. May believes the move from macropolitics to micropolitics in French poststructuralism, in particular the work of Foucault, Deleuze, and early Lyotard, is analogous in many ways to the tactical philosophy of many early and modern anarchists.
The bazaar model of software development represents a tactical political philosophy through its emphasis on decentralized authority, its spatialization of power dispersed in the networks of the Internet, and its rejection of political intervention through an overtly libertarian endorsement of a free-market philosophy.10 Perhaps most important, the bazaar model emphasizes its adaptability to transient conditions through extensive parallel debugging; so, unlike formal or strategic political philosophies, the bazaar model encourages tactical interventions over strategic, teleological planning. In the following sections, I examine the theoretical homologies the bazaar model shares with other poststructuralist tactical interventions: Gilles Deleuze’s critique of Foucault’s Panopticism, Lebbeus Woods’s “anarchitecture,” and Hakim Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zone. In each case, the tactical anarchism depends on architecture to resolve the contingent boundaries of electronic space as electronic space is embedded in techno-cultural narratives, and this translation of anarchistic poststructuralist thinking via architecture suggests an emerging discourse for the subject positions of the architects of information in postmodernity.
The new linguistic experiences of the late twentieth century have been termed “the mode of information” by Mark Poster. Poster focuses on Foucault’s discussion of the Panopticon, an architectural innovation of the nineteenth century representative of the transformation from sovereign to disciplinary power in Western societies. The Panopticon, Foucault believed, epitomized a technology of power, a general model for power, “a way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men” (Discipline 205). The efficiency of panoptic power derives from its ability to automize and disindividualize its power (202). Foucault writes:
The efficiency of power, its constraining force have, in a sense, passed over to the other side–to the side of its surface of application. He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. (202-03)
Poster demonstrates how panopticism as a technology of power operates within the twentieth century in the form of state bureaucracy and computer technology. Both the Panopticon as an architectural innovation, and bureaucracy and computer technology, foster the principles of disciplinary control. “Indeed,” writes Poster in Foucault, Marxism & History,
they expand its scope to a new level. With the mechanisms of information processing (the bureaucracy using people; the computer using machines), the ability to monitor behavior is extended considerably. The techniques of discipline no longer need rely on methods of regulating bodies in space as Foucault thinks. In the electronic age, spatial limitations are bypassed as restraints on the controlling hierarchies. All that is needed are traces of behavior; credit card activity, traffic tickets, telephone bills, loan applications, welfare files, fingerprints, income transactions, library records, and so forth. (103)
Disciplinary control in the information age surpasses spatial and temporal limitations through the advances in technology: “Today’s ‘circuits of communication’ and the databases they generate constitute a Superpanopticon, a system of surveillance without walls, windows, towers or guards. The quantitative advances in the technologies of surveillance result in a qualitative change in the microphysics of power” (Poster, Mode 93). Not only does the Superpanopticon erase spatial and temporal restrictions through the immediacy of information exchange, it also challenges the social hierarchy by circumventing the existing methods of domination: “In the mode of information the subject is no longer located in a point in absolute time/space, enjoying a physical, fixed vantage point from which rationally to calculate its options” (15).
Open Source may represent a space of resistance for the surveillance society, and the metaphor of the bazaar suggests the mode of resistance. In his critique of Foucault’s panoptic technology of power, Gilles Deleuze contrasts the “spaces of enclosure” in disciplinary societies–Foucault’s hospitals, prisons, and factories–with the “modulations” of societies of control, the ephemeral corporations and databanks that organize contemporary life. Deleuze describes the continuous becoming of the subject in the society of control:
Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point. (4)
In the disciplinary society, resistance is localized, the source of power in the maintenance of molds, fixed spaces. In the control society, power is distributed and adaptive, morphing ceaselessly to the contours of resistance. The cathedral-builder prizes conceptual integrity across generations; the bazaar model adapts to contexts without being led by market forces or corporate visions. The bazaar model is a particularly compelling political philosophy because it translates the architecture of enclosures to the architecture of information, and information, the code, mediates power in the control society.
In the societies of control . . . what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password, while on the other hand the disciplinary societies are regulated by watchwords (as much from the point of view of integration as from that of resistance). The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. (5)
The “numerical language of control,” the parlance of information architects, reaches its apotheosis in the biotech century with the coding of the Human Genome Project, “the code of codes” (Haraway 245). The human genome could represent the metapassword, access to unparalleled control or anarchic freedom. Much of the constitution and subjugation of the subject under this regime is a cultural product of database architecture:
Computerized database design is at the leading edge of genomics research. Design decisions about these huge databases shape what can be easily compared to what else, and so determine the kinds of users that can be made of the original data. Such decisions structure the kinds of ideas of the species that can be sustained. (Haraway 247)
Open Source software development, the free distribution of source code for unlimited revisions, carries serious ontological consequences under this regime, consequences that go beyond the scope of this article. The bazaar becomes, quite literally, a site for the construction and reconstruction of the subject, a potential space for autonomous agents to recontextualize the configurations of power in the networks of the control and surveillance society. The architecture of enclosure gives way to the architecture of universal encoding.
The burgeoning availability and application of Open Source software and its development model, at a time when the “mode of information” and its attendant means of surveillance and control are the dominant discourse, resemble the cultural conditions of what has been dubbed the “Foucault paradox,” a situation in which the emergence of the hegemonic discourse of power being described by Foucault emerges concomitantly with its counter-hegemonic discourse:
In other words, the burgeoning panopticism of nineteenth century institutions emerged hand-in-hand with collective discourses of social rights. They bore a reciprocal relation to one another. (Lyon 672)
It is not surprising that the conditions in which the bazaar model emerges are the conditions in which the cathedral model is dominant. Arguably, Microsoft created the personal computing industry through the widespread adoption of an easy-to-use operating system for non-expert users. Microsoft, through its development of the personal computing market, created subsets of software industries that would not exist without the widespread adoption of its operating system. Without this enormous base of users, there would be no need for the employment of programmers in great numbers, and the code produced would not have the same influence over a large number of users. The number of willing “co-developers” available for Open Source projects would also have been greatly reduced without the home computing revolution created by Microsoft. The “Foucault paradox” informs the twentieth century as it did the nineteenth, and increased attention to these co-emergent phenomena would produce more balanced evaluations of the surveillance society and the resistant spaces within.
The play of autonomous spaces in the architecture of information through the implementation of the bazaar model finds its analogous development in poststructuralist theorizing of space with architect Lebbeus Woods’s notion of “freespace.” Woods proposes that normal architecture prescribes intersubjectivity: “Design is a means of controlling human behavior, and of maintaining this control into the future” (279). Like the cathedral, normative architecture constructs object relations in space that precede and prescribe the constituent agents in the network of social relations: “People come and go, ways of living change, but architecture endures, an idealization of living” (281). Brooks praises this form of architecture in The Mythical Man-Month, but information technology has altered the ideological role of space: the enclosures of discipline no longer suffice. Woods proposes freespaces as spaces with potential for functionality but no prescriptive function; as a consequence, freespaces do not impose behavior. Woods introduced the concept of freespace with the Berlin Free-Zone project, what he calls “a hidden city within the one now being shaped” (286). The Berlin Free-Zone embodies the networked subjectivity of Open Source, the free play of signifiers in the space of computer-mediated communication:
This hidden city is called a free-zone, because it provides unlimited free access to communications and to other, more esoteric, networks at present reserved for the major institutions of government and commerce–but also because interaction and dialogue are unrestricted conventions of behavior enforced by these institutions. (Woods 286)
Woods wishes to alter the role of architecture from a discipline that reifies the social hierarchy to a discipline that enables “heterarchy,” the rule of many. “Heterarchical urban forms” such as the Berlin Free-Zone
are invented in response to increasing emphasis in the present culture on the idea of the “the individual,” coupled with recent technological developments, such as the personal computer and systems of communication that simultaneously weaken the established hierarchies by accessing the information formerly controlled by them, and strengthen the autonomy of individuals. (288)
The heterarchical form of Open Source’s information architecture certainly weakens “the established hierarchies,” namely the cathedral-builders, and returns an increased degree of information access to individuals, the legion of co-developers. Freespace is not new, but its public implementation is, says Woods. Similarly, free source code is not new; the information superhighway was paved with the asphalt of free code. But with Microsoft’s monopolistic hold on the productivity software industry, and with a very public battle with the U.S. Department of Justice revealing Microsoft’s anti-competitive practices to the public, the Open Source movement has accrued momentum and become a public emblem of “heterarchic” software development, software without ends.
The “mode of information” measures the linguistic experiences of the surveillance society, and the “anarchitecture” of Woods constructs freespaces for the autonomy of the individual in ideologically suffused spaces. Open Source creates an anarchic space for tactical intervention in the surveillance and control society by making the principal means of control, the code, “visible” to the greatest number of subjects.11 The subject, though participant in its own self-subjugation, is also a participant in its own emancipation. The machinations of surveillance, the operating systems and applications of subject construction, are potentially exposed and reconstructed. Always, whether the Superpanopticon’s architecture of information or Woods’s informed architect, the slippage between concrete and virtual architecture, between buildings and databases, leaves traces of the embeddedness of architectural discourse in the web of technocultural discourses. Perhaps the consummate expression of tactical poststructuralist anarchism and its polyglot of technological, scientific, architectural, economic, and political discourses is Hakim Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ).
The TAZ is a conceptual configuration of the bazaar as political philosophy. Like the bazaar, the TAZ values transient uprisings over sustained development. Like the bazaar, the TAZ is a freespace for individual autonomy, a state prior to mediation. And like the bazaar, the TAZ is a metaphor for the spatialization of liberation, “a microcosm of that ‘anarchist dream’ of a free culture” (Bey). Unlike the cathedral-builders, who must maintain conceptual integrity across generations, to serve corporate interests, even when it no longer proves adaptive to the environment, the TAZ (and now by extension, the bazaar) forms and reforms without teleological motivations:
The TAZ is like an uprising that does not engage directly with the State, a guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it.
This is not a revolutionary paradigm with a vanguard and a utopian dream of a classless society. The TAZ is a revolution that fails, but only because success would be the ultimate failure, the denial of future TAZs. In the society of control based on surveillance and simulacrum, where the State is–in the true sense of the Superpanopticon–all-seeing, the TAZ is an enclave of the real that cannot be mapped, simulated, made spectacle. “As soon as the TAZ is named (represented, mediated), it must vanish, it will vanish, leaving behind it an empty husk, only to spring up again somewhere else, once again invisible because undefinable in terms of the Spectacle” (Bey). While the Superpanopticon makes space visible for surveillance, mapping, and control, the TAZ will only exist in open spaces like Woods’s freespaces, spaces without ideological impressions:
We are looking for “spaces” (geographic, social, cultural, imaginal) with potential to flower as autonomous zones–and we are looking for times in which these spaces are relatively open, either through neglect on the part of the State or because they have somehow escaped notice by the mapmakers, or for whatever reason.
Bey believes there are times and places in history when TAZs existed, and still times and places where they may exist. Bey uses pirates as historical examples of an enclave of freespace that for a time evaded the “map” of authority, temporary instantiations of freedom. The nomadic figure of the pirate is one in a series of nomads, whose “psychic nomadism” Bey refers to as “a tactic”:
These nomads practice the razzia, they are corsairs, they are viruses; they have both need and desire for TAZs, camps of black tents under the desert stars, interzones, hidden fortified oases along secret caravan routes, “liberated” bits of jungle and bad-land, no-go areas, black markets, and underground bazaars.
Again, the image of the bazaar surfaces, except this time it represents a congerie of spatial convergences in Bey’s “psychotopology of everyday life,” the rootless desires and tactics of the cosmopolitan subject set adrift in cyberspace, or any space. Bey’s bazaars symbolize the “interzones,” the marginal territories in the networks of intersecting practices of power. These are Woods’s “hidden city within the one now being shaped.” These are Raymond’s free assemblages of the co-developers in the agora. Bey’s TAZs do not exist in either cyberspace or real space but both. He even destabilizes the discursive configurations of cyberspace by playfully proposing new meanings for the now ubiquitous terms “Web” and “Net.” For Bey, the Net is “the totality of all information and communication transfer,” a definition that removes the hermetic place in technoculture for the primacy of the Internet. The Web becomes a counter-hegemonic term:
Generally we’ll use the term Web to refer to the alternate horizontal open structure of info-exchange, the non-hierarchic network, and reserve the term counter-Net to indicate clandestine illegal and rebellious use of the Web, including actual data-piracy and other forms of leeching off the Net itself.
The cathedral embodies the hierarchic structure of information exchange in the Net, while the bazaar is an apt metaphor for the Web, a non-hierarchic network. The counter-Net describes the practices of warez d00dz and pirates. In this mapping of terminology, the cathedral and the bazaar transcend their place as metaphors for software development and become metaphors of political anarchism. No longer restricted to the assemblage of programmers, they now serve as metaphors for the assemblage and communication of all. The Net and the Web both contribute to the TAZ, but the TAZ is an informational potential, something that does not exist in the networks but may be a product of the networks. The TAZ is actually beyond the networks, because it “desires above all to avoid mediation, to experience its existence as immediate.” Similarly, the bazaar, as a metaphor of tactical poststructuralist anarchism, is the model of authenticity, the place where the databanks of postindustrial capitalism can no longer trace your purchases, where technologies of surveillance are not situated, where autonomy is the essence of human communication. The architects of information are operational agents in the disruption of cathedral-building authoritarianism and its hierarchic Net that ensnares us all:
Whether through simple data-piracy, or else by a more complex development of actual rapport with chaos, the Web-hacker, the cybernetician of the TAZ, will find ways to take advantage of perturbations, crashes, and breakdowns in the Net (ways to make information out of “entropy”).
The counter-hegemonic practice of Open Source software development has registered in the realm of praxis as governments around the world embrace Open Source and Free Software in an attempt to “break free of the United States’ lock on the global software market” (Festa).12 Government legislation, first in Brazil, then in other Latin American countries, Europe, and Asia, is attempting to resist the Microsoft monopoly and reduce state expenditures on information technology by forcing government agencies to use Open Source or Free Software “unless proprietary software is the only feasible option” (Festa). Sometimes the rhetoric of this legislation is openly ideological: the city of Florence, Italy passed a motion warning that the protracted use of proprietary software was contributing to “the computer science subjection of the Italian state to Microsoft” (Festa). In a notable decision, the city of Munich recently chose Linux over Microsoft Office for its 14,000 government computers beginning in 2004.13 These countries and cities recognize the potentially significant political, economic, and sociological ramifications of the large-scale adoption of software engineered by the cathedral-building strategies of Closed Source software developers such as Microsoft.14 In the United States in October 2002, Democrat members of the House of Representatives Adam Smith, Ron Kind, and Jim Davis sent a note to 74 Democrats in Congress suggesting that the Linux GNU General Public License (GPL) was a threat to national security. The note asked members to support a letter written by Representatives Tom Davis and Jim Turner asking the head of U.S. cybersecurity policy Richard Clarke to reject “licenses that would prevent or discourage commercial adoption of promising cybersecurity technologies developed through federal R&D” (McMillan). The letter by Smith, Kind and Jim Davis asks that the cybersecurity plan to reject the GPL. Critics suggested Smith’s endorsement might be related to the large political contributions he receives from Microsoft (which resides in his home state). Bradley Kuhn, executive director of the Free Software Foundation, charged, “the rhetoric [of Smith’s letter] is almost word for word what Microsoft has been saying for 19 months” (McMillan).
Despite the encroachment of the discourses of computer science into everyday life, cultural theorists have neglected the very important work of a discourse analysis of the web of texts and practices that shape computer programmers and their code; in particular, the philosophy, history, and psychology of computer programming, represented in texts such as Brooks’s The Mythical Man-Month, Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, and Gerald Weinberg’s The Psychology of Computer Programming for example, offer cultural theorists textual instances for discussing computer programming as a situated knowledge. The first step toward the understanding of the “network society”15 should involve a critical analysis of the code that forms the infrastructure for this society. Law professor Lawrence Lessig posits the following rallying cry in his popular 1999 book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace:
We live life in real space, subject to the effects of code. We live ordinary lives, subject to the effects of code. We live social and political lives, subject to the effects of code. Code regulates all these aspects of our lives, more pervasively over time than any other regulator in our life. Should we remain passive about this regulator? Should we let it affect us without doing anything in return? (233)
For Lessig, “open code is a foundation to an open society,” and the architecture of the Internet could make cyberspace more or less regulable (108). “How [the code] changes depends on the code writers. How code writers change it could depend on us” (109). A cultural analysis of the discursive practices that constitute the “code writers,” those I have called “the architects of information,” could contribute to the kind of participatory politics Lessig encourages in this often ignored, but increasingly important, segment of society.
I would like to thank the anonymous PMC reviewer for suggesting improvements to this paper and especially Andrew McMurry for his insightful remarks on an earlier draft. For CS.
1. On the “inescapably cultural base of technology,” Barbrook and Cameron, in their treatise on the Californian Ideology, make explicit what is often ignored in discussions of the history and philosophy of the Internet revolution, as embodied by texts such as Raymond’s “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”: “Their [the Californian Ideologues’] eclectic blend of conservative economics and hippie libertarianism reflects the history of the West Coast–and not the inevitable future of the rest of the world.” The historicization of the code via the analysis of computer programming history and practices should be a central concern for cultural theorists.
2. Despite some early attempts to theorize the Internet as a space that embodied either surveillance and control or personal autonomy and freedom, the more considered position is that of law professor Lawrence Lessig: “[I argued instead that] the nature of the Net is set in part by its architectures, and [that] the possible architectures of cyberspace are many. The values that these architectures embed are different, and one type of difference is regulability–a difference in the ability to control behavior within a particular cyberspace. Some architectures make behavior more regulable; other architectures make behavior less regulable. These architectures are displacing architectures of liberty” (30).
3. This expression, “the architects of information,” is intended to suggest more than just a resemblance to the information technology sector moniker of “information architect,” a title generously applied to web designers, software engineers, and similar vocations. I use the term “architect” to draw attention to the way software (the code, cyberspace) constructs real space. The term is also used as a metaphor for individual agency, as for instance by David Harvey: “The architect shapes spaces so as to give them social utility as well as human and aesthetic/symbolic meanings. The architect shapes and preserves long-term social memories and strives to give material form to the longings and desires of individuals and collectivities. The architect struggles to open spaces for new possibilities, for future forms of social life. For all of these reasons, as Karatari points out, the ‘will to architecture’ understood as ‘the will to create’ is ‘the foundation of Western thought’” (Harvey 200). Above all, and quite simply, the term “architect” makes explicit (more explicit than, say, “programmer”) the discourse of the codification of space, both real and virtual.
4. As William J. Mitchell says in City of Bits: “In the end, buildings will become computer interfaces and computer interfaces will become buildings” (105).
5. For a recent cultural analysis of the economics of Open Source, see Wershler-Henry. His first chapter contains a brief overview of Mauss, Bataille, Derrida, and the notion of gift economies.
6. While Linux has made serious inroads in the server market, it occupies only 2% of desktops, where Microsoft still dominates.
7. Linux’s success is more evident in the private sector. According to an Information Week survey from March 2002, “more than half of small companies use Linux as an operating system for desktop PCs, as do nearly half of large ones. Nearly 70% of small companies and more than 60% of large ones say they decided to use Linux as an alternative to Windows” (Ricadela).
8. Barbrook and Cameron call Raymond’s brand of technolibertarianism “the Californian Ideology,” a “mix of cybernetics, free market economics, and counter-culture libertarianism that is promulgated by magazines such as Wired and Mondo 2000 as well as the books of Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly and many others.” Instead of recognizing market forces and techno-cultural discourses as historically situated entities, the Californian Ideology is dogmatic about the inevitable triumph of capital and technology: “Implacable in its certainties, the Californian Ideology offers a fatalistic vision of the natural and inevitable triumph of the hi-tech free market–a vision which is blind to racism, poverty and environmental degradation and which has no time to debate alternatives.”
9. Raymond’s essay is influenced by the techno-libertarian ideas of Michael Rothschild’s Bionomics: Economy as Ecosystem and Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World, enormously successful right-wing neo-liberal economic texts. These texts and others trade on the libertarian notion of the markets as “natural” entities that evolved better without government intervention, an amusing contention to be embraced by technology companies on the West Coast since much of the infrastructure that made the dotcom revolution possible was sponsored by the federal government. The most popular distillation of techno-libertarian economics and the naturalistic fallacies they promoted was, ironically, Bill Gates’s Business @ The Speed of Thought: Using a Digital Nervous System. My essay does not have room for a discursive analysis of this genre; however, a continuing study of the historical and ideological roots of the Internet revolution would certainly find these texts of primary importance.
10. This mapping of the transformation of Open Source software development into a political philosophy onto the concepts of poststructuralist tactical anarchism is not intended to be a wholesale exchange of ideas. The intent is, rather, to examine points of generative convergence between the philosophy of software development and certain proponents of poststructuralist thought. The techno-libertarianism from which CatB emerges contains contradictions within it that could never be reconciled with French poststructuralists such as Foucault and Deleuze. As Barbrook and Cameron note of this brand of techno-libertarianism: “the Californian Ideology has emerged from an unexpected collision of right-wing neo-liberalism, counter-culture radicalism and technological determinism–a hybrid ideology with all its ambiguities and contradictions intact.”
11. Lessig argues for the liberatory potential of Open Source from a legalistic perspective, concluding: “Put too simply, everything I have said about the regulability of behavior in cyberspace–or more specifically, about government’s ability to affect regulability in cyberspace–crucially depends on whether the application space of cyberspace is dominated by open code. To the extent that it is, government’s power is decreased; to the extent that it remains dominated by closed code, government’s power is preserved. Open code, in other words, can be a check on state power” (100).
12. It should be noted that perhaps the most important effect Open Source has had on the software industry is less economic than psychological, because for the first time in years a legitimate threat to Microsoft’s dominance seems practical (Wilcox, Gilbert, and Ricciuti).
13. Decisions such as this one may also suggest Open Source is becoming a response to American cultural imperialism.
14. Microsoft Senior Vice President Craig Mundie announced Microsoft’s new “Shared Source” policy in what has become know as the May Day Manifesto, a speech given to the New York University Stern School of Business on 3 May 2001. Mundie described Shared Source as the following: “Shared Source is a balanced approach that allows us to share source code with customers and partners while maintaining the intellectual property needed to support a strong software business. Shared Source represents a framework of business value, technical innovation and licensing terms. It covers a spectrum of accessibility that is manifest in the variety of source licensing programs offered by Microsoft.” Other than revealing that Microsoft may be afraid of Open Source’s potential, Shared Source changes very little about Microsoft’s essentially Closed Source practices.
15. In Manuel Castells’s seminal study The Rise of the Network Society, the logic of “place” is superseded by the ahistorical space of “flows”: “the network of communication is the fundamental spatial configuration: places do not disappear, but their logic and their meaning become absorbed in the network” (443). Castells argues that the “coming of the space of flows is blurring the meaningful relationship between architecture and society” (449). Castells reconceptualizes postmodernism around this point: “In this perspective, postmodernism could be considered the architecture of the space of flows” (449). A discourse of the “architecture of information,” as I have identified it here, might be considered a continuation of this project.